OK. "Lessons from the Kings- Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times, this is lesson
two in that series. And the title of this lesson, "On the Edge of Greatness. "
King Saul, part number two.
So we're studying the lives of various kings in this series.
And we've begun with the life of King Saul under the title,
"On the Edge of Greatness." And I gave this title to our
study of this particular king because Israel's first King, Saul,
showed a lot of promise at the beginning. I mean, this person
here could have really done some great things.
As we saw last week, after his anointing as King by Samuel and the confirmation
of his rulership by the people, we see Saul
kind of mobilizing the nation in order to defeat one of Israel's
fearsome enemies, the Ammonites. We even
see Saul resisting the temptation to punish those within his own people
who originally opposed his coronation and he spared their lives
giving glory to God instead. He was saying this is not a day for recrimination.
This is not a day for revenge. This is a day of victory. This is the day we give glory to God,
demonstrating great wisdom at that moment.
So we left off last week as the people were reaffirming their allegiance to Saul as King
before God, with joy and prayer and sacrifice.
This heady time would soon give way to darker periods
as Saul would begin his slow descent into madness and loss, a really,
really sad story. So, when we look at Saul's
actions and his decisions as King, we begin to recognize a number of patterns
that led to his eventual downfall. And I want to look at those
as we begin the lesson of this morning. The first pattern that we see
is a pattern of disobedience. A pattern of disobedience.
Let's read, First Samuel chapter 13 beginning in verse 1, it says,
Saul was 30 years old when he began to reign, and he now reigned 42 years over Israel.
Now Saul chose for himself 3,000 men of Israel, of which 2,000 were with
Saul at Michmash and in the hill country of Bethel,
while a 1,000 were with Jonathan at Gibeah of Benjamin. But he
sent away the rest of the people, each to his tent. Jonathan smote the garrison of the Philistines
that was in Geba, and the Philistines heard of it. Then Saul blew the trumpet
throughout the land, saying, 'Let the Hebrews hear.' All Israel heard the news that
Saul had smitten the garrison of the Philistines, and also that Israel had
become odious to the Philistines. The people were then summoned to Saul
at Gilgal." So let's take a look at what is going on here.
The Philistines were the greatest and most powerful enemy
that the Israelites had. And in this episode, Jonathan, Saul's
son, the prince and the heir to the throne, mounts
a foolish attack on a garrison of the Philistines soldiers and wins a small victory.
Now this provokes an all out war with the other
nation and Saul, without any guidance, without any plan,
Saul calls on the Israelites to prepare for war. I mean,
there is a little skirmish that causes a problem. Instead of going to the Lord for
help in prayer, going to Samuel for guidance or whatever,
perhaps some diplomacy can be worked out, no, Saul blows the trumpet
and he assembles the people for war. He's coming off of a victory
against the Ammonites. He's feeling pretty good. He's feeling pretty strong, so he figures,
the Philistines, "Sure, you want to fight? Let's fight."
So in verse 5 to 8 we continue to read. "Now the Philistines assembled to
fight with Israel, 30,000 chariots..." Remember how many people were with Saul?
2,000 with Saul, a couple of thousand, one thousand with
with his son. So here it says, the Philistines, they assemble to fight,
..."30,000 chariots and 6,000 horsemen, and people like the sand which is on the
seashore in abundance; and they came up and camped in Michmash, east
of Beth-aven. When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait
(for the people were hard-pressed), then the people hid themselves in caves, in thickets,
in cliffs, in cellars and in pits. Also some of the Hebrews
crossed the Jordan into the land of Gad and Gilead. But as for Saul, he was still in
Gilgal, and all the people followed him trembling.
Now he waited seven days, according to the appointed time set by Samuel, but Samuel did not come to
Gilgal; and the people were scattering from him."
So very quickly the Jews see that they are outnumbered
and they are outmatched and Saul, as he waited upon Samuel
to seek God's help and blessings, noted that his forces were starting to
run away. Remember, Samuel said before you go out to war
you wait seven days and I will come. OK? And I will come offer
sacrifice or whatever to prepare the troops. So, while Saul is waiting for
Samuel to show up, a huge Philistine army begins
to in camp near him and around him and his own soldiers begin, they are
abandoning him because they see how outmatched they are. So let's keep reading.
