Read Time: 9 minutes1 Samuel 28
The chapter is the end of Saul’s long descent — the rejected king, with Yahweh silent, turning at last to the very thing he had himself outlawed. The Philistines gather for the battle that will kill him, and Saul is afraid, “and when Saul enquired of Yahweh, Yahweh answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets.” The heavens are shut to him; the Spirit that departed long ago leaves him now without a word. So the man who had put away those that had familiar spirits goes by night, disguised, to the witch of Endor, seeking from the dead the guidance the living God will not give. There is a bitter irony in the very place-name: Endor means the fountain or spring of Dor — a name of living water — and to this “fountain” Saul comes who has forsaken the true Fountain of living waters; but the spring of Endor gives only the dead. It is the last act of natural Israel’s king — having forsaken the fountain, he digs the most broken cistern of all, the forbidden well of the dead.
What the woman sees terrifies her, and the message that comes is Saul’s own doom pronounced. Whatever the true nature of the apparition — and Scripture elsewhere is plain that the dead know nothing, that there is no wisdom in the grave — the word delivered is unsparing: the kingdom is rent from Saul and given to David, “because thou obeyedst not the voice of Yahweh,” and tomorrow Saul and his sons shall be with the dead, and the army given into Philistine hands. The rejected king, seeking comfort from the forbidden, hears only the confirmation of the judgment long ago spoken at Gilgal and over Agag. There is no new mercy here; the door he opened in the dark gives back only his own sentence.
There is a larger type in this dark scene, for the witch of Endor is a fitting figure of the great Apostasy that would later seat itself over Christendom. Her whole trade is the lie that the dead are not dead — that departed souls live on, conscious, able to be summoned and consulted and to mediate between the living and the unseen. That is the very lie on which the apostate system was built: the immortality of the soul, the cult and invocation of departed “saints,” prayers offered to and through the dead, the trafficking in souls dressed up as religion. As Saul, the rejected head of natural Israel, forsook the living God and turned to necromancy for guidance, so the apostasy forsook the living word for communion with the dead and the sorceries by which, John says, “were all nations deceived” (Rev 18:23). The medium who claims to raise the dead, who deals in spirits and divination against the plain word of Yahweh, is the seed of that woman who sits upon the beast — Babylon the great, the mother of harlotries, whose merchandise is the souls of men (Rev 18:13). The forbidden well of Endor and the golden cup of Babylon draw from the same poisoned spring: the denial of death, the consulting of the dead, the religion of the grave masquerading as the oracle of God.
The contrast with David could not be sharper, and it is the point of placing this chapter here. David, hunted and weary, still inquires of Yahweh and is answered; Saul, on the throne, is met with silence and turns to the dead. The one has the living word though he lives in caves; the other has a crown and a witch and the grave. The whole difference between the man after Yahweh’s heart and the king of natural Israel is laid bare in their two ways of seeking guidance — the one to the living fountain, the other, at the last, to the pit. Saul’s tragedy closes as it ran: a man who would not obey the voice of Yahweh, left at the end with no voice but the echo of his own doom.
The chapter ends with a strange, sad mercy — the witch and Saul’s servants press food on the broken king, who has eaten nothing all day and falls full-length on the ground in terror, and he rises and eats and goes out into the night to his last battle. There is pathos in it: the great tall king, head and shoulders above the people, reduced to a trembling man fed by a medium before he goes out to die. Natural Israel’s king, chosen by the eye, ends face-down on the earth in the dark, and walks out to the field where he will fall. The reign that began with such promise of the flesh ends in silence, the forbidden, and the grave.
Yahweh answers Saul no more — not by dream, Urim, or prophet — so the rejected king digs the most broken cistern of all and seeks the dead. David in his caves has the living word; Saul on his throne has only the grave and the echo of his doom.
