Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: As always, it's a blessing to be up here with you. Today we're going to be continuing in First Samuel, so if you want to go ahead and turn to chapter five in your Bible, but pre warn you, you had a very, very long passage today, 44 verses.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Come on.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: When we. We've been through a couple of long passages in 1st Samuel, and I don't think there's any getting around that. It just takes a lot of work to make your way through a passage like this.
So we're going to do something a little different today rather than kind of our traditional, you know, reading the passage and then me preaching at you for a little while. We're just going to walk through this passage. We're going to look at the characters, we're going to look at the story story, and we're pretty much going to be done after that. So buckle up. It's a long one, but I think we're going to find that there's something really good in this passage for us. I don't know if you saw the sermon title and the bulletin, but any passage where the sermon title is stupidity is all he knows has to be a good one, right?
All right, so just to quickly make sure we're all on the same page, we're working our way through this portion of First Samuel that we've called exiled. This is the season of David's life where he has already been anointed as the rightful king of Israel by the prophet Samuel. But he hasn't actually physically been made the ruler over the people yet. In fact, not only is he not the ruler, he's actually on the run from King Saul, who is constantly trying to kill their.
During this intense and probably awful time in David's life, God does what he often does when we're going through hard times, and he uses it to teach David lessons and to grow him in his faith.
Last week, Pastor Sam took us through this story where King Saul took an army to chase after David, who was hiding in a cave in the wilderness with his. His much smaller arm.
Saul just happened to choose the same cave as David to go in and spend some time alone and go to the bathroom.
David's men saw this opportunity, saw their enemy right there, and encouraged David saying, look at what a great opportunity God has given to you. Kill him, kill our enemy, and all of our troubles will be ended.
However, David chose not to hurt Saul. Instead, he tells his men that he will not harm the Lord's anointed one.
Then, after Saul leaves the cave, David confronts Saul. And Saul does what he normally does when he's confronted with his own poor choices. He pretends to have a changed part, but unfortunately, nothing actually changes the two part. And David has to wait, leave that wilderness and go to a new one. That's where our story picks up today. So let me pray, and then we can jump into our passage.
Father God, I pray that today you would speak to us through your word.
God, you would use this story, these characters, and you would open our eyes and our hearts to see how we fit into your story, how your word is, is directly speaking into our hearts, into our situations. You would apply the gospel to us.
Amen.
All right, so we are going to start reading in verse one.
We'll start off by reading through verse eight.
Samuel died, and all Israel assembled to mourn for him, and they buried him by his home in Ramah.
David then went down to the wilderness of Paran.
A man in Maon had a business in Carmel. He was a very rich man with 3,000 sheep and 1,000 goats and was shearing his sheaf in Carmel. The man's name was Nabal, and his wife Stane Abigail.
The woman was intelligent and beautiful, but the man, a Calebite, was harsh and evil in his dealings.
While David was in the wilderness, he heard that Abaal was shearing sheep. So David sent 10 young men instructing, go up to Carmel, and when you come to Nabal, greet him in my name.
Long life to you and peace to you. Peace to your family and peace to all that is yours. I hear that you are sharing. When your shepherds were with us, we did not harass them. And nothing of theirs was missing the whole time they were in Carmos.
Ask your young men and they will tell you.
So let my young men find favor with you, for we had come on a feast day. Please gift whatever you have on hand to your servants and to your son David.
All right. So the passage starts with Samuel dying.
This prophet that God has used to lead and judge Israel, the one who anointed King Saul and then anointed King David, has died.
David then goes down to the wilderness of Purim. This is south of the clan of Judah's territory. And it's really kind of the furthest south that you can go. Just south of Israel's territory.
That just kind of sets the scene.
We then begin to be introduced to the main characters of the story. We already know David, but we meet the other two characters here. First we meet a Calebite man in Maon.
We don't initially learn his name, he's introduced first by his business, by his wealth, because as we learn, these are the things that are important to him.
I think it's worth mentioning that it's highly unlikely that Nabal was this man's actual name. Abal means fool, as we'll learn throughout the story.
And that's the role that he plays in the story. I highly doubt the naval mom had her baby and looked at him and said, huh, yeah, he looks like a fool. Let's name on that.
