1 Samuel 21

1 Samuel 21

Cole has an interesting perspective (and application for believers) regarding 9 chapters 18-26 referring to these chapters as "God’s Training School." Every Christian is enrolled in a school--“God’s Training School.” Hebrews 12:8 tells us, “If you are without training [discipline], of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.” So every true child of God is enrolled in the program. There is some good news and some bad news about God’s training school. The good news is, nobody fails the course: “I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6). If God has begun a work in you, He will see you through! The bad news is, you don’t graduate until you die and you can’t drop out before then! If you try to drop out, the course gets even more difficult! Some of you may be protesting because you signed up for the course without knowing what you were getting into! You were told that if you would trust Christ as Savior, all your problems would be solved (instantly was implied) and you would enjoy a trouble free life. Or perhaps you were told that if you would walk in the victory Christ offers, you would live on a higher plane where problems just glance off you. That sounds good, but it’s not biblical. The Bible clearly teaches that God uses trials to train us to become more like Jesus, who learned obedience through the things He suffered (Heb. 5:8). The process takes time and is often very painful, but the final product makes it worthwhile (Heb. 12:11). Others of you are enrolled in the program, but you may not be aware of the course of instruction or the objectives of the training. You aren’t familiar with the catalog. So you don’t understand why certain things are happening to you. You’re wondering why you’re going through certain tests and why you never seem to graduate. Sometimes you think you passed the test, but the next thing you know you’re going through the same course all over again. It’s easier to endure the program if you know what to expect. So I’d like to explain, from the life of David, the program, the courses, and the objectives of God’s training school. As we’ve already seen, David was an unusually gifted and advanced young man. While he was still a teenager he had been anointed as king to replace the disobedient King Saul. He also killed Goliath while he was a teenager. That victory pushed David into instant national fame and popularity. He was brought into the palace and set over the men of war (1 Sam. 18:5). Imagine how it must have felt to be not yet 20 years old and to be where David was at! And yet God did not see fit to remove the corrupt Saul and install the upright David as king until David was 30 (2 Sam. 5:4). What was happening during the 10-12 years between David’s victory over Goliath and his ascension to the throne? He was in God’s training school. Let’s look at the program, courses, and objectives of that school. For rest of his sermon see God’s Training School and below are his subheadings to encourage you to read the full message. A. GOD’S TRAINING PROGRAM IS NOT EXPLAINED TO THE STUDENT IN ADVANCE. B. GOD’S TRAINING PROGRAM GOES ON FOR A LIFETIME. C. GOD’S TRAINING PROGRAM INVOLVES MANY COURSES THAT MUST BE REPEATED EVEN IF YOU PASS. (See 1 Sam. 19:8-10, 11-12; 21:10; 22:1, 5; 23:12-14, 24-29; 24:1-2; 26:1-2.) D. GOD’S TRAINING PROGRAM IS NECESSARY FOR A PERSON TO BE ABLE TO HANDLE PROSPERITY. Here are Cole's "Courses" A. BROKEN PROMISES (101) B. EVIL FOR GOOD (102) C. OPPORTUNITY TESTING (104) Here are the Course Objectives: A. DAVID LEARNED TO TAKE REFUGE IN THE LORD AND TO SEE THE LORD’S LOVE EVEN IN ADVERSITY. B. DAVID LEARNED TO SEEK THE LORD’S MIND RATHER THAN TO ACT IMPULSIVELY ON HIS OWN. (aka Submission) C. DAVID LEARNED TO WAIT UPON THE LORD FOR HIS TIMING. (aka Endurance - 1Sa 26:10,11, Ps 62:5) D. DAVID LEARNED TO ACKNOWLEDGE HIS SIN QUICKLY TO THE LORD AND TO THOSE HE HAD WRONGED. (aka a Tender Conscience) To "fill in the blanks" see "God’s Training School." THERE IS NONE LIKE THAT; GIVE IT ME - Cyril Hocking - Day by Day thru the OT THERE WERE LESSONS for David to learn as a courtier. The syllabus became more demanding for him as a fugitive. Our reading presents David’s visit to the priests, 21:1–9, his flight to the Philistines, vv. 10–15, and a temporary respite, sanctuary in a cave, 22:1–5. What can sustain David when rejected? The showbread is the only answer, vv. 4, 6. Were all in order, this was not lawful. But the priesthood had hopelessly failed, the lamp of God had all but gone out, 3:3, the ark of God was no longer in the tabernacle, 7:1, and God’s anointed was rejected by the nation generally. While God had far from done with these institutions as yet, all was “in a manner” profaned, rendered common. David may have it rightfully, as the man after God’s heart, and with whom His future purposes rest. Without the Lord of the sabbath, there can be no rest in ordinances, Mark 2:25–28. So it is with us. Without Jesus Christ, our advocate upholding us before the Father, as suggested by the table, and without our feeding upon that which God sees us to be in Him, as suggested by the showbread, what is there for a fearful, failing saint? David not only sought food. He felt the need of weapons, ct. 17:47. The priest’s offer of “The sword of Goliath