Kill One Fool, Kill Another
What small moments reveal about who we're becoming
Three chapters of Scripture have been on my heart for years now: 1 Samuel 24, 25, and 26—ninety-one verses. Three locations: a cave, a wilderness, a desert. Three encounters that reveal something about what it means to become who we are in the small moments when we think nobody’s watching.
The Wilderness of Maon
Let’s start in the middle—in the wilderness of Maon, with a man whose mother named him Nabal. Which is a bit shocking. Nabal literally means “fool.” What’s the backstory there? Did she hold that baby, look around the room, and think, “Anyone else seeing what I’m seeing here?” Or was she just really upset with her husband?
Either way, Nabal lived up to his name. Scripture says he was “harsh and badly behaved”—not exactly the legacy you want carved on your tombstone. He was also spectacularly wealthy: 3,000 sheep, 1,000 goats. And it was shearing season, which meant feast time, profit time, ego time.
His wife Abigail, by contrast, was “discerning and beautiful.” This is a marriage so uneven you can see the tilt from miles away.
Enter David.
Not yet King David—this is David in exile, wandering with 600 hungry men, fleeing from Saul’s murderous jealousy. David hears about Nabal’s feast and sends messengers with a reasonable request: We protected your shepherds. Share what you have. Peace be with you.
Nabal’s response is a seven-layer dip of contempt:
“Who is David? Who is the son of Jesse?” (Everyone knows who David is. That’s like saying, “Beyoncé? Never heard of her.”) He accuses David of rebellion against Saul—which cuts deep—and piles up the pronouns: “Shall I take my bread and my water and my meat?” Nabal speaks as if the world were a small room and he stood at the center of it.
Everyone has a breaking point. David’s arrives right here: “Every man strap on his sword.”
Four hundred men set out with one intent: to slaughter every male in Nabal’s household by morning. Maybe a slight overreaction.
But then comes Abigail.
She hears what’s happening and acts—no panic, no delay, just wisdom in motion. She gathers provisions, rides out to intercept David, and falls at his feet. What follows is the longest speech by any woman recorded in Scripture, and it’s worth reading in full. But here are the highlights:
“On me alone, my lord, be the guilt. Let not my lord regard this worthless fellow, Nabal, for as his name is, so is he... The Lord has restrained you from bloodguilt and from saving with your own hand... The Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house, because my lord is fighting the battles of the Lord.”
Abigail takes Nabal’s foolishness on herself.
She names the sin.
She reminds David of God’s calling.
And then comes the key line:
“The Lord has restrained you from bloodguilt and from saving with your own hand.”
She offers David not just food, but a future—a conscience without blood on it.
David’s response is a threefold blessing:
“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you this day to meet me! Blessed be your discretion, and blessed be you, who have kept me this day from bloodguilt and from working salvation with my own hand!”
Abigail goes home in peace. Nabal feasts, drinks, collapses. Ten days later, the Lord strikes him down. David marries Abigail.
The scene ends.
Great story. Dramatic.
But why is it here?
The Cave at En-Gedi
To understand Maon, we need to rewind to the chapter before—to the cave at En-Gedi. Before Nabal, there was Saul.
David started out as Saul’s golden boy. He killed Goliath, won battles, became the people’s song. Then Saul’s jealousy grew teeth. He threw spears. He sent David into battles designed to kill him. He killed the priests who helped David escape. He took David’s wife from him. One moment Saul was weeping, the next moment murderous.
David had every human reason to hate Saul.
So here’s the setup: Saul is hunting David with 3,000 men. Saul enters a cave to relieve himself. (Yes, the Bible is that real.) David and his men are hiding in that very cave. Saul has no idea.
Thus begins the great ethical dilemma: Is it okay, is it right, is it permissible to kill someone while they’re going to the bathroom?
(I truly believe this could be an awesome play. If you do too, let’s write the script together).
David’s men whisper the obvious: “This is God’s deliverance. After all Saul has done to you—the spears, the betrayal, forcing you to live like an animal—God has given him to you. Take matters into your own hands.”
David approaches with a blade ... and only cuts the corner of Saul’s robe. Even that small act pierces his conscience: “The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, the Lord’s anointed.”
