Seek Wisdom in a Hostile World

David at Nob: Bread, a Sword, and a Dangerous Lie

The word of the Lord says,. Then David came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest, and Ahimelech came trembling to meet David, and said to him, Why are you alone, and no one is with you? But David said to Ahimelech the priest, The king has commanded me with a matter, and has said to me, Let no one know anything about the matter on which I am sending you, and with which I have commanded you, and I have directed the young men to a certain place.

So now, what do you have on hand? Give five loaves of bread into my hand, or whatever can be found. And the priest answered David and said, There is no ordinary bread on hand, but there is consecrated bread, if only the young men have kept themselves from women.

And David answered the priest and said to him, Surely women have been kept from us as previously when I set out, and the vessels of the young men were holy, though it was an ordinary journey. How much more than today will their vessels be holy?

So the priest gave him consecrated bread, for there was no bread there, but the bread of the presence, which was removed from before Yahweh in order to put hot bread in its place when it was taken away.

Now one of the servants of Saul was there that day, detained before Yahweh, and his name was Doeg the Edomite, the chief of Saul's shepherds. And David said to Ahimelech, Now is there not a spear or sword on hand?

For I brought neither my sword nor my weapons in my hand, because the king's matter was urgent. Then the priest said, The sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom you struck down in the valley of Elah, behold, it is wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod, and if you would take it for yourself, take it, for there is no other except it here.

And David said, There is none like it, give it to me. Then David arose and fled that day from Saul and went to Achish, king of Gath. But the servants of Achish said to him, Is this not David, the king of the land?

Did they not sing of this one as they danced, saying, Saul has struck his thousands and David his ten thousands? And David took these words to heart and greatly feared Achish, king of Gath. So he disguised his sanity in their sight and acted insanely in their hands and scribbled on the doors of the gate and let his saliva run down his beard.

Then Achish said to the servants, Behold, you see the man behaving as a madman. Why do you bring him to me? Do I lack madmen that you have brought this one to act the madman before me? Shall this one come into my house?

Wisdom in a Hostile World

I think the prevailing notion that we have in the world today as Christians is that we seem to think that we sit on an island and the world is against us. Even in the announcements this morning talking about the state of the war against abortion in our country, we have confusion in our ranks, the waters are muddied, we've got pro-life versus abolitionist versus what are we doing with the politicians, no one knows what to do, it's very unclear.

And I think one of the things that we need to do and what I'm trying to press on you this morning is that our greatest need has not really changed. Those of us who have Christ, our greatest need is to seek wisdom like the precious jewel that it is.

And in a world that we live in, everything tries to muddy and obscure wisdom from us. So we live in a world, just a few fundamental assumptions that we've had for our whole lives are being questioned and challenged in a way that I've never seen before.

I will confess that on the way to church this morning, I was listening to Tucker Carlson and the subject of the interview, if you just take it and you just examine what the guy was saying on there, it's absolutely terrifying.

It's like, things like this, does our government just lie about everything? I mean, that's where we're at. Do they ever tell the truth? I don't know and we really can't know. Are we actually the bad guys in the United States?

I don't know, I don't know. Is our food safe? Can we trust our doctors? Does any news source ever tell the truth? And if they do, which one are they and how often do they tell the truth? Hitting closer to home, is my pastor telling the truth?

Or is he just trying to make money? Is he trying to live a comfortable life and make money off the backs of his sheep? Do we know? Proverbs 8, 11 through 12 tells us, wisdom is better than pearls and all desirable things cannot compare with her.

I, wisdom, dwell with prudence and I find knowledge and discretion. So today, what we're going to do is we're going to look at the hard fought lessons that God teaches the greatest king of Israel at a time when everyone seems to be against him.

So we pick it up and we have two vignettes in this chapter. And the first one is David going to Nob, which is the town of the priests and he runs into a Himalayk and we kind of see the nature of the political situation in Israel if you're there to look at it.

David is in really dire straits. I think that David was probably thinking a lot and we have a lot of David's thoughts at this time period that we'll look at today. But that Psalm that we just sang in Psalm 13, it really perfectly typifies David's attitude during this time.