"So Saul said, 'Bring to me the burnt offering and the peace offerings.' And he offered the burnt offering.
As soon as he finished offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came;
and Saul went out to meet him and to greet him.
But Samuel said, 'What have you done? And Saul said, 'Because I saw that the people were
scattering from me, and that you did not come within the appointed days, and that the Philistines
were assembling at Michmash, therefore I said, "Now the Philistines will come down against
me at Gilgal,
and I have not asked the favor of the Lord." 'So I forced myself and offered the burnt offering.'
Samuel said to Saul, 'You have acted foolishly; you have not kept the
commandment of the Lord your God, which He commanded you, for now the Lord would have
established your kingdom over Israel forever. But now your kingdom shall
not endure. The Lord has sought out for Himself a man after His own heart, and the
Lord has appointed him as ruler over His people, because you have not kept what the
Lord commanded you." And so, he is afraid that he would lose his
following. He disobeys Samuel, who told him to wait.
And he offers the sacrifice himself which he was not allowed to do.
He wasn't a priest. The kings were not allowed to offer sacrifice.
And so Samuel shows up and rebukes him and tells him that because of his disobedience
God would send some... God first of all would remove the kingdom from him and give it
to someone who would obey Him. Notice he didn't say someone stronger than you,
a better tactician than you, a better manager than you. No, no, no.
Someone who'll obey, that's who will get the kingdom.
So this pattern of disobedience to God's commands would continue throughout his
lifetime and he would never truly repent of it.
So was everything lost? No, not necessarily, he could have repented. He could have gone
to God and said, "Look I know I have, I've messed up, please forgive..." he didn't do that.
And so this this pattern of disobedience
eventually led to a pattern of instability. Now, I'm not going to read all of
Chapter 14. It's too many passages here for the time that we have.
So, I'll kind of summarize the story for you. In Chapter 14, we see what
happens after the disaster of the sacrifice, offered by Saul, instead of Samuel.
Jonathan, his son, goes ahead and he attacks another small contingency of
Philistine soldiers and he succeeds again in winning a small victory.
Well, this sudden and unexpected defeat
demoralizes the entire Philistine army to the point where they became afraid
and vulnerable and ready to retreat. Now, we need to understand the
background here a little bit. One of the reasons for this was that there were no
swords or weapons in Israel at that time. Since the Philistines
controlled all the making and repair of iron based tools and weapons, so it they needed
to sharpen one of their implements for farming, they had to go to Philistine
territory in order to have that done. They didn't have their own production of metal. Only the King and a
few others had swords. So, Jonathan and a few others,
again, one of the few who possessed their own armor,
attacked this contingency here. So a defeat against
an enemy that was supposedly, had no weaponry,
rattled the Philistines to the point of panic. They say, "Wow. We thought we
were just going to attack this group and they had no weapons and all of a sudden we've lost two
garrisons to these people who have weapons.
I have a suspicion that the Lord was working in this as well.
Nevertheless, the Philistines are panicked. And they disappear.
So, while this was going on, Saul, undecided about what to
do, makes a foolish oath forbidding his people to eat until a
victory was in hand. Notice here, once again,
he's using a spiritual thing, fasting, in order to achieve a strictly physical end,
military victory. He offered the sacrifice.
Samuel rebukes him for doing this and now he's not sure what to do. So he says, "I know what to do.
Everybody fasts until we win", in order to gain God's favor in some way.
So the problem with the fast is that it weakened his soldiers and his
people to the point where when the Philistines were
demoralized and vulnerable the Jews couldn't take advantage of it because
they were too weak from hunger. They couldn't fight. Also the people were so
hungry that when they took the spoil, left behind by the enemy that ran away,
they ate the blood of the animals and they disobeyed God in the process.