the Philistine” took him back to that memorable God-given victory. But now his conscience was overridden by fear, v. 8f. Fear of Saul drove him yet further. He went over to the Philistines at Gath, Goliath’s home town of all places. However slow many in Israel were to recognize him, these Philistines said “Is not this David the king of the land?”; here was the slayer of ten thousands, v. 11. David was now “sore afraid of Achish”, ct. Psa. 56:4. His self-chosen path brought him lower still as he pretended to be mad. God could have no direct part with him, though He overruled in the matter so that “David therefore departed thence”, 22:1. Fear God alone. Fear through looking at the things that are seen, confidence in the help of good friends, speaking one untruth following hard upon another, even seeking shelter with known enemies, is a slippery slope not a few of us have embarked upon. Be warned, for that is the very purpose of this record. Walter Kaiser - go to page 374 in Hard Sayings of the Bible - Mark 2:26+, 1 Samuel 21:1-6 Who Was the High Priest? ABIATHAR OR AHIMELECH? In Mark we read that Jesus said that Abiathar was priest when David received and ate some of the bread of the Presence from the tabernacle. In terms of the point that Jesus is making it really does not matter who was priest, for the issue is the breaking of the rule about a layperson eating consecrated bread and its application to Jesus’ disciples breaking the sabbath regulations. However, when we look up the incident in 1 Samuel 21:1–6, the text reads “Ahimelech” rather than “Abiathar.” Was Jesus mistaken? Surely the Pharisees would have caught the error? The first point to note is that Abiathar and Ahimelech are son and father. The son, Abiathar, first appears in 1 Samuel 22:20 as the one son of Ahimelech who escaped when Saul slaughtered the priests of Nob and their families for having helped David. Abiathar then remains with David and later serves as high priest during his reign. It looks like the son has been switched with the father. The second thing we should look at is the textual tradition. There is no evidence that this switch is a textual error. It is true that the Western text does omit the priest’s name, but none of the other textual traditions do, and the Western text does sometimes correct or add to the text in various books. When the Western text’s reading remains unsupported by other textual traditions, it is not taken as very weighty. In fact, the Western text actually follows the other Synoptics, for Matthew 12:4 and Luke 6:4 both drop this offending name. Thus there appears to be solid evidence that Mark wrote “Abiathar.” There have been attempts to solve the problem by arguing that “in the days of Abiathar the high priest” should be understood to mean “In the section [of Samuel] entitled ‘Abiathar,’” since this section explains how Abiathar joined David (and there were no chapter and verse numbers for citing Scripture in Jesus’ day). However, if that is what it means, Mark found a most awkward way of expressing it. To mean this, the Greek phrase with “Abiathar” in it should have been placed in Mark 2:25 right after “Have you never read?” Likewise some argue that the phrase means “when Abiathar who became high priest was alive.” However, if this was what were intended (if Jesus had forgotten the name of Abiathar’s father or thought his listeners would not recognize it), a phrase like “in the days of the father of Abiathar the high priest” or “in the childhood of Abiathar the high priest” would have expressed the thought clearly. The phrase as it stands would express such an idea so unclearly and awkwardly that it is unlikely that it means this. What, then, are the possibilities? First, we can be fairly certain that Mark is not covering up the Pharisaic response to an error Jesus made. If Mark had been aware of such a problem, he would have omitted the whole story or changed the name rather than simply omitted the Pharisaic response. Mark probably did not see any other problem with this passage than the issue of Jesus’ defending his disciples’ breaking the sabbath regulations. Second, if Mark did not see the problem, he did not see it for one of three reasons: (1) he actually wrote Ahimelech and the more familiar name crept into the text at a very early stage, perhaps as an error in the first copying (often texts were read aloud to scribes making copies, so an oral substitution of the more familiar name for the less familiar would be quite possible), or (2) he received the story as it is and did not himself realize that there was a problem with it (in the latter case, we do not know if Jesus actually said “Abiathar” or if he said “Ahimelech” and the more familiar Abiathar was substituted in the course of oral transmission), or (3) his view of historical accuracy was not bothered by such an issue, since the main point is not affected by it. Whatever the case, Mark apparently did not realize that there was a problem. The truth is that this is one of the problems in Scripture for which we do not have a fully satisfactory solution. We do not have Mark’s original edition to check which name was in it, nor do we have Mark here to question about his state of mind. We do not have a tape recording of the preaching of Peter (thought by many to be