How long is this going to happen? Remember in David's life, he's the youngest son of Jesse, an obscure backwater family in Bethlehem and he goes and the great prophet Samuel, the leader of Israel, goes and passes over all of David's brothers and comes to the youngest, scrawniest, smallest one and says, you're going to be the king.

David never asked for that. David was busy tending his father's flocks and then David gets vaulted into a position where because of his zeal for the holy God, he takes down the Philistine and he destroys him and becomes famous throughout the land.

Imagine David's life, this little shepherd boy who had been out tending his father's flocks, trying to grow his father's pastures and he becomes this great man in Israel. But it's not so great now because the actual great man in Israel, Saul, has decided that he wants to murder David and that David being alive is not an acceptable solution for Saul and so David's on the run.

And David goes, as we've seen over and over again, David's first impulse is to go to where God would be. He flees to the temple, to the place where the priests are and he comes there and then the response that he gets is much like what Samuel got in chapter 16 when Samuel was going to anoint a new king over Israel and Samuel said, God, Saul's going to kill me if I go do this.

And God tells Samuel, go anyway, do this. And so it is with David when he comes to the priest, Ahimelech, Ahimelech sees him and Ahimelech is not glad that David's there. Ahimelech is trembling. He's terrified.

He's terrified just like the Bethlehemites were whenever Samuel came to them because he knows that the political situation is extraordinarily dangerous. But need drives David to this point because David has nowhere to go.

There's nowhere in Israel that can house him and so he goes to the temple seeking provision, seeking some help where no one else would give it to him and Ahimelech is extremely, extremely hesitant to give him this help.

And so David makes a decision and David's decision is to tell an outright falsehood. Now, I thought about titling the sermon this week, David did nothing wrong because I do not think that this is a sin that David commits in this part of the chapter.

The reason I think that is because the Torah gave clear prescription that it is okay just like the Hebrew midwives did to lie in order to preserve life. When someone is knocking on the door to take out and liquidate the people that are hiding in your basement, you are under no obligation to tell the executioner that there's someone they want to kill hiding in your basement.

This is the similar situation where David understands immediately the danger that he's put Ahimelech in. When he comes into this temple, Ahimelech's terrified and David tells him a story and this story is intended to give Ahimelech a plausible alibi.

David lies to him and says, Saul sent me here. David was in the court of Saul. This is a plausible story. And so David says, Saul sent me here. I'm on a secret mission, an urgent mission and my men are starving and we need bread right now.

And I don't know if Ahimelech buys it but what I do know is that Ahimelech does give David the bread but there's conditions on it. So if you don't know, if you don't know the Old Testament setup here in the Holy of Holies where it was death to go in there, there was the Ark of the Covenant and right before that door there was the table.

It was a golden table, pure gold that had frankincense and incense set on it with a candle stand and it would have 12 huge loaves of unleavened bread. Huge loaves. If you're a baker, it was about four cups of flour in each loaf.

And there's 12 of them sat here. They probably were looking like kind of a boat and they're sitting in piles and what would happen is they would bake the bread on Friday nights and they would bring the bread out and they would remove the bread that had sat all week on the table and they would put hot bread on the table for the Sabbath.

And so David asked for bread. Ahimelech says, we don't have any bread besides the bread of presence. This is holy bread. Leviticus clearly laid out in chapter 24 that no one is to eat this bread of the presence except for the Levitical priests who were running business in the temple.

This was their portion. And it was their portion to take it when it was done, when it wasn't hot anymore. And so they would eat the bread. Miraculous stuff going on here that this bread sits on the table all week.

If you're a baker and you know that you bake with no preservatives, bread that you bake, it spoils in like three days. So this stuff is sitting on the table all week long because this is a holy place and God desires that this bread would be out before him.

So David takes the bread. He is running his world the way a man after God's own heart would. He's leading these men around and he is treating his mission as though it's a holy mission of God. He tells Ahimelech that his men are sexually pure because Exodus and Leviticus tell us that a man would have to be sexually abstinent for three days before he could be considered clean to go into this temple.

