When we talk of faith and its biblical examples, one of those people that needs to be included
would be David.
Although David is not listed in Hebrews 9 any more than in passing, he nonetheless,
in his faith walk with God, proved to be as great a man of faith as any of those who are
listed there in more length.
From his introduction to us in 1 Samuel 16 and the ensuing battle with Goliath in the
valley of Elah up to his reign as the most popular king of Israel, he was a man who loved
God and who trusted Him.
We see this expressed in a number of the songs that he wrote.
You may want to turn to the book of Psalms with me and notice some of his expressions.
We'll just look quickly at several of them.
In Psalm 3, for example, in verse 3, Thou, O Lord, art a shield about me, my glory, and
the one who lifts my head.
Verse 5, I lay down and slept, I awoke, for the Lord sustains me.
I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people who have set themselves against me round about.
Then Psalm 4, verse 3, but know that the Lord has set apart the godly man for himself.
The Lord hears when I call to him.
Verse 8, in peace I will both lie down and sleep, for Thou alone, O Lord, dost make me
to dwell in safety.
Psalm 7, notice how it begins, O Lord, my God, in Thee I have taken refuge.
Notice his faith is in the Lord.
Psalm 11, very similarly, he says, in the Lord I take refuge.
Psalm 16, verse 1, preserve me, O God, for I take refuge in Thee.
That is David's way of saying, I trust in you.
I trust in you.
David was a man who trusted the Lord.
In Psalm 18 he says, I love Thee, O Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take
refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies.
How well those selected verses reflect the direction of his life and the disposition
of his heart.
He was a man who loved and trusted in the Lord his God.
But there were occasionally other directions and dispositions in the heart of David as
well.
Occasionally, the disposition of his heart was unbelief and its direction doubt and fear.
And we come to a passage like that tonight in 1 Samuel chapter 20.
As we study the lives of great men in the Word of God, it is good for us to appreciate
and follow their example of greatness.
But let us remember that they, too, were mere human beings.
They dealt with sin in dwelling them just as you and I do.
They faced temptations, and there were sometimes when they succumbed to temptations.
We can identify with people like that.
I can admire someone who is perfect, but I can identify with someone who fails, too.
Someone who, like David, who while he had the direction of his heart in loving and trusting
the Lord, occasionally came short of that.
We see an example here in the first three verses of 1 Samuel 20.
Remember that Saul at this time is seeking his life.
And David fled from Naoth to Ramah and came and said to Jonathan—remember, that was
the son of Saul—what have I done?
What is my iniquity?
What is my sin before your Father that he is seeking my life?
And he said to him, far from it, you shall not die, David.
Behold, my Father does nothing, either great or small, without disclosing it to me.
So why should my Father hide this thing from me?
It is not so.
He says, Dad's not trying to kill you.
Yet David vowed again, saying, Your Father knows well that I have found favor in your
sight.
And he has said, Do not let Jonathan know this, lest he be grieved.
David had heard that word from someone in the court.
But truly as the Lord lives and as your soul lives, he says to Jonathan, there is hardly
a step between me and death.
So David feels pressure at this point.
Now he has felt pressure before, but for some reason he responds to this situation differently
than he had responded before.
This time he pours out his heart in complaint to his friend Jonathan and begins a period
of backsliding in his life, a time of failure.
As we look at this tonight, I want us to remember that this is only an episode out of a long
story.
What we are going to see does not reflect the general bent and direction of David's
life, but it does tell us about an occasional direction that he experienced.
Let's look tonight at the results of David's fear instead of faith, his doubt instead of
trust, his backsliding.
Result number one of David's backsliding is that he began to live a lie.
Fear took control of David's life at this point, and when fear takes control, truth
often leaves.
It did with David.
In the first place, he lied by his friend Jonathan.
Notice what he says in verses four and five.
Jonathan said to David, whatever you say, I will do for you.
All these two men were close.
And Jonathan, as a good friend, says, David, just tell me what to do.
How can I be of assistance?
David said, Tomorrow is the new moon, and I ought to sit down to eat with the king.
But let me go, that I may hide myself in the field until the third evening.
If your father misses me at all, then say, David earnestly asked leave of me to run to
Bethlehem, his city, because it is the yearly sacrifice there for the whole family.
What's wrong with that?
Well, it's a lie.
David wasn't going to Bethlehem.
He wasn't going down there to sacrifice with his family.
He was going to be hiding out in the field.
But he asked his friend Jonathan to lie for him before Saul.
Now the reason that he asked him to lie was acceptable.
He was trying to find out the true disposition of Saul.
