Saul: Kings of Israel & Judah
Saul, the first king of Judah, is overwhelmed by his duties. But instead of his uncertainty leading him to trust God more, it leads him to a toxic form of insecurity that destroys his reign. He serves as a cautionary tale for believers about the importance of faith in God when things are difficult.
Kings of Israel & Judah: Saul
Series Introduction
In the coming weeks, I want to examine the stories of some of the more interesting kings of Israel and Judah. At first glance, these stories may look like they don’t have much to say to us. These are kings, and we’re regular people. They lived in ancient Israel, and we live in modern Canada. While the specific circumstances they had to navigate were far different than what we deal with daily, what we will find if we do a little digging, is that on some basic level, they faced many of the same challenges and temptations that we deal with today.
From Judges to Kings
The first king we’re going to study is Israel’s first king. Nope, it’s not David, but Saul. But to understand Saul, we must understand the story before he came to power—so…a little history refresher. God delivered the twelve tribes of Israel from slavery in Egypt. After forty years of wandering the desert, the people invaded the land of Canaan, displacing or killing most of the land’s inhabitants. Most…but not all. The remaining Canaanites’ religious practices proved seductive to the Israelites, so they began to mix the worship of God with the worship of the gods of the pagans around them. This angered God, so he allowed foreign powers to make life hard for the people. They would cry out for deliverance and God would raise up a judge–a military chieftain–who would deliver them. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
After the last judge–Samson–God sent a prophet named Samuel to look after Israel. He’s a wise and good man but a lousy father whose sons are corrupt. The people won’t want his sons to inherit the mantle of leadership. The people surmised that their problem was that they were a loosely knit federation of clans, and so they were easy pickings for neighbours with a king who was better able to marshall military resources, so the people asked Samuel to give them a king. Samuel is very upset by the request, but God tells him to go along with the plan.
So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”
But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.” (I Samuel 8:4-9 NIV)
Good Looks with Trouble Underneath
God has Samuel choose a king right from central casting. Saul is a tall, handsome man from a well-connected family (exactly the kind of person the nations around the Israelites would pick as a king). It seems, at first, that Saul is an inspired choice. He is humble (hiding when Samuel goes to introduce him to the congregation). But when the Spirit comes on him, he becomes a fierce warrior, delivering the city of Jabesh Gilead from an army of Ammonites.
Saul’s Insecurity
At first, it seemed the Israelites got the kind of king they could only dream about. He could consolidate all their power under one banner, harnessing the military and economic potential of the Israelite people. But what looked like humility in Saul, was a toxic insecurity that would cause his kingship to go wildly off the rails.
Humility is an understanding of your limitations, the opposite of arrogance. A humble person knows they need, and will therefore accept, help from others. A humble person of faith knows, on the one hand, that they are called to do something beyond their abilities while, on the other, trusting that God is faithful to those he calls. So they know they can accomplish what God has entrusted them with because of God’s faithfulness.
Insecurity is a deep-seated sence of inadequacy that we often try to cover over with bluster. We may try to disprove that gnawing doubt through accomplishment, but no amount of accomplishment can ever make the insecure person feel accepted and secure. The result is insecure people often have a chip on their shoulders. They may not even be consciously aware of their insecurities, but they are driven to try to disprove those things.
Saul is Israel’s first king. If he were the twenty-first king, he would probably have a greater sense of his place. There were be established lines of succession. There would be agreed-upon prerogatives that he would know he could exercise. But I would guess that for anyone, becoming the first king in a neighbourhood as rough as Israel would fill anyone with a measure of self-doubt. If he had chosen to trust that God could sustain him in his role, Saul could have been a good king. But instead, he tries to solve the problem without God, and so he becomes unacceptable as a king.
This insecurity comes to a head with Saul tries to repair the morale of his troops by offering burnt offerings in opposition to the rules:
The Philistines assembled to fight Israel, with three thousand chariots, six thousand charioteers, and soldiers as numerous as the sand on the seashore. They went up and camped at Mikmash, east of Beth Aven. When the Israelites saw that their situation was critical and that their army was hard pressed, they hid in caves and thickets, among the rocks, and in pits and cisterns. Some Hebrews even crossed the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead.