But scripture, and especially in some of these stories in the Old Testament, often uses these names, these words to explain to us the role these characters have in the story.
We see Nabal, who's introduced as a man who is harsh and evil in his dealings is what Scripture says.
So we have this fool who was harsh and evil in his dealings. I think we can already tell that this is not going to go well.
But on the other hand, we're also introduced to his wife, Abigail. We're told that Abigail is intelligent and beautiful, so basically the complete opposite of her husband.
Anyway, David is out in this wilderness and he sends some messengers to Nabal asking him for food in exchange for the protection that David's men have given to Nabal's shepherds and herds.
Now, if this sounds like a mob protection racket, that is basically what this was.
The harsh reality is, is that David has been driven further and further out by Saul.
His primary ally and counselor in Samuel has just died. And David's left with very few options.
He's an exiled warlord. He's leading an army of the dregs of society. I don't know if you Remember in chapter 22, verse 1, but it says that these men who rallied around David were desperate in debt the discontented.
These were the kind of men that he is leading in his army.
These are people who are struggling, who saw a chance in this exile warlord that maybe he could make them rich and change their fortunes.
We don't actually get a ton of focus on these men throughout these stories. From the background of first and Second Samuel, we see this fascinating progression for these men David is leading from these desperate, discontented men.
They get turned into what are later called David's mighty men. We see these men who have done fantastic and incredible things, powered by the holy Spirit of God.
Anyways, David is really left with only three real choices as this exile warlord status. Being hunted by his king.
He can stay in Israelite territory and raid his own people to feed his army, or he can move into enemy territory and try to survive as a raider there.
Or he can do what he has done and situate himself on the edges of their territory in the wilderness and try to continue his assigned role as protector of Israel, which is the choice he makes.
This choice requires that he continues to lean on his own people, who for support.
He's protecting them from these raiding parties of their enemies, the Philistines, the Amalekites, all these people that live around them who are constantly raiding into their territory.
And he's not getting much from destroying those raiding parties. They're not bringing a bunch of supplies into the Israelite territory. They're coming for supplies.
So he's protecting them and relying on his own people's good favor.
And the reality is this is a strategy that should probably have been rewarded compared to what Nabal would have risked losing at the hands of Philistine Iranian parties. What David is asking for here is pretty small potatoes. It should have worked out well.
David wasn't even setting a price. He's just sending his men to ask for whatever Nabal could spare on a feast day.
Let's continue reading, starting in verse 9 or read through verse 13.
David's young men went and said all these things to Nabal on David's behalf, and they waited. Nabal asked them, who is David? Who is Jesse's son? Many slaves these days are running away from their masters. Am I supposed to take my bread, my water, and my meat that I butchered for my shearers and give them to these men? I don't know where they are from.
David's young men retraced their steps. When they returned to him, they reported all these words. He said to his men, all of you put on your swords. So each man put on his sword, and David also put on his sword. About 400 men followed David, while 200 stayed with the supplies.
So Nabal hears David's request, but his response is obviously not what David wanted.
We already know that Nabal is a fool who's harsh and evil in all his dealings. And we get a picture of that here.
David asked Nabal to ask his shepherds about how David had protected them. And he doesn't. He doesn't ask what happened. He doesn't ask for any information. He simply makes his decision. And not even just to say no. He. He's as insulting as possible.
Who is David? Who is Jesse's son? Many slaves these days are running away from their masters.
Abel reduces David to a slave who's run away from his master despite being of the same tribe of David, despite almost certainly knowing that Samuel had anointed David as the future king, despite knowing that David leads an army and. And has been doing his best to protect his shepherds.
I think that we see this picture of Nabal as one who, again, is a fool, someone who reacts without thinking, who is so obsessed with his own wealth and his own things that he has acquired that this is what is important to him and he doesn't care about anyone else.
And then we see David's reaction. David gets the report of what Nabal said, and he gets his army together. He takes 400 men, they strap on the swords, and he marches off toward Nabal.
David is not happy about this insult, and he's decided he's going to do something about it.
Let's continue reading verse 14 through 22.
One of Nabal's young men, the ones that he didn't ask about what had happened, informed Abigail, Nabal's wife. Look. David sent messengers from the wilderness to greet our master, but he screamed at them.