The end was okay, but the means did not justify his end.
The way he was going to find out about Saul's attitude was through a lie.
And so we see that in the first place he lied by his friend Jonathan.
He took advantage of that friendship in a way in which he should not have.
So often that is the way backsliding is when we begin to live a lie.
Sin causes us to use people to manipulate their friendship perhaps to some advantage
for ourselves.
And so deceitful is our heart that sometimes we do that without even realizing that we're
doing it.
Sin can cause any of us to do the same thing as David did with Jonathan.
It can cause us to use people to our advantage.
In this regard I was thinking this afternoon of one of the congressmen who sat on the committee
trying to determine whether to impeach Richard Nixon.
I don't recall his name.
It seems to me he was from Florida.
I remember he had dark black hair at that point, a rather distinguished looking gentleman.
He was the staunchest supporter of Nixon on the whole committee.
And he seemed to have an answer for all of the charges that were brought against the
president.
But eventually there came out that information concerning a certain set of tapes and when
those tapes were transcribed it became clear that the information that the congressman
had to work with, what he had been told by the president, was not true.
And thus he ended up, as I recall, voting to impeach the president because the friendship
that the two of them had enjoyed had been betrayed and the president had lied to him
hoping to use his influence on the committee to his advantage.
Well you say that's only politicians that do nasty things like that.
Well we don't say that if we examine our own selves honestly because we're all very
capable of this kind of manipulation of people.
It's part of backsliding.
David began to live a lie and he first lied by his friend.
Now the result of that was that Jonathan almost got killed.
When he told his father Saul what David told him to tell him, Saul immediately knew it
was a lie and tried to kill him for it.
And he cursed him in the most vile terms possible.
David then fled because he knew that Saul was quite sincere about this effort to kill
him.
Of course Jonathan now was convinced.
And so he fled.
In chapter 21 we see that he lied by his speech.
David left his friend Jonathan in the field and came to Nob to Ahimelech the priest.
And the Ahimelech came trembling to meet David and said to him, Why are you alone and no
one with you?
And 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.
David says, Look Ahimelech, I am 007 and I have sent the men this way and I am here on
a secret mission for the CIA of Saul and I cannot tell you what I am up to.
Is that the truth?
No.
Here he not only lies through someone else but he directly lies to the priests of Israel.
The disposition of his heart was one of fear.
When fear comes, truth leaves.
David began to lie and that disposition in his heart was evidenced by his tongue.
He lied to Ahimelech.
We will come back later to pick up some more of that story but let me summarize it by saying
David then left Nob and in verse 10 it says, He arose and fled that day from Saul and went
to Akish, king of Gath.
But the servants of Akish said to him, Is this not David, the king of the land?
Did they not sing of this one as they danced, saying, Saul has slain his thousands and David
his ten thousands?
Quite a testimony.
David's testimony had preceded him into Gath.
And David took these words to heart and greatly feared Akish, the king of Gath.
Can anybody remember where we have talked about Gath before this?
Let's see, there was somebody from Gath.
Do you remember who it was?
That's right, it was Goliath.
This is Goliath's hometown.
So David disguised his sanity before them and acted insanely in their hands and scribbled
on the doors of the gate and let his saliva run down into his beard.
And so here he lies by his life.
He lied by his friend.
He lied by his speech.
Now he lies by his life.
He begins to act in a way that is contrary to what he really was.
He would scribble on the gate to the city.
He would allow his saliva to run down into his beard.
What a mess that must have been.
And it was an indication to them that he was insane.
And that was his intent, to trick them, to deceive them into thinking that he was crazy.
And so we see backslidden David, the man who loved the Lord, the man who made the Lord
his refuge, now lying, living a lie.
Was not Sir Walter Scott, I think, the one who wrote, oh what a tangled web we weave
when first we practice to deceive.
David stepped into the web of a lie and he got more and more entangled the longer that
it went.
He adjusted his behavior finally to protect himself.
Before we become too critical of David, I think that we probably ought to get a mirror
out though and examine where some of us have been, maybe where some of us are tonight,
or how easily we find to compromise our lifestyle in order not to appear different, in order
to fit in with the situation so that we won't be in trouble with those in the world.
David lied by his life and all of us identify with that.
Now there's a second result of David's backsliding.
The first one is that he began to live a lie.
Number two, his failures affected others.
That too is a result of backsliding.
When you and I backslide, we never do it by ourselves.
It always affects others.
We drag others with us in the impact of it.
Let's look back earlier into chapter 21 and notice again this time with the priest of
Himalek.
