The Bad and the Good

 DEVOTION

1^ST SAMUEL

THE BAD AND THE GOOD 

1 Sam 25:14-22

14 One of the servants told Nabal's wife Abigail: "David sent messengers from the desert to give our master his greetings, but he hurled insults at them. 15 Yet these men were very good to us. They did not mistreat us, and the whole time we were out in the fields near them nothing was missing. 16 Night and day they were a wall around us all the time we were herding our sheep near them. 17 Now think it over and see what you can do, because disaster is hanging over our master and his whole household. He is such a wicked man that no one can talk to him." 18 Abigail lost no time. She took two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of wine, five dressed sheep, five seahs of roasted grain, a hundred cakes of raisins and two hundred cakes of pressed figs, and loaded them on donkeys. 19 Then she told her servants, "Go on ahead; I'll follow you." But she did not tell her husband Nabal. 20 As she came riding her donkey into a mountain ravine, there were David and his men descending toward her, and she met them. 21 David had just said, "It's been useless — all my watching over this fellow's property in the desert so that nothing of his was missing. He has paid me back evil for good. 22 May God deal with David, be it ever so severely, if by morning I leave alive one male of all who belong to him!"

NIV

How is it possible to have two hundred loaves of bread unless this is a type of unleavened bread? Did Abigail have all that stuff just on hand to be able to hurry and load it all on a donkey? Nevertheless, this is a woman of substance, a woman with a heart that must have pleased the Lord. Before she meets with David, he is still bent on seeking the destruction of Nabal and all his household. Even Nabal’s own shepherds knew he was an evil man whom no one could talk to or persuade to change his mind.  We wonder if Abigail is trying to stop David from what he was about to do for the sake of her husband, or if she was motivated by the LORD. We will get to the exchange between Abigail and David, but first, we should consider that she was providing the request that was made by the ten men that David sent to Nabal, and how he rejected them. When she found out how her husband mistreated the men sent by David, she went into action, loading enough provisions to feed David and all his men. Perhaps it was enough to make an offering, a plea to change the course of David and save her family. What is our lesson from this portion of the narrative? Maybe it is about the provisions as an offering to change the heart of David. We know we can not give enough of an offering to God to change his mind or heart. He already loves us beyond what any human could measure; after all, his love is as far as the heavens are above the earth, or unmeasurable. Yet we are told to offer ourselves as living sacrifices. Interestingly, David’s statement about Nabal paying him back evil for good reminds us of Joseph telling his brothers that the evil they perpetrated toward him, God meant it for good. This brings us to the barrier between evil and good. For the most part, as we had considered before, Nabal represents the wickedness of mankind or the evil in this world. We can see evil everywhere we look, hatred against each other, divisions among the people, and even violence in the streets of our cities. So much wickedness all around us, and yet God has built a hedge around us, keeping us separated from evil by His goodness. Abigail was the one doing good and represents this concept of reconciliation that we considered before. There should be a difference between the wicked and the righteous. Although we would be known as the righteous, it is only because we are in Jesus and He is in us. However, for the sake of the comparison, we should be different.  That difference should not be based on our deeds, over the deeds of the wicked, because even the unbelievers can do great humanitarian deeds, sometimes better than the church does. No, the difference is a heart issue. Nabal had an evil heart, so much so that no one could talk to him. Abigail had a heart bent toward good, wanting to prevent injustice. At this point, David’s heart was bent on revenge, but we will see that goodness always prevails. We should always be about examining our heart, or asking the Lord to examine our heart, to see if there are any anxious thoughts, or wicked thoughts, or self-oriented thoughts. We desire to have a heart for God, but, like David, do we allow that “self” that hurts feelings, drives us toward the dark side, seeking retaliation in some form because our feelings are hurt? Let us endeavor to repay any bad with good.