To the end of the book of Second Samuel, King David sought God's explanation for a

prolonged famine in the land, but he failed to seek God for the cure. He was an inadequate

king with a faulty plan, and the results turned out to be devastating. Today on Truth for Life,

Alistair Begg helps us find hope in this horrifying story. He's teaching from Second Samuel chapter 21.

I find it distressing when people who fill the role that I fill like to tell people that they know

the exact reason why certain things are happening now. I wonder where they get it all from.

They style themselves as prophets, but they're not prophets. They should have learned from somebody

who is a prophet, namely David, because David you will notice when he is confronted by this circumstance,

sought the face of the Lord. He realized he didn't know the answer to the question,

and therefore he needed to go to the one who did. You see famine was the calamity, but the underlying

cause was a broken covenant which had incurred the wrath of God. The Lord replies to his investigation,

his plea, as it's referred to, in verse 14. There is, as the Lord, and how he spoke to him,

we don't know whether David sought guidance from someone else, or whether in a direct encounter,

what we need to know is here, and that is that there is blood gilded on Saul and on his house,

because he put the gibbianites to death. Now, what we discover is that Saul, in an unrecorded

incident in terms of, first and second Samuel, he had set aside the covenant with the gibbianites,

and had killed a number of them, probably quite a large number of them, and as a result,

had incurred God's wrath, David says to God, what's going on here with this famine? God says,

I'll tell you what, I am against Saul and what he has done, for he has offended against my name,

he has broken the covenant that was made in my name, and therefore that is why you are up against

things as you are. But you will notice that the Lord had told David the cause,

but he does not inform him of the cure, and fascinatingly, David does not, in this instance,

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