Keep sharing good news without ads.
Source: https://www.sermonindex.net/speakers/jerry-jennings/davids-difficulties/
I'll read with you in 1 Samuel chapter 18. 1 Samuel 18, I'll read in verse 5. It says, and David went out whithersoever Saul sent him, and behaved himself wisely. And Saul sent him over the men of war.
And he was accepted in the sight of all the people and also in the sight of Saul's servants. Then it came to pass as it came, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Philistines, that the women came out of all the cities of Israel singing and dancing to meet King Saul with tabrets or tambourines, with joy and with instruments of music.
And the women answered, I take it they answered in song, one another as they played and said, Saul hath slain his thousands and David his ten thousands. Saul was very wroth, and the saint displeased him, and he said, I have ascribed unto David ten thousands.
And to me they have ascribed but thousands, and what can he have more but the kingdom? And Saul eyed David from that day and forward, and he eyed him suspiciously. It came to pass on the morrow that the evil spirit from God came from Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house, and David played with his hand, as at other times, and there was a javelin in Saul's hand.
Saul cast the javelin, for he said, I will smite David even to the wall with it. And David avoided out of his presence twice, and Saul was afraid of David because the Lord was with him, and was departed from Saul.
Therefore Saul removed him from him, and made him his captain over a thousand, and he went out and came in before the people. And David behaved himself wisely in all his ways, and the Lord was with him.
Wherefore, when Saul saw that he behaved himself very wisely, he was afraid of him. But all Israel and Judah loved David, because he went out and came in before them. I see two things in this chapter, at least two things.
One of the things I see in this chapter is David's rise. The other thing I see in this chapter is Saul's rage. So you have the rage of Saul, but you have the rise of David. And David in my mind is a little picture, a little reminder to me of the Lord Jesus Christ, who was the son of David, David's greater son.
And that title links him to the throne, and it links him to an eternal dynasty. Sometimes you read about the Lord Jesus as a son of God, and that links him to heaven. And other times you read about him as a son of Abraham, and that links him to the land, and to the nation of Israel.
And then other times you read about the Lord Jesus as the son of man, and that links him to mankind, a world of sinners lost, and ruined by the fall, and trembling on the brink of hell. I've noticed that David's name is the first human name you read about in the New Testament, and the last human name you read about in the New Testament.
And his name means beloved, and that reminds me of what is said of the Lord Jesus. God said, this is my beloved son, and whom I am well pleased. And on the mountain of transfiguration, he said the same words, and added, some, hear ye him.
And then it's interesting that we read, and they saw no one save Jesus only. Nice when we get our eyes on Jesus only. Keeps us out of trouble, you see. David was a man that was anointed king long before he took the throne.
The Lord Jesus is the king of kings. He's not just a king. But he's the king of kings, and he's not just a lord. He is the Lord of lords. Even though he has not ruled, excuse me, even though he has not reigned on earth, he is the king of kings, and he's the Lord of lords.
And one day he's gonna rule on this earth. And when he rules on this earth, it'll be the first righteous reign there ever was upon the face of the earth. There isn't one today. I don't know that there ever has been.
But I'm looking forward to the day when there is. And that's when the Lord Jesus, the Prince of Peace, will rule and reign upon the earth, from the rivers to the ends of the earth. And the whole earth will be covered with the knowledge of the Lord as the water covereth the seas.
It'll be a wonderful day in that day. I'm looking forward to that day. I'm sure you are as well. Now, both David and the Lord Jesus experienced something. What they experienced was rejection, and they also experienced exile.
And they experienced rejection and exile before reigning. The Lord bore a cross before he ever bears a crown upon this earth. When you read in John chapter 18, you see the Lord Jesus. You see David's greater son, and he's crossing the Kidron Brook, and he's crossing as a rejected king.
If you go back to 2 Samuel, I believe it is, verse 15, you'll find David, and he's crossing the same brook years before. He's crossing the Kidron Brook, and he's crossing that brook as a rejected king as well.
And then, as the years go by, you see David's greater son crossing that same brook as a rejected king. When we read about Saul, he's an interesting man. We often find him with something in his hand. You say, what's that?
It's a javelin. He has a javelin in his hand. You know what that javelin really was in my mind was a symbol of his authority. He's holding that javelin. He wanted folks to know that he was the man in charge.
He's got this javelin on demand. That's his thinking. And he wanted everybody to think the same way that he was thinking, because he had the javelin in his hand. But over against that kind of behavior, you find David.
David didn't have a javelin in his hand. He had a harp in his hand. You see this man David with a harp in his hand, and you see him with a shepherd's crook in his hand. And then you see him with a sling in his hand, and you also see him with a sword in his hand.
