Morning. That’s an odd story to talk about, isn’t it? That one from 1 Samuel 14. You know, we finished off the Gospel of John last week, so it does give an opportunity to to talk about a story like that. It’s I heard that that passage first preached on years ago, probably when I was in university at Central Pentecostal Tabernacle on 117th Avenue on a Sunday night service, and there’s something about that passage that caught my imagination that day, and it’s it’s stayed with me ever since. And it’s a very interesting story about a father and about a son and about a fearsome enemy, and mostly it’s about breaking free of our inertia and our fear and our passivity and moving forward to trust God even when we have no idea how it’s all going to come about. It’s about continuing to live in the story that God has for us when all we have is what Jonathan had, just a perhaps. The son in our story says he doesn’t know how things are going to turn out. Says perhaps the Lord will act on our behalf. So, our scripture this morning do a little bit of background, takes us back 3,000 years ago when the nation of Israel expressed a desire to have a king just like all the other nations had. Because up until that time their national government had been a theocracy. It was a nation ruled by God. It was meant to be guided by the law that God had given to Moses and for his people to follow. So, God was the acknowledged king of Israel. He was the one who would could be counted on to look after them, and that was a unique relationship that Israel had with the one true God, and it set them apart from from every other nation. But having an invisible ruler probably seemed quite abstract at times. They had they had a series of judges that had been appointed by God to provide some leadership and guidance, but it wasn’t the same as having a flesh and blood king. So, in 1 Samuel chapter 8, Samuel, he was the last of the ruling judges, and his sons were not great shakes, and they weren’t viewed as acceptable heirs to his position. So, it says that the elders of Israel came together and told Samuel, “You’re old, and your sons don’t walk in your ways. Now, appoint a king to lead us such as all the other nations have.” Now, Samuel was displeased with that request, and as he went to the Lord in prayer, and the response he received from God was probably not the one he’d expected. He heard God say to him, “Listen to all that the people are saying to you. It’s not you they have rejected. They’ve rejected me as their king. Listen to them, but warn them solemnly. Let them know what the king who will reign over them will do.” So, that request for an earthly king was kind of a a rejection of God himself and his rule over their nation, but God conceded to give the people what they wanted despite what it would cost them. Israel had never had a standing army. When the need would come, when they were threatened, they would just put the call out, and and men would come to serve from all the various tribes of Israel, and they would trust God to see the enemies defeated. Samuel warned the people that an earthly king would conscript their sons into a standing army, and then he’d take their daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers, probably to feed that army. And the military would take precedence. Samuel also warned them, you know, the king’s going to appropriate your best land, and he’s going to inflict high taxes on you, taxes so heavy that every April 30th, the people will cry out for relief, but the Lord will not answer them. And we read in in 1 Samuel 8 that despite Samuel’s warning that it was not a good idea, explaining the consequences to them, the people said, “Nope, we want a king over us. Then we’ll be like all the other nations with a king to lead us and to go out before us and to fight our battles.” So, it was in the year about 1050 BC that the first king of Israel was chosen, a tall, imposing man named Saul. And the day before Saul was appointed, God told Samuel this. He says, “About this time tomorrow, I’ll send you a man from the land of Benjamin. Anoint him leader over my people Israel. He will deliver my people from the hand of the Philistines. I have looked upon my people and their cry has reached me.” So, Saul was anointed specifically to take care of the Philistine problem. Philistines were often bitter enemies with Israel. They occupied the territory that we know today as Gaza. So, Saul was anointed king at a time when the Philistines were very powerful. They were a great great threat to the people of Israel. And likely none of us have ever lived under a threat of military takeover and fear of being conquered by a powerful enemy. But just a generation or two before our own, the Western world knew what it meant to live in the shadow of an existential threat. 86 years ago, May of 1940, the international situation was desperate. Germany had invaded uh Denmark and Norway. They steamrolled through Belgium and Luxembourg, shattered the defenses of France. They accomplished in just a few weeks what they hadn’t been able to do in all the four long years of World War I. And compared to the allies, the German war machine was just overwhelming. The only holdout, the last vestige of European democracy was that island nation of Great Britain. And their Prime Minister Churchill said, “Our nation will be reduced to a slave state with just a puppet government if we negotiate peace with Hitler.” And Churchill added this. He says, “If this Long Island history story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization.” There was no expectation expectation of all of receiving any help from the United States. Their president Franklin Roosevelt was seeking an unprecedented third term in office. And in 1940, at every campaign stop, he insisted under his leadership