Once Saul leaves, David steps outside and shows him the fragment.:
“See, my father, see the corner of your robe in my hand. I cut off the corner and did not kill you. You may know there is no wrong or treason in my hands. I have not sinned against you, though you hunt my life to take it.”
Saul says:
“You are more righteous than I, for you have repaid me good, whereas I have repaid you evil. May the Lord reward you with good for what you have done to me this day.”
This is David at his finest.
Despite years of mistreatment, despite justified anger, despite opportunity and encouragement, David refuses to return evil for evil. He trusts God to work out his justice and his plan.
That’s what happens right before Maon.
The Desert of Ziph
Now let’s fast-forward past Maon to what comes after—to the desert of Ziph in chapter 26.
Saul is hunting David again. You’d think he’d be done after the bathroom incident. But no—3,000 men, same madness. Late in the evening, David sneaks into Saul’s camp. Saul’s spear stands by his sleeping head. David’s companion urges him to end it. David refuses—again. He takes the spear, not the life.
David reveals himself to Saul—again. Saul repents—again. But this time he adds something new:
“I have sinned … Behold, I have acted foolishly, and have made a great mistake.”
Saul calls himself a fool.
He didn’t say that the first time.
Where have we heard that before?
The Big Picture
Step back now. Take in all three chapters together:
En-Gedi: David spares Saul after years of betrayal.
Maon: David nearly murders Nabal—the fool—after one insult.
Ziph: David spares Saul again—Saul, the fool.
Here’s the question that cracks open an interesting angle to the story:
What if David had crossed the line with Nabal?
Would he have spared Saul the second time?
Kill one fool, kill another?
There are no small moments
Maybe David thinks, “Saul is the real test. Nabal is just a fool. This doesn’t count.” But there are no small moments of obedience—only small moments that determine the big moments. Every act of restraint or revenge is forming you.
You don’t rise, you default
The big moments don’t make you. They reveal what you’ve already become. We don’t suddenly become holy in high-stakes moments. We fall back to who we have quietly become.
You won’t suddenly be patient with your spouse when you’re habitually impatient with strangers. You won’t suddenly control your tongue in important conversations when you don’t in small ones. You won’t suddenly resist big temptations when you’ve been indulging little ones all along.
Consider the contrast: Saul spent years attempting murder, destroying David’s life, hunting him relentlessly. David spared him. Nabal insulted David once, refused hospitality, said mean things. David nearly massacred his entire household.
If David crosses the bloodshed line with someone who merely insulted him, what stops him from crossing it with someone who actually tried to murder him?
You don’t cross a line once and walk away unchanged.
The justification gets easier.
The threshold gets lower.
The restraint gets weaker.
Every small act is a big one
When you restrain your tongue with the fool, you’re preparing to restrain it with the king. When you show kindness to the insignificant, you’re building capacity for kindness to the significant. The way you handle Nabal shapes how you’ll handle Saul.
Our obedience matters
Where do you think your obedience doesn’t matter?
We’re tempted to think it doesn’t matter:
When no one’s watching—the content we consume, the way we treat service workers, the corners we cut.
When the person seems insignificant—the fool, not the king; the difficult family member, not the respected boss.
When we feel justified: “They started it,” “I’m just standing up for myself,” “I don’t need to deal with this.” When it’s just once: “This won’t become a pattern,” “This moment won’t define me.”
But it does matter.
Who you are becoming is being shaped right now—in the small irritations, the minor slights, the moments you think no one sees. These aren’t exceptions to your character. They are your character.
And somewhere—maybe tomorrow, maybe years from now—there will be a Saul moment. A moment that feels enormous. A moment where everything is on the line. And you will not rise to meet it. You will be what you have been becoming all along.
So be faithful now. Not later. Now.
But if we stop at obedience, we would all be undone.
Obedience Can’t Clean the Heart
Here’s what the passage also shows us: violence was brewing in David’s heart. It was in there. And David didn’t stop it. Abigail says, “The Lord has restrained you.” Left to himself, this story would have ended very differently.
And if we look at the big picture, we see that obedience can’t clean our hearts. Because David—this exemplary David at his finest—fails later.
Bathsheba.
Uriah.
Blood on his hands.
Someone asked me recently: How many bad decisions are you away from ruining your life?
One.
That’s the honest answer.
