The boy nobody sent for
David was the youngest of eight brothers. When the prophet Samuel came to Bethlehem to anoint a new king, his father Jesse did not bother to call David in from the fields. Seven of his brothers walked past Samuel first; the prophet rejected every one of them. “Are these all the sons you have?” Samuel asked. Only then did Jesse remember that there was one more, out watching the sheep.
He was anointed in front of his brothers and sent back to the sheep. That is where the story of the fugitive begins — not with a palace, but with a boy who was given a secret that nobody else was ready to believe. He went on tending flocks. He went on being the youngest. He went on being the one who could be forgotten.
Giant, harp, friend
He killed Goliath with a stone when the whole army was afraid, and the women sang about him in the streets. He played the harp for Saul when Saul could not sleep. He loved Jonathan, Saul's son, with a love greater than the love of women, as the book itself will say later. The three years after Goliath were the only years of normal success David ever had, and even then an evil spirit was already working inside the man he served.
One day while David played the harp, Saul threw a spear at him. Saul threw a spear a second time, in another room, on another day. David ran. He had done nothing wrong except be loved by the people more than the king. The king's own daughter — his wife — lowered him out of a window to save his life. He left her behind. He left his best friend behind. He left the city.
“Save me, O God, by your name,
and vindicate me by your might. …
Insolent men have risen against me;
ruthless men seek my life.”
The cave at Adullam
He hid in a cave. His family came down to join him — his father Jesse, his mother, his brothers — because Saul was now their enemy too. Four hundred men came as well, the text says: everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontented. The anointed future king sat in the mouth of a cave, and the first congregation God gave him was the people nobody else wanted.
He had been promised a kingdom and he was given a cave. The gap between the promise and the circumstance is where the psalms come from. He wrote some of the oldest and most honest words in the Bible from inside that cave — not clean words either, often dark, often tired, often how long, O Lord. He let the complaint be real, because the God he was writing to was real.
“Look to the right and see:
there is none who takes notice of me;
no refuge remains to me;
no one cares for my soul.”
En Gedi, and the robe he cut
He moved from cave to cave. Saul chased him with three thousand men through the wilderness of Engedi. In one of those caves David's men saw Saul walk in alone and whispered to him that God had delivered the enemy into his hand. David crept up and cut off a corner of Saul's robe — and immediately his heart smote him, because Saul was still the Lord's anointed. He waited. He let the king go. He called out after him with the piece of cloth in his hand: “See, my father, see … I will not put out my hand against the Lord's anointed.”
That is the kind of decision the wilderness makes a person capable of. He could have become king that day in his own strength. He had every excuse. He waited for God to finish the job in His own time, and he waited for a long time more.
Ziklag — a year and four months in enemy territory
Eventually the running grew worse. David said in his heart, “I shall perish one day by the hand of Saul. There is nothing better for me than that I should escape to the land of the Philistines.” So he crossed over. He went to Achish, king of Gath — the hometown of Goliath, the city whose champion he had killed as a boy — and asked for asylum. Achish gave him the border town of Ziklag.
He lived there for sixteen months. In a foreign city. Under a foreign king. Among the people whose giant he had once killed. He raided enemies of Israel and told Achish he was raiding Israel, which is a complicated kind of faithfulness — he was still Israel's king-in-waiting under Philistine cover, and the deception kept him alive. God does not seem to speak to him directly during those months. The text goes quiet.
Then one day the Amalekites burned Ziklag to the ground while David and his men were away. They took all the women and children, including David's two wives. His own men talked about stoning him. “But David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.” He asked God whether to pursue. God said go. He pursued, he recovered everything, he came back. Three days later, Saul died in a battle up north.
The crown, after the cave
He was anointed king at Hebron first — only over Judah, his own tribe — and even then there was a seven-year civil war before he was king over all Israel. The gap between Samuel's oil on his head and the crown finally resting on it was somewhere between fifteen and twenty years. Most of those years he was running. Some of them he was in a cave. More than a year he was in a foreign country, pretending to serve the enemy. None of them were comfortable.
But the psalms. The men who followed him into those caves became his mighty men. The character that walked into Jerusalem as king was not the character of the boy who had killed Goliath; it was the character of the man who had cut Saul's robe and let him live, who had asked the Lord before he moved, who had strengthened himself in the Lord when his own men wanted to stone him.
That is what the wilderness did for David. It did not make him comfortable. It made him a king.
What this says to us
The years do not have to look like the promise. The place you are hiding in does not have to be the end of the story. God is as near in a cave as He is on a throne, and the man who prays “no one cares for my soul” on his worst night is the same man who will later write “the Lord is my shepherd”. One is not more honest than the other. Both are true, in their season, because God is the one holding the span of them.
Open your heart to where He has placed you right now, even if right now is the cave, the border town, the year that does not resemble the oil on your head. He is making something of it. The psalms you will later be able to sing are being written in you while you are in the wilderness.