1 Samuel Lesson 14
Saul’s First Failure: Human Good – 1 Samuel 13
Matthew 23:27, we have been studying 1 Samuel and the first seven
chapters we said that God is providing the means of delivering the nation
Now in this office that is divinely designed we see a principle in the
first incumbent of the rejection of human good, or the rejection of human
morality, or human righteousness. And it
is these righteousness-es that God emphatically rejects, and the story of Saul
and David is a fantastic story because #1 it shows you the design of the
office, that this particular king is not a king in the sense of the ancient
Near East, nor is he a king in the sense of modern kings, the modern monarchs,
say of western Europe. This king of
Israel is a king with a very special sort, a king who was controlled by the
Word, a king who is underneath in chain of command the prophets, a king who therefore
is responsible to the canonical Scriptures, one who does not have absolute
secular power, and who in fact is a man who is actually very much limited in
his office. But the office of king in
the Old Testament is a fore view to the office of king that Jesus Christ will
fulfill. And you cannot understand
whether Jesus is the proper king until you understand whether He fits the
office and you don’t know the office until you know the Old Testament.
The second thing about it is that God has very graciously condescended
to our stupidity by picking out a clod to fill the office at the first, and
fall flat on his face so that we, in watching, may not sit back and say
ha-ha-ha, I’m better than Saul. Were it
not for the grace of God we would all be Saul’s; American character has a very
Saulish trend to it. And if it were not
for God’s grace we would probably most of us have his traits. So don’t gloat over Saul’s failure, just
learn from it. God picked a loser, God
really picked a loser when he put Saul in the office but He did so as Romans 15
says, for our edification. God was
looking ahead 10, 15, 20, 30 centuries in time, looking ahead to the time when
believers down through history would have to learn the lesson of rejection of
human good. And so therefore He designed
this history to show this lesson and He therefore picked a man who was a
loser. Now it’s not God’s fault, Saul is
going to flunk because of his own volition but God in omniscience knows his own
volition, God in His sovereignty plans it perfectly and therefore out of it all
we have a very good lesson.
Now ultimately therefore the lesson out of all this, out of the office
and out of Saul and his failure, is the fact that it shows what God requires in
the office of king in two ways; it shows what Jesus Christ must be like because
Jesus Christ must have this heart attitude that is lacking in Saul. Jesus Christ must have an attitude of inner
obedience; Jesus Christ must have an attitude of complete openness with the
Father, and a complete rejection of human good.
You say well that’s find but I’m not Jesus Christ. Yes but if you’re a New Testament believer,
if you have personally accepted Christ and you have come to that point in your
life of depending completely on Him for your salvation, then you become a king
and a priest according to the book of Revelation. Now you do not exercise your kingship today;
you exercise your priesthood today, but none of us are exercising our position
as kings. However, one day in eternity
we will and when we do, then we must also follow the model of David rather than
the model of Saul and so the lesson does pertain to us.
Now in Matthew 23:27 we have the classic rejection of God toward human
good. “Woe unto you, scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whited tombstones,” the word sepulcher
is a tombstone and in this particular case it wasn’t just the tombstone that we
see on a grave, where you walk into a cemetery and you see, and the body is
buried under the ground. That’s not the
kind of tombstone that’s meant here.
What kind of a tombstone that is meant here is the kind where you have
sort of like a stone structure, kind of a box shaped thing, these things have
bodies in them and this is the kind of a sepulcher that was used. And so what Jesus says is, “Woe unto you,
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For
you are like these kind of whited” that means white-washed, the stones were of
poor quality and they would whitewash it over.
And He said you are like those “whitewashed tombs, which indeed appear
beautiful outward, but are within are full of dead men’s bones, and of all
uncleanness.”
And you watch the word “uncleanness,” because that is a word that occurs
often in the Old Testament to describe human good. Anything that’s putrid, anything that stinks
is always an illustration of human good.
The reason for this is that odors in God’s Word are used primarily to,
as an anthropomorphism to indicate the attitude of God, so that when the
prayers of the saints are offered the prayers are like perfumes coming up to
the nostrils of God. So the sense of
smell in the Scriptures is usually identified with God’s attitude of acceptance
or rejection. If God says you smell like
sweet perfume, that is a believer who operates on grace. If God says you stink, that is a believer who
operates on human good and God does not like that.
