Wilderness

Wilderness

Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have — right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start — comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 1:26-30)

The Dead Sea is dying. Sounds like an oxymoron, I know. But drop by drop, it’s losing three feet a year. In other words, the Dead Sea’s shrinking. Galilee sends fresh water through the Jordanian Canal, water worthy of Jesus’ baptism. But the Dead Sea poisons it. Darkening and acidizing, it’s a regular saline cemetery. There’s little life in its waters. And its surroundings are equally lifeless. Ominous cliffs rise to the west, flattening out at about two thousand feet. Erosion has scarred the land into a patchwork of caves and ruts and sparse canyons. It’s home for hyenas, lizards and buzzards. And it was home to David for a decade.

Not by choice, mind you. He didn’t want to swap the palace for the badlands. No one chooses the wilderness. It comes at you from all directions — heat and rain, sandstorms and hail – while we prefer air-conditioned bedrooms and cul-de-sac safety. But sometimes we don’t have a vote. Calamity hits, the roof rips, the tornado lifts and drops us smack dab in the middle of the desert. Not the desert in Israel, but the desert of the soul. A season of dryness.

More than anything else, isolation seems to mark these seasons. Saul has effectively and systematically isolated David from every source of stability. His half-dozen assassination attempts ended David’s military career. His murderous pursuit drove a wedge in David’s marriage. After David’s wife, Michal, helped him escape, Saul demanded an explanation from her. “I had to,” she lied. “He threatened to kill me if I didn’t help him.” (1 Sam. 19:17) David never trusted his wife again. They stayed married but slept in different beds.

David races from Saul’s court to Samuel’s house. But no sooner does he arrive than someone tells Saul, “Take note, David is at Naioth in Ramah!” (1 Sam. 19:19) So, David flees to Jonathan, his soul mate. Jonathan wants to help, but what can he do? Leave the court in the hands of a madman? No, Jonathan has to stay with Saul, and David can see the rope fraying on his lifeline. No place in the court. No position in the army. No wife, no priest, no friend. Nothing to do but run. And although the wilderness begins with disconnections, it continues with deceit.

We see David’s deceit in Nob, the city of the priests. The city was holy; David was anything but. He lied each time he opened his mouth. In fact, David gets worse before he gets better. He escapes to Gath, the hometown of Goliath. He tries to forge a friendship based on a mutual adversary. If your enemy is Saul and my enemy is Saul, we become friends, right? Wrong. The Gittites weren’t feeling very hospitable. “Isn’t this David, the king of the land?” they asked. “Isn’t he the one the people honor with dances, singing, ‘Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands’?” (1 Sam. 21:11)

David panics. He’s a lamb in a pack of wolves. Piercing glares, piercing spears. And right about now we’d like to hear a prayer to his Shepherd; we’d appreciate a pronouncement of God’s strength. But don’t hold your breath. David doesn’t see God. He sees trouble, instead. So he takes matters into his own hands. He pretends to be insane, scratching on doors and drooling down his beard. Finally the king of Gath says to his men, “‘Must you bring me a madman? We already have enough of them around here! Why should I let someone like this be my guest?’ So David left Gath and escaped to the cave of Adullam.” (21:14 – 22:1)

Can’t you just picture it? Staring with galvanized eyes. Quivering like jelly. He sticks out his tongue, rolls in the dirt, grunts and grins, spits, shakes and foams. David feigns something like epilepsy. The Philistines, however, believed that an epileptic was possessed by Dagon’s devil and that he made husbands impotent, women barren, children die and animals vomit. Fearing that every drop of an epileptic’s blood created one more devil, the Philistines drove epileptics out of their towns and into the desert to die. And that’s what they do with David. They shove him out the city gates and leave him with nowhere to go.

So now what? He can’t go to the court of Saul or the house of Michal, the city of Samuel or the safety of Nob. So he goes to the only place he can — the place where no one goes, because nothing survives. He goes to the desert, the wilderness. To the honeycombed canyons that overlook the Dead Sea. And there he finds a cave, the cave called Adullam. In it he finds shade, silence and safety. He stretches on the cool dirt and closes his eyes and begins his decade in the wilderness.

Can you relate to David’s story? Has your Saul cut you off from the position you had and the people you love? In an effort to land on your feet, have you stretched the truth? Distorted the facts? Are you seeking refuge in Gath? Under normal circumstances you’d never go there. But these aren’t normal circumstances, so you loiter in the breeding ground of giants. The hometown of trouble. You walk shady streets and frequent shadier places. And, while there, you go crazy. So the crowd will accept you, so the stress won’t kill you, you go wild. You wake up in a Dead Sea cave, in the grottoes of Adullam, at the lowest point of your life and feeling as dumb as a roomful of anvils. You stare out at an arid, harsh, unpeopled future and ask, “What do I do now?”

