Shall I Go Up?
Initiative Born of Inquiry
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“Now when the Philistines heard that they had anointed David king over Israel, all the Philistines went up to search for David. And David heard of it and went down to the stronghold. The Philistines also went and deployed themselves in the Valley of Rephaim. So David inquired of the LORD, saying, “Shall I go up against the Philistines? Will You deliver them into my hand?”
And the LORD said to David, “Go up, for I will doubtless deliver the Philistines into your hand.”
So David went to Baal Perazim, and David defeated them there; and he said, “The LORD has broken through my enemies before me, like a breakthrough of water.” Therefore he called the name of that place Baal Perazim. And they left their images there, and David and his men carried them away.
Then the Philistines went up once again and deployed themselves in the Valley of Rephaim. Therefore David inquired of the LORD, and He said, “You shall not go up; circle around behind them, and come upon them in front of the mulberry trees. And it shall be, when you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the mulberry trees, then you shall advance quickly. For then the LORD will go out before you to strike the camp of the Philistines.” And David did so, as the LORD commanded him; and he drove back the Philistines from Geba as far as Gezer.” — 2 Samuel 5:17-25
Before the Battle He Knew
David had fought Philistines before. He had cut down their champion as a boy with no armor and no sword of his own, and the memory of that valley was written into Israel’s songs before he ever wore a crown. By the time we meet him in the fifth chapter of Second Samuel he is no longer the shepherd who ran toward Goliath. He is the king of Israel and Jerusalem is his. The house of Saul has fallen and the strongholds of the Jebusites have given way before him. He knows how to fight, and he certainly knows how to win.
So when the Philistines come up to seek him, the question that follows is the one we do not expect. He inquires of the Lord. “Shall I go up to the Philistines? wilt thou deliver them into mine hand?” A seasoned warrior, a crowned king, a man whose name the Philistines themselves feared, stops at the edge of a battle he has fought a hundred times and asks whether he should go. He does not assume and does not lean on the muscle memory of past victories. Instead, he asks.
There is a strangeness to David’s actions that runs counter to normal human disposition. David is not a novice seeking permission. He is the most competent military mind in Israel, and the enemy he faces is the one enemy he understands better than any other. If anyone has earned the right to act on instinct, it is David here. And he does not. Such is the story of maturing believers. The maturity of a believer is not measured by how independently they have learned to act. It is measured by how instinctively they have learned to inquire. The mature soul is not the one who needs God less. It is the one who has stopped pretending there is any province of life that runs on its own.
The Sea We Wait For
There is a kind of believer, and most of us have been and perhaps are this believer, who divides life quietly in two. There is the territory that requires God, and there is the territory that does not. The territory that requires God is reserved for what cannot be solved by ordinary means. The diagnosis the doctor cannot explain. The marriage that has run out of strategies. The child who has wandered past the reach of every parental instrument. Here we pray, we fast and wait for the sea to part and for bread to fall from heaven, because here we have run out of ourselves.
The other territory is everything else. The hour we wake and the job we take. The word we speak in the meeting and the route we take returning home. The small money and the inconsequential minutes. The thousand decisions a day that make up the actual shape of a human life. These we manage and calculate independently. These, we have decided seemingly intelligently.
If anyone asks, we will confess the lordship of Christ over every square inch. But our prayer lives expose the map we are actually living by. We bring the storms to God and we settle the weather ourselves. We ask him for miracles and we manage the rest. We have made ourselves the arbiter of which decisions are God-sized and which are not, and that arbitration is itself a quiet sovereignty. It is the most respectable form of unbelief there is, because it wears the clothes of competence and calls itself stewardship.
The Psalmist saw this and named it without mercy. “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle.” The horse and the mule do not move with their master. They move when the bit is pulled. They respond to pressure, not to presence. Their obedience is mechanical, extracted by force, and it appears only when force is applied.
This is the believer who waits for the sea. The God who must reach for the bridle before we will turn. The God who must arrange a crisis before we will ask. We mistake this for humility, this reluctance to bother him with the small things, but it is not humility. It is the assumption that the small things are not his concern, and underneath that assumption is something colder: the conviction that we are competent to run them ourselves. The crisis is not what makes us spiritual. The crisis is what exposes how little of us was ever listening. The God who guides with His eye is offering a manner of life in which the bit is not needed because the gaze is enough. Where the smallest motion of his will is read and answered, not because we are afraid of the bridle but because we have learned to love the eye.
The Second Time He Asked
Divid’s story does not end at Baal-perazim. The Philistines come back. It is the same enemy and the same valley. The text gives us their second coming almost as an afterthought, but it is the hinge of the chapter and one of the quietest theological moments in the entire Old Testament. The same army, the same ground, the same king, the same God who had just given the victory.
And David inquired of the Lord.
Interesting is it not? He had just won but why is he asking again. The first word had been clear and the outcome had been total. If there was any battle in his life he had earned the right to fight on instinct, it was this one. Same enemy, same valley, one week later. Yet, he asks again. What David refuses to do here is the thing most of us have built our lives upon. He refuses to treat yesterday’s word as today’s word. He refuses to let last week’s deliverance substitute for this week’s inquiry. The God who spoke is the God who speaks, and the God who speaks is not bound to repeat himself.
And God does not. The answer the second time is different. Do not charge. Circle. Wait. Listen for a sound in the mulberry trees. The God who told him to go up the first time tells him to hold back the second. Same enemy, different word.
