What To Do When You're Hiding Out Series

What to Do When You’re “Hiding Out”

Psalm 57

We are in the midst of, but hopefully coming to the end of the greatest mass quarantine in human history. When you consider that this is a worldwide Pandemic and stay-at-home orders have included such places as China and India, as well as our own country, it’s easy to conclude more people, even several billion people, have been quarantined during this unprecedented pandemic.

And the quarantines aren’t quite over, though states are gradually easing restrictions. Schools here are out for at least another three months. California state universities have already declared that they will not open even in the fall, that all classroom instruction will be on-line. More than that, those with underlying health conditions, compromised immune systems and the aged—all three apply to yours truly--are being encouraged to continue to stay home until some vaccine might be developed, and that is still months away at best.

To put our incredible circumstances in more common terms—we’ve all be hiding out. We’ve been hiding out until the danger passes. And many of us to some degree or another, with social distancing and small meetings still the order of the day, will continue to do so for some time.

How should we as believers respond as we’re hiding out? What should we be doing while we’re hiding out? Should we even be hiding out? That’s been a major question among many as there has been unrest, protests and lawsuits over state stay-at-home orders. And if we continue hiding out, how do we quell the fear, the anxiety, even the boredom that comes with following such a plan while quarantined at home.

This morning we come to a Psalm in which the great King David experienced very much the same sort of circumstances. He was hiding out until a very serious danger passed by. The Psalm is Psalm 57. The Prologue tells us the circumstances that prompted David’s writing of the Psalm. He was fleeing from the murderous intentions of the now wicked, ruthless, demonized King Saul, who was seeking his life because of a crazed jealousy against a young man who had faithfully, even courageously served him and Israel.

The lesson we’ll learn from him this morning is, Yes, take precautions, but humbly pray and deliberately affirm God’s faithfulness.

Now Psalm 57 is not one of the better-known Psalms. However, it is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. That’s in part because I have been to the very place I where it was written. I have been in the very cave, the cave of Adullam, where David went into hiding when he was being pursued by Saul.

While we were in Israel, as we came near to the end of the day when we visited the Valley of Elah where David had defeated Goliath, Arie Bar David, a Messianic Jew who has to be the best tour guide in all of Israel, decided to give us a bonus. Arie has been a part of Israel’s army for decades, and in his younger years, he was a cartographer, a mapmaker, for the Israeli army. This required him to personally know the topography and geography of the land of Israel like the back of his own hand. So, on this day, he took us off the beaten path, and boy did he ever! He took us off the paved road onto a barely discernible bumpy dirt road in the Mountains of Israel, known as the Shephelah, and drove for about 10 minutes until we came to trail head. Then it was about a 10 to 15-minute hike to the entrance to the Cave of Adullam where David hid from Saul and his forces three thousand years ago.

The cave is the kind of cave I would have imagined. It did not have a large entrance that is obvious on the side of a mountain. Instead, it had a very small entrance that was more akin to a hole in the ground. Only one person at a time could climb down into the hole, and once everyone was in the cave, the entrance could be covered so that no one who was not already familiar with the cave would even know a cave was there. But once you were inside the cave, and 15 or 20 of us were, you discovered that it was a large cavern, with ceilings 15 to 20 feet high, a flat floor, and so much space that it could easily house the four hundred people who gathered to David on this occasion. So, it was an ideal hiding place, not easily discovered by those who might be searching for someone. And as our party was in the cave, dark as it was, by the light of his cell-phone flashlight, our guide, Arie, read from Psalm 57, the very Psalm that David authored while he was in hiding. It was truly a highlight of my trip to Israel—a rare privilege to experience.