[0:00] book of 1 Samuel, David has just spared the life of Saul. He has revealed this truth to Saul. He has shown him that he is righteous rather than wicked. So even though Saul was pursuing him, Saul was seeking to kill him, David had the opportunity yet did not act upon that opportunity and spared his life which showed David's righteousness as declared by Saul. So it's not ironic. Scripture intentionally gives us the chapter which follows this because it's God just opening up the passage to us. So we see David's righteous character there in his sparing of the life of Saul. And unfortunately, when we turn to the next episode, we begin to see that David is a man just like us, right? We understand these things. So in 1 Samuel chapter 25, I want you to see a lesson learned, right? A lesson learned. Then Samuel died and all Israel gathered together and mourned for him and buried him at his house in Ramah. And David arose and went down to the wilderness of Paran.
[1:07] Now there was a man in Maon whose business was in Carmel. And the man was very rich and he had 3,000 sheep and 1,000 goats. And it came about while he was shearing his sheep in Carmel. Now the man's name was Nabal. And his wife's name was Abigail. And the woman was intelligent and beautiful in appearance, but the man was harsh and evil in his dealings. And he was a Calebite. That David heard in the wilderness that Nabal was shearing his sheep. So David sent 10 young men. And David said to the young men, go up to Carmel, visit Nabal, and greet him in my name. And thus you shall say, have a long life.
[1:46] Peace be to you and peace be to your house and peace be to all that you have. Now I have heard that you have shearers. Now your shepherds have been with us and we have not insulted them, nor have we, nor have they missed anything all the days they were in Carmel. Ask your young men and they will tell you. Therefore let my young men find favor in your eyes for we have come on a festive day.
[2:11] Please give whatever you find at hand to your servants and to your son David. When David's young men came, they spoke to Nabal according to all these words in David's name. Then they waited. But Nabal answered David's servants and said, who is David? And who is the son of Jesse? Or who is the son of Jesse? There are many servants today who are each breaking away from his master. Shall I then take my bread and my water and my meat that I have slaughtered for my shares and give it to men whose origin I do not know? So David's young men retraced their way and went back. And they came and told him according to all these words. David said to his men, each of you gird on his sword. So each man girded on his sword.
[3:00] And David also girded on his sword. And about 400 men went up behind David while 200 stayed with the baggage. But one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal's wife, saying, behold, David sent messengers from the wilderness to greet our master and he scorned them. Yet the men were very good to us and we were not insulted nor did we miss anything as long as we went about with them while we were in the fields.
[3:26] They were a wall to us both by night and by day all the time that we were with them tending the sheep. Now therefore, know and consider what you should do for evil is plotted against our master and against all his household. And he is such a worthless man that no one can speak to him. Then Abigail hurried and took 200 loaves of bread and two jugs of wine and five sheep already prepared and five measures of roasted grain and a hundred clusters of raisins and 200 cakes of figs and loaded them on donkeys.
[3:56] And she said to her young men, go on before me, behold, I'm coming after you. But she did not tell her husband, Nabal. It came about as she was riding on her donkey and coming down by the hidden part of the mountain that behold, David and his men were coming down toward her. So she met them. Now David had said, surely in vain I have guarded all that this man has in the wilderness so that nothing was missed of all that belonged to him. And he has returned me evil for good. May God do so to the enemies of David and more also if by morning I leave as much as one male of any who belonged to him. When Abigail saw David, she hurried and dismounted from her donkey and fell on her face before David and bowed herself to the ground. She fell at his feet and said, on me alone, my Lord, be the blame. And please let your maidservant speak to you and listen to the words of your maidservant. Please do not let my Lord pay attention to this worthless man, Nabal, for as his name is, so is he. Nabal, by the way, means worthless.
[4:58] Nabal is his name and folly is with him. But I, your maidservant, did not see the young men of my Lord whom you sent. Now therefore, my Lord, as the Lord lives and as your soul lives, since the Lord has restrained you from shedding blood and from avenging yourself by your own hand, now then let your enemies and those who seek evil against my Lord be as Nabal. Now let this gift which your maidservant has brought to my Lord be given to the young men who accompany my Lord. Please forgive the transgression of your maidservant, for the Lord will certainly make for my Lord an enduring house, because my Lord is fighting the battles of the Lord and evil will not be found in you all your days. Should anyone rise up to pursue you and seek your life, then the life of my Lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living with the Lord your God, but the lives of your enemies he will sling out as from the hollow of a sling.
