2 Samuel 5:17-25 The Persistent Pursuit

Of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsack is preaching from his series, The Warrior Poet King, Study of Second Samuel. Let's listen in.

Well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsack, the lead pastor, and I wanna welcome all of you to this gathering, worship gathering, in the name of Jesus Christ this morning.

How many of you are glad to be together.

With others who love Jesus? Amen, I'm so glad to be together. And I'm gonna start off by introducing the message like I usually do, and then we're gonna sing some songs. Some of you, this is your first time here, and you're like, is he gonna preach right now?

I've actually had people think that. Like, when I get up here, they're like,.

Oh, wow, he's just going for it.

I'm gonna introduce the message, then we're gonna sing some songs, and then I'm gonna come back, and we're gonna kinda walk through it more in depth and in detail. But have you ever noticed that life is full of cycles?

And those of you that are older, you already know that, right? Like, it just comes in cycles at us.

We know that it is.

We were here just a week ago, and here we are again, and Lord willing, we'll be here next week, and the following week, and the following week. We are creatures of habit. The older we get, the more routines become pronounced in our lives, right?

We kinda tend to begin to like those patterns and those well-worn ruts. But more than this is the reality that the clothes get dirty. We throw them in the washer, throw them in the dryer, fold them, put them away, wear them again, they get dirty.

Cycles, right, cycles. The dishwasher is always in a state of either needing to be loaded, started, or unloaded. Anybody? Always one of those is the case, right? And then there are the seasons. I haven't mowed my lawn recently.

I don't know if any of you have, but we know that's coming, right? Anybody a hearty amen to that? Looking forward to a little bit of outside time this time of the year.

It's nice.

We enjoy the seasons, enjoy them coming around. But the reason I'm talking about cycles is that I believe our text shows a spiritual side, a spiritual side of cycles that comes to us as an implicit encouragement to persist in cycles of pursuing God.

To persist in cycles of pursuing God. Our text this morning looks like two identical scenarios that face David. Two different times that the Philistines are gonna challenge David in battle for the identical same valley.

Two times that David is going to inquire of the Lord. Two times that the Lord answers. And two times that the Philistines are defeated at the hands of King David, but maybe even more so to say, at the hands of the Lord Almighty.

But there is something that stands out significantly in these parallel accounts. God's answer to David differs the second time. Same scenario, same situation, same valley, same enemies, but his instruction differs the second time.

See, what I'm gonna point out in this message and what I want us to think about before we even read it is that David didn't have a disconnected kind of relationship from God. He didn't rest on past communication with God and say, I'm okay, he talked to me once.

He didn't take God's answers as once for all communication, but he leaned into God in relationship. We see in our text that David persistently pursued his God and so should we. He was in relationship with him, he inquired of God, even when the same exact situation came up a second time.

So we learn something about David here in the text, but we also learn something about God in the text. We do not serve a silent, detached, and distant God. We serve a God who is able to communicate with us and is indeed involved in the lives of his people,.

Those he loves.

So now that we know a bit of what to look for in the text, let's open our Bibles or our devices or your scripture journal to 2 Samuel 5, verses 17 through 25. So it's 2 Samuel 5, 17 through 25, and let's read this together, recast God's holy and precious word, exactly what he desires for us to hear this morning in the gathering together of his people.

When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed king over Israel, all the Philistines went up to search for David. But David heard of it and went down to the stronghold. Now the Philistines had come and spread out in the valley of Rephim, and David inquired of the Lord, shall I go up against the Philistines?

Will you give them into my hand? And the Lord said to David, go up, for I will surely give the Philistines into your hand. And David came to Baal-perazim, and David defeated them there. And he said, the Lord has broken through my enemies before me like a breaking flood.

Therefore, the name of that place is called Baal-perazim. And the Philistines left their idols there, and David and his men carried them away. And the Philistines came up yet again and spread out in the valley of Rephim.

And when David inquired of the Lord, he said, you shall not go up, go around to their rear and come against them opposite the balsam trees. And when you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the balsam trees, then rouse yourself, for then the Lord has gone out before you to strike down the army of the Philistines.

And David did as the Lord commanded him and struck down the Philistines from Geba to Gezer.

Let's pray.

Father, I thank you that you are a God who is faithful to communicate to us first and foremost and most fundamentally and most obviously through your word. It's even in your word that we come to understand a relationship with you.

It's in your word that we understand a communication that comes from you, revealing who you are and how you desire a relationship with us to go. So Father, I pray that the byproduct of our gathering this morning would be more than just taking in a service, more than the opportunity to just rub shoulders with others, but most importantly, an opportunity to see you in new light, an opportunity to see you in your word and see you calling us further and deeper into relationship with you.

Father, I pray that that would be a reality for each and every one of us, from the one here who has known you the longest.

To the one who knows the least about you,.

That all of us would grow in our faith this morning, that you would just tick up a notch in terms of our relationship with you, our understanding of who you are. And Father, that you would allow the gospel to come to bear in our minds and in our hearts the good news, we are sinners broken, to a person in the room, no one righteous, not a single one of us, and yet you came to rescue us.

You sent your son to die on the cross to take the penalty that we deserve for our sins. So Father, I pray that you would make that reality come alive for us, for those of us who have trusted that and believe that, Father, I pray that it would ignite our hearts and worship to you this morning, that we would rejoice together in gladness and that our voices would lift up in song because we have been redeemed and bought back from our sinful ways by our Savior Jesus Christ and it's in his name that I pray, amen.

All right, yeah, you can go ahead and be seated, but like I say every week, if at any time during the message you need to get up and stretch out, if you need more coffee or water back there, if you need to use the restrooms, they're out the double doors down the hallway on the left-hand side.

So you're not gonna distract me if you get up. You might distract me if you shouted me down or something like that, but much shy of that and I'm on a roll. So keep your Bibles open to 2 Samuel 5, verses 17 through 25.

Again, if you lost your place there, in your device or whatever it is, make sure you've got that open in front of you so you can see that the things that I'm saying are coming from God's word. These are not things that I just kind of invented and wanted to talk to you about this morning.

These are things that God's word dictates that we talk about because we're marching through the book of 2 Samuel. Now, some people naturally thrive off routine and you can think about how you function in life.

Some of you just love routine and you like to kind of do the same things. You go to the same place, order the coffee from the same waitress every week and you just kind of have these routines. Some people absolutely love change and there's a few rare people somewhere in the middle, but that's not very common.

I personally find routine to be monotonous. I am grateful for a calling that involves a variety of different kinds of meetings. Not one Monday looks the same from the next. I get to study different texts every week, communication that varies significantly from week to week.

How many of you would say you have a job like that and you love it, like you've got some flexibility in the way that things are organized and stuff like that? How many of you do the same thing almost every day?

How many of you are okay with that? Some of us are, like we just don't mind that routine.

And that's good.

God puts us together in different ways, right? But in our spiritual lives, we see a frequent calling to persistent pursuit of God in prayer. We need to persistently take in his word to grow in our faith.

We need to create some cadence and routine in our lives. We need to set our lives into cycles that weekly routine cycle cadence of gathering with God's people on the Lord's day. You guys have done that this morning and so that's great.

That demonstrates that you've got at least some notion that this is something that's valuable that God has given to you for your own benefit and blessing. But our text this morning spotlights two different events in the life of David.

They're similar events and they have so much similarity that some scholars have posed a theory that these are one event recorded for us twice. But there's all kinds of really solid, good textual reasons to be confident.

That these are two separate battles,.

Two separate accounts that are recorded to highlight David's persistent pursuit of God and equally God's continued care for his people through David. Verse 17 is set after David has conquered Jerusalem and he now possesses the fortress of Zion which sits up on a hill and he's made that his capital.

Jerusalem is now the capital of his kingdom. He's united all 12 tribes of Israel under his leadership. God has brought him to the throne. God who promised that in his youth and through a lot of twists and turns of his life brought him to the throne over Israel.

And when the Philistines caught wind of the anointing and coronation of King David over a unified Israel, they put out an APB. He is number one on the Philistines most wanted list and they are sending out everybody they can to try to get a hold of David.

