Lesson 2 – Saul the First King

²Saul was out working in the fields when the news of the siege of Jabesh reached him. At this point he didn’t seem to have taken up an specific kingly activities. The text says that he was behind the oxen, so it seems that he was plowing a field. However, when he heard the news, two things seemed to happen:

1. The spirit of the Lord rushed upon him. As the king, he received the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to enable him to rule the people of Israel. This was not necessarily a saving experience like we experience today when we receive the Holy Spirit. It was an enabling and empowering gift.
2. Saul became very angry. Presumably this anger was directed at the Ammonites who dared to attack Israel and put some of God’s people under such a dire threat

Fueled by this anger, Saul slaughtered the oxen pulling the plow and sent the bloody pieces through Israel with a call to arms. The text says that the dread of the Lord fell upon all of Israel. God caused fear to fall on them such that none dared to disobey the summons issued by Saul. In this we can see how the power of the Spirit of God worked through Saul to influence the people of Israel.

³The two passages compare the first and the second time Saul was announced as king before the people. The first time, he was found hiding in the baggage, and the people were not terribly impressed. Some in attendance even wondered if he was a good selection. It was informational, but there seemed to be no reaction. The second time the Spirit of God had come upon Saul and he had just acted very kingly, defeating the Ammonites. This time the people seemed to celebrate him as their King. He had delivered exactly the kind of leadership they wanted to see.

⁴God instructed Samuel to tell Saul to utterly destroy the Amalekites. They were to kill all the people and destroy their livestock. This amounted to wiping them out as a nation – and Israel was not to take any spoils from this conquest. God was passing judgment on the Amalekites for their antagonism against the people of Israel during the exodus from Egypt and during their 40 years in the wilderness. See Exodus 17 for the story. God’s punishment was complete destruction.

⁵Saul did not follow God’s instructions. He practiced selective obedience. He captured Agag, the Amalekite king, but killed all the rest of the people. He and the people kept all the best of the livestock, but destroyed everything else. At first he claimed that the people took the spoils to sacrifice to God. Eventually, however, he admitted that he was afraid of the people. He was unwilling to force them to destroy all the good things as God commanded. Perhaps he thought they would stop following or cast him down as king. Regardless he took the easy path and let them have what they wanted.

⁶Several consequences followed Saul’s actions. First, God “regretted” making Saul king. The word regret in the passage means to experience grief. God didn’t regret Saul in the sense that we would regret making a poor choice – wishing we had made a different one. Rather God was grieved (made sad) over Saul’s disobedience. As a sovereign God, He knew this would happen. But the result of it made Him sad.

The second consequence was that God rejected Saul as king. He was not ruling on behalf of God, because he had just failed to carry out God’s instructions. He did not have faith that the Spirit of God would prevail at the end of this story like it did at the beginning. So God withdrew His favor from Saul.

⁷After delivering the judgment of God on Saul, Samuel obviously intended to simply leave. Saul begged Samuel to accompany him to go worship God so that he would not lose face before the tribal leaders of the people. Samuel relented and did go with Saul, but first he killed Agag, king of the Amalekites – something Saul should have done, but failed to do.

After this, Samuel never saw Saul again as long as he lived. If Saul called him, he did not go. Nor did he ever come to give Saul advice. This shows how Saul was split off from God.

⁸In 1 Samuel 16, we read of how the Spirit of God came upon Saul in power. When he acted, the people of Israel responded with the fear of the Lord. And when the Ammonites had been defeated, they celebrated him as the king they had longed for. However in 1 Samuel 16, the Spirit of God left Saul. In it’s place God sent a harmful spirit whose job was to torment him. The people around Saul recognized this for what it was – an evil, tormenting spirit.

⁹Saul’s reign was going badly. After the initial success of his victory against Ammon and Amalek, the Philistines were oppressing Israel. In this Saul was alone because the Lord was not answering his inquiries. The passage specifies three different ways that God refused to interact with Saul. These represent all the ways that God interacted with His people. Saul was desperate for advice or encouragement as to what he could do to sustain his kingdom.

Since no living person or current method would give him any advice, he decided to return to the one thing that worked in his past: Samuel. Even though Samuel had died, Saul sought to speak to him beyond the grave. He consulted a medium who claimed she could bring Samuel back from the dead to speak to him.

¹⁰Even though Samuel was dead, he had a message for Saul from God. “Tomorrow you will be with me.” Saul would die the next day and God would take the kingdom away from him and give it to someone who was more worthy. This is the final punishment for his disobedience earlier in his reign.

¹¹Deuteronomy 18:10-14 is very clear about what should be done with mediums. They are an abomination to the Lord. They represented an incursion of the wicked Canaanite practices into the culture of God’s people. The only punishment for them was death. Saul had earlier declared they should all be killed – but this was apparently one who had escaped that purge.

¹²The next day Saul fought against the Philistines. As Samuel foretold, the battle went against him and he found himself in a situation where it seemed inevitable that he would be captured. Rather than facing torture and humiliation at the hands of his enemies, he decided to take his own life. First he asked his armor bearer to do it, but the man was to afraid to carry it out. So Saul fell on his own sword and died.

¹³The immediate cause of Saul’s death was defeat at the hands of the Philistines. However the greater reason for it was because he disobeyed God. The matter with Agag was not the only time when he refused to wait on God. By taking matters into his own hands, he demonstrated that he trusted in himself more than he trusted in God.