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After the death of Goliath all would seem to go well with David. The admired of all admirers, high in favour, beloved of Jonathan, and living with the king — whose state is so enviable as his? Yet let no one be sure of anything in this world, that is, of anything capable of vicissitude. David's sufferings and persecutions are beginning now when, to the outward eye, all seems brilliant and prosperous. God, who saw the evil coming, gave him the animating support of dear friend. You will often see how a compensating element is blended with great calamity, and neutralises much of its virus.

1. Put asunder by Saul's malignant envy, yet I suppose that the remembrance of that great surpassing love of Jonathan's must have been a presence and a power to David. There is no influence on a feeling mind stronger than the sense of being loved; nothing more elevating, more securing to the inner life. We are dearer to ourselves when we are dear to someone else. Danger, of a very subtle and fatal kind, lurks in the feeling, "No man careth for my soul." This is, indeed, the fruitful source of suicide. Youths are steadied when away from home by the confidence they have of a mighty love felt for them by their mothers. Is it not Jeremy Taylor who says, "He who loves is happy, but he who is loved is safe!" See how in the constitution of the family, in marriage, in children, in friendship, God has provided a shield for our weakness in the love borne to us. Jonathan saw himself magnified and improved in David, who was his better self. Read the fourteenth chapter to discern the valorous soul of Jonathan. Look at him, with one attendant likeminded with himself, "climbing up upon his hands and upon his feet" into the garrison of the Philistines. "And they fell before Jonathan," and there was trembling in the host: "and that first slaughter, which Jonathan and his armour bearer made, was about twenty men, within as it were an half acre of land, which a yoke of oxen might plough." Here was David's adventurous spirit: Jonathan had seen Goliath for forty days defying Israel, and had not dared to meet him, but he saw David kill him. He loved that which went beyond his own spirit, yet was of the same heroic order. He saw in David a higher and greater Jonathan, the ideal of his own actual life, himself transfigured and perfected. What he had dreamt he might be, he beheld in David.

2. Now, let us turn to the father. Was Saul ever like his son? David, in his song, unites them in a very beautiful harmony: "Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions." And when we look at Saul's early history, there gleams on us a ray of his son's noble spirit. When "the children of Belial said, How shall this man save us? And they despised him, and brought him no presents," it is added, "but he held his peace." That faculty of self-control stands in terrible contrast with the utter loss of self-respect and self-government which he afterwards evinced. Moreover, the grief of Samuel at the Divine rejection of Saul ("it grieved Samuel, and he cried unto the Lord all night") is a touching proof of the truth that Saul was lovely in the early part of his career. Here was a noble nature ruined; but we must confess that his was a situation of such extraordinary difficulty that, while he could have retained his uprightness had he remained in favour with God, yet when we think of his constitutional malady, and of the human and almost necessary vexation which the song of the women must have occasioned; when we think that the praise of higher prowess was bestowed on one who was known to be the aspirant to the throne, as we learn from Jonathan's words to David, we cannot wonder that jealousy caused his ruin.There is no habit so easily acquired, so hardly cast off, as jealousy or envy.

1. We may safely affirm that, if you prize communion with God as your greatest blessing, you will be a stranger to envy. It is the presence of God with us which shuts out the base passions, or keeps them from having dominion over us. And let this be a touchstone to us all. When we feel the rising of envious emotion, let us alarm ourselves, let us be sure we are going back; we are descending to a lower level of the Christian life; we are satisfied to pass the day without a hearty effort to realise God's presence, and therefore has this evil come upon us. Cleave to the Lord, and all virtue, all goodness, all excellence in people whom you meet will be dear to you, because they are His gifts whom you prize higher than all gifts. Envy the gifts! How is that possible when the Giver is yours. Of the Giver "of every good and perfect gift," you can say, "He is my God."

2. This is the first great rule to show us how we may shun envy.

3. But, after this, get into the way of admiring worth, independence, and all moral excellence in whomsoever you see it. Love it in an enemy, and then you cannot have one. Sometimes we are slow to recognise high qualities in people who differ from us; but rid yourselves of this meanness, and delight yourselves in the discovery of nobleness, of generosity, of moral worth in books or men. Wordsworth says —

"My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky;"

but what is God's bow in the clouds for beauty compared to God's gift of genius, of wisdom, of disinterestedness, of charity, when in our human life they arch heaven and earth with a glory "that fadeth not away?" The nobility of Jonathan's character cannot easily be over-estimated.

(B. Kent, M. A.)

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KJV: And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.

WEB: It happened, when he had made an end of speaking to Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.