This sermon is from our guest speaker – Sam Shuttleworth.
WATCH
LISTEN
READ
1 Samuel 14
Outline
I – The Footsteps of humble faith [vv. 1-15]
II – God’s power to save despite a prideful leader [vv. 16-23]
III – The blindness of a proud man [vv. 24-30]
IV – Consequences of pride [vv. 31-46]
Hello, I am Sam Shutteworth. I am the College intern at Alliance Bible Fellowship. Thank you for having me this Sunday. I have loved being here from visiting on Sunday mornings, to helping at the VBS over the summer, and now a chance to be here speaking. It has been encouraging to see how God has been working through you all in this church, and in your community. This morning we will be going through 1 Samuel 14. We are looking at 2 types of leaders: a proud father and his humble son. We’re looking at the faithlessness of Saul and the faithfulness of Jonathan.
“The fact is, the higher up we find ourselves in terms of power, influence, and wealth – the more people look up to us – the more vulnerable we are to pride and self-deceit, and the more prone we are to be blind to our spiritual needs and deficiencies.”– Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth
Background
1 Samuel follows the prophet and last judge of Israel named Samuel. In the first part of the book, the people ask for a king like all the other pagan nations around them. Samuel then chooses Saul to be the first king of Israel. At first Saul starts off well, but soon he begins showing his pride as a leader. 1 Samuel 13 ends with King Saul, being rejected by Samuel and God right before he is about to go into battle with the Philistines. Now Saul’s army got a good glimpse of the Philistine army and many deserted Saul. He was now left with 600 men under him, while the Philistine army had 36,000 chariots and horsemen, not including their foot soldiers. Not including the foot soldiers, that is 60 times bigger than Israel’s forces. That is like America fighting New Zealand. The philistines then split their army into three divisions to spread farther along the mountain ridge. Even so this would still be around 12,000 horsemen and chariots to Saul’s 600 men. Saul and his army are encamped towards the top of the mountain and have some sight of the philistine army in Michmash. This brings us into our text today in chapter 14. As we walk through this text, we are going to be doing a close-up comparison of a son and his father, zeroing in on Jonathan’s constant faithfulness and humility, and Saul’s constant faithlessness and pride. So, our story begins with …The Footsteps of humble faith.
I. The Footsteps of Humble Faith (v. 1-15)
A. So Jonathan and his armor bearer snuck away from camp with no one knowing, so they
could spy out the army of the philistines and maybe take some step of action. They take an unusual route, down the valley and into a Pass. This leads into a key verse showing the heart and mind of a humble leader. Verse 6 Jonathan states “Come, let us go over to the garrison of the uncircumcised. It MAY BE that the Lord will work for us, for nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or few.” Jonathan does not “put God in a box” and proudly states that God will fight for them, or that God is this good luck charm and that because they are God’s chosen people that he will just be victorious.
No, Jonathan allows himself to be directed by God, which is again seen a few verses later in 9 & 10 that “If they say to us, ‘wait until we come to you,’ then we will stand still in our place, and not go up to them. But if they say, ‘Come up to us,’ then we will go up for the Lord has given them into our hand. And this shall be the sign to us.” Jonathan knew he would only be victorious if it was God’s will and his hand was with Jonathan. Here in the text, the Philistines call Jonathan and his armor bearer up to them. Now this is not some leisurely stroll up to the Philistines, the entire plan of Jonathan has been reliant on God. He showed himself rather than a sneak attack, and this pass he was in, and his path up to the philistines here required him to rock climb. Now I am not a rock climber but I have had some experience doing it and it is exhausting. You use every part of your body and it’s draining, now imagine doing it with your sword, and gear. Somehow “By God’s will and grace ” Jonathan and his armor bearer were able to scale the wall and then somehow kill 20 philistines. But God was with them the entire time, and then showed himself in an
earthquake which brings us to our comparison to Saul, his father.
II. God’s Power to save despite a prideful Leader. (v.16-23)
A. As Jonathan was faithfully relying on God and taking steps of obedience, Saul is just sitting around doing nothing. This is when the watchmen saw that the “multitude was dispersing”, and Saul was thinking someone in the camp went off without his knowledge and control. I worked as a counselor at a christian camp a couple summers ago, and we took very seriously the safety of our campers. BUT… there was that one time when we lost a kid. Maybe you never worked at a camp, but you parents in the room prob. know the agony of realizing you left a child behind some place? As counselors, we had to identify the missing child, report it to our Director, then spread out to our designated places to search. We looked under the playground slides, underneath the beds, in the woods. Turns out the little kid was hiding under the bed (just saying – he wasn’t one of my campers!). So here in v. 17, Saul’s doing the same thing, searching his camp to find which of his men had left, having no idea it was his own son.
B. Now it was customary for the leaders to seek God’s direction before the Israelites were to go to war, so Saul, trying to keep the appearance of a true worshiper and follower of God, told the priest to “bring the ark of God”. Now we see Saul’s pride in that as the “tumult” (or commotion) increased Saul told the priest to “Withdraw your hand”. Basically Saul told Ahijah to stop trying to talk with God and see what His will is and took matters into his own hands. Saul’s mind and actions showed that despite his appearance of being one with God, he did not care for what God wanted or would say, but he wanted his victory over the philistines. Now before we start seeing Saul as this awful leader unlike the rest of the army and us, we constantly have the same mindset.
C. “Remember a time when you were on vacation or had people in your house? Or even with your kids on a Saturday morning. You then wake up one morning to do your quiet time and as you start, you hear your friends and family downstairs laughing over breakfast and having a good time and you feel left out. Your kids start goofing around and making noise. So you quickly finish your “devotion”, and go join in and check on them. I know I fall into this so easily. You did it right. You opened your bible, you maybe said a prayer. But what was your heart doing, what was your mind thinking about?” We desire to live like Jonathan but we find ourselves operating like Saul. We want to be humble but often find ourselves in pride.