Now an anthropomorphism is deliberately placed in Scripture so that you
and I can understand how God reacts. Now
this is important for you to realize because we’re going to see a passage in
the Bible tonight that speaks of God in a very personal way, and God reacts
personally and in order to communicate so that you can understand a personal
reaction, all of us can smell, if you have sinus problems you may have problems
in that area, but you can smell. The odor
problem in Scripture does communicate to us exactly how God feels. Now in this case the word “uncleanness”
means rotting stinking human flesh. I
don’t know whether you’ve ever smelled a dying person or if you’ve ever smelled
an animal that’s been dead for a while, or you’ve smelled spoiled meat or
anything else that’s putrid and rotten and you see maggots crawling around and
so forth and you get a good whiff of it, that is what the Scriptures are trying
to communicate as to how God takes it.
Now that is human good; that is how God reacts to this kind of
thing.
Now there’s nothing wrong, as Jesus says in verse 27, to what appears on
the outside. He says yes indeed you
appear beautifully outward, so the outward conformity to God’s righteousness
appears valid. And you watch in Saul’s
life because outwardly the man does appear to conform to God’s righteous
standards. That’s why we call it human
good. Human good is simply a satanic
counterfeit of spirituality. It is a
disastrous thing for the believer to get involved and taken up in and you have
to be on your guard continually that each one of you do not get involved in
this human good thing because it will destroy your soul. It will destroy your soul faster than
personal sin. It will actually destroy
your soul much faster than personal sin because human good is an attempt to
cover up a guilty conscience.
Now there’s one other verse in Scripture that describes human good,
Isaiah 64:6, that describes human good.
Isaiah 64:6 again uses the concept of something that stinks, “But we are
all as unclean, all our righteousnesses are as filthy rages, and we all do fade
as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” For those of you don’t understand what this
is I refer you to a concordance or if you want the straight poop what this is,
it’s menstrual rags, and this is what Isaiah 64:6 describes human good to
be. So if you can’t get it from the
grave I hope you got it from here; this is God’s attitude toward human
good. Now that most of you are in shock
turn back to 1 Samuel 13 and let me demonstrate why human good is so bad.
Let’s look at the soul and watch how it works. Here’s our conscience, our conscience has
God-consciousness in it; the conscience is fed by general revelation and
special revelation together, and together that produces a God-consciousness, so
that the conscience does know truth; there is never a man on the face of this
earth that doesn’t know some truth, because if he didn’t know truth what would
it mean? It would mean that God could
not hold him responsible. See it’s very
simple, it’s a very simple line of reasoning.
You don’t really even need Romans 1 for this truth. All you need is the doctrine of
judgment. God cannot judge people guilty
for violating the truth if they never knew the truth. So therefore we know that all men have a
conscience. All men have some degree of
understanding of truth. There never will
be a person, I don’t care if he’s out in the middle of
Now watch what happens; along comes a person and their conscience begins
to convict them of their sin. Now once
this process begins there’s only one way of handling your conscience. When your conscience points something out to
you that that is sin, that violates God’s righteousness. There’s only one way to handle the problem
and that is through the cross of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ died for your sins on the cross and if you’re not a
believer, then you have to accept Christ as Savior in order to deal with that
conscience problem. Or if you are
already a Christian then you must appropriate the finished work of Christ at the
point of 1 John 1:9. Either way the
affect of the cross, which is summarized by the word blood, is applied to our
guilty conscience. Now that is the only
kind of cleansing available in the universe.
Now what does the mind try to do?
When you are on negative volition and the conscience begins to convict,
the mind has a series of take-outs that it tries to use in the conscience. And depending on how well you’ve used these,
I just cite five of these as defense mechanisms, there are more: fantasy, rationalization,
isolation, suppression and projection.
Projection is the idea of blaming somebody else for it. We are going to
see three of these defense mechanisms used by Saul tonight.
Now these defense mechanisms are cranked out by the mind to answer the
conscience. The conscience said you’re
wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you violated God’s standard and you know you
violated God’s standard. And so the mind
operating on negative volition cannot destroy the conscience. Proverbs
Human good is an attempt by the mind to satisfy the conscience with
something other than the blood of Jesus Christ.