David says furthermore to him in verse 3, now what do you have on hand?
Give me five loaves of bread or whatever can be found.
And the priest answered David and said there is no ordinary bread on hand, but there is
consecrated bread.
That is the bread of the presence, it was called.
It was called that in verse 6.
This was bread that was put out periodically fresh.
It was put on a small table in the tabernacle.
It was 12 flat loaves of bread as they baked bread in that day and they were in two stacks.
Each loaf of bread represented a tribe of Israel and it was called sacred bread.
It was the showbread or the bread of the presence.
It indicated the presence of God with all of the tribes of Israel.
And that was the only bread there.
That was the only food there that Himalek had.
And he says there is no ordinary bread on hand, but there is consecrated bread if only
the young men who were with David or purportedly with him have kept themselves from women.
And David answered the priest and said to him, surely women have been kept from us as
previously when I set out.
And the vessels, perhaps the bodies, of the young men were holy though it was an ordinary
journey.
How much more than today will their vessels be holy?
So the priest gave him consecrated bread.
But that was not necessarily wrong.
In fact, Jesus in the New Testament goes back to this and refers to it as proof that the
Sabbath can be broken for necessary use.
And that was the occasion here.
The bread was being employed for a satisfactory purpose.
Therefore, what the priest was doing was perfectly within the law of God.
So the priest gave him consecrated bread.
There was no bread there but the bread of the presence which was removed from before
the Lord in order to put hot bread in its place when it was taken away.
Now, one of the servants of Saul was there that day detained before the Lord.
Now, why he was there we don't know.
For some reason he had to hang around the tabernacle.
Maybe it was because of impurity.
He had to be there in order for a certain vow to be fulfilled.
Perhaps he was there to be checked for leprosy.
We do not know why this man was there but his name was Doeg the Edomite.
If you take the E out of his name you have a better description of this man in my opinion.
Now, an Edomite was who?
Descendant of whom?
Do you remember?
Esau.
That's right.
The jealous, envious, bitter brother of Jacob and the descendants of Esau the Edomite hated
with a passion the descendants of Jacob or Israel.
So immediately you see a conflict here.
This man though he was an Edomite was a servant of Saul but he was there.
In fact, he was the chief of Saul's shepherds and he happened to be there at that time.
That's all it says at this point.
David said to Ahimelech, now is there not a spear or a sword on hand?
For I brought neither my sword nor my weapons with me because the king's matter was urgent.
I had to really get out of there.
The king said, hurry.
The priest said, the sword of Goliath the Philistine whom you killed in the valley of
Elah, behold it is wrapped in cloth behind the ephod.
If you would take it for yourself, take it for there is no other except here.
He kept it here and David said, there is none like it, give it to me.
So he took it.
And so much for the story.
But now let's go to chapter 22.
The chapter begins by relating that David went to a dolom, a cave, and there people came
to him who were in distress or in debt or discontented.
And they became his band, quite a band.
Imagine an army of people who are in debt, who are in distress, who are discontented.
That's the group that David started with.
That was his band of rascals in the cave of Dolom, about 400 of them.
And so it relates regarding some of their events.
And then in verse 6 it says, then Saul heard that David and his men who were with him had
been discovered.
Now Saul was sitting in Gibeah under the tamarisk tree on the height with his spear in his hand,
and all his servants were standing around him.
And Saul said to his servants who stood around him, here now, O Benjamites, will the son
of Jesse also give to all of you fields and vineyards?
Will he make you all commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds?
He says, do you think this man, David, is going to do more for you than me?
I am a Benjamite like you are.
You should be loyal to me, for all of you have conspired against me, so that there is
no one who discloses to me when my son makes a covenant with the son of Jesse.
And there is none of you who is sorry for me or discloses to me that my son has stirred
up my servant against me to lie in ambush, as it is this day.
So he accuses David here essentially of becoming a revolutionary, a man who was conspiring
to take the kingdom from him.
Was that the case?
Of course not.
God had appointed David to be the king, but David was simply allowing God to bring it
to pass.
He was not conspiring himself against Saul.
Verse 9, Then Doeg the Edomite, who was standing by the servants of Saul, answered and said,
I saw the son of Jesse coming to Nob, to Ahimelech the son of Ahaitib.
And he inquired of the Lord for him, and gave him provisions, and gave him the sword of
Goliath the Philistine.
And so we have a tattle tale here.
This Edomite took it upon himself to report on David what he had seen.
He essentially became a spy for Saul.
And the king sent someone to summon Ahimelech the priest, the son of Ahaitib, and all his
father's household, the priests who were at Nob.
