Anger’s Folly; Anger Foiled

Scripture: 1 Samuel 25

Sermon: Anger’s Folly; Anger Foiled

Topics: Abigail, Nabal, David, wisdom, folly, anger

Preached: March 7, 2004

Rev. Mike Abma

PREAMBLE

Tonight we will be listening to one of those hidden treasures in the Bible.

It is the story of David, Nabal and Abigail as found in 1 Samuel 25.

It is wedged between two other David stories and in both of these David shows mercy and spares the life of his relentless pursuer King Saul.

Even though Saul is not in this story, his figure still hangs in the background.

We are going to read this story in 2 parts.

After part 1 you will be tempted to continue reading part 2.

I ask you to resist temptation, to restrain the urge, and to patiently listen.

Listen, now, to the story of David, Nabal, and Abigail.

1 Samuel 25: 1-13

Now Samuel died; and all Israel assembled and mourned for him. They buried him at his home in Ramah.

Then David got up and went down to the wilderness of Paran.

2 There was a man in Maon, whose property was in Carmel. The man was very rich; he had three thousand sheep and a thousand goats. He was shearing his sheep in Carmel. ³Now the name of the man was Nabal, and the name of his wife Abigail. The woman was clever and beautiful, but the man was surly and mean; he was a Calebite. ⁴David heard in the wilderness that Nabal was shearing his sheep. ⁵So David sent ten young men; and David said to the young men, ‘Go up to Carmel, and go to Nabal, and greet him in my name. ⁶Thus you shall salute him: “Peace be to you, and peace be to your house, and peace be to all that you have. ⁷I hear that you have shearers; now your shepherds have been with us, and we did them no harm, and they missed nothing, all the time they were in Carmel. ⁸Ask your young men, and they will tell you. Therefore let my young men find favour in your sight; for we have come on a feast day. Please give whatever you have at hand to your servants and to your son David.” ’

9 When David’s young men came, they said all this to Nabal in the name of David; and then they waited. ¹⁰But Nabal answered David’s servants, ‘Who is David? Who is the son of Jesse? There are many servants today who are breaking away from their masters. ¹¹Shall I take my bread and my water and the meat that I have butchered for my shearers, and give it to men who come from I do not know where?’ ¹²So David’s young men turned away, and came back and told him all this. ¹³David said to his men, ‘Every man strap on his sword!’ And every one of them strapped on his sword; David also strapped on his sword; and about four hundred men went up after David, while two hundred remained with the baggage.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

PART ONE — ANGER’S FOLLY 1 Samuel 25: 1-13

CHARACTERS

Stories involve characters and action.

The characters of this story are presented right from the start.

First there is David: the man anointed to be king but not yet crowned as king.

The man who has spent his days and nights running from king Saul.

The man who has attracted to himself a formidable force of 600

outlaws, armed and dangerous.

Next we have the odd couple of Nabal and Abigail. I call them an odd couple because they are so different from each other.

Nabal is described as surly and mean. He is self-absorbed and stingy. One form of the name Nabal actually means fool. Nabal is not so much a silly buffoon as he is a mean-spirited, self-centered maniac.

Abigail is the exact opposite. She is intelligent, beautiful, and always thinking of others. In many ways, she embodies wisdom. How they ever became husband and wife is beyond me. I tend to think Abigail didn’t have much choice in the matter.

These, then, are the three main characters.

ACTION

Now for the action. It is David who gets things going. He and his band of 600 merry men, have been roaming the fields in this area of southern Judah. They restrain themselves from looting and pillaging – in fact they do the opposite. They act something like a protection agency for the local farmers. But now they want to get paid. So David sends a message to one of the wealthiest farmers in the region and asks,

“It is feast time, so spare what you can for us.”

David gets the ball rolling by asking.

Nabal heats things up by flatly refusing the request.

Not only does he refuse, but Nabal also insults David. Nabal says, “Who does this David fellow think he is? I think I know who he is. He is an extortionist, a terrorist, an outlaw. He is a nobody, leading a pack of nobodies, who deserve nothing.”

David’s messengers report every word of this back to David.

David’s request is rejected. But more than that, he is humiliated.

And David is steamed, he is ticked, he is boiling.

David becomes unhinged, he goes off the deep end;

he blows a gasket, he goes ballistic — isn’t it amazing how many expressions there are for getting angry?

There are so many expressions because we are all too familiar with the feeling.

We know what it means to feel slighted, insulted, put down, demeaned, taunted, or teased. We know what it feels like to be treated like a nobody. We also know what it feels like to be so angry, we just want to hurt somebody, or something.

Not so long ago, NPR had a short report of a woman in Germany who found that her car had been blocked in its parking spot. She was furious. So she simply got in her car, rammed it forward, rammed it backward, until she was finally able to exit her parking spot. But she drove away, having done $130,000 worth of damages to the cars around her.

