Love What You Cannot

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[0:00] our sermon text from today is 2 Samuel chapter 1, and it is a psalm concerning the death of Saul and Jonathan. And it was written by David, and this is about David. And the end of 1 Samuel ends with the death of Saul and his son Jonathan and other of his sons. And then 2 Samuel really is the story of David and beyond, as king at least. A little background. David and Jonathan were like brothers. In fact, in this psalm that we're about to read, you'll see that David considers him, the love that he has for Jonathan, as one of the closest kinds of loves that we see in the scriptures, right? And in fact, they weren't just like brothers. They were brothers-in-law for a while because David was married to Jonathan's sister, whose name was Michal. Now, part of the intrigue of all this was when David fell out of favor with Saul. David was Saul's son-in-law. When David fell out of favor with Saul, Saul took Michal away from David and married her off to somebody else. So he lost his wife. It's really tough, but he never lost his love for his brother-in-law and his brother in god jonathan right now at the end of second samuel saul had seen a large philistine army basically approaching and he was very worried about it

[1:34] because he was outmatched and so then he did something that was considered particularly evil he was in such a panic that he went to what we call a medium this is somebody that will will communicate with the dead on your behalf. This is a big no-no in scriptures. Leviticus, Deuteronomy both say that people who communicate with the dead like this should be put to death. I mean, there's pretty strong language in the Bible about that. But yet Saul finds somebody, sets out word to find somebody, and that person, the medium of a town called Endor, is actually very nervous, doesn't really want to do this for Saul, suspects that it's a trap and and that he wants to kill her. But he says, no, I actually want to communicate with the dead. And he wants to communicate with the prophet Samuel to get a word from the Lord on what to do about this giant Philistine army coming his way. And this is a very challenging part of scripture because it actually seems like Samuel answers. So what's going on? Is the medium actually working? Is this actually working? Or is the medium just saying something? Or is God kind of telling this person what to say and Saul believes it's from Samuel? We don't know. I'm sure people have a lot of opinions on this.

[2:51] But it just goes to show that there's parts of scriptures that are a bit of a head scratcher and are a bit unusual. And that's okay. You know, it's okay. But the fact remains that Saul does something that's very evil in God's eyes, which is trying to communicate with the dead. and then the reward that comes back from Samuel is tomorrow you and your sons will go to battle you'll be overwhelmed and you will all die so he actually did get a word he as he believed he did get a word from the Lord it just wasn't so remember be careful what you ask for right be careful what you ask for because it may not be good news and that's tough to know that tomorrow you're going to die. I don't understand why he didn't just like get on his horse and ride away, you know, but he was the king. He was the leader of the army. And indeed, the very next day on the slopes of Mount Gilboa, the Philistines surrounded the Israeli army, the Israelite army. Most of them fled. Saul and his sons stayed to fight, but they were all killed, right? And not only that, Saul's body and his sons were found by the Philistines. Saul actually committed suicide then. He did not want to be found alive by the Philistine army, so he actually killed himself. And then when the body of Saul and his sons were

[4:09] found by the Philistine army, their bodies were hanged on the walls of the city of Beit She'an, which is a place where we visited when we went to Israel. It later became a Greek city named Sithophilus, and it's a very well well-preserved Greek ruins in that town. And some Israelites heard of it and they went under cover of night and took the bodies down from the wall when nobody was watching and took them away and gave them a proper burial. So this idea that, you know, this was, this is warfare back then. You know, you have trophies, you have, you have, you take trophies and things like that of other people's bodies. And David hears all the news of this. And what we're about to hear is his response to the tragedy of Saul and his brother-in-law, Jonathan. So let's read from 2 Samuel 1.1 and following that from verses 17 through 27.

[5:07] After the death of Saul, David returned from his victory over the Amalekites and spent two days in Ziklag. Then David composed a funeral song for Saul and Jonathan and commanded that it be taught to the people of Judah. It is known as the Song of the Bow, and it is recorded in the book of Jashar.

[5:29] And here it is, verse 19. Your pride and joy, O Israel, lies dead on the hills. O how the mighty heroes have fallen! Don't announce the news in Gath. Don't proclaim it in the streets of Ashkelon. Those are Philistine cities. Or the daughters of the Philistines will rejoice and the pagans will laugh in triumph. O mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew or rain upon you, nor fruitful fields producing offerings of grain. For there the shield of the mighty heroes was defiled. The shield of Saul will no longer be anointed with oil. The bow of Jonathan was powerful and the sword of Saul did its mighty work. They shed the blood of their enemies and pierced the bodies of mighty heroes. How beloved and gracious were Saul and Jonathan. They were together in life and in death. They were swifter than eagles, stronger than lions.

