CLOUDY DAYS…… DARK NIGHTS

“We all have cloudy days and dark nights, what causes it?

Perhaps, just perhaps, this will help in some small way”

      One of the most famous books ever written was written by a man who was serving his third term in prison. The book he wrote has changed the lives of literally millions of people. The man was John Bunyan, and the book is The Pilgrim’s Progress.

     At one point in this story, while Pilgrim is making the long, arduous journey to the City of God, he falls into a deep, miry, muddy hole called the Slough of Despond. He cannot get out by himself, but when he begins to cry out, Help-a picture of the Holy  Spirit-reaches down and lifts him up from his despondency.

    If we were to translate Bunyan’s Slough  of Despond into today’s terms, we would call that muddy hole “the pits.” There is no way a believer can go through this life without spending some time in “the pits”… and that’s where David was at one point in his life.

    There is nothing ethically, morally, or spiritually wrong with our experiencing cloudy days and dark nights. They are inevitable. That’s why James says, “Consider it all joy WHEN you encounter various trials” (Jas. 1:2). That’s not our concern with David.

    Our concern is what he did after he fell in the mire. There was a fork in the road, and he took the wrong way. The result was misery, compromise, and, in fact, sixteen long months of disobedience.

WHAT CAUSED THE CLOUDS AND DARKNESS?

Now there were some causes that led to these dark days that David experienced. He didn’t just happen to tumble into “the pits.” He experienced it because of three things.

    Notice, 1Samuel 27:1 begins, “Then David said to himself….” Oh-oh. There’s his first problem. It’s important when we talk to ourselves that we tell ourselves the right thing. David didn’t. So the very first cause for his dropping into “the pits” is what I would call his humanistic viewpoint. He looked at his situation and sized it up strictly from the horizontal. You won’t find David praying even once during this period. In fact, David never looks up until much later. He wrote no psalms, he asked for no help, he simply pushed the panic button.

    David is coming off a spiritual and emotional high. Remember, he could have slain Saul twice, but he didn’t. Then he was about to kill Nabal, but Abigail talked him out of that, thankfully. So he’s walked in victory for quite some time. He’s come off the crest of victory, and, as all of us know, that’s a very vulnerable spot.

   The second thing that caused David’s problem was pessimistic reasoning. See what he says to himself: “Now I will perish one day by the hand of Saul” (27:1).

    David should have known better. Notice that he says, “I will perish.” He’s talking about something in the future,… but the man doesn’t know the future. No one does! But pessimistic reasoning continually focuses on the potential downside of the future, and this prompts worry. In the minds of pessimists, the future is inevitably bleak. So we’re not surprised to hear his prediction: “I’ll perish.”

   Samuel had anointed him with oil and assured him he would one day be the king. God spoke to him through Abigail and said that the Lord “shall appoint you ruler over Israel” (25:30). God spoke to him more than once through Jonathan, assuring him, “You’ll be the next king.” Even Saul, his enemy, had said, “I know that you shall surely be king, and that the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand” (24:20). But David ignored all of those promise God had given. He now convinces himself, “I’ll perish. I’ll never rule over Israel… never!”

    Why are we pessimistic? Because our eyes are on ourselves. You and I have never had the Lord lead us to a pessimistic thought. Never once. They come strictly from within our carnal minds… and they can be devastating.

    There’s a third reason that David was in this deep despondency. It’s what we might call rationalistic logic.

Then David said to himself, “Now I will perish one day by the hand of Saul. There is nothing better for me than to escape into the land of the Philistines….”

                                                                                    1Samuel 27:1

   Can you believe that statement? That’s nothing other than rationalism. He thought, “Times are hard. God’s has deserted me. I thought I could be king, but I’ll never be king. I’m gonna die if I keep on the front edge of Saul’s army. They’ll finally catch up with me. I’ll have to escape. The best solution is to go to Philistia.”

   Well, for sure Saul wouldn’t look for him in the Philistine camp! The adversary lived there. What a picture this is of a believer who deliberately opts for carnality.

    We don’t hear much about the carnal believer, do we? We hear a lot about the lost person who’s never met Jesus Christ. We hear a great deal about the saved person who’s walking in victory. But not much is said about the believer who chooses to disobey God and operate in the flesh. David, at this point in his life, is a clear illustration of a man who is a believer on the inside, but on the outside he looks just like a nonbeliever because of the way he’s living his life.

