He brings bread for their souls. “Peace be with you” ( John 20:19). He brings a sword for the struggle. “Receive the Holy Spirit” (v. 22).
Bread and swords. He gives both to the desperate.
Still.
5
DRY SEASONS
THE DEAD SEA is dying. Drop by drop, at a rate of three feet a year, she is shrinking. Galilee sends her fresh fluid through the T Jordanian Canal, water worthy of a Messiah’s baptism. But the Dead Sea impoverishes it: darkening, acidizing, creating a saline cemetery. You find little life in her waters.
You find little life in her surroundings. Ominous cliffs rise to the west, flattening out at two thousand feet. Erosion has scarred the land into a tyranny of caves and ruts and sparse canyons: a home for hyenas, lizards, buzzards . . . and David. Not by choice, mind you. He didn’t want to swap the palace for the badlands. No one chooses the wilderness. It comes at you from all directions—heat and rain, sandstorms and hail. We prefer air-conditioned bedrooms and culs-de-sac—safety.
But sometimes we have no vote. Calamity hits and the roof rips. The tornado lifts and drops us in the desert. Not the desert in south-eastern Israel, but the desert of the soul.
A season of dryness.
Isolation marks such seasons. Saul has effectively and systematically isolated David from every source of stability.
His half-dozen assassination attempts ended David’s military career. His pursuit drove a wedge in David’s marriage. After David’s
* * *
Wilderness begins with disconnections.
It continues with deceit.
* * *
wife, Michal, helped him escape, Saul demanded an explanation from her. “I had to,” she lied. “He threatened to kill me if I didn’t help him” (1 Sam. 19:17 TLB). David never trusted his wife again. They stayed married but slept in different beds.
David races from Saul’s court to Samuel’s house. But no sooner does he arrive than someone tells Saul, “Take note, David is at Naioth in Ramah!” (19:19).
David flees to Jonathan, his soul mate. Jonathan wants to help, but what can he do? Leave the court in the hands of a madman? No, Jonathan has to stay with Saul. David can hear the twine popping on the lifeline.
No place in the court.
No position in the army.
No wife, no priest, no friend.
Nothing to do but run. Wilderness begins with disconnections. It continues with deceit.
We saw David’s deceit in Nob, the city of the priests. The city was holy; David was anything but. He lied each time he opened his mouth.
David gets worse before he gets better. He escapes to Gath, the hometown of Goliath. He tries to forge a friendship based on a mutual adversary. If your enemy is Saul and my enemy is Saul, we become friends, right?
In this case, wrong.
The Gittites aren’t hospitable. “Isn’t this David, the king of the land?” they ask. “Isn’t he the one the people honor with dances, singing, ‘Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thou-sands’?” (21:11 NLT).
David panics. He’s a lamb in a pack of wolves. Tall men, taller walls. Piercing glares, piercing spears. We’d like to hear a prayer to his Shepherd; we’d appreciate a pronouncement of God’s strength. Don’t hold your breath. David doesn’t see God. He sees trouble. So he takes matters into his own hands.
He pretends to be insane, scratching on doors and drooling down his beard. Finally the king of Gath says to his men, “‘Must you bring me a madman? We already have enough of them around here! Why should I let someone like this be my guest?’ So David left Gath and escaped to the cave of Adullam” (21:14–22:1 NLT).
Dare we envision this picture of David? Staring with galvanized eyes. Quivering like jelly. He sticks out his tongue, rolls in the dirt, grunts and grins, spits, shakes, and foams. David feigns something like epilepsy.
The Philistines believed “an epileptic was possessed by Dagon’s devil and that he made husbands impotent, women barren, children die, and animals vomit.” Fearing that every drop of an epileptic’s blood created one more devil, the Philistines drove epileptics out of their towns and into the desert to die.1 And that’s what they do with David. They shove him out the city gates and leave him with nowhere to go.
