Scripture: 1 Samuel 18:1-30
Sermon Series: 1 Samuel: God of Reversals – Sermon 19
Are you a wise person? What does it mean to be wise? Kids are so candid. Listen to these responses given by a group of children who were asked: “What do you think wisdom is?”
Rocky, age 9, said, “Wisdom is…wearing a hat when feeding seagulls.”
Nine-year-old Carol said, “Wisdom is…never asking for anything that costs more than $5 when your parents are doing taxes.”
Nicholas, age 11, apparently spoke from experience and said: “Wisdom is…never bugging a pregnant mom.”
And, Heather, a seasoned teenager said, “Wisdom is…knowing not to answer when your Dad is mad and asks, ‘Do I look stupid?’”
Wisdom has nothing to do with age. All of us know old fools. It’s more than education or accumulated knowledge. You can be educated, have a string of degrees after your name, and still be a foolish person.
Last week we worked our way through what’s probably the most famous story in the Bible, David and Goliath. We all know how that ended. As we continue our series in 1 Samuel, we’re in chapter 18 (p. 241).
Overnight David went from a nobody to a young man of insane popularity. His name headlined every news story. He’s gone viral on social media. But as we turn the page in our Bibles, David finds it was easier to live in obscurity than to handle the headaches of popularity. Within this chapter we find varied reactions to David’s sweet success.
One of the keys to unlocking God’s voice in a text is the use of repetitive words. Chapter 18 has many. Six times different uses of love are used with David as the object – vs. 1, 3, 16, 20, 22, 28. Almost everyone loves David. But not King Saul who envies and fears him. The text says so three times – vs. 12, 15, 29. David is also successful – vs. 5, 14, 15, 30. Why is David successful? Because God is with him, vs. 12, 14, 28. Success from a biblical perspective is being wise and David is wise. He knows God, knows His Word and seeks to apply it to his life. That’s what makes someone wise.
Are you a wise guy? Wisdom is found in those who know God and His Word. It’s for those who apply God’s Word to their lives. That was David.
But true wisdom is lived out in the crucible of life. Are you in a difficult situation? Maybe a hostile environment? David lives out wisdom in a terrible situation, worse than most of us can fathom.
If you want to be wise yet be able to live in a tough situation, this message is for you. Throughout this chapter we’ll see the contrast between the wise young man, David and an old fool, King Saul. If you’re taking notes…
1.The wise have godly friends. Before there were Goose and Maverick, Frodo and Sam or Aibileen and Minny (pictures), there was the real life friendship of David and Jonathan. Some friendships should never have happened. Maybe that’s what makes them so special. That’s the case here.
David is an older teenager; Jonathan a seasoned warrior, probably in his forties. David has a menial jo, a shepherd from a poor family. Jonathan is the prince. He’s royalty and lives in the palace. He’s old enough to be David’s Dad. They have nothing in common but a love for God and honoring Him by fighting His battles. “The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul…Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.” (vss. 1-4)
Liberals have sought to sexualize this. It’s not there. These men are comrades in arms. It highlights something sorely needed in today’s culture – men who have friends. Look at the pages of the Bible and Church History. Consistently, men who did great things for God had close friends.
Where there’s a Moses, there’s a Joshua. Elijah had Elisha. Without a Barnabas would there have been a Paul? Luther had Melanchthon (picture). Ira Sankey and D. L. Moody (picture) were partners in ministry. J. R. R. Tolkien was instrumental in C.S. Lewis (picture) coming to Christ and it was Tolkien who urged Lewis to write. In a few weeks we’ll look deeper at this wonderful friendship of Jonathan and David when we study chapter 20.
There’s great symbolism that Jonathan gives David his royal robe. He’s symbolically transferring his own royal rights, chief of which was his legitimate claim to the throne in Israel. His passing over his royal armor has a similar significance. You didn’t surrender your royal rights to a competitor, you eliminated them. It was an act of faith. Only faith makes us willing to humble ourselves and be the lesser.
While Saul “takes” David to be part of his army. Jonathan whose name means “give,” gives David his symbols of rank and inheritance. David who’d refused the armor of Saul accepts the armory of Jonathan. It’s very different from the royal family feud of William and Harry (picture).
Verse 1 records that Jonathan was literally “knotted” to the soul of David. It’s a relationship characterized by loyalty, love, personal devotion and self-sacrifice. Do you have those kind of friends? Are you that kind of friend?
Men, who are your friends? I’m not talking about your bowling partner or drinking buddy, I’m talking about a real friend.
It’s sad that we’re fearful of developing deep, abiding male friendships. I’m thankful for godly men who have strengthened me, held me accountable and given me godly encouragement. We need such Christian male friends.
