In this insightful episode, Rick Hughes navigates through the fascinating account of David, a man after God’s own heart, facing trials and political turbulence under King Saul’s rule. Explore how David’s decisions impacted his future and what it means to trust in God’s justice rather than human power. With a focus on spiritual growth and a deep dive into biblical principles, this episode challenges listeners to re-evaluate their own life paths and align them with divine wisdom.
Welcome to The Flatline with your host, Rick Hughes. For the next 30 minutes, you’ll be inspired, motivated, educated, but never manipulated. Now, your host, Rick Hughes.
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Good morning and welcome to The Flatline. The Flatline radio show brought to you here by Rick Hughes Evangelistic Ministries Incorporated. Thank you for listening. We’ve been on the air now about 15 years across the country. It’s my great honor and my great privilege to bring you accurate information, not human speculation, but accurate information from the Bible, the canon of Scripture, hopefully designed to help you understand, to clarify what is God’s will for your life, and if you can do that, if I can do that, then you can orient and adjust to the will. It’s up to you. My job is not to make you do anything. My job is not to solicit money from you, not to do anything except give you information. We do that on the Flatline once every Sunday morning, same time on this station every Sunday. Thank you for listening. I love to hear from listeners and know where you are because so often we never know who’s listening, who’s not listening as we design our new contracts for the year. So if you’re somewhere out there, you can drop us an email, rick at rickhughesministries.org, rick at rickhughesministries.org. Let us know you’re listening wherever you may be, and it’ll help us to determine whether or not to continue broadcasting in your area. You know, last week we started a study on the life of David. Sean, intending to show how bad decisions limit future options. We ran through some of the episodes in David’s life, and we’re going to do that again today and continue that study with David and Saul and some of the things that took place back in the book of 1 Samuel. And it’s all designed to give you some wisdom. Wisdom is part of what’s called the flotline of your soul, your main line of resistance. When you learn these 10 unique problem-solving devices that we call the flotline, then you are able to stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside source of stress. In David’s case, and he’s a young man at this time, he’s having some stress and he’s having a lot of adversity because the king is trying to kill him. And how he handles it, and we can compare it to your life and how you’re handling some of the things that you’re going through today. So let’s take a look and let’s do a little refresher and try to remember this. And this is kind of an Old Testament survey, and we’re gonna draw some New Testament conclusions, some biblical principles that are applicable to us today. And a lot of this deals with political intrigue going on in the kingdom at that time. So remember that David was introduced to King Saul after he killed the Philistine giant, Goliath. And in 1 Samuel 17, 57, as soon as David returned from killing the Philistine, then Abner took him and brought him before Saul And David still had the Philistine’s head. I can’t imagine that, going to meet the king with a cut-off head of the giant. That must have been quite a sight. And Saul wanted to know who he was. He said, I’m the son of your servant Jesse from Bethlehem. And the Bible says, from that day forth, Saul kept David with him and would not let him go back home to his family. Fortunately, Saul had a son named Jonathan, and David and Jonathan became best friends. Jonathan respected David very much, even gave him his uniform and his weapons, it says in 1 Samuel 18, 34. Jonathan took off his robe and gave it to David along with his tunic and his sword and his bow and his belt. David was just a shepherd boy. He didn’t have a military uniform. So he gave him all of that, and Saul was so impressed with him that he even gave him a leadership position in the army. In 1 Samuel 18 5, whatever mission Saul sent him on, David was successful, so that Saul gave him high rank in the army, and this pleased all the troops and Saul’s officers as well. So we saw that at first King Saul admired David for his heroics, but eventually David He became jealous of David, especially when people began to sing about David. They sang Saul is slain is thousands and David is tens of thousands and it made him very jealous, very angry. displeased him and he wanted to take credit for his work and David didn’t want David to get credit for his work and so and that day on the Bible says Saul kept a close eye on David he was jealous of him and designed to kill him and Saul was afraid of David the Bible says in 1st Samuel 18 12 because the Lord was with David but departed from Saul and Let’s make a note of that. God departed from Saul. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t saved anymore. You don’t lose your salvation. Saul is in heaven today. He was a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and what came in the future. He didn’t know him as we know him, but he knew who he was going to be, and he believed by faith. So as you make bad decisions, it’s possible that you quench and you grieve the Holy Spirit, and the end result is you wind up on what we call the my way highway. Saul was on the my way highway. He disobeyed God. God told him to do certain things. He didn’t do it. He did it his way. And so the Lord said, I’m going to replace you with a king that will obey me. And Saul’s jealousy was over that. God selected a new king. Saul had even said, I beg you to forgive my sin and come back so I can worship the Lord, begging Samuel to reinstate the ministry of the Holy Spirit. But Samuel said, I will not go back with you. You rejected the word of the Lord. The Lord rejected you as king over Israel. In 1 Samuel 16, 14, the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul. The Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul. That’s the enablement of the Holy Spirit. and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him. So Saul got jealous and wanted his son Jonathan to kill him and Jonathan wouldn’t do it and Jonathan told David that he needed to get out of town. Jonathan in 1 Samuel 20, 42, Jonathan said to David, go in peace. We both sworn in the name of the Lord saying, may the Lord be between you and me and between your descendants and my descendants forever. So he arose and departed and Jonathan went back into the city with his dad. And David is on the run. Fear turns to flight. Operation survival mode. And so the first place he goes is to Nob, where the temple is located in the Ark of the Covenant. Here, he made a terrible, terrible, terrible decision. He lied to the priest. Amalek, the priest said, why are you here? What do you want? And this is what he said, quote, the king ordered me on private business. Don’t let anybody know anything about what I’m sending you on. And I’ve directed my young man to such and such a place. So don’t tell anybody. So now that I’m on this secret mission, what can you give me to eat? What can you give me to feed me? And so he wound up taking the seven day old showbread and the sword of Goliath. And the priest thought they were doing the king a favor, but it wound up getting them all killed because there was a man in that crowd named Doag and Edomite who heard these things and reported them to Saul. And Saul came down and called all of the priests of Ahimelech to come to his office, and he killed all of them by Doag the Edomite. He killed them all. Killed the priest, killed everybody in the town. He was so mad, he killed all the children, all the women, everything. Donkeys, sheep. You can read about it yourself, 1 Samuel. Let’s see what verse that was. It’s verse 18, and that’s in 1 Samuel 22, 18. So here’s Saul in his rage, having Doag the Edomite kill everybody. So this is a bad decision that David made, misleading the priests and getting them all killed. So from here, David fled to Achish, the king of Gath, tried to take refuge there, but he wouldn’t take him in. And so there he had to pretend like it was really crazy. And then David goes to the king of Moab and asks for protection for his family since his great-grandmother was a Moabite. Her name was Ruth. And so his family goes there, please let my father and my mother come here and stay with you until I know what God’s going to do with me. And he brought them before the king of Moab, and they dwelt with him all the time David was in the stronghold of Adullam. This is 1 Samuel 22. So we left off with David sparing Saul’s life. Saul was on the run looking for him, trying to kill him. He took 3,000 chosen men and went to look after him in 1 Samuel 24. And they stopped to take a break, and Saul goes into a cave to relieve himself or go to the bathroom, and it happens to be the cave David’s in. David’s men thought God had delivered him, but he didn’t. David would not kill him. He just snuck up behind him while he was doing his business, cut the hem of his robe off, and when he left to go outside, he walked out behind him and revealed what he had done. And the Bible says in verse 16, Saul lifted up his voice and wept. Here’s a few principles we’re going to go over today, and you should be able to apply them into your life as well. Number one, David will wait on God’s justice, not execute his own justice. He could have killed him. He could have whacked him right there in the cave, but he did not do that. He was not going to step in and kill God’s man. And two, David demonstration of fidelity to Saul meant nothing to the king. He didn’t care. He was so emotional, he lacked any mental stability and he went right back and tried to kill him again later. So three, Saul had abandoned God’s plan. God abandoned Saul and he was no longer going to be the ruler of Israel. And here’s a very important principle. No man is too important to be replaced by God. No man is too important to be replaced by God. Now, today in our political scene, there are a lot of people that want to replace our current president. They think they could do a better job. They think they have more smarts. They think he’s a liar. They think he’s all sorts of things. But listen to Romans 13, 1. Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except that which God has established, and the authorities that exist were established by God. If God allowed our current president to be elected president, who is so smart as to say that they know more and they want to assassinate him or get rid of him, vote him out of office, do whatever they need to do to get rid of him because they hate him so much? David would not make that move. He would not do that. because he recognized that Saul was God’s man, even though Saul was not acting like it. And there was another episode where David could have taken Saul out, but he didn’t when Saul came again to try to kill him and bivouacked and sleeping in a ravine, and David snuck into his camp at night and was urged by his men to kill him again, and he wouldn’t do it. This reminds us that the leopard does not change his spots. Another attempt on David’s life, Saul did it in 1 Samuel 26, one through three. So David still would not seek revenge. And in 1 Samuel 26, 10, as surely as the Lord lives, the Lord himself will strike him or his time will come and he will die or he will go into battle and perish. But the Lord forbid that I should lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed one. Now get his spear, get his water jug that are near his head and let’s go, let’s walk out. And again, once David reveals to Saul that he could have killed him, Saul said, I’ve sinned. Come back, David, my son. Oh, yes, my son. Oh, yes, the one you’ve been trying to kill. Because you considered my life precious today, and I will not try to harm you again. Surely acted like a fool. And I’ve been terribly, terribly wrong. So what are some of the lessons we learned from this? So far in this study, we’ve learned that power hungry politicians will murder to preserve power. Power-hungry politicians will murder to preserve power. Where did I get that? In 1 Samuel 19, 1, Saul spoke to his son Jonathan and to all of his servants that they should kill David. Now, two, why would he want to kill David? What’s the deal? Well, A, he recognized the people appreciated David more than him, and B, he knew God had withdrawn his blessings from him, King Saul, Thus, in jealousy, he wanted David dead. And three, ABC, David never did anything to harm Saul, never did anything to make him look bad in the kingdom. And D, Saul was operating on emotional anger, full of malice towards David. By the way, the Bible tells you never to have malice. Ephesians 4, 30 and 31, be kind to one another, tend to hearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ’s sake has forgiven you. That’s impersonal love that the believer uses in the flat line of his soul, and it’s a tremendous problem-solving device, having impersonal love for God, problem-solving device number seven. And then number eight is sharing the happiness of God, and number nine, or number 10 is occupation with Christ. So let’s run over those real quick, just to give you a reminder. Problem-solving device number one is rebound, confessing your sin. And this leads us to problem-solving device number two, the filling of the Holy Spirit. And this leads us to problem-solving device number three, the faith rest drill. And this leads us to grace orientation and then to doctrinal orientation. These are all problem-solving devices. Then to having a personal sense of destiny and then having personal love for God, impersonal love for all mankind, sharing the happiness of God and occupation with Christ. 10 unique problem-solving devices. God had a plan for David. He had a personal sense of destiny. He should have recognized that. And I know David had personal love for God because he would not kill Saul, God’s anointed. And he had to live by faith, but he was afraid. He was making some bad decisions in regard to that. He wouldn’t kill him, but he was absolutely scared to death. So Saul operated on emotional anger, full of malice and hatred. This is the same David, the same David that we’re talking about, that God would later establish a covenant with in 2 Samuel 7, 8 through 16, where he promised, and your house and your kingdom will be established forever before me, and your throne shall be established forever. The Lord Jesus Christ came through the line of David. That’s how important David was in God’s eyes. And Had Saul been able to kill David, well, apparently the line of Christ would have been cut off. So this gives you some idea who was motivating Saul to kill David. This is exactly what the enemy Satan wanted. He doesn’t want to go to the lake of fire. He doesn’t want to be in burning forever in the lake of fire. And if he could cut off God’s plan, he can be exonerated. Didn’t happen. But he tried, he tried his best to get Saul to kill him, just couldn’t do it. So power politics, you need to remember that word, power politics are corrupt. And if they have absolute power, they corrupt absolutely. Power politics are corrupt. And if they get absolute power, they will absolutely corrupt everything. So Saul thought he was untouchable, But actually, the one that was untouchable was David because of the promise of what would come in the future. Now, David made some mistakes in the moment of fear and panic, running. First of all, he lied to the priest at Nob, Ahimelech. And secondly, this one lie, I’m on the king’s business and I just need some food and a weapon. It’s a private business. matter. I’m not supposed to tell anybody what I’m doing. This is all the lies he told Ahimelech. That lie caused the