I Samuel 29:8 And David said unto Achish, But what have I done? And what hast thou found in thy servant so long as I have been with thee unto this day, that I may not go fight against the enemies of my lord the king?
Some people are always throwing their elbows. They are always fighting, scrapping to get to the front of the line. People who are of action and also awareness, realizing there are other people around, often have to excuse themselves. They seem to be always saying, “Pardon me. Excuse me. I didn’t mean that.” King David was a man of action, but he was also a man of awareness. So, a number of times through his life he asked the question, “What have I done?” Basically he is saying, “Pardon me.” He is protesting his innocence.
On the other hand, Shakespeare has one of his characters in Hamlet saying, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” That is kind of a cliché for us. If someone overly protests their innocence, we think there is something to hide. If someone is always saying, “I’m innocent. I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” then you wonder what it is that they didn’t do.
So, David was a man who usually protested his innocence because he was innocent, and you find the same in I Samuel 29:8 where he says to the king of the Philistines, King Achish, “What have I done?” What had David done? David had fled King Saul. David had fled right into the hands and arms of the Philistines, and now his ruse is coming to a head, which is to say, the Philistines are going up against King Saul in battle. They expect David, whom they believe an honest ally, to go with them.
What would David do once he got to the battlefield? Would he fight against his own people? What would he do? We don’t know, because God spared David that problem. The lords of the Philistines essentially said to their king, “Don’t trust this David. He is the champion who killed our Goliath. Don’t trust him. As soon as he gets to the battlefield he will come from behind and whack you in order to gain favor with King Saul again.”
David says to Achish, “But what have I done? and what hast thou found in thy servant so long as I have been with thee unto this day, that I may not go fight against the enemies of my lord the king?” David is speaking of the Israelites. King Achish for his part is saying over and again, “Hey, you are an angel of Jehovah. You are an honest man, David.” Yet, at this point in his life, David was not acting the honest man.
Throughout his life he had protested his innocence. In chapter 17 when he went to the battle of the Israelites against the Philistines and eventually killed Goliath, his brother said, “I know the naughtiness of your heart. I know why you’ve come to the battle. You just want to see what’s going on. You are prideful.” David said, “Is there not a cause? Didn’t Dad send me here for a reason, to bring you food? What have I now done?”
Again, in chapter 20, David said to Jonathan, Saul’s son, “What have I done? Your dad is hunting me as if I am an animal.” The answer to both those previous questions was, “David, you’ve done nothing. You are innocent.” Perhaps out of habit he asks King Achish, “What have I done?” The answer is, “A lot. You’ve not been living in integrity.”
Now we can understand David’s plight. We can certainly sympathize. Was David a good man? Yes! Was he persecuted by Saul? Yes! Was he being honest now? No! There is a sense in which the universe knew that. The Amalekites certainly did. In I Samuel 30:1 it says, “And it came to pass, when David and his men were come to Ziklag on the third day, that the Amalekites had invaded the south, and Ziklag, and smitten Ziklag, and burned it with fire.” The king of the Philistines basically sent David back to the land that he had allotted to David because his lords did not trust David to fight on the side of the Philistines. When they got there, they found that the Amalekites had invaded their homes and taken their families.
Why did the Amalekites do that? It is because of David’s own lie. For some time, David had been going on forays against the Amalekites and pretending as if he were making incursions into Israel. The fact is, he had been killing Amalekites and leaving no survivors to tell what he had done. Well, there were some other Amalekites and somehow they had known. So, there is a sense in which because David was not honest, the entire universe knew, the Amalekites knew and God knew.
We can learn something from a good man who is involved in bad actions. That is, nothing protests one’s innocence as effectively as the truth. If David, who was a good man, was living a life of inconsistency, then certainly I can and you can as well. It is fine to say, “Excuse me. Excuse me,” but none of us want to live a life of excuses. The best life to live is a life of integrity and truth. When I do that, I don’t have to have a long memory or remember my story from before, and I have the protection of God because God honors the truth.