[5:55] And when the Lord does for my Lord, according to all the good that he has spoken concerning you and appoints you ruler over Israel, this will not cause grief or a troubled heart to my Lord, both by having shed blood without cause and by my Lord having avenged himself. When the Lord deals well with my Lord, then remember your maidservant. Then David said to Abigail, blessed be the Lord God of Israel who sent you this day to meet me and blessed to be your discernment and blessed to be you who have kept me this day from bloodshed and from avenging myself by my own hand. Nevertheless, as the Lord God of Israel lives, who has restrained me from harming you, unless you had come quickly to meet me, surely there would not have been left in the ball until morning light as much as one male.
[6:42] So David received from her hand what she brought him and said to her, go up to your house in peace. See, I have listened to you and granted your request. Then Abigail came to the ball and behold, he was holding a feast in his house like the feast of a king and the ball's heart was merry within him for he was very drunk. So she did not tell him anything at all until the morning light.
[7:03] But in the morning when the wine had gone out of the ball, his wife told him these things and his heart died within him so that he became as a stone. Ten days later, the Lord struck the ball and he died.
[7:16] When David heard that the ball was dead, he said, blessed be the Lord who has pleaded the cause of my reproach from the hand of the ball and has kept back his servant from evil. The Lord has also returned the evil doing of the ball in his own head. Then David sent a proposal to Abigail to take her as his wife. When the servants of David came to Abigail at Carmel, they spoke to her saying, David has sent us to you to take you as his wife. She arose and bowed with her face to the ground and said, behold, your maidservant is a maid to wash the feet of my Lord's servants. Then Abigail quickly arose and rode on a donkey with her five maidens who attended her and she followed the messengers of David became his wife.
[7:56] David had also taken a hymnome of Jezreel and they both became his wives. Now Saul had given Michael, his daughter, David's wife, to Palty, the son of Lish, who was from Gallim. 1 Samuel chapter 25.
[8:13] Kind of ironic, isn't it, that Nabal would not give any food to David's men and in the end, David gets everything Nabal owns. Because in taking Abigail as his wife, he also gets every possession that she had. As a matter of fact, the region in which Nabal was living was in the Hebron region and David is first made king in that region and sets up his rule in that land more than likely on the land he acquired from marrying Abigail. And this is the region where he first becomes king before he's made king of all of Israel after the death of Saul, if you remember. But yet we're getting ahead of ourselves because we want to see first before we got to that point, we're not here to look at the theology of multiple marriages. We've looked at that reality even Sunday, this past Sunday. In the beginning, God created them male and female. And the original design of marriages that one man and one woman would be married together. We see in the Old Testament things that make us scratch our head, but these things that was not in line with the original intent of marriage yet were permissible for some unknown reason. And we don't want to get too deep into that and we don't want to stretch it further than we can. But we do not let the exceptions to the rule become the standard or the interpretation of the rule because we see how God originally designed it and we see that reaffirmed for us in the New Testament. Later on, when David does get to be king, he goes and gets Michael, his first wife, and brings her back because they were never divorced. Saul was not right to give her away. We know that he has children by these two wives. He has no children by Michael. And there's a lot that plays out in that history later. But anyway, we're looking at a lesson learned in 1 Samuel chapter 25. David has proven himself in sparing the life of Saul. And now very soon, we will also see that he's still got a lot to learn. He's still got a lot to grow in. He's still got a lot to...
[10:12] God is working on him. Now, it's amazing because in this time, and we've seen it consistent throughout Scripture, the wilderness is often a place of formation. The wilderness is a place where God is working in the individual. He is creating something within the individual. He is building and molding and shaping the individual for the ministry or for the position that he's called them to.
