40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 1 Samuel 31:1-13 (Episode 257)

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

Chad and Daniel wrap up the book of 1 Samuel. Saul and his sons go out to battle with the Philistines and we say goodbye to all of them. The Philistines desecrate the body of Saul and some men Saul rescued in the past have not forgotten it. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network HWSS Northwest Arkansas 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. check out all the other podcasts that are living over there while you're over there you might want to jump on that here we still stand regional conference in bentonville that thing's filling up gonna sell out so if you want to go uh make sure you grab a ticket hang out with chad and i and a whole bunch of other people in bentonville argosol april 16th and 17th uh definitely if you're able we'd love to see you there it's gonna be a good time chad we are going

to uh wrap up the book of first samuel now uh we've said goodbye to the person who the book is named after samuel a few chapters back today we are going to say goodbye to another main figure in this book who is going to as samuel said join him yeah i think we're i don't know i can't speak for everybody but i'm kind of ready for saul to be out of the picture only because it's like uh It's like sometimes when you're watching a series on Netflix or whatever, and you know something's coming, but it's like, okay, it doesn't happen in the next episode or the next episode or the next episode, but you still know it's coming. And it's like, when it finally happens, you're like, okay, I'm glad we're finally here. It's kind of like that with Saul. I mean, we'll talk more as we work our way through the chapter about his life and some

of the things we've learned or maybe learned afresh or change our perspective on with regard to him. But we've known that this time is coming, that his day is coming for quite a while. Yeah, I think for a guy like Saul, too, there's certain people that... that are tormented enough, plagued enough, that if you have a word from Samuel that you're going to go be with him, I think in Saul's case, it's a better place for him to be. You don't look at Saul's life as it is at this point

and think that this is something that is good and full of joy and he's living life with the joy of life being a gift. This dude is intensely tormented by the pressures of being a king, his own madness, all kinds of things. So when Saul dies, you don't really feel as much like it's a tragedy, but that perhaps it's that he is better off. This is not the saddest of things. Now, Jonathan, on the other hand, it is not that way. I know I'm giving away stuff, but we're going to get there. But when you look at the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, you are sort of relieved for Saul, but you're grieved for Jonathan.

Yeah, yeah. Well, in the case of Saul, it has, as you say, it's been a downward spiral for quite some time. And in the biblical narrative, had Saul lived on, things would have only have gotten worse. So you can see how he goes from having suspicions to jealousy to these fits of rage to pursuing David. I mean, all the way to our last encounter with him is when he stooped so low as to go and visit a necromancer, a medium. So, I mean, you can't get much lower than where he's gone. So it's good. It's good that chapter 31 happens and that not just so that he can reach his end,

but also so that we can make the transition into what will be the next phase of Israel's history, where we see David's gradual, it's not immediate. It's not like we're going to turn the page and all of a sudden all Israel gathers around David, cheering him and proclaiming him to be a king. There's still going to be several years coming up where David continues to struggle because of Saul's son. I mean, we'll get to that, but it is going to be a transitional period for us as we focus more and more on David's rise to power.

but anyway let's look at this relatively short chapter it's only 13 verses and see see what actually happens at Saul's end so to bring kind of everybody up to speed where what we know when Saul consulted the medium he had seen the forces of the Philistines gathering and so I talked a couple episodes before about how some of this is out of sequence you know we have him with the medium then we have david doing this then we're kind of back to saul back to david so david right now is as far away as possible from the scenes that are about to transpire which i think is the narrative was set up that way like so remember david was going to go and fight with the philistines against the israelites and the philistine leaders were like no no get that guy out of here so david

had to go back south with his men. They get back there. Their town has been raided, pillaged. So they have to chase those guys down farther south. So David has been moving south, south, south. So he's as far away as possible from Saul when Saul dies. And of course, he's not going to know, not like he can check the internet the next day and get the news. He's not going to know for quite a while until somebody shows up to tell him what happened to Saul. So for all David knows, Saul has been successful in his campaign against the philistines because he's so far separated from him saul on the ahenna's way up north where he's about to face this great philistine army that's gathered together for this massive offensive against israel so that's the that's the context

so verse one says now the philistines were fighting against israel and the men of israel fled before the philistines and fell slain on mount Gilboa now anytime you start out like that, you know this is not going to be good for the Israelites. The Philistines, we don't know how the numbers compared, but the Philistines had gathered all their forces, so a sizable number were going against the Israelites. Yeah, this kind of gives you the impression that this battle wasn't one of those battles where it was kind of close for a little while, and the tide turned, and gradually the Israelites started to be overwhelmed. This sounds like uh they they came out to fight and this was a route from the jump yeah yeah so they're you know

