Faithful God #2
| David and his men reached Ziklag on the third day. Now the Amalekites had raided the Negev and Ziklag. They had attacked Ziklag and burned it, 2 and had taken captive the women and all who were in it, both young and old. They killed none of them, but carried them off as they went on their way. (1Samuel30:1-2) |
The predicament is that the Philistines are attacking Israel and, in the battle, Saul and Jonathan will be killed. David and his men would have done nothing -- while they had not fought against their own people, they had also not fought for their own people.
The crisis is that, while they were at the battle line, Israel's other enemies, the Amelekites, had attacked David's home city, Ziklag, and carried women, children and plunder off into captivity.
If David had not been delivered from fighting in the Philistine-Israelite war, it would have been many days after the attack on Ziklag, but now it was just afterwards and David is in a position to rescue them.
But not only does their "early discharge" from the Philistine army resolve the crisis of the "Ziklag kidnapees" but it resolves David's predicament too, because now, instead of being passive while the Israelites are fighting Philistines, David is now fighting Israel's other enemy, the Amelekites.
"Ah it's all coincidence!" say the scoffers, but one cannot deny the perfect timing of all these intricate events and it's actually easier to believe that it was God's faithful hand in all this than to believe that it was random coincidence.
So too we find God mysteriously at work in the crises and predicaments of our lives.
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