[10:33] We see it. We go all the way back to Moses, right? We see Abraham wandering around in the land that was not his own. And God was, when he was Abram, he called him out of the land and put him in a wilderness to wander around. And it's there that he worships God. He builds altars and he worships and God's creating this nation of people. We see Moses. Moses spends the first 40 years of his life becoming somebody in Egypt. And then God puts him in the wilderness. The backside of the wilderness is what the Bible says for 40 years where he becomes nobody. And then when he becomes a nobody on the backside of the wilderness, then God has him ready to do something, right? And he leads the people of God out where to the wilderness. And he spends the next 40 years with a bunch of people that God's working on in the wilderness. And we see this theme throughout Scripture. Everybody that worked is in the wilderness.
[11:22] I mean, Paul has what they call the wilderness years, the silent years for about three and a half years or three to three and a half years after Paul's conversion on Damascus Road. Paul kind of disappears after a little while. The church is growing and Paul is gone. And Paul says Christ was teaching him in the wilderness, right? Preparing him for what he was about to do. We see these things in Scripture.
[11:44] The same thing going on with David. So God is capitalizing even on these years where David is in hiding and running. So no time is wasted in the economy of God. God is doing something. He's not only doing something on the national level, he's doing something on the personal level, right?
[12:01] So what to David looked like kind of lost years, God was capitalizing to formative years. Because the lessons he's learning in the wilderness will be put into practice on the throne. And we see one of these lessons here. And it's something that needed to be learned, had to be worked out of him. And we can see it very clearly in our passage. The first thing that we notice and it's introduced to us, and I don't think coincidentally, it's very kind of just suddenly introduced to us, is the very first verse in the 25th chapter. And that shows us that we have a nation saddened. There's a nation saddened. It says, then Samuel died. This is why we know Samuel didn't write the book 1 Samuel, because he's dead before it ends. And we know for certain that he didn't write the book of 2 Samuel, because he's dead before it's ever written. The events recorded in 2 Samuel, Samuel never saw. But it tells us there in the first verse of the 25th chapter, then Samuel died. It's just kind of out of nowhere, we're just introduced to this concept. And I, you know, I think it's intentional that we're introduced to it in light of what follows it. Then Samuel died, and all Israel gathered together and mourned for him.
[13:17] Two times in the book 1 Samuel, we're told the same thing here in the 25th chapter, in the first verse, and then in a couple of chapters, the 28th chapter, in the third verse of the 28th chapter, we are told again, Samuel was dead, and all Israel gathered together and mourned for him.
[13:33] So we see here that this is in the time frame of a nation saddened, because Samuel is dead. Samuel, after Moses and Joshua, is the one man who has unified the nation. Joshua's leadership brought them into the promised land, and after coming into the promised land, they drove out some people, and then he distributed them among the promised land, as was God's plan. And as they were to be, the land distribution took place, and each tribe was to live and kind of take possession.
[14:08] They didn't just come in and run everybody out. That's not the way it worked. Even archaeologists kind of testified to that reality. We need to understand that they didn't just come in and annihilate everybody. It was kind of a systematic overtake of the land, if you want to put it as such, a subtle kind of pushing out the people, which is what God said would happen. So after they distribute the land, each tribe goes, and then we get all these tribal judges and tribal kings and tribal, not kings, leaders. And we see it in the book of Judges, right? There are all these local battles being fought. And it's not until we get to the end of the book of Judges that we see the nation's really in disarray. And in the man, Samuel comes on the scene, and Samuel is the unifying factor. Samuel brings the nation back to one body, because then there is a prophet in the land that speaks not just to one locale, but he speaks to all the people. He speaks to all the people of Israel. Rather than there being a local prophet or a local judge or a local ruler, there's one. Samuel is a national prophet, and he is a national judge. He's the first of the school of prophets. He's the last of the school of judges, and he's a national judge. It says at the very beginning of this book, all of Israel was coming to him. Why? Because not only is he the unifying factor, he's the one who reintroduced the Word of God to them. They had went 400 years without hearing a clear word from God. And now all of a sudden, the Word of God is back, and it's back in this person.
