The chapter opens with the thing finally said out loud. Saul tells his son and his servants to kill David. It is a stated intention, beyond any bad temper a thrown spear might excuse. Jonathan, who 1"delighted much in David," warns him, then does something braver and pleads with his father: 4"Let not the king sin against his servant David, because he has not sinned against you." He reminds Saul what Saul himself saw and rejoiced in, and names the killing for what it would be. Saul listens and swears, 6"As the LORD lives, he shall not be put to death." For one paragraph, peace holds.
It does not hold long. War comes again, David wins again, and a 9"harmful spirit from the LORD" comes on Saul as he sits with a spear in his hand while David plays the lyre that once soothed him. Saul's oath before the LORD lasted less than a season.
Michal saves her husband with love that outweighs loyalty to her father, and she does it with a household image laid in the bed under a pillow of goats' hair. There is a quiet irony in it. Samuel had told Saul that "presumption is as iniquity and idolatry" (1 Samuel 15:23), and now an image in a bed outwits the king's own messengers. The man rejected partly for a sin like idolatry cannot see through a blanket over an idol.
David runs to Samuel, and here the chapter turns strange. Saul sends messengers to seize him, and 20"the Spirit of God came upon the messengers of Saul, and they also prophesied." He sends more, and the same thing happens. He sends a third company, and again. Finally he goes himself, and the Spirit comes on him before he even arrives. 24"he too stripped off his clothes" and lay prophesying "all that day and all that night." Three waves of men, then the king, and each is made powerless to do what they were sent to do.
The question the crowd asks is an echo. In chapter 10, when Saul first prophesied, the people said, "What has come over the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?" (1 Samuel 10:11). Then it marked the start of a kingship. Here it marks its undoing, and the words sound like mockery.
What should we make of an encounter with God's Spirit that leaves a man unchanged? Saul is not a better king afterward. He does not repent. In the next chapter he is hunting David again. Direct and overwhelming contact with God, it turns out, is not the same as a transformed heart, and that should sober anyone tempted to measure their standing by the intensity of an experience in place of the fruit that follows it.
Underneath the chapter runs a quieter pattern. Every weapon Saul lifts is turned aside by someone else's hand: a son's plea, a wife's trick, a prophet's company, at last God's own Spirit standing in the doorway. David does nothing to save himself. He is warned, hidden, lowered through a window, and carried to Ramah by others. The greater Son of David would be hunted long before he was crowned, and delivered by his Father, all the way through death itself.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you guard your anointed through more hands than we can count, a friend's honest word, a quiet deception, your own Spirit standing where no army could. Keep us from mistaking a powerful experience for a changed heart. Give us Jonathan's courage to speak truth to those we love, and David's willingness to be carried. Thank you for the greater Son of David, who trusted you through death. In Jesus' name, amen.