Taking Action on Wrong Thinking
[1] Then David said in his heart, “Now I shall perish one day by the hand of Saul. There is nothing better for me than that I should escape to the land of the Philistines. Then Saul will despair of seeking me any longer within the borders of Israel, and I shall escape out of his hand.” [2] So David arose and went over, he and the six hundred men who were with him, to Achish the son of Maoch, king of Gath. …
[11] And David would leave neither man nor woman alive to bring news to Gath, thinking, “lest they should tell about us and say, ‘So David has done.’” Such was his custom all the while he lived in the country of the Philistines. [12] And Achish trusted David, thinking, “He has made himself an utter stench to his people Israel; therefore he shall always be my servant.”
1 Samuel 27:1–2,11–12 Read More
From the opening of this chapter, you can tell that David isn’t living according to the truth. Instead of believing what Samuel, Saul, Jonathan, Abigail, and others have told him about being King of Israel, he is believing his circumstances. His circumstances lead him through some really crazy ideas.
Saul is going to kill him one day
The best thing for him to do is live among the Philistines.
What?! Don’t you want to reach right into the pages, grab David, and make him look at everything we have read so far? Samuel with the oil, David sparing Saul two times, all of the victories, the songs, Jonathan’s covenant, the whole thing screams the opposite of these things that he is thinking.
Whenever we deviate from the truth, we can make some pretty stupid decisions. David’s deviation through this whole chapter leads him to live in the land of the Philistines and 600 men and their wives and families follow him. He has to lie to his host and manipulate to get a village to himself. He has to go out and kill every single person in the villages he raids so that the truth doesn’t come back to his host, Achish, King of Gath.
David is a fighter and a leader, so he does what he knows to do in a place where it seems possible to do it. We don’t know how anything would have gone differently if he had stayed in Israel, but the next months in the land of the unclean Philistines will be full of troubles.
Despite his bad choices, God isn’t away from him. All of these battles will be used by God later to expand the reign of Israel. They kept David and his men from fighting their own countrymen and they had an inside look at a prosperous country. Remember that the Philistines lived with much more wealth and power than the Israelites. They terrified Israel and subjected them to oppression for years, so David and his men would have learned a lot about cities, armies, and a higher standard of living in these times too.
Eventually, the circumstances will change and David will snap out of this big Philistine deception. Eventually, he will long for Jerusalem and write about it in songs, but for now, he’s getting ripped off as he forgets about the things that have been told him in the past.
You can get the Daily Bible Readings to your inbox via email every day by subscribing here. Join the discussion online on Facebook or Twitter.