Saul remained at Gilgal, and all the troops with him were quaking with fear. He waited seven days, the time set by Samuel; but Samuel did not come to Gilgal, and Saul’s men began to scatter. So he said, “Bring me the burnt offering and the fellowship offerings.” And Saul offered up the burnt offering. Just as he finished making the offering, Samuel arrived, and Saul went out to greet him.
“What have you done?” asked Samuel.
Saul replied, “When I saw that the men were scattering, and that you did not come at the set time, and that the Philistines were assembling at Mikmash, I thought, ‘Now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal, and I have not sought the Lord’s favor.’ So I felt compelled to offer the burnt offering.”
“You have done a foolish thing,” Samuel said. “You have not kept the command the Lord your God gave you; if you had, he would have established your kingdom over Israel for all time. But now your kingdom will not endure; the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him ruler of his people, because you have not kept the Lord’s command.” (1 Samuel 13:5-14, NIV)
Kings were meant to have limited power, because, they were under God’s authority. Their political power did not give them the right to take the prerogatives of the priesthood. Saul would have known this, but he rationalized his actions, essentially saying, “What else could I have done?” Certainly, his military situation was grave, but God had wanted to teach Saul that he could trust him. He lost that opportunity. Saul’s actions have grievous consequences. Samuel tells him that his kingdom won’t endure. This means that Saul’s kingship won’t turn into a dynasty. Samuel says God has already started to engineer the reign of his replacement (whom we shall soon see is David).
We see Saul’s insecurity front and centre again in the story of David and Goliath. Goliath is an elite Philistine soldier. The Masoretic Text (the primary Hebrew manuscripts used to translate the Old Testament) say Goliath was 6 cubits and a span (9’10”) but most other manuscripts say 4 cubits and a span (6”9”). Most scholars believe this is more likely the case. Goliath would have been an extremely tall man (especially in an age where poor nutrition stunted people’s growth) but Saul is also a very tall man. He is meant to be the champion for the Israelites. But he refuses to engage Goliath in battle. When David says he will go, perhaps Saul asks him to use his armour so that people watching from a distance will think Saul is the victor.
When David defeats Goliath, Saul’s insecurity leads him to see David, who is entirely loyal to him as a threat. Saul tries to send David on a suicide mission, ostensibly to have David earn his place as the king’s son-in-law. When David continues to grow in military success and popularity he actively tries to kill David. As Saul does this, we see another of his character flaws come to the surface: He starts to conflate his self-interest with God’s will.
Saul Sets His Will Against God’s Will
Although Samuel has told Saul that his kingdom will not endure, Saul still tries to work to make sure his Son Jonathan succeeds him as king. In this part of the world, when one dynasty replaced another, the easiest thing the new king could do was to wipe out the existing royal family to prevent the previous kings’ heirs from becoming a competitor for power. We see Jehu do this to the family of Ahab. As it turns out, Saul needn’t have worried. Even though David stood to politically benefit from the death of Ish-Boseth, Saul’s Son and his competitor for the throne, he had the assassins put to death out of opprobrium for what they had done. The other threat to David’s power was Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth. But rather than killing him, David places Mephibosheth under his protection. Although Saul’s family is not in danger from David, he refuses to accept it, so Saul’s overriding obsession becomes killing David.
For Saul, this overriding goal justifies his attempts to hunt down and kill David. Saul has the priests of God slaughtered because they aided David (even though they had done so in good faith believing David was on a mission from Saul). Even after that, when he receives news of David’s whereabouts, Saul concludes that God has engineered this so that Saul can finally have David eliminated: “Saul was told that David had gone to Keilah, and he said, “God has delivered him into my hands, for David has imprisoned himself by entering a town with gates and bars” (1 Samuel 23:7, NIV).
Saul has transgressed God’s commands most seriously by killing the priests, and yet he somehow thinks God is working to help him eliminate the rival that even his son and designated heir has concluded will be Israel’s next king. Saul is deluding himself because he needs to justify his disobedience to himself.
The End of Saul’s Story
Of course, Saul never managed to get his hands on David. He comes close on a few occasions, but David spares his life. Eventually, David becomes a refugee in Philistia. The Philistines amass a great army, attacking the Israelites and, during the battle, killing Saul and his son Jonathan, ending Saul’s hopes of a royal dynasty. His son Ish-Bosheth succeeds him in a rump state, but he is incompetent and unpopular and soon finds himself assassinated.