[15:33] So Samuel unifies them. Samuel brings the Word of God back to them, for God is speaking to Samuel. And all of Israel knows that Samuel hears the Word of God, and he's declaring it to them. And then Samuel is used by God to anoint the first two kings. Now, only one of them takes office in his life, but he anoints the first two kings of the nation of Israel. You could not find a more instrumental man in the nation of Israel at that time than Samuel. And Samuel died. And it tells us all of the nation mourned. This was a national sorrow that affected the nation, not just location, it was national. So we see that the nation is saddened because of the death of Samuel. We're told the same thing in the 28th chapter. And then following that telling, we see what Saul does. Following this telling, we see what David does. Because now, Samuel is dead. The nation mourns, gathers together.
[16:40] Samuel is buried at his house in Ramah. Kind of ironic. Saul erected a statue for himself. Samuel was buried. Kind of in a, just a, just a humble grave. And then it tells us, and David went further into the wilderness. If you're looking at a map of the nation of Israel, he actually went further south, south of the Dead Sea. So he, he got more isolated. We don't really know why. We can read the text and kind of see it put together there. More than likely, the death of Samuel affected David. Almost certainly it affected David. And it seems that maybe there's this feeling that there's some spiritual protection that was present when Samuel was alive that's not there anymore. But anyway, David goes further south.
[17:26] He, he leaves. He flees. Saul is not chasing him. It just says that David moves away. Maybe he just needed to withdraw and mourn because Samuel is a very important person to him as well. But we see that what is about to take place, takes place in this context. That something very instrumental has just happened on the national scale. And that is the nation is saddened because Samuel is dead.
[17:56] Right? He who spoke the word, he who did the will of God, he who anointed the kings, he who appointed them, he's dead. He's not there anymore. Make no mistake about it. The enemy that tempts us knows the trying moments. And if there is a trying moment, this is one in David's life. Because Samuel is dead. And so David moves further away.
[18:26] And he goes south and he's in a more desolate region even than En-Gedi. En-Gedi, the caves of En-Gedi, which is his stronghold. Now he's getting even further. As a matter of fact, there is kind of some, some, I don't want to say confusion. There's, in the original language, when they translate it in some, the New American Standard says that he moved to the wilderness of Paran. Some of your translations may say something different because there's kind of some confusion. Some people don't think he moved all the way down to Paran because it is so desolate.
[18:56] It is really just almost impossible to live there. But we see that he separated himself, he isolated himself, and he went down. And then we're introduced to the second thing. So the first thing we see is a nation's sadness.
[19:13] The second reality that happens here is there's a man scorned. Evidently, sometime prior to this, David either entered into an agreement with the man or entered into an agreement with the man's workers. But we're introduced to this man that lives in that region who is very wealthy. And there was a man of Maon whose business was in Carmel. Now that's really close proximity now to where David is. And this man, Nabal, was a very wealthy man. We know he's wealth because of his land mass. We know because of the wealth was determined not in how large your bank account was, but how large your flock was, right? So we see his livestock counted for us here.
[19:54] And he's a man who's very well off. We're told that he's a Calebite, which means he's a descendant of Caleb, one of the two men, along with Joshua, who said they were going to go into the promise. And they gave a good report, which coincides. This isn't Mount Carmel. This is the town Carmel, which is down there around Hebron, if you're looking at a map. So it's south of Jerusalem. It goes a little bit further south. And that is where Caleb inherited his land. So we don't know that if maybe, since we're told he's a Calebite, his wealth was in part because he inherited some of his descendants' land. But anyway, he's a very wealthy man. And it comes a day where it's sheep shearing day. Now that's a day of celebration. It's a day of rejoicing. It's a festive day is what we're told in the New American Standard. And the reason it's a day of rejoicing is because that happens twice a year. But that's the day where the money is made. The wool is sold, the accounts are settled, and there's a big party. It's market day, right? We're shearing the sheep. We're going to sell the wool. Wool is a high commodity of that day. The money is going to be coming in, all of the labor and effort, all of the work. And you need to understand this thing because what follows doesn't make sense if we don't understand what's going on just kind of culturally there. Culturally, what's going on is this is the day where the man is getting paid and he pays the people who've worked for him. Right? This is that day. Well, David sends 10 of his men. Now he's got 600 men with him. He only sends 10. They're not asking for much. He didn't say, I want you to feed all 600.