They had food laws, of course, but they were so hungry they ignored all of the food laws and just
stuffed themselves because they were starved. And Jonathan, another interesting point
here, Jonathan, who did not know of the oath to fast, ate some
honey in ignorance, and he had to be saved by the will of the people less he
be executed by his own father. Such was the confusion
going on here. So in this episode Saul showed how unstable his
character was becoming. He showed his irreverence and
arrogance when he offered the sacrifice. And then he committed
his nation to an oath. Both actions done without the guidance of the prophet
or the approval of God. He was king, yes,
but he didn't have the power that the priest had. He didn't have the gift of the
prophecy that Samuel had. And he didn't rely on that.
So he didn't follow through with the Philistines. He had a chance to destroy them once and for all
but he fumbled the ball, costing the Israelites many more battles
with the Philistines in the future. Yet,
despite this pattern of instability God continued to give him success in his
military campaigns. After all, God has an agenda too.
And he uses flawed people to carry out his agenda even though they are flawed
like Saul. So we can draw a couple of lessons from this. For example, you know God can
use you despite your flaws.
And even under God's grace, sometimes, you do suffer the consequences of your mistakes.
Being a Christian doesn't mean that you don't suffer the consequences of some
of your errors, some of your sins. And uncorrected sins and weaknesses
tend to repeat themselves and they grow stronger and more pervasive with time.
Now, this last lesson especially, is true in Saul's life. So we see a pattern
of disobedience, a pattern of instability, which in turn leads
to a pattern of open rebellion. So disobedience, to
instability, to open rebellion. Chapter First Samuel 15
verse 1, we'll read in a moment.
So in chapter 15 we read about Saul's increasing disregard for the commandments of God.
We don't have time again to read the story, so again, I'll summarize this
chapter for you. So for the time being the Philistines are quiet.
And they're licking their wounds, they're leaving the Israelites alone.
Samuel comes to Saul with a message from God.
And the message is go and destroy one of their old enemies the Amalekites.
This was a nation that had caused problems for the Jews
while they wandered in the desert.
Now Samuel specifically instructs Saul to completely wipe out the entire nation.
And he says to him quote, "both man and woman, child and infant, ox and
sheep, camel and donkey." In other words, this was to be a total annihilation of
this nation and its animals. No trace of the
Amalekites was to remain because God was judging them for their pagan religion
and their opposition to his people in the past. So their time of judgment
was at hand. He said, "The cup of the Amalekites is not full yet.
Well now their cup was full. Time for judgment.
So Saul raises an army and he defeats the people militarily but he
doesn't do exactly as God commands. There is that pattern of disobedience again.
He kept the king of the Amalekites alive.
And he spared the best of the flock of sheep and oxen. He kind of took the
cream off the top, if you will. So what makes matters worse is that
when he's confronted with the evidence of his disobedience by Samuel
Saul refuses to acknowledge his sin. And so we look at verse 20.
Verse 20, it says, "Then Saul said to Samuel, 'I did obey the voice of the Lord, and
I went on the mission on which the Lord sent me, and have brought back Agag the king of
Amalek, and have utterly destroyed the Amalekites.'"
And so he kind of rewords the command, if you wish, of God, to
make it comply with his actions. God said destroy everything.
And then when Saul answers Samuel's accusations, says, "Yeah, well, I did
what God said, they're defeated. They're all dead except for the king and the
best of the animals and so on and so forth. Then in verse 24.
We see him blaming the people for his sin.
It says, "Then Saul said to Samuel, 'I have sinned; I have indeed transgressed the command of the Lord and
your words, because I feared the people and I listened to their voice.'"
So he tries to reword the command, that does the work.
Now he's going to blame somebody else for what he did.
He's saying, "Well, they pressured me into doing it. It was wrong, but it's not my fault."
What's his problem?
He doesn't want to accept responsibility for his actions. Right? I mean, he was the king.
He was the king. In those days, this was not a benevolent monarchy.
If the king said do this. That was it.
And then in verse 30.
He expresses sorrow but only for the consequences of his sin,
worldly sorrow, not true spiritual sorrow. "Then he said, 'I have sinned; but please honor me now
before the elders of my people and before Israel, and go back with me, that I may worship the
Lord your God.'" So he has lost the respect of the people.