He can’t go to the court of Saul or the house of Michal, the city of Samuel or the safety of Nob. So he goes to the only place he can—the place where no one goes, because nothing survives. He goes to the desert, the wilderness. To the honeycombed canyons that overlook the Dead Sea. He finds a cave, the cave called Adullam. In it he finds shade, silence, and safety. He stretches on the cool dirt and closes his eyes and begins his decade in the wilderness.
Can you relate to David’s story?
Has your Saul cut you off from the position you had and the people you love?
In an effort to land on your feet, have you stretched the truth? Distorted the facts?
Are you seeking refuge in Gath? Under normal circumstances you would never go there. But these aren’t normal circumstances, so you loiter in the breeding ground of giants. The hometown of trouble. Her arms or that bar. You walk shady streets and frequent question-able places. And, while there, you go crazy. So the crowd will accept you, so the stress won’t kill you, you go wild. You wake up in a Dead Sea cave, in the grottoes of Adullam, at the lowest point of your life, feeling as dumb as a roomful of anvils. You stare out at an arid, harsh, unpeopled future and ask, “What do I do now?”
I suggest you let David be your teacher. Sure, he goes wacko for a few verses. But in the cave of Adullam, he gathers himself. The faithful shepherd boy surfaces again. The giant-killer rediscovers courage. Yes, he has a price on his head. Yes, he has no place to lay his head, but somehow he keeps his head.
He returns his focus to God and finds refuge.
Refuge surfaces as a favorite word of David’s. Circle its appearances in the book of Psalms, and you’ll count as many as forty-plus appearances in some versions. But never did David use the word more poignantly than in Psalm 57. The introduction to the passage explains its background: “A song of David when he fled from Saul into the cave.”
Envision Jesse’s son in the dimness: on his knees, perhaps on his face, lost in shadows and thought. He has nowhere to turn. Go home, he endangers his family; to the tabernacle, he imperils the priests. Saul will kill him; Gath won’t take him. He lied in the sanctuary and went crazy with the Philistines, and here he sits. All alone.
But then he remembers: he’s not. He’s not alone. And from the recesses of the cave a sweet voice floats:
Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me!
For my soul trusts in You;
And in the shadow of Your wings I will make my refuge. (v. 1)
Make God your refuge. Not your job, your spouse, your reputation, or your retirement account. Make God your refuge. Let him, not Saul, encircle you. Let him be the ceiling that breaks the sunshine, the walls that stop the wind, the foundation on which you stand.
A cave-dweller addressed our church recently. He bore the smell of Adullam. He’d just buried his wife, and his daughter was growing sicker by the day. Yet, in the dry land he found God. I wrote his discovery on the flyleaf of my Bible: “You’ll never know that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.”
Wilderness survivors find refuge in God’s presence.
They also discover community among God’s people.
Soon [David’s] brothers and other relatives joined him there. Then others began coming—men who were in trouble or in debt or who were just discontented—until David was the leader of about four hundred men (1 Sam. 22:1–2 NLT).
Not what you’d call a corps of West Point cadets. In trouble, in debt, or discontent. Quite a crew. Misfits, yes. Dregs from the barrel, no doubt. Rejects. Losers. Dropouts.
Just like the church. Are we not the distressed, the debtors, and the discontent?
Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called i
nto this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? (1 Cor. 1:26–28 MSG)
Strong congregations are populated with current and former cave dwellers, people who know the terrain of Adullam. They told a few lies in Nob. They went loopy in Gath. And they haven’t for- gotten it. And because they haven’t, they imitate David: they make room for you.
Who is David to turn these men away? He’s no candidate for archbishop. He’s a magnet for marginal people. So David creates a community of God-seeking misfits. God forges a mighty group out of them: “they came to David day by day to help him, until it was a great army, like the army of God” (1 Chron. 12:22).
Gath. Wilderness. Adullam.
Folly. Loneliness. Restoration.