Well, let this same David be your teacher. Sure, he goes wacko for a few verses. But in the cave of Adullam, he gathers himself. The faithful shepherd boy surfaces once again. The giant-killer rediscovers courage. Yes, he has a price on his head. Yes, he has no place to lay his head, but somehow he keeps his head. He returns his focus to God and finds refuge.

Refuge surfaces as a favorite word of David’s. Circle its appearances in the book of Psalms, and you’ll count as many as forty-plus appearances in some versions. But never did David use the word more poignantly than in Psalm 57. Even the introduction to the passage explains its background: “A song of David when he fled from Saul into the cave.” So, close your eyes and envision Jesse’s son in the dimness: on his knees, perhaps on his face, lost in shadows and thought. He has nowhere to turn. Go home, he endangers his family; go to the tabernacle, he imperils the priests. Saul will kill him; Gath won’t take him. He lied in the sanctuary and went crazy with the Philistines, and here he sits. All alone.

But then he remembers: he’s not. He’s not alone. And from the recesses of the cave a sweet voice floats: Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me! For my soul trusts in You; and in the shadow of Your wings I will make my refuge. (Psalm 57:1) Make God your refuge. Not your job, your reputation or your retirement account. Make God your refuge. Let him, not Saul, encircle you. Let him be the ceiling that breaks the sunshine, the walls that stop the wind, the foundation on which you stand. The truth is that most of us, like David, will never know that Jesus is all we need until Jesus is all we have.

Wilderness survivors find refuge in God’s presence. They also discover community among God’s people. “Soon [David’s] brothers and other relatives joined him there. Then others began coming — men who were in trouble or in debt or who were just discontented — until David was the leader of about four hundred men.” (1 Sam. 22:1–2)

Not exactly a corps of West Point cadets. In trouble, in debt or discontent. Quite a crew. Misfits, yes. Dregs from the bottom of the barrel, no doubt. Rejects. Losers. Dropouts. Just like the church. (No, that’s not a typo) Because if we’re honest with ourselves, aren’t most of us the distressed, the debtors and the discontent? The Apostle Paul, talking to the church in Corinth, certainly thought so: “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of ‘the brightest and the best’ among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? (1 Cor. 1:26–28) Strong congregations are populated with current and former cave dwellers, people who know the terrain of Adullam. They’ve told a few lies in Nob. They’ve gone loopy in Gath. And they haven’t forgotten it. And because they haven’t, they imitate David: they make room for people like you and me.

And who’s David to turn these men away? He’s no candidate for archbishop, that’s for sure. He’s a magnet for marginal people. So David creates a community of God-seeking misfits, and God forges a mighty group out of them: “(t)hey came to David day by day to help him, until it was a great army, like the army of God.” (1 Chron. 12:22) Gath. Wilderness. Adullam. Folly. Loneliness. Restoration. David found all three. So did Whit Criswell.

Whit was raised in a Christian home. As a young man, he served as an officer in a Christian church. But he fell into gambling, daily risking his income on baseball games. Over the course of time, he lost $200,000.00 and found himself in desperate debt to his bookie. So, he decided to embezzle funds from the bank where he worked. Welcome to Gath.

Of course, it was only a matter of time until the auditors detected a problem and called him in for an appointment. Criswell knew he’d been caught. But the night before the meeting he couldn’t sleep. So, he resolved to take the path of Judas. Leaving his wife a suicide note, he drove outside of Lexington, parked the car and put a gun to his head. But he couldn’t pull the trigger, so he took a practice shot out the car window. He pressed the nose of the barrel back on his forehead and mumbled, “Go ahead and pull the trigger. This is what you deserve.” But he couldn’t do it. The fear that he might go to hell kept him from taking his life. Finally, at dawn, he went home, a broken man.

Meanwhile, his wife had found the note and called the police. She embraced him. The officers hand-cuffed him and led him away. He was, at once, humiliated and liberated: humiliated to be arrested in front of family and neighbors, but liberated from the chains of mistruth. He didn’t have to lie anymore. Whit Criswell’s Adullam was a prison cell. In it, he came to his senses; he turned back to his faith. Upon release, he plunged into the work of a local church, doing whatever needed to be done. Over a period of years, he was added to the staff of the congregation. He’s now the Senior Pastor at Cornerstone Christian Church in Winchester, Kentucky. Another David restored.

Are you in the wilderness? Crawl into God the way a fugitive would a cave. Find refuge in God’s presence. Find comfort in his people. Cast your hat in a congregation of folks who are one gift of grace removed from tragedy, addiction and disaster. Seek community in the church of Adullam. Refuge in God’s presence. Comfort in God’s people. Your keys for wilderness survival. Do this and who knows? In the midst of the desert you may write your sweetest psalms.

Grace,

Randy