It’s easy to long for the “good old days.” When your church and your town is shrinking in numbers, when folks don’t attend worship like they did before COVID, when it’s harder and harder to deny that the economy, not to mention the culture, is in a serious state of decline, it’s easy to want things to be the way they used to be.

David certainly understood such nostalgia. After all, not too many years before the events of today’s passage, he had been King Saul’s golden boy, promoted from armor-bearer to general of the royal army. He had even married Saul’s daughter, and everyone had been singing about his many military successes (21:11).

But by the end of today’s passage, his former enemies thought so little of him that even when he was standing right outside their gates they didn’t bother to throw him in prison. And even when he began to gather some soldiers around him, a prophet of the Lord made it clear that he wasn’t supposed to stay in a “stronghold,” a relatively safe place. He had to wonder if God was ever going to make him king, as Samuel had promised him (16:13).

And didn’t the Son of David go through the same sort of thing? In the span of one week, He went from the Palm Sunday crowd singing His praise to the Good Friday crowd crying out for His blood. Even his closest friends abandoned Him, and He died on the cross with only two thieves for company.

But we know that God eventually kept His promise to David, no matter how desperate his situation may have seemed while he was on the run from Saul. In fact, even when the Philistines drove him away from them, David confidently sang, “I will bless the Lord at all times” (Psalm 34:1). He even proclaimed, “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He guards all his bones; not one of them is broken” (Psalm 34:19-20).

David thus got a glimpse of how God would eventually bring the greatest good, the salvation of the world, out of the suffering and death of Christ. For even when Jesus was nailed to the cross on Good Friday, not one of His bones was broken (John 19:33, 36). And even though Jesus died to pay the penalty all our sins deserved, the Father delivered Him from death itself, and He walked out of His tomb on the third day.

So, no, things in our lives may not be the way they used to be, or the way we want them to be. But God is still in control of everything that happens to us. And as we trust in His resurrected Son, we can be sure that He is with us, accomplishing His good and perfect will, no matter how things may look to us today.

I Samuel 21:10-22:5 (NASB)

10 Then David arose and fled that day from Saul, and went to Achish king of Gath.
11 But the servants of Achish said to him, “Is this not David the king of the land? Did they not sing of this one as they danced, saying, ‘Saul has slain his thousands, And David his ten thousands ‘?”
12 And David took these words to heart, and greatly feared Achish king of Gath.
13 So he disguised his sanity before them, and acted insanely in their hands, and scribbled on the doors of the gate, and let his saliva run down into his beard.
14 Then Achish said to his servants, “Behold, you see the man behaving as a madman. Why do you bring him to me?
15 “Do I lack madmen, that you have brought this one to act the madman in my presence? Shall this one come into my house?”

22:1 So David departed from there and escaped to the cave of Adullam; and when his brothers and all his father’s household heard of it, they went down there to him.
2 And everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontented, gathered to him; and he became captain over them. Now there were about four hundred men with him.
3 And David went from there to Mizpah of Moab; and he said to the king of Moab, “Please let my father and my mother come and stay with you until I know what God will do for me.”
4 Then he left them with the king of Moab; and they stayed with him all the time that David was in the stronghold.
5 And the prophet Gad said to David, “Do not stay in the stronghold; depart, and go into the land of Judah.” So David departed and went into the forest of Hereth.