The men treated us very well when we were in the field. We weren't harassed and nothing of ours was missing. The whole time we were living among them. They were a wall around us both day and night. The entire time we were with them, herding the sheep.
Now, consider carefully what you should do, because there is certain to be trouble for our master and his entire family.
He is such a worthless fool. Nobody can talk to his.
Abigail hurried, taking 200 loaves of bread, two clay jars of wine, five butchered sheep, a bushel of roasted gurney, 100 clusters of raisins and 200 cakes of pressed figs, and loaded them on donkeys.
Then she said to her male servants, go ahead of me. I will be right behind you.
But she did not tell her husband Nabal.
As she rode the donkey down a mountain pass, hidden from view, she saw David and his men coming toward her and met them. David had just said, I guarded everything that belonged to this man in the wilderness for nothing. He was not missing anything. Yet he paid me back evil for good.
May God punish me and do so severely if I let any of his males survive until morning.
So we see this escalation of the conflict.
We see Nabal's servant, who hears what Nabal says and is very alarmed. He rushes off to Abigail, who is intelligent and beautiful, and tells her what happened. Says, your husband screamed at David's servants. He insulted David and refused to give them anything.
Oh, and actually, although he didn't ask us, David's men were really helpful to see Them. We didn't lose any sheep, any men to the raiding parties of the Philistines or to any wild animals or anything.
Abel's entire household knows that he's a fool. They knew that insulting a warlord leading a bunch of desperate men near your territory was a bad idea.
There wasn't anything they could do about it. So they turned to Abigail, hoping that she could save them.
Could Abigail do something about it? Well, she's going to try. We're going to see what happens. She takes an offering of food and she sets off towards David Ari. Now, this food that she collects sounds probably like a lot of food, but in reality, it really wasn't that much.
If you look at Nabal's herds, which is kind of the primary way that their wealth was measured in this time period, he had 3,000 sheep and 1,000 goats. And she takes the five sheep along with her.
There's. This is not a large significant amount of supplies that she's taken, but it's probably what she can gather right then.
So she gathers it and she sets off.
David, on the other hand, we're told, is marching for bloodshed.
Text tells us that David makes a promise to his men that he's going to kill every single one of the men in Abel's household.
I think we should just pause here for a second and consider David. Here we just saw in a chapter before David make this choice to not kill Saul in the cave.
He even feels bad for cutting off the corner of Saul's robe. David had the chance to use violence, to take a short kite before even encouraging him to bury it. But he chose not to harm the Lord's anointed.
Yet here in this story, he chooses violence.
David fully gives in to his anger over what's happening over this situation. He gives in to the frustration of his situation, of trying to lead and feed these men that are under his command, and he gives in to his anger.
We can't discount how rude and foolish the text presents Nabal as, but it definitely doesn't seem like this situation justifies the level of violent anger that David shows here.
I think we're seeing David's despair and frustration over his situation with Saul really welling up in him Here.
Awal has become his Saul replacement, someone that he can take his frustration out on, someone that is not the Lord's anointed that he can now take out his anger on.
Just because Nabal is rude and foolish doesn't mean that he and his entire household should die.
I think it's easy for us to read these kind of stories and get caught up in the narrative of it and almost read it kind of like a fictional story. We like David. He's the protagonist. He's the one who is rising to the kingship. So we root for him in the story.
But I think when we read these kind of stories, we need to make sure we take a step back and realize this is not a fictional story. This is a real story about real people who are making real decisions, sometimes poor ones. And in this case, David lets his anger overtake him and he makes a poor decision here.
He swears to all of his men that he's going to wipe out Neval's entire household.
Things have gone from bad to worse for Abigail and her hopes to stop this.
All right, let's Continue reading verses 23 to 35.
When Abigail saw David, she quickly got off the donkey and knelt down with her face to the ground and paid homage to David. She knelt at his feet and said, the guilt is mine, my lord, but please let your servants speak to you directly.
Listen to the words of your servant. My Lord should pay no attention to this worthless Ool Nabal, for he lives up to his nanny. His name means stupid and stupidity is all he knows.
I, your servant, didn't see my Lord's young men whom you sent.
