Faith and Fellowship

1 Samuel 14

Here we find Jonathan, son of Saul, going on a military campaign against the Philistines with his father. The Israelites were still using bronze weapons, which were woefully inferior to the iron weapons of the Philistines. Only Saul and Jonathan had the new fangled iron ones. The army of the Philistines was massive. 30,000 chariots, 6,000 horsemen, and "people as the sand which is on the seashore in multitude." Gulp! The Israelites were so afraid that many "the people hid in caves, in thickets, in rocks, in holes and in pits." Only 600 Israelites went with Saul to war. The odds weren't exactly in their favor. To top this all off, Saul begins the war by performing a burnt offering before God, which is the duty of the priest, Samuel, thereby incurring the displeasure of the Lord, eventually leading to God removing His anointing and Spirit from him.
Now that you see the circumstances, let's focus on Jonathan, the hero of this story. Here is a man whose father is king of Israel. His dad is head and shoulders taller than the rest of the people, handsome and muscular, exactly what you would expect a manly king to look like. Saul has been anointed by God for this task, even though the cry of the people for a king was an affront to the Lord. Jonathan has had this man to look up to day and night and has developed a faith in the Lord God Almighty that far surpasses his father. Jonathan sees the battle does not look good, but he has heard of the faithfulness and might of the Lord God, and he says to his armor bearer, "Come, 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 by few." This young man understands, at least in part, who the God of Israel is! How he comes about this faith we do not know, but we see that although his father had a semblance of understanding of God, Jonathan had the real deal. This is pretty neat since we understand that things can be passed down from generation to generation and we usually associate this with curses and the like. But here we see the anemic faith of Saul coming into full blossom in his son. This is not to say that Saul did the best he could, because there were several decisions he could have made that would have turned things around for the country of Israel, but that is not the topic here. We see how Jonathan trusted in the Lord of Israel to put his enemy to shame before him. He probably heard the stories of the Mighty God who delivered his ancestors from slavery in Egypt, who dried up the Red Sea, who led them through the wilderness for forty years in the form of a pillar of fire or dust, who came through for the country time and again in the time of the judges, and dared to believe that it not only could, but would, happen that day. His belief was upon the only thing that mattered: the God of Israel.
The “fellowship” part of the title comes from Jonathan’s armor bearer, who tells him, “Do all that is in your heart. Go then; here I am with you, according to your heart” (NKJV). What a statement of trust in Jonathan! He did not say, “Yeah, I have the faith in the Lord that you do and I stand here in agreement with you, buddy!” No. His trust was in Jonathan, and in doing so, in the Lord. As we, for a moment, glimpse the relationship between these two men, we see the character of Jonathan. To earn such a trust, he had to have been unerring in his pursuit of the Lord. He must have been and upright man whose yeses were yes and nos were no. He had to have shown himself not only courageous, but prudent. And most importantly, he had to show that his faith was a real faith in the Creator God, not a show for others to see proclaim his spirituality. These are all traits he later proves in his friendship with David, even when his own father wanting his dear friend dead.
We see here that our own faith can bolster the confidence of another to see great victories, even if they do not have the trust we do in the Almighty God. Here the Lord sees the righteousness of Jonathan and delivers twenty of the enemy into their hands and then sends an earthquake to route the rest of the enemy. As Pastor Judah from Generation Church in Seattle says, “that’s good preachin.”