the US would not be drawn into that European war. What was happening in Europe, the very collapse of democracy, was simply not their fight. Meanwhile, night after night the German Luftwaffe pummeled London and other cities in England with bombing raids that sent British citizens scurrying in terror underground. World was on fire. US ambassador to Britain declared, “Democracy is finished in England.” And 1941 looked like it would be the year of total collapse. Now, shortly after Saul was anointed king, the situation became just as desperate for the people of Israel. At the time of his anointing, Saul was given some confirming signs that God would be with him. Once he was told that if he approached the Philistine outpost, he was going to meet a procession of prophets coming down from a place of worship, and they would carry instruments of worship, and they would be prophesying. And Samuel told Saul, “When that happens, the spirit of the Lord will come upon you in power. You will prophesy with them. You’ll be changed into a different person. Once these signs are fulfilled, do whatever your hand finds to do, for God is with you.” Now, what an amazing assurance that would be for for Saul to come into his kingdom, the kingdom God was giving him. Do whatever your hand finds to do, for God is with you. But despite that assurance, and he had an initial resounding victory over the Ammonites, but Saul seemed in no hurry to take on the task that he’d been appointed to complete, to go up against the Philistines. He dragged his feet, and his son Jonathan, who’s the hero of our story this morning, he took the initiative to attack a Philistine outpost, but it was like poking the bear and provoking this beast of the Philistines, and it led to a massive military response. Israel had an army, a standing army of 3,000 soldiers on hand, but 1 Samuel 13 says that when the Philistines then assembled to fight Israel, they came marching with 3,000 chariots and 6,000 charioteers, and soldiers as numerous as the sand on the seashore. With their chariots alone, they had as many, essentially, as many tanks as Israel had soldiers. And they were a dominant power, the Philistines were also at great advantage when it came to military technology. In verse 19, we’re told that the Philistines had forced Israel to stop manufacturing their own weapons. There were no blacksmiths, no metal workers allowed in Israel. Instead, if the people of Israel needed their farming or their gardening tools sharpened, they had to go to a Philistine shop to get that done. It’s like the Philistines had sent weapons inspectors into Israel searching for WMDs, weapons of minimal destruction, things like swords and knives and spears. And that Israeli disarmament program was so effective that we’re told in verse 22, only two men, King Saul and his son Jonathan, they’re the only ones armed with a sword and a spear. Rest of the army, presumably, were fighting with hoes and gardening tools. So, heavily outnumbered, lacking weapons, with a Philistine army bearing down on them, the leaders in Israel didn’t know what to do. King Saul King Saul could only watch as his frightened army melted away in the night. Each morning, he would wake up to find that more and more of his soldiers had gone AWOL. Some of them had gone into hiding. It says, “When the men of Israel saw that their situation was critical, that their army was hard-pressed, they hid in caves and thickets among the rocks and in pits and cisterns. Some Hebrews even crossed the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead.” Even worse, some of the Israeli soldiers had taken the next step. We read in chapter 14 verse 21, “They deserted and they enlisted in the army of the Philistines.” And so as the situation continued to deteriorate, King Saul first panicked and then he became very passive. He panicked when he was supposed to wait for Samuel to come and offer sacrifices to God, but Saul waited and on the seventh day he took it upon himself to offer those sacrifices even though he wasn’t qualified to do that. Then after he panicked, he became very passive. Following all those desertions, it says he only had 600 of his original 3,000 soldiers left with him. And it says as he simply slumped down under a pomegranate tree. So it seems at that point he was just waiting for the story to whatever was going to happen was going to happen. He didn’t see himself as a vital character in that story any longer. He uh he was he had been told by God, “Do whatever your hand finds to do, for God is with you.” But instead of waiting out that promise, he just sank into a pool of inertia. And you may feel a little bit like Saul this morning. You sense that God has called you to more than you are right now, but maybe you’re discouraged. Maybe you feel panicky. Maybe you feel passive at times and you’re in a state of inertia that you can’t seem to break free from. And you might think if God’s not going to help me out here, I’ll just pull in my horns. I’ll I’ll think about my own survival. I’ll get by on comfort food and Netflix, but I’m not going to try anything anymore. I’m done with that. And you feel that there’s a great tension in this story. You know, you get drawn into it. Ever you ever felt like you were going out into life you were outmanned and and unarmed and scared and your friends were melting away and there was no one there to help you take the next step. The temptation is to panic or to become very passive. All you really want is to get yourself out of that story or at least out of that chapter that your story is in. And if that’s you, give some attention to the next part because that’s where the story gets really good. Cuz despite the behavior of his father, Jonathan, the son, simply decided to try something. Like us, he was just a character