we've been talking about i'm listening to uh the heart the hardcore history podcast right now and and while they when they describe some of the battles you know maybe it's the persian against the greeks or whatever it might be there comes a point in many of these battles where either because of fear overwhelming odds or whatever it might be the the overwhelmed forces realize they have only one choice and that is to retreat yeah and usually what happens when that when that transpires is you have a massive slaughter that takes place because they can get you in the back they can chase you down and so i i suspect that's what was going on here in verse one that's why the israelites fell slain on on mount galboa but it wasn't just kind of the random israelites verse

2 says that the Philistines overtook Saul and his sons. And then we have the verse that you alluded to earlier, Dan, the Philistines struck down Jonathan and Abinadab and Malkishua, the sons of Saul. So this is a terrible day for Israel. I mean, not only are they about to lose their king, as we'll see in the next few verses. But they've lost Jonathan, who is, as we've talked about before, one of the best men that we've encountered, not just in 1 Samuel, but really in the entire Old Testament. It's really, really difficult to find a character who has more integrity, more faithfulness, more just kind of those qualities that are often lauded in the scriptures that are held up as great qualities for a person to have. And so it's very difficult

not to like Jonathan and to admire him. And yet on this day, he, along with two of his brothers, are struck down by the Philistines. Verse three, to continue, says, the battle pressed hard against Saul, and the archers found him, and he was badly wounded by the archers. So who knows what, I mean, we kind of wish we had more details about what was happening here and the sequence of events where Saul's sons killed around him. Were they like a fighting unit together or what happened? We're just not told. But we are told that at least the archers from the Philistines were able to get close enough to where they could wound Saul. not kill him, but wound him. Saul, verse four, Saul realizes that it's over. I mean, he knows

that there's no recuperating from the arrow wounds. So he turns to his armor bearer and he says to him, draw your sword and thrust me through with it, lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me through and mistreat me but his armor bearer wouldn't do it it says because he he feared greatly though we're not sure i mean what was he afraid of was it was he just kind of yeah maybe just panicked in the battle which you know would not be uncommon whatsoever for someone just to kind of completely lose their cool he doesn't he's too scared to do anything he's almost just kind of traumatized into to unaction maybe that's why maybe it was because he feared god and because of that he wouldn't do this to the king or maybe he was like david you know david had many

opportunities to thrust saul through as well two in particular in the cave and then when saul was asleep with the spear at his head but in both those occasions david because of his fear of god and his fidelity to the king would not thrust Saul through. So whatever the reason, the armor-bearer is not going to do what Saul asked him to do. Yeah, I mean, it could be, and I'm drawing this from what happens next, but it could be this sort of thing. This is his armor-bearer, so this is someone who—this is not just anybody. This is not some random soldier that he says this to.

This is somebody who is with Saul a lot. You would assume that he's close with Saul. They probably have a relationship, and this is just something that it seems that he just can't do. And you could put yourself in that situation. I'm sure if you were with someone that you knew well, and they were wounded, and they said, you know, you need to go ahead and put me out of my misery so I don't get captured, this might be a very difficult thing for you to do, not to mention if that person is the king. i mean you can imagine if you were like the president's security and he's wounded and he

says uh you know shoot me you might be like i feel like that could come back on me in a bad way potentially yeah you know right so yeah uh you know and or maybe you have a fondness for him and you're like i just can't do that and we'll see that the armor bearer is not just unwilling to do it he's because he he doesn't do it but he also he also won't leave yeah yeah it's not like he uh after Saul does what he does as we'll get to in a second uh it's not like he he runs for the battle no he's so he he is as we shall see he's fiercely devoted to Saul he won't he won't leave him there so whatever his whatever the reason is for his refusal he does refuse to do this so Saul's left basically he's down to his last option Saul's made a lot of choices in his

lifetime and a lot of them were bad choices some of them were good but he's down to one last choice and this choice is either to be there wounded let the Philistines come up probably do some pretty horrific torturous things to him not to mention just the whole humiliation that goes along with this. And this was, if you're familiar with ancient warfare, this was not unusual. We've seen evidence in the Bible itself as to what was done to the leaders of your enemies when they were captured. And it was not something you wanted to be done to you. So Saul chooses instead to take his own life. And that's the way that verse four ends. So Saul took his sword and he fell on it. And then to get back to what we were hinting at about the armor bearer,

