Journey through the Cave of Adullam
The termites burrowed deeper and farther into the earth’s crust, wanting nothing to do with the heat and melancholy of life above.How often has it been trampled by foragers and sweeping winds that will never allow it to hibernate in peace just for the pleasure of solitude?
Beneath and under, things might seem damp, but it is never without company; under and beneath are colonies of others working as soldiers, building and carving out sculptured crevices with detours and intricate webs of suites that baffle arcane architecture and that continues to confound those who ponder at natures marvel to cure the mundane.
Sometimes, it is not only ants and termites that want to escape the madness of men and the insanity of our world.
Like the creatures that burrow to escape the elements, we too, seek refuge from the never-ending battles of our world. We’re tired of the wars that never cease, the rule of the powerful, the conspiracy-fueled influence of the media, the pollution of our resources, and the manipulation of our food supply. We were meant to roam the earth freely, but we find ourselves living in fortresses, bunkers, and off-grid to escape the people we were meant to love.
David, a figure of intrigue, fled from the feral wrath of Saul, the king of Israel, who sought his life because God had anointed him.
Saul has become unpopular. His disobedience has disrobed his royalty. He has disparaged the sacred Levitical order by embracing the profanity of the witch of Endor. Saul could see the throne slipping off his grasp, but he wouldn’t let go for the sake of Jonathan and the heritage of the house of Benjamin. Someone must pay for his failure with necromancy, and his wicked fangs are now aimed at David, the elect of the God of Israel.
David left Gath and escaped to the cave of Adullam. When his brothers and his father’s household heard about it, they went down to him there. All those in distress, debt, or discontented gathered around him, and he became their commander. About four hundred men were with him.
This Bible story in 1 Samuel 22 shows how young men metamorphose into powerful spiritual entities and become like a God to their generation.
We find parallels to this phase of Davidic transmutation throughout the Bible of how the sovereign God separates men to himself by what the casual observer might misconstrue as persecution and injustice into a phase of powerful incubation that sucks you in as a baby and transfigure you into an adult and a king.
In the story of Moses, the great lawgiver, we read of how God used his seemingly unpleasant flight from the palace of Pharaoh as an adopted Hebrew child who, in a fit of rage, killed an Egyptian in defense of a Hebrew slave fled to the wilderness of Midian, where he was just about settling down into a life of meaningless routine tending sheep for Jethro.
It had been forty years since he fled Egypt in fear for his life when God appeared to him in the burning bush.
Moses ran from Egypt as a confused refugee; He came back to the same palace embedded in power, demanding freedom not only for one abused Hebrew enslaved person but for a whole generation of people who the Egyptian taskmasters had enslaved for over 400 years.
Men do not become powerful because they crave power; men become immortal when they inhabit God and allow God to inhabit them.
Power emanates from encounters with the sovereign creator of the universe. Yahweh said to Moses, “I will make you a God unto Pharaoh.
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Now hear this: I make you as God to Pharaoh [to declare My will and purpose to him], and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet. You shall speak all that I command you and your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go out of his land. I will make Pharaoh’s heart hard and multiply My signs and wonders (miracles) in Egypt. But Pharaoh will not listen to you, and I shall lay My hand on Egypt and bring out My hosts [like a defensive army, tribe by tribe], My people, the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment (the plagues). The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the children of Israel from among them.”
Exodus 7:1–5
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In the journey of our transfiguration, God at a point herds us into the womb of creation sometimes symbolized as a cave, a wilderness experience, a painful divorce, death in the family, or bankruptcy that crept in when we were just about at the cusp of what should be a kairos moment of financial deJAVU. So that parched moment of solitary denial brings us to the end of self and starts to unravel the divinity ingrained within us.
Within us is the spirit of God seeking expression, like a river wanting to level with other water bodies until it finds its full expression as an ocean.
David ran into the cave of Adullam and encountered eternal life in the womb of the earth.
While David hibernated in what seems a cul de sac of stasis nonexistence, he penned the book of Psalms and poured out his heart as a liturgy for Israel and humanity as a memorial.
David scampered into that cave, afraid and unsure of what the prophecy and the anointing that God pronounced from Samuel’s mouth over his life would amount to. For nine months, he was sequestered from the civilization of his age as it unfolded while the Lord God almighty became for him a sanctuary.
While disconnected from Judah and the king’s wrath, God forged the new Jerusalem from within David with a crucible of fire, prayer, and sanctification.
In the cave, David learned how to get on his knees in prayer while his spirit sups up to God in agony, and as he received of God, the ensuing serenity of his person made him into a refuge into which 400 hundred vagabonds could find shelter and receive of God themselves and manifest the divine to all men, like in the wilderness when the trials of the nation of Israel brought them into a direct encounter with God a top mount Sinai giving men a glimmer of God the creator and the maker of men and in whom all power is embedded.
The transmutation of David in the cave of Adullam resonates with the story of how Jesus became Christ. In His death and resurrection, He was able to bequeath every believer with the gift of eternal life through His Holy Spirit, who dwells in the believer.
It was necessary that Jesus die, be buried, and be resurrected on the third day so that we could have the gift of eternal life. Just like those 400 hundred broken men who became the mighty men of David through transfiguration after nine months of hibernating in the cave, we also become coheirs and heirs with Christ at His death through our baptism and into His life by obedience through faith in His finished work on the cross of Calvary.
However, I am telling you nothing but the truth when I say it is profitable (good, expedient, advantageous) for you that I go away. Because if I do not go away, the Comforter (Counselor, Helper, Advocate, Intercessor, Strengthener, Standby), the person of the HOLY SPIRIT will not come to you [into close fellowship with you]; but if I go away, I will send Him to you [to be in close fellowship with you].
John 16:7
The depression in the world can feel like a dark cave we want to burrow further into like termites, but when we remember the biblical accounts of how men encountered God and became transformed, we should have hope that our lives and the turmoil that seems to want to engulf us are by design and could be the motif for what life is calling us into.
Life as we perceive it in its mournful musing is the tip of a multilayered spiritual iceberg that needs to be excavated with the puttering precision of an archeologist using the hidden mysteries of scripture to understand the constellation that cooked up the chaos we all sometimes find bewildering and hard to navigate without help.
Hidden in that monumental challenge, you now find yourself is your call to the cave of Adullam, a call to the threshing floor; in the cave of Adullam, it seems as if David was buried and forgotten in the wild wilderness of Sinai, it was like eternal silence from the God of creation for the children of Israel.
When Christ was buried, fear gripped His disciples, lacking the understanding that the messiah needed to die before he could save them; likewise, we all behold his face as in the mirror, we are transformed into His image; we are not buried, like a seed in life’s soil, we are being planted and watered by God himself.
Adullam is a symbolic place of becoming like the one who called you unto himself. It is in Adullam that fear loses its grip because now there is nowhere to run. It is from the ashes that a new scope of our architecture emerges with ferocious power to withstand all raging fire. Without the womb of Adullam, nothing new, transformative, and lasting can come from a wanderer’s life. At Adullam, we submit to God and let Him make us in His likeness and in His own image.
For we are God’s [own] handiwork (His workmanship), recreated in Christ Jesus, [born anew] that we may do those good works which God predestined (planned) for us [taking paths which He prepared ahead of time], that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:10