caught in the middle of a story. He wasn’t at all sure how it was going to end, but since Jonathan knew that it was ultimately God’s story, nothing ultimately could go wrong. Cuz he saw himself as a character in God’s story, Jonathan just decided he was going to try something. He said to his armor bearer in chapter 14, verse 6, “Come, let’s go over to the outpost of those uncircumcised fellows. Perhaps the Lord will act in our behalf. Nothing can hinder the Lord from saving whether by many or by few.” You know, we tend to really like the last half of that verse. Nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few, but we miss the sentence that comes first that makes us a little nervous. Says, “Perhaps the Lord will act on our behalf.” What does that tell us about the story Jonathan was living out of? Tells us he didn’t know how things were going to go down. He certainly didn’t know the outcome. He knew that God was not limited. He knew that God could deliver and that the odds against success really didn’t matter to God. He didn’t know how this particular chapter of God’s story was going to play out, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from staying in God’s story and being a willing character in it. All Jonathan had to go on was a perhaps, a maybe. So, each of us here this morning, we’re in the middle of the story that God is writing. We’re all active characters in it. Like any good story, there’s tension. We don’t know how it’s going to unfold. We don’t know if the next chapter in our lives is going to be a happy one or a really sad one, a victory or a tragedy. God could be writing it either way. We actually do We do a lot of things when all we have is a maybe or a perhaps. We We get married on the basis of a maybe or a perhaps. We have children. We change jobs. We make a business decision. We choose a church. All we really have is a maybe or a perhaps that the Lord will be in it and will act on our behalf to work things out. And we know that many of those things we enter with a perhaps, they might be really difficult when push comes to shove. Book of Revelation chapter 3 verse 7, Jesus is described as the one who holds the keys of David. And it says that when he opens a door, no one can shut it. And when he shuts a door, no one will be able to open it. So, you and I are living in a story where God opens and shuts doors and uh neither we nor anyone else knows anything about that. I mean, the story of the world, it’s really God’s story. He’s the author. He’s writing it. And I think that some doors God leaves unlocked for us, but he leaves that door closed just to see if we have the faith to turn the doorknob. And we may sometimes have missed God’s movement or direction because we insisted on trying to see the end from the beginning, but God may just want us to keep pushing on a sticky door until it eventually swings open. So, God will draw us to sometimes to unlock doors They look like they’re firmly closed just to see what our faith will do, to see if we’ll stay in his story. And you know, even if we get it wrong, even if we make a mistake, because it’s God’s story, we really can’t alter the plot in a way that messes up God’s book. You and I, we can’t ever make a mistake so big that God can’t turn it around in the next chapter or erase it completely. So, there’s great confidence in that. You and I can’t mess up God’s story. But that doesn’t mean that as we press on, all of our chapters are going to end well. You know, Jonathan’s going to have a great victory in our passage this morning. But the last chapter of Jonathan’s life, some years later, it would involve a violent death alongside his dad on a cold battlefield in a later skirmish against these same Philistines. So, we can’t predict how every chapter is going to end in our lives. To stay in God’s story, we have to come to grips with the fact that our death is never going to be an overwhelming tragedy to God. He’s okay with it. God fears nothing. He owes no one anything. He knows that if you and I have put our faith and our trust in him and we die in this world, we’re going to be with him in eternity. So, God has already written that happy ending for us. So, keeping us perfectly safe is not really the purpose of the story. You and I participate in the kingdom of God. We shouldn’t ever make the mistake thinking that the winner is the one who can stay alive the longest because that’s not the story God has written us into. He calls us to live with a measure of uncertainty, but to keep moving forward in battle against a real enemy. Whether we live or we die, it’s not that vital. If the choice is between trying to live in complete safety with our own pleasure, our own fulfillment guaranteed, or wanting to burn our lives out for the kingdom of God, yield in obedience to his leading, well, God would have us opt for that. We really have no control over whether we live or die. The only thing we have a bit of control over is how we live the life that we live right now. And we’ll never really live until we stop fearing death and and feel that I should press on some doors and I should see if they open and I should follow God and and just obey his leading. Jonathan, you know, for him to obey God, he had to go beyond the point of no return. He had to His father was all paralyzed with inertia beside of pomegranate tree, but Jonathan had to push through all that, leave everything in God’s hands, and here’s how it played out. He said to his armor-bearer, “Let’s go to the outpost of those uncircumcised fellows. Perhaps the Lord will act on our behalf. Nothing can hinder the Lord from saving whether by many or by few. We’ll cross over toward the men and let them see us. If they say to us, ‘Wait there until we come to you,’ we’ll stay where we are and not go up to them. But if they