Instead of going to grace and instead of saying I know I have sinned,
and now I know I must rely completely on the finished work of Jesus Christ at
the cross, instead of that the mind says no, I’m not guilty. I’m not guilty, not really, conscience you’re
all screwed up. Look it, I’m a pretty
good person, look at all my good works.
And so the mind begins to trot out all these good works through defense
mechanism and tries to tie up the conscience with human good. Now look at something here. If human good could do that job, then why did
Christ ever die in the first place; it’s simple logic, if human good could
solve man’s sin then Jesus Christ did not have to die for sin. And so if it was just simply a case of
operation see-saw and here’s your human good and here’s your personal sins and
you could balance your sins with your human good and leave it at that, God
didn’t have to die. There’s no need
whatever for the atonement.
And so actually human good is so awful in God’s side because it negates
the death of His Son. Any time human
good is put forward the cross of Christ is eliminated and this is what is so
horrible and stinking about human good, is that it negates the finished work of
Jesus Christ on the cross. Any time any
person puts human good to their conscience and says well I’m not so bad, I’ve
done this and I’ve done that and so on, that person is essentially saying
Christ’s death on the cross means absolutely nothing to me. That is actually the sinful mental attitude
behind human good.
We’re going to see this in 1 Samuel 13.
Verse 1, “Saul was,” and those of you with a New Scofield notice there’s
some gaps in verse 1, the reason for this is that the Hebrew text, some where
before 300 BC lost out this particular verse, it just dropped out and has not
been able to be recovered. This is not
an error in Scripture it’s simply the fact that the verse got lost in
transmission, so nobody actually knows what verse 1 is saying and we won’t
waste time with it.
Verse 2, “Saul chose him three thousand men of Israel; of which two
thousand were with Saul in Michmash, and in Mount Bethel, and a thousand were
with Jonathan in Gibeah of Benjamin; and the rest of the people he sent every
man to his tent. [3] And Jonathan smote the garrison of the Philistines that
was in Geba, and the Philistines heard of it.
And Saul blew the trumpet throughout all the land, saying, Let the
Hebrews hear.” Now we have to get a map
to see exactly what’s going on here to get the strategy involved. Gibeah is a place just northeast of
Jerusalem. To the north of Gibeah is a
place called Michmash. And then to the
east is a place called Gilgal and those three points are very important to
understand what’s going to follow, so get them in mind. The highlands are all up and down here, this
is where the mountains are in Israel; this is all in the hills, these two
things. The Philistines pentapolis is
down here. That Philistine pentapolis
has been able to subjugate most of the land and the Philistines have been able
to extend the perimeter to the north and east and control basically the land of
Israel.
Now Saul has been elected and chosen by God as the king. What is the king supposed to do. The king was
primarily to take over the role of the judge which therefore means that the
king’s primary job was political deliverance, freedom. And so the king here is going to fulfill his
role. And I want you to see this,
because though Saul personally ruins his ministry through human good,
nevertheless he has been elected to a role and every time God elects an object
to do something that object will do it.
Saul, even in apostasy, accomplishes God’s elected will. So we have God electing the king to deliver
the nation and here is the first point where Saul begins to go on the
offense.
To the south at this place called Gibeah, this is the place where he
stationed Jonathan. He’s got a thousand
men stationed to the south, and to the north at Michmash Saul exists with two
thousand men. Gilgal is the remote
outpost in the back where the nation is to assemble and conduct it’s political
center of unity, at Gilgal. Now watch
what happens; verse 3, Jonathan, in the southern garrison takes the thousand
men and he raids the garrison right in the vicinity. This is one of those rare cases, actually, in
the Old Testament where the Jews begin the war.
Usually this is not the case, usually you’ll find the enemies of Israel
coming in and starting it and then the Jews will react and destroy them. But here is where they start the war, the
justification, it is a just war, it is a holy war, it’s ordained by God. So Saul blew the trumpet throughout all the
land saying….” Here’s where Saul
announces the results the battle. It was
a small garrison, Jonathan was able to over power it and this also points out
something else.
