40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 1 Samuel 25:32-26:12 (Episode 252)

Episode Date: January 31, 2021

David listens to Abigail. Nabal's heart cannot handle the news of what has just happened. David "remembers" Abigail. And another opportunity to rid himself of Saul is placed in David's lap. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network HWSS Northwest Arkansas 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. And while you're over there, make sure you go to the events page or go down to the show notes and click on the HWSS Northwest Arkansas link so that you can register for the event coming up in April in Northwest Arkansas, Bentonville, Arkansas. Come down to the Ozarks. Chad's coming, not just coming, but he's speaking, and I'll be there, and Eric Sorensen will be there, and Loso, and Scott Keith, and Gretchen Ronovic, and Jared C. Wilson. Andy Gullahorn's going to be doing a concert.

It's going to be a good time that you want to be a part of. I know me and Chad are looking forward to it because we haven't done that sort of thing in a little while. It's been a while. So, yeah, we're going to shake off the rust, get out there, and hang out with you guys. So it's only $65 for a two-day event. It is April 16th and 17th. Come hang out. Come check out where I live.

I assure you it's a good time. Chad, we left David in a spot where he had just heard a pretty convincing and compelling speech from a wise woman explaining to him why he should not go do a very Saul-like thing that he was on his way to do. Yeah, I was thinking about this over the course of the week, and I think I've convinced myself, or Abigail's convinced me, that this is the most convincing and eloquent speech that a woman gives in the entirety of the Bible. I was going over various sayings or conversations that women have had from Genesis onward.

And there are some, of course, very wise women, very wise sayings that are recorded in Old and New Testament. But I don't know that anything reaches quite this, not just her persuasiveness, but her subtlety. i was i was talking to to my wife stacy about this this week and trying to explain to her that basically it's like she uh she sort of warns and almost rebukes the king but in such a polite and uh convincing sort of way that he receives it gladly i mean it's it's it's an amazing piece of rhetoric yeah i mean she also has like all the things all the elements that you would need so

when she shows up we know that she initially says uh hey everything is my fault which of course is not true but it creates the space for david to listen to her because david is upset about this thing and if someone comes up and says that thing is my fault this this demands that you hear them out because this is the thing that you're upset about so that so she he doesn't just run right past her as she's you know just comes down yelling stop don't do it and he's just like nope we're killing everyone who pees standing up they're all gonna die uh you have to figure out a way to get him to pause and she does that by saying hey this is my fault and then of course explaining that it's not really her fault but that he really should think hard about what he's

gonna do and also she comes with the very thing that he wanted in the first place yes yes so she's not just relying on her eloquent rhetoric uh but she is also like not only should you not do this thing because you're gonna regret it but you also shouldn't do this thing because i've got all the bread i've got all the fig cakes i've got the wine i've got everything i've got it all right here yeah uh so so there really is no reason for david to do this other than just being offended yeah all right other than just wanting revenge anything else that he might want is right there in front of him right i mean i i guess you could say the two reasons that david could perhaps brush this off is that he feels insulted and so he's just too too petty uh to get over that ego yeah

the ego's wounded so he can't let that stand or that he really does view this statement from this wealthy man this fool as it were as an actual threat uh that he is going to tell saul about his whereabouts and he's actually concerned about this yeah i think that's especially that that second reason might be enough impetus for david to continue onward but he's convinced he doesn't he's convinced by abigail he receives her as we'll we'll see in his response just a second uh he he blesses her because of what she said and he's actually very glad that she showed up because otherwise i think he's you know his his temperature has lowered he's not quite as hot as he was and He realizes, yeah, that would have been a really stupid thing had I gone on to do what I'd planned.

You know what's true about David is that David is a guy who it seems like is a pretty passionate person. I mean, you read the Psalms. This is a guy who is not unemotional, right? and and we see this that that he he sometimes does that he he acts impulsively uh on numerous occasions uh which a couple i think it was a couple years ago you and i talked about well before we got to this outside the podcast i remember correctly we talked about how david was one of those just all in kind of people yeah he's not like yeah i'm sort of interested in this Or, yeah, I mean, I'm pretty much going to do that.