[6:33] O women of Israel, weep for Saul, for he dressed you in luxurious scarlet clothing and garments decorated with gold. O how the mighty heroes have fallen in battle. Jonathan lies dead on the hills how I weep for you my brother Jonathan oh how much I loved you and your love for me was deep deeper than the love of women oh how the mighty heroes have fallen stripped of their weapons they lie dead let's pray father thank you for this word we asked you to add your blessing to it in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, a little more background, just a little bit more background. As Victoria said, David and Saul did not get along. David was pursued by Saul after they had a falling out, right? His wife was taken away. David actually snuck up on Saul once and had the chance to take his life, but he didn't do it, you know? So there's a lot of things going back and forth. And Saul had been a relatively good king at first. There's a lot of good feelings about Saul. He was taller than other people. God had chosen him. Samuel had gone and anointed him. But then Saul fell out of favor with God. Saul didn't do what God had asked him to do. Saul was disobedient. And so you know this beautiful story about how Samuel then went and found David. And he looked

[8:07] looked at all his brothers and said, oh, that one's tall and big and strong. He's a good-looking young man. And God says, not that one. No, not that one, not that one. And none of the sons of Jesse were good enough. And Samuel said, well, what am I doing here then? If you don't want any of these boys to be king. So he says, do you have any other brothers? They're like, well, we got the little brother. He's out in the field watching the sheep. He's not important enough to to be here with the adults, you know? And Samuel says, bring him here immediately because God doesn't care what the outside is like. He cares about the heart. He cares what you're like on the inside. And it's a beautiful thing about just God embracing somebody who was small and youthful, but still has future and potential, right? So God has Samuel anoint David as king of Israel Israel right there. Now here's a real problem. Saul was still king, right? So this is basically a rebellion. What do you do when you have two people who have a claim to the throne at the same time? Are they going to like sit down with tea and try to work it out? Oh, who's going to be king? Well, I'll be king on Tuesdays. You'll be king on Wednesdays. That's not how it works.

[9:20] There's a war. There's fighting. So Saul tries to kill David, right? Saul tries to kill David. David. And the people like David better than Saul. That really needles Saul. He's really mad about it and he's jealous of David. David's younger. I guess he's better looking. He's had more victory in battle than Saul has. And so things come to a head and Saul tries to kill David over and over again, right? So then David hears that Saul died. And we get this, what I would call a psalm, or it's It's called the Song of the Bow because it talks about Jonathan's bow. And it's an unusual song. I mean, you kind of noticed that it was kind of an unusual song, right? Why? Because there's a lot of actually psalms and songs in the Bible that kind of praise God when your enemy is defeated. There really are. Like when the Egyptians were swallowed up by the Red Sea, sea. Miriam starts singing this song about the horse and the rider thrown into the sea and how God has delivered them. So it would have been totally understandable for people back then to think that David would write a song saying, oh yeah, you know, like, Queen, we are the champions, you know, we're going to win, we won, you know, the sort of a victorious type of song.

[10:42] home. They would not have blinked if David had said, okay, we're creating a new song about how David's better than Saul, and everybody's going to have to learn it in school and sing it and sing it when I come to your town. That would have been normal. That's just how things were done. It's like the victor even tells the story, and the story was he's dead because he was bad and I'm good and God chose me, not him. That sort of thing. But that's not what happens here. That's not what happens here this is the bible is full of surprises the bible is full of sort of what we call reversals and inversions right and so uh david actually praises saul and praises jonathan and is deeply saddened that saul has died although in the long scheme of things i also know that david understood that for him to be king saul would have to die there's just no other way there There was no way Saul was going to go, okay, you know, I give up. You really are the king. That was never going to happen. So Saul was going to have to die for David to truly take control over the whole country, as God designed for him to do.

[11:52] But David is genuinely sad that Saul is dead. Now, I think David might be sad because he still understood that Saul was God's anointed king, in one sense or another. Even though David had been anointed king and really had replaced Saul, and that was made clear to David, nonetheless, God had anointed Saul at one point in time, and so Saul really was still a very special person. And so David is truly saddened that this great person that God had chosen had fallen and then had finally died. So he'd gone down a dark path and maybe David was just truly sad about this. The other is that, this is the more cynical view, is that the victor can afford to be magnanimous, right? It makes them look better, right? Have you ever noticed like elections coming up? I'm dreading it, but maybe you guys are like excited about it, but I'm dreading it. But in most normal elections, this is not a normal election so I don't think this will happen, but in most normal elections, do you know what when the winner gives a speech, do you know what they always say?

[13:03] Now's the time for us all to get along. Have you noticed that? And the loser doesn't always say that. Sometimes the good losers say that like, yeah, we should get along. Sometimes the bad losers are like, either you didn't really win or I'm still mad or we're going to get you or whatever. But the winner always says, now's the time for us to get along. And I always wonder why weren't they saying, now's the time for us all to get along before the election? Why weren't they campaigning on let's kind of all work together? That's a different thing. But that's kind of the normal thing for the winner to go, oh, OK, I really respect my opponent. Now's the time for us all to get along. That's what they say after they win. Then maybe that's what David is doing here. That's the cynical view of it, right?

