How often do you stop to think about your struggle with Satan, Sin, and Death against the backdrop of the finished work of Christ at the cross, the empty tomb, and His promise of heaven? How quickly are you able to identify the slimy, condemning words of Satan whispered in your ear? Have you trained your ears to pick up the tantalizing, tempting lure of Sin before it takes control of your heart? How are you doing in your resistance against the intimidating, terrorizing promises of Death’s taunting jabs?

These questions are designed to make you think about the war within your heart and mind. That war within your heart and mind is what I will refer to as the war of the will. Your heart and mind make up a combination of desires and thoughts, that when married together – when your desires and your thoughts are joined together – they become the epicenter that is commonly called “the human will”.

Satan, Sin, and Death are the eternal enemies of God and are therefore the true enemies of the human will, because God has painted the image of himself upon the canvas of the human will. When we say that all humans were created in God’s image, we are saying that God has painted his own image on the canvas of the human will. 

The problem for all of us is that our hearts and our minds have been totally infected by Satan, Sin, and Death; our human wills are completely bankrupt and set against God from moment of our birth. What happened in the Garden in Genesis 3 as Adam and Eve rebelled against God, has totally infected the entire human race. 

This is why the Apostle Paul – quoting the Psalmist – says in Romans 3:10 – 18 that…

“None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and thew way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.” 

Bottom line here… upon being born, none of us are righteous or good. Our hearts and our minds – our human wills – are completely overtaken with Satan, Sin, and Death.

Paul makes this point even more clear in Ephesians 2:1 – 3 where he says that…

“you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience – among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”

Can you see how Paul describes the utter helplessness of the human will apart from God’s saving grace? The human will – the heart and the mind – without the saving effects of God’s grace, is both dead and under the control of our enemies – Satan, Sin, and Death.

You may be wondering why I am beginning our study of 1 Samuel 19:1 – 10 with a simple survey of the broken condition of the human will. The answer to that question is this: in our text today, God is revealing – through the story of king Saul, his son Jonathan, and the king-to-be, David – the absolutely depraved condition of the human will that is set against the absolutely free will of the God of our salvation. Look at the text with me…

1And Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and to all his servants, that they should kill David. But Jonathan, Saul’s son, delighted much in David. 2And Jonathan told David, “Saul my father seeks to kill you. Therefore, be on your guard in the morning. Stay in a secret place and hide yourself. 3And I will go out and stand beside my father in the field where you are, and I will speak to my father about you. And if I learn anything I will tell you.” 4And Jonathan spoke well of David to Saul his father and said to him, “Let not the king sin against his servant David, because he has not sinned against you, and because his deeds have brought good to you. 5For he took his life in his hand and he struck down the Philistine, and the LORD worked a great salvation for all Israel. You saw it, and rejoiced. Why then will you sin against innocent blood by killing David without cause?” 6And Saul listened to the voice of Jonathan. Saul swore, “As the LORD lives, he shall not be put to death.” 7And Jonathan called David, and Jonathan reported to him all these things. And Jonathan brought David to Saul, and he was in his presence as before.

8And there was war again. And David went out and fought with the Philistines and struck them with a great blow, so that they fled before him. 9Then a harmful spirit from the LORD came upon Saul, as he sat in his house with his spear in his hand. And David was playing the lyre. 10And Saul sought to pin David to the wall with the spear, but he eluded Saul, so that he struck the spear into the wall. And David fled and escaped that night.

John Woodhouse, in his excellent commentary on this passage, argues that this passage is a description of the war between the human will and the will of God when he says that “The Bible speaks of a conflict of wills that is of another order. On the one hand there is the will of God, the creator of and sovereign ruler over all things. His will is entirely good. On the other hand, there are the wills of human beings, which are consistently set against the will of God.”2 You see, our sinfully infected will – our hearts and our minds – are in deep conflict with the will of God.

Woodhouse goes on to explain that “The Bible shows us that this conflict is the reason that human wills are so often and typically in conflict with one another. If our wills were all in harmony with God’s will, we would be in harmony with each other. It is because we all seek to assert our own wills that we inevitably clash with one another. That is what causes quarrels, fights, and wars among us (see James 4:1 – 10).”3

What Woodhouse is simply agreeing with here, is the doctrine of how our vertical relationship with God affects our horizontal relationship with other human beings. The war within, between our own human will and the very will of the God of our salvation, this is what we see happening in our passage today.

