The When you see him trusting God for empowerment and protection against lions and bears and giants and all kinds of enemies and day on truth for life we'll hear about one occasion where David in fear relied

on his own cunning instead of relying on God's faithfulness.

Alistair Begg is opening the Bible to First Samuel.

It is a phenomenal collapse by any standards.

It's right up there with the story of Elijah after his victory with the prophets of bail.

It's the same kind of scandal that you find in the life of Peter, where he says quite presumptiously and presumably in front of his

friends to Jesus, Lord, I'm ready to go with you to prison and to death.

And then within a matter of a very short time

in responding to a lady, he says,

woman, I do not know who Jesus is.

Now it is really quite astonishing that one who has been chosen to be Israel's king

should, as Woodhouse points out, have this skeleton in his closet. And if you look at the

text you can see that it is there and it is hard to deny. He has determined that the best thing he can do is escape.

You'll see that in verse one. I should escape. And so in verse two, we're told that he went over to the other side.

Just even those two words convey, I think more than geography, as we will see. Now one of the striking features that we should

note immediately of the record that we have in the Bible is the way in which it

presents all of its heroes, and we can refer to them in that way, not airbrushed, but

warts and all. And actually is one of the verifying features I think of the authenticity of the It is a record of the people that God has chosen to use.

He puts his treasure in all clay pots,

and we can see that as we read our Bibles.

Now to help us navigate the chapter, I just have three headings. First of all to notice

quite simply in verses 1 to 4 the plan or David's plan. He says what I'm going to do is I will escape and all being well

...