Abigail - Beauty, More than Meets the Eye

Good morning and welcome to worship today, especially those of you gathering online as you travel and are home recovering from illness and surgery. It is good to gather with you.

I am so excited about this new series we are starting today for the Fall. I have picked a few names to start with and I have had some others recommended. The only coherent theme will be looking at the amazing, heroic, and otherwise great women of the Bible. This week we begin with Abigail.

Now, I have to admit… I did not remember the story of Abigail, or Abi as I’ll probably call her from time to time. I remember reading through the story of David and Saul, but this one escaped me.

So, we are going to be reading from 1 Samuel, so you can go ahead and open your Bibles up to 1 Samuel 25 as I catch you up in the storyline.

If you remember back to the beginning of the story of the people demanded a king, and Saul is anointed by Samuel as the king. He does good in the eyes of the Lord for a while, then begins to slip away from following God. He makes a few mistakes and Samuel let’s Saul know that he and his heirs will not be king. Samuel then hears from the Lord and goes to anoint the new king from the house of Jesse. Samuel goes to Bethlehem and meets Jesse, and together they sacrifice an animal and each of Jesse’s 9 son’s pass before him. They are strong warrior type men, but none of them are the one… So, Samuel asks Jesse if he has any other sons… in 1 Samuel 16, Jesse says, “Yes, but he’s the youngest and he’s keeping the sheep.” So Jesse calls him from the wilderness and Samuel knows that he is to be king and anoints him to be the next king of Israel.

Fast forward, and David meets Saul, faces Goliath, becomes friends with Saul’s son Jonathan, becomes a warrior in Saul’s army, and marries Saul’s daughter Michal. About this time, Saul begins to get paranoid that David is trying to kill him to take the throne, so Saul starts trying to kill David.

At this point, David and his band of merry men head off into the wilderness to hide from Saul. I say his merry men, because David becomes kind of a Robin Hood figure as he protects the villages, shepherds, and families living in the wilderness. And that is where we pick up. David has some of his men assigned to the family of Nabal in Carmel. Nabal had thousands of sheep and goats that the shepherds led through the wilderness. So, when it was time for the end of season shearing and BBQ, David sends some men to say, “Can we come to the party too?”

David’s men have protected the shepherds, and as they say it, “we never suffered harm and we never missed anything when we were in the fields, as long as we were with David’s men. They were a wall to us both by night and by day, all the while we were with them keeping the sheep.”

You would expect Nabal to invite them to the party, right? Well not this guy.

1 Samuel 25:10-13

“Who is this fellow David?” Nabal sneered to the young men. “Who does this son of Jesse think he is? There are lots of servants these days who run away from their masters. Should I take my bread and my water and my meat that I’ve slaughtered for my shearers and give it to a band of outlaws who come from who knows where?”

So David’s young men returned and told him what Nabal had said. “Get your swords!” was David’s reply as he strapped on his own. Then 400 men started off with David, and 200 remained behind to guard their equipment.

In the 90’s, when I was in the Army, we would have said, they were locked, cocked, and ready to rock. They were going to war! Not only had Nabal refused to invite them to the party, he also insulted David. By the way, the name Nabal actually means “foolish” or “foolish one.”

But there was one thing that stood between this foolish man and his death at the end of David’s sword. Abigail. The NRSV translates here description as clever and beautiful. The new living says she was “sensible and beautiful.” King James says she was “a woman of good understanding, and of a beautiful countenance.” And the Living Bible says she was “a beautiful and very intelligent woman.”

I think you get the point. She had brains and beauty. So, what does this intelligent and beautiful woman do when she discovers what her “brutish, crude, and mean” husband had said about David?

She gets to baking… 200 loaves of bread, 2 skins of wine, 200 fig cakes, 100 clusters of grapes, and 5 dressed and cleaned sheep… all to be delivered to David for his men.

As she rides through the wilderness, she meets David in a valley and bows before him. Begging for mercy on her and her house.

1 Samuel 25:24-25

She fell at his feet and said, “I accept all blame in this matter, my lord. Please listen to what I have to say. I know Nabal is a wicked and ill-tempered man; please don’t pay any attention to him. He is a fool, just as his name suggests. But I never even saw the young men you sent.

She goes on to say,

1 Samuel 25:27-31

And here is a present that I, your servant, have brought to you and your young men. Please forgive me if I have offended you in any way. The Lord will surely reward you with a lasting dynasty, for you are fighting the Lord’s battles. And you have not done wrong throughout your entire life.

“Even when you are chased by those who seek to kill you, your life is safe in the care of the Lord your God, secure in his treasure pouch! But the lives of your enemies will disappear like stones shot from a sling! When the Lord has done all he promised and has made you leader of Israel, don’t let this be a blemish on your record. Then your conscience won’t have to bear the staggering burden of needless bloodshed and vengeance. And when the Lord has done these great things for you, please remember me, your servant!”

She offers the gifts to David’s men and thanks David for his protection in the past. She compliments his leadership. She acknowledges his rightful place as king, and she honors him. Abi even reminds him of his call to be king, and how murdering the men would be a blemish on his record as king.

