So open your Bible's to 1 Samuel 21 as we begin.

Transcription

1 A Psalm of Boasting Our Psalm today is Psalm 34 but we are going to begin in 1 Samuel 21. And the reason we are in 1 Samuel 21 is because Psalm 34 begins with the superscript that lets us know the occasion in which this Psalm was written:

2 Now we are going to spend a little bit of time on the story which creates the context for this Psalm. And there are two reasons for that. First, I really think we miss some of the major application points if we don't recall to mind what was going on in the life of David when he wrote this Psalm. Second, I'm going to argue rather strongly for a particular interpretation of our passage this morning and I want you to see from the Bible itself where this is coming from. So open your Bible's to 1 Samuel 21 as we begin. Much of 1 Samuel is the story of David on the run from Saul. And believe me, he's running for his life. We alluded to this briefly last week, but I want you to get your head around how panicked and fearful David is during this period of time. This is a critical piece of the argument I am going to make. David was so, so scared. To really appreciate the fear in David's heart, recall what led up to this. Remember, David was a tremendous success as a young man in Israel.

3 He had been anointed future king by Samuel He had defeated the Philistine champion Goliath. The women were singing of him, Saul has killed his thousands but David his tens of thousands. And Saul began to burn with jealousy. And that jealousy slowly consumed him. It ate him up. As you read the story of Saul in the OT you can literally trace the progressive control of sin in Saul s life. First, you see these impulsive fits of rage where he tries to pin David to the wall in the palace. Next, he tries to orchestrate a situation in which the Philistines kill him. Then He tries to bring in his son and his own daughter into the plan to kill him. Finally, the guy is just bloodthirsty and begins to hunt him like a wild animal. He's personally leading the army of Israel to find him and murder him in cold blood. Now of course we know how this story ends. David becomes king. And we already know where the story is going and we see this as the character building years of David. But man, knowing the end of the story always wrecks it. Because of course David doesn't know how all this will end. And he's literally running for his life. He's terrified. There are at least 5 Psalms that were written during this period of time and they all give us tremendous insight into David s emotional condition. Psalm. 59 begins, A MIKTAM OF DAVID, WHEN SAUL SENT MEN TO WATCH HIS HOUSE IN ORDER TO KILL HIM. Read the Psalm. David says his enemies are like howling dogs.

4 These are vicious wild dogs. This is the middle eastern equivalent of wolves. Picture yourself in the woods late and night and listening to howling wolves close in on you. Can you rest in any way? How does David feel? He's lurching at every noise in the bush. He's running and running and running realizing that every second counts. Whose going to be that guy who might turn him in? It's just pure terror. This isn't pretend. We aren't playing paintball here. He has seen the rage in Saul's eyes before. He knows this guy isn't kidding around. His heart pounding out of his chest. We will pick up this narrative in chapter 21. As the story begins you my recall that scene where Jonathan is sending signals to David via arrows. And those signals were supposed to alert David to the fact that Saul was bent on murder. And so after hugging Jonathan goodbye, David fled with a bottle of Gatorade and granola bar. He doesn t have any weapons or protection. He doesn t have any food or provisions. This is serious stuff and he had Saul on his tail. David has absolutely no place to go. So pick it up with me in verse one, he goes to the high priest at Nob. Now look at what David does:

5 Now David is lying. David is not on a secret mission for the king. He's running away from the king who want to pin his body to the wall with a spear. Now I don t think this lie is justifiable. It was certainly expedient, but it was not the right thing to do. Dilemmas like these are called situational ethics. And the reason its called situational ethics is because you wrestle through whether or not a situation changes your ethics. Is it ever ok to lie? Can you think of a situation where lying would be ok? The very fact that this sin is recorded let s us know that even the great heroes of the Bible struggled with this. Abraham lied about his wife. Jacob did the same thing. Rahab lied about the spies hiding on the roof. And is often times the case, the lie seems to meet the need of a given situation, but it has effects which are not perceived by the liar. That is the case with David. Later Saul is going to find out that the high priest helped David. And that is going to enrage him. And Doeg the Edomite will obey the orders of Saul and slay 85 of the high

6 priests. David did not think about the jeopardy in which he was placing the high priest by lying to him. The point I want to make here is this: what would drive David to do this? This is a bit out of character for David. I think the answer is simple. David is scared spitless. People who are panicked act irrationally. They do things they wouldn't normally do. And I think that's what we see here. David says, to the high priest give me the showbread and a sword I'm on a secret mission for the king. So the priest reasons, here is one of the most powerful respected servants of the king, coming to me alone with genuine need. Here is the man who stands next to the king as one of his most important confidants. And he is telling me he is on a secret mission. And the priest says, "Well I guess I can give you the showbread. David says, "Do you have any weapons? I had to leave so fast, I don't even have a sword." The high priest says, well.