[21:26] I want you to give what you think is necessary. I want you to give what you think is good. So he sends 10 of his men, which seems like a small number, to Nabal and he sends them in his name. He says, go in my name and tell him, you know, while your shepherds were with us, they did not miss anything. As a matter of fact, one of the shepherds testifies later to Abigail that David and his men were a wall about them by day and by night. Now we kind of have the wording in which David says, surely I served this man for nothing, that more than likely there was an agreement. Because since this area was so desolate, thieves and robbers were very prevalent in this area as well. And for someone as wealthy as Nabal, everybody knows what you have. And since everybody knows what you have and everybody knows that shepherds aren't usually, you know, the toughest guys around and it's hard to keep up with a couple hundred sheep, let alone 3,000 of them, right? And since everybody knows that and you have a few shepherds with some helpless sheep, they'll just go steal your sheep. But that didn't happen because there was a man named David and his mighty men that were in the region too.
[22:37] We don't know for certain, but we can almost imply that there was a verbal agreement between Nabal and David that I will protect your shepherds while they're in my region, which only makes sense.
[22:49] So David protected them. Even if there was not a verbal agreement, there is an understood agreement because his shepherds testified to the reality that yes, they kept us safe. David and his mighty men were a wall about them by day and by night the whole time the shepherds were there. So the sheep that were being shorn, I think is the right word, to make the money really were there because of David's protection.
[23:18] So you need to understand what's going on. Nabal is profiting from David's labors. So David sends his men to say, hey, we were glad we could help. You just pay us what you think we're worth.
[23:37] That's a pretty fair assessment. Nabal says, I don't know who David is. And he does something pretty amazing. He calls him the son of Jesse. Now the last person to call David the son of Jesse was Saul. So now all of a sudden we begin to see Nabal's political allegiance.
[24:00] He's lined up with Saul. Now word of David's kingship definitely had gotten out because Nabal's wife Abigail knows all about it. She calls him Lord multiple times.
[24:12] which is the word sir or giving one a place of prominence and speaks of his soon coming reign when she gives her speech. Nabal refers to him as the son of Jesse. And then he begins to speak of many servants have disowned their masters. What is he saying? David should have never left Saul.
[24:31] David's on the run from Saul. Now he's trying to get help from me. And he begins to doubt David's integrity. And he shames and scorns him.
[24:44] We don't really see the weight of it until the shepherd testifies to Abigail where he says that his master, because it says the young men, just left. And we're like, oh, okay.
[24:56] But when the messenger came, he says that he sent them away and he scorned them. That wording is that he raised his voice and yelled at them and made a mockery out of them.
[25:09] So get the picture. Nabal is profiting from the sheep that they're shearing and the very men that protected them while they were helpless in the wilderness just got scorned.
[25:24] David gets mad. I'm on this side in my humanity and I say, well, I would too. This is why we're reading the chapter, right? The lesson learned.
[25:36] David's men go back to David and say, David? He says, he's not paying us anything. David says, get your swords. And he puts his sword on too. And 400 men go with him. David has a habit of leaving a couple hundred back to take care of the baggage. We see that multiple times.
[25:57] Their tools, everything that would be necessary for their livelihood. David and 400 men are on their march. And David makes a declaration, as the Lord lives before the sun comes up, there will not be a male left in Nabal's household.
[26:14] That's David's intent. Now listen, let's see this. The one who came to kill David, David spared. The one who made a mockery out of him, David's about to kill.
[26:34] This is where the enemy takes his opportunity. If the enemy of our souls cannot get to us one way, he always has another. If the one pursuing you wrongfully won't upset you, then let's just see about this one who does you wrong.
[26:56] There's always a way to poke the beast, so to say. It happens in my own life. Right? And Nabal is the one being used now to bring to light David's humanity.
[27:09] Because David is going to take his own vengeance. What has been his declaration the whole time? Saul has been pursuing him. What has he written about in the book of Psalms? By the way, we find no psalm as it circles around this encounter, right?
