The Bible in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz) - Day 116: David and Abigail (2023)

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Fr. Mike reflects on the relationship between David and Abigail, and how the Lord calls David to be a better man through Abigail. Where has God put these types of relationships in our lives? Today's readings are 1 Samuel 25 and Psalm 63. For the complete reading plan, visit ascensionpress.com/bibleinayear. Please note: The Bible contains adult themes that may not be suitable for children - parental discretion is advised.

Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Bible in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's voice and live life through the lens of Scripture. The Bible in a Year podcast is brought to you by Ascension. Using the Great Adventure Bible Timeline, we'll read all the way from Genesis to Revelation, discovering how the story of salvation unfolds and how we fit into that story today. It is day 116, and today we are reading one chapter from Samuel again, 1 Samuel chapter 25, the death of Samuel and the rise, well, the next step in David's life. We're also praying from the book of Psalms, and we're praying Psalm 50, sorry, 63. My goodness.

If you want to download your own Bible in a year reading plan, you can get that at ascensionpress.com slash Bible in a year, and you wouldn't even need me to say this. Yeah, I would know right away. You would know right away that what we're praying is Psalm 63 today. Goodness gracious. We're also reading from the Revised Standard Version, the Second Catholic Edition. I'm using the Great Adventure Bible from Ascension. If you want to also subscribe to this podcast, you can.

You have my permission to do that if you'd like. Once again, as I said, it is day 116. We're reading 1 Samuel chapter 25. We're praying Psalm 63. 1 Samuel chapter 25, death of Samuel. Now Samuel died and all Israel assembled and mourned for him. And they buried him in his house at Ramah. David and Abigail. Then David rose and went down to the wilderness of Paran. And there was a man in Maun, whose business was in Carmel. The man was very rich, and he had three thousand sheep and a thousand goats. He was shearing his sheep in Carmel. Now the name of the man was Nabal, and the name of his wife Abigail. The woman was of good understanding and beautiful, but the man was chal, and the name of his wife, Abigail. The woman was of good understanding and beautiful,

but the man was churlish and ill-behaved. He was a Calebite. David heard in the wilderness that Nabal was shearing his sheep. So David sent ten young men, and David said to the young men, Go up to Carmel, and go to Nabal, and greet him in my name. And thus you shall salute him. Peace be to you, and peace be to your house, and peace be to all that you have. I hear that you have shearers. Now your shepherds have been with us, and we did them no harm, and they missed nothing all the time they were in Carmel. Ask your young men, and they will tell you. Therefore let my young men find favor in your eyes, for we come on a feast day. Please, give whatever you have at hand to your servants and to your son David. When David's young men

came, they said all this to Nabal in the name of David, and then they waited. And Nabal answered David's servants, Who is David? Who is the son of Jesse? There are many servants nowadays who are breaking away from their masters. Shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I have killed for my shearers and give it to men who come from I do not know where? So David's young men turned away and came back and told him all this. And David said to his men, every man belt on his sword, and every man of them belted on his sword. David also belted on his sword, and about 400 men went up after David, while 200 remained with the baggage. But one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal's wife, behold, David sent messengers out of the wilderness

to salute our master, and he railed at them. Yet the men were very good to us, and we suffered no harm, and we did not miss anything when we were in the fields as long as we went with them. They were a wall to us both by night and by day, all the while we were with them keeping the sheep. Now therefore know this, and consider what you should do. For evil is determined against our master and against all his house, and he is so ill-natured that one cannot speak to him then abigail made haste and took 200 loaves and two skins of wine and five sheep ready dressed and five measures of parched grain and a hundred clusters of raisins and 200 cakes of figs and laid them on donkeys and she said to her young men, Go on before me, behold,

I come after you. But she did not tell her husband Nabal. And as she rode on the donkey and came down under cover of the mountain, behold, David and his men came down toward her and she met them. Now David had said, Surely in vain have I guarded all that this fellow has in the wilderness, so that nothing was missed of all that belonged to him, and he has returned me evil for good. God do so to David, and more also, if by morning I leave so much as one male of all who belong to him. When Abigail saw David, she made haste, and alighted from the donkey, and fell before David on her face, and bowed to the ground. She fell at his feet, and said, Upon me alone, my lord, be the guilt. Please, let your handmaid speak in your hearing, and hear the words of your handmaid. Let not my lord regard

this ill-natured fellow Nabal, for as his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name, and folly is with him. But I, your handmaid, did not see the young men of my lord whom you sent. Now then, my lord, as the Lord lives and as your soul lives, seeing the Lord has restrained you from blood guilt and from taking vengeance with your own hand. Now then, let your enemies and those who seek to do evil to my Lord be as Nabal. And now let this present which your servant has brought to my Lord be given to the young men who follow my Lord. Please forgive the trespass of your handmaid, for the Lord will certainly make my Lord a sure house, because my Lord is fighting the battles

of the Lord. And evil shall not be found in you so long as you live. If men rise up to pursue you and seek your life, the life of my Lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living in the care of the Lord your God. And the lives of your enemies he shall sling out as from the hollow of a sling. And when the Lord has done to my Lord, according to all the good that he has spoken concerning you, and has appointed you prince over Israel, my Lord shall have no cause of grief or pangs of conscience for having shed blood without cause

or for my Lord taking vengeance himself. And when the Lord has dealt well with my Lord, then remember your handmaid. And David said to Abigail, Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you this day to meet me. Blessed be your discretion, and blessed be you who have kept me this day from blood guilt and from avenging myself with my own hand. For as surely as the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, who has restrained me from hurting you, unless you had made haste and come to meet me truly by morning, there had not been left to Nabal so much as one male. Then David received from her hand what she had brought him. And he

said to her, go up in peace to your house. See, I have listened to your voice and I have granted your petition. So Abigail came to Nabal, and behold, he was holding a feast in his house, like the feast of a king. And Nabal's heart was merry within him, for he was very drunk, so she told him nothing at all until the morning light. And in the morning, when the wine had gone out of Nabal, his wife told him these things, and his heart died within him, and he became as a stone. And about ten days later, the Lord struck Nabal, and he died. When David heard that Nabal was dead, he said, Blessed be the Lord who has avenged the insult I received at the hand of Nabal, and has kept back his servant from evil. The Lord has returned

the evildoing of Nabal upon his own head. Then David sent and wooed Abigail to make her his wife. And when the servants of David came to Abigail at Carmel, they said to her, David has sent us to you to take you to him as his wife. And she arose and bowed with her face to the ground and said, Behold, your handmaid is a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my Lord. And Abigail made haste and rose and mounted on a donkey, and her five maidens attended her. She went after the messengers of David, and she became his wife. Ahinoam of Jezreel. David also took Ahinoam of Jezreel, and both of them became his wives. Saul had given Michal,

his daughter, David's wife, to Palti, the son of Laish, who was of Galim. Psalm 63 Comfort and Assurance in God's Presence A Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah. O God, you are my God. I seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where no water is. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.

Because your merciful love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live, I will lift up my hands and call on your name. My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips. When I think of you upon my bed and meditate on you in the watches of the night, for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy. My soul clings to you. Your right hand upholds me. But those who seek to destroy my life shall go down into the depths of the earth. They shall be given over to the power of the sword. They shall be prey for jackals. But the king shall rejoice in God. All who swear by

him shall glory, for the mouths of liars will be stopped. Father in heaven, we give you praise and we give you honor. We thank you for all your ways. We thank you for the ways in which you send people to us, either to encourage us to holiness or to keep us from evil. We thank you for all those people, Lord, that have ever, ever prayed for us, ever stood up for us, that ever stood up to us, so that we can be called to greatness and be deterred from folly, deterred from evil. Lord God, we thank you for all the people that you've brought into our lives

who encourage us to get closer to you, and all those you brought into our lives who encourage us to stay far, far away from what is wrong. Lord God, thank you for all the Abigails that you brought into our lives, and may you be praised, and may they be blessed forever and ever. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and may they be blessed forever and ever. In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. So what we hear, we get, you know, David, as we've noted before, as we're going to see many, many times after this, David is not a perfect human being. David is in many ways a hero of the Old Testament, right? He becomes the archetype. When we read Chronicles, we're going to see David as the archetype of the future Messiah,

right? He's going to be the foretaste, the type of the future Messiah, but he's not a perfect human being. And in today's scripture, we have the story here of how David and his men have been guarding Nabal's shepherds and said, hey, how about a little something for the effort, eh? You know, kind of a situation. And Nabal is a pretty arrogant human being. He's, well, he rejects this and not just rejects it,

but he is pretty rude, I guess we'll say that. He's pretty rude in the way in which he rejects David's request for some sustenance for the men who guarded the men of Nabal. Now, keep this in mind, is that even the men who were guarded, right, the shepherds of Nabal, they said that David's men were not only good at guarding them, they not only protected them in the wilderness, but they also were good to them. I mean, it's a matter of what you recognize is even though the people who are following after David are relatively rough, right? They're the people who they were maybe down on their luck when they joined up with David.

In some ways, they are following the lead of their leader, and their leader is a just and upright human being. And so that's a good thing, and that's one of the things we can keep this in mind, is how our leaders are typically. That's how we are. Not always. Obviously, it's not a hard and fast rule. It's not a one-to-one kind of situation. But oftentimes, we look to those who lead us to know how to act.

And that's one of the reasons why we're so grateful that Abigail here in this scripture passage, Abigail was willing to stand up to David. She didn't stand up to David, but she was willing to stand up to the evil that was in David's heart. I don't think she could have, in that context, maybe stood up to David, but she did intercede. And in doing this, she demonstrates her wisdom. She demonstrates her courage. There is so much virtue in her, so much goodness in her. In fact, there is this blessing called the nuptial blessing that's in the marriage rite in the Catholic church. And the blessing over the bride says, may she be as the women whose praises are sung throughout scriptures. May this bride be of the same kind of quality as the women whose praises are sung throughout the scriptures. And Abigail

is one of those women. Abigail is one of those women who is just filled, filled with wisdom. And she is filled with courage because she faces down this David who is coming to kill her husband. She is very brave and she's very wise. And also, as Scripture says, she's very beautiful. Now, on the other hand, here's Nabal who's described as churlish and ill-behaved. And I love it. The fact that Scripture gets to use the word churlish to describe Nabal, which is awesome. Also, he's a Calebite, so he's got that going for him, which is nice. But what we have is,

as we said, as our leaders go, so often we take our lead from them, hence leader. And so here's David, he's going down the wrong path. He's going to take vengeance because of a personal insult. Later on, we're going to see David be insulted, and he's not going to take vengeance on that because he's learned something by this point. But in this moment, he is still that young and still brash and still is willing to take rash actions. And so we're grateful to Abigail for having stood in David's way, not just so Nabal could continue to live, because he's not going to continue to live, as we heard, but so that David wouldn't be guilty. And again, we just think about all of the people in our lives, all the people who wouldn't be guilty. And again, we just think about all of the

people in our lives, all the people who have stood up to us and said, hey, how about not doing that? Or all the people who have said, hey, I think it's time to move forward. We talked about this yesterday a little bit, where there is that sense of what are the battles that we're called to fight? What are the battles we're called to avoid fighting? There are some people, and this is a great example of when, yeah, here is Abigail who is able to stand in front of David and say, this is not a battle you want to fight. This is not a thing you want to do. I can think of so many people in my life who have, I was on my way to do something that,

you know, even I knew wasn't right. I knew I was, I'm just going to do this thing. I don't care. And someone was willing to stand up and say, ah, buddy, I don't think you want to do this. And I'm so, so grateful for all the times I've had good friends, all the times I've had good family members who have said that, that stood up to me and said, I don't think you want to do this. And so grateful to the Lord for allowing me to listen to them and be hopefully wiser and less guilty. Or there's also those times where there's that person who stands up and says, hey, maybe this is a battle you're called to fight. Like we talked about yesterday. Again,

this is the thing. It's so good. We have to keep our ears open. We have to keep our heart open to be stopped by the Lord and to be spurred on by the Lord. We listen to the voices of the people around us. And in the midst of that, we ask, okay, what part of this is the Lord speaking? How much of this is the Lord's voice? Because as we know, no one of us knows everything and we need all of us. We need a community. That's what God has given us, the church. And that's why he's given us each other on this Bible in a year. For this whole 365 days, we are this community, the coming together and praying for each other on this Bible in a year. For this whole 365 days, we are this community coming together and praying for each other and hopefully supporting each other and praying and interceding on behalf of each other so that when it's time to move, we can help each other move. When it's time

to not move, we can help each other avoid moving. That's what I'm praying for. And that's hopefully we're praying for each other. I am praying for you. Please, please, please pray for me. My name is Father Mike. I cannot wait to see you tomorrow. God bless.