say, ‘Come up to us,’ we’ll climb up because that’ll be our sign that the Lord has given them into our hands.” So, both of them showed themselves to the Philistine outpost. “Look,” said the Philistine, “the Hebrews are crawling out of the holes they were hiding in.” And the men of the outpost shouted to Jonathan the armor-bearer, “Come to us, we’ll teach you a lesson.” So, Jonathan said to his armor-bearer, “Climb up after me. The Lord has given them into the hand of Israel.” And look at how God writes the ending to this chapter. It says Jonathan climbed up using his hands and his feet with his armor-bearer right behind him, and the Philistines fell before Jonathan. His armor-bearer followed and killed behind him. In that first attack, Jonathan and his armor-bearer killed some 20 men in an area of about half an acre. Then panic struck the whole army, those in the camp and field and those in the outposts and raiding parties. The ground shook. It was a panic sent by God. The Hebrews, remember those deserters who had gone and enlisted with the Philistines? Those who had previously been with the Philistines and had gone up with them to their camp went over to the Israelites who were with Saul and Jonathan. And when all the Israelites who were hidden in the hill country of Ephraim heard that the Philistines were on the run, they joined the battle in hot pursuit. So, the Lord rescued Israel that day. All the deserters and the traitors of Israel were scooped up into God’s story and became part of this great God-ordained victory. And there’s some real encouragement in life for us there. For those of us who might feel a bit overwhelmed, maybe we’re panicky, maybe we’re passive, maybe we sank into inertia, we’re unsure about whether God’s going to come through in anything in our lives, if we take a risk, if we attempt any kind of a fresh start or a new beginning. One application for us from this passage is to learn to be okay living with the maybe and the perhaps, realizing that nothing can hinder the Lord from saving, whether by many or by few. And realizing that the circumstances of our lives, no matter how miserable and difficult they might be today, they don’t really present any challenge to the renewing power of God. Like Jonathan, we can learn to say, “I’m going to try something. Perhaps the Lord will act on my be- on on my behalf.” So, let’s be willing to take a chance or two knowing that even if we get things wrong, God’s not going to desert us. He’s the author of our salvation. He’s not going to write us out of the story that he’s writing, and no matter what happens, we’ll continue to be good characters in his story. So, even if we come against the door that doesn’t seem to budge, still might be the door that God wants us to go through. God was determined to give Jonathan victory, but Jonathan, greatly outnumbered, still had to kind of screw up his courage and climb hands over feet up the up to the Philistine outpost and start swinging his sword. Trying something new, some new initiative in following and serving God, knowing not not knowing how it’s going to work out. That’s a pretty legitimate application for us from this passage this morning. God’s going to do what he wants to do. He’d always intended to answer the cries of his people and deliver them from the Philistines. And if Saul had been anointed for that task, but he kept dragging his feet and watching things deteriorate, if he wouldn’t act, then God would just use the next man up, Jonathan, and would accomplish the task through him. So, learning to be a bit like Jonathan is a fair application to take away from this passage. But, I think if that’s all we take away, it’s like listening to a piece of music with the treble turned up high and the bass turned all the way down. Uh we can still hear and we can still enjoy the melody, but we’re missing an awful lot of the music’s power. We can read these Old Testament stories and find examples like Jonathan to follow, and we can look for morals and and bits of guidance to help us go from good to great. So, you know, we can treat the Old Testament as a bit of a self-help book, but there’s a much better, richer way to read the Old Testament that brings the bass into the music. So, the what we’re listening to and responding to, it’s not all treble. There’s a cheat code to uh when reading the Old Testament. You might want to write this down. The cheat code to understanding the Old Testament is Jesus. You know, Jesus had once said to the Pharisees in John 5, “You diligently study the scriptures. You think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” He told these religious leaders, “You’re reading the Old Testament. It’s my story you’re reading. You’re reading about me.” Remember on that first Easter afternoon when Jesus, he was cloaked in anonymity and he spent time with a couple discouraged disciples on the road to Emmaus. You know, their their hopes for the Messiah had been shattered by the cross, but there was this curious rumor of resurrection in the air. And what Jesus did with those two men that afternoon was lead them in an extended Bible study. Says, “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus explained to them what was said in all the scriptures concerning himself. And later that same day, Luke records that Jesus appeared to 10 of his disciples and again he said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you. Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the law of Moses, in the prophets, in the Psalms.” Then he opened their minds so they could understand the scriptures. Jesus was telling them and he’s telling all of us this morning that all throughout the the Old Testament, if our minds are open to it, we can follow that trail of jewels that tells the story of Jesus. It’s everywhere. It’s in the law. It’s uh it’s in the Psalms. It’s in the prophets. It’s liberally scattered the story of Jesus throughout the Old Testament. Even in our passage this morning, a story about war and victory over the Philistines in 1 Samuel, the cheat code, Jesus, is still there instructing us how to understand and interpret and apply that passage to our lives. So when we read the Old Testament with Jesus in mind, it’s like we’re turning on a big subwoofer so that the melody we’ve been listening to only with treble, suddenly it’s pulsating and throbbing with bass. And there’s so much more for us to listen to and enjoy when the bass is turned up. So for example, in our story this morning, story of a king, the first king of Israel, Saul, turned out to be a bit of a dud. And his son, Jonathan, probably would have made a much better king. But even before Jonathan’s act in taking on the Philistines, 1 Samuel 13 tells us that after Saul had offered his unauthorized sacrifices, God had already determined that his legacy and his kingdom would not endure. It’d be taken from him and given to a man after God’s own heart. That man would turn out, second king of Israel, would turn out to be David. And David certainly had very deep flaws and failures. Adultery, murder, that was part of his life. He did retain an ability to repent rather than simply make the excuses Saul did, and in that he showed himself to be a man after God’s own heart. As we turn up the bass though, we read the Old Testament, we see that every king and every hero and every ruler, everyone is a severely flawed human being. You know, we can take examples from them, encouraging inspiration from them, but they were all failures. They all needed a savior. You know, sometimes we get a chance to to meet our heroes. And I remember just after university I had a chance to meet one of mine. He was a Christian leader, he was from the States, he was coming up for a conference. Uh he’d written books that a lot of us had read about making disciples and uh and walking as a disciple of Christ. And uh so so he is a hero, you know, we went out for for a lunch and uh sometime as we were leaving that lunch, I just noticed a little fork on the on the restaurant floor. So I kind of just reached down to pick up the fork and uh about that he just kicked the fork under a table saying, “Well, that’s not my problem. Leave that for someone else.” It’s just a tiny thing. These are the kind of things you and I might do all the time, but you don’t expect it from your hero. You don’t expect your heroes to have feet of clay like that, like the rest of us. But he did, you know, so we it’s inadequate for us just to take an example from Jonathan or from David or from Joseph in the Old Testament and try to live our lives off the fumes of their examples because severely flawed people needed a savior just as much as we do. We can take some inspiration, we can learn some lessons from them, but far richer is the transforming power that comes through the one the Old Testament’s really talking about, the one the Old Testament’s really pointing to, which is King Jesus. Remember God told Samuel that uh for Israel to choose an earthly king it was a really a step down for them. It was kind of a rejection of God, and the consequences for the people would be unpleasant. Yet, even that wouldn’t rewrite the story that God was writing for the salvation of the world, the story of Jesus as the only flawless king, the almighty king, the one who observed every aspect of the Old Testament law without fail, came to earth, humbled himself to endure the shame and agony of the cross to make a way for the sins of us and all to be forgiven who put their faith and trust in him. Jesus, the one the Old Testament’s really all about, gives us far more than the tinny moral inspiration of any of the characters in the Old Testament. He offers us base-heavy redemption. So, you and I, we can read the Bible as though it’s primarily about us or primarily about God. We can read it for inspiration and little examples of faithfulness like that of Jonathan. And then we can make some alterations and changes to our our lives as a result. Or we can read the Bible as being primarily about what God has done through Jesus Christ the king. And if we learn to read the Bible that way, we start seeing Jesus everywhere we look. As inspired as we might be by Jonathan this morning, King Jesus offers far more inspiration and encouragement and stability and power. So, the lesson today is not just be like Jonathan, take some chances, push on the door even if it feels sticky, take a risk, and perhaps God will swing it open for you. That lesson is there for the taking. And we can be encouraged by that, but how much greater the impact for us that King Jesus is always committed to defeating all of his enemies, to answer our prayers, and to make us fruitful as we abide in him. The Bible’s not primarily about you or about me. It’s always primarily about Jesus. So, as you read the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, keep humming to yourself as you read. It’s all about the bass, about the bass, no treble. You’ll You’ll never hear that again quoted in a message. But we have to overcome the panic and the passivity in our lives and to be excited about staying in God’s story and looking forward to the way he’s developing us as a character in it. And let’s just pray about some of this together. Take a moment your your time with God. Consider any areas of life where you might feel like you’re you’re currently stuck in inertia and you feel panicky and you feel passive. Ask God to give you the faith and courage to step out not knowing exactly how things are going to end up. And thank Jesus that because your story is being written in the his story that your ending is sure to be a happy one.