[27:24] Because when Saul was pursuing him, his psalms were, Lord, I give it into your hands and will you avenge me of my enemies? And now all of a sudden David says, get your swords, we're going to go take care of this man.
[27:37] Why? Samuel's dead. He's in the wilderness. It's a desolate place and he's just been scorned. The enemy knows how to attack and when to attack to stir us.
[27:49] But the good news is is just as the enemy has his instruments, so too does the Lord our God. Which gets us to the third thing and that is a restrained sin.
[28:03] There is a nation saddened, there's a man scorned, there's a restrained sin. This is where we meet Abigail. We met Abigail once before. Abigail is Nabal's wife. We know these are arranged marriages.
[28:15] Abigail is described with flowing praise at the very beginning and all of a sudden one of the shepherds comes to Abigail and tells her what's going on and Abigail does the only thing she can. She's a business person too. She doesn't talk to Nabal.
[28:25] He's over here having a festive day, right? She gets all of these goods together and sends all this. It's a bunch of food by the way. It's a whole lot of food but there's 600 men and she gets all this food together and says, go, go, go, go, go.
[28:36] I'll talk to him about that later. Just leaves him out of the equation because as the shepherd says, he's a worthless man. Nobody can talk to him. So she just sends the food and then she gets on her donkey and then we see the sovereignty of God because it says as she is on her donkey going around the hidden place of the mountain, she meets David.
[28:55] David's got his sword. He's got his men. He's going to go kill. He's going to get vengeance and they, boom, they come face to face. And she gets off her donkey, falls on her face and prostrates herself and delivers.
[29:10] Note this. This is the longest speech by a woman in all of the Old Testament. The song of Deborah in the book of Judges may be a little bit longer but it's a song.
[29:20] This is the longest speech given by a woman in all of the Old Testament. And she declares to David, don't worry about Nabal.
[29:31] He's worthless. Even his name means worthless. That's what it means, right? That's the transliteration of his name. She says, as is his name, so is he. Don't worry about him. I mean, she admits it. She says, well, that's her husband. Right, these are days of prearranged marriages.
[29:44] It's not like they fell in love and all of a sudden they're out of love. This is like her parents got a dowry because Nabal is wealthy and they said, you're going to marry that man. Okay, that's who I have to marry, right? So then she has this and she's got this great integrity.
[29:57] He does not. And then she just forgets about Nabal and begins to speak of David and his soon coming position and begins to remind David who he is before Yahweh and is interweaving this story of, you know, you're serving the Lord and as some Bible translators say, verse 28 of the chapter is almost like the theme for the whole book of 1 Samuel.
[30:16] You're fighting the Lord's battles and the Lord will secure your future. Right? You fight the Lord's battle and let God deal with everything else and may your enemies who pursue you, they're going to be slung out like a stone out of a sling.
[30:31] That should remind David of something. He knew something about a sling and a stone, right? And an enemy. He knew something about it. There's a man named Goliath that there's a stone who came out. But she says to David, but your life will be bound up with the living.
[30:44] That is, God's going to protect you. And then she just reminds him and by the time she gets done talking, David makes this great declaration, blessed to be the Lord God who sent you to me, blessed to be your sermon and blessed to be you who have kept me from sinning this day and taking my own vengeance.
[30:58] She is God's instrument of wisdom to David. And she comes and declares to him, no, Paul's not worth fighting over because you're fighting the Lord's battles.
[31:16] This is where he begins to learn the lesson. Don't take your own vengeance. You focus on what the Lord has called you to do and let God take care of all this other stuff. And he says, unless you had come, David admits it.
[31:32] This is where we get, you know, we're told that David is a man after God's own heart. David, I mean, God says it from the very beginning about David. And we're always wondering why David is a man after God's own heart because David keeps sinning.
[31:44] We read the story of David, we find David sinning a lot, right? We just do. I mean, he does some awful things, he does some terrible things, he does some good things. He costs the lives of a lot of people, even more than Uriah, who, by the way, was one of his mighty men.