The completely bankrupt will of King Saul is at war with the completely free will of the God of the universe, and that war within King Saul, can no longer be contained inside of him like the dirty little secret he hoped it would continue to be. 

#1: NO MORE SECRETS (V. 1)

We know already from our study that the Spirit of God left Saul because of his sinful rebellion against God and that a demonic spirit from God has overtaken Saul (1 Sam. 16:14; 18:10 – 12; 19:9). We know that Saul has become increasingly suspicious, jealous, and fearful of David (1 Sam. 18:8 – 9, 12, 15, 28 – 29). 

We also know that Saul has not only tried to kill David twice in private with his spear, but he has also tried to lay two different deceptive snares to get David murdered by the Philistines, and not only that, but he has now become “David’s enemy continually” (1 Sam. 18:11, 17 – 29). All of this, until this point, has been done privately and mostly within the heart and mind of our rejected, king Saul.

But the problem with the war, deep within the human will, is that when that war is not repented of, it can no longer be kept a secret; what we entertain deep inside the hallways of our hearts and minds, will always become public at some point. 

This is illustrated in verse 1 of our passage, where we read that “Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and to all his servants, that they should kill David.” Saul has become stark raving mad in his murderous thoughts and desires. He cannot seem to find any relief for his murderous thoughts and desires. He has tried to relieve his deep dark secret desires and thoughts through his own deceptive plans and failed attempts to murder David, but he has been unsuccessful.

His dirty little secret is no longer lurking in the shadows of his darkened and depraved will; it is now fully public and fully exposed for all the world to see as he tries to convince his own son and all his servants to fulfill his darkened, murderous fantasies. 

Saul has rejected the only protector he ever had in the person of the God who saves and now his rebellion is on full display, and he has David in his crosshairs, hoping that no one will protect him from his murderous plans. But the beauty of the gospel for us – and for David – is that God has provided a protector so that we can escape the war within in one piece.

#2: THE PROTECTOR (VV. 1 – 3)

David’s protector comes to him in the person of the murderous king’s own son, Jonathan. We remember earlier that “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David” and that “Jonathan loved him as his own soul” and that “Jonathan made a covenant with David” and that he gave David his own royal clothing and weapons as a sign of their tightly knit friendship (1 Sam. 18:1 – 4). 

We must also remember that Jonathan has already been depicted as a man and a warrior of great faith in God’s ability to protect and to save his people from their enemies and that Jonathan too was once the object of his father’s venomous and murderous plot to kill him as well (1 Sam. 14:1 – 45).

This same Jonathan, we are told, in verses 1 – 3 of our text, because he “delighted much in David” (v. 1), warned David that Saul was looking to murder him, and that he should find a place to hide so that Jonathan could intervene on David’s behalf and find out what was going on.

Jonathan, the crown prince of Israel, is literally putting his own life on the line to protect David from his own father’s murderous plans. And as Jonathan steps in as David’s protector, he inevitably becomes his own father’s confronter.

#3: THE CONFRONTER (VV. 4 – 7)

A true protector does not merely just shield someone from their enemies; they also confront the enemy for their evil plans. True protectors do not hide in neutrality; they confront evil courageously.

True to his character, in verses 4 – 7, Jonathan courageously confronts his father for his evil, murderous plans against David. He begins in verse 4 by calling Saul’s plan exactly what it is when he says, “Let not the king sin against his servant David, because he has not sinned against you” and he also reminds his father that everything David has done has “brought good to” him. 

He then reminds his father in verses 4 – 5 that God had used David to bring about “a great salvation for all Israel” when he risked his life to defeat Goliath and that even Saul, “rejoiced” when he “saw it”. This all leads to Jonathan’s probing question in verse 5 when he asks, “Why then will you sin against innocent blood by killing David without cause?”

Notice that Saul does not really answer the question. He does not say, “I am overcome with fear, and jealousy, and suspicious thoughts about David”. In other words, he does not confess his sin. Instead, he makes, what appears to be, a godly decision after being confronted, when he says in verse 6, that, “As the Lord lives, he shall not be put to death.”The reality is that Saul is still playing games with his words.

We know that Saul’s words will not align with his actions shortly. Even though Jonathan takes his father at his word and tells David that he is safe now, we know from the rest of the text that there is no escaping the bondage that has been created by the war within Saul’s heart and mind.