It's Goliath's sword. You know this man David was a lawyer. He was no pushover. And whatever task that God had for David, David was a man that was ready. You ready, brother? Am I ready for whatever task God has for you and for me?
Brethren, are we watering the flock? I've mentioned this before, but my world is small, and I want to keep it that way. And so this might be boiled over bones, but at least it's bones, okay? But it's the brethren that have the responsibility to roll the stone away and water the flock.
You doing that? You say, well, brother so-and-so, he'll be coming. He'll have a word for the people of God this morning. He'll roll the stone away and he'll water the flock, but how do you know the brother's gonna get there?
You know things happen. I've known brethren that have come to a worship meeting and then never made it. They were in eternity before they got there. So that means that we need every brother that God has blessed with a measure of gift or ability or the courage enough to get up and speak should be a brother that is ready for whatever task God has for that individual.
Sisters as well. God has things for the sisters to do, but one of the things he doesn't have for them to do is to speak publicly. David was a man who was ready for whatever task God had for him to do.
God help us this afternoon to be ready as well for whatever task God has for you and whatever task God has for me. Now, this dear Saul's an interesting man in my mind. He was jealous. He was a man that was very, very jealous.
He was jealous over his authority. He was jealous and territorial over his position. Thus, he became very envious of David. And not only was he envious, but he was very, very sensitive in relation to David and in relation to what the people said about him over against what they said about David.
He was very jealous about that. He was very sensitive about that. He was very territorial about that. David was getting attaboys. And Saul wasn't getting any attaboys. You say, what's an attaboy? That's when somebody pats you on the back and says, attaboy.
You did real good. Right? That's an attaboy. And David was getting attaboys and Saul wasn't getting any attaboys. David was getting praise and Saul wasn't getting praise. And that affected Saul in a bad way.
It made him jealous and made him very sensitive and it made him very territorial. First, he is envious. And then his envy turns into something. It turns into jealousy. And then he's suspicious. And then his suspicion turns into something and that's fright.
He became afraid of David. Because he knew that God was with David. And that frightened Saul. That brought fear into him. Fear began to grip that man's soul. And then he becomes angry. He probably became angry because he got fearful.
And it bothered him that he became fearful and now his fear turns into anger. It makes him angry that he realizes, suddenly I'm afraid of this man, David. And then his anger turned into hatefulness towards David.
And then that hatefulness turned into murder in his heart. Poor Saul. He got afraid. And then he got hateful. And then that hatred welled up in his heart. And it came out with the attitude and the idea of murdering this man, David.
So in this difficult situation, and it was a difficult situation because David was dealing with a very difficult man. Have you ever dealt with difficult men? I met a woman one time. She was an Amish lady.
Her name was Elizabeth. Roy and I met her in a shoe shop. She was a shoe cobbler. She was kind of getting on in age. I don't know how old she was. I didn't ask her. It wasn't none of my business. But I knew she wasn't any spring chicken.
So I asked her, I says, you married? She goes, no. I said, you ever been married? And she says, no. I said, you ever think about being married? And she says, yeah. But she says, you find me a man that's not difficult.
And she says, I might think about getting married. Well, I don't think this man here, Saul, was the only man that was difficult. I said, you know, that's kind of our nature. Men can be difficult. Saul was a man who was very, very difficult.
And David was a man that was dealing with a man that was difficult. And there's a lot of women in the world today, and they're dealing with men that are very, very difficult. My dad was a difficult man.
And my mom dealt with my dad as a difficult man. And then God took him into eternity, many, many, many years ago. He was extremely difficult. Saul was difficult. And now David is dealing with this difficult man.
But you know, the word of God is quite interesting in my mind, says that David acted wisely in his dealings with Saul. And he really turned to and he trusted the Lord. Where would he turn? Where would you and I turn?
Where do you turn in difficult situations? Where do you turn when you're dealing with difficult people? Well, the place to turn is to the Lord, just exactly like David did. And he trusted God for help.
He looked to God for help. He didn't look to his fellow man for help, but he looked to God for help because God was there to help him. And you know, it's interesting in my mind, I don't read in the word of God, but I might've missed something.
I'm not that close a reader. Well, I admit that. So I might've missed something, but I really never have read in the word of God where David ever considered Saul his foe. He never looked at him that way.
I don't know that he looked at him as his friend, but he never looked at him that I can see as his foe. And I think that's because he was simply trusting in God for the help that he needed in a difficult situation, a difficult time in his life.
And that really kept him in good stead with God. And it kept him in favor with his fellow man. It'll do the same for you and me. It'll keep us in good stead with God. It'll keep us in favor with our fellow travelers to eternity.