Too many men are loners. It’s an American epidemic. Some years ago David Smith wrote a book that became very popular. The title tells you everything that you need to know, The Friendless American Male (picture). His thesis was that most American men don’t have very many friends. Many men don’t have any friends at all.
How many friends do you have this morning? I’m not talking about casual acquaintances. I’m talking about good friends, close friends, intimate friends. If there ever was a place to find for godly friends, it must be in the church.
Recently, we’ve started men’s breakfasts at Grace. The next one is February 18th. Men, let me encourage you to be there! It’s a good place to start.
Christian men need and must be that kind of friend that Jonathan and David were. The wise have godly friends. Do you have godly friends?
2. The wise are faithful. The enduring relationship between David and Jonathan is set in stark contrast to the relationship between David and Saul, which soured because of Saul’s insane fear and jealousy, verses 6-16.
Have you ever thanked the Lord for not showing you the future? One of the best things that God does for us is to keep us from knowing what will happen beyond today. Just think of all the stuff you didn’t have to worry about just because you never knew it was coming your way!
While it’s true that God never changes, we certainly do. The places we live change. People change. Even friends change. Jobs change.
Think about what happened in the last five years. Aren’t you glad that God didn’t show you your life ahead of time? Instead we take life one day at a time. Because God never changes, God knows that it will work together for good, but you and I don’t. God is kind to us to not show us tomorrow. That’s what makes the Bible so relevant.
Do you think if God had shown David that after he took out Goliath, he’d be spear dodging, that he’d have still run lunch to his brothers in the army? The aftermath of giant killing led David into one of the deepest, longest and darkest valleys of his entire life. He goes from the pinnacle of popularity to public enemy #1…all because he faithfully does the right thing.
How much abuse would it take for you to turn in your notice at work? David eludes Saul twice. Because David is successful and some women sing about it, Saul is insanely jealous and suspicious.
David didn’t create problems for Saul; he revealed the deep seated problems already there. What’s amazing is that after the first spear chunking episode, David goes back. The same courage that David took to the battlefield, he took into Saul’s throne room. In spite of terrible mistreatment he remains loyal. I wonder if he tried to excuse Saul’s actions, rationalizing that Saul was having a bad day.
The contrast between the two men is stark and unpacked in the rest of the story of 1 Samuel. While Saul has a spear in his hand which he will attempt to use against this faithful servant, David’s hand holds a sedating musical instrument of peace.
The people of God trust God and look for the best and don’t jump to the worst conclusion. They try to be part of the solution, not increase the problem. That’s David. Saul’s problem is that he thought it was his kingdom and tried to cling to it. David realized that it was God’s kingdom and he faithfully seeks to advance it.
Jealousy will decimate a friendship. It will destroy a marriage. It can shoot tension through the ranks of business organizations. It can quickly nullify unity on a team. It can foster bitterness and ugliness in the church.
We live in a very competitive world. Envy can’t stand it when others are doing better. The Greek word for envy means “to boil within.” Picture in your mind a seething boiling jealousy growing within someone’s heart.
Jealousy with Saul gave birth to unwarranted suspicion and anger. Saul stewed about it and got more angry and upset. We all do it. You’ll find yourself driving, or talking on the phone, or seeing a person out somewhere, and you’ll begin to process information in your mind – unwarranted, suspicious stuff. When you trace it to its root, it’s often because you can’t rejoice in how nice they look, how well they’re doing, or how happy they are, the success of their business, or whatever else it is.
It breeds a destructive angry spirit and thinks the worst. And most dangerous is that jealousy fails to recognize God knows what He’s doing in apportioning gifts. When I’m jealous of the success of another, I’m saying “God, you don’t understand. I’m supposed to have that. I’m supposed to be there. I’m supposed to look like that. Why do I have this gift and not that gift?” Romans 9:20, “…shall the clay then say to the potter, ‘Why have You made me like this?’” It fails to trust that God knows what He’s doing.
The distinction between David and Saul reveals the difference between those who love God and want to serve Him and those who reject Him. Though mistreated, though suspected, though he’d done nothing wrong, David faithfully kept doing his job.
I am only responsible for one person – ME. The same is true of you. Living for God is not environmental or circumstantial. I don’t just serve Him when everything is rosy. David kept going out and doing his job. He answers rightly the question we all must answer: Who does God want me to be? How can I faithfully please Him in this situation?
It’s not who you’re married to. or who your parents are, or where you work. It’s who does God want me to be? David is faithful. He believed God’s words in 2 Corinthians 12:9, “My grace is sufficient for you.” It was enough for David. It’s enough for us. That’s true power! The wise are faithful.