D. But despite our sinfulness and our mistakes and Saul’s sinfulness, verse 23 comforts us by again reaffirming that “the Lord saved Israel that day.” But the story isn’t over. Next we have…
III. The Blindness of a Proud Man. (v. 24-30)
A. Jonathan had already snuck off to fight the Philistines when Saul made this “rash” vow. This vow is prideful, foolish, and simply stupid. He places his soldiers under a vow to fast. This vow to fast appears holy and spiritual to those around him but in reality comes from a place of pride. Can’t we also sometimes do the same, when we publicly pray or serve so that others see us and not to glorify God. He is going to pursue the Philistines, he’s made up his mind. This fast is a way to try and bring God along as a good luck charm for him and his army. Which fasting is good and I encourage you to do it with a right heart because God provides the energy you need during the fast. Moses and Jesus both fasted forty days in the wilderness. God supplied them the energy they needed, but Saul’s fast was not one of a true heart but out of selfish ambition, to look holy before his army. This fast then is constantly repeated to have made the “men hard pressed”, “faint”, and “very faint”. God was not with them in this fast.
B. Now this army just fought and chased the philistines for roughly 15 miles through a valley. Like this is a crazy amount of work. During Covid, my friends in Greensboro randomly texted the group chat one day and said “hey we got nothing better to do let’s meet at one friends house and lets try and run a marathon. No training, just meet there and we will start. Only a few of us made it to 20 of the 26 miles and let me tell you, that was probably the most pain I have ever been in, in probably my entire life. By the 20th mile when we were back to the cars, we wouldn’t have even considered it a waddle, we were in so much pain. And guess what the first thing we did? We all drove straight to cookout, and got ourselves a greasy cookout tray, a peanut butter Oreo milkshake and had a feast. These men were exhausted from this chase, exhausted from fighting and killing philistines, and then you throw a fast into the mix. Jonathan could not have said it better “my father has troubled the land. How much better if the people had eaten freely today. For now the defeat among the philistines was not great.” Do you see? Saul’s pride hurt everyone around him. It hurt his own army. It crushed his chances for victory. And eventually, it would incriminate his own son. This leads us quickly in the fourth section.
IV. The Consequences of Pride and the Humble Man’s Response. (v. 31-46)
A. There are 3 consequences of Saul’s pride, and each one gets worse than the first.
B. The first is what was previously said by Jonathan. The Israelites could have had a greater defeat over the Philistines than the end result.
C. The second is in verse 32 and 33 where the people “pounced on the spoil” and ate the animals with the blood still in their food. They were as famished as I was at my failed marathon attempt, and they ate like animals. Devouring what was around them and by eating the blood of the animals they were sinning against God. But why is this so bad? Well in Leviticus 17 God commands the Israelites to not eat the blood of anything because in verse 11 it explained “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.” This explains the significance of the blood in their sacrifices to atone for their sin. By eating the blood, it is sinning against God and not allowing for the atonement, the payment of sins to be given.
D. The third consequence of Saul’s pride is found in verses 39, 43, and 44 where the punishment of Saul’s vow is death. Saul pridefully thought that he was honoring God with the fast and was so righteous that he would put to death anyone that broke it. And in 43 and 44 Saul was prepared to do just that and to kill his own son, but the people stepped in and boldly confronted the king.
E. Now Saul again and again showed his pride in what he said and did, but I want to look at Jonathan here in 43. He gave no excuses, no beg of forgiveness, he understood what he did wrong and humbly accepted the punishment. God ended up using this to exalt Jonathan in the eyes of the people, and to humble Saul, but Jonathan humbly accepted whatever God directed and would do.
This leads us into the last section of this chapter where it foreshadows Saul’s reign. God already declared that Saul’s family will no longer reign after him and while he still was king, there was no peace. Saul had constant warfare, but you need to see that God is still faithful with an unjust king. He still is faithful to Israel and his own promises by giving Saul victory and forming the kingdom of Israel.
Application
In this chapter, we see a prideful man leading his people poorly contrasted against the actions of a faithful humble son. Throughout the pages of Scripture, there’s no clearer example of a humble/faithful Son than what we find in Philippians 2.
In verses 6 to 8, speaking about Jesus, it says “Who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking on the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Here we see Jesus humble himself, and take on the form of a baby. And similar to Jonathan’s humble response of “Here I am; I will die”, Jesus humbly took on the punishment of all our sins on the Cross. Just moments before his arrest in Matthew 26, Jesus states that He had the ability to call 12 legions of angels to his side but knew the Father’s will and humbled Himself.
Probably every person in this room can relate in some way to Saul. We’ve all been there in those moments when our pride gets in the way. When we know our coworker or employee has a really good idea, and we’re not gonna get the credit when he shares. What about when you’re in an argument with your spouse and you know you’re wrong, but you don’t wanna give in because you’ll have to lose so the marriage can win. Kids or teenagers – what about those times when your parents are correcting you? Are you responding like Saul, or even ignoring your parents, out of a place of pride? We’ve all been there…
But Jesus shows us a better way. The faithful Son humbly came and laid down His life so that we can receive life. The problem with pride is that it always gets in the way and trips us up. And humility will always clear the way.
So, maybe you need to repent of some area of pride in your life that’s getting in the way. I plead for you to look to Jesus and walk humbly with him. Our pride always gets in the way – but Jesus has shown us a better way.
Questions for this week:
- What do we learn about Saul from his decisions in this chapter?
- What positions of authority has God given to you in this season of life? How can you guard against being overly-heavy in those positions?
- How did Jesus model humility in His life and death? What motivation does this give us to lead humble lives?