1 Samuel 29:1–5

Then the Philistines gathered together all their armies at Aphek, and the Israelites encamped by a fountain which is in Jezreel. And the lords of the Philistines passed in review by hundreds and by thousands, but David and his men passed in review at the rear with Achish. Then the princes of the Philistines said, “What are these Hebrews doing here?”

And Achish said to the princes of the Philistines, “Is this not David, the servant of Saul king of Israel, who has been with me these days, or these years? And to this day I have found no fault in him since he defected to me.”

But the princes of the Philistines were angry with him; so the princes of the Philistines said to him, “Make this fellow return, that he may go back to the place which you have appointed for him, and do not let him go down with us to battle, lest in the battle he become our adversary. For with what could he reconcile himself to his master, if not with the heads of these men? Is this not David, of whom they sang to one another in dances, saying:

‘Saul has slain his thousands,
And David his ten thousands’?”

David and his men catch a huge break; they won’t be involved in any way in the coming battle. This prevents David from possibly killing Saul, or even being accused of killing Saul. The same goes for his men. They can’t kill any Israelites.

Who can know what nightmares will be avoided because of this? The recriminations could be endless.

David will ultimately be hailed as a man after God’s own heart. He will make mistakes, and be called out severely for them, but he will be held up as the great king. His dynasty is even messianic.

But this battle has the potential to ruin all that. Keeping David from it is part of the plan of redemption.

Many of God’s greatest blessings are the things we cannot see—the things that didn’t happen because God kept them from happening. Sometimes we notice that we “just dodged a bullet,” but usually we don’t know what we don’t know.

Detecting these hidden blessings is difficult, even unnatural. When we reflect on what might have been, we usually think of good things we missed. We don’t want to think about all the ways our sin and stupidity might have taken us out.

Thus, we fail to see, and fail to appreciate, many of God’s greatest blessings. Even though we don’t intend it that way, this is effectively the same as having a negative attitude.

By failing to think about the disasters we avoided, we compare what did happen to an unrealistic ideal.

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These weekday DEEPs are written by Mike Slay. The Saturday ones are written by Matt Richardson. To subscribe to the DEEP click here: https://www.ailbe.org/resources/community

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Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.