death of all the priests at Nob, as well as all the citizens of the city and all the animals in the town. Man, woman, boy, child, girl, donkey, whatever they had, everybody was killed. That’s the rage of Saul through Doag the Edomite. Since David went to the Philistine king Achish for protection, he acted crazy once again when he perceived they might kill him. And it’s very interesting. This was in the town of Gath, and that’s where Goliath was his hometown, Gath. So David went to the king of Gath to get protection. And then eventually he went to work for Achish as a mercenary to provide security for him. And he even agreed to fight against the armies of Saul in 1 Samuel 28, 1 and 2. This is a prime example of how far a believer out of fellowship can go. If you return to your unbelieving lifestyle, or what we call reverse your progress, a believer can be saved, accept Christ as his Savior, start growing, and then something distracts him. He gets on the my way, highway, and then he begins to go in a different direction He even lives like an unbeliever and then all of a sudden other Christians say, well, he wasn’t really saved or he wouldn’t do that. That’s baloney. I know several people that were really saved absolutely saved and led a lascivious lifestyle, a lifestyle of pursuing drugs or alcohol or other things. And they went to heaven, but they went to heaven the hard way, under the sin unto death. So this is a prime example. If you go in reverse as a believer, if you, instead of growing in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, if you fail to use the problem-solving device, number one, rebound, and you let sins accumulate in your life, then the filling of the Holy spirit is going to be quenched and grieved. And then as a result of that, you’re going to be disciplined by God on three stages, stage one warning, stage two intense and stage three death. You’re not going to orient to grace. You’re not going to use the faith rest drill and you’re going to be full of self pity and misery and go out under the sun unto death. That’s exactly what happened to Saul. So David made some mistakes and, uh, When he went over to Achish and he wanted to fight against Saul’s army and join the Philistines, that’s a complete reversal process. He’s going in the opposite direction. And when you’re in reverse process reversionism or backsliding, this means you’re going in the opposite direction spiritually, mentally, or physically. And the believer, if that’s you or me, and we begin to do that, the object of our love, we reverse that. We move away from that. If you’re married, you’ll move away from the love of your spouse. You will move away from, you want more and more attention. You can’t concentrate. Your priorities have changed. And the reverse process begins to take place. You reverse your love object. You no longer love God. You love self or you love the details of life. And many people do. Many people today are more in love with the gifts of liberty and freedom than they are the giver who gave it to us. So the believer in this reverse process cannot be distinguished in any way from an unbeliever. He looks just like an unbeliever, but he has not lost his salvation. You do not lose your salvation. Christ said, I will never leave you. I will never forsake you. He said, I give unto them eternal life, and they will never perish, and neither shall any man ever pluck them out of my Father’s hand. Those are divine promises. So God actually spared David from going into battle and killing his own people. In 1 Samuel 29, 1 through 11, when King Achish would not allow him to fight under the advice of his military commanders. So he did not wind up going to fight. And Saul died. Saul had been predicted by Samuel, you’re going to die tomorrow. You and your sons are both going to die. And Saul died, ascending to death in that battle. fell upon his own sword and took his own life. And that’s how bad it got to be. David is excused from duty when it comes to fighting his own man. So now we’ve learned that. And let’s look at how Saul dies in battle, okay? This is in 1 Samuel chapter 31, the tragic end of Saul and his sons. Now the Philistines fought against Israel and the men of Israel, fled. The Philistines fought against Israel and the men of Israel fled. They broke and ran, fled before the Philistines and they fell slain on Mount Gilboa. Then the Philistines followed hard after Saul and his son, Jonathan. And the Philistines killed Jonathan, killed Abinadad, killed another son, all three sons. And the battle became fierce against Saul and the archers hit him with arrows and he was wounded severely by the archers. Then Saul said to the one who bore his armor, draw your sword, thrust me through with it and kill me, lest these uncircumcised men come and thrust me through and abuse me. But his armor bearer would not do so because he was greatly afraid. This is the same thing David feared. I’m not killing him. If he’s supposed to die, let God kill him, not me. This should remind you, God didn’t send you to straighten out anybody’s problem. He can handle the own straightening out. And you decide in your mind you need to get rid of the preacher. You decide in your mind you need to get rid of the president. You decide in your mind you need to do something. You need to wait and let the justice of God handle it. The