On Oaths and Dying

In the last part of Acts, Luke tells the story of how Paul ended up in Rome. That story's very interesting, but one part in particular is very intriguing. In Chapter 23, more than forty of Paul's countrymen hatched a plot. They had "bound themselves with an oath not to eat or drink until they had killed Paul."At the end of Acts, Paul is very much alive and residing in Rome waiting for his audience with Caesar.
In this day and age, oaths aren't that big of a deal, but back in Paul's day, an oath breaker at the very least lost his honor, at the worst he may lose his life. So, if Paul lived more than four years after that oath (see 24:27 & 28:30), what happened to the forty men who took the oath to kill him?
We know that the human body can survive at least forty days without food, but four years? I don't think even the longest hunger strike ever has gone on that long! Did the men finally break down and start eating again after Paul slipped out of their clutches, or did some of them actually keep their oaths and slowly starve to death?
We don't really need to know. Maybe one of the reasons Luke threw this in was because in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught his disciples to not make oaths, but to merely let your yes be yes and your no be no. He said "And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black."
Making an oath like that - to not eat or drink until they kill Paul - is really foolish. It assumes you have a lot more control over life than you do. You may be thinking that you would never do anything so foolish, but is that so? Have you ever said to a worried child "I'm not going to die"? How can you make such a promise? Why would you make such a promise?
What those kinds of promises do is over inflate our importance. The point you should address isn't "will you die and leave me?" Instead, the point needs to be that even if you do die, the child still has God. Don't go for an easy answer. Go for the one that's going to help them learn to trust God rather than trust you. You'll certainly have to do a bit more talking than a simple, "I'm not going to die, sweetie," but it's well worth it to teach a child a very important lesson about the heavenly Father.