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2 Samuel 21:1-2 – A Broken Covenant

In law, there’s such a thing as a statute of limitations. There are some crimes, where, if legal proceedings aren’t begun within a certain number of years, then it’s too late to do anything about it. But there’s no statute of limitations with God. One of the great myths we believe is that time heals sin. That if something happened long enough ago, we can just move on. But not with God. And we have an example of that here. The crime, as we learn from verse 1, is Saul’s execution of the Gibeonites. If you’re wondering who the Gibeonites are, verse 2 gives you pretty much all that you need to know. In Joshua chapter 9, the Gibeonites had tricked Joshua and the people into making a covenant with them. They’d pretended that they had come from a long way away, when they were actually their neighbours. Three days after making the covenant, the Israelites found out who they really were. The people wanted to kill them. But Joshua and the other leaders told them: ‘We have sworn to them by the LORD, the God of Israel, and now we may not touch them. We will let them live, lest wrath be upon us, because of the oath that we swore to them’. Four centuries had passed between then and Saul’s day. Although what Saul did isn’t recorded elsewhere in the Bible, we learn here that he had slaughtered many of them. And that’s in line with what we know of Saul from elsewhere, when back in 1st Samuel 22 he commanded the murder of 85 priests.

So why did Saul kill the Gibeonites? It seems that he struck them down in some sort of nationalistic zeal. But zeal isn’t a good thing in and of itself. Zeal can be misplaced. Saul in his misplaced zeal broke a covenant that had been made four centuries earlier. And if it was wrong to break a covenant that the people of Israel had been tricked into making all those years ago, how much more serious is it for our own nation to have broken the covenants it made with God almost four centuries ago (in 1638 and 1643)? And actually, Saul’s biggest crime here is taking God’s name in vain. Remember what Joshua and the other leaders had said: ‘We have sworn to them by the LORD, the God of Israel’. So to break that vow was to drag God’s name through the muck. The blood that had been shed needed atoned for. And in fact if it wasn’t atoned for, it would look like the God of Israel was some sort of nationalistic God, who never held his people to account.

Question

  1. How had Saul broken a national covenant?

Prayer Points

  1. Pray that our nation would repent of covenant breaking.
  2. Use prayer points from your congregation.
  3. Pray for family matters.