He's afraid of that. He doesn't want to be rebuked publicly by Samuel and lose his
grip on power. So he says, "Yeah, I sinned I'm sorry. But come on back
with me, and pray with me, in other words, stand up with me, give me your approval in front of the
people, so that they will continue to give me their approval.
Of course, Samuel pierces his denials and his defenses with the
truth about what his sins really are. Let's read verse 23, he says,
"For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and insubordination
is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord,
He has also rejected you from being king." So what are his
sins that Samuel says? Well, rebellion for one.
He says rebellion is divination in the sense that you rely on some other source of power.
In this case, self or others or you seek out
spirits instead of God's power.
It's the allegiance to power from below rather than power from above.
It is the attempt to overthrow the balance and the
order of God's power and institute another power in his place.
How does a king rebel? I mean, he's in charge. You can't rebel against the people.
The people are supposed to be subordinate to him. Well, he's rebelling
against the power that's above him, against God, that's rebellion. He's putting
himself, he's answerable only to himself.
Then Samuel says he's stubborn.
Samuel equates stubbornness to the sin of idolatry and wickedness.
It's a direct refusal to submit to God's authority.
It's idolatry when it's done in ignorance.
It's wickedness and iniquity when done despite knowing the truth.
I'm going to repeat that stubbornness becomes idolatry when done in ignorance.
But it's wickedness and iniquity when we know the truth
but we do our thing anyways. God sees that as wickedness.
And then thirdly, rejection.
Refusing to follow the path that God has laid out for you in his word.
This equals rejection of God. You refuse to do what God wants you to do or to
follow the path that he has given to you. Yeah, you've rejected God.
So here Samual lays out the final consequence. He will be rejected by God.
So Saul had gotten to the point in his life where his arrogance makes him sin without
thinking of the consequences or recognizing the nature of his sin and he's just in a pattern.
He's unstable. He's just like a bull in a china shop.
Everything he touches now, it's just going to cause problems.
So in the end he doesn't see the price that his sins are costing him.
Not just the respect of the people but the complete loss of God's favor
and the privilege of serving him. And of course, in another sense,
the loss of the kingdom for his son.
We'll read later on, as he grows older, he begins thinking about passing the kingdom on
to his son. And he's also jeopardized that as well.
So we've seen the pattern of disobedience that leads to instability,
that leads to rebellion, and then we see a pattern of fear in his life.
As I said, disobedience leads to instability
which produces open rebellion and these things in turn
create this intense paranoia in him.
He was too proud to repent so he just forged ahead without God's blessing.
This is a sure recipe for depression and fear.
So in chapter 16, we see that Saul is now
violent and out of control. He threatens to kill anybody who opposes him.
What a difference from the guy at the beginning who was hiding in the baggage area
and too shy to come forward to be acknowledged as king by the people.
He's come a long way from the time when God called on him through Samuel
and he was saying, "Oh, I'm from the least tribe and my family is the least."
There was some humility there. He couldn't believe that he would be chosen as King. What a long
way he's come from that particular personality.
And how did he get there?
Well, he was tested by God by being given a great responsibility and his
disobedience led to instability, led to rebellion, and now
leads to his constant paranoia. He's now become a
ruler keeping his position by force not by grace.
He rules only because God allows him to do so. But he's in fear,
fear from God's will and fear of God's purpose. So we see that he now begins
to seek out secular things, like music, to soothe his troubled soul.
Right? It says he's troubled by spirits,
a way of saying he's depressed, he's down,
he's unstable and his advisers say, "Well, let's find him
someone who plays music and sings that could soothe him.
Instead of going to God in prayer, he turns to secular things in order
to soothe his troubled soul, again, rather than pouring
out his heart in repentance to God. So Saul has rebelled against the
Lord and he is attempting to rule without reference to God's will or direction.
All right. So, I'm going to stop here and we're going to draw some lessons now.
But we're going to continue next week, again, not a happy scene. We just watched this
guy just spiraling down, down, down. It's a sad story. I think most of us know how it ends.
