Saul sits under a pomegranate tree at Migron with six hundred discouraged men and a priest in an ephod, and his son is somewhere else, climbing a cliff toward an enemy garrison with only his armor-bearer. 1"He did not tell his father." The chapter draws the contrast before either man speaks: a king sitting still, a prince already moving.
What Jonathan says to his armor-bearer holds faith and honesty together. 6"It may be that the LORD will work for us, for nothing can hinder the LORD from saving by many or by few." He stops short of claiming a guarantee. "It may be" sits beside confidence. What he is sure of is God's character, and the outcome is left open: a garrison of armed Philistines is no harder for the LORD to overcome than one man, because numbers were never what decided victory.
The armor-bearer's answer is one of the quietly beautiful lines in the book. 7"Do all that is in your heart," he says, and 7"I am with you heart and soul." He commits his life to Jonathan's plan on the spot, into what looks by any military reckoning like a suicide mission.
Jonathan asks for a sign, and the kind he chooses matters. If the Philistines say wait, the two will retreat. If they say come up, the two will climb straight into the enemy's hands. He stakes everything on the answer that is worse for two lone attackers, since a garrison inviting them up holds every advantage of terrain and numbers. That is what happens: 12"Come up to us, and we will show you a thing." Jonathan reads it as confirmation: 12"the LORD has given them into the hand of Israel."
What follows happens almost too fast to picture. Jonathan climbs with hands and feet, the armor-bearer behind him, and about twenty men fall. Then something larger than two men's swords takes over. 15"There was a panic in the camp, in the field, and among all the people." Two men began it. God finished it, with an earthquake and a terror no human weapon produced.
Saul, watching from a distance, does something that would be comic if it were not so telling. He orders a headcount, finds Jonathan missing, and calls for the priest to inquire of God, the discipline he abandoned under pressure at Gilgal. But once the panic spreads, he cuts the inquiry short: 19"Withdraw your hand." Saul wants God's blessing as long as it costs him no delay. It is the failure of chapter 13 in another disguise. He remembers to consult the LORD once someone else's faith has made the consulting unnecessary.
Once the battle turns, everyone finds courage. Hebrews who had served the Philistines switch sides, and men hiding in the hills pour out to join the pursuit. None of them started it, and all of them finish it. The narrator will not let credit land anywhere else: 23"So the LORD saved Israel that day." The verdict passes over Jonathan's courage and Saul's late arrival alike.
Centuries later a very different army, twelve ordinary men with no weapons, was sent to overturn an empire armed with a message and the confidence Jonathan carried up that rock. Paul says God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong (1 Corinthians 1:27). Jonathan never saw the empty tomb his faith was pointing toward. On a cliff nobody else would climb, he understood what kind of God he served.
Ask where you are waiting for certainty before you move. Jonathan had none, and he had a God who is not limited by numbers.
Prayer
Father, forgive us for waiting for certainty before we move, and for dropping the prayer we started the moment it becomes inconvenient. Give us Jonathan's confidence in your character, which does not change whether we face many or few. Thank you that you have never needed our strength to accomplish your purposes, only our willingness to climb. In Jesus' name, amen.