“Sha’ul said, ‘Come here,
all you heads of the people.
Think carefully: who has
committed this sin today?'”
-1 Samuel 14:38
From verse 38, we’re told that Saul summoned all the heads, chiefs, and military leaders of Israel.
What was going on here?
Well, from Saul’s perspective, he had just initiated a divine trial to find out who among his camp had sinned…
A transgression so severe, apparently it caused God to withdraw His Holy presence and no longer answer through the Urim and Thummim.
What happened next was absolutely flabbergasting.
Following on the heels of the amazingly stupid and foolish vow that Saul had just made, what does he do next?
He makes another amazingly stupid and foolish vow!!!
Following the standard Middle Eastern vow formula, Saul publicly proclaims…
“For, as Adonai Israel’s deliverer lives,
even if it proves to be Y’honatan my son,
he must be put to death.”
Yikes!
Since Saul personally made the vow this time, he’d have to pay the consequences if the oath was broken.
Or to put it another way, Saul was basically swearing to God that no matter what he MUST follow through with this vow even if it meant the death of his own son Jonathan.
Notice once again how Saul removed himself from the possibility that it might’ve been HIM who was the problem.
That’s another trait of an ungodly leader to take note of.
An ungodly leader is NOT willing to consider the possibility that he might be the issue and not those he is leading.
So onward to the takeaway.
What can we glean from all of this?
The lesson is…
If you want to know a person’s personality, nature, temperament, morals, etc., all you have to do is look at their past behavior.
This principle is perfectly demonstrated in Saul.
In the past, Saul made a dumb vow that totally demoralized his men and eventually caused them to sin.
What’s to say he wouldn’t do the same thing in the future?
Well, as we just witnessed, he did do the same thing.
He made another vow declaring that whoever committed this sin that caused the Lord to go silent, that person must die…
And no one would be exempt including his own flesh-and-blood son.
So you can see that true to his character, the rash and impulsive Saul repeated his grievous behavior with potentially very dangerous consequences.
And that’s your takeaway for today.
If you wanna know how someone will behave in the future, look at how they’ve behaved in the past.
That’ll tell you all you need to know.
Ya feel me?
Rich,
Ordinarilly I agree with you 100%, and what you say here today is correct, in that we shoudl judge someone based on how they have acted in the past.
But I would like to add that shouldn’t be all we do- each one of us has acted sinfully in our past, but through salvation in Messiah we have been given a new character (hopefully!) and when our past is considered, the way we act today shoudl also be in the mix.
When Shaul made that vow (“even if it turns out to be my son”), I am not sure that he did exclude himself, only that he was using the example he gave as a means to demonstrate that whomever it was, they would not escape.
Shaul’s sin was not in making the foolish vow, but in failing to go through with it, which the Torah commands must be done. Think of how difficult it must have been for Jephthah when his daughter came out of the house to meet him (Judges 11:1-12:7), causing him to sacrifice her in order to fulfill his vow.
Another thing we must be careful about is judging someone we do not know- your correct lesson about looking into how someone has lived requries that you base your decision on more than a Facebook posting or two, which (sadly) is pretty much all someone today needs in order to determine the spiritual condition of a person (I just did a message on this, myself).
So, I didn’t mean to make a comment that is longer than your lesson, but I believe we have to know someone well enough to know their past AND to look at their present activities to really make a fair judgement.
Totally agree. But as a general principle, I do believe one’s past is the best indicator of one’s future behavior…
Unless a radical transformation takes place. In this case, being born again would definitely qualify.