STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 26
1 Samuel 20:1-42
Oct. 1, 2000
Text Comment
Jonathan seems not to know about the most recent efforts on his father’s part to seize David and kill him. And he supposes that, like the last time, his father will inform him of any plans that he is developing to rid himself of the young upstart. This chapter concerns Jonathan’s effort to find out his father’s intentions and, then, his effort to inform David of them so that he might make his escape.
v.3 Its David’s life that is at stake, after all, and he is less inclined to take Jonathan’s assurances for granted. The LXX has “replied” where the NIV has “took an oath.” Literally the MT has “swore again” but there is no mention of another oath before this.
The “mere step between me and death” is probably meant to recall the two occasions in which David literally dodged Saul’s thrown spear.
v.5 The New Moon was celebrated as an additional Sabbath and was an occasion for special sacrifices and sacrificial meals.
v.6 Evidence, by the way, that in additional to the ritual of the central sanctuary, there were occasions of worship in the towns and villages for matters of local importance. The temple has not yet been built, of course, and sacrificial worship has not been centralized the way it would later be.
v.8 The covenant referred to is that in 18:3 made by Jonathan with David. Apparently Saul did not yet know about this covenant, but he would learn later (22:8).
v.13 Jonathan knows that David is the Lord’s own choice to succeed Saul and assumes, therefore, that David will be king.
v.15 Jonathan is a good man and also a wise man. He knows that the remnants of the old royal house are often perceived as a threat to the new royal house and are exterminated as a precaution (Mary Queen of Scots; Bonnie Prince Charlie). David, of course, will be faithful to his covenant with Jonathan and show kindness to the house of Saul as a result, later on when he is established as king. (2 Sam. 9:1)
v.16 “David’s enemies” is almost certainly a euphemism for David himself, because the logic of Jonathan’s remark is that David would be called to account if he did not keep his covenant with the house of Jonathan. Proof of this comes in 25:22 where a similar phrase is found. The NIV leaves “enemies” out in that case because it so obviously is a reference to David himself, not to his enemies.
v.17 The LXX has “Jonathan swore to David,” instead of “made David swear.”
v.20 The presence of the lad may well be to provide testimony that Jonathan had not met with David when he was out shooting.
v.23 Matthew Poole suggests this about the stratagem with the arrows. Jonathan was concerned that he might be watched (cf. v.30 which suggests that Saul did not trust his son) and did not know ahead of time how much opportunity for private conversation with David there would be. He had to plan for the eventuality that he would not be able to see him or talk to him. As it happened, matters turned out better than feared.
v.26 Since the New Moon was a sacrificial feast, certain rules of ceremonial cleanliness applied. You can read about the various ways in which someone might be rendered unclean in Lev. 11-15.
v.27 Such ceremonial uncleanness was, by and large, a very simple matter to remove, hence David should have been there the next day.
v.29 Here is another case of a godly man telling a manifest untruth in a context in which it is not clear at all that the Bible condemns him for doing so (cf. the Hebrew midwives; Rahab; etc.). There are circumstances in which telling an untruth does not amount to “bearing false witness against one’s neighbor.” Interestingly, in the biblical examples, the untruth is told virtually always on behalf of someone else, not oneself. Here David. So, by and large, count on it. The lies you feel tempted to tell will very rarely be justified by such examples as these.
By the way, the second “let me get away” is a translation of the same word rendered “escape” in 19:17. Did Jonathan put it that way as an intentional test of Saul’s state of mind toward David? Saul’s response may indicate that.
v.31 Those are considerations that weigh heavily with Saul but do not with Jonathan. His father does not understand the spiritual mind of his son.
v.33 The same word can mean “raised” so it is not certain whether Saul actually threw his spear or only made a threatening gesture with it. In any case, Jonathan knows now beyond a doubt how far his father will go to kill David.
v.41 It has always been wondered why David and Jonathan went through with their elaborate plan and then met face to face anyway. As one commentator suggests, “Presumably it is a case of strong emotions conflicting with the best laid plans, just as happens in ordinary human experience.” [Gordon, 169] It is possible, of course, as we said earlier, that it turned out to be possible for them to meet whereas the plan was predicated on it proving impossible. In any case, David’s bowing down to Jonathan three times and his deep emotion at this parting is evidence that David understood how great a man Jonathan was and how much he owed him. David’s head has not been turned by the promise of his one day sitting on the throne of Israel.