Jeremiah 4
The chapter holds out true repentance and then sounds the alarm of the coming destruction from the north. “If thou wilt return, O Israel… return unto me… and thou shalt not remove.” But the return Yahweh seeks is no mere outward turning: “Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns. Circumcise yourselves to Yahweh, and take away the foreskins of your heart.” The plough must go into the hard unbroken ground of the heart, and the circumcision Yahweh wants is inward — the same heart-circumcision Paul presses, the cutting away not of the flesh but of the heart’s hardness. It is the answer to the sower’s hard and thorny soil: break up the fallow ground, that the seed may take root.
Then the alarm. “Blow ye the trumpet in the land… the lion is come up from his thicket, and the destroyer of the Gentiles is on his way.” The evil from the north that the seething pot foretold is now coming — Babylon, the lion, the destroyer — and the prophet cries for the trumpet and the standard and the flight to the fenced cities. “Declare ye in Judah… a grievous vision is declared unto me.” The judgment long threatened is now at the gates, and the prophet’s grief breaks through: “My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart… I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.” This is the weeping prophet weeping — the man whose own heart is torn by the doom he must announce, who feels the wound of his people as his own. Here the Ox bears his load: the burden of the word is not carried at arm’s length but felt in the bowels, the laboring servant groaning under the weight he was given to carry, as the greater Servant would weep over the same city and bear in himself the grief of the people he came to save.
The vision rises to a terrible undoing of the creation itself. “I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light… the mountains trembled… there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled… the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down.” The judgment is painted as a return to tohu va-bohu — the formless void of the beginning, creation unmade. The land under Yahweh’s wrath becomes Genesis 1 run backwards: light gone, mountains shaking, man fled, the fruitful place a wilderness. The covenant land, forsaking its God, is given back to chaos — the most fearful picture of what it is to leave the fountain of living waters.
Yet even in the unmaking, mercy sets a limit. “For thus hath Yahweh said, The whole land shall be desolate; yet will I not make a full end.” The judgment is fierce but not final; a remnant is kept, a seed preserved through the chaos, as in every judgment of the prophets. And the chapter ends on the pathos of a people adorning itself even as it falls — “though thou clothest thyself with crimson… in vain shalt thou make thyself fair; thy lovers will despise thee, they will seek thy life.” The harlot bride dressing for lovers who have become killers — the broken cisterns turned to enemies, the painted face that cannot stop the destroyer from the north. “Woe is me now! for my soul is wearied because of murderers.”
Break up the fallow ground and circumcise the heart, for the destroyer comes from the north. The prophet weeps as the land is unmade to formless void — yet Yahweh will not make a full end; a remnant is kept through the chaos.
Matthew 15
The chapter opens on the clash between the commandment of God and the tradition of men. The Pharisees object that the disciples eat with unwashed hands, and the Lord turns it back on them: by their tradition of Corban — declaring a thing dedicated to God — they let a man refuse to support his own father and mother, “thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.” They honor him with their lips while their heart is far from him; they strain at outward washings while their inward man is unclean. And he states the principle plainly: “not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man” — for out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, thefts. Defilement is from within, from the heart, not from unwashed hands — the same truth as Jeremiah’s heart-circumcision, the uncleanness that no soap can wash because it is marked within.
Then the Canaanite woman, one of the great scenes of Gentile faith. A woman of Canaan — the outsider of outsiders, of the very nations Israel was to drive out — cries after him for her demon-possessed daughter, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David.” He is silent, then says he is sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, then seems to refuse her: “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” And her answer is the faith that wins: “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” She takes the lowest place and clings, and the Lord marvels: “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” The Gentile who claims only the crumbs is given the children’s portion — the gathering of the outsiders again, the centurion and the Canaanite, those who come with nothing but faith and the lowest place.