She is wise, she is beautiful, she is cunning.

So, what does David do?

1 Samuel 25:32-34

David replied to Abigail, “Praise the Lord, the God of Israel, who has sent you to meet me today! Thank God for your good sense! Bless you for keeping me from murder and from carrying out vengeance with my own hands. For I swear by the Lord, the God of Israel, who has kept me from hurting you, that if you had not hurried out to meet me, not one of Nabal’s men would still be alive tomorrow morning.”

Certainly, her beauty was more than skin deep.

Would you pray with me?

[Prayer]

The law of the jungle prevailed. Oh, they had cleared the jungle, their captors had made sure of that, but somewhere between the starvation, the beatings, and the hard labor, the men in the WW2 Japanese prison camp Chungkai had reverted to a more savage time. Earnest Gordon had come into the camp a robust Scotsman, but the diphtheria had drained the life from his body and was but a shell of the man he once was as he lay on his cot wishing for, hoping for, and welcoming the death that would soon come. But then something changed.

One day, two new prisoners were transferred into the camp. Rather than steal rations from others, they shared. Rather than avoid work, they took extra shifts to give the weaker men a break. Don’t get me wrong, they were just as thin and frail as any of the other prisoners, but there was something different about them. They began to treat Gordon’s ulcerated sores and massage his atrophied legs. Slowly, his strength returned, and with it his dignity.

They new way of life, their witness, the beauty of their actions, transformed the camp. Soon, Gordon began to care for those more sick than he. The others in the camp became generous and gracious. There was a brightness in the camp now, though they were still held captive. They began to hold worship services and Bible studies. Twenty years later, as a Chaplain at Princeton, Ernest Gordon would share these words;

“Death was still with us—no doubt about that but we were slowly being freed from its destructive grip… Selfishness, hatred… and pride were all anti-life. Love… self-sacrifice… and faith, on the other hand, were the essence of life… gifts of God to men… Death no longer had the last word at Chungkai.”

Something happens when beauty enters doesn’t it. No, I’m not talking about comeliness. I’m not talking about what culture defines as beauty or prettiness today, or yesterday, or tomorrow. It seems attractiveness is a fad that passes with the various times – thin or plump, platinum or ginger.

Beauty goes beyond the skin tone and eye color, the cheekbones and hair color. Beauty strikes at the heart of the man or woman. These men that came into Changkai brought with them a beauty that changed the camp, prisoners and captors alike.

Beauty has a way of changing a man.

And that is what happened when David encountered Abi. There is no doubt she was attractive. Scripture is clear to define that… but there was something more. Abi gave, not for what she could get out of it, Abi gave because she knew that she was the only chance that Nabal had. She was the only chance that the men who served Nabal had. She was the only chance that anyone in the village had. She placed herself at the mercy of David and came to take the blame for all that had taken place.

She didn’t make an excuse for what her husband had done, instead she took the blame.

She not only took the blame, she placed herself in position to be the first to receive the sword if her plan did not work. Her willingness to sacrifice herself saved the camp, Nabal, and all his men.

She returned to camp to find Nabal passed out drunk, so she saved the news for the next morning. Then, when she tells him how close David came and how near he came to death and the death of all who lived under his protection, Nabal had a heart attack, spent a week in a coma and died.

When David found out, he reached out to Abigail and asked her to become his wife. I’m sure the physical beauty had something to do with it, but there was certainly more than meets the eye when it comes to Abigail. As Max Lucado puts it,

“…beauty can overcome barbarism.

Meekness saved that day. Abigail’s gentleness reversed a river of rage. Humility has such power. Apologies can disarm arguments. Contrition can defuse rage. Olive branches do more good than battle-axes ever will.”

Meekness. Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek.” We think of the meek and the mild… we think of the meek as the week, but there is much more to that word. Meek is the word that ‘means focused. It is a word used to describe a domesticated stallion. It is power under control.’

There was a power in the beauty and in the sacrifice of Abigail as she bowed before David, certain that she was the only chance at stopping his anger. Her sacrifice saved lives.

A similar thing happened at that Japanese Prisoner of War camp. I won’t go into the gruesome details – you can read the book “To End All Wars” by Ernest Gordon or see the movie by the same title. In a nutshell, there was a miscount of the tools and the guards began threatening to shoot each prisoner until the guilty party stepped forward. A man stepped forward and was beaten to death before the tools were recounted and all were accounted for. One of the prisoners looked at another one and asked, “Who does that?” “Who takes the blame for someone else?”

He stood between the anger of the guard and the other men…

Abigail stood between the anger of David and her guilty foolish husband…

And Jesus stands between us and a holy God. 1 Timothy 2:5-6 tells us that Jesus was our “Mediator who can reconcile God and humanity – the name Christ Jesus. He gave his life to purchase freedom for everyone.”

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that who ever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

And that begs the question… if God loved us that much, can we not love one another?

Because we have been forgiven, can we not forgive?

One prisoner can change a camp.

One Abigail can save a family.

Be the beauty in the midst of the ugliness of the world around us.

Be the body of Christ for the world in need.