Even the very best of us break. Sooner or later, we fail. The Nabal or the Saul or the Bathsheba moment comes, and we don’t always have an Abigail to stop us.
Abigail Reveals the Heart of Christ
But Abigail is the heartbeat of this passage. Look closely at what she does:
She bows before David at his very worst—when violence is brewing in his heart, when 400 armed men are marching toward slaughter. She doesn’t wait for David to calm down or come to his senses. She intercepts him in his rage.
She takes the utter foolishness of Nabal’s sin on herself: “On me alone be the guilt.” Not “let me explain my husband’s behavior” or “he didn’t mean it.” She absorbs the guilt. She makes Nabal’s foolishness her own burden.
She brings provision—not just food for hungry men, but a future. She reminds David of who he is and who he is called to be: “The Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house, because my lord is fighting the battles of the Lord.” In other words: Don’t throw away your future on this fool. Don’t let this moment define you.
She prevents sin from overcoming him: “The Lord has restrained you from bloodguilt and from saving with your own hand.” She names what’s happening—David is about to take salvation into his own hands, to work out his own justice, to become his own deliverer.
And then, after all this, she becomes his bride.
Do you see it? Abigail reveals to us the heart of Christ.
Jesus comes to us at our worst—not after we’ve cleaned ourselves up or gotten our act together. He meets us in our rage, our violence, our self-destruction. He bows before us, which is to say, He takes on flesh and dwells among us.
He takes the utter foolishness of our sin upon his shoulders and says, “On me alone be the guilt.” Not figuratively. Not symbolically. Fully. He absorbs what we’ve done. He makes our foolishness His burden.
He brings provision—the gift of grace and his Spirit, the power to overcome what we cannot overcome on our own. He reminds us of who we are: beloved, called, made for something more than this small vengeance, this petty destruction, this grasping for control.
He restrains us from trying to work salvation with our own hands. This is the heart of the gospel, isn’t it? We are prone—like David marching toward Nabal’s house—to think we can save ourselves. That if we just obey hard enough, believe hard enough, try hard enough, we can earn our way to righteousness. That we can clean our own hearts.
But we can’t.
A message about obedience—left on its own—will crush us.
This is why we need Jesus to intervene.
To stop us from trying to save ourselves.
To restrain us from working salvation with our own hands.
And here’s the scandalous beauty:
He makes us his own.
We become his bride.
Not after we’ve proven ourselves. Not after we’ve demonstrated consistent obedience. But while we are still prone to march toward our own destruction.
Our obedience still matters—but differently now.
Not as the means of salvation, but as the response to it. Not as the fuel that earns God’s love, but as the fruit of having received it.
Bound in the Bundle of the Living
The longer I walk this Christian journey, the more I want to be obedient. Not externally obedient while my heart rages. I want the obedience of the heart. And there’s both comfort and discomfort in this desire.
The comfort: that I even want to be like Jesus. That’s not natural. It’s a sign his Spirit is working in me. I’m thankful for the encounter in Maon—Abigail gives me great hope that my life can reflect and even reveal Christ.
The discomfort: the more I pursue obedience, the more I see just how much sin there is within me. It’s as if God, in his grace, lets us see our sin gradually—because if we could see what he sees all at once, it would wreck us. But Christian maturity includes this growing awareness of just how sinful we are. Yet we also grow in our awareness of the inexhaustible depths of grace. This is the paradox of Christian maturity: the more you grow, the more you need the gospel.
In her speech to David, Abigail says something I’d missed for years:
“Your life shall be bound in the bundle of the living in the care of the Lord your God.”
This is utterly true of David—through every high and low, through En-Gedi and Maon and Ziph, through his finest moments and his devastating failures, he remains bound in the bundle of the Lord’s care. And it’s true of us. Our lives are bound in the bundle of the care of the Lord.
Yes, even David breaks. We all break. Which is why the story ultimately turns our eyes to Christ. Because unlike David, who needed Abigail to restrain him, Jesus doesn’t need restraining. He is the one who restrains us. He is the one who intervenes. He is the one who takes our guilt and says, “On me alone.”
Like David, we can say:
Blessed be the Lord.
Blessed be his discretion.
Blessed be Jesus—
who keeps us from bloodguilt
and from working salvation with our own hands.
May that blessedness be the fuel for our obedience.