The chapter then gives the feeding of the four thousand, a second wilderness feast, this one in the region of the Gentiles. Again he is moved with compassion, again he will not send them away fasting, again he takes the loaves and the few fishes, gives thanks, breaks, and gives — and four thousand are fed with seven baskets of fragments left. Where the five thousand were fed in Israel with twelve baskets over, here in Gentile country the seven baskets remain — the bread of life multiplied for the nations too, the table spread in a second wilderness for the outsiders. The Bread of Heaven feeds whoever comes, Jew or Gentile, in the desert.
Between these stands the healing of the multitudes, and the crowd’s wonder gives the chapter its quiet summit: they bring the lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and he heals them, “insomuch that the multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak… and they glorified the God of Israel.” The Servant who bears the infirmities heals the broken of body, and the people glorify the God of Israel — the works of the kingdom drawing out praise. The chapter holds together the indictment of the heart’s defilement, the faith of the Gentile who takes the crumbs, and the compassion that feeds and heals the multitudes — the King refusing the outward religion of tradition and reaching the inward man, the outsider, and the broken.
Defilement comes from the heart, not unwashed hands; the Canaanite woman’s faith claims the crumbs and is given the children’s bread. The King feeds a second multitude in the wilderness and heals the broken, and the people glorify the God of Israel.
Synthesis and Exhortation
The day sets two ways of seeking and two kinds of cleanness side by side. Saul, with Yahweh silent, turns to the dead at Endor — the rejected king digging the most forbidden cistern when the fountain has gone quiet to him, and a figure of the great Apostasy that would forsake the living word for communion with the dead; Jeremiah calls for the fallow ground to be broken and the heart circumcised before the destroyer comes; and Matthew’s King teaches that defilement is from the heart, not the hands, and finds great faith in a Canaanite who claims only the crumbs. The king who seeks the grave, the people who must break up the heart’s hard ground, and the Gentile who comes with nothing but faith all turn on the same thing — the inward man, the heart that either seeks the living God or forsakes him for the forbidden and the outward.
The heart is the day’s deep theme, against all outward religion. Saul kept the outward form — he had even outlawed the mediums he now consults — but his heart never obeyed the voice of Yahweh, and at the end the form is empty and he goes to the grave. Jeremiah’s people clothe themselves in crimson and wash with soap, but the iniquity is marked within and only the circumcised heart will do. The Pharisees wash their hands and honor with their lips while the heart is far off. And against all of it stands the Canaanite woman, who has no form, no standing, no claim — only a heart of faith that takes the lowest place — and is given the children’s bread. The kingdom is of the heart from first to last: the broken fallow ground, the inward cleansing, the faith that claims the crumbs.
The hope holds its shape — the remnant kept, the table spread, the judgment not final. Jeremiah’s land is unmade to formless void, yet Yahweh will not make a full end; a seed is kept through the chaos. The King feeds the four thousand in the wilderness as a foretaste of the feast, the Gentile given the crumbs that are the children’s bread — the nations gathered in promise. Saul goes to the grave, but David’s throne is sure. The saint lives breaking up the fallow ground of his own heart, seeking the living God and not the forbidden, claiming the crumbs of grace that are in truth the children’s bread, kept as the remnant through the judgment that will not make a full end.
So the exhortation gathers to the heart and the living God. Do not be Saul, keeping the outward form while the heart never obeys, and turning at last to broken and forbidden cisterns when the fountain has gone silent — seek the living God while he may be found, and break up the fallow ground of your heart that the seed may root. Let your cleansing be inward, the circumcision of the heart, not the washing of hands; for defilement is from within, and no soap reaches it. And come as the Canaanite woman came — with no claim but faith, taking the lowest place, content with the crumbs — for to such the children’s bread is given. Seek the fountain, break the fallow ground, cleanse the heart, and claim the crumbs of grace; the King feeds whoever comes to him in the wilderness.
Be not Saul seeking the grave when the fountain goes silent; break up the fallow ground and circumcise the heart, for defilement is from within. Come as the Canaanite came — with nothing but faith, claiming the crumbs that are the children’s bread.