Notice which of the two garrisons went on the offense—Jonathan’s. And this is going to be a trait you will observe again and again with these
men. Saul was a great man but for some
reason never could get on the offensive.
He always bogged down, something always slowed Saul down and he never
seemed to exercise his potential as a leader.
His son, Jonathan, was a fantastic leader and very aggressive. And Saul’s successor, David, was a very
aggressive fighter. But Saul was not;
Saul was a remarkable person, he had the ability but he always seemed to
hesitate. He was like a lot of the
generals in the Union Army during the Civil War. They had potential, some of them, most of
them were clucks, but some of them had potential and could have clobbered the
Confederate army had they taken advantage, but time and time again they
hesitated. And this is always disaster
in war, as we found out in Vietnam. You
never hesitate, you come in as fast as you can, clobber them and while the
enemy is running clobber them some more.
When you get somebody running that’s the time to hit them and hit them
with everything you’ve got, clean them up, don’t ever let an army escape. If an army is on the run the time to
annihilate them is right then, even if you have to extend your supply lines,
get in there and annihilate them.
Jonathan was this kind of man, he was a very aggressive man and it was
he who fired the first shot, so to speak.
So then Saul blew the trumpet announcing the fact that war had
begun. The trumpet was the call for the
draft; they had a kind of draft though it was a modified situation. It was not permanent in the land of Israel,
it was kind of what we might call a voluntary draft and it worked this
way. When the nation was involved in a
war the war was counted not as the nation’s war but as Yahweh’s war or
Jehovah’s war. And this means that the
nation had a religious and spiritual obligation to go to war. And so the men would be called out to come to
arms. When they came to arms then they
went through the ranks and threw out all those who were psychological
misfits. The way they dealt with this
problem is dealt with in Deuteronomy.
They went through and they got rid of all the people who were mama’s
boys, and they got rid of the yellow-bellies, they got rid of all the people
who didn’t like to fight, and so forth, and then they got rid of these
characters then they had a good solid core of men who would fight. And this is how they organized their army and
it’s this process that’s referred to in verse 3 by the trumpet. The trumpet is the announcement of the
gathering of the army, “Let the Hebrews hear.”
Verse 4, “And all Israel heard it said that Saul had smitten a garrison
of the Philistines, and that Israel also was held in abomination with the
Philistines. And the people were called
together after Saul to Gilgal.” Now Saul
smites a garrison is reference to the fact that he’s the commander; the
commander always takes credit for officers under his command just as the
commander always is to blame for men and what they do under their command. So Saul is credited with the victory, which
is all right, and then it says “Israel also was had in abomination with the
Philistines.” Now this word is another
choice word in Scripture, ba’ash and ba’ash is a word that means to stink
from pus-filled wounds. Now does that
communicate how Israel appeared to the Philistines. That’s what the word means and in the niphal it
means to become stinking like a pus-filled wound. And that’s exactly the Hebrew, that’s the way
the Holy Spirit wrote it so don’t blame me, I didn’t write it. This is to convey in language that would be
understood by the reader; it’s too bad the translators don’t have the guts to
translate it that way but it was originally designed to communicate to you the
attitude the Philistines have. It was
kind of a little pus-filled thing, the kind of thing that irritates you. The Philistines didn’t think of it as a major
disaster but they just thought of it as an annoyance, a terrible annoyance, and
they saw it as kind of an infection that existed in their land. And this was their attitude toward it and the
people, it says in verse 4, were gathered together after Saul to Gilgal.
Verse 5, “And the Philistines gathered themselves together to fight with
Israel,” and in verse 5 we have the Philistine counterattack. Now this is a magnificent demonstration of
the Philistine general staff and how they thought about war. They were masters at psychological
warfare. This is shown by the fact,
first of all those of you with King James, when it says “thirty thousand
chariots” it’s three thousand chariots, not thirty thousand. “…three thousand chariots, and six thousand
horsemen, and people as the sand which is on the seashore in multitude; and
they came up, and pitched [encamped] in Mishmash, eastward from
Beth-aven.” Now notice two things about
this. First of all, obvious point that
you can all get from the text, you don’t need Hebrew to get it, is notice which
army they hit? Is it the aggressive one
or is it the army that’s standing still. See, they don’t touch Jonathan. They come up to Saul’s two thousand but they
don’t touch Jonathan’s one thousand. Now
that has been demonstrated over and over and over again in war; the enemy will
always pick on the weak unit. They will
not pick on the aggressive units. The
Philistines come up against Saul because they sense the man is indecisive, and
this always is the way it goes.