Now my Lord, as surely as the Lord lives and as you yourself live, it is the Lord who kept you from participating in bloodshed and avenging yourself by your own hand.
May your enemies and those who intend to harm my Lord be like Nabal.
Let this gift your servant has brought to my Lord be given to the young men. Follow my lord.
Please forgive your servant's offense, for the Lord is certain to make a lasting dynasty for my Lord because he fights the Lord's babbles throughout your life, may evil not be found in you.
Someone is pursuing you and intends to take your life. But my Lord's life is tucked safely in the place where the Lord your God protects the living. But he is flinging away your enemies lives like stones from a sling.
When the Lord does for my Lord all the good he promised you and appoints you ruler over Israel, there will not be remorse or a troubled conscience for my Lord because of needless bloodshed or my Lord's revenge.
And when the Lord does good things for my Lord, may you remember me, your servant.
Then David said to Abigail, blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who sent you to meet me today.
May your discernment be blessed, and may you be blessed today. Ye kept me from participating in bloodshed and avenging myself by my own hand. Otherwise, as surely as the Lord God of Israel lives, who prevented me from harming you. If you had not come quickly to meet me, Nabal wouldn't have had any males left by morning light.
Then David accepted what she had brought him and said, go home in peace and see. I have heard what you said and have granted your request.
I'm sure for some of you, this really resonates with you. I can guarantee you that Julie Release thought this about me a time or two. Stupidity is all he knows.
But seriously, Abigail's treatment of David here is incredible.
You could probably write an entire book on how to talk to people who are angry just based on this.
I want to break this down into three parts. I want us to kind of look at what Abigail has to say.
First off, she takes ownership of the problem.
Abigail wasn't there. She's not the one who offended David, but it was her husband.
And she knows that taking ownership of problems and then apologizing for them often does more to blunt anger and establish credibility than trying to point fingers and blame other people.
I think this is something that we can all learn from Abigail, especially when we're dealing with people who've been hurt by the church.
It's really easy to point fingers, to try to explain how we aren't like those other people or try to explain away other people's foolishness.
But at the end, that's really not all that helpful.
Yes, we can and probably should acknowledge that people are foolish, that sometimes stupidity is all they know. But maybe instead of trying to point fingers, we should simply take responsibility for the hurts that others in the church have indulged, apologize, and try to help them heal.
Abigail shows us that this is effective.
It works. It helps people who are angry or earning.
Secondly, we see Abigail calls upon the Lord as the one who has sent her as a mercy to David to keep him from the sins he's about to commit, she lists those sins out. She says, bloodshed and vengeance by his own hand.
These would be a sin for David.
David may have recognized that harming the Lord's anointed, harming the king, what is a wrong? But it isn't just the king.
Him shedding anyone's blood without permission from God would be a sin that was established by the covenant that God made with his people. Was this rainbow right after the ark landed. And while the anointed king might be allowed to make war against the enemies of the people, this would not be that this would be David taking up arms against God's own chosen people, as foolish as he might be.
Added on top of that is that David would be directly going against God's commands.
God says that vengeance is mine.
In Deuteronomy, chapter 32, 35 and 36, it says, Vengeance and retribution belong to me. In time their foot will slip, for their day of disaster is near and their doom is coming quickly. The Lord will indeed vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants when he sees that their strength is gone and no one is left, slave or free.
God is very clear multiple times throughout Scripture that vengeance belongs to him, that we are not to take vengeance for ourselves, but we are to leave it to God.
David's anger was about to cause him to sin, but Abigail steps in and she reminds David that it is God who has sent her to keep him from sinning.
Throughout the series, we've been talking about David learning to trust God through these hard times in his life.
However, it's one thing to trust God when things are hard and there's really nothing we can do about it. I think it's a whole other ball game to learn to trust God. When we feel like we've been wronged and we see an opportunity to take revenge, we say things like, oh, I care deeply about justice, or that person needs to learn. But in reality, we just want to get even because we're angry and we think it'll feel to.
But like David is faced with, can we actually trust God to handle vengeance for us? Isn't that really the question? Do we actually trust God to handle it?
We might not see it happen.
He might choose mercy for that person.
Will their offense against us go unpunished?