[31:55] He put one of his mighty men on the front line and had him intentionally killed. Even that, but when he counted the people, the plague came, thousands of people died because of David's sinful decision.
[32:06] And we want to know why is David a man after God's own heart? It's because every time God sends wise counsel, David accepts it, acknowledge it, and admits it. Psalm 51, the penitent psalm, that follows his sin with Bathsheba after sinning Uriah.
[32:22] When the plague is over and all those thousands of people die, it is David who buys the mount of the Lord to offer a sacrifice, which, by the way, was Temple Mount. He buys that and says, he makes this great declaration, I will not offer to God that which costs me nothing.
[32:39] Here, he says, unless you had come, I would have done this. You have kept me. God has used you to keep me from sinning. He admits his weaknesses, and he acknowledges it.
[32:51] And we see a restrained sin here. It's not that he's not weak, it's that he allows God to lead him and to guide him, and he allows God to stop him when he needs to, and then he heeds that counsel.
[33:06] Because if this had been Saul, he would have said, woman, get out of the way, or more than likely, he would have said, no egg, take care of the woman. Because that's what he did when he met some priest at Nob, right? But he heeds the counsel and he stops.
[33:22] And he learns this lesson the next day. David says, go home. We'll take your gift and your food and we'll go eat. So they go back.
[33:34] We get to the fourth and final thing, and that is a matter settled. Because David said, okay, I won't take my own vengeance. We get to this matter being settled. Abigail comes home.
[33:45] Nabal's having a great day. He's a festive day. He's throwing a party fit for a king, it says, and he says he's very drunk. So she says nothing to him. But in the next morning, when the sun comes up and liquor's gone, she tells him everything that had happened.
[33:59] And then it tells us in his heart died within him and he became like stone. Many people believe he either had a massive stroke or a heart attack. And then we're told about 10 days later, the Lord struck and killed him.
[34:18] He didn't die from a stroke or a heart attack. He died because the Lord struck him. That's what we're told in Scripture. The Lord struck and killed him.
[34:32] Then David learned the lesson. And he learned this lesson. He makes this declaration. When David heard that Nabal was dead, he said, blessed to be the Lord who has pleaded the cause of my reproach from the hand of Nabal and has kept back his servant from evil.
[34:48] The Lord has also returned the evil doing of Nabal on his own head. That is, if I focus on the Lord and fighting his battles, he can handle everything else.
[35:02] He can handle everything else. I don't have to take my own vengeance. I don't have to worry about somebody doing me wrong. I don't have to worry about this. An important lesson learned at an instrumental time in the nation.
[35:15] That though everything seemed to be going wrong, if I focus on what the Lord has called me to do, he can fight those battles. Let him have it. Let him have it.
[35:27] He learned that lesson. Kept him from sinning. God used a woman. He ends up, I think, man, he was very quick on the trigger there, but he proposes to her and brings her in, right?
[35:38] We see, again, the integrity of Abigail because she says, she knows he's going to be king. And she said, when you enter into your kingdom, remember me, do good to me. Now, that doesn't mean, we want you to take me in.
[35:48] It just means, just remember my kindness to you. Well, he remembers it very quickly and he sends her a proposal in marriage and she says, I am the servant of the Lord to wash his servant's feet. I'm not just to serve the king.
[36:02] I will wash the feet of his servants. That's humble, right? It's humility. She didn't do that. He did have one child through her. We don't know anything other than his name. Nothing else there.
[36:13] But we see that she is so instrumental that God uses her to restrain the sin that would have been present. Again, the enemy has a way of getting to us.
[36:24] God has the people and the opportunity and the time and the circumstances to stop us. The question is, will we learn the lessons and heed the word at the right time?
[36:37] And we see a lesson learned for David here in 1 Samuel chapter 25. Thank you, brother. Thank you.
[37:29] Thank you, server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server server Thank you.
[38:29] Thank you.
[38:59] Thank you.
[39:29] Thank you.
[39:59] Thank you.
[40:29] Thank you.
[40:59] Thank you.
[41:29] Thank you.
[41:59] Thank you.
[42:29] Thank you.
[42:59] Thank you.