1 Samuel 14:1-52 ~ John 7:31-53 ~ Psalm 109:1-31 ~ Proverbs 15:5-7
Today is May 13th. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it is wonderful, truly, to be here with you today like we do every day, right? One step forward every day takes us through the whole Bible every year. So off we go into the wild frontier, as it were, in the life of King Saul, the first king of Israel, and his goings and comings and what that means to our lives. We’ve been reading from the God’s Word translation this week, which is what we’ll continue to do since today is still this week, even though we’re closing down another week, another one of our weeks together today. So 1 Samuel chapter 14, verse 1 through verse 52 today.
Commentary
The Philistines are a people who are pretty strong and are like the nemesis of Israel. They are in conflict with each other quite often and now that there is this new king, it is just amping everything up. Israel has just been this anomaly, they didn’t look like everyone else. They weren’t conducting their culture like everyone else. It was just this interesting thing that hadn’t been seen before. Once they got a king, they started resembling everybody else and so that just brought some conflict into the picture.
We’re getting to know King Saul a little bit and we can see that as a person he’s an insecure person which makes him an insecure leader. He’s very, very focused on what people think about him. He wants people to look at him and his leadership as strong and to love him. He is very insecure inside. We saw all that developing, even in his coronation and in all the stuff we’ve already read. So what happens today is Jonathan, Saul’s son, the prince of Israel, is making moves and the moves that he makes cause the Philistines to scatter and then everybody goes into battle. It is pretty clear that Jonathan has instigated this because they did a search of who was missing. All of a sudden Jonathan is on the radar. He has won this very, very important victory. Saul now needs to show his strength and wisdom and leadership. So he makes everybody take an oath not to eat, which proves to be kind of counterproductive. Saul is trying to seem spiritual but on a practical level these people are burning calories like crazy. They are in war. They are running and they are fighting and they are falling and they are getting up and they covering terrain, so they are exhausted.
Jonathan just doesn’t even know about this, so he eats some honey and that is going to cause Saul to kill his son because he has made this oath and he has to save face and he has to be full of righteous indignation. He has to be the king. At this point, the army is like no, no, no. Jonathan is responsible for this victory. He should not die. He is the prince. So Saul, he has to be humbled in the moment, but he also keeps his son, but that begins to drive a wedge between King Saul and his son and we’ll see that re-emerge later.
What we can see developing here is just a simple fact. Our insecurities, if they are the lead in our lives, if we’re leading from our insecurities, and I don’t mean just leadership like leadership of people, I mean like within ourselves in our own lives, if that is the lead story, our insecurity is our lead story and that informs all of our choices and decisions, we start looking like Saul pretty quick. Maybe the circumstances are different, but the thing that motivates the circumstances and leads us into the choices that we make comes from the same place.
It doesn’t work. If we just look at the choices that we’ve made out of insecurities, out of what everybody else is going to think about us, out of comparison to each other, we can see that we entangle ourselves like crazy. We obligate ourselves to things that we don’t want to do or that we don’t feel compelled to be involved in because we want to please everybody. Or our insecurities pull us within ourselves and we withdraw and isolate from others because they are so much better, they’re doing so many wonderful things and we’re not. You can play this out in any of a myriad of circumstances in your life, in our lives.
Our insecurities, if that is the lead story on who we are, then it is not the truth. It is just the truth we’re inventing. It’s the truth we’re settling for. It’s sort of the easy way because it lets us withdraw. We don’t actually have to live into who we were created to be and it’s not going to work. I mean, look at the situations in your own lives that are being informed and chosen out of insecurity. They are not working. It doesn’t work that way. We were created to have an identity bestowed upon us by our creator and he has bestowed that identity upon us – God’s children created in his image. That is who you are. The rest of this stuff is fabrication.
It just starts with one wound, one hurt, one something or another in your life at some point that begins to inform every other decision and then we start making these strange obligations and decisions and responsibilities and compulsions and addictions and it is all coming from this place that we’re seeing in Saul. So let’s consider today. Is the lead story my insecurity? Is that the thing that is actually out there that everybody can see except for me? And I’m trying to cover it over with this personality and image and aura and it is not working and I’m miserable and I’m probably not fooling anyone anyway? Maybe I can be true. Maybe I can just be true. Maybe I can be a child of God created in his image and maybe that is enough. Let’s consider it today. And as we continue through the life of Saul, we’re going to watch everything we just talked about. We’re going to watch it all play out so we’ll get a very, very clear picture of where those roads go. So let’s invite the Holy Spirit to come.
Prayer
We do that, Jesus, come. Come into those places. Holy Spirit, is the lead story of my life, the main presentation of who I am coming from, my hurts, my insecurities, my comparison? Is that what has been going on here? Because that would explain a lot. Right now I get this vision of freedom, that it could be true, that I really can be true. I just am a person created in your image and you love me and you’ve rescued me and you’re inviting me forward toward wholeness. You’re inviting me through the process of sanctification every single day to become more and more who I really am and that is whole. And yet all this other stuff just completely diminishes and clouds that out. So I’m here. I’m here. I’m thinking this through and I’m inviting your Holy Spirit because I don’t want that. I don’t even like what that sounds like. So come Jesus, by the power of your Holy Spirit give me vision for who I really am and show me how to walk that path toward my own wholeness that is who I was really created to be. Show me how to disentangle myself from all of the kudzu that has risen up and wound itself around me and entangled me so that I don’t really even know where I am anymore. Help me. God, help me. I want to be true. I want to reflect your glory into this world. Come Holy Spirit, we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.
SONG played on today’s DAB “No Longer Slaves” Bethel Music https://itun.es/us/6IP64