PSA Bible Reading Challenge 2023-2024

We start to see a side of David that we haven’t seen before.  Let us keep in mind that David is now a convicted felon running from the law.  He doesn’t want Saul to know at all where he is so he makes up a story for the priest in Nob in order to get the bread of the presence.  He arrives at Gath and pretends to be a madman so that they would not see him as a threat and the king of Gath is insulted as to why anyone would bring a madman to his gates, as if he doesn’t have enough madmen in his city.

What David is willing to do in order to protect himself is pretty extraordinary.  He is willing to tell untruths, what we call lies.  This catches  up with him as he unethically seduces and rapes Bathsheeba.  He is willing to play the crazyman in order to protect himself.  What we will see is that in the long run all of this will catch up to him.  Right now there is no harm and no foul as he does these things, but they are offenses not just to the people with whom he interacts, but offenses to God as well.    Keep in mind that when we betray those around us we also betray the Lord.

I was pretty captivated by this story and it is easy to recognize that David and Jonathan have a friendship which is sincere and intense.  Jonathan has no idea that his father is looking to kill David, and David knows that this is the case and breaks the news to Jonathan.  They come up with an elaborate scheme which would protect David perpetually and provide Jonathan with proof that his father is indeed looking to take David out.  

They follow through on their plan, Jonathan discovers that indeed his father is looking to kill David and he is able to get David safely away with a weapon to protect himself.  What I want to look at is how Saul tells Jonathan that if David is not killed then Jonathan will never gain the throne, and that is of the utmost importance to Saul is that his son, Jonathan, would gain the throne.  That is not what is most important to Jonathan.  His friendship and his love of David supersedes all of his aspirations.  

Think about what you are willing to sacrifice in order to fulfill some preconceived idea of success.  It isn’t always finances that drives people, but sometimes it is power or the ability to dictate or to be seen as important.  Whatever it may be look at what it might be which takes priority over relationships in our lives.  God is a God who created us to be in relationship with Him and with each other.  Don’t sacrifice that for anything.

So the weird meter just went off if you happened to pick up on this chapter without reading the preceding ones.  Let’s get ourselves up to date.  Saul, who is currently reigning as king, is jealous of David because everyone sees him as the hero who killed Goliath.  David, who was anointed king but secretly lest the current king, Saul, find out, is now married to the current king’s daughter and has a very deep friendship with the king’s son, Jonathan.  This David, as one of you asked me today, is the same David who one day will rape Bathsheba after he sees her bathing on her rooftop.  So, now we should be all caught up.

This chapter finds us with both Jonathan and Michal, David’s wife, going to bat for David and really saving his life.  Jonathan by convincing his father that David was actually on his side, and Michal by lying on behalf of David and thus giving him the time that he needed to elude the men of Saul.   We end the chapter with Saul sending messengers to capture David after he had teamed up with Samuel, who was still the high priest.  

As each wave of messengers come to capture David they are overcome with the Holy Spirit in a good way.  They become messengers of the Lord and they are completely taken up with worshiping the Lord, so much so that they are not able to carry out their duty of capturing David.  After this happens three times the king himself, Saul, goes to see what in the world is going on.  As a result (vs.24): He stripped off his clothes, and he too fell into a frenzy before Samuel.  He lay naked all that day and all that night.  The meter just went to 11.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to be so caught up in the  Spirit of God that you are really unaware of anything else which is happening around you.  That was the state of the messengers, and then of Saul, as they were caught up in a Holy Spirit frenzy.

There is a bit of a conflation of time here as David is seen as returning from killing the Philistine, whom we know to be Goliath, and the women are enamored with him and shout out that he has killed 10 thousand Philistines and Saul, the actual king, had only killed a thousand.  Needless to say this was infuriating to Saul, the king.  They aren’t giving me any credit.  Not that he deserved any credit, but he was the king after all, and he should get the credit whether he deserved it or not.

Saul had promised that whomever killed Goliath would marry his daughter and after one false start David did actually marry Saul’s daughter, Michal, and so becomes the son-in-law of the king, Saul.  As a result of this we see that Saul places him in charge over soldiers who every time they go out they conquer and they win a battle.  Instead of this pleasing  Saul because he now has less enemies today than he did the day before, he becomes afraid of David because he is becoming more and more powerful.  

Why is it that the success of others often is seen as a threat to us?  Why do we feel jealous or of less worth when others do something good?  Why do we evaluate ourselves at times based upon the strength or weakness of those around us?  The converse can also be true.   Why do we sense a twinge of excitement or joy when someone whom we feel is not our ally has a bad day or is facing a difficult time.  Look over Matthew 5:44 and rethink that approach.  