He's like, no, he's 100 percent. Yeah. And this goes for like good things and sin and bad things. Yeah. Yeah. He's 100 percent kind of person. Yeah. And the other thing, but I think that maybe the the most commendable thing about David is not, you know, what a great warrior, what a great leader or any of this, but that he is actually a guy who listens to reason when it comes. And so you see this. If Abigail doesn't do this, come and give this speech, a whole bunch of people are going to die.

I have no doubt that this is about to be a horrific scene if she doesn't do this. And I know I'm giving it away, but David does listen. If you take the infamous David and Bathsheba story, One of the big problems in that story is that there isn't anyone telling him otherwise until Nathan comes along. I mean, so he's all in on covering up this thing. But once Nathan comes, he does listen. And so he is a man who, and I have no problem saying even with Abigail, does sort of heed the word of God coming to him.

He does listen. And this, of course, when God says that David is a man after his own heart, well, one of the things that we've said over and over and over again, what is God always trying to get you to do? He's not mainly after you not being a sinner. It's too late for all that. What he is interested in you doing is the listening, hearing, right? He wants your ear. And David is a guy who is, wow, impulsive and all in and makes mistakes because of that. when someone does speak reason to him or the Word of God to him, it does seem that he is

pretty good at considering it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and that's a good lead-in to actually what he says here, so we'll get into the text. This is verse 32. Abigail has just delivered her multi-verse—it's quite a long speech, really, for the biblical narrative—just delivered her speech, and she ends it by asking that David will remember her. That is, remember her when God is gracious and saves him from his enemies and even puts him as ruler over Israel. So David responds to her this way. He says, blessed be the Lord God of Israel who sent you this day to meet me, and blessed be your discernment, and blessed be you who have kept me this day from bloodshed and from saving myself or avenging myself you could translate that a couple different ways

by my own hand yeah i actually actually really like the the way the esv says this that you have kept me from blood guilt and from working salvation with my own hand so work the sort of working out salvation for myself yeah yeah that's pretty that's actually a very accurate literal translation of the uh of the the hebrew of uh hoshea it's a it's a form of yashas to save that we see all over the place and so this is this is the idea of him yeah he's he's causing the salvation to happen for himself so working salvation so he's trying to do he's trying to to get everything worked out on his own without consideration really of anybody else or of god or what the consequences might be well if he believes that this guy is actually going to go reports to

saul where he is he's like well time to go save myself right and uh and he says he's been stopped from doing this that he has been stopped from taking salvation his own hand which by the way for us this is also something that we are we are fortunate when god saves us from this as well we all need we all need to be saved from trying to save ourselves yes exactly yeah the uh the whole of working salvation with our own hands. That's a pretty good description of every sinner. Yes. I've never tried to do this.

I don't know about you, Chad. I have never attempted this. No, never, never. Never tried by my own efforts and drives and desires to please God on my own apart from Christ. No. Yeah, I mean, that pretty much sums up the entirety of the human problem right there.

David does in just a few words. We are always working salvation with our own hand instead of letting God do what he does. I noticed, too, at the very beginning that David acknowledges that God sent Abigail. He blesses God and says, who sent you this day to meet me? So, I mean, of course, it never says that Abigail heard God tell her, you need to go do this. But this is God's providential guidance of Abigail to save David from doing something which would cause him much grief later on. Yeah, it seems completely appropriate to say that David is taking this as a word from God. When you say that God has sent you to say this thing to me, this is why I say when David hears from God, he is at least someone who listens.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we could say the same thing. If we're ever like thinking about doing something evil or on our way to do something evil, somebody steps up and says, basically, that's a bad idea. Don't go down that road. But we can say without a doubt that that person was sent to us by God. This is the way that, and I mean, who of us cannot think of multiple situations where something like that has happened? you know our spouse a friend a sibling a stranger sometimes somebody steps up basically says no no don't don't do that you you will regret that if you do that and then we maybe listen and maybe don't right maybe we listen maybe we don't yeah but uh either way we have to acknowledge that