   Psychologist Rollo May has said, “Man is the only animal that runs fast when he has lost his way.” Isn’t it remarkable how when we lose our way, we move quickly in the wrong direction and play into the adversary’s hand? That’s exactly what David did.

   Now you might think this kind of decision doesn’t affect anybody but yourself. I’ve even heard believers say, “I’ll take my lumps. I’ll choose this route and I’ll live with the consequences.” Wait a minute. Nobody takes his lumps alone. You drag others with you. if it’s true that no man lives to himself, and no man dies to himself… then we can be certain that no man sins to himself either.

HOW EXTENSIVE WERE THE CONSEQUENCES?

Just look at what happened following David’s decision.

So David arose and crossed over, he and the six hundred men who were with him, to Achish the son of Maoch, king of Gath.

And David lived with Achish at Gath, he and his men, each with his household, even David with his two wives, Ahinoam… and Abigail….

                                                                                    1Samuel 27:2-3

   When David left his wilderness home in Israel and retreated into Philistine country, he didn’t go alone. He’s the commander-in-chief of the guerilla troops, remember. The men he’s trained in the cave of Adullam are bonded to him. They have lived together and have done battle together in the wilderness as well as among the border tribes. David surely knew they would follow him.

   But it is not only his fighting men who go with them. They also bring their households… and David’s two wives, Ahinoam and Abigail, go along as well. So now we have David and his family plus six hundred more households.

   You think you can compromise and it won’t affect your family? You do not live independently of everyone else. When you make a decision that is wrong, when you choose a course that is not God’s plan, it affects those who trust you depend on you, those who look up to you and believe in you. Though innocent, they become contaminated by your sinful choices.

   And where did David go? He fled to Gath. Remember Gath? We’ve been there before with David. Remember the giant? Remember his hometown? He was known as Goliath of Gath. Strangely, that’s where David’s headed. Can you believe it? Only a few years earlier he slew Goliath in the Valley of Elah. Now he runs to Gath, the very home of that giant, and decides he’ll live there with Achish, the king-the archenemy of the Israelites. It says,

Now it was told Saul that David had fled to Gath, so he [Saul] no longer searched for him.

                                                                                                1Samuel 27:4

    The first consequence of David’s poor decision, then, was that it created a false sense of security because Saul had stopped following him. “Hey, I’m safe in here. Saul has stopped dogging my every move, hunting and haunting me. The pressure’s gone! What a relief!”

   Sin has its temporary pleasures. Disobedience has its exhilarating moments. We’re fools to deny it. There are times when we relax and enjoy disobedience because of those pleasures… but they are passing, they are short-lived… they never bring ultimate satisfaction. Never. Never!

   Here is a case in point. We often think the pleasure of sin are obvious, overt pleasures. But sometimes it’s just a release of pressure. When we’re feeling the intensity of responsibility, walking with God, and we opt for the wrong destination, suddenly there’s a release of pressure. We think, This is great! It pays off. When that happens, watch out. Destruction is near.

   The second consequence of David’s decision is found in verse 5. If you can believe it, here’s the giant-killing talking to the king of Gath. Listen to his words:

Then David said to Achish, “If now I have found favor in your sight, let them [the citizens of Gath] give me a place in one of the cities in the country, that I may live there; for why should your servant live in the royal city with you?”

                                                                                                            1Samuel 27:5

    The second consequence is submission to the adversary’s cause. When we choose a disobedient lifestyle, when we give ourselves to carnality rather than spirituality, we begin to serve the adversary’s cause. We actually submit to the enemy and willingly serve his wicked cause.

Man! I can’t believe David calls himself the “servant” of Achish. But that’s exactly what he is.

So Achish gave him Ziklag that day; therefore Ziklag has belonged to the kings of Judah to this day.

And the number of days that David lived in the country of the Philistines was a year and four months.

                                                                                                1Samuel 27:6-7

    So the third consequence is a lengthy period of compromise. You say, “Oh, it won’t hurt. A day  or two here, and I can get back into the swing of things. What’s a couple months of carnality compared to a lifetime of obedience?” It doesn’t work like that. There is something magnetic about slumping into despondency and beginning a lost-world lifestyle. The pull is deadly. Scars are formed in our (and others’) memory.

  When Abraham went down to Egypt, he stayed for quite a while. When his nephew, Lot, went to Sodom, he pitched his tent nearby, but before long, he was living in the city itself. Erosion set in. Eventually, Lot became one of the elders who sat at the gate of the city. Ultimately, he became identified with Sodom, intoxicated by its shameless lifestyle.