Pastor Sam, a couple of weeks ago in his series Woozier 1, talked about this, that it can be difficult to extend mercy to someone we feel that we have that has hurt us.
But we have to trust that God is who he says he is and that he will do what he says he will do.
Because as much as we might like for other people to get their just desserts, we don't want ours.
The reality of the gospel message is that those punishments will not just get passed over or forgotten about.
If we are believers, and if God chooses to have mercy on that person, then those punishments are fully borne on the shoulders of Jesus Christ.
Our punishments have been borne by Jesus.
So we should trust that God will punish others or Jesus will take it upon himself. If God has mercy.
We see time and time again throughout Scripture, we see time and time again in our own lives that God does follow through with his promises.
In fact, he does take vengeance in his time.
We'll see that in our story, finally. Third, Abigail reminds David of the future promises of God.
And he's supposed to be trusting God to lead him toward this future.
She says, take the gift, forgive the offense, because the Lord is building a future for you that is far better than anything that you could possibly take for yourself with that anger in your sword.
God will provide for you and your bone. He will keep you safe and healthy. And she says that when God does all these amazing things and that David becomes the king, he wants to be able to walk into that promised future without the baggage of the bloodshed and taking vengeance for himself.
He wants to be able to experience the amazing, incredible future that God has for him without the baggage of these sins.
Abigail encourages David to remember the promised truths of God, that they're far better than anything his sin could gain for him.
Trusting God through hard times is difficult, but God's promises are so, so good.
And we can trust that he will accomplish them.
We will walk in the truths that he has promised.
It's so easy to have our eyes focused on our problems, on the things we're dealing with, the hard, the real hard things in life, and to lose sight of the promises of God.
But God has promised to provide for us even in the midst of these difficult times. Look at David here. He made the right choice in the previous chapter. But here, when he's about to give in to his anger and make the wrong choice, God intervenes. He steps in. He sends someone into his path to remind him that there's a better way to trust God. And it's not just anyone that's brought into David's path. It's an innocent who rides on a donkey, who humbles themselves and takes the blame upon their own shoulders, who brings free gifts and delivers salvation from the oppression of sin, enabling God's promises to be fulfilled. Does that sound familiar, Abigail? In this story, not David is the image of Christ.
God sends someone who acts as the image of Christ to step in, to intervene to keep David from his sin.
David may have lost his counselor in Samuel, but God was still watching. God still cared, and God was still leading David.
God sent a savior to David in the form of this woman who portrayed Christ. Dan, I think that we should take encouragement from this.
If you're struggling with your circumstances, if you're not sure what to do, if you need guidance, or you're struggling with your own mental health or emotions.
I think we can take heart from this story.
God sees you, he cares, and often he sends help in the form of other believers.
We need each other.
If David had ignored Abigail's counsel here, he would have sinned.
We are surrounded by other believers.
And get this, each and every one of the other believers in this room bears the image of Christ, just like Abigail did in the story, and has the Holy Spirit dwelling within them.
You're surrounded by people who have God dwelling within them, and they can speak God's words to you.
We just have to humble ourselves enough to listen.
David could have ignored Abigail.
He could have, having just made this promise to 400 bloodthirsty men. He could have let his pride take over and continued on his angry journey.
But instead, she pricks his conscience.
He sees her words, he hears her words, and he's humble enough to listen.
He's humble enough to recognize the helping hand of God before him.
We need to be that humble to recognize God's word in front of us, to recognize where we are struggling, when we are angry, when we are on our way bent towards sin.
We need to recognize when God steps in.
Okay, let's continue with our passage. Let's finish it off. 36:44.
Then Abigail went to Nabal, and there he was in his house holding a feast for a king. Abel's heart was cheerful and he was very drunk, so she didn't say anything to them until morning light.
In the morning, when Nabal sobered up, his wife told him about these events. His heart died and he became a stone.
About 10 days later, the Lord struck Nabal dead.
When David heard that Nabal was dead, he said, blessed be the Lord who championed my cause against Nabal's insults and restrained his servant from doing evil.
The Lord brought Nabal's evil deeds back on his own head.
Then David sent messengers to speak to Abigail about marrying him.
When David's servants came to Abigail at Carmel, they said to her, david sent us to bring you to him as a wife.