And so David has been running his men around and he has kept them pure in the sexual sense. They have abstained from relations with women. And this is going to be a seed. This is a principle in David's life that we will see Uriah in 2 Samuel will not break.

Uriah will not go into his wife Bathsheba to cover up David's sin later because Uriah has been trained well by David. And this is that when we're on the mission from God, we do not defile ourselves and we do not partake.

This was at counter to the surrounding nations. Another way that David's different. The surrounding nations would send their armies out and it was rape and pillage. Go take everything. Go rape the countryside.

Have your own offspring. Intermingle with them so that you can snuff out their population. That was the culture of war. That was what was going to happen. But David stands above this because David saw that military action was holy before God.

That he was a commander in God's armies and that he had to live a holy life in front of God. So back to David in the temple. Starving, afraid, desperate. And Ahimelech has a terrible decision to make.

And that decision is, do I help him? I know what's going on here. I know what Saul's about. I know that this proverb gets sung all over the place. And I know that this is a dangerous situation. But Ahimelech makes the right call.

And he gives David bread. And no less than Jesus, the Son of God, in all three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, commends Ahimelech. He names him Abiathar in the New Testament because Abiathar is the son of Ahimelech.

And Abiathar is the last surviving priest of the line of Eli. And his line will be ended in tears, not in blood, as Solomon will later depose Abiathar. As we see that prophecy unwind from some 50 years ago.

But Jesus says this in talking about the Sabbath. Mark chapter 2, verses 25 and 26. Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions became hungry? How he entered the house of God around the time of Abiathar, the high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priest.

And he also gave it to those who were with him. Ahimelech acts to preserve life. David didn't miss breakfast and got hangry. They were starving to death in the wilderness. They were in dire straits. It was a very desperate situation.

And so Ahimelech, the priest, preserves life. He gives David the bread that it was not good to eat for normal non-Levitical people. But Jesus knows, and Jesus comments on this, because God is the Lord of the Sabbath.

God is the Lord of life. God is the bread of life. Bread is given for life and nourishment and David needed the life. And so this temple was about keeping David alive on this day. David also needs a weapon.

His story is that he ran out really fast and he doesn't have any weapons. True enough, he did run out really fast. Remember he was hiding in the field. When he gets the news, you can't go back. And so David leaves.

And then we get Ahimelech really almost doubling down in his support here. I'm going to believe this and I'm going to give you not just any weapon, the weapon. This is like the, I don't know, so many nerd jokes go through my head here and I'll spare you from all of them.

Basically what David gets is the most recognizable weapon possible. He's going to carry this huge sword around and everyone's going to know not only that he has this huge iron sword that's probably the greatest and strongest, most powerful weapon in the Middle East, but it's also one that everybody knows who did this and how he's carrying it.

And so David, the slayer of Goliath, takes his sword and there's a problem in the midst. And the danger, so David starts this chapter in danger of starvation. But as we get through this text in the temple, David runs into a different danger and that is the danger of the enemy within God's people.

And that enemy is Doeg. We get it in verse 7. One of the servants of Saul was there that day, detained before Yahweh, and his name was Doeg the Edomite. Does anything good come from Edom? No, it does not.

It does not. Edom was a wicked people that were always setting themselves up in the high places, unassailable to God's people because they lived in the mountaintops. They had strategic position. They were a violent people that came from the evil son Esau, who the Bible has nothing good to say about either.

And so Doeg is a chief herdsman of Saul. He's big up in the court. Doeg has the ear of Saul and Doeg is watching all this happen. And David sees it and David knows there's a problem. He will tell us later that when he saw Doeg there, he knew that the ruse was not going to work very well, because Doeg is in the presence.

And then we get a psalm about Doeg and this is the kind of psalm you don't want written about you. Doeg would be better off in history if no one knew his name, but we know his name, both from this chapter and the next chapter, but also from Psalm 52, where Doeg makes his name into the title of Psalm 52 and it has such cheerful verses as this to say about Doeg.

Why do you boast in evil, O mighty man? The loving kindness of God endures all day long. Your tongue devises destruction like a sharp razor, O worker of deceit. You love evil more than good, falsehood more than speaking what is right.