3. The wise are humble. In his bestselling book on business, Good to Great, Jim Collins (pictures) found two common traits of CEOs in companies that transitioned from average to superior market performance: humility and an indomitable will to advance the cause of the organization.
Given David’s soaring popularity, Saul could hardly continue open assaults on his life. But a diabolical mind has other ways to arrange a funeral and one of them was by dangling the prospect of a wedding before the young hero. “Then Saul said to David, ‘Here is my elder daughter Merab. I will give her to you for a wife. Only be valiant for me and fight the Lord’s battles.’ For Saul thought, ‘Let not my hand be against him, but let the hand of the Philistines be against him.’ And David said to Saul, ‘Who am I, and who are my relatives, my father’s clan in Israel, that I should be son-in-law to the king?’” (vss. 17-18).
It’s rare to find someone talented, successful and humble. The star athlete dates the beauty queen and he thinks she’s lucky to have him. But that’s not David. David is truly a humble hero. Though he’s Israel’s hero, he thinks himself unworthy of such a match.
The humble man willingly steps aside when someone with more ability comes along. The proud won’t budge though dwarfed by those around him. The humble man knows the kingdom is God’s. David fits Charles Simeon’s (picture) summing up of real Christianity: “Humility, humility, humility.”
Living by faith is living without scheming but Saul is better at scheming than trusting God. He says one thing but has another intent. He doesn’t want David as a son in-law, he wants him as a corpse. Saul suggests a wedding while planning a funeral.
The worst lies are packaged with holy water. Saul said, “I will give you my daughter, if you will fight the Lord’s battles.” He puts on a pious façade on his evil and takes the Lord’s name in vain. What pious-sounding words.
Remember the Ten Commandments? “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain” (Exodus 20:7). Saul violates this command. Under the guise of piety, he seeks to advance his own evil agenda. It’s beyond crafty. It’s cruel. Saul uses his daughter—actually, his daughters, to fulfill his own diabolical ends. The plan fails because of David’s humility and character.
Thankfully the text is not “scratch and sniff,” because there’s a stench. His words are pious, but his intent is evil. Saul offers his daughter to David with the hope that she’ll be the death of him as he seeks to earn her hand by accomplishing great military feats.
But Saul is unprepared for David’s response. David rejects Saul’s offer. It’s not that David is reluctant to endanger himself in battle. This he does willingly, without expectations of rewards such as a wife from the daughters of Saul. David is a truly humble man who considers his station in life unworthy of such a gift, so he declines. Due to his decline of Saul’s offer, Merab is given to another man as his wife. This doesn’t reflect negatively on Saul as much as it does positively on David.
Many of us regard things that have come into our lives as failures, as some condemnation or something to be avoided. Please don’t miss the hand of God when your plans—good or bad—hit a wall. Don’t miss it when days of difficulty, disappointment and failure emerge. Please don’t be a Saul and miss the opportunity to see that God is at work in the dark shadows as well as in the light, working to wake you up and get your attention.
Walter Wangerin’s (picture) book, Ragman and Other Cries of Faith, has a number of short stories in it. One of the stories is of a husband and wife who regularly argue with one another. They live in an apartment. And the routine of the man is when he gets annoyed with his wife and when an argument ensues, he simply goes out of the apartment, slams the door, and goes and walks round the community for a while until he’s reduced the level of his annoyance and then he returns.
As the story unfolds, one of these arguments happens, and the man grabs his coat, ‘cause he’s looked out the window; it’s bucketing rain. So he grabs his coat and goes out the door, and he slams the door. As he goes to leave, he realizes that he’s slammed his coat in the door.
Now he’s got a real problem. Either he leaves his coat lying in the hallway and goes out and gets a thorough soaking, or he has to ring the bell. But if he rings the bell, then she’s gonna be opening the door. He rings the bell. She opens the
door. She’s doubled over laughing. And Wangerin writes, “And in that moment, there was the opportunity for repentance, for forgiveness, for reconciliation. But like a fool, I grabbed my coat and slammed the door and walked out into the rain.”
Saul here, in his failed evil plan, has the opportunity to turn to the Lord, but he doubles down and hatches a new plan. David chose humility. Saul chooses to double down. Which will you choose?
4. The wise have godly ambition. A Volkswagen had a bumper sticker with, “When I grow up, I’d like to be a Cadillac.” That’s ambition. The last part of chapter 18, verses 20-30, focuses on David’s godly ambition. Ambition is defined as “a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.” According to the Bible, ambition is much more than that. It’s the motivation of our heart behind our drive. David was “a man after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14). He has holy ambition focused on glorifying God. Who are we focused on? Ambition is good if it’s focused on glorifying God and that which has eternal significance.
