Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 160 · June 9
At Ziklag
“And David was greatly distressed; for the people spake of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters: but David encouraged himself in the LORD his God.”
Ziklag was a town on the southern edge of Philistine land. Achish, the Philistine king of Gath, gave it to David, believing he had won over a deserter from Israel. David lived in Philistine country "a full year and four months," as the King James reads it; the Hebrew says "days and four months," which may mean a year or only a few days more.
He went there because of something he said to himself, and no prayer is recorded anywhere near it: "And David said in his heart, I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul: there is nothing better for me than that I should speedily escape into the land of the Philistines." From Ziklag he went out raiding other peoples, and he left neither man nor woman alive, so that no witness could carry the truth back to Gath. Then he told Achish that he had been raiding the south of Judah, his own people. "And Achish believed David, saying, He hath made his people Israel utterly to abhor him."
Near the end of that time, David and his men came home to find the town burned and their families gone. The Amalekites had carried off every wife, son and daughter. The men "lifted up their voice and wept, until they had no more power to weep." Then the men who had followed David through years of running turned on him: "the people spake of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters." The disaster had landed right in the middle of his own scheme.
"But David encouraged himself in the LORD his God." That sentence is famous on its own, and on its own it can sound like a mood he worked himself into. The next verse shows what it looked like from the outside. He turned to Abiathar the priest and said, "I pray thee, bring me hither the ephod." Then he asked the LORD a plain question: "Shall I pursue after this troop? shall I overtake them?" And God answered him: "Pursue: for thou shalt surely overtake them, and without fail recover all." Encouraging himself in the LORD meant going to God, asking Him, and doing what He said.
The story ends well: "there was nothing lacking to them, neither small nor great." But take the warning under the happy ending. The question David asked at Ziklag is the question he did not stop to ask at the border all those months before. Asking it so late cost him months of lying, a burned town, and the day his own men talked of stoning him. Strength in the LORD is open to you even inside a mess you made yourself, and God still answers those who come to Him there. Better still, ask Him at the border, before the mess is made.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 160 is Removed Completely (Psalm 103:12).