One of the presenters at a conference I attended was recently in India. Walking along the street he saw a huge sign that had a picture of a man on it, and the words ‘a sad demise’. He asked his colleagues about it: ‘This poster, “a sad demise”… What’s that about?’
They said, ‘A great guru has just died and this poster and a number of activities are being held in his honor.’ At this conference the presenter said, ‘The death of this guru, apart from Jesus, was truly a sad demise.’
The last chapter of 1st Samuel relates the account of another sad demise – the death of King Saul after an approximately 40-year reign, death by suicide in a losing battle, the death of a paranoid man who had rejected the word of God and therefore was rejected by God. It was a reign that began with a stunning military victory when Saul was under the influence of the Spirit of God.
What happened? What led from his stunning victory to his sad demise?
The problem lay within his own heart. He had a pattern of rejecting the word of God, and then opposing God’s chosen king. And that can only lead to destruction.
The decline of Saul was absolute: decline in his own character, decline in his authority, and his enmity toward David, God’s chosen king.
Saul starts at the top of his game, winning a spectacular victory over the Ammonites. He probably reigned well for many years. He was king for approximately 40 years. Saul was thirty years old when he came to the throne, and his decline does not begin until his son Jonathan has grown up to become a warrior himself.
1st Samuel relates two stories that see the kingdom slipping away from Saul:
In the first, Saul has a small force under his control as he prepares for battle. 1 Samuel 13:3 says that Jonathan defeated the Philistine garrison. Chapter 14 tells the story.
Jonathan and his armor bearer – just the two of them – attack and kill twenty men, and the LORD sends the Philistines into a panic. The Israelites, led by Jonathan, pursue them. But Saul, unbeknownst to Jonathan, has sworn a foolish oath: ‘Cursed be any man who eats any food before evening comes, before I have avenged myself on my enemies’. (Somehow this has become about Saul personally.)
Jonathan does not know this and to renew his energy he eats some honey that he comes across. When, at the end of the day, Saul discovers this, he is about to have Jonathan killed – his own son! – but his army defies him and says, basically, ‘No! He is the hero of the day! There is no way you’re going to put him to death!’
When Saul calls the people to a place called Gilgal under instruction from Samuel to wait for him for seven days so Samuel can offer a sacrifice to the Lord, he does not wait. To prevent his own army from deserting he offers a sacrifice himself. For starters, he disregards God’s explicit instructions that only a Levite can offer a sacrifice. Then of course he disregards the instructions of Samuel, the man of God.
So, when Samuel does come on the last day, he says to Saul, ‘You acted foolishly. 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 as leader of his people, because you have not kept the Lord’s command’.
When Samuel goes, Saul counts his soldiers. The number has dropped from 2000 to 600.
So in a just-over-one-week long episode of battle and sacrifice, Saul sees his authority defied, his army slips away, and hears that the Lord has stripped his kingdom from him.
That is the first story.
In the second story, chapter 15, Saul is commanded by God to attack the Amalekites and destroy everything: man, woman, child, cattle, sheep, donkeys. Everything.
But what does Saul do? He spares the best and only destroyed the weak. Greed won over obedience. When Samuel goes to meet him, Saul is not even there. Saul has gone to another place and has set up a monument to himself. Now there is pride.
When Samuel catches up with him and asks why he disobeyed the word of the Lord, Saul deflects responsibility to his men. Samuel says again, ‘Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king’.
And when Samuel is about to leave Saul pleads with him: ‘Please honor me before the elders of my people and before Israel; come back with me so that I may worship your God’ (note, not his God). The word ‘worship’ in this instance means to prostrate oneself before the Lord. It is a posture of the body, but not necessarily of the heart. He is more concerned with his reputation before his men than with the reality of his own sin. His disobedience, greed, pride and self-absorption have earned God’s displeasure and cost him the kingdom.
There is no room for those things in the heart of a ruler of God’s people.
After these two stories things just get worse:
When God tells Samuel to go to Bethlehem to anoint David as the next king, Samuel says, ‘How can I go? If Saul hears it, he will kill me’. (Saul is apparently to kill even Samuel to protect his throne – Samuel, the prophet who anointed Saul in the first place and to whom Saul pleaded for the honor of worshiping with him!) But Samuel goes ahead and anoints David as king.
With the entrance of David onto the scene, Saul’s decline picks up speed, while David’s ascent and favor increases.
When faced with Goliath, Saul is dismayed and greatly afraid, this man who was the largest Israelite and who had won great victories in the past. David fought and killed Goliath.
On the army’s return, the women meet the soldiers with singing and dancing. But this is what they sang: ‘Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his tens of thousands’. Saul was very angry and this saying displeased him. He said, ‘They have ascribed to David tens of thousands, and to me they have ascribed thousands.’