And this is not some abstract principle, some of you think this is just
sweet little military science, this isn’t some abstract principle, this applies
to you in the Christian life. Satan
won’t bother you generally if you are an aggressive believer. Now he’ll try to throw roadblocks up and so
on, but generally… the principle is stated by James, you know the verse,
“Resist Satan and he will flee from you.”
Now that principle holds in spiritual warfare as well as political
warfare. The enemy avoids aggressive
units and Satan avoids aggressive believers like this; he’ll try to cripple you
and then he attacks. But usually when a
believer is aggressive he won’t bother you and it’s the same thing here, the Philistines
are going to bother Saul because they know that Jonathan is fast, he’s
aggressive, he’s got an offensive mentality; go hit ‘em, that’s Jonathan. And Saul, he’s sitting there, well, let’s see
about this. So the Philistines obviously
are going to attack this. Well that’s
the first thing you can gather.
The second thing is the notice about the chariots and the horsemen. Remember I told you that the mountains are up
and down here and these two particular garrisons are in the highlands. Now it just turns out that the chariots can’t
be used in the highlands. There’s no way
the Philistines can deploy these chariots, except for one purpose; only one
purpose, they are used to scare the opponent psychologically. Chariots did to an ancient army what tanks do
to a modern army. Tanks and armor are
used for shock value; this is why the Germans when they started World War II,
the so-called blitzkrieg and so on was a very powerful tool, as long as they
didn’t encounter any organized resistance, like they did in Holland and Poland,
it was very effective warfare because you kept pushing, pushing, fast, fast,
fast, so your opponents never get a position to stand still and to fight you,
and you constantly push, push, push all the time you push. And with the armor coming in and tanks like
this, this always creates a shock to it.
The Romans learned an equivalent to it through Hannibal; Hannibal had
one of the greatest shock devices the Roman army ever faced; it was
elephants. And you see a group of
elephants moving toward you and one Roman sphere isn’t going to do too much and
the Romans found out about that; and Hannibal was a master for the same
reason.
But the Philistines operated the same way, they brought three thousand
chariots up, two men in each chariot, that’s why you have six thousand horsemen,
two men to each chariot, and they began to move them up the valleys. Now of course anybody with some smarts who
had an aggressive mentality would have immediately taken the initiative and
ambushed the chariots. That’s a simple
thing, you could destroy the backbone of the Philistine army by ambushing them
as they came up the valleys but they don’t do that. Notice the reaction.
Verse 6, “When the men of Israel saw that they were hedged in, (for the
people were distressed) then the people hid themselves in caves, and in
thickets, and among rocks, and in high places and in pits. [7] And some of the Hebrews went over the
Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead. As
for Saul, he was yet in Gilgal, and all the people followed him
trembling.” Well this was a mass
disaster at this point. They get faked
out by the psychological threat of all these chariots and they begin to move
and there’s a mass retreat to the east, to Gilgal, and across the Jordan
valley, all the way over on the east side of Jordan. So that’s what happens to
Saul’s army; you can see they’re in wonderful shape. And Saul, for some reason, always had this
problem during his career. He never
could seem to mobilize men to fight. He
encountered the same thing at Goliath.
What saved the day when the Philistines attacked and you had Goliath
standing out there; everybody was shaking and trembling again, and David
finally got it straight and moved out and took care of the problem. But Saul was characteristic of this in
Scripture.
