My hero was almost executed today for winning a battle.

I know that sounds pretty ridiculous, and I also know that the king would say it had nothing to do with winning the battle, but that’s sure how it looked to me.

I am Prince Jonathan’s armour bearer and he is my hero.  I have always said that I would do anything that he asked me to do, and I think that today proved it.

Calculated risks are all very well, but this was just blind faith.  Nevertheless, we came out of it alive and the Philistines didn’t, so blind faith isn’t always blind.

Prince Jonathan’s father is King Saul, the first king of Israel, and he is a brave man – but not as brave as my master, Prince Jonathan.

This morning, our army and the Philistine army were just sitting around waiting for something to happen, but the prince had the idea of making it happen, instead of just waiting.

So he said to me, “Let’s go over to the Philistine garrison on the other side.”  Of course, I agreed, and we sidled nonchalantly out of the camp, not letting anyone know we were going – particularly not the king!  We made it out of the camp without being noticed and walked along a deep valley that led towards the army of the Philistines. They were spread out on a sort of plateau near the towns of Michmash and Geba, while we were down in the valley, a long way below them, at the bottom of some pretty steep cliffs.  They had a couple of outposts keeping watch over the pass we were walking along, and the prince could see that we wouldn’t be able to get past them without being spotted.

We paused out of sight of these outposts and talked about what we should do.  “Come on, let’s go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised,” said Prince Jonathan.  “It may be that the Lord will work for us, for nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few.”

Well, that’s one of the things I love about the prince: he has amazing faith in Yahweh our God.  I have faith in God too, but not as much as the prince has.  Instead, I have faith in Prince Jonathan.  He decides what we two should do, based on his faith in God; and I do whatever the prince tells me because I have faith in his faith.  It works pretty well.

The prince suggested that we show ourselves to the Philistines and do a little test.  If they told us to come up to them when they saw us, then we would take that as a sign to go up because God would give them into our hand – although I wasn’t really sure what that would look like.  What can two men do against an army?  Nevertheless, we went.

When the Philistine watchmen saw us, they immediately started laughing at us, saying that the Hebrews were crawling out of their holes.  I suppose it was sort of true – we had been hiding in a big cave, and I think that was part of why Prince Jonathan wasn’t happy.  He didn’t think that God’s people should be hiding in holes like rats!

Then they told us to come up to them, promising that they would “show us a thing or two” if we did.

Jonathan and I looked at each other and he smiled at me with a confident, “There, what did you expect?” look in his eyes.  I grinned back at him and we kept walking.  When we reached the bottom of the cliff, Jonathan said, “Come up after me.”

I didn’t get upset when he said this because I know the prince too well, but I did remind him once again that he was forgetting what an armour-bearer is for: I am meant to go in front of him and protect him.  But he wouldn’t allow it.  It was his choice, he said, for us to go and do such an impossible thing, so he had to lead.  I can’t imagine King Saul ever saying that to his armour bearer!  What a wonderful king Prince Jonathan will make when the time comes.

Anyway, we climbed up, needing to use our hands as well as our feet – no chance of holding any weapons to defend ourselves.  Throughout our climb, the Philistines could easily have used their spears or arrows to put an end to us, or even dropped stones on us.  But they didn’t.

Being in front, the prince reached the top first, and was up and at them before I had even made it up onto level ground.  All I could do was to try and catch up.

By then the Philistines weren’t laughing anymore.

A large crowd of them was waiting for us, but we didn’t wait for them to greet us.

Prince Jonathan ran towards the crowd and hacked at the closest ones with his sword, injuring them and knocking them off balance, while I followed up behind him and finished them off one by one.  It was hard work, because they all had good armour on, but we just kept moving straight through the crowd, and by the time we had killed about ten of them, I could see that the throng was thinning in front of us.

Then they started to run away, and we chased them.  We killed about 20 men between us, and by then the rest were all fleeing, shouting and screaming.

I guess that they would eventually have regrouped, fought back and pushed us off the cliff if God hadn’t chosen just that moment to send an earthquake.

Suddenly the earth was heaving and rolling, and the prince and I had to stop, just to stay on our feet.