verse five says that when his armor bearer saw that Saul was dead, he also fell on his sword and died with him. Thus Saul died with his three sons, his armor bearer, and all his men on that day together. And you almost have to, that sixth verse, you just kind of have to like read it very slowly. It is one of those extremely weighty verses in this story. Then Saul died and his three sons and his armor bearer and all his men on the same day together. I mean, it just, it's like it is i'll sometimes be in church and i'll be listening to whoever's reading the scriptures and i almost want to say hey wait slow down a little bit you know like pause because this is one of those things where you just can't rush past it you got to take in everything that's

being communicated in these in these few verses you've got in these few words the king's dead and his successors at least some of his potential successors are also dead his sons are dead armor bears dead and it adds all his men on that day together and of course you know we don't know exactly how many soldiers soldiers died but uh i'm guessing that this was a a massive slaughter because yeah i mean we'll see in the rest of that we'll see in the rest of the chapter because they didn't even get the king's body you know they left it on the battlefield it was there the next day and if you have any guys who are surviving and fairly able to get to the king's body of course they're going to carry that off the off the battlefield nobody was there or

everybody ran and so even the king's body was just left there out out in the open yeah and this together phrase which is you know they all died on that day together it makes you think that this was in one area this wasn't happening like a battle over here and a battle over there and that this was one isolated battle that was enormous uh probably and and they got routed and just sort of the way that saul reacts and i would we don't know this obviously but if he is wounded and he does know you know that all three of his sons have died uh i mean you could see why he's why he would be done yeah yeah you could definitely see where i mean any hope he has of of the future is just been extinguished by everything that he's experienced you have to

wonder too if you know does our samuel's words ringing in his head i mean once your sons die and and he's samuel told you that you and your sons will be with him saul saying you know what okay there's sort of an acceptance of what samuel has said that this is okay this is going to happen yeah and i don't know how those words from samuel would not have been stuck in saul's mind because he's you know he's he knew samuel was a prophet of the lord that's why he asked the medium to call him up so i mean he uh he does trust the the word to the prophet and so it would have been i think impossible for him not to go into this battle knowing that it was going to be going to be the end yeah yeah and i also think that i mean that we don't know who this harbor bearer is but i will

say that i don't think it was cowardice that that made him refuse to uh do what saul says it just seems that this is something he was unwilling to do to his king and uh and once this was done he was also unwilling to walk away uh at any point yeah it makes me wonder if maybe there wasn't uh an ongoing relationship between this armor bearer and saul like they had been together in many battles you know super super close uh i mean you i mean you think back to who was the first armor bearer we heard about for Saul was David, right? I mean, they were, and they were at least for a time very close because we're told that Saul loved David. I mean, when he first meet the two of them together, when David is the one who comes to play the harp or the lyre for Saul, yeah, Saul loved

him. So there was a time when they were extremely close. And so possibly this was the case with this armor bearer too okay let's uh let's move on this is verse seven when the men of israel who were on the other side of the valley were those who were beyond the jordan saw that the men of israel had fled and that saul and his sons were dead they abandoned the cities and fled then the philistines came and lived in them of course this is kind of a telescoping forward it wasn't like all this happened really fast but it's this is the the bible's way of telling us about the implications of this defeat. Here's what happened. It was so bad that these guys who were living here and there, when they realized that Saul was defeated, they just took off because they knew the

Philistines were coming. And as a result, the Philistines were able to recapture these cities and to make them Philistine cities, which is when you look at this outside of this particular the chapter in the big picture of what's been going on this is a huge setback for the israelites this is sort of a an unconquest of the holy land the whole purpose of them going into the promised land was to drive out the inhabitants and to take their cities and live in their cities well now we had the exact opposite happening the israelite leader is killed the israelites flee and the very people that they were supposed to be driving out now come and take possession of these israelite cities so it's very much of kind of a reversal of of joshua and i think the reason this is set up

this way is because this is the bible's way of kind of bringing everything to a head placing israel into a very um into a situation that's that's completely contrary to what god willed for them to put them in these dire straits so that when david comes to power then we'll see how god was able to work through him and bring israel back to where he desired them to be okay verse eight what happens the next day next day the philistines they came to strip the slain so that i mean this was this was uh pretty common in these battles as well for either the philistines or for even you know other people like as we'll find out in the opening chapter of second samuel there was an amalekite hanging around after the battle too and he was looking around for stuff he could take

off the dead people and he'll he'll find saul but we'll save that for for the next time anyway they they're checking out the slain probably taking away whatever they can find from what they want and they find Saul and his three sons fallen down on Mount Gilboa. So we're not even, at least I'm not even sure, if the Philistines knew that Saul was dead until this moment. They knew, obviously, that they had won the victory, that they had won the battle, and that they were able to drive the Israelites away.