You know, God used these incidents. God allowed this difficult man and difficult situations to come into the life of this man by the name of David. And He did it not to make David bitter, but to make David better.
And when those things intrude into your life and intrude into my life, and God allows those things, not necessarily makes them happen, but God allows those specific things to come into your life and mine, situations and circumstances, going up the creek and over the mountain in life.
And God don't allow those things to come into your life and mine to make us bitter, but He does that to make us better. A better man, a better woman, a better boy, girl for the glory of God. David wasn't a perfect man, but I think these situations in his life caused him to become a man of faith.
What kind of man is that? Well, that's really very simple in my mind. Faith is just believing God. That's simple. We talk about faith, more faith, so on and so forth. But faith is just believing, taking God at His word, believing what God tells us.
And a child of God, a believer, like this man David, we just move through our lives on the principle of faith. In other words, we believe what God tells us in the word of God, and that really removes lots of difficulties in life.
Doesn't it? Well, it does for me. David was a man that lived in constant danger. But it's interesting in my mind that through all of this danger that he lived through, God preserved him and protected him in that danger.
And David was kind enough and gracious enough to write in Psalm 18 and verse 19 something about that. He wrote, he delivered me because he delighted in me. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? God delighted in David, and thus he delivered him through these circumstances, not necessarily out of them, but through them.
And because he delighted in David, and as it was, so it is today. Our brothers already reminded us this morning, relative to children, we're living in a dangerous world. We're living in a difficult world.
We're living at the end of the age and the eve of the coming of the Lord Jesus. We can expect what we are living through today, and it may get worse than what it is already. Our world is dangerous. I don't know what your world is around Lancaster and Blue River and down here in the hills and the hollers of Wisconsin.
I don't know what your world is like. But I know what it's like in Oklahoma, in the nations. A place where there's 39 Indian reservations and over 40 tribes of Indians, maybe 50. You see the United States government years and years ago stole their land from them.
And then they all herded them up into boxcars and they hauled them all down to Oklahoma and turned them loose in Oklahoma. So they live in Oklahoma. There's a lot of dangerous places in Oklahoma. Not because they're Indians.
Not because the majority of the people in the state of Oklahoma are either Indian or they have Indian blood in them. It's just the way it is. But they're not living in teepees. No, they're not washing their clothes down at the river.
They're not eating buffalo meat anymore. They have all the modern conveniences that we have in Wisconsin, Iowa, or anywhere else. There's nothing strange about us. The only thing that's really strange about us down there in Oklahoma is our driving.
We kind of like to herd other cars down the road. You know what I mean? You could be going 80 and the fella behind you, you can't see his license plate because he's herding you down the road. And you may be coming up the road 80 mile an hour and somebody will pull out of their driveway right in front of you.
Now it's their road. It ain't your road no more. So you better get on the brakes. That's how it works down there. I'm kind of finally learning that that's how it is. So when you see him head for the stop sign or you see him heading out of an intersection or out of a driveway, you better get your foot close to the brake because you're likely gonna need to use it.
You go to Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is absolutely dangerous. Don't matter who you are or what neighborhood you live in, they have a thing going on there called home invasion. That's really a fancy name for somebody coming to your door and kicking your door down, whether you're gone or whether you're in there and they come in and they wanna rob you.
That's going on all over the world in this country, this United States that used to be so secure when we were young, don't you know? Never thought about those things. And I never ever paid a penny for a glass of water either.
And now I gotta pay a dollar and 20 cents for a liter of Pepsi Cola water. What's the name of it? Aqua something. It's delicious. I recommend it. It's great stuff. That's the world we're living in. It's a different world today.
It's a dangerous world today. And David is a man that was in constant danger and God preserved him and protected him in it through it. I believe that God can do the same for you and the same for me. So I really don't worry about these things.
I go to bed at night. I don't lose any sleep. I just go to bed, put my head down on the pillow and I'm out in la-la land till sometime in the morning. I think that David's honesty and his integrity before God sustained him in the years of Saul was in the business of persecuting him and making accusations against him.
You know, brethren, I learned something one time. I have learned a few things, not too many. And I am a slow learner. I had a friend by the name of Troy Valentine. He's gone into eternity now. He used to be the chief of police and I worked for him as a cop.
Must've been mumbling one day. I remember him saying to me, he says, you know, he says, you know, Jerry, you cannot control what people say about you or what they do to you. You ever think about that?
You can't control that. You can't control what people say about you. You ain't gonna say what they wanna say about you. They're gonna do to you what they wanna do to you. But I tell you what he did tell me.
He says, this is what you can do. He says, you can control what you say about them and what you do to them. It doesn't mean that I've always done that. But the older I get, the more that makes sense to me.