the source of Mark) to see if he was using the right or the wrong name. While many ancient historians would not have been bothered by such an innocuous slip, it did seem to bother Matthew and Luke, so we cannot be sure that it would not have bothered Mark. Thus we can either arbitrarily select one of the speculative solutions mentioned in the previous paragraph, perhaps choosing the one which pleases us the best, or we can say, “We honestly don’t know what the answer is to this problem, nor are we likely to ever know.” In that case, this verse makes plain that our knowledge is always partial so that our trust remains in God rather than in what we know. Gleason Archer - go to page 367 in Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties - Who was high priest when David ate the showbread—Abiather or Ahimelech? Mark 2:26 quotes Jesus as asking His hearers whether they had never read what David did, when he and his men were hungry and entered the sanctuary at Nob to beg for food, in the time of Abiathar the high priest (1 Sam. 21:1–6). As a matter of fact, however, it was with Abiathar’s father, Ahimelech, that David had dealings; for Ahimelech was really the high priest at the time of that episode. Did Jesus err when He referred to the wrong high priest? A careful examination of Mark 2:26 reveals that Christ did not actually imply that Abiathar was already high priest at the time of David’s visit. He simply said, “Epi Abiathar archiereōs,” which means “in the time of Abiathar the high priest.” As things turned out, bloody King Saul soon had Ahimelech and the entire priestly community of Nob massacred by Doeg the Edomite (1 Sam. 22:18–19); and Abiathar the son of Ahimelech was the only one fortunate enough to escape. He fled to join David (v. 20) and served as his priest all through David’s years of wandering and exile. Naturally he was appointed high priest by David after David became king, and he shared the high priesthood with Zadok, Saul’s appointee, until David’s death. Under these circumstances it was perfectly proper to refer to Abiathar as the high priest—even though his appointment as such came somewhat later, after the incident at Nob—just as it would be proper to introduce an anecdote by saying, “Now when King David was a shepherd boy,” even though David was not actually a king at the time he was a shepherd boy. According to W.F. Arndt and F.W. Gingrich (A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament [Chicago: University of Chicago, 1957], p. 286), epi with the genitive simply means “in the time of”; and that is the meaning that applies in Mark 2:26 (the same construction as Acts 11:28 [“in the time of Claudius”] and Heb. 1:2 [“in the time of the last of these days” (epʾ eschatou tōn hēmerōn toutōn)]). The episode did happen “in the time of” Abiathar; he was not only alive but actually present when the event took place, and he very shortly afterward became high priest as a result of Saul’s murdering his father, Ahimelech. If Jesus’ words are interpreted in the way he meant them, there is absolutely no variance with historical fact. 1 Samuel 21:2 David said to Ahimelech the priest, "The king has commissioned me with a matter and has said to me, 'Let no one know anything about the matter on which I am sending you and with which I have commissioned you; and I have directed the young men to a certain place.' BGT 1 Samuel 21:3 (follows Hebrew numbering) καὶ εἶπεν Δαυιδ τῷ ἱερεῖ ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐντέταλταί μοι ῥῆμα σήμερον καὶ εἶπέν μοι μηδεὶς γνώτω τὸ ῥῆμα περὶ οὗ ἐγὼ ἀποστέλλω σε καὶ ὑπὲρ οὗ ἐντέταλμαί σοι καὶ τοῖς παιδαρίοις διαμεμαρτύρημαι ἐν τῷ τόπῳ τῷ λεγομένῳ θεοῦ πίστις Φελλανι Αλεμωνι LXE 1 Samuel 21:2 And David said to the priest, The king gave me a command to-day, and said to me, Let no one know the matter on which I send thee, an concerning which I have charged thee: and I have charged my servants to be in the place that is called, The faithfulness of God, phellani maemoni. Lexham English - And David said to the priest, “The king has commanded me in a matter today and said to me, ‘Nobody must learn of the matter about which I am sending you and concerning what I have commanded you.’ And to my servants I have affirmed at the place the one called ‘Faithfulness of God,’ Phellani Maemonei. KJV 1 Samuel 21:2 And David said unto Ahimelech the priest, The king hath commanded me a business, and hath said unto me, Let no man know any thing of the business whereabout I send thee, and what I have commanded thee: and I have appointed my servants to such and such a place. NET 1 Samuel 21:2 David replied to Ahimelech the priest, "The king instructed me to do something, but he said to me, 'Don't let anyone know the reason I am sending you or the instructions I have given you.' I have told my soldiers to wait at a certain place. CSB 1 Samuel 21:2 David answered Ahimelech the priest, "The king gave me a mission, but he told me, 'Don't let anyone know anything about the mission I'm sending you on or what I have ordered you to do.' I have stationed my young men at a certain place. ESV 1 Samuel 21:2 And David said to Ahimelech the priest, "The king has charged me with a matter and said to me, 'Let no one know anything of the matter about which I send you, and with which I have