that that person was there by divine by divine appointment as Abigail was for David and uh he goes on after blessing her multiple times he says uh nevertheless as the lord god of israel lives who has restrained me from harming you unless you had come quickly to meet me surely there would have been would not have been left to nabal nabel until the morning light as much as one man who he's standing up literally so he david more or less is restating what he had intended to do and at the same time thinking thanking god that he has restrained him from committing this this act yeah so in this act then in this act abigail has not just stopped david from committing a pretty major sin here but has also uh saved a lot of lives so she has she has done something

good for for no people for her friends her family her the people that live near her so i mean this is a this is no small thing that abigail has has just accomplished i mean she has saved david from blood guilt but she's also saved a whole bunch of other people from death other people lives yeah Yeah, we're never told exactly how many are part of this family, this group, but evidently quite a few because he's a rich man. He's a powerful man. He has a lot of flocks and herds, and so it requires a lot of people to work for him to keep all that whole operation going. Yeah, based on the food that she brings, it's a lot of people. That's a lot of mouths to feed, yeah.

It's not an army that's working for Nabal, but it's like a small army. It's that number of people, a lot of people whose lives have been saved. So verse 35, David receives what she brought and tells her to go to her house in peace. See, I have listened to you and granted your request. Going back to what you said just a minute ago, the importance of listening. So she goes home. Now, we're to another scene in this story, which is, in my opinion, just unforgettable. What happens here between husband and wife.

So, Abigail goes back home to Nabal, and behold, he was holding a feast in his house. Remember, he doesn't even know she's gone. He has no idea. She didn't talk to him. She didn't disclose to her husband what she was about to do. And I love this line. This cannot be just thrown in there for rhetorical effect or to round out the picture, because it says he was holding a feast in his house like the feast of a king. that was that interesting given the entire context here of king saul and soon to be king david and

here's this fool who's acting like a king no idea of the fact that his life could have been over with this just a matter of hours he's just uh living it up and as we will see in the rest of the verse not only eating at this feast but also drinking way past his heart's content until he's completely intoxicated so he's he's having a feast like the feast of a king although he's not a king he's nothing but a fool and nabal's heart was merry within him as the uh as the translation says and uh he uh was very drunk that's just basically repeating itself that's why his heart was merry because he was drunk so abigail once more showing great wisdom did not tell him anything at all into the morning light yeah it's uh as as someone who has had some conversations over the years

with people whose hearts were extremely merry probably not a good idea to have any kind of serious conversation with a person at that point number one they probably won't remember it and number two there's no telling how they might react yeah at the moment so wisely abigail decides to let him sleep it off and then she's going to talk to him. So verse 37, in the morning, when the wine had gone out of Nabal, so he's beginning to sober up, probably has a headache at this point. Then, after all that, his wife told him these things. In this line here, oh my goodness, his heart died within him so that he became as a stone. wow that's a that's pretty that's pretty amazing writing right there pretty amazing description

and i i think this might be a little bit of conjecture but i think the whole stone metaphor is intended for us to link that back to what abigail said to david where she said may the lives of your enemies be like something which is slung out of the hollow of a sling right which of course is a stone it's just which course is a stone yeah yeah so you can kind of basically so it sounds like basically she goes in in the morning and tells him what she did and he just has a heart attack over this yeah it almost sounds like that yeah his heart died within him became as a stone you can just imagine him just uh he's yeah he's not doing too good he's uh he's got a headache he's trying to recover from last night she tells him these things and i i get the

picture of him just kind of freezing there with that that you know that expressionless face where he just been completely gripped by the truth of what what could have befallen him had not abigail acted on his behalf and then verse 38 jumps forward 10 days later it happened that the lord struck nabal and he died yeah so his like his heart became uh like a like a stone like you You have something happen here that doesn't kill him, but perhaps he's out of commission for 10 days and then succumbs to whatever it is that happened. But this is something that the text says that God has done.