That was obvious. But did they know that they'd actually been successful successful in killing the leader of the israelites i'm thinking not because the way this is told makes it almost sound as if this is a uh a lucky find for them like oh my gosh look we we were able to kill the king as well as his sons so what do they do well they uh they cut off his head this first nine they cut off saul's head they stripped off his weapons and they sent them throughout the land of the philistines to carry now this is an interesting uh phrase to carry the good news to the house of their idols and to the people this is a different kind of gospel here

it is yeah yeah and uh it and that that's a good that's a great way to put it so in uh in hebrew when you when you carry good news or when you carry news especially of a battle it's The verb is basar, and that is really the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek word for evangelize. So when you evangelize, on its just kind of a generic meaning, you're telling someone about good news. Well, you can do the same thing in Hebrew. You can tell someone about good news or news. And when you do that, when you evangelize in that way, you basar, which is the verb that's used here for them carrying this good news to the house of their idols and to the people. So they're carrying back the gospel, the Philistine gospel of Saul's, not just his defeat, but his death.

And keep in mind that this is not just kind of a military victory for the Philistines. This is a theological victory for them. so strategically it's great because the leader of their enemy is dead but also theologically it's great for the philistines because this means that their god to them this means that their god is better yeah their god won so they're going to the house of their idols and informing their gods that they have prevailed and killed saul because you know these particular gods apparently don't know that yeah which is uh i don't know says something about your god yeah yeah one of those ironies right you gotta let your god know what happened on the day of battle yeah that's uh i don't know

that's a tell yeah yeah yeah omniscience must not be a a quality an attribute of the philistine gods i guess not yeah they're like hey good news god uh yeah guess what we won preaching the gospel the false gospel to your god is a weird thing yeah and they uh they're not of course they've uh they've debased the body of saul they've cut off his head strip up his armor but they're not done yet this uh this kind of goes on to to describe the rest of what the philistines did as they were letting everybody know how victorious they were they put his weapons that is the weapons of saul in the temple of Ashtaroth. That's very similar to what we heard earlier in 1 Samuel

where they put the Ark of the Covenant in the temple of the god Dagon. So now they're taking the armor of the servant of Yahweh. Of course, this isn't the Ark of the Covenant, but it is connected at least to the worship of the Israelites. And they put that in the temple of Ashtaroth, which is a female goddess. and they fastened his body to the wall of Beth-Shan.

So they're just going to expose his body and of course, let it be, let it be a carrion for whatever birds happen to come along. This is a further way of humiliating, humiliating the Israelites. Now we have the closing verses, last three verses. I mean, I don't want to say it's like a, a very positive and like a highly positive shift because this whole chapter is of course

not the best of news but this is this does go to show that even in the in the recording of the death of Saul we we have evidence that for all his faults there was there was something about Saul that was also that was also great at least early on you remember when he first met him after after he's anointed as king his first military campaign was to go and rescue an israelite city what had happened was the ammonites came along and they surrounded the city and it was obvious that the israelites couldn't get away and they said i'll tell you what we'll let you live if you bring all your males out and we're going to gouge out one of their eyes and then we'll let you live but the inhabitants of the city said give us three days so they they took these three

days to go throughout Israel and to see if someone would come and deliver them. Lo and behold, Saul was the man. So Saul gathers an army, and he goes to this city, and this city is the city of Jabesh Gilead, and he is able to rescue the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead. Well, these people didn't forget that. Certainly when you have the Philistines doing this sort of thing with the body of Saul, they are interested in Israel knowing about it, because this is part of the insult. And Israel is not just like well we don't care what you do with saul because you know he wasn't that great anyway and and you know we didn't like him it's i that's not this that's not how this reads at all i think that this would be a great offense this is an offensive thing for them to do yeah i mean