7 Evidently, David after he had killed Goliath had placed that sword in the tabernacle as a memorial of God s faithfulness to Israel. So in verse 10 Now that ought to trigger something in your brain. What nationality is Achish king of Gath? Gath is one of the five Philistine cities. And who is the most famous Gathite Philistine in the Bible? Goliath. From just what we are told in the record, David had killed their champion, Goliath, been involved in several raiding parties and slaughtered 200 of them to fulfill a dowry for his wife and now he going to go parading into the city carrying the sword of their headless hero. That is not going to put you on friendly terms with them. David is well-known in a bad way. They know who he is. Now why do I say all that? The fact that David goes to the Philistines

8 shows you just how desperate he was. I m not sure what he was thinking, but he's certainly desperate. Why did he think he would be welcomed here? David must think he's on the brink of certain death for him to decide on such a risky course of action. Verse 11 So David realizes that he is not being received as he hoped and he realizes that he is in real trouble. So he feigns madness.

9 So the Philistines say the guy is crazy. No wonder he came to us and they let him go. So that's the background of Psalm 34. Incidentally it is also the background for Psalm 56. You have two Psalms both of which credit God with deliverance from this situation. Now here's what's interesting. In both of these Psalms, if you didn't have the superscript letting you know the occasion of the writing of the Psalm, I don't think a single person in the world would ever guess that it was this drooling into the beard event that prompted the writing of these two Psalms. And that actually makes me excited. Anytime you are surprised by something in the Bible, there's usually some gold to be discovered. A lot of commentaries skip over the superscript and don't even attempt to make a connection. They say something like, "Well, we are told the occasion of the Psalm but there is nothing in the Psalm that connects the narrative of 1 Samuel 21 to the Psalm itself." And

10 then they just move on and read it generically. But reading it generically is the exact thing the superscript wants you to avoid. I think the whole point of the superscript is that we want you to go back and read the narrative and interpret it in light of the event. Otherwise you're just bound to make the mistake of reading it generically and miss some of the great application. Overview So with the narrative in mind, let's look at the Psalm. The Psalm is divided in two parts. There's a hymn first and then a sermon. So let's read the hymn first - it's found in the first ten verses. By the way, don't get hung up on the name of the king in the superscript. If you're attentive you will have noticed that the Psalm says David changed his behavior before Abimalech and yet the actual narrative says the name of the king was Achich. Abimalech was simply the title of King. It's like the word Pharaoh. So the Psalm is just using a generic title whereas Samuel actually names him.

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12 THE PSALM IS AN ACCROSTIC. Now one of the things you probably can't see in your Bible is that this Psalm is an acrostic,

13 I think one of the thing that tells you is that he wrote this Psalm later. He's had some time to reflect on this. When your freaking out in a prison cell in a Philistine city your not thinking about alliteration, rhyming, and acrostics. He's had some time to meditate. And what is the conclusion of his meditation? God delivered me! He says, "I sought the Lord and he answered me and delivered me from all his fears." He talks about the angel of the Lord encamping around him. This poor man cried out and the Lord saved him. Now again, if you didn't know about the context of this Psalm what would a person think? An ignorant, flat-out reading without any context gives you a certain impression doesn't it? It sound like here was this guy who was in desperation, he folded his hands to pray and bam, the Lord intervened in some sort of crazy way and delivered whoever was writing it. If I had to guess at an event I might have said the cave event, or the spear event, but I would have never guessed this. Why wouldn't we guess the drooling in the beard event? Because when you go back and read the actual narrative, you get a very different feel. When you read 1 Samuel 21 you get the sense that David is panicking and resorted totally to human means. He throws dignity to wind. You get the sense that he just lost his nerve and freaked out and did whatever human thing came to his mind in that moment of fear and started drooling and wonder of wonders, it worked! Would you look at that! And everyone who reads Psalm 34 feels this tension. This Psalm feels more like a Psalm that Peter should have written, when, while