The New English Bible renders the last phrase, “until David’s grief was even greater than Jonathan’s.” One of the few early indications of David’s interior life and the strength of his feelings.
We already mentioned, several weeks ago, how the story of David and Jonathan serves as
one of the Bible’s great illustrations of human friendship. We look at Jonathan and the friend he was to David and can’t help but wish we had more friends like that! And that makes only more poignant the fact that these two friends were now to be separated, David fleeing to the wilderness, Jonathan having to remain in a court now soaked with the hatred of God’s grace.
C.S. Lewis wrote in one of his letters to Arthur Greaves [477]:
“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘Sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ I know I am very fortunate in that respect.”
Well, it was not to be so for these two fast friends. Only once more and briefly, so far as we know, were they ever to meet again in this world. There, once again, we have the mystery of divine providence and the dark side of the life of faith in the world. The very thing that might have done David the most good is taken from him. But, then, should that surprise us. David is a figure of Jesus Christ, a prophecy in flesh and blood of the Messiah who would come. If ever there was a man who had to do a great thing all by himself, without the support of friends, it was the Lord Jesus, until, at the very end and at the crisis point of his life and our salvation, he was entirely alone, all having deserted him. “He trod the winepress of the wrath of God alone.”
But, I don’t think the chapter is primarily about human friendship or that Jonathan stands in this chapter as an example of a true friend, though he was and has certainly left us an example of that friendship we all ought to aspire to.
I think rather that Jonathan is here being contrasted with his father Saul and that we are given to see in the two men the difference between the mind of faith and the mind of unbelief. In the difference between the two men we see the difference the Spirit of God is able to make and what he can do in the heart of a man.
Saul had no sooner stopped prophesying at Naioth, no sooner recovered from the spell of the Holy Spirit of God, than he began again laying plans to kill David. The demonstration of God’s approval of David, the way in which he had been prevented from killing David on several occasions, the Holy Spirit himself having stopped him in his tracks at Naioth, his own promise made to Jonathan in 19:6 that he would not harm David, none of this mattered to Saul. Envy and fear had eaten him up. He had no regard for the will of God, he was unable to calculate the woe he was bringing upon himself and his family by his rage, even the resistance of his own children mattered not at all to him. And, what is more, he couldn’t read the signs. It was obvious by this time that God was on David’s side, not Saul’s. Clearly Saul was not going to succeed in killing David. God would not allow it. Reason demanded that Saul cease and desist and acknowledge the inevitable, but he would not.
Bizarre as his behavior seems to us in some ways, this is the very character of unbelief. The Devil knows full well what the facts are. He was once in heaven. He knows the power of God. He was banished from heaven and forbidden to return. He knows that he cannot prevail against God, but still he does not submit to God. This is everywhere the Bible’s view of unbelief. It is never intellectual honesty that leads a man to reject the truth about God and Jesus Christ, however much the unbeliever may believe that about himself. The unbeliever doesn’t want to accept reality as God defines it and is perfectly willing to ignore, even to murder a host of innocent facts in order reject that reality. There is a kind of madness to all unbelief, the Bible says. Paul uses the term “suppression” to describe what people do to avoid the truth about God that is plain to them and everyone else. They suppress it. And psychiatrists and psychologists tell us that suppressing the truth can have grievous emotional and spiritual consequences. It certainly did in Saul’s case. But, whatever the results may be in the human soul of this defiant refusal to see the truth that God has revealed, Paul says, the fact is that all human beings are without excuse. We see this situation writ large in Saul’s case, but Saul, even in this torment of rebellion against God, even in this futile rejection of the truth anyone should have been able to see, Saul is everyman.