Yeah, this is not unusual. We've seen this, of course, multiple times in the Old Testament. We today tend to talk about secondary causes. We might say, ultimately, God caused something to happen, but there are all sorts of intermediate secondary causes, that actually resulted in whatever the effect might be. But the Old Testament tends to lead directly to the immediate cause, directly to the God cause.

And so you'll see this all over the place where God strikes someone down. And most of the time, we're not told how that happened. I mean, anything could have happened to Nabal. He might have walked outside and stumbled and hit his head on a rock and died, or it might have been some sickness that he's come to, maybe the heart condition, or it could have been anything else. It really doesn't matter in the end. The fact is that God is taking him out because of who he is, because of what he's done. Now, David's response, verse 39, is David certainly sheds no tears over the death of his adversary. When David heard that Nabal was

dead he blessed god blessed be the lord who has pleaded the cause of my reproach from the hand of nabal and has kept back his servant from evil the lord has also returned the evil doing of nabal on his own head so for david it's just like well he got what he he got what he had coming yeah the translation in the esv says uh blessed be the lord who has avenged the insult that i received yeah so david's like totally over this insult i think this who is david really bugged him yeah you could tell this this got to david it's really this got under his skin big time for whatever reason i mean it's a it's in some ways it seems a little bit overdone okay so a guy insulted you well welcome to life you know we all get insulted this

really got to david for some reason maybe it's because it simply could be because look at the situation he's in i mean you know they're out they're running away from saul constantly they're they're under threat people are betraying them left and right you can imagine that david is uh it's pretty stressed out and then this happens he's like good grief you know i did a lot of good for this guy and this is the return that i get and so perhaps uh a lot of his frustration at the situation that he's in was directed at Nabal because of what was happening in his own life. Yeah, I'm sure this is an accumulative thing.

You are talking about a guy who has delivered Israel already numerous times, defeated the Philistines numerous times, and he doesn't seem to feel like anyone's really appreciating what he does. So maybe this was just the last straw, where he's like, Okay, look, I'm done being insulted and treated as though I haven't done anything good for this community. And the last thing I'm going to do is take it from somebody whose very name means fool.

Yeah, yeah. I'm over it. Well, this story is going to wind up this way. So David makes this speech, and without a single gap in the verses, without any hesitation whatsoever he goes right from blessing god for the for the for the death of nabal to this into verse 39 then david sent a proposal to abigail to take her as his wife hey she didn't want she didn't want him to forget her and he remembered her he remembered he he actively remembered as we as we talk about all the time on this show zakar he actively he didn't

just you know think of her no he actually he very much acted on on her behalf we're uh i know you've watched the the viking series and uh we're in the very last season of it now reading something like this reminds me of all those situations in that uh in that series where a wife will lose her husband and then like a day or a week later she's with another guy yeah yeah yeah it's over and over especially with the leadership it seems like uh someone will uh one of the the female warriors will be widowed and then uh next thing you know you know next episode or later in that same episode all of a sudden a guy steps forward and that's what's happening here with with abigail and and i don't think uh abigail probably had any qualms whatsoever about this especially given

her speech to David earlier. Yeah, it doesn't seem like the Old Testament shares are sort of a hallmark version of marriage and husband and wife relationship and any of that. It does not convey these relationships the same way that we look at them. No, I mean, we are so separated culturally from this world that I think it's probably, actions like this would probably strike us even if it was like an unhappy marriage which it obviously was i mean she didn't like her husband she thought he was a fool even in those situations it does strike us as a little bit odd that you know the guy's barely dead and abigail receives a proposal and she's like sure i'll be mrs david no problem yeah uh well imagine if you were had

you were in church and some woman died and then there's some other guy and he's like who already had a wife by the way and just said yeah you can be my wife and you know immediately she's with you you'd have all kinds of questions like okay first of all isn't he already married second of all that seems really quick but i don't think this stuff even enters the mind of anyone no i don't think that it is either it's very very uh much separated from our our day and time well the way it happened was david sent some servants to abigail uh and they they spoke to her saying david has sent us to you to take you as his wife not really even much of a uh of a proposal yeah that's how i did it i just sent some like but i got when i got when i got some engaged i just sent some of my

friends over to jess and was like hey tell her that uh to come on over i want to i want her to be my wife the groom's party shows up with the marriage proposal well verse 41 she uh she gets up she bows her face to the ground and this is uh this is her response to the marriage proposal she says behold your maid servant is a maid to wash the feet of my lord's servants then she quickly arose got on her donkey with her five maidens so she has some female servants and they followed the messengers of david and became his wife this is like if you sent your groomsmen over to this girl's house and we're like you're late for church and then she has to go get like her five friends and go over to the wedding yeah yeah so it's really some it's some some odd odd details

here i by the way in my uh my research on this chapter maybe other people know this i didn't know this but evidently at one point in english history a lady's personal servant was called an abigail for this very reason like a small a it wasn't the name it was that kind of a title for a prominent lady's personal female servant would be called an Abigail, precisely because of what Abigail says here. Behold, your maidservant is a maid to wash the feet of my Lord's servant. So she puts herself in a servile, humbled position and gets up with her five maidens and becomes David's wife. Now keep in mind that this is to David's benefit in more than one way. he uh he's married a beautiful woman but he's also presumably we're not told this exactly but

presumably abigail has received we're never told about children that she has with with nabal so presumably everything is passed to her so i i'm assuming that uh all of nabal's possessions now belong to david yeah so he's also he's not only gained a wife he's also gained some some wealth Even if she didn't get everything, presumably he's going to get quite a bit of this property. And he has also established a foothold in this area of Hebron, which will end up being David's first capital. So when David, when after Saul dies, and for the first several years before Jerusalem is captured and made the capital city, David's capital, the place from which he is going to reign when he's home anyway, is going to be this area where Abigail's from. So he becomes, she becomes his wife. we're also told then at about two more wives at the end of this chapter, we're told about Ahinoam

of Jezreel, who had become David's wife somewhere along the way. We're never told when this happened, but he's already got this other wife. Now, you might be thinking, yeah, but wasn't he already married to Saul's daughter? Yes. The end of the chapter tells us that Saul had given Michal, his daughter, David's wife, to Palti, whoever he was, the son of Laish, who was from Galim. This is a move, no doubt on Saul's part, to make sure that David has no claim to the throne. So he's no longer the king's son-in-law. He's just an outlaw as far as Saul is concerned. So he was not about to let his daughter remain married to David, lest David use that as a pretext to claim claim the throne the idea that you would just uh give your married daughter to someone else is

is not exactly something that was uh commonly done so this is this is sort of a very unusual very unusual move right i mean now they don't marriage is different obviously uh then i mean all the romance got ruined out of this chapter by the last two verses when you're like oh wow this is great then it says also you know he saw some other girl and he took her as his wife too so that's not not terribly romantic but it was that there was at least this idea that you wouldn't just you couldn't you couldn't give your daughter to two different people that wasn't something that you could do and you couldn't give her to somebody they get married and then just you decide you just don't like him given like that's not how

that worked either so Saul is definitely doing something out of the ordinary and probably something that the people didn't think was probably a great precedent no no and i mean to make matters even kind of more strange you know later of course she's gonna be brought back to david so the poor the poor woman is just you know she's given to david because david killed all the philistines and then she's taken away from david and then later on david's gonna get her back and then really one of the last things we hear about her is when she's mad at david for dancing in front of the ark and then they have a spat and then that's pretty much it for david and and mccall so talk about a rocky relationship well anyway that's uh that's the end of chapter 25

long chapter but a terribly fascinating chapter too with all the speeches and and the uh the drama going on okay verse uh i mean chapter 26 is going to be very similar in theme as well as details to what we read just a chapter before the whole Abigail chapter. So chapter 24 was when David was in the cave, hiding in the cave with his men, and then Saul came in to relieve himself. David cuts off a corner of Saul's cloak. When Saul leaves the cave, David steps out and says more or less, hey, look what I could have done. I was so close to you with my sword that I could have easily taken you out. I did not because you're the king. You're the anointed of the Lord. Instead, I just cut off a corner of your cloak. So look, Saul, I'm innocent. Quit chasing me. And Saul at that point

acknowledges that David is his son, his adopted son, and says that he's in the wrong and David is in the right. What we're going to see in this chapter is a replay of several of those details, but it's different too. It's not just a doublet, as they're sometimes called. This is not just kind of the same story told in slightly different ways. Yeah, thematically it's very similar, but there are significant details. One of those details that's different is in this case, in chapter 26, David is on the offensive. David actually searches out King Saul, and David sends out spies instead of Saul sending out spies. So there's some significant differences between these two as well. It starts out with telling us once more about these betrayers known as the Ziphites. We heard

about them in chapter 23. They had already betrayed David once. They're going to do it again. So opportunist, excuse me. Then the Ziphites came to Saul at Gibeah saying, is not David hiding on the hill of hachila which is before yeshimon now last time if you if you go back to chapter 23 they gave like extremely detailed descriptions of exactly where david was at here they give a you know a fairly general description of where where he where he's hiding out at so saul gets up goes into the wilderness of Ziph, and he has within 3,000 chosen men to search for David in the wilderness. Saul camps in the hill of Havilah, which is before this place called Jeshimon, beside the road, and David was saying in the wilderness, when he saw that Saul came after him

into the wilderness, David sent out spies, and he knew that Saul was definitely coming. This is one of the connections between the previous chapter and what happens here, or not the previous chapter, the previous episode and what happens here. So when Saul heard from the Ziphites where David was supposedly hiding, he told them to be careful and check and to learn with certainty. This is chapter 23, verse 23. He says he wanted them to find out with certainty exactly where David was. The Hebrew there is El-Nakor, exact same Hebrew phrase that's used here at the end of verse four. He wanted to find out definitely where Saul was at. So the desire to learn something definitive was prominent in the first episode.

The desire to learn something definite is prominent in this episode, except it's different characters wanting to find this out. so saul i mean david goes to where saul camped and he's checking out the whole scene he sees where saul's at he sees where abner's at who's the commander of saul's army remember that abner was saul's uncle so abner is in charge of the uh of the of the army and saul is right in the middle of the camp so he if you think back to the israelite days when they were in the wilderness us, you had the tabernacle right in the middle of the camp, protected, surrounded on all sides. Saul is in that position now. He's the leader, he's the king, and so he has his soldiers all around him. The question is, what's David going to do? David talks to some of his men, and we're

going to be introduced to people here, some people that we're going to learn much more about later on. The first one is Ahimelech the Hittite. Now, unfortunately, we don't know anything else about him. He is mentioned only here, but the fact that he's called a Hittite does tell us something. This isn't Ahimelech the Israelite. This is Ahimelech the Hittite. So evidently, gathered around David in the wilderness were not just Israelites, but non-Israelites as well. You know, maybe these guys were mercenaries. Maybe they were just hooking up with David because they heard that he had a good army and they could fight for him, whatever the situation might be. Ahimelech has joined him. Then we're introduced to one of three guys. There's three

brothers. Abishai is one of them. Joab is the other one. And for the life of me, I cannot remember the name of the third one. We're going to meet him later on. I'll look him up later. But there's three brothers, they're the three sons of David's sister that we're introduced to here in verse 6, Zeuriah. So David's sister, Zeuriah, has three sons, so three nephews of David, and these three are going to figure prominently in the chapters that are coming up. Now, two of them introduced here. We have Abishai, and then we have Joab. So David says to these guys, who will go down with me to saul in the camp and one of them one nephew abishai says i will so that's not that's not my that's not the response i would give i would say for what yeah what are we going to do yeah a little

before i need more before in response to this question i also have a question it is i need more information uh what to do what what is the plan yeah because it seems like i mean we're talking about a camp not of like 15 or 20 guys this is a camp of 3 000 soldiers yeah yeah 3 000 men and in the very middle of them is saul so what what's what's the plan here what are we going to be doing well abishai is like he he's uh as we learned from other other stories he's a little bit impetuous himself he's like i'll go yeah just tell me later what the plan is but i'll go. So David and Abishai, they get together, and it's nighttime. Saul's asleep in the middle of camp, and his spear, oh, Saul's spear once more. We hear about his spear all the time. His spear

is stuck in the ground at his head. Yeah, so practically speaking, it's there so he can grab it. At the same time, hearing this kind of description, it's pretty hard not to also see implicit implicit in that the fact that if it's stuck in the ground at his head it could easily be stuck somewhere else maybe through his head yeah you know it's there so you can grab it but also if you're asleep that means that someone else can grab it somebody else could and abner does men they're all laying there they're all lying around him all right so now we have abishai giving a little speech to david and i kind of picture them whispering this back and forth to each other. This is almost exactly the same speech that David's men gave to him back in the cave

while they were watching Saul squatting down and encouraging David to take action. So Abishai says to David, today God has delivered your enemy into your hand. Now, therefore, please let me, he wants to do the action, please let me strike him with the spear to the ground with one stroke, and i will not strike him the second time i think the reason that he's mentioning i'll do it once not twice is because saul has thrown his spear more than once at david and this is abishai's little dig at saul he's like it ain't gonna take me twice one time and that spear will pin him to the ground it seems to what he's offering is to obviously he's aware uh that this opportunity has been uh presented before david couldn't do it and uh so partially what he's doing is saying

look i know like your conscience is like not really wanting you to do this i'll do it yeah like i got no i got no problem like going over there i'll sleep well at night it won't bother me the best sleep of my life is coming after i pin this guy to the earth yeah so david says to to Abishai, more or less, no, don't destroy him for who can stretch out his hand against the Lord's anointed and be without guilt. And then he adds, as the Lord lives, surely the Lord will strike him or his day will come that he dies, or he will go down into the battle and perish. But the Lord forbid that I should stretch out my hand against the Lord's anointed. So more or less, David says, look, I know you want to kill him. Let's just wait. His day is coming. He's going to fall in

battle. God's going to strike him down. Some way or other, he's going to die. But however he dies, it's not going to be because of us. And then he adds, but now, please take the spear that is at his head and the jug of water and let us go. And then we have one of these interesting, and we'll have to wrap up here. We have one of these interesting episodes in biblical narrative where you can it's very easy to miss but something happens between verse 11 to verse 12 david says to abishai to take the spear in the very next verse you read david took the spear and the jug of water so commentators uh dating all the way back to to the the jewish commentators the middle ages have pointed out that probably what happened was david told him to take the spear and

then david is like to himself thought you know what i think i better take the spear because this guy just might grab the spear and then decide he's going to take out saul against my against my wishes so david takes the spear and the jug of water and uh we'll have to pick up the story from there next week it seems that david is not interested in killing saul but man he cannot escape from this, I mean, this is kind of trolling a little bit here. Oh, yeah, it's this major trolling.

I mean, and think about it, you know, he had, it really bothered David when he cut off a section of Saul's garment. But it does, there's no hint of it bothering him that he takes the king's spear and his water jug. Yeah. He does this quite

willingly. Yeah. Well, we'll have to wait until next week to see how this plays out. See how Saul feels about this. See what David has planned. So, join us for that. Chad, I'll see you next week. Alright, see you then.

Thank you.