And they burn a city. They capture everybody, take all the plunder, and they run away before they can get caught. And so David is out doing something and his men, his 600 men, are with him. And the Amalekite raiders come and they raid Ziklag and they take David's wives — unfortunately for them. Because David finds out about this when he comes back, sees the city burning. And they find a, you know, one enemy and they interrogate him and they figure out what had happened, and he then with his 600 men pursues them, gets his wives and saves everybody. They didn't kill any of the inhabitants. They bring them all back. They take all the plunder, and they're there in Ziklag for two days. And they're there waiting to hear how it went with the Philistines. What's gonna happen with all those questions? What's gonna happen with the kingdom? Did we win the battle? How do I respond to these times?
And then there's that beautifully pregnant biblical phrase in verse two: "On the third day." And all of us, you know, readers of the Bible immediately are thinking, the third day is the day that Jesus resurrected. And it clues us in — just to take a pause for a moment and remember, or think about the fact — that many of us, at some point in our lives, will find ourselves in those two days in Ziklag, as it were. Where there are tensions in our lives that are unresolved, where there is a sense that the battle is over but we're not sure if it's a victory. And there's this strategic pause that's happening, and we're waiting to hear the news. We're waiting for more data. We're waiting for more information, and we're just having to wait.
And David does the right thing. He stays in that place. He does not do anything rash. He doesn't make the situation worse. He waits — which is very different than Saul. Remember Saul: one of the reasons he was ousted as king is because he didn't wait for Samuel to come and do the sacrifice. He did the sacrifice himself. And so immediately, the author is calling us into David being a better king, probably, than Saul.