Fields & Festivals - 1st Samuel 20:24-42

The festival is upcoming and David and Jonathan have made their plan to find out if David is safe in Saul’s presence because presumably they both want things to go back to the way they were and David wants to go home. David is going to wait in a field while Jonathan goes to the festival and sees how Saul reacts to David not being there and maybe have a conversation with him about it. On the first night of the festival, David’s seat is empty and Saul doesn’t say anything about it because he thinks, “something hath befallen him, he is not clean, surely he is not clean.” This refers to the ritual purity that one has to undergo before participating in a religious festival. I also wonder how anyone knows this who is recording this because it seems like someone would have had to ask Saul his thoughts on the matter and to me, it seems like this might have been difficult information to come by, maybe someone was guessing, it doesn’t really matter ultimately, I just thought it was interesting.

The second day of the festival, Saul asks Jonathan why David still isn’t there and Jonathan fibs a little bit saying that David begged him to let him go to Bethlehem to be with his family for the festival. Saul’s reaction is disproportionate to the response and he becomes enraged with Jonathan. Maybe it was because he didn’t think it was Jonathan’s place to give permission to David to leave, maybe it was because he thinks Jonathan is trying to usurp his authority, maybe it's because he thinks that David is showing him disrespect by going home instead of being with Saul, maybe he’s acting like many abusive people to when the object of their rage is not submissive to them. It seems the reason for Saul’s anger is because he knows now that Jonathan has chosen David’s side over his, which looking at this situation, logically, that’s a pretty big leap. There’s been other reasons that Saul could have come to that conclusion, but this one doesn’t make any logical sense, but Saul isn’t acting rationally. Saul curses Jonathan’s mother, and interestingly tells Jonathan that as long as David is alive Jonathan can’t be king, so that seems to be an underlying reason as well. Saul sees David as a threat to his dynasty, and is angry that Jonathan is not more angry about it too.

Saul tells Jonathan to go bring David to him so that he can kill him, and Jonathan tries to go back to the same rational argument that he thinks worked the first time, asking “wherefore shall he be slain? What hath he done?” Saul now throws his spear at Jonathan to kill him, and that’s when Jonathan realizes that it is fully his father’s intention to kill David. Jonathan leaves the party and grieves, it says he grieves for David but I think that’s only partly it. The first time your dad tries to kill you and you realize that he’s an irredeemable psychopath, it’s a hard time for a child regardless of age, so I think Jonathan didn’t just grieve for David but also for himself because whatever he thought he had with his father was over and he just now realized it.

The nest day Jonathan takes a servant out with him to the field where David was hiding and they do the thing with the arrows being shot to the side and the phrase said that indicates that Saul does indeed still want to kill David. Then he sends the servant back and he goes to David and they bow, hug, kiss, and cry and recovenant “the Lord be between me and thee, and between my seed and thy seed forever.” Basically, please don’t kill me and y family when you are king. It says that David exceeded Jonathan in his crying, but again, I don’t think that it’s because he’s going to miss Jonathan, I mean I think that that’s a huge component of it, but David’s life as he knew it is over now, he’s not safe anywhere and he can never go home. I recently have spent the last 16 months grieving the loss of what I thought my life was going to be, what I wanted it to be, and it takes a lot of energy to move forward in a life that you didn’t want while grieving the loss of the one that you had. There is a significant grieving period for that type of loss, or at least there was for me. But Jesus has carried me through it, and I’m getting there.

Another point that I think it important to make here is that Saul tries to kill Jonathan and doubles down on killing David, he’s escalating his wickedness here but what happened at the end of chapter 19? Saul was so overcome with the Spirit that he prophesies. His encounter with the Spirit is so strong that he takes off his royal robes, essentially stripping himself of his worldly status, humbling himself before God and then prophesying. I’ve never felt the Spirit so strongly that I’ve prophesied out loud for other people to hear and my heart isn’t nearly as hardened has Saul’s. All that to say, I couldn’t imagine the magnitude of the outpouring of the Spirit in order for that to happen to Saul, I would like to believe that after a spiritual encounter like that would have been transformative, for me at least, I’d hope. But just a short time later Saul is even worse off spiritually than he was before. I don’t think that he degraded spiritually because of that spiritual encounter but it certainly didn’t change him positively. That’s the point, an angel appearing to Laman and Lemuel didn’t stop them from constantly rebelling and eventually becoming murderous, and Saul having the Spirit so strong that he prophesied didn’t keep him from further hardening his heart. It just goes to show that supernatural intervention doesn’t convert, the person has to be ready.

It's hard to look at examples of like Alma the younger and the sons of Mosiah, or Moses with the burning bush, or Amulek or Zeezrom because then we just think that anyone can become converted if only they could have that strong spiritual experience. Then it’s easy to look at people you love leaving the church or disbelieving and become angry at God because all it would take is a supernatural intervention and then they could be saved like all those other examples. I think, honestly, that if supernatural intervention was so effective that it could convince everyone to repent that it would happen so much more because if it was effective and God chose not to do it and let people wander in disbelief further sinning, furthering their misery, then that is cruel and the God that I know and love is not cruel. Therefore I have to deduce that it is just not that effective unless a person is in a specific place in their life where it would be. And I think what’s hard is that we see these stories of Paul actively hunting Christians when he’s converted, Zeezrom actively trying to turn the crowd against Alma then Amulek reads his thoughts and suddenly he’s convinced of the error of his ways. These people are actively in the depths of iniquity and suddenly snatched out of their wickedness by God, so we see people actively working in their iniquity and think that it’s time and become angry at God for not intervening at that point. But we don’t know their hearts, we don’t know if it would be effective or not. I’m confident that if God had intervened earlier in these cases, they would have been as ineffective as what we see with Saul right now. It has to be the precise moment of effectiveness and God knows when that moment is and we don’t. So it’s easy and understandable to become frustrated when we want God to intervene and He doesn’t, but we have to remember that if it’s not the right time then it wouldn’t work even if God did act the way we wanted him too. Timing is incredibly important, we just don’t understand it.

I think that we only see the big grand gestures of examples of God’s divine intervention and think that it has to be angels or paralysis or something like that, but I’ve spent the last 16 months watching hours of videos of people sharing their stories about how God reached out to them in their lives. These stories talk about thoughts coming into their heads, messages coming from strangers that hit them in a different way, prayers of “I don’t think you’re real but if you are show yourself to me in this very specific way” and suddenly it happens. I have spent months listening to these testimonies about God’s divine intervention and it rarely, if ever, has involved angels or physical incapacitation. These are stories from people actively engaged in devil worship, witchcraft, sexual immorality, drug addiction, violence, death, murder, in prison. Sometimes it’s just people at the end of their emotional rope, getting divorced, death of a loved one, disease, infirmity. God reaches out and catches them, and their testimonies are so strong and their commitment so firm. It’s inspiring, honestly, I needed to hear them and I don’t think I would have made it through this last 16 months without surrounding myself with these testimonies, and I didn’t go out searching for it, God literally brought it right before my eyes, and I needed it. We have to trust his timing and we have to trust that He will snatch our loved ones out of the world and into himself the moment that it would be effective to do so. I truly believe that that is true.