Then, as I watched the fleeing Philistines, some of them fell over.  Of course, the men running behind them didn’t have time to stop, so they tripped over them and fell on top of them.  And in the confusion and fear, they all thought it was us attacking them.  Within moments, hundreds of Philistine warriors were fighting each other, and the shouting and panic continued to spread through the army.

It was then that the prince and I looked back towards our own camp and saw that there seemed to be a lot of movement there too.  Within a very short time, Israelite soldiers were streaming towards the Philistine camp.  There were still many more Philistines than Israelites, but the Philistines were all in a panic, too busy killing each other or running away to get organised to fight our army.  Not only that, but every so often another earth tremor would shake the ground and terrify them all over again.

To cut a long story short, the Philistines ran in all directions, killing each other and never quite getting organised enough to fight back against our brave soldiers, who had been so badly outnumbered when they committed themselves to the attack.  There were also lots of other Israelites hiding in the hills who saw what was happening and came out to attack the fleeing Philistines too.  A wonderful victory was unfolding and the rout would have been complete, except that King Saul had made a pretty basic error.  Of course, he wasn’t trying to cause trouble, but his mistake almost killed my master.

You see, King Saul had given his soldiers an order that none of them should eat any food until night fell and they had finished defeating the enemy.  But it wasn’t just an order – he made it into a curse and an oath before Yahweh, so it was extra serious.

By the time we met up with some other Israelite soldiers in a forest, chasing Philistines together, there were hungry, worn out Israelites all over the countryside.

The prince and I had heard nothing of all of this, and as we entered the forest it seemed as if God was providing the special food that we needed.  There were plenty of beehives around, and honey was dripping out onto the ground underneath.  Prince Jonathan did the obvious thing: he used the staff in his hand to get some of the honey without disturbing the bees too much, then put it on his hand and ate it.

You should have seen the smile on his face and the way his eyes lit up.  You’d appreciate some pure, delicious honey to fill you with instant energy too, if you had been doing all the hard work we had done that afternoon.  I was about to follow his example when one of the men said to the prince, a hint of worry in his voice, “Your father strictly charged the people with an oath, saying, ‘Cursed be the man who eats food this day.’ ”

Now you’ll never hear Prince Jonathan criticising his father, even though the king isn’t always very wise, because the prince always shows respect for his father, just as God commanded us.  But this time he said that his father had caused trouble for the land, because the honey would have been just the thing to fill everyone with spirit for finishing off the battle.

Well, I didn’t eat any of the honey because of the king’s curse, but I didn’t expect any trouble to come of the matter.  When evening came, I found that I was wrong.

The curse expired at evening, and then there was quite a disturbance over food.  Many of the men were so hungry that they were killing animals and eating them without properly draining out the blood.  That got sorted out, but it seemed to put King Saul on his guard, as if he sensed that something was not quite right, and that Prince Jonathan had something to do with it.  Maybe he was a bit jealous that his son had so bravely shown his faith in God and won an amazing battle.

Whatever the reason, King Saul asked God for an answer through Ahijah the priest, but God wouldn’t answer.  King Saul took that as a sign that someone had broken his curse.  He asked everyone what had happened, but none of us would answer him.  After all, no-one wanted to get Prince Jonathan into trouble after the amazing victory he had won!

But Saul could tell that we were hiding something, so he drew lots to find whether the problem was with his family or everyone else, and God said the fault was with King Saul and Prince Jonathan.

I was starting to get concerned by this time, but I felt that surely God wouldn’t help Prince Jonathan to miraculously win a battle and then get him in trouble for breaking a rule he hadn’t even known about.  I should have known better, really, but I don’t always understand God as well as I should.

God gave the answer alright, and the prince was very noble in offering to die if that was necessary.  What a disaster that would have been!  King Saul was ready to kill him, too, but everyone else stood up and said that it would be completely unjust, after the salvation the prince had achieved.  Fortunately, we managed to convince King Saul that it wasn’t Prince Jonathan’s fault, as he hadn’t known.

We didn’t try to show whose fault it really was, but I hope that the king learns not to take such foolish oaths and curses again!

So it is that we are all alive tonight, saved by the love of God and the courage and faith of Prince Jonathan.  Not only that, but we are all happy because we helped to save the prince from his father’s thoughtless curse.

I guess that the surviving Philistines are the ones who will be most unhappy tonight.  Just this morning they were in a position of power, but now they have lost almost everything.