[13:47] I think the answer to why David does this is actually here. It's in the song itself. I don't think he's being cynical or opportunistic. I do think he's sad because Saul's the anointed. But deeper down, the answer is in there is that David loved these two men. He loved Saul. He loved Jonathan deeply, right? Right? And Jonathan gets a special mention about their great love for each other. But he loved Saul too. And I definitely want to say that there are mistakes that David makes all through his life. Everybody should know this, right? But there are several places where David and his actions and his words are a foreshadowing of Jesus. David is like a foreshadowing or a type of the Messiah of Jesus. That doesn't mean he is Jesus. That doesn't mean he's God's incarnate son the way way Jesus was. But there's some really interesting ways in which David foreshadows Jesus. This is one of them, where he actually loves his enemies, as Jesus commands people to do. Another one which we can look at someday is how David treats Saul's grandson, Mephibosheth. That's another way in which he really extends grace in a very Christ-like way to somebody else, right?

[15:06] That Saul and David were enemies, that there can be no doubt about that, but the remarkable thing is that David continued to love the man who tried to kill him over and over again, which to me is crazy and impossible. I don't know how, if somebody actually was, I'm not saying like figuratively or symbolically, if somebody was actually trying to kill me and chasing me around the countryside with weapons, would I love that person?

[15:37] I just don't know. I mean, I don't think I could, right? So you're going to wonder, like, what's the deep analysis today, right? What's the really deep insight? There isn't one. This is really simple today. The real simple thing is that God calls us to love our enemies, and David is an example of that today. day. He loved his enemies. He loved Saul. And he was genuinely sad and heartbroken that Saul had died. So we are meant to love our enemies. And I can't say it any clearer than that. There's no like fancy magic words to go beyond that, right? And so that would be on a personal level that we're supposed to love our enemies, people who have wronged us and are still actively trying to hurt us. I liked what Victoria said, is there anybody you can think of? And maybe you can think of that somebody, but I don't want to get too distracted, right? But you could probably think of one or two people that have hurt you or maybe are still hurting you, right? Or it could be somebody that you've never met. Maybe there's somebody on the other side of you politically, political season has been on us, although I guess it's been here for like, I don't think it ever went away, but it's really getting active now. Can you hate people on the other side of yourselves

[16:52] politically? You can. It's an easy thing to do. I think that's what you're encouraged to do, actually. I think that's the game. It's a blood sport out there. We don't know who we are unless we hate the other people. No. We can love people we've never met who are different from us politically. They're the children of God, too. They really are, right? It can actually be people waging actual war in this world. There's wars all over this world. I'm not going to list all of them right now, but you know which ones I'm talking about. There's like three or four really big ones, right? There are soldiers and fighters on either sides of these wars killing each other. They're enemies. And we might have picked a side in our own mind too. And thus those people on the other side of the side we've picked are our enemies. But we can love those people too. It's not easy. I think almost everybody in America could agree that Osama bin Laden was a bad person after September 11th. My nephew Martin said to my brother-in-law, Craig. This was after September 11, 2001, and Craig was putting Martin to sleep and doing their prayers, and Martin said, Papa, let's pray for Osama bin Laden.

[18:09] And Craig was thinking, I don't want to. I really don't want to. But Craig was like, Like, is it because we should pray for our enemies? And Martin said, yeah. I mean, that's what we were, like, I guess Sunday school works, you know. Sometimes Sunday school works. Good news, right? So they did.

[18:29] They prayed for Osama bin Laden that night. It doesn't matter if it did any good. It was a commandment from Jesus. Love your enemies and pray for them, right? We condemn violence. We do. Violence is wrong. It doesn't solve anything. All the problems of the world are not solved by violence. But God loves even people who are fighting in wars. He's calling us to love people who are fighting in wars, too. There's a lot going on in the world, right? He calls us to love people fighting in wars. He calls us to love people we don't like. He calls us to love people on the other side of the political spectrum or the social spectrum or whatever there is. So I only have three things left to say. This is a short one. Gosh, we're going to get out of here by 1125. All right, And then we have time for Eric's Deli.

