Miss the lesson of King David's life-long test, and we risk failing the test ourselves. Make no mistake: It is the same test you are currently facing and will face again.
In my Community Bible Study, we're going through First and Second Samuel. Right now, we're going through the rise and fall of King Saul and the life of King David. One of the lessons seemed to center on David passing a test when David refrained from killing King Saul and Nabal (the miserable miser whose wise wife David later married). According to the lesson, the test seemed to be repeated three times—David refused to kill King Saul at two opportunities and was held back from killing Nabal by Nabal's cool-headed wife.
However, if we think that the test in front of David was simply to not kill King Saul or the annoying Nabal, we miss the test entirely. And we will likely miss the lesson we need in order to pass the same test.
David indeed refused to kill King Saul because he was God's anointed. It certainly would have been more expedient to kill him. Letting King Saul live meant more than a decade of misery for David, his family, his men, his men's families, and all of Israel. King Saul mistreated everyone around him—even throwing his spear at his son Jonathan in a fit of rage.
The counselor in me can't help but see King Saul as a schizophrenic: He's delusional, paranoid, hyperactive, grandiose, obsessed, and possesses unclear thinking, which are the top signs of a schizophrenic. He's given to fits of mania as well as going from hyper-passionate to extremely depressed. In someone who is raised to know God's law and then does not do it, schizophrenia would be a natural result of the super-highs that came when God's spirit moved on him and the super-lows of when God rejected him or when he felt guilty for doing what he wanted to do, even when he knew he was disobeying a direct order from God.
(This happens, for example, in Christian men who struggle with pornography. They experience such extreme highs from the sin and such extreme lows from the shame cycle that it creates an unhealthy state of mind that can eventually lead to schizophrenia. Don't ever let anyone tell you that pornography has no victims. Sin always grows, always spreads, and always requires more from you than you were willing to give.)
King Saul's pursuit of David meant severe neglect of the rest of his duties and even left Israel open to marauding armies. He was a terrible king. You and I would not have to look hard to find justification to eliminate him. But David refuses both opportunities.
But the test wasn't to refrain from killing God's anointed, King Saul.
The test wasn't to refrain from killing. David did a LOT of that in his day. If we read the life of David and see the tests as "Don't kill" or "Don't kill specific people but kill others" then we run the risk of reading ahead, assuming the lesson of David's life does not apply to us. We, after all, don't usually have to run for our lives or refrain from killing mad-kings or insulting kingpins.
I've heard sermons that made much of David's repentance as the test he passed. They point to Acts 13:22 where God says "After removing Saul, he made David their king. God testified concerning him: ‘I have found David son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.’ Or they point us to the summary of David's life in 1 King's 15:5 "For David had done what was right in the eyes of the LORD and had not failed to keep any of the LORD’s commands all the days of his life—except in the case of Uriah the Hittite." But the declaration in Acts isn't about repentance and the summary in 1 Kings adds David's failure as an asterisc, but mentions nothing about repentance.
But the test wasn't to have a repentant heart.
The scripture in Acts is a reference to 1 Samuel 13:14, where the prophet Samuel informs King Saul that God has chosen another instead, because of his disobedience. Taken together, these three scriptures provide us with the nature of the test AND the answer to succeed.
God says of David:
He will do everything I want him to do
Had not failed to keep any of the Lord's commands (except in the adultery issue)
The test was always about obedience.
The man that believes will obey; failure to obey is convincing proof that there is not true faith present. To attempt the impossible God must give faith or there will be none, and He gives faith to the obedient heart only. - A. W. Tozer
God gives faith to attempt the impossible commands of God to the heart that obeys. Over and over Jesus says: Know God. Trust God. Obey God.
If we know God intimately, we will trust God, if we trust God, we will obey him. Obedience is the fruit of knowing God.
If we read 1 and 2 Samuel from this perspective, we can now see that in almost each chapter, King Saul careens from doing what God commands to disobedience. Then the torch is passed to King David. In some chapters, we can see that David forgets to consult with God and ends up in some crazy predicaments (such as having to drool down his beard to pretend he's mad or living in Philistine territory while sneak-attacking Israel's enemies). In other chapters, we can see that David remembers to ask God what to do. Sometimes he seeks God's heart through prophets and priests (he keeps the only one that escaped King Saul's mass murder rather handy, in his own entourage). Sometimes he seeks God's heart on his own, in worship.
Towards the end of King Saul's life, we now see a consistent pattern in David's life of seeking God's heart: Lord, do you want me to do this? God answers sometimes with a Yes or a No. Sometimes with specific instructions, such as when he tells David to wait for the sound of the angel armies marching in the tree tops. 2 Samuel 8:14b tells us that God empowered David's success in all he did.
Thankfully, this test is an open-book test: God also gives us the answer for how David was able to do all that God commanded and receive such a glowing "grade" on the test—one that is certainly the test of our lives.
The answer to passing the test is found in the phrase "after his/my own heart." In Hebrew, the word is kil-bā-bōw. In Greek, the keyword is "kata." Kilbabow provides the understanding that a heart can spread from one to another (like a contagion, either positive or negative). Kata provides the understanding that a pattern is communicated and comes from a higher position to a downward one. Kata also indicates "filled, in totality."
David passed the test and did all that God commanded because his heart wholly belonged to God. The Fear of God, the fountainhead of wisdom, ruled in David's heart. Even when he made three huge mistakes that cost tens of thousands of lives (adultery with Bathsheba, murder of Uriah, and counting his troops), he demonstrated a fear of the Lord and a faith that trusting himself to the merciful heart of a holy God was a better place than being on his own.
This is the abiding that Christ means when he tells us that life is found in abiding in him and that without him, we can do nothing:
“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." - John 15:5
This is the test: Will we receive God's heart? Will we abide in his heart?
If we will do so, we will live.