And all of them came to the king.
And Saul said, Listen now, son of Ahaitib.
And he answered, Hear my, my Lord.
Saul said to him, Why have you and the son of Jesse conspired against me?
So now you see the priest and David are linked together in Saul's mind, in that you have
given him bread and a sword, and have inquired of God for him that he should rise up against
me by lying in ambush as it is this day.
It is absolutely not true.
David was not lying in ambush.
But that's how Saul, with his jaundiced eyes, saw it.
And Ahaitib answered the king and said, And who among all your servants is as faithful
as David, even the king's son-in-law?
That may not have been the right thing to say.
Who is captain over your guard and is honored in your house?
Did I just begin to inquire of God for him today?
Far be it from me.
Do not let the king impute anything to his servant or to any of the household of my father,
for your servant knows nothing at all of this whole affair.
He pleads ignorance.
He says, King, I don't know anything about this.
The king said, You shall surely die.
I will elect you and all your father's household.
The king said to the guards who were attending him, Turn around and put the priest of the
Lord to death, because their hand also was with David and because they knew that he was
fleeing and did not reveal it to me.
But the servants of the king were not willing to put forth their hands to attack the priest
of the Lord.
They were smart.
And the king said to Doeg, You turn around and attack the priest.
And this unclean gentile did that.
He turned around and attacked the priest and he killed that day eighty-five men who wore
the linen ephod.
That was the dress of the priest.
And he struck knob, the city of the priest, with the edge of the sword, both men and women,
children and infants, oxen, donkeys, sheep.
He struck with the edge of the sword, but one son of a Himalek, the son of a Hittab,
named Abiathar, or Abiathar, escaped and fled after David.
And so every one of his family was wiped out by this Edomite at the behest of Saul, except
for one man, Abiathar.
Do you see how David's lie, how his backsliding had affected others?
He went to the priest who really was innocent and ignorant of this whole matter.
He lied to the priest, got the priest to cooperate with him, and the priest and his whole family
ended up dead as a result of that association with David.
In light of this occasion, David wrote Psalm 52.
Just turn there a minute and get a flavor of the Psalm.
Psalm 52.
Notice the inscription to the Psalm.
David writes, Why do you boast an evil, O mighty man?
The loving kindness of God endures all day long.
Your tongue devises destruction like a sharp razor, O worker of deceit.
You love evil more than good, falsehood more than speaking what is right.
Verse 5, God will break you down forever.
He will snatch you up and tear you away from your tent and uproot you from the land of
the living.
Who do you think he's talking about?
Well, he's talking undoubtedly here about Doeg, that Edomite.
And yet, some of those words could reflect the disposition in David's own heart, for
it was because of his lie, his lie, that a Himalek was killed.
I want to point this out though before we go further.
And that is that the sovereignty of God was overseeing this.
In His providence, God allowed this to happen because it accomplished another aspect of
His will.
You see, a Himalek was a descendant of a man by the name of Eli.
Now, those of you who've read the Old Testament will recognize that name.
It is the man who was the high priest of Israel in the days when Samuel was a little boy.
I want you to turn back to the third chapter of this book, 1 Samuel, and look briefly at
some words that were given to Eli.
You'll recall that Eli was a very lazy, slovenly high priest, and he did not discipline his
sons who committed terrible immorality with the women who came to offer sacrifices at
the tabernacle.
It was a despicable scene.
And in response to that, God gives judgment to him.
And in 1 Samuel 3 verse 11, the Lord said to Samuel, and behold, I am about to do a
thing in Israel at which both ears of everyone who hears it will tingle.
And that day I will carry out against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house
from beginning to end, for I have told him that I am about to judge his house forever
for the iniquity which he knew, because his sons brought a curse on themselves and he
did not rebuke them.
And therefore I have sworn to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli's house shall
not be atoned for by sacrifice or offering forever.
And elsewhere, God says, every one of them will be out of the priesthood.
There will not be a priest in the family of Eli because of the sin of Eli and his sons.
And do you see how God allowed that judgment to be carried out?
All of his descendants at Nob are killed except for the one man, Abethar.
If you read a little further into 1 Kings, the second chapter, you come to some words
of Solomon.
We will not take time to look at it tonight.
And Abethar is still alive at that point.
However, Solomon removes him from the priesthood.
He allows him to live, but he removes him from the priesthood.
So ultimately, you see, down to the very last man who was a descendant in Eli's family,
they were all taken out of the priesthood by death or by the king's decree.
So you see God's will was accomplished even through the failure of David.
