by Jeremy Wolcott
I'll come right out and admit it: today's reading is tough. I find a lot of times that it's too easy to look at the life of a “hero of faith” like David, as recorded in the Bible, and say, “he did X, and I should too.” Or, when they make obvious mistakes, sometimes instead it's simple enough to look at them and conclude, “they did Y, and evidently I shouldn't.” But you'd have a hard time taking that tack with this passage. Like we saw on Monday, David's life isn't quite that simple; his actions sometimes are clearly exemplary or outright evil, but sometimes they are questionable, too, and God doesn't always seem to react in a clear-cut way to what's going on.
From the comfort of my desk chair it's pretty easy to second-guess David's activity in this passage. Instead of abandoning the land of God in fear of Saul and running off to indenture himself in service to the Philistines—the uncircumcised enemies of God that he was so passionate about defeating only 10 chapters ago!—why didn't he remain in Israel, for example, trusting that God would deliver him from Saul's grasp and make everything right? Why did the man whom God said he selected for the uprightness of his heart (ch. 16) butcher men and women alike in his terrorization of the surrounding towns? And why, of all things, did he rely on deception (vv. 10-11) in order to build trust with his Philistine master? I'm almost ready to call shenanigans on God – catalogs of missteps like this certainly seemed sufficient to bring down previous Israelite leaders (Saul, for example, had the kingdom wrested from him on account of his faithlessness with the Amalekite king in ch. 15). But no condemnation is forthcoming from the pen of the writer here. No prophet turns up to inform David of the Lord's displeasure at his actions. In fact, no later mention, either good or bad, is made of David's exploits as a Philistine vassal.
But something that my friend Doug mentioned to me while we were talking about these stories the other day sticks in my mind. He said, more or less, “it's hard to get a sense of the difference that the depth of David's relationship with God makes in just one of these vignettes.” In other words: you can't extract what actually made David a man “after God's own heart,” as it says back in 13.15, by simply tallying up what he did and didn't do (and especially not in just one chapter!). So, just as in yesterday's passage we weren't able to see the real picture without looking at the whole of David's experience, it's pretty difficult to draw up a nice little moral from this story alone either. Fortunately or unfortunately, the lives of God's people don't read like Aesop's fables.
So, if the story of this chapter doesn't present us with an obvious take-home message that can be conveniently summed up in a memorable maxim, what can we say about it? I think the answer is comforting: taken together with the rest of the history of David, this passage is part of the larger story of how God raises people who are willing to build a life-long, consistent relationships with him to places of huge impact in his kingdom. And, even more reassuring for me, just as God was able to use David to establish a powerful kingship for his people despite his blunders and moral shortfalls, he is able to work with us and through us even when the paths we choose look pretty faithless in retrospect.
Stories like David's help to remind me that I shouldn't count myself out of doing great things as part of God's work simply because I screw up sometimes; he's big enough that he can overcome the questionable decisions I make and ultimately bring good from them. He's not looking for perfection from us before we get to work: instead, he wants us to jump in and develop a relationship with him on a day-by-day basis, like David did. Will you join me in responding to God's invitation to join him in the building of his kingdom—daily—as we forge enduring relationships with him?
Your fellow traveler,
Jeremy