Biblion Bible Commentary
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He Strengthened Himself in Yahweh
1 Samuel 30:1-15
1 When David and his men had come to Ziklag on the third day, the Amalekites had made a raid on the South and on Ziklag, and had struck Ziklag and burned it with fire, · WEB
David comes home to ashes and an empty town, his own men talking about stones — and the turning point of his life is one sentence long.
When David and his men had come to Ziklag on the third day, the Amalekites had made a raid... and had struck Ziklag and burned it with fire 1 Samuel 30:1.
The bill for sixteen months arrives all at once. The town he took to be safe is ash, every wife and child is gone, and the raiders are Amalekites — the nation Saul was told to finish 1 Samuel 15:3 and the people David had been raiding to keep his cover 1 Samuel 27:8. There is one mercy buried in the report: they didn't kill any 1 Samuel 30:2.
Then David and the people who were with him lifted up their voice and wept until they had no more power to weep 1 Samuel 30:4.
Grief without dignity, described exactly — men crying until crying is no longer physically possible.
David was greatly distressed, for the people spoke of stoning him... but David strengthened himself in Yahweh his God 1 Samuel 30:6.
Here is the hinge of his life, and the two halves of the verse must be read together. He has lost his family, his town, and now his men — the four hundred who followed him through every wilderness are picking up rocks, and their bitterness is not unreasonable, since it was his arrangement that put their families in that town. There is no comfort left in any direction and no one to give it. And the phrase that answers it is the one Jonathan had done for him in the woods 1 Samuel 23:16, now done alone: he strengthens himself in Yahweh his God. Not in his prospects, not in his record, not by talking himself round — the strengthening has an object, and it is a person. What Jonathan taught him in a wood he can now do without Jonathan, which is what discipleship is for.
"Please bring the ephod here to me" 1 Samuel 30:7.
And the very next thing is the thing missing from the whole Ziklag chapter: he asks. Shall I pursue? — and the answer comes back full and specific: pursue, for you will surely overtake them, and will without fail recover all 1 Samuel 30:8. The channel Saul found closed that same week is wide open to a man who had wandered from it, because the difference between them was never the size of the failure.
The pursuit then turns on a dying slave. Two hundred men drop at the brook Besor, exhausted 1 Samuel 30:10, and in a field the rest find an Egyptian abandoned by his Amalekite master because he got sick — three days without food or water 1 Samuel 30:12–13. They feed him first and question him after. The whole rescue depends on a man his own side threw away, which is a lesson about God's methods and about David's men, who at this moment are better than they will be in a few hours.
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