Okay, let's review a couple of quick announcements. First of all, continue prayers for Camp Arete for this summer. Also for the church picnic. Now, we're vectoring in here. It's Tuesday. Saturday's coming. And so far, on any given day, yesterday or today, The forecast for rain on Saturday ranges from 80% on the Weather Channel. I think Alan said Channel 11 had 20%. Yesterday, it was, you know, Channel 13 had 20%. I always take local forecasts over Weather Channel. Anyway, I found that that's a little more accurate. But who knows? By tomorrow or Thursday morning, we will narrow it down. But it sort of looks good. If you haven't been out for a picnic before, I encourage you to come out, bring some friends. We have a great time, a lot of good food, and it's a great time to get to know other folks in the church. Also, I had emails from both Jeff and Doug in the last 24 hours. They reached Natal Fine. They're partnering with a couple of pastors there, one of whom was just with Jim Myers a couple of weeks ago. They're doing quite well. I also talked to Jim this morning, and he's doing well. He's been back from Brazil two weeks, and he's teaching for two weeks at his school, and then he goes to Zambia for two or three weeks. So pray for him. And he's going to be teaching on spiritual warfare, so he wants to get a hold of a book that we've got out on spiritual warfare, and we're trying to figure out how to get that to him under such short notice. But anyway, pray for those things. It's pretty good as far as that goes. So we can remember those things and pray for the picnic. And if for any chance we have to bail out, we'll just put it on the next week, which doesn't look all that great in terms of the long-range forecast, but what do they know? All right. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not grow weary. They shall walk and not faint. Fear thou not, for I am with thee. Be not dismayed, for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee, yea, I will help thee, yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God, and the peace of God which surpasses all comprehension shall defend your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind has stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee. For the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever." Before we get started, we'll have a few moments of silent prayer. The reason for this is to give you the opportunity to make sure that you are in right relationship with the Lord, walking by the Spirit. so that God the Holy Spirit can fill you with the truth of his word and that you can come to understand it and apply it in your life. After a few moments of silent prayer, when you can avail yourself of 1 John 1 9 if necessary, I will open in prayer. Let's pray. Father, we're thankful that we can come together to focus on your Word tonight. As we live through our days with all the uncertainties and vagaries of life, especially in this election year when each day seems to bring more extreme statements and sayings from one side or the other. Father, we know that the only hope for real stability in a nation and a culture is to be grounded upon you and your Word. And it is only when a nation or people are focused upon you that we can have any measure of happiness, any measure of joy. And Father, we have a great opportunity through the website, through missionaries that we have, through individuals in this congregation who are constantly going out to communicate the truth, whether it's through Good News Clubs, whether it's through Vacation Bible School we have coming up this summer, or whether it's through their individual witness to others. And we pray that you would Give them the wisdom, the skill, the opportunities to present the truth of Your Word. Father, we continue to pray for Chafer Seminary. We pray for Jim Myers. We pray for Doug and Jeff as they're ministering down in Brazil. We pray that You would give each of those individuals and organizations opportunities to make the truth clear and that they would have responsive listeners. And Father, we pray for us that we'd be responsive to Your Word tonight. We pray this in Christ's name, Amen. All right, we continue our study in 1 Samuel. We're in 1 Samuel 13, 14, where we stopped last time. And we are working our way through what I think is one of the more interesting chapters that we run into in the Scripture. It's a narrative. It is the turning point in Saul's reign as king. And in these chapters, what the writer of Samuel is helping us to understand is the failures put it in the terminology of the text, the failures of Saul's heart. He is not a man who's devoted to God. And he is a man who is self-absorbed, a man who is arrogant and has, as I was pointing out last time, we'll see more of it next time, he has a superficial religious focus on God. He thinks if he says the right things, does the right things, engages in the right ritual and acts religious, then somehow that is being spiritual, that that is having a right relationship with the Lord, and it's complete failure. What we see in this section, starting in verse 14 of chapter 13 and going down through chapter 14, verse 15, is we see the contrast, and the writer really wants to make this clear, this contrast between Saul and Jonathan. And we saw the failure of Saul last time in his disobedience. As he's impatient, he rushes to, instead of waiting all day for Samuel to show up and to present the sacrifices, he jumps in and makes an excuse, rationalizes disobedience to God, and orders a sacrifice and performs a sacrifice himself. And this is just a sign of his internal problem of rebellion, which will be really focused by Samuel when we get to chapter 15, who will say that rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. Now, there's a whole interesting and important doctrine that comes out of that, because what Samuel is focusing on is the original sin of Satan. And the original sin of Satan is disobedience to the authority of God. And so this is why the Bible emphasizes authority so much. And what we have in Saul is a man who doesn't submit to the authority of God, but in contrast, we have his son Jonathan who does submit to the authority of God. And as we start, I want to address your attention to 1 Samuel 14, verse 6. This is the crux verse in this section I'm looking at that tells us what this whole section is all about. Jonathan is getting ready to go into a battle against overwhelming odds. It's just Jonathan and his armor-bearer going against a large number of Philistines. And he says to his armor-bearer, come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. And the use of that word indicates that he's focused on divine viewpoint. By using the term uncircumcised, he is recognizing that the Philistines have no right to the land. They are deep in the heart of the land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And by calling them uncircumcised, he is focusing on the fact that they are not participants in the Abrahamic covenant. They have no right to the land. God did not give this land to them. And therefore, this is ultimately a spiritual issue. David will say the same thing when we get over to 1 Samuel 17 when he faces Goliath. And it shows that their focal point is on spiritual truth and divine viewpoint. And so no matter how overwhelming, how large the problem may be, and the same thing is true for the rest of us, God is greater than any circumstance, any situation, any problem, any group of people, any political party, any political decision, any Supreme Court decision. God is greater than any of those things, and we dare not let circumstances ever get us down. And he says, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. It may be that the Lord will work for us, for nothing restrains the Lord from saving by many or a few. In other words, there's nothing in human experience that can limit God's ability to solve the problem. And that is a great focal point, that no matter what our problem is, whether it's financial, whether it's health, related, whether it is related to job, or career, or marriage, or people, or circumstances, whatever it might be, there is no problem that's too big for the grace of God. And there's no sin in your life or my life that's too big for the grace of God. And the grace of God solved the greatest problem we'll ever face at the cross. And the grace of God will solve every other problem we face. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy. That doesn't mean that everything is going to work out the way we think it ought to work out, but it does mean that God and God alone can solve the problems, and we need to learn to trust Him and not trust in other circumstances, other related circumstances. So this tells us what the focal point is. God saves by few or many, and if you notice in the introductory slide, What I have chosen as the basic theme of 1 and 2 Samuel is what gets repeated through one episode after another throughout both of these books, originally one in the Hebrew, is that the battle is the Lord's. We saw that in terms of the recovery of Israel, under the priesthood and judgeship of Samuel, that they were at the bottom of the barrel. They were just in total cultural collapse and chaos and the degradation and apostasy of religion under the house of Eli and the priesthood of Eli. And yet God responds to the prayer of Hannah, one of the faithful few in Israel, and God turned things around through his power working through an obscure little child to begin with, who then grew to adulthood. We saw the problems with Israel's defeat and the apparent defeat of God. In 1 Samuel 4, the battle of Aphek, when the Israelites were defeated, the Ark of God was captured by the uncircumcised Philistines, and God showed that He doesn't need the Israelites to win the battle. He was very capable all by Himself of defeating the Philistines. And we have the whole fun episode with the ark of God being put in the temple of Dagon. Dagon bowing down before the ark the first night. The second night he bows down. And when they came in the next day, his hands and his feet had been cut off. God had disarmed the false god. And then we have the other episodes with the rats and the bubonic plague and the tumors or hemorrhoids However you want to translate that. And there's a lot of humor, a lot of earthy humor. The Hebrew text is extremely earthy in Samuel. But God is really poking fun at those who are not biblically correct. We live in an age today when everybody wants to become politically correct and succumb to political correctness. And if you're not politically correct, then you're just going to scare the pants off of all these weenie little college kids. who are so self-absorbed that they think a college campus is a safe space that's going to just reconfirm all their hideous little ideas. But when we know the truth, we can stand on the truth. And that's what we see with Samuel. We'll see it with Jonathan. And we see it with David. And Jonathan is going to take a stand, and he is going to turn the tide of battle here because he understands the principle that the battle is the Lord's. So let's go back and just review a little bit of what's going on here. Here's our map. This section, let me tell you, this section, if you don't like maps, you're in trouble. I love maps. I can sit down with maps all day long. But this is one of those sections you really have to know the geography and know the terrain. Fortunately, we live in a day when we're not left without these visual aids. So this is one of those great chapters, a couple of chapters, for teaching using the visual so that we can come to a much better understanding of what was happening on the ground. Here's the basic setup. We have the Mediterranean to the west. We have the Jordan River to the east flowing into the Dead Sea. Gilgal is located here, which is where Saul was crowned king. Previously it was significant because when the Israelites crossed over into the Promised Land they recommitted to the Mosaic Law and this was where the men of Israel who had grown to maturity during the wilderness wanderings and had not been circumcised, which is a sign of the Abrahamic Covenant, that this was where they were all circumcised in one very large group circumcision. And we know from numbers that that would have involved approximately 650 plus thousand men, because at the end of numbers, they numbered all the men over the age of 20 who were old enough to fight. And these are the ones who would have been circumcised. So this was quite an event. And I'll leave the rest of that to your imagination. So this is Gilgal. Directly to the west, you have Ramah, which is the city of Samuel. Just below that, just a couple miles away, is Gibeah. And then as we look at other maps, just in this area to the northeast of Gibeah, you have Geba and Michmash, the focal point of these particular events. As we looked at this previously, in the beginning of Chapter 13, There has been an incursion by the Philistines into this highland country, the high hill country, mountainous country of Samaria. And they brought in, I pointed out that the text says 30,000 chariots and 6,000 horsemen. A lot of debate over how to translate this. Probably the 30,000 doesn't work. That would have been an exceptionally large number of chariots. When you compare it with other things, for example, the 900 chariots of Sisera in Judges chapter 5, 30,000 just seems out of order. A couple of things I didn't point out last time. One thing I did point out, 30,000 chariots, and if you translate horsemen as charioteers, which could conceivably be the translation, then that would make sense. If you had 3,000 chariots and 6,000 charioteers, that would be two per chariot, although I was doing some additional study and some think that this could be horses. It could even mean horses there as opposed to horsemen. Some translations have cavalry there, which is probably what this would imply to a lot of people. Trouble is you don't have evidence of any armies at that time in the Middle East using cavalry. Okay, so that would not work. But it could mean horses, and it could mean those who are in the chariots. But the problem with that as charioteers is there are examples of Greeks using two, and these are Philistines, so they're related to the Greeks. But there are also Syrians who use three, and others who used three or even four per chariot. But it looks like, I would say, it's most likely just talking about 3,000 chariots and then those who ran the chariots, those were the warriors that were involved. And so we're introduced to terms, the locations in Michmash and Beth-Avon. And the result of this is the men of Israel just, they panic. They're overwhelmed by technology. They're overwhelmed by numbers. I remind you of what happened at Kadesh Barnea when the 10 of the 12 spies came back and said, We can't do it. We can't conquer these people. They have giants in the land. There's too many people, and they have fortified cities. The focal point that God is always trying to get across to Israel is that it is by His power and His might. It's not based on technology or numbers or skill or how many West Point and Annapolis graduates you have and how many computers you have. It is based on your spiritual relationship with the Lord. If Israel is obedient, then God is going to give them the victory. And so the people are scared to death. They scatter. They hide everywhere. And many of them even fled east across the Jordan into the land of Gad and Gilad. And Saul is left at Gilgal. And all the people following him are trembling. They're scared to death. Skipping on down a little bit, after the episode where Saul has impatiently violated his role and responsibility as king. The role of the priest is to offer sacrifices, not the king. Samuel then tells him what the real problem is. You've done foolishly. You've not kept the commandment of the Lord your God which he commanded you. For now the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever. Now this is one of those interesting situations that come up in scripture, which shows something about the omniscience of God. Now, I'm not going to, I don't want to get distracted on this, but just remember God knows all the knowable. This is one of the significant aspects in understanding God's omniscience. He not only knows everything that will happen, he knows everything that could happen. Jesus says the same kind of thing when he says to Capernaum, And to Bethsaida that if the works that had been done there had been done in Sodom and Gomorrah, then Sodom and Gomorrah would have repented in sackcloth and ashes long ago. He knows the what-ifs. Now that's important because you have a whole school of theology called Calvinism that emphasizes the idea that God only knows what He has decreed to be true. He doesn't know all of the knowable. He can only know what He has decreed to be true, and therefore He decrees what will take place, and everything that takes place is what He has decreed. So what this shows, again, from an Old Testament example, is God knows what would happen if somebody had exercised their volition in another direction. If Saul had been obedient, then God says He would establish his house forever. How that would have worked out, we don't know, but he clearly states that there would have been a distinction there. And then he says, But now your kingdom will not continue. The Lord has sought for himself a man after his own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be commander over his people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you. Now, the way this is translated here is to indicate that is to indicate that this is something, it's stated in the perfect tense in the Hebrew, which indicates it's seen as a past completed action, but it is really what they call a futuristic perfect, which is stating that this is something that is so certain of its future fulfillment that it is stated as if it has already been completed. Now the issue here is what does this phrase, a man after his own heart, mean? And there's basically two views. One that is often stated in commentaries is that this should be translated, a man after God's own choosing. Now, the only example I ran across of this particular confirmation of this translation is an excerpt that's quoted from the Babylonian Chronicle during the early years of Nebuchadnezzar. And in that, it says, In the seventh year, in the month Kislev, the king of Akkad mustered his army and marched to Hattu. He encamped against the city of Judah, and on the second day of the month Adar, he captured the city, seized its king, and a king of his own choice." And in the Akkadian, that is literally a king according to his heart. So that's translated as, in that text, in that quote, as a king of his own choice. But that's an interpretive statement. Other views, and the view that I take, is that according to his own heart is a term that basically must be understood within the framework of two verses in 1 Samuel. We always look to meaning within the biblical text. And if we can find parallel meanings or parallel context within the book that we're studying, so much the better. In 1 Samuel 2.35, God is speaking about Samuel, and he says, then I will raise up for myself a faithful priest who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind. See, that is a slightly different phrase, but it is the same preposition, which in Hebrew is the preposition ki, according to, and it is according to my heart. So that's the same idea, and it is the fact that the person who has a heart after God is a person who has a focus on the Lord, a commitment to the Lord, and who desires to do that which pleases the Lord, even if they fail, as David did on a number of occasions, and he failed pretty seriously. In 1 Samuel 16.7, which is on the bottom of the slide, The Lord speaks to Samuel in 1 Samuel 16, 7, when Samuel is looking at all of David's brothers, and some of them looked presidential, excuse me, some of them looked like a king. Some of them looked a whole lot more authoritative than the runt that eventually was brought in, because David was sort of viewed as the runt of the litter, and he was out with the sheep. even Jesse, his father, sort of remembered David as an afterthought. So he wasn't, apparently, as a teenager, real impressive. At least he didn't impress his family. And at that time, after Samuel has looked all these brothers over, thinking that, oh, well, these look presidential, or they look like kings, but God's not indicating one of them, the Lord said to Samuel, do not look at his appearance or at his physical stature, because I have refused him. For the Lord does not see as man sees, for a man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." So he's looking for a man. He has said in 1 Samuel 13, 14, that he's going to choose a man after his own heart or according to his own heart. And this is, in my view, choosing someone who is focused exclusively on God who's really devoted to God in contrast to Saul who isn't. I think that an argument against interpreting this as a man after God's own choosing is in contradiction to the text because we've already seen that God chose Saul, didn't he? He chose Saul to be king. So whatever the reasons were are not important in terms of that particular choice. So God did choose Saul But so the idea of choosing someone else who is according to his heart is not choosing someone who's according to his choice. That would be a contradiction with what we've seen already. Now, after he has been duly confronted and rebuked by Samuel, we then read, then Samuel arose and he left. We're not told that he perform the sacrifices. Saul's already done that. So Samuel just stands up after he's rebuked Saul and told him that he's not going to have a dynasty. He got up and he went from Gilgal to Gibeah of Benjamin. And then we're told Saul numbered the people present with him. How many have I got left? And there were 600. This is reminiscent of what happened with Gideon in Judges chapters 6 through 8. But in that instance, God narrowed the number that Gideon had from 32,000 down to 300. Here the others have all fled because they are panicky and afraid of the Philistines. But we have two geographical locations here, Gilgal and Gibeah of Benjamin, and we have There's some textual problems, some other problems here that I'm not going to go into a lot of detail. I think that it reads well, probably the best reading in the Masoretic text. Samuel arose, and Samuel goes from Gilgal. Now this is a, unfortunately the background on this, probably in live streaming is a little dark, but it does give a good topographical rendition here, which you can see here in class. Gilgal is over here. Here's Jericho, Old Testament Jericho, Herodian Jericho here. This is right going into the plain of the Jordan. So just off to the east of the map there would be the location of Gilgal. So what we see in terms of the movement is Samuel is going to leave, and he is going to go this way and head south to Gibeah of Saul. Which makes sense, because what has happened is that already the Philistines moved into this territory here, and they had taken up their position here at Michmash. So going a northern route to get back towards his home, which is in Ramah, would have put him in danger of the Philistines. So it makes more sense, makes good sense, that he headed towards Gibeah of Benjamin. And then we're told in 1 Samuel 13, 16, that Saul, Jonathan, his son, and the people present with them remained in Gibeah of Benjamin, but the Philistines encamped at Michmash. Now, one of the things that we ought to note here is that there is, again, a little bit of a discrepancy Here we have the word Gibeah of Benjamin, and in the Masoretic text it reads Giba, not Gibeah. And so there's debate over this, and for example, the New King James and a couple of other translations translate this as Gibeah, because in their thinking that makes a little more sense. But what we're told here in the first 15 is Samuel went to Gibeah of Benjamin, and then he would have circled around to the south and gone up to his home in Ramah. But here we have Saul and Jonathan moving, and where are they going to go? They're going to go to Geba. That's what's in the Masoretic text, not to Gibeah. Now, this makes sense because in the early part of chapter 13, Jonathan had already attacked the Philistines in Geba, and they retreated from Geba, and if you see this line that kind of runs down this way, if you can't read the text there, it says Wadi Shaban. Our Wadi Shaban to the northwest and Wadi Swinit to the southeast here. This is really important for what we're going to study in this battle, because on the northeast side you have Mikmash and there's this huge chasm between Mikmash and Geba. So Saul and Jonathan are on one side, and then there's this chasm between them and Mikmash, and the Philistines are on the other side, and that's going to set us up for the battle that begins to take place in the first half of the next chapter. From this position, I want you to notice something. These three towns We have Gibeah of Saul here to the southwest, then Geba here, and then Michmash. Now, I'm going to add this line. See there, they're going from southwest to northeast, that they're almost in a straight line in those three points. Now, if you're standing just to the southwest of Gibeah, this is what you're going to see today. You see Gibeah in the foreground. and then you see Geba in the mid distance and then you see Micmash in the far distance. Now the interesting thing when you're looking at this terrain is it's dry, it's rugged, and you don't see the fact that when you get out right about here halfway between Geba and Micmash it's just going to drop away into this huge chasm. It's sort of like when you're driving across either northern Arizona or you're driving across the panhandle of Texas, and in the panhandle of Texas, all of a sudden, the ground just splits open and you have the Palo Duro Canyon. Of course, in Arizona, it splits open and you have the Grand Canyon. But until you're right up on it, you don't see it. That's what we see here. So this is where we get to look at these topographical features. And this is an aerial photograph looking at this area. And I'm going to put the labels on here. There we go. Over here, see here's Geba, right here. So this is really, we're really looking to the northwest. To our right would be north. So we're kind of looking northwest from the southeast to the northwest. This is Geba. This is the Michmash Pass. Now that's going to come up in the text. There's this pass. that is mentioned there, and the Philistines are going to send one of their troops out to guard the path. Over here you have Michmash, so you see how Geba is on one side of the chasm, here's the chasm running this way, and you have Michmash over here, and when you look down here you can see that that looks pretty rugged. We're going to get a closer look in just a minute. That looks pretty rugged. And then we'll come back, and the text mentions the names of these cliffs, and they're located on each side here. So this is what happens. Now in verse 17 we read, then raiders came out of the camp of the Philistines in three companies. One company turned onto the road to Ophrah, to the land of Shual. The second company, turned to the road to Beth Horan, and another company turned to the road of the border that overlooks the valley of Zeboim toward the wilderness." Now, how anybody can read this without a good map in front of them, I don't know, because this is what tells you what's going on. This is a dynamic battlefield, and what happens is the Philistines are going to cut off all aid and succor to the Israelites. Remember, the Israelites are down to 600, And the Philistines have 3,000 chariots and 6,000 charioteers, and we're not told how many infantry accompanied them. So the Israelites are definitely outnumbered in extremely rugged terrain. So you have the Philistines who are now bivouacked and set up their garrison at Michmash. Here's Michmash right here, are going to send their troops north to the land of Shuai. Ophrah, by the way, if you went up right about here to the bottom of the eye on Ephraim, that's where Shiloh was located. Shechem is even further north. So you're right on the backbone of the hill country of Samaria, and it's very rugged. This is going to cut off any aid that's going to come in from the north. Then they're going to send another troop east this goes down the zebulim valley and is going to uh... prevent any aid that comes up from the transjordan any troops are going to come across from the transjordan and would come in from the east would be cut off there and then they're going to send that third group to beth horan which is off due west of mcmash and so they send their troops there those black lines on the map represent the troop movements of the philistines Now in verse 19 we read, now there was no blacksmith to be found throughout all the land of Israel. You have a transition. There's a dynamic explanation of what's going on on the battlefield and all of a sudden the author stops and says, now we have to understand what the situation is here. This is a bad situation. And not only are the Israelites being trapped, I don't know if you've ever been in any circumstances in life where you feel trapped and like you don't have any options, but that's exactly how Saul And Saul felt, in fact, his response is, I'm trapped. I'm just going to sit back here and do religious things. We're going to see that in a minute. I'm just going to sit back here and hope something's going to happen. It's a faith in faith. It's not a faith in God. In contrast, you have Jonathan, who's going to put his faith in God, and he's going to execute a maneuver to see if God's going to open the door to victory. Okay, that's what we're going to get to here. In verse 19, though, we're reminded that it's not only a geographical problem, it's not only a problem in terms of the fact that they're vastly outnumbered, but it's also a problem of technology. And this is one of the examples, one of the greatest examples in Scripture that I have found as to why individual citizens need to have access to the latest and greatest technology, just like the government. Now I know some people are going to get upset with that because the government has atomic bombs and they've got all kinds of different missile systems and everything else. But the whole idea of the Second Amendment is to give the citizens the ability to protect themselves against tyranny. Now, we can't do that anymore, and it's just silly to think that we can, that a bunch of Texans with 30-odd 6s and a few AR-15s can hold off a mechanized infantry unit today. That's insane, but the principle is still true. And this was practiced many times in the ancient world. And the Philistines did this, and we're told that they removed all gunsmiths from Israel. I'm just updating the text a little bit. They removed all blacksmiths from Israel. Now, this is not quite at the beginning of the Iron Age, but there was definitely many cultures who already had access to iron and the smelting of iron before the Iron Age really came into full bloom. And they removed all the blacksmiths so that the Hebrews, and this is sort of a term of derision. It wasn't politically correct. They called them Hebrews to run them down a little bit, lest the Hebrews make swords or spears. So they didn't even have blacksmiths who could help them with bronze weapons. And then they forced, this really shows that they were tyrannizing the Israelites, and it also forced a destruction of their economy along with this, that all the Israelites would have to go down to the Philistines, that's down along the coast, to sharpen each man's plowshare, his mattock, his axe, and his sickle. This is their livelihood. In order to even farm, they had to go get all of their tools sharpened by the enemy. They were completely under the control of the Philistines. Now here we have a, this is a forge, the remnants of a forge that was found down along the coast of what was Philistia. And so these kinds of things in that time period are not found archaeologically in Israel. That is something of an argument for silence, but it shows and confirms what the Scripture says in that time period. And there's an economic level to this, we're told in verse 21, and the charge for sharpening was a pym for the plowshares. How many people know what a pym is? Nobody? Need a good Bible dictionary. Okay, these are a couple of weights that had the Hebrew word pem inscribed on them. And what we discover from these weights that a pem was two-thirds of a shekel. Now right now it runs about four shekels to the dollar, but a shekel at that time was about what a common laborer made in a month. Now think about that. A shekel was what a common laborer made in a month, which meant that he had to give two-thirds of his monthly income in order to get one thing sharpened, not everything. If he had a couple of plow shares and he had axes, each one was going to cost him two-thirds of what he made in a month. That is an economic catastrophe for the Israelites. They had no money left over, and they're completely under control of the Philistines. This is arms control. And arms control was practiced in different ways by the pagans in the ancient world. We have one example at the beginning of Judges with Adonai Bezik, who's one of the Canaanite kings. And Adonai Bezik fled before the tribes of Israel. They pursued him, and when they caught him, they cut off his thumbs and big toes. Now, this is a sign that the Israelites were already being affected by paganism. Dismemberment was not part of the Mosaic law on how you treated your enemies. Why did they do that? That's what the pagans did. They'd cut off their thumbs so they couldn't hold a spear. It's awfully hard to hold a spear and even to shoot an arrow, and it's terribly difficult to wield a sword if you don't have a thumb. You can't grip anything. And it's hard to run into battle and to maintain your balance if you don't have big toes." So they cut off their thumbs and their toes, and Adonai Bezek said that there were 70 kings that he had defeated with their thumbs and big toes cut off who used to gather scraps under his table. So this was a bit of revenge that was executed by the Israelites. They just gave him what he had always done, what he had a reputation for. So this is what the Philistines are doing. is that they are controlling the Israelites by controlling their access to weapons to defend themselves. So not only do you have an army that is outnumbered, an army that's got a weakened position, but you have an army that the only two people in the army that have a sword are Saul and Jonathan. You think you're in trouble? Everybody else just has wooden weapons and maybe the odd bronze weapon, but they don't have anything to really carry into battle except for the few odd tools that they could gather together. And as a result of this, there was not much available. They might have had slings and javelins and clubs and knives, and that was about it. but they were certainly inferior to the metal weapons of the Philistines. Now, verse 23, which is the last verse in chapter 13, the garrison of the Philistines went out to the pass of Michmash. Now, what we saw earlier was they sent out three companies. One went north, one went east, and one went west. And now they're going to send out a fourth one to guard the pass. This is going to prevent any maneuverability on the part of Saul and the Israelites. They can't maneuver. They're kind of trapped down in Geba now. Remember, they just had this huge chasm in front of them. And then they can't go up the road through the pass. They can't go east. They can't go west. They can't have any troops come in to save them. So this gives you a little bit of an idea here of what this terrain looks like. Extremely rugged. Then here we have another look at the pass from another aerial view. Here's the pass going this way. Of course, this is modern photograph, so it may look a little different, but roughly the terrain's the same. Here's another look at it from the north. And this is your main, this was a main sort of east-west transition. This gives you a wide-angle view of the area, so you get an idea of how rugged the topography is. And you can see Mick Mash is over here. on the far ridgeline. Here's one more look at at at Michmash itself and then this is looking from the north to the south and you see the ravine, the wadi that comes through here and the rugged terrain and at the time in the ancient world we're looking more towards this area here where the Philistines have their outpost up on top of this this rugged cliff face over here. Now, this is what happens next. One day, as they're being sort of trapped, Jonathan decides we have to do something to shake things up. You can't win a battle, you can't win a football game, you can't win anything on the defense. And so you have to engage the enemy and you have to defeat the enemy. That's what happens in the Christian life. We have to engage and defeat the enemy in two areas. We have to put to death the deeds of the flesh. Romans chapter 8, and we have to take every thought, captivity for Christ, and we have to get rid of, not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds. So that deals with the sin nature, and it deals with worldliness. So that's where we are on the offensive. We're on the defense when it comes to Satan and the demons. Now we're told that one day comes along, Jonathan the son of Saul says to his armor-bearer, Well, let's go over to the Philistines garrison that's on the other side. Basically what he said, let's go stir up a little trouble. Let's go see if we can start something. And there's a lesson here in terms of discovering God's will for your life. This isn't like Gideon. Gideon put out the fleece, but he didn't put out the fleece to determine whether God really wanted him to attack the Midianites or not. He put out the fleece to see if he could come up with something so difficult for God to do that he could end up avoiding what God had already clearly told him to do. Earlier in Judges 6, God says, I've chosen you to go and raise up an army and go defeat the Midianites. So it's very clear what God's will was for Gideon. Gideon said, I'm going to put the fleece out, God, and hopefully it's going to be so difficult you can't do it, and then I won't have to go fight the Midianites. And then when God did that, He said, okay, let's twist things up a little bit. The last time I wanted you to have the dew fall just on the fleece and not on the surrounding area. This time I want you to have the dew fall on the surrounding area but not on the fleece. And God did it both ways and Gideon couldn't get out of it, so he had to go through with it. And God then reduced his force from 32,000 to 300 to show that the battle was the Lord's. It wasn't Gideon's. It's not up to technology. I mean, who ever heard of a battle where you take a bunch of soldiers at night, and you surround the enemy camp, and each soldier has a torch, and it's enclosed in some sort of a clay pot. And then on the signal, you break the clay pot, and the torches all of a sudden become seen by the enemy. And what's happening there is you usually had like like one torch for every 30 or 40 men. So if you got 300 men and you saw 300 torches, you would think that there was about 30 times that number of people that were attacking you. And that's what the deception was with Gideon. Now, there was a guy by the name of British, a British young man who was kind of exceptionally eccentric, who was reared in a Plymouth Brethren home. And he had a great love for the Jewish people, even though as an adult he became somewhat cynical and wasn't as convinced about the truth of Scripture as he was when he was younger. And his name was Ord Wingate. And he was detached by the British military to the Jewish army, the Haganah, prior to World War II. This was in the late 30s in the middle of the Arab rebellion. And at that time, the Jews in the Kibbutzim would not attack the Arab Knight Riders. They just went into a defensive position, and the Arab Knight Riders would come, and they would attack the Kibbutzim. And then the next day, they would have to clean up whatever mess that the Arabs made. But they never took it to the enemy. Well, Ord Wingate came along and said, we need to take a lesson out of Gideon's book. And he did exactly this. He tried Gideon's tactic and they surrounded an Arab village and they attacked it at night suddenly with torches suddenly appearing and breaking the clay pots to expose the whole deal just like Gideon did. And they defeated the Arabs. And he was responsible for training the Haganah members like Moshe Dayan and numerous others who were the great heroes in the war for independence some 10 years later, in training them in night attack strategy and tactics, and he basically laid the foundation for the later IDF in the way he trained the Israelis. So that's the kind of thing that makes a leader. That's the kind of thing that initiates. And what Jonathan is doing here is he's not sure if God is going to deliver them. But he's thought through the situation, and he says, okay, I've got a strategy, I've got a tactic in mind for attacking these guys, and we can defeat them. But it's going to depend on a couple of factors. And if God is with us, we're going to be able to get up on top of the cliffs, and then we can take out the Philistines because they won't expect it. If we get up on top, they'll think we're worn out. They'll be thinking they're in a position of strength. And if God lets us get in that position, we can wipe them out. But if we have to stay down below where they have the high ground, then God's not with us and we're not going to win the battle. So he's thought this through. He's not just coming up with some random task. that, well, if they call us up to the top of the cliff, we'll get into the battle, and if we stay at the bottom, we won't. He's really thought through the implications of where he's going to be, and so he sets this up. And he's going to leave, and he's going to go after the Philistines. Now, we're told something about Saul here. In 1 Samuel 14, too, we're told, and Saul was sitting in the outskirts of Gibeah, and this again should be Geba, He's probably along the cliffs there. And actually, the word there that's translated gibia is, gibia means hill. So it could, it very likely should just be translated on top of a hill or along the edge of the cliff. And then it says, under a pomegranate tree, which is in Migron. Now, it doesn't say tree, it says under a pomegranate. Now, there's one guy who's done some interesting speculation here, that just as you have names that are given, we'll see these in a couple of verses, names that are given to the cliffs, that these caves were also places where they were very large, and they were places where a large number of soldiers could hide. And they had names. So he speculates that the name of one of these caves, because it had a lot of holes in it, was called the Pomegranate. And I think that may very well be true, that Saul is sitting in a situation here. He's in a cave with a number of his men waiting for an opportunity to, or just a defensive position probably. He's not looking to engage the enemy. And he's got 600 men with him. And then we're told another note in 14.3 that Hija, the son of Ahitab, Ichabod's brother, the son of Phanehas, the son of Eli, the Lord's priest in Shiloh. Y'all got that? Y'all follow that? I'll show you, give you a chart in just a minute, was wearing an ephod. Now the ephod is the emblem of the high priest, but the ephod would also have had the Urim and Thummim on it. and the high priestly garment therefore with the Urim and Thummim was a means of seeking divine guidance and so what we have is Saul and for good luck he's got the high priest with him but there's an irony here because Saul is the man whose dynasties been taken away from him and Ahithab is the high priest whose dynasties been taken away from him remember he's a descendant of Eli and back in 1st Samuel chapter 4 When Israel was defeated, if you remember, Israel's defeated, the Ark of the Covenant is captured. When the messenger gets back to Eli, he tells Eli that the Ark of the Covenant is captured, and Eli falls over, breaks his neck, and dies. His daughter-in-law, who is the wife of Phinehas or Pinhas, she's pregnant, goes into labor. and gives birth to a son, and she names him Ichabod, meaning the glory has departed. Literally, it means no glory. The glory has departed. Now, what we're told in verse 3 is that Ichabod had a brother, Ahitov, and he had a son named Ahijah. So, Ahijah is the last high priest in the family of Eli. So, he's a man whose family lineage is going nowhere, just as Saul's is going nowhere. But that little, just that one verse, the only place we have this mentioned, why is it there? It's there to tell us that Saul is seeking cover through just religious observance. Now, here we get into what Jonathan does. Between the passes, okay, between the passes, Jonathan sought to go to the Philistine garrison. There's a sharp rock on one side and a sharp rock on the other. And the name of one was Bozes, which meant slippery. That's not in your text. I just added that for you. And the name of the other was Seneh, which means thorny. Now, Jonathan's going to be the first person in the Bible to do any serious rock climbing here. And he has got to scale the one that is on the north side, which is Seneh, so that he can engage the Philistine troops. Now here, we've seen this slide already. This is Bozes and Sinai, and we're told in the next verse that Sinai faces the south and Bozes faces the north. So Sinai is on the north side of this huge chasm that runs here between Geba and Mikmash. And I'll just show you a couple of other pictures. We're going to start off looking at it from the southeast, and each of these pictures is going to allow us to go around to the south and come around to the southwest. So that's going to give us a pretty good aerial view of what this terrain is like. Here we have McMash and the other cliffs. Here are the cliffs that Jonathan would be scaling along here. Here's McMash up here on the ridgeline. And so the Philistines were up in this area somewhere. Here's another shot. We still see McMash up here, but it gives us another look at the terrain here, height of all of these cliffs he's having to deal with. Now we're moving a little bit around to our left to the south and we're looking due north. Here's McMash over here and we can look down and get a little different shot of these cliffs that Jonathan's going to have to scale. And now we've come around to the southwest a little bit more to look back towards the direction we were coming from to get an idea of what he has to climb up. And there's another view. So we have a pretty good idea of what he has to do. Now, this is another shot of the Wadi Suwanit near the cliffs of Mi'kmaq. So it looks even steeper in this particular shot. So this is a little rugged perspective looking at his rock climbing ability. So in verse 6, Jonathan says to the young man who bore his armor, come let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. This is where I started. We've seen what led up to this. He has this divine viewpoint because he understands the enemy has no right to the land. God didn't make a covenant with the Philistines to give him this land. God made a covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They have no right to the land. And so he identifies the enemy correctly. And he recognizes that nothing can beat them if the Lord is with them, that the Lord can give them the battle. And so when we talk about the terms uncircumcised, the Jews were not the only ones that practiced circumcision in the ancient world, but they were the only ones whose circumcision was directly connected to a covenant with God. And so this tells us that there's a theological definite theological dimension to this. Now, later on in Jeremiah 9, 25 and 26, we see an interesting passage where God warns that He's going to punish even Israel. He says, I want to punish all who are circumcised. That would be Israel and maybe a few other kinds. The Egyptians did it and they practiced it, but it was more of a coming of age thing where you would have large group rituals, and it was entering into manhood. Everybody had to be tough and man up, and they couldn't wimp out, and it was a rite of passage, but it had nothing to do with anything spiritual. But other nations around did not practice it, Edom, Ammonites, Moabites. And God says, notice verse 26, all who dwell in the wilderness, for all these nations are uncircumcised. And all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in the heart." See, the issue wasn't that physical external circumcision. It's whether they were set apart to God spiritually, internally. Paul's going to use that terminology to apply it to the baptism of the Spirit in Colossians 2, 9 and following. 1 Samuel 14, 7, so his armor bearer says to him, Let's do whatever you want to do. Do whatever is in your heart. Here I am with you according to your heart." So Jonathan says, very well, let's cross over to these men. We'll show ourselves to them. Let's see if we can do something that's going to propel some action. Let's see if we can stop this stalemate. And if they say to us, wait until we come to you, if they're up on top and they spot Jonathan, his armor bearer, down below and says, wait, stay there until we come down to you. Jonathan says, then we'll stay in our place. We won't go up to them, and we won't be engaging in the battle. He understands the terrain and that they would have the advantage. Then he said, but if they say to us, come up to us, then we will go up. For the Lord has delivered them or given them over to us, and this will be a sign to us. He's not arbitrarily picking this. He's thought it through. says, if God gives us this, this will be a tactical advantage, and if God gives us this opportunity to scale the cliffs, then we can take them. And that's what happened. Both of them showed themselves to the garrison of Philistines, and the Philistines are taunting them. They're making fun of them. Look, these little Jews are coming out of their holes in the ground. They've hidden away. And then the men of the garrison called to Jonathan, his armor-bearer, and said, come on up, and we'll show you something. They're treating it lightly and that shows that they're not treating this as a serious assault. So Jonathan said to his armor bearer, come up after me for the Lord has delivered them into the hand of Israel. He has confidence because God is his shield and his buckler. God is his fortress. God, he knows the battle is the Lord's and he's going to win the battle. So what happens is Verse 13, that's at the bottom of this slide. He climbs up on his hands and knees with his armor-bearer after him, and he begins to assault the Philistines, and his armor-bearer's coming behind him and kills him. So he's knocking them down. The armor-bearer comes along behind to make sure they're dead. And we're told that in the first half an acre, he killed about 20 men. Sort of reminds me of the rangers going up on Pon de Hoc on D-Day. when they were making their assault there. And there was trembling. Then this is where God intervenes. This is where God intervenes. And then there was trembling in the camp. The people are afraid. They're being taken by surprise. And now the Philistines are beginning to act in fear. There's trembling in the camp, in the field, and among all the people. The garrison and the raiders also trembled. and the earthquake. I read that. First thing I did was I texted Steve Austin. I said, have you done any work on this? And he said, a little bit. He said, it's very likely that this location was probably the epicenter of a small earthquake. And this is what he says. He says, this is very likely a phenomenon called an earthquake swarm, where you have a bunch of small earthquakes in one location. and within a few minutes of each other. And at the epicenter of a small quake like that, it would sound like a cannon battle, like an artillery battle going off with all of these explosions taking place. Remember when he talked about the earthquakes in the Bible, when he was here at the Chafer Conference, he mentioned that, that the earthquake at the cross, if the cross is the epicenter, it wouldn't shake as much at the epicenter, but it would sound like an explosion going off. And so if you have a bunch of explosive sounds going off, this would scare the Philistines to death. And that's exactly what is depicted in the text, that they are afraid and they begin to run and to panic. And this is what we will pick up next time. And by the way, he also pointed out, if you remember from his lectures at the Chafer Conference, he showed a slide of this mud core that he took at the Dead Sea, and that core showed at certain key levels a disturbance in the strata that would indicate an earthquake. And he said that there was definitely a disturbed layer in the Dead Sea mud at approximately 1050, 1040 B.C. in this area, which would be this particular earthquake. So that I thought was quite fascinating. So what we see again is the battle is the Lord's. Now next time we're going to come back and we're going to see what happens, but when religious Saul gets a hold of this, he is really going to mess it up. He is going to almost turn victory into defeat because he takes over, but he fails to trust the Lord to win the battle. And that's what happens in all of our lives. Sometimes we start off great trust in the Lord, the battle is the Lord's, next thing you know the battle is mine, and then it all falls apart. We have to stay the course. So, remember that. Next time we'll come back, look at the conclusion of the Battle of Michmash. Father, thank you for this opportunity to study these things. to look at the details of what has been recorded, that we can understand it better, and that we can get a very clear idea of the fact that You work and intervene in the lives of men. You solve our problems. You overwhelm our enemies. You are the one who protects us, and You are the one who puts fear into the heart of those who oppose us. And Father, we face much opposition in this nation. We face many people. who seek to destroy the influence of the Bible and Christianity on the laws and the institutions of this nation. And the only way that we're going to see this reverse is if you intervene. And we pray that you would intervene. We pray that you would do whatever is necessary in order to bring these people back to an orientation to truth and to understand the truth of your word that this nation may continue to be a bulwark for the teaching of your word, the proclamation of the gospel, sending out missionaries, and supporting Israel. And we pray all these things in Christ's name, amen.