1 Samuel 30:21 Commentary and Bible Study

But David didn't take the spoil for himself, and this is a lesson for us too. He responds perfectly. There is an incident here which shows that some of his men were really quite wicked people, because they don't want anything to be given to the two hundred who were too faint to join the pursuit. They wanted the two hundred that couldn't come to be excluded from receiving any of the spoil. They were willing to give them only their own wives and children that had been recovered.‘Then said David, Ye shall not do so, my brethren, with that which the LORD hath given us, who hath preserved us, and delivered the company that came against us into our hand.’ These are very significant words. In other words David is himself so humbled by the fact that he has gone into Philistine territory, even after he has tried to enrol against Israel. He has been judged by God and then given everything back, and he so humbled and he so keenly aware that he didn't deserve anything, that he is in no mood to start to ‘get stuffy’ as the saying goes, and say, this man deserves so much more than this man. He is not in any mood to think about people deserving anything. No, he says, ‘the Lord has given it; just divide it.’ That verse is rather important. It is not just a little incidental; it is the great evidence of the fact that at that moment, David was overwhelmed by grace, and as far as he was concerned everybody was going to have just the same share of the spoiled, whether they deserved it, or whether they didn't, because nobody deserved anything in his mind. They said, ‘It is David’s spoil’; he said, ‘It is the Lord’s spoil.’ He has given it to us, and delivered the company that came against us into our hand. These men who protest are acting as if they had secured all this great spoil for themselves without God’s help. Lacking faith, they are blind to the great deliverance they have received: the restraint of the Lord on the Amalekites in sparing the families, the guidance through the Egyptian young man to the Amalekite camp, the state of the Amalekites which made them incapable of fighting, the triumph over them with a much smaller force, the providence which happened to place so much spoil in the possession of the defeated Amalekites.David is not flattered by his newly restored popularity. There is an important principle to be observed here, and those wicked men in his company must be made to recognise it. David made it a statute in Israel: the people who are too weak to fight, who are left at home in the camp looking after things, are as worthy of the reward as those who go to the battle. It became standard practice in Israel from that day.