Episode Details

When You Are Afraid

1 Samuel 21:10-15, Psalm 56, 02/28/2021, Remsen Bible Fellowship

Introduction

What do you do when you’re afraid? Is there a more practical question we could ask? How many of you have felt fear, dread, uneasiness, or anxiety in the past year? Month? Day? Hour? Maybe the fact that we’re talking it about brings those feelings to mind even as we speak. If we have those feelings, and to some degree, we all do--we need to do what to do with them. We need to know how to respond. Because one of the most dangerous things you can do with fear is to just passively marinate in it. 

You’ve likely read or heard that Jesus was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Well, we might say that David was a man of troubles, acquainted with fear. Last week we saw him running from Saul into the presence of the priest, Ahimilech. God provides for David, despite David misleading the priest, and he is given both the bread he needs for the journey, and the sword of Goliath, the Philistine whom he killed. 

But David knows it isn’t safe to stay there (we’ll see why in a couple of weeks), and so he books it for--of all places--Gath. It seems that in escaping there he’s hoping for some measure of safety. So let’s read the text.

And David rose and fled that day from Saul and went to Achish the king of Gath. And the servants of Achish said to him, “Is not this David the king of the land? Did they not sing to one another of him in dances, ‘Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his ten thousands’?” And David took these words to heart and was much afraid of Achish the king of Gath. So he changed his behavior before them and pretended to be insane in their hands and made marks on the doors of the gate and let his spittle run down his beard. Then Achish said to his servants, “Behold, you see the man is mad. Why then have you brought him to me? Do I lack madmen, that you have brought this fellow to behave as a madman in my presence? Shall this fellow come into my house?”

First we should note that we can see why David’s running, right? Saul is out for his life. That’s a good reason to head to the next town, in fact we even see Jesus doing this on occasion (see John 4). However, if we look at verse 11, we see there is an issue: David has been recognized! And so while he thinks he’s fleeing to safety, instead it seems he has jumped out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire. 

And if we are reading carefully, we can see why this particular town knows who he is. He fled to Achish, king of the city of Gath. Who else was from Gath? Only the most famous of those ten thousands whom David had killed, Goliath himself (17:4)! So David flees into the arms of the city whose hero he had killed--carrying the dead hero’s sword. Maybe not the best move. Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20. 

When David realizes the mess he is in, he panics, and in his fear decides his only recourse for escaping this situation alive is to act like a madman. So he begins scratching up the walls like a cat and slobbering like a rabid dog. The ruse seems to disgust his host/captor, who then asks his servants why it matters who he is if he’s crazy. Why bring me yet another madman into my court, who has time for this nonsense?

Transition

This is a strange text. We read this the other night and Andie asked me, “you’re going to preach that on Sunday?” And it’s a fair question. What are we to learn? What can we gain from a story of fear, fake insanity, and a king with no time for crazy?

But we need to pause and put ourselves in the shoes of the original audience. As I said back when we started in first Samuel, we don’t know the exact author or date of composition for this book, but it was likely written near to, perhaps even during the Babylonian captivity. And if it were written during the captivity, and then becoming more widespread