I don't think it's for good intent. They don't wanna question him. They wanna put him to death. And let me share a brief explanation of the Philistines because I realize that I've mentioned them a lot in previous several weeks without much explanation of who they are and it might be helpful for us to have just the smallest and shortest of history lessons on who in the world are we talking about when we're talking about the Philistines.

Most historians believe that they were primarily a seafaring people out on the Mediterranean Sea living on islands. They settled the east coast of the Mediterranean after some voyages and trips. The reasons are numerous why people see them as seafaring but a lot of their culture was oriented around the water and around the sea and so that's part of the reason.

One major reason is that their primary God that they worship, their primary deity was named Dagon. He was half fish and half man. Merman father, right? They were more technologically advanced than the Israelites.

They settled the coastal plains and lived along the shores of the sea, a fertile area where there was good crop growth there and all of that kind of stuff and they were loosely divided among five primary settlements.

Each settlement, each primary city had its own king but Israel holds the hill country and up into the mountains and then down into the Jordan Valley to the east of them and so that made the Philistines were restricted in their travel and restricted in their trade because these people had come in and moved in really close to them.

So when you see the Philistines attacking Israel, it isn't just that they were bullies. Now, how many of you hear the story of David and Goliath? He comes out and taunts Israel and it's like, what kind of a jerk is this and why is he acting this way and certainly we ought to beat up on him and stuff like that.

Now, they certainly could be bullies and they were at times and seasons but battles historically have been about trade routes, resources or advantageous territory. That's the primary reason. There's other things like things get really dark in the human heart and there's such a thing as genocide and superiority and all of that kind of stuff that can come to bear in there but most of the time when people expend the resources for battle, there's a cause behind it.

I'm not gonna get political at all right now but we know that when war ensues, there's a cause for it. Somebody thinks it's a good idea but further, some of you have been to Israel and you could speak more to this from experience but if you were to set a map of Israel, I have always loved this because we have a little bit of an advantage living in West Michigan when we conceive of the territory of Israel.

If you were to set a map of Israel to scale over West Michigan, we can roughly think of Grand Rapids as the area near the Sea of Galilee. You can think of Kalamazoo as approximately where the Jordan River empties into the Dead Sea in the south and then you can kind of see the coast there would approximate the coast of the shore of Lake Michigan.

We have kind of an image there of the basic gist of distances when you're talking about Israel. Isn't that kind of cool how that works? It gives you a little bit of a perspective on what we're talking about when we're looking at the Old Testament.

Really, what you need to understand is the Jordan River then basically approximates 131 going up the side of Michigan there. Fits really nicely and so what you have is you have the Philistines basically settled in the area from St. Joe to Saugatuck.

So that's where they live. They live over there and about five miles in from the lake shore is about the area of possession of the Philistines. These places, I hope that that keys in for you the reality that these places are not far apart when we're reading about them in the Bible.

It was surprising to me when I realized that almost all of the events of the Old Testament took place in a region about the size of southwest Michigan. One major distinction between southwest Michigan and Israel is that there's a central spine of mountains that runs right down.

Right down, you can kind of see the darker color is the mountains, the raised area. The Jordan River runs through a major valley on the planet, a major scar across the face of our planet that runs all the way from basically the Sea of Galilee down into Africa, down into Kenya.

It's called the Rift Valley and it just goes and goes and goes. So the Red Sea is a part of that and so you can kind of see the mountains that are up there to the left. So the Philistines were looking for David so he went down into the stronghold.

I believe that's the stronghold of Zion.

That he's just occupied.

So this implies that he was somewhere up in the high places west of Jerusalem, maybe overlooking Philistine territory and taking it in when he was made aware of the APB. And so he went down to Zion from a higher location in order for safety.

The fact that the Philistines organized for war in the Valley of Raphaim shows that they are intentionally trying to provoke David. There's a little bit of location going on there. The Valley of Raphaim is just a few miles south and west of Jerusalem.