Selah.

You love all words that devour, O deceitful tongue. So who is Doeg typologically bound in with in Psalm 52? Could that psalm not have been exactly about Satan? Could have been. What does Doeg do? Doeg speaks malicious falsehoods.

But as we look next week, there's a curious thing that goes on. David's the one that presents a story that's not true. Doeg just tells Saul that a hemlock provided for David, that David was there. And yet, through history, we get that Doeg is the liar.

He's a speaker of falsehoods. He is an ambitious man who destroys others to raise himself up. He is full of pride. He hates the loving kindness of God. He loves evil and he hates righteousness. What I want you to take away from this and remember is that it's easier for us in wisdom.

We come from a strain where for many of our lives we'll say something like, name the verse to prove your point. And we have this idea that the Bible is an encyclopedia or a dictionary to where what we can do is go, okay, lying.

Let me look up lying in the Bible and let me get a definition for it. Okay, that's it. That's what it is. No, the Bible is written. It's the revelation of God. And God, remember back to the beginning where we started.

What do we need? We need wisdom. And when we read scripture, we have to read scripture with wisdom because oftentimes what the enemy will do is he will try to put pieces of the Bible seemingly against other pieces and he'll try to put commandments against other commandments.

So in this text, the Bible tells us clearly, thou shalt not bear false witness.

Right?

The Bible also clearly tells us that Doeg, bearing witness to what happened in Ahimelech's temple.

Is falsehood.

And malicious lies and deceit. And we think, well, that doesn't really match up with the definition. And it's not that intentions change the truth and the timeless objectivity of the commandments. But instead, it does tell us that we have a ground operating principle and that is that we are to love righteousness and hate wickedness.

And so in this case, what David is doing is David is doing everything he can to try to protect the life of these priests in Ahimelech. Samuel did the same thing and if it makes you really uncomfortable what David did here, let me make you more uncomfortable.

God told Samuel to lie in chapter 16. Yahweh told Samuel, tell Saul that you're there to offer sacrifices. Tell the people you're there to offer sacrifices. That is not why Samuel went to Bethlehem. Samuel went to Bethlehem to anoint a new king.

Okay?

So we have to read that and we have to understand intention. That the Bible is infallible. That the Bible is truth. That God does not speak lies. He's not like a man. And so we have to understand that God wrote the laws.

That the laws are perfect and they are good and they are for our good and are flourishing. And what we have to understand is that to advance God's kingdom is always lawful and to advance man's kingdom is always sinful.

What Doeg is doing is advancing his kingdom. He thinks that if he gives Saul the right piece of information that he will be raised up and that Saul's tide floating up will raise up Doeg's boats. And you have to remember, he is going expressly against the word of God in doing so because God has already declared publicly that Saul's reign is over and that his dynasty will end.

And so Doeg sets himself up and says, no, I don't like what you said there, God. I'm for Saul and I'm going to profit off of this. And so Doeg is remembered in history as being an evil, malicious, destructive, wicked man.

That's what he is. And David is remembered as being a man after God's own heart. Danger number two, the enemy of my enemy. So we move on and David leaves the temple and he's later going to regret that he went there.

And he goes to, we have to think, why are you going here? He goes to the city of Goliath.

Okay?

So he leaves Israel and he knows this situation is getting dangerous and he goes right into the heart of the Philistines.

Okay?

He flees there and immediately, I don't know what he's thinking. I really don't. We know what he's thinking later. I don't know what he's thinking at this moment. But it's pretty apparent that David thinks that he's going to be able to get a little bit of refuge, get some supplies.

You know, if worse comes to worse, he can convince the king that he's an enemy of Saul also, that he's kind of a refugee, that Saul is trying to kill him. And so maybe he can get some provision so he can go and hide out and build his mighty men up in the cave that we'll see next week because geographically this gets really close to each other.

So it's not an idiotic strategy. He wants to get some provision so that he can set up a base camp. That's his worst case scenario. His best case scenario is what actually happens later in the book is that this king accepts him in and he's like, oh yeah, I'll just make you a general of my troops and you can fight your war with all my resources behind you.

