Saul is now confident of victory and is ready to charge into
the fray and complete the rout in the night.
The priest, however, steps up and says, let’s first pray about that
plan. How often do we conceive our plans
and move ahead without submitting them to the Lord? We may even make a pretense of prayer but do
we take the time to honestly listen to see if the Lord is saying no to us? There is no word from the Lord concerning
Saul’s plan so something must be done, right?
The Urim
and Thummim are consulted and ultimately it is determined that Jonathan has
done something that has caused the Lord to be silent in the matter. Jonathan is
confronted by his father, the king, and confesses that he ate some honey this
day, which was forbidden by his father with the invocation of a curse on any
man who ate. The people rally around Jonathan,
with the argument that there would be no victory without him working with the
Lord to accomplish it. Saul, in a moment
of triumph, looks foolish. Not a good
start to his reign.
The kingdom of heaven was considered the rightful
inheritance of the righteous Jews. In
this parable, Jesus speaks a prophetic word to the crowd. He sounds just like one of the Old Testament
prophets but He speaks with a different authority. Jesus’ hearers would know exactly what He was
talking about, they would recognize that the nation had rejected the messengers
of the king and had treated them shamefully or ignored them. They would, however, be surprised to hear
that, in the end, others, outsiders, “both bad and good”, would be summoned to
the feast in their stead. The Lord has
rejected generations of His people for their unfaithfulness before but has
never gone and found others, Gentiles, to take their place, this is a new
idea. The word for Gentiles isn’t
universally good though. At a wedding
feast, guests were given apparel to wear and one, it seems, came to the feast
but refused to act like a proper guest, wearing his own garments. We can’t reject God’s gracious gift of the
new garment and come as we are or on our own terms and receive grace.
Do you rejoice in your sufferings? I sure don’t. Paul says there is something
incredibly redemptive and productive about suffering. “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance
produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to
shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy
Spirit who has been given to us.” Grace
should change us all by itself, it should make us grateful to the one who
extends it to us, but it doesn’t, we can take grace for granted if we don’t
have suffering. In this world, there is
suffering because of sin. We can draw
near to Him in our sufferings and persevere in our faith or we can throw it all
away because of suffering. There aren’t
many opportunities for growth that are unaccompanied by suffering in this
life. We wouldn’t know math, reading, or
much of anything else without suffering the pain of learning these disciplines,
much less become people of character without testing. The gift we have received is that when we
face the ultimate test of eternal judgment we pass because of Jesus. The second test is the test of faith and
character, did you learn anything and apply what you learned. Saul was given a gift, a kingship, but it
looks as though he did nothing with it, he acted as if it were his rather than
a regency. The life we live in hope is a
gift, it is not our own.
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