It would be a primary way up through the mountains into Jerusalem from the southwest direction. And so what's going on is when the Philistines set up camp there and kind of muster for war, they're encroaching on Israelite territory and cutting off a road out of Jerusalem.

So now Jerusalem has to do something about it in order to continue to trade to the south and west of them. So what I want you to understand is what we're trying to get at here is imagine that St. Joe wants to attack Kalamazoo.

So they muster at Pawpaw. That's about the distances that we're talking about. That doesn't help a ton, does it? St. Joe attacks Kalamazoo, we're ready for him. That's not in my notes, but I think we would be.

Some of you work in St. Joe, you're like,.

I don't know, I don't know how this is gonna go.

But verse 19 snaps into focus. The reason we're reading nine verses instead of just one. Because honestly, when you read some of these historical accounts, sometimes I would imagine that many of us would scratch our head and go, why all this detail?

When it would suffice to just basically say a sentence or two and move on. At face value, it seems like the events of this entire passage could be summarized in this one sentence. David defeated the Philistines twice at the Valley of Rephiam, end of story.

That's the story in a nutshell. That's what we've got going on here. That's the only movement we have in this text from beginning to end. They muster at Rephiam twice, he beats their tail, and they go running twice, end of story.

But the point in this passage is found in the details today. In verse 19, we see that David inquired of the Lord. And he asked two questions. The first time that they muster there at Rephiam, he asked two questions of God.

Two important questions. Should I go up and attack the Philistines?

First question.

Will I succeed?

Second question.

And I absolutely adore and love the honesty of these two questions because often if we're honest, we think that the spiritual question is the first and the less spiritual is the second. But if we're honest, we often ask of God with the purpose of the second question in mind.

What am I getting at? Our questions for God are not truly and deeply often about finding out what God wants, but they're more about finding out if it, whatever it is, will go well for us. How often do you pursue God just to know what he wants you to do so that you'll just do it?

And how often do you pursue God because you wanna know if it's gonna succeed? You getting me? Isn't that often the nature of our questions that God will go to him if we wanna know how it's gonna go for us?

Are you really interested in knowing that God wants you to go to U of M Medical School only to get burned out and leave a year later? I mean, what if he says, yeah, I want you to go to U of M, and I want you to learn through the pain and suffering of failing out of something?

I mean, would you sign up for that? Do you wanna know that? You go to God and say, what do you want of me?

Well, I want you to go do this.

Would you wanna know if it wasn't gonna succeed? The question, where do you want me to go to college? Who do you want me to marry or any of the major life decisions? Where do you want me to work?

Do you want me to move?

Do you want me to switch jobs? Is actually a bit more accurately asked,.

Where will I succeed?

Is that not really the nature of many of our questions? And yet, David, here in the text modeling for us, David is not ashamed to ask that follow-up question. Who do you serve? Do you serve a God that loves you?

Do you serve a God who is with you, who is guiding you into what is good for you, even if it means some pain and difficulty for a season? Do you serve a God who has your best interests in mind? Yes, you do, if you serve the Lord God Almighty and Jesus Christ, his son.

He asked the question, should I attack? And secondly, will I be successful? Now, I wonder if David was actually ready for a yes and then no answer. Yes, you should go up.

No, you won't succeed.

This happened to Saul, by the way, lest we think that that's an impossible answer. David, I mean Saul, King Saul, at the end of his life was just grasping at straws. He was pursuing God and God was closed off to him because he had sinned and he had broken covenant with God and so God says, I'm closing you off.

I'm raising up somebody else to lead and so Saul, in desperation, strange account, but he actually goes to a necromancer, somebody who speaks to the dead, like a medium, like a sorceress. And he goes and he speaks to her and she brings up the soul of the prophet Samuel from the place where the book gets its name, 2 Samuel.

And he asks, should I attack the Philistines? And Samuel, kind of like, dude, I was resting. What you doing? Basically says, dude, no, you don't need to attack the Philistines. Tomorrow, the Philistines are gonna attack you and you're gonna join me.

You and your sons are gonna join me. You'll be here with me. Now, would you wanna know that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't worry about it. You don't need to take the aggression. They're gonna come get you. You're gonna be dead tomorrow.