Listen to Paul describe the unsaved man, however educated, however sophisticated, but unbelieving man, in Ephesians 4:17-18.
“So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their under-standing and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.”
Saul’s problem and every unbelieving man’s problem is not intellectual but spiritual. It is not what he does not know, it is what he is unwilling to know or believe. It is not that he hasn’t sufficient knowledge but that he is unwilling to face facts because the implications of those facts are so unwelcome to him. Man is, if you will, addicted to unbelief. And Saul is a perfect picture of his condition. Addictions are terrible things. An addicted person can even realize, at least from time to time, that he is destroying himself, but still is unwilling to do anything about it. That was Saul here. He could see from time to time that David was God’s man and that he would be and must be king. He could see that it was futile and wrong for him to try to kill David. But, nevertheless, he would try again a day later.
You remember the famous story of the man who thought he was dead. His doctor tried every argument he could think of to persuade him that he was alive. He walked, he talked, he ate and drank, he had a temperature. He had him listen to the beat of his own heart through the stethoscope, but, still, the man was adamant. He was dead. This went on for days. Finally, the doctor hit on a plan he thought would work. He decided to convince the man of one indisputable fact: that dead men do not bleed. He gave him books and articles to read on the circulatory system. He illustrated the point with experiments on animals. He gave him video tapes to watch. Finally the man acknowledged the point. “Alright, you’ve convinced me. Dead men do not bleed.” The doctor immediate took out a pin and stuck the man on his arm and the blood oozed out. The man’s face turned ashen, he turned to the doctor in horror, and whispered “Dead men bleed after all!”
That seems a fair description of Saul in these chapters. But, the Bible says, it is a fair description of all men in the face of the truth of God.
Now, take Jonathan in comparison. Jonathan, of course, has more to lose personally by David’s enthronement than Saul does. David is to succeed Saul, but he is to displace Jonathan! And then there are the natural considerations. Not easy things to set aside. After all, Jonathan finds himself in this chapter an enemy of his own father. And, I think, for a man like Jonathan, that must have been a bitter thing. Did you notice, as the chapter began, that Jonathan seems to have taken his father’s assurances at face value. Remember, in the previous chapter Jonathan had talked his father out of another attempt on David’s life and Saul had promised that he would not harm Jonathan’s friend. Jonathan apparently believed what his father had told him!
Robert Alter [Com., 123] thinks this is evidence of Jonathan’s naivete. His faith in his father’s promises was misplaced and, in view of Saul’s previous behavior, demonstrated that Jonathan was artless and simple in the matter of judging human behavior. David, on the other hand, Alter says, was wary and calculating.
But, I don’t think that is it at all. I think Jonathan was a man who “hoped all things and believed all things.” I think he loved his father and wanted to believe the best of him and that led him to put the best construction on his words. He didn’t leap to the conclusion that his father couldn’t be trusted, he had to be dragged to it, as is right. We would certainly want our children and our friends to believe the best of us until they were forced to accept a harsher verdict, wouldn’t we. I think, precisely because Jonathan was such a good and loyal man, the words of his father in vv. 20-31 must have cut especially deep.
But, in spite of all of this, in the teeth of familial loyalty and of his own personal loss of the throne, in vv. 13-15 Jonathan, in effect, acknowledged David as the Lord’s chosen successor to his father and as the one who would and should replace him on the throne of Israel. See it there in v. 16. Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David. Here is a man who had surrendered in faith to the will of God, precisely what his father was determined not to do! So much had he surrendered to the divine will, so much did he trust his heavenly Father to do what was right, to be gracious and loving in all his ways, that Jonathan could not only acquiesce in David’s appointment but could love David himself. That is a still greater and more amazing thing. To be displaced and to love the one who displaced you. To the unbeliever, surrendering to the will of God is a disgrace, a defeat. Saul was willing even to throw a spear at his own son to prevent it. Saul declared that Jonathan had disgraced himself, his parents, and the royal house.