That would be awesome, right? That's not what happens here. So David goes in and the problem is David doesn't know his own notoriety. He walks into town and he's seized at Gath and immediately the people start dancing and they're saying,.

Hey,.

Do you not remember this song? Hey king,.

Do you not,.

Like you got the king of Israel who slayed tens of thousands coming in here. That's pretty dangerous.

Right?

Is that what we want to do? We want to just let this guy come in with his huge sword and his men behind him. We all know what that sword means. He chopped our champion's head off. This is a bad situation.

What are we going to do here? And David is afraid and he sees the danger because this song gets twisted. Understand, this is what enemies of God do is they twist the truth. Did David really kill his tens of thousands?

Look,.

The song is a song,.

Right?

And songs amplify. And David did figuratively kill more than Saul when he took down Goliath because it took down the head of the snake,.

Right?

It put the Philistines in disarray and it changed the balance of this war,.

Right?

And it sets David up as he's going to be the great chieftain eventually who brings peace to the whole region through his military might.

Okay?

God's favor on him. So what do they do? They twist the words of the song. And David writes this psalm in the midst of this about this. It's Psalm 56. This one has a near and dear place in my heart because Psalm 56 was the subject of the first sermon that was ever preached at Covenant Baptist Church.

It was the one Sunday in the pool house. And there was a few of us there and I had a Weber grill cardboard box and I had my stuff on there and I preached Psalm 56. Psalm 56 hit really close to home. I'm going to read five verses of it.

David wrote, Be gracious to me, O God, for man has trampled upon me all day long an attacker oppresses me. My foes have trampled upon me all day long for many attack me proudly. When I am afraid I will trust in you.

In God whose word I praise, in God I trust, I shall not be afraid. What can mere man do to me? All day long they distort my words. All their thoughts are against me for evil. These psalms are incredibly important to understanding 1 Samuel 21 because if we don't read the psalms what we would take away is that David is a coward that David tells lies and that David does extremely unfaithful things to try to save his own skin.

How do we reconcile David acting like a madman in the court of Achish with his words in Psalm 56 that says that what can man do to me I will trust in you, O God. God's enemies always twist his word. They do it today.

We hear God's enemies appeal to Christians to behave in godless ways by saying that we must love our neighbor. It is the most cherished lie of the enemy today. He loves that verse and he loves to pound Christians into submissiveness and into reckless evil by telling us that we have to love our neighbor because the definition of love is everything.

It's absolutely everything. So David trusts in the Lord and David acts to secure safety and it is an amazing act. I thought about recreating it here maybe getting some markers.

And turn around.

And start scrawling stuff on the wall. What David does is he goes all the way. So he's brought in and he starts foaming at the mouth drooling all over himself and he starts drawing graffiti all over the gates of the town and then the king he gives us a little insight into the politics of Philistine.

He says, Why are you bringing me another madman? Do I need more of them? Get this guy out of here. And we have to know again I think it's a thing that we do in narrative is we take these things dispassionately and we don't think about what was really going on here.

David would have looked like the drug soaked tattered clothes homeless man screaming obscenities on the corner and what is the normal human reaction to that kind of display? Pretend like you don't see it and walk by.

Right?

You ever been screamed at in a big city on the corner?

Yeah.

You know what you do you put your head down you avert your eyes and you walk away. And that's exactly what Akish does. Akish goes, I don't need that in my kingdom. We've already got plenty of that.

Yeah.

The madness the madness of God's enemies sets up this kind of behavior and it starts to be the fruit that runs through the whole thing. I think Akish is actually glad that Goliath was killed. I think Goliath was a problem for the Philistines.

I think he was a madman.

Who was spewing.

Blasphemy curses and obscenities.

Constantly.

And he was a problem for kind of the more moderate kings who just wanted to secure their own power in the area of Philistine.

Right?

This king just wants things to go back to normal. Don't bring this craziness into my camp. I don't want any of this. So he sends him away. And that was where this sermon ended on Monday.

And it's actually.

Longer than I thought. I'm at about 20 minutes. And I was praying and I was like, man, that's just like going through the narrative. I don't really know what the wisdom is. What do we do here? And here it is.