   Now David, when he goes to Gath, ends up staying for sixteen months. This is the man known as “the sweet psalmist of Israel” (2 Sam. 23:1). Yet there’s not one psalm attributed to those days when he was with Achish in Gath and Ziklag. Of course not! The sweet singer of Israel was mute. He wrote no songs when he was in this slump. He couldn’t sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land governed by the enemy’s influence! As the Jewish captives in Babylon would later ask, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:4). There is not much joy flowing out of David’s life during this carnal interlude in Gath.

   Even Achish saw David’s decision for what it was: a desertion; a defection. David, who has walked with God, now walks away from Him. How tragic! Sometime later, Achish pinpoints it like this:

Then the commanders of the Philistines said, “What are these Hebrews doing here?” Achish said to the commanders of the Philistines, “Is this not David, the servant of Saul the king of Israel, who has been with me these days, or rather these years, and I have found no fault in him from the day he deserted to me to this day?”

                                                                                                                        1Samuel 29:3

DAVID “SOWS THE WIND”

As David opts for this lifestyle, the winds and storms begin to increase in a rather rapid movement of events.

   First of all, a duplicity begins to mark David’s steps. Webster says that duplicity is “deception by pretending.” You pretend to entertain one set of feelings, but really you’re operating form another entirely.

    Deep inside, David is an Israelite. He will always be an Israelite. But he’s trying to make the Philistines think that he is on their side. That’s what happens when you spend your time in what a  friend of mine calls the “carnal corral.” Inside, you're a believer, but on the outside you want to look like the rest of the world. There’s a lack of absolute allegiance.

This miserable dilemma creates the need to compromise.

   And that’s precisely what David begins to act out.

Now David and his men went up and raided the Geshurites and the Girzites and the Amalekites; for they were the inhabitants of the land from ancient times….

And David attacked the land and did not leave a man or a woman alive….

                                                                                                            1Samuel 27:8-9

   The Geshurites and Girzites and Amalekites were the enemies of Israel,, but they were not enemies of the Philistines. Still, they were not their allies either. Sort of like the Russian-American dilemma in the Second World War. While they were enemies of Nazi Germany, they were not really our allies. So when David slaughters these Geshurites and Girzites and Amalekites, he slaughters people who are neither enemies nor allies of Philistia.

   Apparently David was accountable to Achish for his actions, and when he returns to the city, the king asks for a report. “Where have you been? Where have you made a raid today?”

   Duplicity leads to vagueness. David answers, “Against the Negev of Judah” (27:10). Negev is a broad Hebrew word meaning “south,” so David was saying, “Oh, I was fighting in the southern part of Judah,” implying that he was killing the people of Judah, who were Israelites. But he wasn’t killing Israelites. He was killing Amalekites and Geshurites and Girzites.

   David is more than vague, though. He says he has been fighting against the Negev of Judah “and against the Jerahmeelites and the kenites.” That is a lie. He didn’t fight those people. That’s why he wiped out those he did fight, so the word wouldn’t get back about what he had really done. He was covering his tracks, you see, so nobody would really know where he was or exactly what he had done.

And David did not leave a man or a woman alive, to bring to Gath, saying,

            “Lest they should tell about us, saying, ‘So has David done and so has been his practice all the time he has lived in the country of the Philistines.”’

                                                                                                            1Samuel 27:11

   When you operate in the “carnal corral,” you also operate under a cloak of secrecy. You don’t want to be accountable. You don’t want anybody asking. So you cover up.

    He must have done a good job, because Achish believed him.

So Achish believed David, saying, “He has surely made himself odious among his people Israel; therefore he will become my servant forever.”

                                                                                                            1Samuel 27:12

DAVID “REAPS THE WHIRLWIND”

Because David earlier opted for the wrong fork in the road, he began living a style of life that resulted in incredible inner turmoil. I want you to see the injury and devastation that happened inside David as a result. Ultimately, he came to a point of utter despair.

First, David loses his identity;

Achish begins getting flak from the people of Philistia. They want to know why David and his men and all their households are in their midst. “Why in the world are all those Israelites living down in Ziklag?” These people were their sworn enemies. David was, in fact, the man who had killed their mighty champion, Goliath.