[19:18] Three things, okay? If you want to take notes, this is a great time, but you don't have to. One is that this is good for us, right? Loving your enemies. This is the tricky thing. Loving your enemies is good for you, okay? Definitely it's good for them, but it's good for you. Because when you decide to love other people, it frees you from the mental work of how to take revenge on them. This is not because I'm a virtuous person. It's just that I've learned how my brain works. If I'm angry at somebody, I will stay angry at them until I remember to ask myself, how can I love them? And then how can I pray for them? And once I decide that I love a person, it doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any consequences if they've done something wrong. It doesn't mean that at all. It just means I'm like, God, help me love this person. And what I find is all the extra energy, mental and emotional energy, that my brain has been spending on that other person is now freed up for life. It's freed up for other things. So loving your enemies is good for you. It's good for you. you if you can do it, right? It's great freedom from the mental tape of thinking about what next to say to them or the perfect comeback that you didn't remember, that you didn't think of in the

[20:45] moment. I hate that. And then it's better actually to say, you know what? I'm glad I'm so slow on the uptake because then I don't have to regret saying it. You know, it's much better that way. But there's There's freedom in, there's freedom, personal, emotional, mental freedom in loving somebody who has hurt you. Number two, loving other people even that we don't like is a witness to the rest of the world. It's a witness to the world. The world is watching. I don't know how much they're watching, but they're watching, right? My dream for the church is that someday the world sees us not as people who take the right side or the wrong side of an issue on wars or politics or culture wars but that the church is people who loves everybody the best we can. That's like that's the thing we're known for. Not that we picked a side on a debate. Not that we just told everybody who we know exactly who the good guys and the bad guys are. I'm not sure the church needs to do that all the time. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the church needs to be prophetic. Sometimes the church needs to speak for justice. Absolutely. But if the first thing we're known for is that we We love people, even if we disagree with them. That's what I want the world to see.

[21:59] Because you know what? Someday they might say to themselves, when we're attacked from all around, if I go into the church, those people will love me, even if I disagree with them. There's going to be a community for me there. They're going to, I don't have to agree with them to join them because they love everybody, evidently. It sounds like a good place to be. So that's number two. Number three.

[22:20] Number three is let's not pretend that this is easy. Talk is cheap. I can tell you to go love your enemies and you'd be like, good word, you know. It's hard. Actually, guess what? It's beyond hard. It's impossible. Hear me. It's impossible. Pretty much, right? I'm hardwired to hate and take revenge. That's just how my brain works, right? If there was a, you know, the settings app on your phone, you know, a little gear or or whatever it looks like on your phone. And you open the settings and you're like, what to do when you get a notification. And mine is like, what to do when somebody hurts you. And it's like, there's a little toggle switch that's set to on that says, get mad and take revenge.

[23:08] It's that one's on, then they come from the factory that way. That's where you open up the phone, take it out of the box, go to the settings. And my default setting is take revenge. It's just in my app. right that's the default setting in the preferences of my brain it is not natural for me to love my enemies it's actually impossible and the only way to do it since it doesn't come to me naturally is for it to come to me supernaturally that's the only way it's gonna work so I'm not telling you it's easy I'm telling you it's impossible it is impossible on your own power right so and I'm not gonna lecture you that this is the right thing to do because we know that you know it's right to love your enemies you know that there's benefits to it right we but we also know how hard if it doesn't come to me naturally it comes to me supernaturally it comes to me by God's power in the world the Holy Spirit is God's active force in the world that changes hearts opens our eyes fills us with love teaches us to forgive and sends us to Jesus on our knees so we need to pray for the supernatural so that so your openness doesn't need to be loving to loving your enemies because that's hard to do your openness only needs to be to follow the

[24:29] direction of the holy spirit and to ask for his help that's all you have to do okay so what i want to do right now for all of us is to pray for the spirit to change our default setting and give us the supernatural ability to love our enemies. Because I think that's the only way we can do it. If I tell you you should try harder to do it, that doesn't work. Because you can't try harder to do things like that. It's really hard to do, right? It's impossible. So I'm going to ask you to pray along with me in your own heart if you are ready to. Now, listen, you may not be ready to today. And that's okay. Really, it is okay. If you're not ready today to ask the Spirit to help you love your enemies these because it's not the time yet. You're still processing it. That's okay. You don't have to pray along with this one. If that is true for you, though, I do ask you to come talk to one of the pastors or one of the deacons, and we want to just listen to that. We want to hear about that and pray with you about whatever that is, whatever wound that you're carrying, because that's important. That wound is important, and we're ready to be with you, walk with you in that. that. So if you're not ready to pray this prayer, then don't pray along. But if you are ready to

[25:41] pray this prayer, then I'm going to ask you to pray along with me, and I'm going to start praying right now about the Spirit helping us to love our enemies. So let's pray. And again, pray along if the Spirit leads you to. Let's pray.

[25:56] Holy Spirit, I address you today. I address you as one person of the Trinity, and I'm asking you right now to help me to do something that's impossible which is to love my enemies love those who have hurt me love the unlovable to love the violent to love the hateful to love people I can't understand to love people that want to hurt me and who hate me I cannot do it on my own I do not have the power and I don't want to do it on my own but I want you to lead me in that way and I want you to give me your power to love those who I find unlovable Spirit please move through us now we ask it in Jesus name Amen