Lessons We Learn from Saul
While Saul seems like an unsympathetic character, but when we consider his life, I think there are some important warnings we can discern.
Seeking the Easy Way Out
Saul’s insecurity led him to doubt God’s faithfulness. When faced with a difficult situation, confronting a numerically superior Philistine force with a demoralized army, he tried to fix the predicament himself. He offered burnt offerings as a way of invoking God’s favour, in disobedience to God’s commands. What else could he do? He could have (and should have) waited on God. The Israelite army was outmatched. But the Philistines’ God Dagon was no match for Yahweh. Saul didn’t allow God to demonstrate his faithfulness in tough times. If he had, God would have delivered the Israelite army, showing himself to be faithful. The next time Saul was in a difficult spot, he could look back on his past experiences with God and found confidence, even when facing long odds.
Have you ever experienced a similar situation? Obviously, the particulars don’t match our experience, but have you ever been faced with a difficult situation and taken the self-reliant way out, instead of the obedient way? Maybe you felt God’s leading to take a new kind of ministry, but you decided not to do it because you felt like you weren’t up to the task.
I remember when I was asked to help out doing communications for Nightlight, a parachurch organization, how I almost turned down the job for fear that it would be financially ruinous. I was working a full-time job, and they offered me a part-time job, with a lower salary. However, I felt like I had to accept the job without even knowing if it would be possible for me to stay part-time at my previous employer. In the end, they allowed me to do that, but we still had to take a hit on our income because the hourly wage was less. Then when we decided that I should go to seminary full-time, I wasn’t sure if I could swing the finances. I was afraid that I would loose my house. It’s easy to talk about faith in God in the abstract, but when you’re in a situation where God’s faithfulness is the only thing standing between you and disaster, that’s where real faith lives. I’m so glad I took the risk on God, I could just have easily refused. “I’m sorry, those seem like great opportunities, but I’m not in a place where my finances would permit that.” If I had, I wouldn’t have seen how God can come through in a pinch. And next time, I would be more reluctant to obey.
Interpreting Your Will as God’s
Another way that we can be tempted to be like Saul is when we confuse what we want with what God wants. Samuel had told Saul that his kingship wouldn’t transfer to his son, yet Saul tried to make that happen. He baptizes his own agenda (perpetuating his dynasty) as God’s will. What I find so galling is that this happens, even after Saul mercilessly slaughters the priests of Nob, because of perceived political disloyalty.
We might also similarly deceive ourselves. On an absurd level, we might pray to get away with something we know is wrong (“Lord please don’t let my wife find out about that extra-marital affair”). But more likely is where we set our hopes on something idolatrous, and plead with God to help us acquire it. If I’m looking for ultimate meaning achievement, I might pray for God to help me accomplish things. If my ultimate goal is money, I might pray that God would help me get that job that pays a lot more. The person who idolizes material possessions might pray that God would help them acquire that perfect house or car. The things we seek might not be bad, but if we seek to find ultimate meaning in them, they will disappoint us. God may be actively frustrating our efforts because what we seek can’t save us.
Conclusion
Saul was a complicated character cast into a difficult job. He began with promise, but ultimately lost his nerve, refusing to trust in God when the stakes were high. The rejection he experienced as a consequence of his failures, set Saul on a dark path. Like Saul, we’re given a job that feels impossible, but the impossibility is the point: we can only be the people God has called us to be by the power only he can give us. Without a reliance on the Holy Spirit, our faith won’t bear fruit. So we need to ask ourselves if we feel able to do what God asks us to do. If the answer is yes, we probably need a more expansive view of our calling. If the answer is no, then we need to remind ourselves that while we aren’t able to do what God asks of us in our own strength, we can certainly do it with God’s help. Our inadequacy should lead us to humility, not insecurity.
We must also remember that God is not there to help me accomplish my will. Instead, I must submit myself to God’s agenda. As I do this, I find that what he wants for me is for my good, even if it feels like a difficult pill to swallow at the moment. Let’s not be like Saul seeking salvation in things we know God doesn’t condone. Instead, let’s remember that God alone saves.