   Achish defends David. “Hey, everything’s okay. David’s our guy now.” But the people said, “No, we don’t want him down there. We don’t trust him.”

   And so Achish has to confront David with the fact that they can no longer tolerate having him around.

Then Achish called David and said to him, “As the LORD lives, you have been upright, and your going out and your coming in with me in the army are pleasing in my sight; for I have not found evil in you from the day of your coming to me to this day. Nevertheless, you are not pleasing in the sight of the lords.

“Now therefore return, and go in peace, that you may not displease the lords of the Philistines.”

And David said to Achish, “But what have I done?...”

                                                                                                            1Samuel 29:6-8

   David becomes a man without a country. He becomes a displaced person. The loss of identity is the first turn in the downward spiral of carnality. Who am I? What is my mission? Where am I going? What’s all of this about, this stuff that I believed all my life? Who has my true allegiance? Tough questions… no answers.

   David is facing a real identity crisis. He’s a displaced person. He’s become neither Philistine not Israelite. Like the carnal believer, he doesn’t feel comfortable in the things of God, but he’s now losing interest in his life in the pits. It’s a battle for identity.

 Second, David loses his satisfaction.

And David said to Achish, “But what have I done? And what have you found in your servant from the day when I came before you to this day, that I may not go and fight against the enemies of my lord the king?”

                                                                                                                        1Samuel 29:8

   David now has to wrestle with disillusionment. The few benefits of carnality are being eclipsed by the many liabilities. When one first walks away from God, it feels pleasurable and freeing, maybe even delightful. But after a while the bills come due and you gotta pay the piper. It’s when you start paying the piper that disillusionment sets in.

   After displacement and disillusionment, David descends into depression.

Then it happened when David and his men came to Ziklag on the third day, that the Amalekites had made a raid on the Negev and on Ziklag, and had overthrown Ziklag and burned it with fire….

And when David and his men came to the city, behold, it was burned with fire, and their wives and their sons and their daughters had been taken captive.

Then David and the people who were with him lifted their voices and wept until there was no strength in them to weep.

                                                                                                            1Samuel 30:1-4

   Put yourself in David’s stirrups. He comes up over the hill on horseback, and there before him in the distance is the city where he and his men have lived for the past year and a half… and the entire place is burned to the ground. Worse than the physical destruction, though, was the personal cost. All of their wives and children had been taken away as captives by the enemy-the Amalekites, the same people David had raided earlier.

  David and his men wept until they had on more tears. If you’ve cried that long, then you know the depth of such depression.

 Now look at what happened.

David was greatly distressed because the people spoke of stoning him, for all the people were embittered, each one because of his sons and daughters.

                                                                                                                        1Samuel 30:6

   The fourth step down was distrust. The very people who had looked to David as a guide and a friend and a leader now turned away, embittered at the results. The guys he had trained in the cave, his crack troops from the wilderness of Paran, these guys are now grumbling, “We don’t trust David anymore.” Mutiny now boarded the bus of carnality. 

   David had reached the point in life where some people think of taking their own lives. He was so far down the ladder of despair that he’d reached the bottom rung. The last stop. The place where you either jump off into oblivion or you cry out to God for His forgiveness. For rescue. The wonderful thing is that we do have that choice, because God never gives up on His children.

  David made the right choice.

David was greatly distressed…. But David strengthened himself in the LORD his God.

                                                                                                            1Samuel 30:6

  Now you’re talking, David. That’s the way to handle the Slough of Despond. The pits may seem bottomless, but there’s hope above. Reach up! Help is there.

   For the first time in sixteen months, David looks up, and he says, “Oh, God, help me.” And He does. He always will. He is “a very present help” when needed.

   Dark days call for right thinking and vertical focus. That’s what David learns at this moment in his life. He finds that the Slough of Despond isn’t designed to throw him on his back and suck him under… it’s designed to bring him to his knees so he will look up.

   Perhaps you have known the joys and ecstasies of walking with Christ, but in a moment of despondency you’ve opted for the wrong fork in the road and you’re now in the camp of carnality… you’re living in the “carnal corral.” In the words of the prophet, you’ve been like those who “sow the wind, and…reap the whirlwind” (Hos. 8:7).

   But, like David, you’ve gotten tired of feeling displaced. The disillusionment has bred distrust… and the depression is killing you.

   Reach up. Come home. The Father is waiting at the door, ready to forgive and willing to restore. It’s time to return…to strengthen yourself, yet again, in the Lord your God.