justice of God can handle it. The Supreme Court of Heaven is open 24 hours a day. Go to the Father in prayer. Put it before him in prayer and watch what he will do. So Saul was greatly afraid. And his armor bearer saw that he wasn’t going to do that. He said, I’m not going to do that. Therefore, Saul took out his own sword and fell on it. And when the armor bearer saw Saul was dead, he also fell on his sword and died with him. So Saul and all of his sons and his armor bearer and all of his men died together that same day. And when the men of Israel who were on the other side of the valley and those who were on the other side of the Jordan saw Saul, that the men of Israel had fled and that Saul and his sons were dead, they forsook the cities and they fled. And the Philistines came and dwelt in their cities. And so it happened the next day when the Philistines came to strip the slain that they found Saul and his three sons fallen on Mount Geboa. And they cut off Saul’s head, stripped off all of his armor, and sent word throughout the land of the Philistines to proclaim it in the temple of their idols and among all of their people. And then they put his armor in the temple and then they fastened his body to the wall. And when the inhabitants of Gilead heard about what the Philistines had done to Saul, all the valiant men arose and traveled at night and came under the cover of darkness and took Saul, took the bodies of his sons off the wall of Beth-shan. And they came to Jabesh and burned them there and they took their bones and buried them under the tamarisk tree at Jabesh and they fasted for seven days. And that’s the last thing we hear of Saul. So there you have it, a lot of mistakes by David, a lot of tragedy by Saul, a politician trying to retain his power in the hour of weakness. You know, it’s really tragic to hear these sort of things. It’s tragic to see what’s happening in our country today. May I remind you that we have forsaken the word of God. Hosea 4.6 says, my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Since you’ve rejected knowledge, I will reject you from being a priest for me. This country has been a priest nation for God for many years. We have sent forth missionaries across the world. We have been a haven for the Jew. We have evangelized our own and everyone else we can. We’ve protected the word of God. And God has blessed us in a mighty way, ways that no other nation in the world has been blessed in. And now we face a pandemic, not just us, but the whole world. But it’s at a political season, at election time. And so it’s being used as a weapon against the current president by the incoming administration who wants to take charge, who think they can do a better job of managing things. So the only way they know how to do that is to attack the person, attack the person of our president, to malign him, run him down, slander him, criticize him, and lie about him. of course our president doesn’t take it lying down he always fights back which is interesting so we’re in a critical time in history here’s the answer the answer is you as goes your spiritual life so goes the course of history in America it doesn’t depend on the current president it doesn’t depend on who might be president it Our freedom and the blessing of God on our nation depends on you. As goes your spiritual life, so will go the history of the United States of America. Now, we’re at a crossroads in history. It’s not hard to see that. We’re looking at a crossroads. Which way are you going to go? While the pandemic is going on, many people are beginning to turn to the Lord and focus on the Lord and cry for the Lord to help them. But when this stuff is over and life goes back to normal, if it ever does, then people are going to forget about God, right? They go back to just what they’ve been doing, being occupied with the gifts and forgetting who the giver is. That’s what’s got us here to start with. We have forsaken the Lord. We’ve moved away from his word, and everything that is right has now become wrong, and everything that used to be wrong is now ordained as right. It’s sick. We are sick. We have abandoned God’s word. We’ve abandoned the principles of God, and you’re seeing it in politicians today, and you’re seeing it in the power struggle for office of the presidency of the United States. May God deliver us from what lies ahead, from what we may see. Who knows? But we’re coming into the most perilous time in history in this election year. My prayer is that you will seek the Lord’s will and that you will do as God leads you to do and that God will raise up some man, whoever it may be, that will deliver us from the coming doom that we face in the future. Until we get back to the Word of God, until we get back to honoring God, there’s no way we’re ever going to be prosperous and no way we’re ever going to survive. We’re split down the middle. Think about it. Pray about it. And get with it spiritually so that God can use you in the future. And this is my prayer and praying for you and your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Floodline.
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Thank you for listening to The Floodline with your host, Rick Hughes. If you’d like to contact Rick, please write to him at P.O. Box 100, Cropwell, Alabama, 35054, or online at www.rickhughesministries.org.