David found all three. So did Whit Criswell. This Kentucky native was raised in a Christian home. As a young man, he served as an officer in a Christian church. But he fell into gambling, daily risking his income on baseball games. He lost more than he won and found himself in desperate debt to his bookie. He decided to embezzle funds from the bank where he worked. Welcome to Gath.
It was only a matter of time until the auditors detected a problem and called for an appointment. Criswell knew he’d been caught. The night before the examination he couldn’t sleep. He resolved to take the path of Judas. Leaving his wife a suicide note, he drove out-side of Lexington, parked the car, and put the gun to his head. He couldn’t pull the trigger, so he took a practice shot out the car window. He pressed the nose of the barrel back on his forehead and mumbled, “Go ahead and pull the trigger, you no-good slob. This is what you deserve.” But he couldn’t do it. The fear that he might go to hell kept him from taking his life.
Finally, at dawn, he went home, a broken man. His wife had found the note and called the police. She embraced him. The officers hand-cuffed him and led him away. He was, at once, humiliated and liberated: humiliated to be arrested in front of family and neighbors, but liberated from the chains of mistruth. He didn’t have to lie anymore.
Whit Criswell’s Adullam was a prison cell. In it, he came to his senses; he turned back to his faith. Upon release, he plunged into the work of a local church, doing whatever needed to be done.
* * *
You’ll never know that Jesus is all you need
until Jesus is all you have. Are you in the wilderness?
Find refuge in God’s presence. Find comfort in his people.
* * *
Over a period of years, he was added to the staff of the congregation. In 1998 another area church asked him to serve as their senior minister. At this writing, that church is one of Kentucky’s fastest-growing congregations.2
Another David restored.
Are you in the wilderness? Crawl into God the way a fugitive would a cave. Find refuge in God’s presence.
Find comfort in his people. Cast your hat in a congregation of folks who are one gift of grace removed from tragedy, addiction, and disaster. Seek community in the church of Adullam.
Refuge in God’s presence. Comfort in God’s people. Your keys for wilderness survival. Do this, and, who knows, in the midst of this desert you may write your sweetest psalms.
6
GRIEF-GIVERS
THE MOST SACRED symbol in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, is a tree: a sprawling, shade-bearing, eighty-year-old American elm. Tourists drive from miles around to see her. People pose for pictures beneath her. Arborists carefully protect her. She adorns posters and letterhead. Other trees grow larger, fuller, even greener. But not one is equally cherished. The city treasures the tree, not for her appearance, but her endurance.
She endured the Oklahoma City bombing.
Timothy McVeigh parked his death-laden truck only yards from her. His malice killed 168 people, wounded 850, destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, and buried the tree in rubble. No one expected it to survive. No one, in fact, gave any thought to the dusty, branch-stripped tree.
But then she began to bud.
Sprouts pressed through damaged bark; green leaves pushed away gray soot. Life resurrected from an acre of death. People noticed. The tree modeled the resilience the victims desired. So they gave the elm a name: the Survivor Tree.1
Timothy McVeighs still rock our worlds. They still, inexcusably, inexplicably maim and scar us. We want to imitate the tree—survive the evil, rise above the ruin. But how?
David can give us some ideas. When Saul “McVeighs” his way into David’s world, David dashes into the desert, where he finds refuge among the caves near the Dead Sea. Several hundred loyalists follow him. So does Saul. And in two dramatic desert scenes, David models how to give grace to the person who gives nothing but grief.
Scene one. Saul signals for his men to stop. They do. Three thousand soldiers cease their marching as their king dismounts and walks up the mountainside.
The region of En Gedi simmers in the brick-oven heat. Sunrays strike daggerlike on the soldiers’ necks. Lizards lie behind rocks. Scorpions linger in the dirt. And snakes, like Saul, seek rest in the cave.
Saul enters the cave “to relieve himself. Now David and his men were hiding far back in the cave” (1 Sam. 24:3 NCV). With eyes dulled from the desert sun, the king fails to notice the silent figures who line the walls.