Pretty sad story.
So there's a reason for this. It's not just that the
circumstances were difficult in his life.
He began well. He had a great victory at the beginning, the respect of the people, the blessing of God.
He had it all. He had it all.
But the disobedience that he demonstrated when he was tested, and not in a great thing,
God said. "Wait for the priest to come and offer the sacrifice." He couldn't wait.
So sometimes those small disobediences begin to
morph into larger ones. And there's also always consequences.
The advantage of being able to read about Saul's life is, we see his entire life
and we can recognize the patterns in his life. We can't always do that in our own lives.
Hopefully we can look to the past and see if there
are any patterns there that have led us to where we are today. Good or bad.
That's a good way also, when we are in prayer, to examine ourselves,
to examine our lives and see what are some of the things that have brought me to
this point of success or this point of failure. You'll see it's a very helpful thing.
So anyway, Saul's tragic life is so full of
important lessons for us, even though we live in a different era and a different position that
he experienced. A couple of lessons from his life, after all the
series is called "Lessons from the Kings". So here's a couple of lessons. Lesson number one,
success is no guarantee against judgment.
Saul continued to reign. He continued to have the allegiance of the people.
He continued to win military battles, nevertheless.
But this was not because God was pleased with him.
It suited God's overall purpose for the nation to keep him there and to protect the nation,
but Saul's judgment was coming.
So we mustn't judge our standing with God by how we feel
emotionally or how successful we are.
We need to judge our standing with God by how obedient we are. That's the measure of success.
If success with God
was based on wealth then all the stars in Hollywood would
be going to heaven. We could say that God is pleased with the millionaire
purveyors of pornography online because those guys are making millions and millions of
dollars spewing their garbage on the Internet.
They're successful. They've beautiful homes, their kids go to private schools, they have nice cars,
they are clean. They hobnob with the elites.
We don't measure our success with God
with our success here on Earth. What do we do when we have success here on Earth?
Well, we give thanks. If you're a believer, whatever good I have,
I'm happy to give thanks to God. The ability to recognize
what we have, that what we have comes from God, that's a wonderful blessing
because the giving of thanks is what leads us to contentment.
People say, I just don't feel content or I just don't have that feeling. And I ask them,
"How much time do you spend in prayer, giving thanks,
reviewing the blessings, that you have and giving thanks for them? Once in a while I
give thanks at my meals." I guarantee you,
if you sat down and said I'm only going to begin to give thanks just for the
blessings that I have and I'm going to start reviewing those.
There's not enough time in the day.
I give thanks because I'm able to blink.
I'm able to blink, because there are some people that have eye
disease problems, they cannot blink. People have
bells palsy, for example, have to manually make their
eyelid move because of the trauma that causes to their face.
Imagine, if you couldn't blink, if you had to do it manually. If you to put drops in your eyes.
People who've had eye surgery, didn't work real well, now they've got to put big drops in their eyes
every few hours.
Imagine if that's what you had to do.
That's just blinking, just blinking. I mean, we could go
on with all the bodily functions. I think I'll spare you those.
Think just for a minute. If you couldn't breathe in and out, those
people that have breathing issues, serious asthma,
I can breathe deep. Thank you Lord for that. So if you started
breaking down all your blessings, there are not enough hours in the day
to give thanks for all of them. My point is when we begin to
cultivate a thankful heart the outcome of that is that,
that leads us to contentment.
We also enter into a more content state.
See, the state of contentment is not achieved by getting more stuff.
People think, well if I just had more, if I have a bigger bank account,
more money in the bank, more safety, more investments, whatever, I'll feel content.
No, it doesn't work like that.
The road to contentment is through a thankful heart,
no matter what you have.
So, lesson number one, success, there's no guarantee against judgment.
Lesson number two, obedience is more important than ritual.
In both the Old and New Testaments, God has ordained certain rituals that express deeper meanings and truths.
For example, the sacrificing of animals
to represent the result of sin and the need for atonement, in the Old Testament.