I'm grateful. I think what, there was a little trick here and Barney and I had been talking and I think in this chapter one of the things that started happening is looking at, this chapter is actually looking forward and not backwards so much.

And so I want to give us some wisdom. I said that we need to seek wisdom. And I want to give you wisdom this morning from this story. And the wisdom is the wisdom of Christ who is all wisdom. All wisdom that this universe has ever had is found in Christ.

He is the treasure vault of heaven's wisdom. And everything that we should do, every way that we know how to act, every way that we speak and every way that we understand should be found in Christ.

So let's look.

At these two incidents. First of all, the Ahimelech incident. While I don't think David sinned, I do think that he acted unwisely. And I think that this type of lack of wisdom is going to be one that characterizes David throughout his reign.

And that is this. David has a very difficult time with people that are close in his camp or with people who are not outright enemies. He has a difficult time dealing with them decisively. He will do that later with his own son who sets up a rebellion.

And I think what David did here with the intention of trying to preserve life, he acts unwisely and he eventually will regret that he ever went to Nob because as we'll see, every one of them is slaughtered by Saul, except for Abiathar.

So he was in desperation and I think he was tempted to do something that you and I, I know, have felt tempted to do because every direction of our culture hammers us into this box to act this way. And that is to smooth things over instead of drawing attention to the point of conflict.

Is this Christlike.

To say this?

Listen,.

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross, which means his own instrument of execution, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.

So then none of you can be my disciple who does not give up all his own possessions. Therefore, salt is good, but if even salt has become tasteless, with what will it be seasoned? It is useless either for the soil or for the manure pile.

It is thrown out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. We don't know what to do with that passage in the church today. If that was not spoken by Christ, I think we would instantly try to set those words against Christ.

And here's what we do. And here's what David did. David wanted to save the priest. He really did. But the line between him and Saul was a line that could not be crossed. And it was the point of conflict that needed to be brought forward.

And through his smoothing it over, David's actions take away the tactile, tactical, strategic actions that a himmelet could have taken to preserve life. Because what David does is he gives the plausible deniability, but he denies the conflict.

Imagine if David had gone into Nob and he had said, choose this day who you will serve. Saul, the king who has been deposed and his dynasty is crushed under God's foot, or me, the anointed king of Israel.

And if you choose me, Saul's coming after you. And if you choose Saul, I'm leaving right now. And everyone in the presence will say that you are loyal to Saul and I'm leaving. I'm out of here. And may God have mercy on you.

If he had said that, what would a himmelet's action have been? I think that what he would have done is he would have had a point of conflict and a himmelet could have acted in a way. See, David, through trying to smooth things over, takes away the opportunity for a himmelet to show faith and to trust in the promises of God.

And so that desire to straddle the line was well intentioned, but he didn't understand his enemy well enough. David's not there yet. He doesn't quite understand his enemy well enough. He doesn't understand the madness of Saul because what Saul is going to do is kill anyone who doesn't progress his goal of keeping power and keeping the throne.

Christians, we have played this game for a long time. A long time. We misunderstand our enemies because we have a pietistic desire of having no enemies. When's the last time you thought of another human being as being an enemy?

Did you know we have them? If we don't have enemies, then the Bible makes no sense in the New Testament.

When it tells us.

To love our enemies. How do you love them if you don't have any of them? And we think that we've got this game figured out in our arrogance. In my arrogance, what I've thought in my life is that I can hold a commitment to Christ in my heart and I can burn with emotion and with passion when we sing psalms like Psalm 13.

And I think,.

How long, oh Lord,.

Until you strike down your enemies in this country? How long until the darkness takes itself and it's crushed under your feet? And I do nothing because what I think that I have is the zeal of the Lord between my ears and in my heart, and it does nothing in my life.

That is the pietistic nonsense that describes the church today. And I am a huge part of it. For my whole life, for my whole life, I have talked about how evil abortion is and my feet went nowhere. For too long in my life, I have suffered evil and the thoughts of wicked men in my face and said nothing because I didn't want to harm the relationship.

The solution that we have devised to the problem of Jesus saying that we would be hated.