And notice the last phrase in verse 7, “all the people followed him
trembling.” Now I think this has
important spiritual implications for believers and it’s this: that believers,
both as groups and as individuals can sense when their leadership is not in
solid with the Lord. Even a dumb
believer has sort of a spiritual intuition that he it not really safe with this
kind of thing. And the fear and the
trembling manifests itself in several areas; let me list a few. One of the areas where today believers are
following Christian leaders trembling is in the area of witnessing and personal
evangelism. I have long said from this
pulpit that the reason we do not have more witnessing and more personal
evangelism is not because believers don’t want to do it; it is primarily
because the believers are not convinced they have been taught properly, and
have been exposed to the facts of Christianity and have a confidence in
it. And the reason we do not have more
people opening their mouth about Christ is because they’re chicken to do
it. So therefore some guy will take a
businessman out to lunch and they’ll talk 59 out of 60 minutes about the
football game and maybe 1 minute talking about Christ, that’s when they say
grace, and apart from that the gospel never gets presented. Why?
Because they’re chicken, that’s why.
Believers do not have confidence in this area.
We have another area, we have the problem of missions. Believers are following trembling in a lot of
areas of missions in the sense that we do not have missions where we should
have missions. We should have missions
on more university campuses to affect the learning and the academic environment
of this country, but we don’t. We should
have missions in some of the inner cities to take care of some of the urban
situations and we don’t. We should have
missions in a lot of the areas of the world that are hot spots and we
don’t. We should have missions in some
of the Orient where the oriental religions are coming from, such as India and
so on.
Now after their hiding and following Saul trembling, verse 8; here’s the
beginning of Saul’s first failure. From
13:1-15:35 we actually have three failures of Saul. The first failure is 13:1-14, that’s the one we’re
dealing with tonight. The second failure
is 13:15-14:46, that is the second failure; the third failure is 14:47-15:35 so
you have three separate failures of this man Saul. Only one of these failures is followed by
some form of discipline and the discipline increases. Now God the Holy Spirit has preserved this
record of a man’s failure not for us to gloat and say ha-ha, look at Saul; the
reason the Holy Spirit has preserved the record of this man’s failures is so we
as believers will not fall into the trap of human good. We will deal with our spiritual problems in
grace, we admit we are sinners, we appropriate the finished work of Christ, we
move on. We don’t bother trying to
impress people with how much we do, like the whitewashed tombstones, full of
stinking rotting bodies on the inside.
In verse 8 this is the beginning of Saul’s first failure. And to understand the failure you have to
turn to 10:8. This was when the prophet,
Samuel, anointed Saul. First I want you
to look in verse 7 to get the context, “It shall be when these signs are come
unto thee, that you shall do as occasion serve thee; for God is with
thee.” Then he adds, “And you shale go
down before me to Gilgal,” now this is an indefinite proposition, sometime
you’re going to go down to Gilgal; well that “sometime” has come tonight. And Samuel says, “and behold I will come down
to you to offer burnt offerings, and to sacrifice sacrifices of peace
offerings: seven days you will wait until I come to you and show you what you
shall do.”
Two things here. First, verse 7,
“when these signs have come,” what are the signs that shall come? The changed life, remember the Spirit was
going to come upon Saul and it was going to give him a new heart, and so
therefore in verse 9, “And it was so, that when he had turned his back to go
from Samuel, God gave him another heart; and all those signs came to pass that
very day.” So what Samuel is saying is
that the signs are the empirical confirmation to Saul of his kingship. Remember we said there were other
confirmations to the nation but this is the personal confirmation to Saul that
he is chosen of God. Now after he is to
have this confirmation, then Samuel says you will do as “occasion serve you,”
that is Saul, use your head, be a good king. He is given free latitude except one command,
only one limitation, just like in the Garden of Eden, Adam, you can do
everything but just don’t eat of this tree.
Saul, do as the occasion serve thee, except when you go down to Gilgal
you wait seven days, and then he adds, “till I come to thee and show you what
you’re going to do. Notice why he is to
wait; who comes first, the prophet or the king in the new economy? The prophet.
So the prophet has to be there, you’ll notice this in holy war, the king
must always consult the prophet. So the
prophet is to show the king, this is divine guidance is what it is, comparable
to diving guidance in our Christian life.
You don’t do something as the occasion serve you until I, Saul, come to
tell you, you just cool it until I come there and I’ll tell you what to
do. That’s the background, turn to 1
Samuel 13 to see what happens.