Pride. After defeating their enemies and their enemies’ champion, should Saul not have been rejoicing? (Harry Truman, former president of the US, said, ‘It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.’)
Saul cared who got the credit. After all, it was Saul’s army who pursued and defeated the Philistines once David had killed Goliath. Credit where credit is due, right?
But Saul’s wounded pride led him to conclude: ‘What more could he have but the kingdom?’ And Saul eyed David from that day on.
Like Captain Ahab in his quest to find and kill the white whale Moby Dick, the quest to destroy David becomes a paranoid obsession with Saul, while David shows increasing favor from the Lord.
The next day a harmful spirit from God rushed upon Saul, and he raved in his house, while David was playing the lyre, as he usually did. Saul had a spear in his hand and he hurled it, saying to himself, “I’ll pin David to the wall.” But David eluded him twice.
Saul was afraid of David, because the Lord was with him but had departed from Saul. So Saul removed him from his presence and made him a commander of a thousand. And he went out and came in before the people.
And David had success in all his undertakings, for the Lord was with him. And when Saul saw that he had great success, he stood in fearful awe of him. But all Israel and Judah loved David, for he went out and came in before them.
Saul sends David out on raiding parties on at least two occasions, hoping he would be killed, but God gave David protection and victory.
Saul thinks his own family has turned against him: his son Jonathan became David’s best friend, and his daughter Michal was in love with David, to the point of deceiving her father and saving David’s life.
David had more success against the Philistines than all of Saul’s servants. Saul tells his son and his servants to kill David.
He sends three groups of men to capture David, and then goes himself, but is unsuccessful.
He used his army for his personal vendetta, leading three military expeditions to catch and kill David but again is unsuccessful.
He attempts to kill Jonathan for his loyalty to David.
In chapter 21 & 22 there is an episode that reveals how far Saul has sunk in character and sunk in his regard for the Lord: David, alone and now on the run for his life, stops in at the tabernacle and pleads for some food and some kind of weapon. The priest, being told by David that he is on a secret mission for the king, gives him some bread and a sword (the sword of Goliath!) and sends David on his way.
Saul, who is in the midst of accusing people of aiding David, hears that David has been to see the priest. Saul calls the priest and all the other priests to him. He accuses them, too, for conspiring with David to lie in wait for Saul.
The priest is astonished! ‘David is loyal,’ he says. ‘I don’t know anything about this!’
So what does Saul do?
He orders his soldiers around him to kill the priests! The shocked soldiers refuse. ‘Kill the innocent priests, these servants of God? No way.’
So Saul enlists the help of a foreigner and not only the priests are killed, their whole town is put to the sword; man, woman and child. All because of Saul’s fear of one man. He is paranoid and thinks everyone is helping David, and a town is destroyed because of it.
So David is on the run for his life. And 600 disaffected men and their families join him and he becomes their leader.
And to highlight the difference between Saul’s character and David’s character, the Bible recounts two occasions in which David, unknown to Saul, is close enough to Saul to touch him and could have killed him without anyone knowing he was responsible. His men even encouraged him to do so. But he refused, because Saul was his king.
Amazing!
Then Saul comes to the end of his life. The night before a great battle with the Philistines, as a last resort he seeks counsel from the Lord, but the Lord is silent. So Saul, desperate and in secret, goes to see a witch, something absolutely forbidden by God.
Saul commands her to summon the spirit of Samuel (who had died some time ago). When it actually works the witch is shocked and cries out in fear.
Saul says to Samuel, ‘I am in great distress. The Philistines are fighting against me, and God has departed from me. He no longer answers me, either by prophets or by dreams. So I have called on you to tell me what to do’.
Samuel replies that Saul will in fact lose the battle and he and his sons will be killed.
Sure enough, in the next day’s battle, the Philistines rout the Israelite army, and Saul’s sons, including Jonathan, are killed.
When Saul sees this, he despairs. He says to his armor bearer, ‘Draw your sword and thrust me through.’ His armor bearer refuses. ‘Therefore Saul took his own sword and fell on it”.
Thus ends Saul’s life.
He whose first act as king was to lead Israel in victory in battle, as a young man, now dies in battle at his own hand.
Disobedience to God. Greed. Pride. Fear. Paranoia. Violence against God’s chosen King. And then death, suicide. The story of Saul is perhaps the most tragic in the Old Testament.
But it is a story that gets played out in our day all around us, isn’t it? Saul’s story reveals for us a very simple truth: those who set themselves against God’s word and against his chosen king are on the road to destruction.