In the New Testament, baptism in water to express removal of impurity
and the transition between the old life and the new life.
Communion to represent and remember the body and the blood of Jesus offered in our stead.
Those are rituals. Rituals are important and they are central to
our religion, but they are not the substance of our religion. You see the difference?
Obedience to God. This is what our faith is about.
This is the story that our rituals tell.
Some people think that performing the rituals of our faith in exact accordance to
the Bible, this is what our religion is about,
that we have the unleavened biscuits, crackers, the matzah,
and the grape juice, and that we have first the
bread and then the wine. I remember once, in an assembly, there was a young guy who was
presiding at the Lord's table and he was nervous and it was his first time.
And he was standing there like this, with the Communion tray with the fruit
of the vine and he was waiting for the prayer and he was nervous and he started twirling
the tray. And the communion was
falling down on him and I mean, it was like a panic. People were going nuts, like it set
off a nuclear bomb.
Another time at a big lectureship, we
were having communion on the Sunday morning, again, there was a guy who was up there,
very nervous, not used to this. He said the prayer, "Lord, bless the
elements and so on so forth. And he picked up the communion tray and handed out the
communion first. In other words, the fruit of the vine, he distributed that first
before he did the bread.
Everybody was like, "Oh, no!
We're going to die! God's going to send the thunderbolt down and kill us because we we took the fruit of the
vine before we took the..." Really?
Like I said, some people think that performing the ritual of our faith in exact
accordance to the Bible, this is what we're about. And eventually we make the ritual our God,
and sacrifice our time and our love and our passion to the promotion of it's
repetition of the ritual. But rituals are
important but only in the sense that they represent our daily effort to
obey God and follow his will for our lives.
Saul thought he could cover his disobedience with an elaborate and expensive sacrifice.
He excused his disobedience by claiming that he kept the animals alive so he could
offer sacrifice to God. But God told him to destroy all of these not
to keep them for sacrifice.
And Samuel, he cut to the heart of the matter when he said to Saul,
"Has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as
in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than
sacrifice. First Samuel 15 verse 22. Hey, I'm not saying
let's do away with communion, no, of course not.
These are things given to us by God. We can't eliminate these things.
And I'm not saying they're not important, they are important. I'm not saying
it doesn't matter how we do them. Yes, it does matter how we do them. We have instructions from the
scriptures on how to do these things. But these things,
these are not the weighty matters of the law. These are not the
substance of our faith that we come here and have the crackers and the juice on Sunday.
This is not the substance of our faith. The substance of our faith is that we obey
God and that we love each other in the way God loves us.
That's the substance of our faith. When we get the substance of our faith right,
then the rituals have meaning.
If we're loving each other then coming together for communion is true communion,
we are sharing one body. We are together, grateful for the
blood of Christ. And we demonstrate that belief and that
gratitude in the way that we love one another and serve one another.
So let's keep the right things in perspective here. Lesson number three,
There's always hope.
Always hope. Even after Saul
disobeyed the first time, in the matter of the sacrifice, God gave him
another chance with the campaign against the Amalekites.
Who knows if God would have not spared Saul if he would have done right the second
time around. And God kept him alive and on the throne for 32 years,
First Samuel 13:1.
And at any time Saul could have repented, he could have asked God to
redirect his way. He didn't do it.
Many times it's not our sins that defeat us. It's our refusal to ask
God for help to change. That's what defeats us.
The one who made the moon and the stars? Can He not change a man's heart? Can He not
help us to overcome certain obstacles.
Saul didn't avail himself of God's mercy not because the mercy wasn't there.
He didn't receive God's mercy because he didn't ask for it.
He didn't ask for it. So there's always hope despite our failures.
God wants to give us a second chance.
We just have to ask for it, because I firmly believe that He is the God of hope.
And he is the God of love and he is the God of mercy, the King of mercy,
if we would just ask in humble obedience.
OK. Well, there's just too much left in Saul's life to try to squeeze it all here in the last three minutes.
So we'll stop here and we'll wrap up this part
of our series on Lessons on the Kings next time. All right. Thanks for your attention.