If you look at vs.29 you read that “Saul was David’s enemy from that time forward.”  David’s fame continued to grow, the Spirit of the Lord departs from Saul setting up a combustible atmosphere which can only end with the king losing his reign.  That is coming up.

The timing of all of this is interesting, but let’s stick to the most attractive part of this chapter.  DAVID AND GOLIATH!!  Now that we know what we are talking about, you know the story.  Which of the details of the story which you read did you not know and with which were you not familiar?  Did you know that David’s brother scolded him because he was a bratty kid asking too many questions (vs.28)?  Did you know that David got the smooth stones after he had talked to Saul and tried on his armor (vs.40)?  Did you know that Saul had no idea who David was?  

This is where the crux of the problem arises simply because in the previous chapter we have David who comes in and plays the harp for Saul and soothes his soul when the evil spirit of the Lord comes upon him.  But let’s just assume we stepped back into time a bit, or something like that.  How about David defeating Goliath?

If you are going to focus on something in this chapter you have to turn to vs.45-47 where David pronounces that the Lord does not save by sword and spear.  Not by power, not by might, but by my Spirit says the Lord.  Look at Zechariah 4:6 and you see almost the same kind of sense from the prophet who says that it is not by our hand, it is not by our weapons, but it is by the Spirit of God that we are able to accomplish anything.  What a great lesson in this intensely militarized time period in which we live.  

This has to be my favorite chapter in this entire book of the Bible.  I want you to focus on vs.7 where we read: “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”  What a powerful statement.  I think of the things that we do in order for people to see.  I think of what we say in a crowd, what we post on social media, what we pretend to align ourselves with simply for the reason so that those around us, or those who know us, can see what we are saying at the moment is our feeling or our stance.

What if God were the only who cared and saw what we felt and what we did and no one else would see?  How would our lives be different and how would we spend our time differently?  Samuel is told by God that people judge according to what we can see and what we hear and what we have heard and what we have said.  People judge on outward appearances and so we feel the need to keep up our appearances, to pretend that everything is going perfectly well, even if we are falling apart.  Now, this is not the topic of Samuel’s visit or the primary reason for these verses.

God had given up on Saul and so was determined for Samuel to go now and anoint his new king, who would be David.  When he sees David’s brothers, who would be perfect picks for kings, God says don’t look at them, but look at their hearts.  God looks at the hearts of people, and these hearts cannot be seen from the outside.  You cannot judge a person based upon what they are saying and doing on the outside, what they post on social media which often reflects a story that simply is not who they are or how they are feeling.  Judge a person based upon what is on their heart.  What they say when no one is listening, what they do when no one is watching, what they think when no one could ever know.  Choose that person who is not concerned about image but rather about integrity. 

We have a problem Houston.  We might want to think of Saul as having compassion in this chapter, which is why he killed all the women and children but saved the king and the sheep of the king.  I’m not sure I would go that route.  So God commands Saul to go and kill the Amalekites and to make sure that no individual and no livestock is kept alive.  Saul slaughters them but keeps the king and some of the best livestock.  The reason he gives Samuel, who still happens to be the high priest, is that he wanted to sacrifice these perfect animals to the Lord and present the king of the Amalekites to the Lord.  He tries to who that his intentions were good.

The response he gets, and it is a great response, is do you think that God prefers sacrifices over obedience?  You disobeyed thinking you would please the Lord.  It is not okay to disobey just because you think you have a better idea than the commandments of the Lord.  It is not okay to second guess God and come up with a better plan than the plan that God has.  It is never okay to do that.  

Then something interesting happens.  Saul is sorry for what he has done.  He apologizes, he recognizes his sin, but he is not forgiven and he is not given a second chance.  Samuel says it is fine for you to be sorry but the Lord will remove the kingship from you and give it to someone else.  Remember he has already told Saul this news a number of chapters earlier.  But as we said yesterday it seems almost forgotten and I wonder if it was simply not going to be enforced until this new event, this new disobedience takes place.  

Almost as a display of the anger of the Lord, Samuel, again who is the high priest, takes the king of the Amalekites and hews him into pieces to show that this was not what the Lord wanted.  A bit gory here.  And this chapter ends with the Lord being sorry for making Saul king. So, if you are God and you know how things are going to turn out, how can you be sorry.  What would you expect.  But that is how we are seen to God, He is sorry every time that we sin and turn our back on him.  But the difference between us and Saul is that we have an eternal sacrifice which cleanses us from our sins.  That sacrifice is God himself found in Jesus who allows us to when we say like Saul: we are sorry, to actually make a difference and wash us clean from our sin.  