Anger can do that to a person. It can make a person react totally out of proportion to the insult or injury or annoyance.

In the book of Proverbs, anger is continually tied to folly.

A patient person has great understanding.

But a quick-tempered person displays folly. 14:29

The question for David is “How will he respond?”

That he is angry is clear.

But what will that anger do to him is the question?

Will he control his anger or will his anger control him?

The questions floating around the larger story are questions about David:

Will he be an angry, grumpy fool like Nabal?

Even more to the point, will he be any better than Saul – Saul, the

spear-throwing, moody, temperamental, image-obsessed king?

Would David be any better?

By verses 12 and 13 things don’t look good.

David basically says, “Meat’s back on the menu, boys”^[1] and he and his 400 men, armed and dangerous, are ready to completely wipe out Nabal and take whatever he owns by force.

By the end of scene 1, things look very bad not only for Nabal, but also for David.

PART TWO ANGER FOILED 1 Samuel 25: 13-4

But one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal’s wife, ‘David sent messengers out of the wilderness to salute our master; and he shouted insults at them. ¹⁵Yet the men were very good to us, and we suffered no harm, and we never missed anything when we were in the fields, as long as we were with them; ¹⁶they were a wall to us both by night and by day, all the while we were with them keeping the sheep. ¹⁷Now therefore know this and consider what you should do; for evil has been decided against our master and against all his house; he is so ill-natured that no one can speak to him.’

18 Then Abigail hurried and took two hundred loaves, two skins of wine, five sheep ready dressed, five measures of parched grain, one hundred clusters of raisins, and two hundred cakes of figs. She loaded them on donkeys ¹⁹and said to her young men, ‘Go on ahead of me; I am coming after you.’ But she did not tell her husband Nabal. ²⁰As she rode on the donkey and came down under cover of the mountain, David and his men came down towards her; and she met them. ²¹Now David had said, ‘Surely it was in vain that I protected all that this fellow has in the wilderness, so that nothing was missed of all that belonged to him; but he has returned me evil for good. ²²God do so to David and more also, if by morning I leave as much as one male of all who belong to him.’

23 When Abigail saw David, she hurried and alighted from the donkey, and fell before David on her face, bowing to the ground. ²⁴She fell at his feet and said, ‘Upon me alone, my lord, be the guilt; please let your servant speak in your ears, and hear the words of your servant. ²⁵My lord, do not take seriously this ill-natured fellow Nabal; for as his name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, and folly is with him; but I, your servant, did not see the young men of my lord, whom you sent.

26 ‘Now then, my lord, as the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, since the Lord has restrained you from blood-guilt and from taking vengeance with your own hand, now let your enemies and those who seek to do evil to my lord be like Nabal. ²⁷And now let this present that your servant has brought to my lord be given to the young men who follow my lord.²⁸Please forgive the trespass of your servant; for the Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house, because my lord is fighting the battles of the Lord; and evil shall not be found in you as long as you live. ²⁹If anyone should rise up to pursue you and to seek your life, the life of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living under the care of the Lord your God; but the lives of your enemies he shall sling out as from the hollow of a sling. ³⁰When the Lord has done to my lord according to all the good that he has spoken concerning you, and has appointed you prince over Israel,³¹my lord shall have no cause of grief, or pangs of conscience, for having shed blood without cause or for having saved himself. And when the Lordhas dealt well with my lord, then remember your servant.’

32 David said to Abigail, ‘Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you to meet me today! ³³Blessed be your good sense, and blessed be you, who have kept me today from blood-guilt and from avenging myself by my own hand! ³⁴For as surely as the Lord the God of Israel lives, who has restrained me from hurting you, unless you had hurried and come to meet me, truly by morning there would not have been left to Nabal as much as one male.’ ³⁵Then David received from her hand what she had brought him; he said to her, ‘Go up to your house in peace; see, I have heeded your voice, and I have granted your petition.’

36 Abigail came to Nabal; he was holding a feast in his house, like the feast of a king. Nabal’s heart was merry within him, for he was very drunk; so she told him nothing at all until the morning light. ³⁷In the morning, when the wine had gone out of Nabal, his wife told him these things, and his heart died within him; he became like a stone. ³⁸About ten days later the Lord struck Nabal, and he died.

39 When David heard that Nabal was dead, he said, ‘Blessed be the Lordwho has judged the case of Nabal’s insult to me, and has kept back his servant from evil; the Lord has returned the evildoing of Nabal upon his own head.’ Then David sent and wooed Abigail, to make her his wife.⁴⁰When David’s servants came to Abigail at Carmel, they said to her, ‘David has sent us to you to take you to him as his wife.’ ⁴¹She rose and bowed down, with her face to the ground, and said, ‘Your servant is a slave to wash the feet of the servants of my lord.’ ⁴²Abigail got up hurriedly and rode away on a donkey; her five maids attended her. She went after the messengers of David and became his wife.

