“David departed from there and escaped to the cave of Adullam…And everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was bitter in soul, gathered to him. And he became captain over them. And there were with him about four hundred men” (1 Sam. 22:1-2, ESV).
David became a leader of another kind. A group of outcasts who were eaten up by life came to David and followed him. Those who were in distress, in debt, and bitter in soul came to David because David could identify their problems. No matter what the problems might be, such as marital issues, anxiety, doubt, etc…, David could relate to them. The exilic David could relate to those who were in exile. Who we are determines what we see; what we experience shapes the way we relate to the experience of others.
In 2 Corinthians, Paul calls God the “God of all comfort” (1:3). Paul says that this God “comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (1:4, ESV). In wilderness, David must have encountered the God of comfort and experienced the comfort of God. Because David tasted what it was like to be comforted in distress, he was able to comfort those who were bitter in their souls. He had empathy toward them.
David didn’t ask for the experience in wilderness. No one asks for discomfort and suffering. It’s just part of life. Theologically, it’s part of God’s sovereign plan to prepare us and present us mature in Him. God sent David to the wilderness to minister to these four hundred men who could only be comforted by a soulful leader like David. (Later on, two hundred more men followed David. See 1 Sam. 23:13; 25:13; 27:2; 30:9) No one prefers a wilderness experience. But by God’s sovereignty, David and this group of men met in an unexpected place. In God’s sovereign will and grace, David became a pastor and a counselor among the 600 men in the wilderness.
These are the people David lived with for that decade of wilderness years. They foraged together, ate together, prayed together, fought together. There’s nothing explicit in the text about the spirituality of David’s company—nothing that says they became a community of faith and searched out the ways in which God worked his salvation in their lives—but the context demands it. We know that David prayed; I think it’s safe to assume that he taught his companions to pray, surviving in hostile surroundings and realizing that God was with them, working out his sovereign purposes in them.[1]
David and the group foreshadow a relationship between a pastor and a congregation.
[1] Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall: Earthly Spirituality for Everyday Christians (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), pp. 94-95.
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