A lot of battles are recounted in this chapter, primarily against the Philistines.  Remember the Philistines?  They were the ones who were after Samson and didn’t let up on his wife Delilah, who was also a Philistine, until she told them and found out what made him weak.  So the Philistines were historic enemies to the Israelites.  We once again see Jonathan, although this time he is described as Saul’s son.  We don’t know how old he is, but we do see that he has a mind of his own and definitely wants to kill Philistines, the enemies of Israel.

So he leaves the camp where there are hundreds of soldiers and and sets out with his armor bearer to see if he can scare up any Philistines.  He does and he kills over a dozen and Saul sees the commotion in the camp of the Philistines and wonders what is going on.  We see that Saul was quite a stern commander.  He reminds me a lot of my basketball coach in college.  A great guy, but pretty stern in some ways.  He told the troops not to touch any food until they had completely annihilated the Philistines.  Of course, his son Jonathan was busy sneaking behind enemy lines to hear this command and so missed out.

Jonathan eats and encourages others to eat until everyone is doing the opposite of what the king said and he has no clue how this started.  He says the person who started this will die, even if it is my own son.  It is his own son, he decides he should die, but the people tell him: You do know that he is a mighty warrior.  It would be a huge mistake to kill him.  So, he ends up not killing him.  That pretty much sums up the stories that take place in this chapter.  The stories of Saul and his son Jonathan.  We haven’t seen David yet, but we are close.  We know that there will be a new king because Samuel had said that the disobedience of Saul was going to make that happen.  That seems like a long time ago and it could easily be forgotten because of the intensity and the success of Saul at this point.

What do you see as you read the first verse of this chapter?  Do you see the big hole that is there?  The literal translation of the Hebrew is: “Saul was…years old when he began to reign, and he reigned…and two years over Israel.”  You do know that we do not own the original manuscript of any of these texts.  We do not own the original document that John wrote when he wrote his Gospel or when he wrote Revelation.  We do not have the original letter to the church in Philippi.   We do not have the original text of whomever wrote Genesis.  What we have is a compilation of documents some of which go back to the 10th century, a few go back to the 1st century as a result of the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but most go back to the 14th or 15th century.  That is well over a thousand years from the time the document was originally written and to where we are today.  Think of how many times that document was written and rewritten.

It is no wonder then that there may be places in Scripture that we simply do not know and do not have the Hebrew that originally went in this place.  We can make really smart guesses as to what should be there.  For example we hear in Acts 13:21 that Saul reigned 40 years, but again, that is just a really good educated guess that in this place the number 40  should be added.

I don’t  want this original document reality to shake you up.  The Spirit of God has been present and has been evident in the rewriting of these text through the ages.  Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found the next oldest text was from the 10th century.  When the scroll of Isaiah was found and it was written nearly 1,000 years earlier, the document was virtually identical.  I say virtually because there were some differences but none of significance.  This is why Scripture continues to be the ultimate authority for me in how I live my life and how I make decisions.

So about this chapter.  It doesn’t take long for Saul to lose favor with the Lord.  He gets restless and doesn’t wait for Samuel to show up to offer the sacrifices as he is about to go against the Philistines.  He was getting restless because his troops were seeing the size of the Philistines and they were getting nervous and because it was taking so much time for Samuel to get there and for them to be ready for battle, Saul decides to wait no longer and to make the sacrifice himself.  When Samuel sees what he did he says: “What have you done?”  “You have done foolishly.”  As a result he is stripped of his throne.  That didn’t take long.  But it does take a while for him to give up his throne.

We also see Jonathan, his son, for the first time in this Scripture.  He is a grown man and he is not identified as his son until a bit later on.  Keep your eye on the relationship that Jonathan and David have.  It is pretty interesting.

We have a summary statement of Samuel and in some ways also a clearing of his name.  He calls the people together and says that he is in their presence as is his children.  Look at vs.2 where he says that he is old, but his kids are there.  But remember what it was that caused the people of Israel to ask for a king?  The corruption of the sons of Samuel caused the people to lose faith in the efficacy of the priestly class.  He calls the people out and asks them, have I ever been corrupt?  Have I ever stolen anything from any of you?  They all answer together that they are witnesses that Samuel has not been corrupt.  He doesn’t ask if his children were corrupt, but he just wants to clear his name.

As a result he gives the people the history of the judges, of which he considers himself one.  He tells the people of Israel this is the end of an era.  You asked for a king, now you will get a king.  But, this king will serve you no purpose if you do not obey the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength.  A king is not going to solve your problems.  In fact, Samuel expresses disappointment that the people couldn’t just view God as king and carry on with life as he, Samuel, judges the nation of Israel.  But you asked for a king, now you have one.  Saul is your king.  Just to prove my point I’m going to make it rain and thunder in the middle of the most important time of year for you, your wheat harvest.  Not the nicest thing to do, but he does prove his point.