charged you.' I have made an appointment with the young men for such and such a place. NIV 1 Samuel 21:2 David answered Ahimelech the priest, "The king charged me with a certain matter and said to me, 'No one is to know anything about your mission and your instructions.' As for my men, I have told them to meet me at a certain place. NLT 1 Samuel 21:2 "The king has sent me on a private matter," David said. "He told me not to tell anyone why I am here. I have told my men where to meet me later. NRS 1 Samuel 21:2 David said to the priest Ahimelech, "The king has charged me with a matter, and said to me, 'No one must know anything of the matter about which I send you, and with which I have charged you.' I have made an appointment with the young men for such and such a place. NJB 1 Samuel 21:3 (follows Hebrew numbering) David replied to Ahimelech the priest, 'The king has given me an order and said to me, "Do not let anyone know anything about the mission on which I am sending you, or about the order which I have given you." I have arranged to meet the guards at such and such a place. NAB 1 Samuel 21:3 (follows Hebrew numbering) David answered the priest: "The king gave me a commission and told me to let no one know anything about the business on which he sent me or the commission he gave me. For that reason I have arranged a meeting place with my men. YLT 1 Samuel 21:2 And David saith to Ahimelech the priest, 'The king hath commanded me a matter, and he saith unto me, Let no man know anything of the matter about which I am sending thee, and which I have commanded thee; and the young men I have caused to know at such and such a place; The king: 1Sa 19:17 22:22 Ge 27:20,24 1Ki 13:18 Ps 119:29 Ga 2:12 Col 3:9 1 Samuel 21 Resources - Multiple Sermons and Commentaries Related Passages: Proverbs 12:22 Lying lips are an abomination to the LORD, But those who deal faithfully are His delight. DAVID LIES TO THE PRIEST David said to Ahimelech the priest, "The king has commissioned me ("gave me a mission") with a matter - The king here refers to King Saul who was hardly sending David on a mission but in fact was seeking David's life! David was clearly guilty of lying and deception, which he carried out because he was afraid someone might report his whereabouts to Saul. He reasoned that if they thought Saul had truly sent him, then no one would tell Saul they saw him, for they would assume Saul knew. David has forgotten the words of Moses in Numbers 32:23+ "if you will not do so, behold, you have sinned against the LORD, and be sure your sin will find you out." Youngblood thinks he was deceptive “to protect the priest from any accusation of complicity in his flight from Saul”? (Expositor’s Bible Commentary) and has said to me, 'Let no one know anything about the ("top secret") matter on which I am sending you and with which I have commissioned you - David says this "top secret!" David adds to his lie so that no one would dare say anything about his presence in Nob. His ruse should have defused any questions about why he was in Nob. But as we learn one man, Doeg the Edomite, did not "buy it!" And later David gives a clue that something is "fishy" because he has come without his sword or weapons (1Sa 21:8)! and I have directed the young men to a certain place.' - NIV "I have told them to meet me at a certain place." NET NOTE on a certain place - The Hebrew expression here refers to a particular, but unnamed, place. It occurs in the OT only here, in 2 Kgs 6:8, and in Ruth 4:1, where Boaz uses it to refer to Naomi’s unnamed kinsman-redeemer. A contracted form of the expression appears in Dan 8:13. John MacArthur minces no words declaring that David "supposed, as many do, that it is excusable to lie for the purpose of saving one's life (ED: Compare Michal in 1Sa 19:17+). But what is essentially sinful can never, because of circumstances, change its immoral character (cf. Ps 119:29). David's lying led tragically to the deaths of the priests (1Sa 22:9-18). (Borrow The MacArthur Study Bible) TSK - The whole of this is a gross falsehood; and which was attended with the most fatal consequences. It is well known that from all antiquity it was held no crime to tell a lie in order to save life. (ED: MEN'S THINKING, BUT NOT GOD'S!) Thus Diphilon "I hold it right to tell a lie for safety:nothing should be avoided to save life." (ED: CLEARLY DIPHILON HAD NEVER READ 1 Samuel 21-22!) John Davis: “David evidently adopted what is commonly known today as a ‘situational ethic.’ He assumed that the situation was of such a nature that the greatest good could be accomplished by getting food for his men at the cost of truth. This perhaps was the same feeling shared by Abraham in deceiving the king in Egypt (Ge 12:13+). Recall also the lies of Rahab (Josh. 2:4+) and David ’s wife, Michal (1Sa 19:14+). The concept of a situational ethic, therefore, is not a new one…. As is the case with many lies, they seem to meet the immediate need of a given situation, but have ultimate effects which perhaps were not foreseen by the one lying. Such was the case in David ’s experience, for this lie led to the ultimate destruction of the city of Nob (cf. 1Sa 22:22ff.).” (Borrow Israel : from conquest to exile : a commentary on Joshua-2 Kings) (ED: "LITTLE LIES can have BIG CONSEQUENCES!)