for for all saul's faults he was still king and he was it was not like he had abandoned his responsibilities as king to protect the people no no and i mean he died on the battlefield died on the battlefield yeah so the people want to respect respect his body after death and so what they do these people of Jabesh Gilead the very people that Saul had rescued back in the day they hear what the Philistines did and so the valiant men they they walk all night to this city where Saul's body's been exposed and not just the body of Saul but also the bodies of his sons and they remove these from the wall of Bethshon, and they bring them back to their city, and they cremate them there. They burn their bodies, and they took their bones, and they buried them under the tamarisk

tree at Jabesh and fasted seven days. And that's the way the chapter ends. That's the way the book ends with the burial of the bones of Saul and of his men. Now, there's a number of things that are worthy of talking about here in connection with not just the death of Saul, but just kind of the way this whole thing came together. One of the things I noticed in this chapter is that, man, there's a lot of connections to other events in 1 Samuel, as well as other earlier books even. I mean, just kind of echoes of these other earlier narratives. And some are positive and some are negative.

In fact, there's a number of them that are negative. I mean, you think, okay, when was the only other time we heard about a body of an Israelite being burned? Well, it was all the way back in the days of Achan in Joshua. And why did that happen to him? because he violated the laws of Haram, of this complete destruction, which is kind of the same thing that happened to Saul. That's the reason that Samuel told Saul the kingship would be taken away from him

because he didn't fully carry out what the prophet had commanded him against the Amalekites. And then another story that leaps immediately to mind, a little bit more connected to this, and that is back in judges you had this false king abimelech and at one point he's wounded because a woman throws a millstone on his head from a tower and he says to his armor bear pierce me through so that no one will be able to say that i was killed by a woman and in that case his armor bear is like ready and willing he's like pulls out his sword

abimelech is done now the opposite is the case here with saul saul's wounded but not by not by a woman throwing millstone but by the philistines and then he says to his armor bear pierce me through his armor bear says no i i i won't do it and then of course one thing i alluded to earlier is that this kind of is a bookend if you will to the beginning of first samuel at the beginning of First Samuel, we have once more a great Philistine victory. They come out against the Israelites, they are able to rout them, and then they capture the Ark of the Covenant. Same thing, similar thing here, they come out against the Israelites, they're victorious, and they're able to kill the king and his sons. And instead of taking the Ark of the Covenant back to the home

of their God, they take the armor of the king back to the home of their God. So it's interesting the way that the book itself is structured so that we we began with this philistine victory which then precipitated the israelites request for a king it was after that big loss where they came to samuel and said hey give us a king well now once more we have a big loss but what's going to follow after this is not the people asking for a king but the rise of really the king that god desires them to have in the person of David. Yeah, it seems like, you know, this might feel like a weird thing to do, for them to burn the body of Saul and Jonathan and Saul's other two sons. I'm trying to put myself in that situation, because this is not a typical thing that you would

do. I mean, Israel are not big cremation people. They bury their dead. However, if I was in this situation and there's these this guy and his three sons and they're they're they're using their bodies to mock uh they're desecrating these bodies it's just all this is going on and you go uh and you take those bodies uh i can see the argument where you say we're going to ensure that even if they were to come here and try to retrieve those bodies again that this is not going to happen right and so that makes some sense to me that uh that bodies that have been treated this way that you would say that we're not even going to, you know, if the Philistines pursued us, found us, well, they're not going to recapture these bodies and hang up on walls and let birds

eat on them and all this kind of stuff. That's not going to happen. We're going to eliminate that possibility right here. Yeah, they certainly treat them with respect. After the bodies are burned, they take these bones and they do bury them. They bury them under this tamarisk tree at their city i mean much like the same thing that happened with jacob and his his bones he was embalmed and he was carried to be buried in israel's and then when the israelites came out of egypt they took the bones of joseph with them in order that they could bury those in the in the land of israel yeah you you look at this uh look at this chapter in the in the kind of the light of the big picture of of first samuel what we learned so far it's pretty fascinating to me

and hopefully it has been to everybody else too. You get a little bit different perspective on Saul when you see his entire life. We've mentioned a couple of times that our perspective has changed on Saul. I'm much more sympathetic toward him as a person than I had been before. But you can see how over time, kind of the good, the bad, and the ugly was pretty obvious in him. And I mentioned earlier in this episode, how you have a downward spiral. But it wasn't as if from the very beginning, he was a loser, or he was a terrible person, or he was someone who was just looking to be kind of a dictator of Israel. Even truly to the end, one thing that struck me about Saul is that he was not like some of the other later kings. He wasn't flirting with Baal and Asherah.