If only Saul had obeyed the word of God spoken to him by Samuel and not surrendered to his own pride and greed! Even then, after he realized David was God’s chosen successor, if he had repented and honored David and either stepped down or at least groomed David for leadership, his end would have looked far different.
But he didn’t.
And David came to the throne and was regarded by history as Israel’s greatest king.
Who is the main character in the book of 1st Samuel?
Jesus once told his disciples that he was revealed in the whole of the Old Testament:
And beginning with Moses and all the prophets he interpreted to them in all the scriptures all the things concerning himself.
‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled,’ he said.
To the religious leaders he said, ‘You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. But it is they that testify about me.’
The Bible is about Jesus. It promised Jesus. It gives pictures of Jesus. It tells of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and ascension. It explains and proclaims these things. It is about Jesus. Every passage in the Bible ties into the great arc of the single Bible story: Man fell into sin and God worked in history to reconcile us to himself for eternity. The center of this story is Jesus.
1 Samuel is a chapter in this story and David is a picture of Jesus. He’s not a perfect picture, by any means. But he is the one God had chosen, a man after God’s own heart, to be the ruler of God’s people. He is a picture of Jesus, who was given the throne of David, and recognized to be the ‘son of David’. Saul, then, is a picture of one who sets himself against the king of God’s people.
Who is Jesus?
He is the center of all that God the father has done and is doing in the world for mankind. When God wanted to reveal himself to mankind, he did it in Jesus, his son. We have forgiveness in Jesus. We have been adopted as God’s children in Jesus. God has reconciled the world to himself in Jesus.
So Jesus is our savior.
He is also our Lord. God created the world in him, and you and I were created by him and for him. God has established him not just as king, but King of kings, and Lord of lords. The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ and he shall reign forever and ever.
God has exalted him and given him the name that is above all names. And one day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Jesus is the king of heaven and king of all the earth. All authority in heaven and earth has been given to him and the Bible says that the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven in flaming fire inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.
The gospel, the good news that we who have stepped out from under the Lordship of God and were facing judgment for that have had our punishment put on Jesus at the cross and can therefore stand in God’s sight as innocent, forgiven – this good news is not just for us to take or leave, to accept as an invitation to life. It is a gospel to be obeyed. We can live under the kingship of Jesus, or we can rebel against it. But the fact is Jesus is our king. He is your king. Whether you want it or not.
And he will always be king. There is no escaping that reality. Jesus is the Christ. Christ is a Greek word. It means ‘anointed one’. Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one, God’s chosen king. All rebels will be judged at the end of the day. That’s what hell is: judgment for rebellion against Jesus. So the most important question for you is: Will you live under the authority of Jesus? Because if not, you have chosen the fate of Saul: destruction.
It is true that living with Christ as Lord has immediate benefits and to live as if he was not has immediate consequences. For example, you lack the wisdom of God and life is much harder than it otherwise would be. You don’t live under the blessing of God.
But these consequences are nothing compared with the eternal consequence of rebelling against Jesus. Rebellion, by the way, is not just actively opposing Jesus, but also choosing to continually ignore him and his kingship, his rule. The consequence of a life lived insisting that Jesus is not king of your life, is hell.
Most of you in this room have willingly placed yourself under the kingship of Jesus. You make mistakes. You sin. We all do. I do. But we recognize it for what it is, and we repent as those who are under Christ’s authority. You’re okay. You live in grace.
But I’m guessing that not all of you have placed yourself under the Lordship of Christ.
Some of you have chosen just to ignore Jesus. I want you to know how serious that is. Some of you are actually in rebellion against Jesus, opposed to Jesus. You will absolutely not let him be Lord. That, too, is a posture of eternal significance.
So you need to make a decision.
If you are a young person, and you have heard all about Jesus, then I am calling you now to make a decision: receive Jesus as your Saviour but also to respond to his Lordship. If you have been in the church for a long time, and recognize that you have basically ignored Jesus and have refused his Lordship of your life, then I plead with you to repent. If you are a guest today or have just begun attending church. I challenge you with the reality of Jesus and call you to name him Lord.
All of you who need to respond to Jesus today because all of us will one day acknowledge that Jesus is Lord. The question is: will you do it willingly now or do it in fear later?
Saul’s experience is the experience of all who refuse Christ’s lordship. The life apart from Christ is a life lived with a disregard for the word of God, and spirals into pride and self absorption, and results in your destruction. It’s like eternal suicide: a fate that you your self have chosen.
CS Lewis has famously said that in eternity there will be two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Your will be done’, and those to whom God says, ‘Your will be done’.
To respond to Jesus, though, you will discover to be a decision not of sacrifice but of joy. To respond to Jesus is to have life to the full, and you will find that the life you have held onto for so long is nothing to the life you have in Christ.
Amen.