What this man told me years and years ago, I was a sinner with a heart like a swinging brick. And I'd never seen the inside of a Bible in those days. And I've never really forgotten what Mr. Troy told me.
And I think it's good advice, even though it comes from a man who, as far as I know, never knew anything relative to the message of the gospel. And neither did he wanna know. He was just that way. You might've noticed down in verse 11 that Saul casts a javelin at David.
Javelin's a pretty interesting weapon. It's dangerous. It's a stick with a point on it. It's not only dangerous, but it's lethal. And it can cause great bodily injury. And that's exactly what Saul wanted to do to David.
He just wanted to pin him right to the wall with his javelin. And you know, sometimes, sad to say, the dear people of God, myself included, unintentionally have a javelin in our hand. What we really ought to have in our hand is the book.
Or perhaps a crook, shepherd's crook. Or maybe the hook, fishing for souls. But sometimes, just unintentionally, with no balance whatsoever, just in maybe a careless, unthinking way, we have a javelin in our hand.
And this javelin doesn't really harm anybody physically, but it can harm people emotionally. It can harm their feelings. It can hurt their feelings in an emotional sort of a way. You know, there's a lot of javelins that can be cast.
And one of those javelins is a javelin of bigotry. Bigotry. Then there's a javelin of prejudice. Prejudice, perhaps, over somebody's color. The color isn't quite right to suit us. Or maybe the way they comb or part their hair as a javelin of prejudice and bigotry.
Sometimes we have that javelin of bigotry towards someone's Christian connection. You know, we're not the only saved people in the world. There are people that are saved and born again. They are part of the body of Christ and they're in certain denominations because they really don't even know that there's anything other than that.
They don't know anything about assembly truths because no one has really taken the time to explain it to them. Or maybe they have taken the time to explain it to them and they really have no interest with it and they're happy where they're at.
But we really don't have any reason to be prejudiced towards them or against them. I've kind of always thought about it this way, that they are responsible to God for the light that they have. That's their responsibility.
But you and I are responsible to God for the light that we have. And that's our responsibility. There's also the javelin of legality. And then there's over against that is the javelin of lawlessness. And then there's the javelin of hypocrisy, pretending to be something that I'm not.
Or maybe spiritual pride. Is that possible? And arrogance. They kind of go together. The only thing I can think of that's worse than spiritual pride and arrogance is preacher pride. Then there are other times in our lives when we become the recipients of this.
We become the recipients of these carnal acts and actions that are dangerous. They're dangerous to us. Dangerous to you. And they're not only dangerous, they're disgraceful. That those acts and actions should come from a child of God.
And that makes them disgusting. So how do we deal with it? I know what the flesh says. And I just bet you that David was thinking the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if it went through his mind. Saw through that javelin at him, meant to hit him, meant to kill him.
And just for an instant, at least David probably would have liked to pick that javelin up and thrown it back at Saul. And pinned him to the chair he was sitting in. You say, why would you think that? Because that's the way I think.
Yeah. That's what the old flesh says, right? Cast the javelin back. That's really what the flesh wants to do, isn't it? Take that javelin and throw it right back as hard as you can throw it at the one that threw it at you.
But what did David do? David didn't do that. I think we need to take David's example. I need to take David's example. When Saul threw that javelin at him, he didn't pick it up and throw it back. Oh no.
You say, what'd he do? Well, he stepped aside. Well, that's good of him, wasn't it? That was right. He did the right thing. He stepped aside. And he walked away. And the Bible says he behaved himself wisely.
And then the Bible tells us that he behaved himself wisely in all his ways. Is that as far as it goes? No. He behaved himself wisely in all his ways and God was with him. Well, that's a lovely example, isn't it?
You know, a brother told me he's gone into eternity now, but years and years ago, he told me something. He said, they that go with God always win. We need to go with God. We need to do as David did. Step aside and walk away and let it go.
Let God take care of it. You know, the Lord sets an example for us in the same identical way. 1 Peter 2, verse 23, when he was reviled, what'd he do? Retaliate? No, he reviled not. That's what he did.
He did the right thing. 1 Corinthians 4, verse 12, Paul exhorts us. Being reviled, what do we do? We bless. We bless. Being persecuted, what do we do? Fight back, throw the javelin back and just suffer it.
And in due time, you know, time has a way. Time has a way of healing things. Time has a way of setting things right. So we need to just give it time and do as David did, do as the Lord did. He reviled not.
And what did David do? He just stepped aside and he walked away and he behaved himself wisely and then more wisely. And then the Bible tells us, it's an encouragement to you and me, that the Lord was with him.