The Ones Who Stayed With The Baggage

At twenty to six they start loading the van, and the whole of it comes out through his hallway.

It is his house because his is the one on the corner with the wide door and the front room nobody uses, so the gear came in on Thursday and stood there all weekend: crates, folded tables, a box of cables somebody labeled wrong, two sacks of something heavy leaning against the radiator. He made tea for whoever came by. He moved the crates twice when the pile started leaning. On Sunday night he slept badly because his front room smelled like other people's coats.

Now they are carrying it back out past him, cheerful in the cold, and he is holding the door with his shoulder because the latch does not stay. Somebody says thanks for having it all, you are a lifesaver, and means it, and gets in the van. The doors go. The engine turns over twice before it catches. And then it is quiet in a hallway with the light on at ten to six and a chair by the window where he will be sitting in about four minutes.

Here is what you think while the tail lights go up the road, and you have thought it so often that it does not even feel like a thought anymore. It feels like a fact about the world. If you disappeared tomorrow, nobody would actually be short of anything. Somebody else would have a wide door. The work is being done by the ones who can go, and you keep the boxes, and keeping boxes is not work.

Two hundred men who could not cross a stream

There is exactly one place in Scripture where this argument gets had out loud, in the open, by men who had just come back from doing the thing. It is worth knowing that it happened, because you have been having the same argument on your own for years with nobody on the other side of it.

David has six hundred men and their families have been taken. They set off after the raiders at speed, and they reach a stream called the Besor, and two hundred of them cannot go on. The text is not vague about why. They were so faint that they could not cross. Not unwilling. Not hanging back. Out of body. So four hundred cross, and two hundred stay with the baggage, and the four hundred come home with everything recovered and a great deal more besides.

Then some of the men who went say what men who went have always said: these did not come with us, so they get their wives and their children back and not one thing more. And David answers them, and his answer became law.

For who will hearken unto you in this matter? but as his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff: they shall part alike.1 Samuel 30:24

Read the last three words twice. They shall part alike. Not proportionally. Not a reduced share for a reduced day. Alike is a flat word with no arithmetic in it at all.

You have an equal share among God's people, and it is equal in the plain sense of that word rather than in the encouraging sense of it. 1 Samuel 30:24 says alike, and there is no proportion anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit does not keep a second set of books for people who could not cross the stream.

And notice what happens to the ruling immediately afterward. The next verse says David made it a statute and an ordinance for Israel from that day forward. He did not do the two hundred a kindness. A kindness is a one off and it sets no precedent and everybody involved knows the recipient was carried. He changed the law of the shares, permanently, so that no man on any later day would have to stand at a stream and argue for his own portion.

You were written into a standing law rather than into an exception, and there is no clause in it about what your body could do on the day. It was set down as a statute in Israel and it is written that way, and the Spirit who put it in the record is not filing an amendment for your case.

Whose spoil was it in the first place

Now go back one verse, because the reason David gives is the part that undoes your hallway.

He says the men have no standing to allot anything, because what they are dividing is what the Lord gave them. That is his whole argument. Not that the two hundred tried hard, not that guarding the baggage was strategically important, not that everybody contributes in their own special way. He says the spoil was a gift and the ones holding it did not generate it, so nobody in that camp has the authority to decide who has earned a portion of it.

Sit still with that for a second, because it takes the floor out from under the thing you have been telling yourself at ten to six in the morning.

You have been running a calculation in which your share among God's people is a reward for output, and your output is a wide door and a kettle. But the thing being shared was never a reward for anything. It was given. And a gift cannot be allotted by contribution, because the moment it is, it stops being the thing it was and becomes something else entirely, and God has not changed the terms on which He gives.

I am not going to hand you a role here. I am not going to tell you that your real ministry is intercession, or hospitality, or encouragement, or any of the other words people reach for when they want a man who cannot go anywhere to feel better about it. You do not need a title from me and I have no authority to issue you one. What I can tell you is what David told four hundred men who had just fought all night.

You are one of them at full strength, and full is not a figure of speech in that verse, it is the actual ruling. The word puts the share on the giver instead of on the output, and His Spirit has never once audited a man's legs before applying it.

Right now, as you read this, you have a part here that is not decorative, and nothing about this year has reduced it. Scripture calls those two hundred too faint to cross and does not scold them anywhere in the account, and the same Spirit who preserved that silence is not scolding you in a hallway at six in the morning.