14 chained to the wall in prison, the angel of the Lord came and released his bonds. Instead we are told that this was a Psalm of David when he performed this weak-backed, trickery that saves his neck. And it leads to this interpretation question. Did David pretend to be mad being guided by the Holy Spirit or did David pretend to be mad being guided by his fearful impulses? The reason it's confusing is because this Psalm appears to link together this disguise of madness and this great outcome of the Lord, so that it might be inferred that the same Spirit by whom help David write this Psalm somehow suggested this strategy to the mind of David, and directed him in deceiving King Achish. But the whole way that question is framed is wrong. It makes it sound like at any given motive we have either pure motives or faulty motives. Our motives are like a glass of water you scoop up from the pond. There some pure water in their but floating through it and impossibly mixed into it are all these suspended impurities. I think David's motives here are impossibly mixed. I think he's half trusting in God and half relying on his own purely fleshly instincts. The fact that we frame the question in this way, "Did David's trust in God result in his deliverance?" shows a confused understanding of God's blessing. Listen, the blessing of the Lord is not contingent on our performance. Was David's beard-drool stunt trusting in God or trusting in himself. Yes. And you want to know what David is doing here? David is really praising God for delivering him through the stunt and despite the

15 stunt. God does this all the time in our lives. ALL THE TIME. Do you not think that God has blessed you despite your sin and sometimes even through your sin? I could list a thousand ways in which God has blessed my dirty mixed up motives. Do you remember Jacob. His mother told her Jacob to go in and deceive his father. And he received the blessing and yet through sinful means. The sin was Jacob's and his mother's; the blessing was God's. If a couple get pregnant outside of marriage, it is still the blessing of God to give them a child. The sin is theirs. The blessing is God's. I remember one time, I basically didn't consider the feelings of my wife and went on a trip she wasn't super happy about. She let me go but things were not 100% good and I kind of knew it. But I kind of ignored that and went anyway. That trip was the best trip of my life. The sin of selfishness was mine. The blessing was Gods. It's certainly tainted. Had the motives been more pure, it would have been better. Jacob's blessing would have been more beautiful had it happened God's way. Pregnancy inside of marriage would have been better than pregnancy outside My trip would have been better had I had the full approval of my wife. Perhaps David's deliverance would have been more like Peter's had he acted differently. Sure. We could say this about every day of our life. Psalm 103, Does God treat us according to our inquities? No Way. We sin and instead of punishment we get blessing. This is the way of God.

16 It's easy for the prideful to say, "Well, I shouldn't enjoy this blessing. I shouldn't praise God for this blessing because it's a dirty blessing. It's tainted. Should that stop us from praising God for the blessing? Absolutely not. Praise him. Praise him for giving us what we don't deserve. Praise him for not treating us according to our iniquities. All blessing is exactly that: blessing - not wages!" God is determined to bless his people despite their weakness, sin and poor decision making. The reason I spent so much time on the introduction is I want to try to make a strong case that David was terrified, fearful and acting out of pure instinct. It's not that he's outright sinning in the same way a man whose having an affair. He's just reacting. His behavior was more animal than human. It really wasn't all that noble. I have a hard time imaging Jesus doing this as a way to escape from his enemies. I think very little of what he did running from Saul in those initial hours and days was very spiritual. He flat out lied to the priest at nob and it cost those 85 priests their life. Read the Psalms while he is on the run. He's a scared animal and you read mixed motives. And then he resorts to these crazy means to wiggle out from underneath the thumb of this Philistine king. And David's story is very much like anyone else's story. Talk to anyone who is in the throws of suffering. Maybe someone in a serious health struggle, or going through a painful relational issue, or someone whose in anguish over a hard decision and what you will see is genuine cries for help mixed with animal instincts of survival. People who are really struggling with money feel tons of pressure and they often times resort to increased foolishness with their finances. They do faithless things, like ask people in manipulative ways for help. And they get helped. Is that not the blessing of God?

17 The sin is theirs, the blessing is God's. People who are insecure might be starving for a compliment. And so they ask I think when David writes Psalm 34, probably in the cave of Addulam weeks later as he's reflecting back, he's thinking to himself, man, I was such a fool. What was I thinking, marching into Philistine country. I'm like King Achishes worst enemy. And that whole feigning of madness stunt. I can't believe he didn't see right through that. God had to have been just laughing at the stupidity of that attempt. Here I was in my absolute idiocy and God saved me! Praise God for delivering me. This is really the angle I'm arguing for. Not that God used the madness to deliver David, but God delivered David, despite the madness. We titled this Psalm a psalm of boasting. David boasts not in his own strength, not in his wisdom or cunning. In verse 2 David says, "My Soul boasts in the Lord!" Listen to how he says it. Let the humble hear and be glad. Let the humble hear about this stunt I tried to pull and be glad! Last week we defined humility as seeing yourself accurately. If we see ourselves accurately, we realize that all our perceived control is an illusion. We are creatures of impossibly mixed motives - stroking pride and trying to honor God in the same action. That's reality and to admit it is a step toward humility. You too, humble person, can be like David. You can pull of a class act stunt of foolishness where you take matters into your own hands. You can allow your weakness to overtake you and try to wrestle situations into your control. And God can save you, even

