This is such a stark and brutal set of texts. David’s father-in-law, the king, goes insane and tries to murder him. Sometimes we miss the shock of this because we’re familiar with it, but it reads like a true crime novel. David has done nothing but serve Saul. He married Saul’s daughter and was best friends with Saul’s son; he was a distinguished and celebrated military leader that massacred Saul’s enemies and led Israel to glorious victories. Then, out of nowhere, “Saul tried to pin him to the wall with his spear” (19:10). It actually says that. Later he hunts him, “track[s] him down” like a rat in the mountains, David narrowly escaping with his life (23:26). David’s life flips on a dime from golden boy royalty to despised and hunted. It was quite literally safer for him in foreign hostile territory than it was in his own home (27:1).
There’s a small detail in this text that turned my head upon re-reading. 19:9 tells us that “an evil spirit from the Lord came on Saul” which led him to try to spear David. An interesting connection appears when we remember that, similarly, Isaiah tells us about Jesus that it “was the Lord’s will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer.” God brought about the suffering of the king.
A suffering king is no new idea to the Bible, especially during this season of the year. Strangely, the all-powerful God likes to conquer through weakness and perfect through suffering. God chose the youngest, smallest, weakest son of Jesse, a kid about whom we might say “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him” (Isaiah 53:2). David was not sinless, but was innocent in this matter, and still the Lord caused Saul to hate him. Jesus was morally perfect in every way, yet “the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (53:6).
The king who is destined by God to suffer is the embodiment of God’s upside down, inside out kingdom. In a world ruled by power, God overthrew the world with weakness. When we needed a Savior, God fittingly sent the One King who rules and reigns to bring salvation to completion through His lowly suffering (Hebrews 2:10). As one commentator says, the cross “is the most revealing of the nature of God.” [1] Behold, then, your God and King, nailed to a tree, a Man of sorrows who was acquainted with grief, so great, that even His suffering and death are simply the beginning of His victory.
[1] Donald Guthrie, Hebrews: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 15, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1983), 92.
Written by: Danny Nathan, Worship Director
Based on: 1 Samuel 19; 23:15–29; 26; 27:1
Passion Week Devotional 2025: Day Five