This is the death of every formula we have tried to build for the Christian life. There is no principle David could have extracted from the first battle and applied to the second. There is only a Person, and the Person must be asked, because the Person is alive and is doing something in this valley today that he was not doing in this valley last week. The believer who reduces guidance to principle has, in the very act of the reduction, walked away from the Guide.
Christ himself stands as the floor beneath everything we are saying. “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do.” The Greek here is “Ou dunatai” or “He is not able.” Not chooses not to, but constitutionally incapable of acting apart from the Father. This is not preference, it is being. The eternal Son, equal in power and glory, by whom the worlds were framed, will not lift a hand outside the sight of the Father. The verb is present and continuous. It refers to what the Father is doing now. Not the last village or the last healing but this very moment.
If this is the inner life of the Son of God, what shall we say of ours? The Son, who has every right to act on his own divine knowledge, every right to draw on his own omniscience, does not. He looks and listens. He moves only with what he sees. David in the valley of Rephaim is a foreshadow of this: a king who will not act from memory because the Father has not finished speaking, a warrior who will not draw the sword until he hears the sound in the trees.
Initiative Born of Inquiry
There is a temptation, when a piece like this presses the case for dependence, to hear in it a call to a smaller or more cautious life. A life that refuses to move until some inner voice has spoken with sufficient clarity. This is not what the Scriptures are describing. The believer who inquires is not the believer who hesitates. The believer who inquires is the believer who, having heard, moves.
David asks, and then he goes up. He asks the second time, and then he circles, and when the sound is heard in the mulberry trees he bestirs himself, and the Philistines are struck from Geba to Gazer. The same Son who can do nothing of himself walks into the temple and overturns the tables, touches the leper, calls Lazarus out of the tomb, sets his face like flint toward Jerusalem and refuses every voice that would turn him back. There is no figure in the Scriptures more decisive than this Son, and there is no figure more dependent. The dependence is the source of the decisiveness. He moves with the unhurried certainty of one who has nothing to prove, because what is to be done has already been seen.
This is the inversion most of us have not made. We have assumed that initiative and dependence are weights on opposite ends of the same scale, that to add to the one is to subtract from the other. So we have settled for a sad equilibrium: enough independence to feel competent, enough dependence to feel devout, a life that is neither bold nor surrendered, only managed. The kingdom knows nothing of this equilibrium. In the kingdom, the most surrendered are the most bold. The strength of the action is measured by the depth of the inquiry beneath it.
This is the difference between resignation and submission, and the difference is not subtle. Resignation says, I will not act, because nothing I do matters. Submission says, I will not act apart from God, because everything I do matters, and I will not have it counted to me that I moved without Him. Resignation collapses the will, but submission consecrates it. Resignation produces the believer who drifts but submission produces David, sword drawn, eyes lifted, waiting for the sound in the trees and ready to break the Philistines the moment it comes.
The Spirit-led life is the most active life there is. It is also the only life in which the activity is finally worth anything.
Sons Who See the Father
There is a verse in the Sermon on the Mount the church has always found difficult to take at face value. “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” We file it under sentiment, because to take it at full strength would require us to revise the entire architecture of our practical theology. A God who has counted the hairs is a God for whom no province of life is too small. A God for whom no province of life is too small is a God who must be consulted in all of them. The numbered hairs and the unnumbered prayer lives of his people stand in a contradiction the New Testament refuses to resolve in our favor.
What the believer is being invited into is not a method but an identity. The inquirer is not a technique for navigating decisions, it is the native posture of a child who has come to know the Father’s voice and cannot imagine moving without it. This is what John means when he tells us that as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God. The right. The “exousia” is the authority of sonship. And the authority of sonship is not the authority to act on one’s own. It is the authority to act with the Father, because the Father is now near enough to be asked, and the asking is no longer interruption but conversation.
This is also the shape of the age to come, breaking in. In the age to come there will be no province of life that is not communion. There will be no decision that is not delight. There will be no calculation severed from the face of God. The Spirit-led believer is a citizen of that age, and the inquiring posture is the way that citizenship shows itself now. We are not asking because we are anxious. We are asking because we have started, however falteringly, to live ahead of time.
The mule does not know the master’s mind because the mule has no share in the master’s life. The son sees the Father because the son is in the Father. This is union, and union is the only category that can finally hold what we have been saying. Christ did not come merely to forgive us so that we might manage our lives more righteously. He came to bring us into himself, and into the Father in himself, so that the inquiring life of the Son might become the inquiring life of his people. We are in him, and he is in the Father, and the Father attends to numbered hairs.
So the question we end with is not whether we will adopt a new discipline. The question is whether we will live as what we already are. The believer who inquires in the small things is not climbing toward a more spiritual existence. They are stepping into the existence Christ has already secured for them, and refusing, finally, to live beneath it. They are taking up the privilege of sons. They are walking with the Father by the eye and not by the bridle. They are, in the deepest sense, going home.
We pray
Father, we have lived too much of our lives by our own competence. We have brought you our seas and managed our weather, asked you for miracles and arranged the rest, and we have called this stewardship when it was sovereignty. Forgive us.
Teach us to ask in the small hours and the small rooms and the small decisions we have hidden from your gaze. Loosen our grip on the territory we have called our own, and give us the freedom of children who have learned the Father’s voice.
We do not ask to be paralyzed. We ask to be sourced. We do not want resignation. We want submission, the active, listening, moving submission of the Son who does nothing of himself and therefore does everything in you. Make us sons who see the Father.
In the name of Jesus Christ, who has gone before us into this life and now calls us up into it.
Amen.