#4: NO ESCAPE (VV. 8 – 10)

Interestingly, the author tells us in verse 8 that “there was war again… with the Philistines” and that David did what David is known to do as he went out and defeated them “with a great blow, so that they fled before him.” At this point in the passage, the contrasts are strikingly clear between David, the incoming warrior-king who had been chosen by God to be victorious over Israel’s enemies, and the outgoing king, Saul, who had been rejected by God because of his rebellion, who was now losing all ground to the real enemy within his own heart and mind.

The author reminds us once again in verse 9 that “a harmful spirit from the Lord came upon Saul, as he sat in his house with his spear in his hand” while “David was playing the lyre”. This image paints the picture of a victorious incoming king who was chosen by the very will of God to bring peace and redemption from our enemies. 

That image is contrasted with another image of the current, rejected king who sat at home with a spear in his hand, under the spell of a murderous demon, because he had long ago lost the war within as he surrendered himself to Satan, Sin, and Death and was now being used as a pawn to wage war against God.

Even though we read in verse 10 that, “Saul sought to pin David to the wall with the spear” we also read that David “eluded Saul” by God’s grace and that he “fled and escaped that night” never to return to the house of Saul again. Saul cannot undo what the will of God had freely planned to do with David. Saul cannot escape his own bondage even as David freely escapes the attacks of his enemy.

The contrast is thick here: one man cannot escape while the other man does escape. One man’s will is in bondage to the enemy while the other man’s will is completely free and dependent upon the One True King, who is our redeeming God. One man’s will is at war with God’s will while the other man’s will is set free by God’s will.

CONCLUSION…

In conclusion, the war within each and every one of us is the battle between our own corrupted will and the perfect will of God. This is why I started us off with the following questions:

  1. How often do you stop to think about your struggle with Satan, Sin, and Death against the backdrop of the finished work of Christ at the cross, the empty tomb, and His promise of heaven?
  2. How quickly are you able to identify the slimy, condemning words of Satan whispered in your ear?
  3. Have you trained your ears to pick up the tantalizing, tempting lure of Sin before it takes control of your heart?
  4. How are you doing in your resistance against the intimidating, terrorizing promises of Death’s taunting jabs?

Our hearts and minds – our will – is constantly under attack from the enemy. Satan, Sin, and Death will stop at nothing to wage war against the will of God as they seek to hijack your will so they can use it as a pawn in their unrelenting attacks on the Creator of the universe.

For the believer, this threat is real each and every day. We believers need to be on guard against our enemies using our wills as pawns in their war against God. For the unbeliever, your will is already hijacked and in need of freedom. This is the argument that Martin Luther makes so clear in his book: The Bondage of the Will.4

Luther makes it clear that all of humanity is caught up in bondage, that there is no such thing as human free will, and that the human will is constantly set against God’s will until it has been set free by the gracious and redeeming work of Christ at the cross of Calvary.5

Luther’s point intersects with the principles of our passage today. Namely that hidden sinfulness will not stay hidden for very long. We are in dire need of someone to protect us from our enemy and not only protect us but to also confront the enemy. And finally, we need someone to set us free – to set our will free from the bondage of Satan, Sin, and Death.

This is the beauty of the message of the gospel. We know that it is God’s kindness to us that he would not leave us in the darkness of sinfulness if he chose us out of darkness to be his children. In his kindness, in his grace, God has shown us the depravity of our own sinfulness against him. 

He has offered protection in the work of Christ at the cross of Calvary. He has confronted Satan, Sin, and Death in the victory of the empty tomb. He has given us a way of escape from our enemies as we cling to Christ by grace, through faith, in accordance with the Scriptures, for the glory of God alone.

What more could a believer cling to when all the powers of hell unleash their fury against us? What more hope could the unbeliever find than the hope that is found in Christ at his bloody cross where the debt of sin was paid in full? The war within can be won my friends! You do not need to walk in hopeless defeat!

The cross was bloody, the tomb is empty, and Christ is returning! Christ is the light that came into the world to reveal sin, to offer lasting protection, to confront our enemies, and to provide a way of escape for all who trust in him. That is good news for both the believer struggling with Satan, Sin, and Death on a daily basis and for the unbeliever who needs salvation. – Amen!!!

1 Unless otherwise specified, all Bible references are to the English Standard Version Bible, The New Classic Reference Edition (ESV) (Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, 2001).

2 John, Woodhouse, 1 Samuel: Looking for a Leader, Preaching the Word Commentary, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2008), 365.

3 Ibid.

4 Martin, Luther, The Bondage of the Will, Translated by J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 1957).

5 Ibid., 317 – 318.