David and his men arrive home to find nothing left standing. Ziklag is burned, and every wife and son and daughter is gone, taken alive but taken. The men who followed David through so many close calls now weep 4"until they had no more strength to weep." This is the lowest point David reaches in the book, because the cost has landed on the very people he was trying to protect. And it gets worse. 6"the people spoke of stoning him." The men who followed him through every wilderness now turn on him, each bitter over his own lost children and looking for somewhere to put the grief. David is alone, and God's name has not crossed his lips for a chapter.
Then the sentence the chapter turns on: 6"David strengthened himself in the LORD his God." He does it on his own, with neither Jonathan nor Abigail arriving to carry the word for him. He turns back to God, alone, with his own men talking of killing him. It is active, deliberate effort, David reaching for what he had set down and picking it up with both hands.
The next thing he does confirms it. 7"Bring me the ephod." After a whole chapter with no ephod and no inquiry, David calls for Abiathar and asks the question he should have been asking all along. 8"Shall I pursue after this band? Shall I overtake them?" The answer is a double promise. 8"Pursue, for you shall surely overtake and shall surely rescue." This is the David the whole book has been building toward, the man who asks before he acts, restored to himself in a single verse.
The rescue is thorough almost past belief, but the detail worth lingering on is the abandoned Egyptian slave. His Amalekite master left him behind because he fell sick, with no food or water for three days. David's men find him and, in place of treating him as one more enemy, 11"they gave him bread and he ate." Only then do they ask him anything. David's mercy toward a foreigner nobody valued leads him to the camp he needs, and the Amalekites' cruelty to their own servant becomes the means of their undoing. The result is complete. 19"Nothing was missing." David brought back all.
What David does next says as much about him as the victory. Two hundred men, too exhausted to cross the brook, had stayed with the supplies while four hundred went on. Some of David's men want to cut the two hundred out of the plunder. David's answer becomes Israel's law. 24"as his share is who goes down into the battle, so shall his share be who stays by the baggage. They shall share alike." The victory was never David's strength. It was 23"what the LORD has given us," and a gift from God is not a wage that some earned more than others.
David closes the chapter by sending gifts from the plunder to towns across Judah where he had wandered as a fugitive, quietly building the goodwill that will carry him to a throne in Hebron. It all began because, at the bottom, weeping until he had no strength left, surrounded by men ready to kill him, David remembered where his strength had always come from and reached for it again.
Where has your strength been coming from lately, and what would it mean to reach for the LORD first?
Prayer
Father, teach us David's discipline in the worst moment of this chapter, to strengthen ourselves in you when no one else is left to strengthen us. Thank you that you rescue completely, nothing missing, when we finally come back and ask. Give us David's heart toward those who serve quietly with the baggage, that we would never withhold honor from those whose labor we cannot see. In Jesus' name, amen.