Saul went into that final battle for his life knowing that the prophet, the dead prophet, weird, the dead prophet had prophesied over him. You're gonna be dead tomorrow.

What?

Well, let me state again, as I have in previous sermons, that what David does here in inquiring of the Lord is a very specific Old Testament method of discerning the Lord's guidance. So he had Abiathar, the priest, with him.

He had an actual priest of God with an ephod. An ephod comes with two fixtures on it. It had a pocket in the front with two tiles in it called the Urim and the Thummim. Now, the way that this worked is it was divinely-sanctioned lots that were divinely-sanctioned dice, if you will, to throw to determine the Lord's guidance.

Now, that's foreign to us, and it's different, and yet we know proverbially that God says every casting of the lots comes from God. The decision of the lot comes from Him. And so this was divinely-sanctioned in Old Testament law.

And what they would do is they would take a cup, put these two tiles in, and say, God, give us Urim if you desire for us to go up. Swirl the cup, swirl it, swirl it, swirl it. What's gonna happen if you swirl something with tiles in it?

One's gonna pop out. First one to pop out, if it's Urim, you desire for us to go up. Does that make sense? That's the way that would, pretty simple, pretty straightforward means of determining the will of the Lord.

And that's exactly what I believe that David is doing here. But I wanna be clear that God is no less able to guide us in the here and now. But equally, nobody can force God to speak. You can't force God to speak.

We need to ask God, we need to ask Him to reveal His will, and then we act. Nothing indicates that in the absence of God speaking,.

That David would have been sinful.

To either attack or wait out the Philistines. To attack or not attack is not a issue of spiritual sin. Unless God reveals what He is to do. What we actually see in this passage are two important things that I wanna highlight for you in David going to inquire of the Lord.

The first is just simply that David asks.

Do you see it?

David inquires of God.

He asks God for direction. This is good for us to take on and apply in our lives. It is, hear me carefully, church, it is an unqualified good for us to talk with our God, is it not? Unqualified good for you to pray and talk with Him at any moment at any time.

But the second observation I wanna say is that God chooses to respond. He doesn't need to respond, but He can respond in a way we understand if He wants to steer us in a direction. How many of you trust and believe that God is able to communicate to you if He wants to get through to you?

He's able, He can, absolutely. The calling to us all in our lives in relationship to God is to humbly come to God in prayer, expressing a genuine willingness to follow Him in whatever He desires for us to do.

We tell Him which way we're heading,.

Then we ask Him to communicate with us in clarity if He desires to do otherwise than what we're planning, and then we move forward in humble action. But seeking the Lord's guidance is not a science, and He is not a computer program, He is not a vending machine, as we're gonna see in just a few verses.

But in our text, in this situation, God does indeed give David affirmation, and He does say, go up, for God will hand the Philistines to King David and to his forces. And so David confronted the Philistines at Baal-perazim in the Valley of Rephaim, and he defeated them there, the text tells us.

Now, we see the result of this is the defeat of the Philistines in this instance. God said, go up, you will succeed. He goes up, and He does succeed. And He gives God the credit for His victory in the text.

Do you see it?

He gives God the credit.

And He renames the place Baal-perazim, which means something like the Lord broke out against His enemies. Where the word breakout is like the idea of a dam bursting forth in the water, breaking down a dam, and all of a sudden, just a rush and a torrent of water comes through the breach, and the dam bursts, and everything is gone.

In English, I think we could have named this place, and a good translation of Baal-perazim is Lord Bursty McBursterton.

There you go.

Thank you.

A little bit of humor there, but honestly, taking it a slide down, I wanna be serious for just a moment, because sometimes humor comes best at the front of something very serious. It's worth asking this question, church.

Do you have a God who could rightly be called the one who breaks out against His enemies? Is that an appropriate title for the God that you serve? A God who bursts forth like the waters of a dam breaching, and all of a sudden, boom, and the rocks fly, and the water floods, and everything is swept away.

Like a flood I've heard of before, kinda tamed down for like little kids' nurseries and stuff with little fluffy animals and coming in two by two, but is yours a God who would flood and break out against His enemies?

