Scripture Daily

Context No. 1448 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

Context · Reflection

1 Samuel 26:6-11: in context

6Then David answered and said to Ahimelech the Hittite, and to Abishai the son of Zeruiah, brother of Joab, saying, “Who will go down with me to Saul to the camp?” Abishai said, “I will go down with you.” 7So David and Abishai came to the people by night; and, behold, Saul lay sleeping within the place of the wagons, with his spear stuck in the ground at his head; and Abner and the people lay around him. 8Then Abishai said to David, “God has delivered up your enemy into your hand today. Now therefore please let me strike him with the spear to the earth at one stroke, and I will not strike him the second time.” 9David said to Abishai, “Don’t destroy him, for who can stretch out his hand against the LORD’s anointed, and be guiltless?” 10David said, “As the LORD lives, the LORD will strike him; or his day shall come to die, or he shall go down into battle and perish. 11The LORD forbid that I should stretch out my hand against the LORD’s anointed; but now please take the spear that is at his head and the jar of water, and let’s go.”

A second time, David has the chance to kill Saul. Slipping into Saul's camp by night with Abishai, he finds the king asleep, his spear stuck in the ground by his head, the whole army sleeping around him. Abishai reads it at once as God's provision: God has delivered your enemy into your hand today; let me pin him to the ground with one thrust of the spear. But David refuses. Do not destroy him, he says; who can stretch out his hand against the LORD's anointed and be guiltless? The LORD will strike him, or his day will come to die, or he will fall in battle; but I will not lift my hand against him. And they take only the spear and the water jug, and leave.

The interesting thing in this scene is how David reads the situation differently than Abishai does. Abishai sees the sleeping king, the spear ready to hand, the sleeping guards, and draws the obvious conclusion: God has delivered your enemy into your hand; this is clearly meant to be. It is a natural reading; the opportunity is so perfect that it looks like providence, an open door God has set before them. But David does not accept that a God-given opportunity is the same as a God-given permission. The chance to kill Saul was real; that did not make killing him right. David refused to treat the mere existence of the opportunity as God's approval of the act, because he knew the act itself, stretching out his hand against the LORD's anointed, was wrong regardless of how convenient the moment. There is real discernment in that distinction, and we badly need it. We are constantly tempted to read our opportunities as permissions, to assume that because we can do a thing, and the circumstances have lined up to make it easy, God must be sanctioning it. But the fact that we are able to do something, even that the way has opened conveniently before us, does not make it right; the rightness of an act is not settled by the ease of the opportunity. David could have killed Saul and called it God's provision, as Abishai urged; instead he judged the act by whether it was right, not by whether it was possible, and left the removal of his enemy to God's own timing.

Do I read my convenient opportunities as God's permission, assuming that because I can do a thing and the way has opened easily, it must be right, or do I judge the act itself, like David, refusing to let a God-given opportunity be mistaken for a God-given approval?

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