Saul was delighted to learn that his younger daughter, Michal, loves David. He decides to use this as a means to David’s death at the hands of the Philistines. David doesn’t have sufficient funds for a traditional bride price or dowry, so Saul suggests a creative alternative, the foreskins of a hundred Philistines. Obviously, since no Philistine would willingly submit to circumcision, this grisly evidence would prove that they’d been killed. David exceeds Saul’s requirements and timetable.
While it sounds crude to our ears, mutilation of dead soldiers was common in ancient warfare. Egyptians counted severed hands. Native Americans took scalps. These foreskins are gruesome tokens of proof of the death toll.
David is not about to miss the deadline. Clearly he was planning to take things up a notch—or, we might say, one hundred notches. You can only imagine how he goes out with his men. David says, “Now, what we’re going to do is this: we’re going to do this in a very orderly way. We’re gonna just kill them one at a time and deal with them one at a time. And you, if you’ll just take care of things and make sure; and you, if you’ll just count so that we know exactly where we are, because we not only have a deadline, we have a number to hit.” You can imagine them saying, “That’s 74, David! Seventy-four and counting.” “Very good. We’ve got a way to go. We’ve still got twenty-six to go to meet the king’s deadline.”
As they’re getting close to a hundred, he says, “You know, I’ve got an idea: let’s double it!” They said, “Double it, for goodness’ sake?” He said, “Have you ever seen Michal? How beautiful she is? Double it! I’m happy to double it.” He’s ambitious for the right reasons. What a scene it must have been.
And David brought them “in full number to the king, that he might become the king’s son-in-law. And Saul gave him his daughter Michal for a wife.”
What else could Saul do? He has no options now, but there was no celebration on Saul’s part. He’d been hoping for an elimination and the dreadful part of it from his perspective is that David is still in circulation.
The overriding fact that dawns again on Saul is not simply that his daughter loved David but Saul saw anew that “the Lord was with David”—and clearly not with him, because he is the rejected king. And all the people that are around him in his own family love this man that he increasingly hates.
And if “perfect love casts out fear,” as the Scriptures remind us, Saul knows nothing of that kind of love. You only need to look at the beginning of chapter 19, where you’ll realize that Saul at that point, immediately discards any attempts at subtlety. All of the hatred that consumes him, that builds fear upon fear in him, is about to be out in the open.
Everyone loves David, for God is with him. If God is with David it’s because David longs to be with God. Why is David successful? Because he’s the Lord’s anointed and it mattered little how Saul might try to stop it.
Conclusion: Being wise, following God’s way is a choice. David had a choice. Saul had a choice and you and I have a choice. What will we choose?
In 1958, Robert Lane had a son and gave him an unusual name. This Harlem man named his son Winner Lane. Yes, he named his son Winner. Apparently, Mr. Lane had a good feeling about the future of his young boy.
Some years later he had another son. What do you think he named this son? Champ? Hero? Boss? No. He named this son Loser Lane. So Robert Lane’s two boys are named Winner and Loser. And yes, this is a true story.
So, how did these two boys turn out in life? Did his expectations about his boys prove correct? Steven Levitt (picture) in his book, Freakonomics describes their lives this way. Writing about Winner Lane, he states, “The most noteworthy achievement of Winner Lane is the sheer length of his criminal record: nearly three dozen arrests for burglary, domestic violence, trespassing, resisting arrest, and other mayhem.
In contrast, Loser Lane went to prep school on a scholarship and eventually joined the NYPD. He worked his way up to become a detective and eventually a sergeant. While his brother Winner made a career of going to prison, Loser Lane made his career placing people like his brother in prison.
The expectations Robert Lane had for his two boys were completely wrong. Winner Lane turned into a loser and Loser Lane was a winner. Why? They each made a choice. Saul and David made choices – one to be wise and one to be foolish. You and I must also make a choice.
In our contemporary culture we frequently blame our choices on our circumstances. We all have personal choice. We all are responsible for those choices. Being wise, being the right kind of person is a choice. Wise people know and choose to live for Jesus.
To some degree any of us can be nice externally even in the midst of a hostile environment. What we struggle with is inner peace. So do you want to know how to be “nice” from the inside out. Do you want to know how to be a wise guy? It’s from having Someone living inside. It’s living in the power of 1 John 4:4, “ Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” Jesus suffered the most hostile environment and died so that we could have His power and His peace. He’s our model. But you can’t have His power unless you know Him.
Do you know Him? That’s what got David through dealing with Saul and it’s what will get you through whatever you’re facing too.