Saul's oath serves Saul. 24"Cursed be the man who eats food until it is evening and I am avenged on my enemies." The oath is timed to Saul's vindication, and no part of it serves the LORD's deliverance of Israel. In the hour of Jonathan's great victory, won by God through two men on a cliff, Saul makes the battle about himself again. The cost lands on his exhausted troops, who chase the fleeing Philistines all day on empty stomachs because their king needed a vow to feel his triumph secured.
Jonathan, off in the pursuit and never told of the oath, walks through a forest dripping with wild honey and eats. 27"His eyes became bright." It is a small, human, reasonable act, refreshment after a battle he risked his life to start. When he is told what his father swore, he says, 29"My father has troubled the land." It is the word used of Achan, whose sin brought disaster on all Israel, now turned on the king. Jonathan sees that Saul's zeal has cost Israel a fuller victory.
By evening the starving troops break, slaughter captured animals on the ground, and eat with the blood in it, against the law. Saul moves quickly to stop it, rolling a great stone to serve as an altar so the meat can be drained. It is one moment where his instincts serve the people, and it cannot undo what the oath cost.
When Saul wants to press on through the night, a priest slows him: 36"Let us draw near to God here." Saul inquires, and 37"he did not answer him that day." Silence from the God who had worked an earthquake through Jonathan hours before. Saul turns the silence into an investigation, certain the fault lies with someone else, and swears a heavier oath that the guilty man will die, 39"though it be in Jonathan my son." The lot falls on Jonathan, the one man in the account who had worked with God that day.
Jonathan's answer to his father is calm. 43"I tasted a little honey with the tip of the staff that was in my hand. Here I am; I will die." It is plain truth and readiness to pay for it. And Saul, having sworn, is prepared to kill the son whose faith won the battle he never managed.
It is the people who do what needed doing. 45"Shall Jonathan die, who has worked this great salvation in Israel?" Their counter-oath is as solemn as Saul's, and they keep it. They understand what Saul missed all day: a vow sworn in the LORD's name is not the LORD's will because his name was invoked. God cannot be conscripted to ratify a rash word spoken piously. Jonathan lives because ordinary Israelites had the courage to say so.
The chapter closes with a list of Saul's victories and his household, accomplishments, and it lacks what a summary of a faithful king usually includes, any word that the LORD blessed him. Saul fought hard all his days. Whether he ever stopped fighting for himself long enough to trust the God he kept invoking is the question left hanging.
Centuries later another Son was sentenced by rulers who thought they served God's justice, and no crowd rose to ransom him, because his death was the deliverance itself.
Ask what vow or religious word of yours has served your vindication more than God's glory.
Prayer
Father, forgive us the vows and religious words that served our own vindication more than your glory. Thank you for those who have had the courage to say far from it when someone tried to wield your name for harm. And thank you for Christ, whose death was no miscarriage of justice needing to be undone but the deliverance we could never have secured. In Jesus' name, amen.