Oh for the Good Old Days!
1 Samuel 10:24 And Samuel said to all the people, “Do you see him whom the LORD has chosen, that there is no one like him among all the people?” So all the people shouted and said “Long live the king!”
When the Lord chose Saul to be the first King of Israel, Saul didn’t see himself as King material. In 1 Samuel 9 Samuel tells him that he is the “desire” of Israel. At that time Saul says, “Am I not a Benjamite, of the smallest of the tribes of Israel, and my family the least of all the families of the tribe of Benjamin? Why then do you speak like this to me (1 Samuel 9:21)?” He was a Benjamite. Why was that significant?
The Foolishness of the Tribe
At the end of the period of the judges, every man did that which was right in their own eyes. The Israelites no longer looked to the priestly leadership to guide and instruct them, but they worshipped in the way that they wanted to worship and as a result, most in Israel had turned to idolatry and to the wickedness associated with the practice of idolatry at that time. There was no accountability to the living God that had delivered the nation from bondage. The current generation of Israelites had lost the wonder of the miraculous and had turned away from the God of miracles Who was also a God of justice. As a result, a great sin was committed by a few men in Gibeah from the tribe of Benjamin. They had abused a man’s slave wife until she died.
The nation of Israel did want to judge this great sin and asked the city to deliver up the evil men who had done this. But instead of delivering them up, the whole tribe of Benjamin stood together and fought to defend these evil men. (There is a lesson here for us today.) As a result the whole tribe was destroyed except for 600 men. Israel found wives for those 600 men so the tribe didn’t die out, but the tribe did become the smallest in Israel. No doubt being from Benjamin made a person a social outcast in Israel at that time. That is the tribe Saul came from.
Starting Right but Ending Wrong
Saul started right. He did have the look of a king about him, but he seemed to realize that he was not kingly material. He was humble. If only he had stayed that way. I suspect he never had the self-confidence that most would think a king should have. But even though he was “chosen” by God to be king, he failed to honor God in all his decisions. He became a man who made decisions that seemed right to Him without recognizing his accountability to God.
His first mistake was to offer a sacrifice that only a priest should have offered. His second mistake was to take an oath and not keep it because the oath would have required the death of his son. He shouldn’t have taken the oath; but, after taking it, he should have kept it. But the thing that did him in was saving Agag, kind of the Amalekites. In the Bible, it seems that the Amalekites were representative of the flesh. They were always fighting the Israelites when the nation was “down,” and Israel was told that they would have war with Amalek from generation to generation. The king of Amalek represents the flesh and pride in all of us. It is the trinity of evil that we call ME, MYSELF AND I. Saul started out humble, but in the end he took things into his own hands. He lost his kingdom and he lost his life. I personally don’t believe that he lost his soul.
Lesson
I do not believe that the Lord chooses us to be saved, but He does choose the saved for His purposes. Each of us that have truly been humbled in the sight of God because we are figuratively from the tribe of Benjamin could do great things for the Lord if we would just stay humble and let Him tell us what to do instead of us telling Him what to do. We all have an Agag living within us. It is easy to go from not feeling we can do anything to doing that which God has not called us to do. We try to be so socially relevant in our service for God that we have to retranslate the Scriptures that are given by inspiration of God so that we can do what we think is right in our own eyes.
I sometimes look at my own life and ask myself, “How much of what I do is for me and how much of it is for the Lord?” I sometimes wish I had that freshness and sense of wonder that I had when I was first saved. I didn’t know much at that time and some of the things I thought I knew were wrong, but I wasn’t worried about offending people by standing up for my convictions. I did have complete confidence in the Lord. I was not concerned about being rejected because I was “different.” And I have to confess that I had joy that I know very little about today. Oh for the good old days!
Bruce Collins
Meditation for the week of April 12, 2015