Yeah, right. He was a Yahweh alone kind of person. The mistake he made, and I think this is one of the greatest takeaways that we can get from his life. One of the things that I return to over and over with regard to him is that what was his downfall was he did not fully carry out. He didn't, as it were, how might we say it? He didn't live exclusively by what God had spoken to him through the prophet Samuel. And he was sincere, I do believe. He was sincere in what he did wrong, but that sincerity in the end really didn't help him out very much. Samuel has said, when you get to the Amalekites, then you are to carry out the decree of God that they all are dead. And Saul didn't do this. And maybe he had sincere justification for why he didn't do that.

He was going to maybe execute the king later, and he was going to offer the animals a sacrifice. Well, that's okay, but in the end, it's not our sincerity or our good motives or anything like that by which we live. Instead, it's got to be what God has told to us. So this almost blind acceptance, closing your eyes to everything except what God has said when it comes to matters like this, is one of the great takeaways from the life of Saul. Yeah, Saul is certainly a guy who, at the end of the day, was not perfectly equipped to be king, but he was not ill-equipped because he was an idolater or a coward. He was neither of these things.

He was not an idolater and, you know, a more cowardly man than Saul might have heard the words of Samuel and said, well, the last place that me and my sons are going to be tomorrow is on the battlefield. This is not the kind of guy that Saul was. You never get the impression that Saul is afraid or that he's a coward or anything like that. And you never get the impression that he is even interested in any other god? No, which, I mean, if you know the rest of the history of the kings, sets him apart. I mean, relatively speaking, if you look at the rest of the kings of Israel, Saul was one of the top probably five best, which is the crazy thing to say, given what we know about Saul. But at least in regard to being faithful to Yahweh alone, he stands out, because almost all these other kings were flirting with a multiplicity of other gods.

I mean, you're talking about a guy who, even when he can no longer get a hold of God, when God is no longer talking to him, so this would be where most people say, well, maybe there's some other god that I could get involved with that would give me some direction. it doesn't it doesn't appear as though it ever even enters saul's mind no no he's like i'm gonna i'm gonna use a medium to call upon the prophet of yahweh yeah this is a guy that is desperate to hear from the one god yeah yeah i mean it's it's a reminder too that as i as i think about his death there's almost with saul there's almost no other way that he could die because in this sense he was a guy you know his his greatest enemy was always himself and Saul was on this path of of self-destruction for for quite some time so it's almost it's almost fitting that uh I'm not justifying and somehow the way he died but when you look at

the story of Saul, the fact that Saul killed himself, that he died by his own hand, kind of fits with a whole trajectory of what had been happening in his life. I mean, he really was a guy who seemed to be bent on self-destruction because of his actions. And so you can see how this was, just from the narrative perspective, a fitting way for his life to end, as sad as it was. And for me anyway, again, one of my takeaways from Saul is that you can see that he really was his greatest foe. And it's a great reminder to me that we can look out and we can see maybe people who are against us or this or that that's opposed to us. But at the end of the day, it's the guy I see in the mirror every morning when I wake up that is the one that is really my greatest enemy. And for that reason, to learn from the life of Saul is to, once more, to trust not in myself or in anything that I can do, but instead to trust in the God of mercy, who is trustworthy, unlike I am.

Yeah, and that's where we will leave it. That is the book of 1 Samuel. Obviously, the story is not ended. this is one of those books that there's a part two so there we got we got a sequel in a lot of ways it doesn't really feel like we're starting anything new next week uh we're just continuing right yeah yeah i think probably yeah first and second samuel because you couldn't fit the whole thing on the one scroll right so he's like all right well we're out of scroll so i guess we're going to move on to samuel part two yeah and if you're going to break it up this is as good a

place as any uh yeah i mean it's it is it's a great place to break it up uh you know saul's out of the picture now and we can focus we can focus on david and uh see what see what happens we've heard plenty about him but we gotta we gotta find out the rest of his story now yeah and uh yeah and make sure you tune in next week i do think that david's response to the news is certainly noteworthy yeah we're going to see a response and then uh this uh very powerful lament that he that he sings not just over his friend jonathan but over saul as well yeah very poignant lament yep all right guys well we will uh be in second samuel uh next week hope you join us chad i'll see you then all right see you then

We'll see you next time.