The beginning of King Saul’s
fall is when he offers the burnt offering instead of waiting for Samuel to
arrive and do it. When Samuel
finally gets there, he chastises Saul and pronounces some consequences. It is worth looking at these
consequences to see what we can learn.
13 And Samuel said to Saul, Thou hast done foolishly: thou hast not kept the commandment of the Lord thy God, which he commanded thee: for now would the Lord have established thy kingdom upon Israel for ever.
It sounds like Saul’s
kingdom would have been established forever if he had kept the commandments and
not offered the sacrifice, but because he had, his kingdom would not
continue. That is quite a big
consequence hanging on a single act.
Why was this the case?
I think one
possibility is that Saul showed he couldn’t handle the pressure of being in a
tight spot without deciding to break commandments. And he was in a
tight spot.
1) His
people were scared and were deserting the army.
2) Samuel
didn’t come when he said and there was no indication of how long he’d be
delayed.
3) They
were facing a humongous Philistine army that looked like it would attack at any
moment.
That’s a very tense,
high pressure situation. If I were
in that situation, I’d be so stressed I’d be ready to have a litter of kittens
or something. (Yes, I am a type-A
personality.)
It is only natural to
want to do something to escape that
tension somehow as quickly as possible.
But Saul broke the commandments to do it.
The trouble is, that
wasn’t going to be the only high pressure situation King Saul would face, and
if he couldn’t learn to face it the right way, it would be very hard to hold
the kingdom together without continuing to break commandments out of
expediency. Soon every situation
looks one where it is expedient to break commandments of the Lord. That’s the kind of thing that destroys
a king’s moral authority. But if
he could keep the commandments and
make it through, then he’d become stronger and more capable of keeping
stability, even in the most tumultuous times.
This has a good
lesson for us too. If we can learn
to keep the commandments even when in tight spots and under pressure, then we
become stronger and more capable and our little kingdom (as small as it is)
will be established. If parents
can keep the commandments in family crisis, then their family will be more
firmly established.
As a final note, we
can notice that when Samuel anticipated “a man after [the Lord’s] own heart who
would be commanded to be captain over the Lord’s people, we can see that as a
dualistic prophecy. It anticipates
the rise of David as king, but also the mortal ministry of Jesus Christ. Christ was a man after God’s heart and
was made captain over God’s people as the captain of our salvation. (Samuel says little things like this that
anticipate and prophecy of Christ throughout his ministry and they are always
worth noticing and marking.)
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