Is your God a smasher of foes? That is not a popular title for God right now. It's a title for Him in the text. Maybe we've mixed up in our minds the way that He is indeed.

We're studying it as a church.

We're going through it in community groups. Hopefully, many of you are connected in community groups, and many of us are studying through the book Gentle and Lowly right now, right? And He is indeed gloriously, majestically, mercifully, gentle and lowly toward those who run to Him for mercy, who run to Him on the basis of what His Son did for them on the cross.

But this same God who is indeed gentle and lowly towards His own, an adopter of us into His family, but He is a fearful prospect to those who stand in opposition to Him. Those who would line up in the valley against Him will be the recipients of His great wrath.

But those who come to Him for humble help, He will gladly adopt into His family. And so the application is don't spend your days on earth camped against this one. Don't spend your days camped against this one.

Run to Him for grace, and He will welcome you in and wash away your guilt and give you a place in His eternal family. But further, of course, church, we have a distinct calling in our time to bring more in, to bring more away from that wrath and more toward the gentleness of God.

Have we allowed the fire of hell to be cooled in our hearts by fear, by the swirling and raging of our culture that says you can't talk like that, church? You can't speak that way. You can't share your faith with others.

You can't proselytize. You can't seek to win more. Are you hearing that in our world?

Shut up, church.

That's what the world wants to say. And the message from God today is I'm breaking out against your neighbors. I'm gonna break out against family members that aren't in with Christ. I'm breaking out against them in the end.

Talk to them.

Share the glorious good news with them. Have we stopped grieving over the wrath of God toward those who are in opposition to Him, church? What does it do in our hearts when we think of our coworkers, our next-door neighbors, or even family members who will face the God who breaks out like a flood against His enemies?

What are we doing in our hearts and what are we doing with our mouths and what are we doing with our time? Do we believe it, church? Do we believe His wrath is coming to those who reject Him? Then how can we stay silent?

How can we fear that they might make fun of us or that we might get labeled at work.

More than a mere victory?

God broke out against His enemies on this day. There's another application here worth our attention. David routinely gives God credit for victories and we see that over the course of his life. We see it in his Psalms.

We see it when he reveals his heart. His soldiers are holding the swords. I want you to hear me on this one for a minute.

It takes a little bit of buildup.

His soldiers are holding the swords and the shields. Their muscles are sore at the end of this battle. There are fatalities and injuries to be cared for at the end of this battle with the Philistines.

And David says, what? Yahweh gets the credit for this victory. How many of you would, just take a moment.

To think about that and consider that.

How many of you want to sign up for David's army? He's not saying, thank you guys for your sacrifice on the battlefield. He's saying, God won the day today. I would call that, I would call that risky gratitude.

Because here's the risk.

We run the risk of offending the worker by giving the credit for their successes to God. Do you hear what I'm saying? There's a bit of a risk involved in that. I mean, how much longer is the army gonna go on with David giving the credit to God for their sore muscles and the work and effort that they put in?

We can offer thanks to people for sure, but we need to reserve ultimate thanks to God who is at work behind the swords and the muscles and our battle plans. Verse 21, the victory is complete. The Philistines have left their gods behind in battle.

And you might be a little bit confused at David taking the idols. Anybody, when I first read that, go, what's he gonna do with those idols? Like, why in the world is David taking the idols that the Philistines left on the battlefield?

But according to 1 Chronicles 14, 12, you can jot that down, look it up later. 1 Chronicles 14, 12, David collected those idols, took them away, and burned them in a massive bonfire. This battle is a demonstration that Yahweh is greater than their little wooden gods.

And now we start over in the text. And the Philistines once again muster at the Valley of Rephaim. What is the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

And whoever came up with that adage, by the way, has never used a computer. Do you know what I'm talking about? Have any of you ever done the same thing and on the 17th time it works, and you're going, I didn't do anything different.

All I did was reboot it again. So I don't know, I mean, maybe technology is insane making.

I don't know.

But yeah, David collected them, he burned them, and now they're starting over again.