18 through it. So, let the humble rejoice that our hope, our deliverance, our boasting is in the Lord! God rescues fools. God saves fools who try to take matters into their own hands. Again, God is determined to bless his people despite their weakness, sin and poor decision making. Do you know how awesome of a truth this is? The reason this is so rarely preached is that it feels so dangerous. If I tell you, God will bless you, deliver you, help you despite your sin and maybe even through your sin, what does that do? That's going to make you sin all the more. Right? That is where I think the second part of this chapter comes in. Remember we have a hymn and a sermon. The sermon really does actually address this abuse of Grace, what Bonhoeffer called 'cheap grace'. If sin increases, then grace abounds. Why not sin all the more so grace can have a hay day? David actually marvelously answers this question in the next section.

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20 There are some beautiful gospel truths here, even in this OT, pre- Jesus, pre-new covenant era. Remember the question is this: if we concede that God will bless us despite our failures and sometimes even through our failures, where

21 does that lead? Won't we just stop caring about our failures? Doesn't that ignore passages about the discipline of the Lord? How does this all fit together? David says, listen I want to teach you the fear of the Lord given my experience. People who fear the Lord won't abuse grace. How do you learn the fear of the Lord? The fear of the Lord is taught to those people who receive the grace of the Lord. David says, "Do you desire life? (v12) Do you desire to be happy? You want to taste the good things in this world? (v8)" What's the formula for happiness? Draw near to God to this God that blesses even the failures of the world. Discover his path for happiness. You want to know why God wants this truth preached, you want to know why God wants grace preached and proclaimed and shared and spread in your family and among your friends? You want to know why grace is more powerful than law? Because sin looses it's power when we see the superior satisfaction of obedience in God. We are so scared to preach the grace of God because we think, well man, the sinner is going to try to eat his cake and have it too. He's going to try to participate in as much sin as possible and then get forgiveness and blessing. But David is correcting this. No! Listen my friend. Do you want happiness? Think back to that time that God blessed you despite your sin. If that is what God gives you when you sin and when you

22 spurn him and when you disobey him and when you ignore him and when you wrestle the control out of his hands, imagine what he gives you when you obey him, when you turn away from evil and do good! Taste and see that the Lord is good! Taste. Do what he says and taste. Compare. Lay them side by side. Does this not taste better than that! Let the blessing of the Lord through failure drive you to the increased blessing of the Lord through obedience. We actually have to allow God to bless us. We can accept wages easy enough. In fact we get mad if we feel like we didn't get our wages. But a blessing we didn't deserve is super hard to accept. I failed. I was sneaky. I wasn't entirely truthful and you blessed me anyway. Yes. And God blessed me anyway. Let me just speak personally. When I replay the motive video of my life, I see an embarrassing list of failures. Why did you go into ministry, Jason? Well, I certainly loved the Lord and wanted to serve him, but it sure didn't hurt that if you work hard and do a good job you get the praises of men. Why did you get married, Jason? Well, I certainly loved Lisa but I was 100 times more focused on what Lisa did for me. I wasn't ready to die to self and give my life up for her and serve her at every turn. I wanted her to give to me. Why do you discipline your kids Jason? Well, I certainly love them and want them to experience the Love of following Jesus, but I also am super bugged and their sin inconveniences me and I want that to stop, now. What should my wages be for that stunt? What should my wages be for that kind of beard-drooling class act of foolishness. ZERO. And

23 then I look at my life and I say, "God why do you continue to bless me when my motives are so impure and mixed? Why do you continue to bless and bless and bless me when I look at the big picture and there is so, so little that is commendable. Gross." When that moment of realization hits, you have a choice. You can refuse to accept the grace and only accept wages which will only reenforce habits of sin OR you can accept the grace and just praise God for his good character which will drive you to sin less. God that you for blessing even the drool on my beard! What a good God you are! David says, Those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. If you obey God, you will experience a type of blessing such that you will not feel the need to sin to get more blessing. You will have everything you need! Listen to the sheer joy of this guy who is seeking God. the humble are what? Glad. those who look to HIM are what? their faces are radiant! taste and see that the LORD is good. How happy is the man who tastes this goodness! The Lord delivers, he comforts, he provides, he protects, and redeems. Seek peace and pursue it.