She stood up, paid homage with her face to the ground, and said, here I am, your servant, a slave to wash the feet of my Lord's servants. Then Abigail got up quickly and with her five female servants accompanying her, rode on the donkey following David's messengers. And so she became his wife.
David also married Ahinoam of Jezreel, and the two of them became his wives. But Saul gave his daughter Michael, David's wife, to Palti, son of Laish, who was from Gal.
That's the End of our story. Today, Once again, we see Abigail show her intelligence and wisdom as she comes back to see her husband party.
He's drunk, he's happy in his wealth, so she waits until the morning to speak to him.
And while David killing Nabal may have been an overreaction on his part, God is just and he judges Nabal in his gibel heart.
Nabal experiences the reverse of Ezekiel 36, 26, where God replaces the stone hearts of his people with hearts of flesh.
Abel's heart is fully hardened and ten days later, God takes vengeance for David and all of the other people when Abel is hurt and he dies facing the consequences of his own sin.
When Dave hears about this, he praises God and then he decides she was intelligent and beautiful and takes Abigail as his wife.
All right, that's our passage today.
I struggled a lot with this passage with trying to come up with a main idea, a three point message, all the things that you're supposed to do when you're writing a sermon.
And honestly, I didn't come up with one. There's a lot of really practical things in this story that I think we can take to heart and learn from.
But where I really think that God wants us to land is to just listen to the story, see these characters and really think about ourselves, where we're at right now.
Ben, you can come on back up. In the story. We had these three main characters and I think the chances are good that we can resonate with one of them if we're honest with ourselves. Do we feel like an a ball?
Do we find ourselves being defined by our desire for stuff?
Do we find ourselves missing out on the treasures of God because we're so focused on trying to gain things for ourselves?
Only God has opened your eyes recently and you realize that you've been a fool, that stupidity is all that you've known, but you don't know what to do to change things.
If you're feeling like Nabal, there is hope.
Notice in the story that Abigail told Nabal all about what she had done. And he had 10 days before God enacted his justice and ended Nabal's life. During those 10 days, he had the chance to turn, to repent, to accept God's freely offered mercy and start an end.
But instead he hardened his heart. He turned away from God's mercy. His heart died within him and then he lost his life.
None of us know how much time we have.
We can take advantage of the opportunity to turn and repent.
Listen, if you're feeling like Nabal God loves you. He really, really loves you. And he's offering mercy.
He freely offers forgiveness and grace.
He has sent his son to step in and intervene, to take your punishment on his own shoulders.
You can accept that.
Maybe instead, and probably most likely, you find yourself feeling like a David. You're in the thick of hard circumstances.
You keep trying to make the right choices and decisions, but nothing really ever seems to get better.
Sometimes you struggle with your emotions, your mental health, finding a way continually to continue following God when everything around you seems so hard.
Listen, God loves you. He really, really loves you.
He's put people in your paths to help you be humble. Listen, ask for help, maybe open up in gospel community about where you're at, about how light was bartered, and actually listen to the responses you get.
The Holy Spirit, God himself is present in the people around you. He wants to help you. He wants to step in. He wants to speak into your life.
You don't even see all the ways of. He's walking alongside of you, helping you through the tough times.
Maybe instead you aren't struggling. Maybe, like Abigail, God has put you in a place where you had the energy and the wisdom to help others.
But something is trying to hold you back.
Maybe it's a stupid husband. Maybe it's feeling like you don't know enough. Maybe it's simply that your life is pretty good right now and you don't want to upset things.
Listen, God loves you.
He really, really loves you. He's made you for this time. He's filled you with his spirit. He's called and equipped you to be able to see what others are going through and to step in and speak his words to them.
Abigail was the image of Jesus Christ to David in this story.
She saved him from sinning, possibly saved him and helped him to actually step into being a king, helped him to learn to trust God through these hard times.
And she was the image of Jesus Christ to her husband.
He did not accept.
But now it's our turn. We need to be Jesus to those around us.
Whatever you're struggling with, whatever you're, wherever you find yourself, whether it's angry, whether it's in a good place, let's spend a few minutes and ask God to speak to us. Ask God to tell us where we're at and how he wants us to move forward.
Because I guarantee you that he wants to speak to you. He wants us to respond to this message.