Now there is a third result of David's backsliding that we'll look at and then we'll be on our
way.
Result number one, he began to live a lie.
Result number two, his failures affected others.
Dad, do you realize that your failures affect your kids?
Mom, do you realize that?
Sunday school teacher, do you recognize that your failures impact your students?
Do you realize what happens when your home, a Christian home in the neighborhood, explodes
what that does to your neighbors around you?
How careful we must be because of this second result of backsliding.
But the third result is that David's testimony was marred.
I want to look at this in chapter 21 again.
We've read about David and his pretended madness.
In verse 14 it says, then Achish said to his servants, behold, you see the man behaving
as a madman.
Why do you bring him to me?
Do I lack madmen?
Somehow I kind of like that statement.
I think there are probably a lot of people in political leadership who could say about
the same thing.
Do I lack madmen?
That you have brought me this one to act the madman in my presence?
Shall this one come into my house?
Essentially what he says is, get him out of here.
He's nuts.
Now, what's the tragedy here?
The tragedy is David's testimony.
You see, his testimony was, as is stated in verse 11, it was a testimony that glorified
God.
But now think of the testimony that he had in Gath.
His testimony was that of a man who was insane.
Now, we're not going to take time to read it, but there are two Psalms actually that
were written either during this time or shortly afterward.
They are Psalms 34 and 56.
And if you read those Psalms, you will see phrases that relate back to exactly what was
taking place.
But I think the thing that is underscored to me is this, that while David was the feigned
madman, in his heart he knew better, for those Psalms reveal meditations of faith.
They reveal a heart that is still warm toward God, though he was in a backslidden state.
Now what happened to David?
Well, he went to the cave of Adalim, and there in the solitude and the quietness, the loneliness
of that place, it seems that he realized his sin and returned to the Lord.
And once again we have a Psalm that tells us something of his inner thoughts during
that time, Psalm 57.
There he expresses again his faith in the Lord.
David had a period of backsliding in his life, tragic results from it.
But because he was a true child of God, he was recovered.
He came back to the Lord.
Now you say, Pastor, why do you talk about David being backslidden?
Well, I guess because we talk so well of David that sometimes we put him on a pedestal that
is a little too high, as sometimes we are wont to do with people that we only see superficially.
David was a man.
He dealt with fears, doubts, lust, and he was a man who knew failure and sin.
He was a man who backslid.
But don't leave him there.
That's another reason I wanted to talk about David in this episode.
Because though David went through that period, he came out of it.
He came out of it.
He came back to the Lord, and God reclaimed him there in the cave of Adalim.
God may have led us to talk about this tonight because there is someone here who is sitting
in that cave with David.
You've been away from the Lord, and the backsliding and all of its fruit may not even be seen
yet, though some of it may be.
But there in the solitude and the loneliness of where you find yourself tonight, God is
saying to you in love, my backslidden child, return to me.
What I want to challenge you to do is to respond positively and come back to the Lord as David
did.
To recognize the episode that you've been through over the last week, month, year, I
don't know.
To recognize that what you've been through has been sorrowful and tragic in its consequences,
and that you indeed are repentant of it.
But to say as David did, Lord, I'm coming back and I'm returning to you, and I love
you and I trust you and I want to walk with you.
You see, despite this record that we have here in chapters 20 and 21 of 1 Samuel, God
still called David a man after his own heart.
And that's the kind of a person God wants you to be and God wants me to be.
And we can be, but we need to come when necessary to that cave of Adalim and do business with
God.
Are you there tonight?
Will you do business with him?
Let's pray.
With our heads bowed and as God the Holy Spirit speaks tenderly, lovingly to each of us, as
perhaps you sit there in the cave of Adalim in your heart and you've heard the voice
of the Lord.
Will you tonight by the uplifted hand say, Pastor, I have been backslidden and God is
dealing with me, and tonight I want to respond like I know I should.
I want to come back to a place where I'm a man, a woman, after God's heart and I'm
walking in obedience and faith.
By the uplifted hand I'm saying that tonight.
Will you put your hand up to that?
Yes.
God bless you.
A number of hands.
Anyone else?
I want to pray for you.
Oh, Father, thank you for the lessons that all of us have learned tonight, but for that
special voice of the Spirit that has been sounded in the caves of these who have lifted
the hand.
Would you right now totally reclaim those lives?
Would you restore that love and faith to a place of warmth, a place of obedience?
Father, I pray that you would recover these ones from the backslidden journey where they've
been.
And may all of us tonight take heed of the lessons that we've seen from David's example.
And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen.