“Y’honatan assassinated the governor of the P’lishtim in Geva. The P’lishtim heard of it; so Sha’ul had the shofar sounded throughout the land, saying, “Let the Hebrews hear!”-1 Samuel 13:3
Verse 3 kicks things off with a bang.
We’re told that King Saul’s son Jonathan went ahead and assassinated the governor of the Philistines in Geva.
Talk about a ballsy move man!
Now we know why Saul and 2000 of his men had gathered at Michmash and another 1000 men had joined Jonathan in Gibeah of Benjamin (remember Gibeah was Saul’s hometown).
Here’s the situation:
The Philistines were starting to flex their muscles and had taken back part of Israelite territory.
Samuel had succeeded in pushing them back a while ago.
But now the Philistines had begun rattling their sabers once again.
At the time, they controlled the strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea Coast.
That was all fine and dandy because they were sea people who did their trading by boat.
But in order to sell things from other places and have roads to trade, they needed more land to the east, like Canaan.
And that’s where Israel was, right in their way.
The Philistines were a practical people who cared more about money than empire-building.
They didn’t want to take all of Israel’s land in Canaan (like the Arab nations want to do today).
They just wanted to take control of different parts of Israel’s holdings so they could use them as trade routes to make themselves richer.
That’s why at the start of Saul’s time as king, the Philistines had a fort in Saul’s hometown, Gibeah.
The bottom line, these uncircumcised Philistines were starting to get hog wild out of control.
So Saul knew he had to stop them now before they gained too strong a foothold in Canaan.
The problem was Saul didn’t have a real army.
His army was a militia that only took action when there was a clear benefit to its own tribe’s interests.
If a soldier didn’t see any benefit to himself or his tribe, heck if he was gonna risk his life for King Saul.
So we can see throughout history, the ways of men never change.
Saul needed a crisis or some huge event that would wake up the tribal leaders and get them to send their soldiers to help him fight the Philistines.
Well, what Saul’s son did was just the “huge crisis” that Saul needed.
By taking it upon himself to go to Geva and kill the Philistine leader who was ruling in that area, Jonathan had just thrown a stone smack dab into a hornet’s nest.
The Philistines were furious that one of their leaders had been killed and were now gonna go after Israel with a vengeance.
This was a blessing for Saul because politically he knew it would now be hard for any tribal leader to not send help to battle the Philistines.
So the takeaway I’m getting from all this is just how helpful the Scriptures are in showing us how certain patterns repeat themselves throughout history.
In this case, the pattern shown is how a major crisis can rally a nation together and bolster the status of a leader.
The terrorist attacks that took place on 9/11 are a good example.
That event rallied the nation together and considerably bolstered Bush’s standing as President of the United States.
Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was another crisis event that woke up the nation like no other.
Also, consider Jonathan’s ballsy move in going off and assassinating the Philistine governor of Giveah.
Gotta admire that bold and aggressive action, don’t you think?
The lesson here is that sometimes you gotta shake things up…
Sometimes you gotta rock the boat and do it in a big way in order to make some progress in your life.
Ya feel me?
Alrighty, see you all next time.
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