But don’t you know they see him. As Saul heeds nature’s call, dozens of eyes widen. Their minds race, and hands reach for daggers. One thrust of the blade will bring Saul’s tyranny and their running to an end. But David signals for his men to hold back. He edges along the wall, unsheathes his knife, and cuts not the flesh but the robe of Saul. David then creeps back into the recesses of the cave.
David’s men can’t believe what their leader has done. Neither can David. Yet his feelings don’t reflect theirs. They think he has done too little; he thinks he has done too much. Rather than gloat, he regrets.
Later David felt guilty because he had cut off a corner of Saul’s robe. He said to his men, “May the Lord keep me from doing such a thing to my master! Saul is the Lord’s appointed king. I should not do anything against him, because he is the Lord’s appointed king!” (24:5–6 ncv)
Saul exits the cave, and David soon follows. He lifts the garment corner and, in so many words, shouts, “I could have killed you, but I didn’t.”
Saul looks up, stunned, and wonders aloud, “If a man finds his enemy, will he let him get away safely?” (24:19).
David will. More than once.
Just a couple of chapters later, Saul, once again, is hunting David. David, once again, out-shrewds Saul. While the camp of the king sleeps, daredevil David and a soldier stealth their way through the ranks until they stand directly over the snoring body of the king. The soldier begs, “This is the moment! God has put your enemy in your grasp. Let me nail him to the ground with his spear. One hit will do it, believe me; I won’t need a second!” (26:8 MSG).
But David will not have it. Rather than take Saul’s life, he takes Saul’s spear and water jug and sneaks out of the camp. From a safe distance he awakens Saul and the soldiers with an announcement: “God put your life in my hands today, but I wasn’t willing to lift a finger against God’s anointed” (26:23 MSG).
Once again, David spares Saul’s life.
Once again, David displays the God-saturated mind. Who dominates his thoughts? “May the Lord . . . the Lord delivered . . . the Lord’s anointed . . . in the eyes of the Lord” (26:23–24).
Once again, we think about the purveyors of pain in our own lives. It’s one thing to give grace to friends, but to give grace to those who give us grief ? Could you? Given a few uninterrupted moments with the Darth Vader of your days, could you imitate David?
Perhaps you could. Some people seem graced with mercy glands. They secrete forgiveness, never harboring
grudges or reciting their hurts. Others of us (most of us?) find it hard to forgive our Sauls.
We forgive the one-time offenders, mind you. We dismiss the parking-place takers, date-breakers, and even the purse snatchers.
* * *
Vengeance fixes your attention at life’s ugliest moments.
* * *
We can move past the misdemeanors, but the felonies? The repeat offenders? The Sauls who take our youth, retirement, or health?
Were that scoundrel to seek shade in your cave or lie sleeping at your feet . . . would you do what David did? Could you forgive the scum who hurt you?
Failure to do so could be fatal. “Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple” ( Job 5:2 NIV).
Vengeance fixes your attention at life’s ugliest moments. Score-settling freezes your stare at cruel events in your past. Is this where you want to look? Will rehearsing and reliving your hurts make you a better person? By no means. It will destroy you.
I’m thinking of an old comedy routine. Joe complains to Jerry about the irritating habit of a mutual friend. The guy pokes his finger
* * *
Enemy destroyers need two graves.
* * *
ger in Joe’s chest as he talks. It drives Joe crazy. So he resolves to get even. He shows Jerry a small bottle of highly explosive nitroglycerin tied to a string. He explains, “I’m going to wear this around my neck, letting the bottle hang over the exact spot where I keep getting poked. Next time he sticks his finger in my chest, he’ll pay for it.”
Not nearly as much as Joe will, right? Enemy destroyers need two graves. “It is foolish to harbor a grudge” (Eccles. 7:9 TEV). An eye for an eye becomes a neck for a neck and a job for a job and a reputation for a reputation. When does it stop? It stops when one person imitates David’s God-dominated mind.