The Fools Ledger : Samuel 25:36

The Fool's Ledger

For a long stretch of my life, the last thing I did most nights was run the day back and keep the score myself: what I did right, and who came up short. I would never have said it out loud. Out loud I gave God the credit, the way Nabal would have if you caught him at the right hour. But in the dark, with no one watching, I added up the column in my own hand and signed my name at the bottom.

So did Nabal. The man is rich and the man is blind, and the two go together. David's men ask him for bread. He answers by counting. "Shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I have killed for my shearers and give it to men who come from I do not know where?" (1 Samuel 25:11, ESV). My bread, my water, my meat. Three possessives in a single breath. The accounting is not the sin. The name on the account is the sin.

Because the bread was never only his. One of his own servants knew better and said of David's men, "They were a wall to us both by night and by day, all the while we were with them keeping the sheep" (1 Samuel 25:16, ESV). Nabal was kept, and he could not see that he was kept. Self at the center fills the whole field of vision. There is no room left in it to see the wall that stood between you and the dark.

There is no room left to see the swords, either.

Four hundred men are climbing the hill with blades drawn to kill every male in his house, and Nabal is at the table. The text leaves him there: "he was holding a feast in his house, like the feast of a king. And Nabal's heart was merry within him, for he was very drunk" (1 Samuel 25:36, ESV). Merry, at the exact hour of the sword. Toasting himself like the king he had just mocked, with the danger real and close and unseen. He cannot see it. He is looking at himself, and a man looking at himself sees nothing climbing the hill.

His good cheer kept a clock, and that clock ran exactly as long as the wine. "In the morning, when the wine had gone out of Nabal, his wife told him these things, and his heart died within him, and he became as a stone" (1 Samuel 25:37, ESV). The wine wore off and he saw, and the seeing is what killed him. The humbling he never counted as a humbling came when he sobered up. It always does. The wine wears off in everyone. Sobriety is not optional and it is not gentle, and it comes on its own schedule, and you do not get to skip the morning.

Why couldn't he see? The text gives his name as the answer. "Nabal is his name, and folly is with him" (1 Samuel 25:25, ESV). It is the fool of the psalm. "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 14:1, ESV). Read where he says it. Not out loud, where the shearers could hear. In the books, where only he was looking. He lived as if no one kept the account but Nabal, as if the only auditor of his life was the man already three cups into the feast.

The stone in his chest was the humbling. The seal came later. "And about ten days later the LORD struck Nabal, and he died" (1 Samuel 25:38, ESV). The ledger he kept in his own name, Someone else had been keeping the whole time. The audit he assumed was his to run was closed by another hand. He was never the one keeping the audit; he was the one being audited, and he had drunk too deep to know the difference.

So did the rich man in the field. He told his soul to relax, to eat and drink and be merry, and God answered him in the dark: "Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" (Luke 12:20, ESV). Same word. Same table. Same clock.

I am not writing about a drunk who died three thousand years ago.

I am writing about the man who keeps books in his own name, who is merry while the swords come up the hill because he is busy looking at himself. That man sat at my table for years. I drank from that cup.

And maybe you keep a book or two of your own. Most of us do. Let us be honest together, then, and open them. We have played on the opposite side of holy. Paul has a name for what we were: "And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds" (Colossians 1:21, ESV), and he is not describing strangers. He is describing the people who would later read his letter. Run the column. The math is not close, and it is not flattering. Every honest audit ends the same way: the sum stands against us, and it cannot be covered from our side of the table.

The wine is going out. The morning is coming. There is a ledger, and it is open, and it is being kept by a hand that is not yours.

There is one other hand. It took the page and drove a nail through it. Paul names what God did with the account. He says God made us alive together with Christ, "having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross" (Colossians 2:13–14, ESV). The book did not go unkept, and the debt did not go unpaid. It was paid in a death — His, not yours. That is not comfort, at least not first. It is the price of the cancellation, and it is a wound before it is a mercy.

The pen was taken out of my hand. I did not lay it down — it was taken. That is the only reason I can say any of this at all.

Perhaps for you the morning still comes, and the wine still goes out, and the books still open. But in Jesus ours is out of our hands now, the page already nailed, and we did not get ourselves there. The man who keeps no account in his own name is no longer standing on the other side of holy. Paul does not leave the sentence about the alienated and the hostile where he started it. He follows it all the way to the cross. In Christ, "he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him" (Colossians 1:22, ESV). Holy. The far side of it, and we were carried over in a body that was broken and a grave that did not keep Him.