But Jonathan replies to that in righteous anger (v. 34). He loved David for the Lord’s sake and could not abide his father’s unfounded and foolish accusations.
We live among faith and unbelief every day, of course. But we too often do not see clearly the vast chasm that separates them. Believers and unbelievers mix together in the world, even in the church to a certain extent. They wear the same kind of clothes, drive the same cars, live in the same sort of homes, work at the same jobs, eat the same food, die the same deaths, and are buried in the same cemeteries. But, the fact is, they are as different from one another as life is from death, heaven is from hell, and God’s grace and love is from his wrath.
The difference does not always appear in ways as pronounced as here in the difference between Jonathan and Saul, but the difference is always there and is always as great.
And surely, there are any number of important lessons for us to carry away from that fact.
1. There is the gratitude we owe to God if we can say in our hearts that, hard as it may be to bear it, we do love the will of God because we love God and trust him to do what is good and right. Most men and women have no such love. They are like Saul. They will go to their graves resisting the will of God rather than embracing it. If we embrace that will, then, clearly, we have God’s grace and God’s grace alone to thank for it. It is a very great thing to believe in God, it is a very unnatural thing for fallen human beings to believe in God, it is against all their instincts.
And, in a way, God does not make it easy to believe. He wants us to know what a gift this faith in him really is. He put obstacles in Jonathan’s way and then gave him true faith to surmount those obstacles. He made Jonathan face the full reality of the loss that God’s will was to be to him, at least in the present – loss of the throne, loss of his father’s good will – and then gave him faith sufficient to face those losses and remain true to the Lord and his counsel. How true to life this is. God does not make it easy to believe, he simply grants faith. He doesn’t come down and show himself and prove himself in a way that no one could possibly doubt. He doesn’t perform a miracle for everyone who is thinking about faith in Christ. He doesn’t speak with an audible voice from heaven to tell those who are putting their faith in Jesus that they are doing the right thing. He simply puts the conviction of his Word and presence in their hearts and often he does that in the midst of personal situations that are very difficult and do not get appreciably better when that person becomes a Christian. Think of this young UW student in Ed Dunnington’s RUF chapter. A new believer and now cancer!
You remember, perhaps, the scene in Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy after the death of Davy Vanauken, still a young woman, not so long after both of them professed their faith in Christ. Sheldon thought he had been had! This Christianity thing was obviously a crock. No true and living God would love a woman enough to save her and then promptly kill her. So, in his romanticism, he decided he would ride out to their favorite spot in the little sports car they had loved to ride in and there, in that place, he would give up his faith. What he found, he said, was that he couldn’t. He tried, but he couldn’t. He found out that he couldn’t be an unbeliever in the same way a man finds that he can’t move a boulder. He puts his shoulder against it and pushes with all his might. And it doesn’t move.
No, faith is God’s gift and it will make even a prince happy to give up his throne and risk his life and the wrath of his father the king just to serve the Lord’s anointed. Don’t sell your faith short, brothers and sisters, it is an extraordinary thing that you have in your heart and mind. Only God could put it there. That he has is his great gift and goodness and love to you.
2. But, then, let us also take away from our text and this sterling example of Jonathan’s faith the honest and tough-minded acceptance of the fact that trusting in the Lord and submitting to his will is going to cost us. It cost Jonathan, it cost David, it certainly cost our Savior and he said and his apostles said that it will cost us as well.
It cost Jonathan his father’s regard, it cost him his throne, it cost him David’s fellowship. We don’t know what else it may have cost him, but probably considerably more: the regard of others at court, his reputation as the crown prince, and so on. We don’t understand this. We don’t see why this must be so. But it is and the one thing we cannot accuse the Bible of is not telling us that faith will bring trials with it according to a fixed law. God grants us faith and then tests that faith. So it has always been and shall be until the Lord Jesus comes again and turns our faith to sight.
If we want to be men and women of faith, let us expect to have Jonathan’s lot in life. And look at that man here, this great and good man. Is not his faithfulness in the teeth of trial what makes his life so beautiful to us.
Lord, we believe. Help our unbelief.