43 David also married Ahinoam of Jezreel; both of them became his wives. ⁴⁴Saul had given his daughter Michal, David’s wife, to Palti son of Laish, who was from Gallim.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

ANGER FOILED

From verse 14 onward Abigail steals the show.

She literally steps between Nabal, the fool, and David, the hot-blooded monarch-to-be bent on restoring his honor.

As quickly as David sets things in motion for the sake of revenge,

so quickly Abigail sets things in motion for reconciliation.

She gathers this massive quantity of food.

Then Abigail literally throws not only this food, but also herself into this mountainous ravine, this narrow gap between the two large colossal egos of Nabal and David which are about to collide.

When she enters this mountainous ravine, there is David, mumbling and grunting to himself. He is venting his anger. He is getting himself worked up for what he is about to do.

There is a theory out there that we always need to vent our anger – let it all out. Yell, Scream, Shout, that’s okay. I call it the Mount Vesuvius theory of anger. Vent that anger or else it will explode.

The problem with this theory is that it isn’t really true. Here is David, venting away, and he is no less angry than when he left camp. If anything, he is more angry, and more ready to wipe Nabal out. That is what venting often does – it gets us more angry, not less.

Abigail, steps in and shows how to really deal with anger.

You may wonder, “Was Abigail angry?”

Well, think about it.

Her knuckleheaded husband, Nabal, is about to get everyone killed.

She has got to ride out to the rescue – and we get the distinct impression that in being married to Nabal, this is not the first fire that she has had to put out.

Wouldn’t you be angry?

There are some people who can only see Abigail as the passive, placating wife who gets off her donkey, bows before David, and does a bit of groveling because of the mess Nabal has got them into.

But that is getting the picture all wrong. Abigail isn’t passive, she is active. She isn’t simply placating, she is assertive.

The Bible clearly portrays her as a strong, decisive, resourceful, courageous woman.

How does she handle the anger in the air?

1. The first thing she does is absorb the anger herself – in almost a Christ-like way, she absorbs the blame for someone else’s folly.

2. The second thing she does is be honest. She doesn’t cover for her husband. This is not a case of co-dependency here. She knows Nabal and she knows he is a fool. She in fact calls him a fool, plain and simple.

3. But the most wondrous thing about Abigail’s long talk with David is how vastly different it is from Nabal’s.

Where Nabal called for the worst in David, Abigail calls for the best.

Where Nabal called David a nobody, Abigail reminds David he is a somebody.

Abigail calls David to remember who he is:

He is the leader of men.

He will begin a dynasty.

He is blessed by the Lord.

And he is about to be king.

That is perhaps one of the most dangerous things about anger. It has the effect of causing us to momentarily forget who we are.

Abigail’s words have the effect of reminding David who he is. He is not Saul. He is to be a forefather of the Messiah.

Conclusions

Anger remains a volatile, explosive, and potentially destructive force in our lives.

Whether it is the anger that explodes into rage, or that simmers long in bitterness and resentment, anger has the ability to corrode us on the inside and demolish things on the outside.

This sermon comes partly out of reading a book by Garret Keizer called The Enigma of Anger. It is an exploration of how much anger we carry around in our lives – in our families, in our churches, in our heads.

One clear antidote to anger is to give ourselves the time to remember who we are.

Count to ten or hundred or a thousand, just remember who you are.

And who are we?

We are chosen people, we are dearly loved children,

Called to be imitators of God and called to live lives of love.

That doesn’t mean we won’t get angry. We will.

But it does mean that we control our anger rather than have it control us.

Another antidote to anger comes in one of the toughest messages about anger from David’s Son, our Lord. It is the challenge to pray for those who are our enemies. In other words, we have to pray for those very people who make us most angry. And in the end, we have to forgive them – even if they are fools or a pain in the neck.

In the end of the story of David, Nabal and Abigail, the few glimmers of justice and peace come not by David’s sword. David just walks away.

Glimmers of justice and peace do not even come as a result of Abigail’s incredible intervention. She has to go home and tell her knucklehead of a husband the truth.

The few glimmers of justice and peace actually come when we are told the Lord strikes Nabal and he dies.

Anger is at least partly our attempt to make things right, to set the record straight, to fix things, to not let someone get away with that ….

But in the end, justice and peace and all the rest of the things we want put right…..well these are ultimately found in God alone.

1. A “Lord of the Rings” phrase spoken to the orcs of Mordor. ↑