The incident has come about that Samuel prophesied, remember the army…
[tape turns] … has retreated back to his
back command post at Gilgal, and he’s waiting there. So this is the set up for the situation
prophesied in 1 Samuel 8. “And he
tarried seven days, according to the set time that Samuel had appointed; but
Samuel came not to Gilgal; and the people… now after the semicolon, see the
semicolon after “Gilgal” in verse 8, after the semicolon you have a description
of the situation and Saul’s reaction.
Now let’s look at it good because this is characteristic of a believer
with human good. “…and the people were
scattering,” literally, “from him.” In
other words, people all the time, he was at Gilgal and he could see the road
clogged with these people that were fleeing east to get across the Jordan
because of these chariots that couldn’t be used. They were just scared; the rest of them were
in the caves. By the way, the caves they
hid in were the caves where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls, it’s all full of
caves up in the northern end, northwest of the Red Sea. So they’re hiding in the caves, running down
the road, it’s just a mass disaster.
Now Saul has a choice; Saul can do what Samuel said and wait seven days
and if he waits seven days, Samuel told him to wait seven days and wait until I
come and tell you what to do. But what
does Saul do? The last part of verse 8
is put there so you can visualize what he
is seeing; he’s seeing his army disappear. We’re going to see what happened, he started
out with two thousand men, and he added to that the number that he’d gotten in
the draft, which we’ll just say thirty thousand, and when we meet him the next
time you know how much he winds up with?
He’s got six hundred, a slight attrition, and that’s where he’s
left. And that’s what he’s seeing,
obviously it’s a bad situation. But the
Word of God is not saying this believer faces an easy time. He’s saying yes, you do have a difficult time
Saul, but watch.
Verse 9, “And Saul said, Bring hither a burnt offering to me, and peace
offerings.” He remembered at least what
Samuel is supposed to do. “And he
offered the burnt offering. [10] And it came to pass that, as soon as he had
ceased offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came; and Saul went out to
meet him, that he might salute [bless] him.”
Now there’s several principles to recognize that recur again and again
in Saul’s life. The first thing is that
in verse 9 he is offering the burnt offerings. Remember what I told you about
human good. One of the things about
human good is that it always wants to put on a good outward appearance and this
includes a piety. And so Saul knows that
this sacrifice should be done, that’s an outward observance, an outward
religious act, so he does it. He
fulfills this outward form.
Notice too in verse 10, when Samuel comes, what does Saul do? The great man of etiquette comes out that he
might salute him. Again, the outward
performance. Saul is meticulous,
unblamable in his over behavior. He
recognizes the principle of the sacrifices, the peace offerings, he knows they
have to be made and he also knows that he should respect the prophet. But now we’re going to see this man’s heart,
we’re going to take a look inside Saul as the conversation proceeds for the
next four verses. Let’s read 11-14.
“And Samuel said, What hast thou done?
And Saul said, Because I saw,” now watch this, “Because I saw that the
people were scattered from me, and that you came not within the days appointed,
and that the Philistines gathered themselves together at Michmash, [12]
Therefore, said I, the Philistines will come down now upon me to Gilgal, and I
have not made supplication unto the LORD; I forced myself therefore, and
offered a burnt offering. [13] And Samuel said to Saul,” you’ve acted like an
idiot, “Thou hast done foolishly: thou hast not kept the commandment of the
LORD thy God, which He commanded thee; for now would the LORD have established
thy kingdom upon Israel forever. [14] But now thy kingdom shall not
continue. The LORD has sought him a man
after His own heart, and the LORD has commanded him to be captain over his
people, because thou hast not kept that which the LORD commanded thee.”
Now the first part, verses 11-12 illustrate one of the features of human
good. And it always is that we’ve got
excuses. See, human good begins with an
excuse. This is very characteristic of
it; human good starts with an excuse, it starts with an excuse to the
conscience; the conscience says you violated God’s will, and the mind says oh
no I haven’t, but, but, but, but, but, and so it puts human good up here. It says no conscience, you’ve got it wrong,
see it’s this way, and it’s always an excuse, human good, the very heart of
human good is that it can excuse, an excuse to avoid grace, that’s what it is,
an excuse not to apply the finished work of Jesus Christ. Human good is characteristically an excuse,
always an excuse, always somebody else’s fault.
That’s how it always starts, because if human good would acknowledge
that is my responsibility then there would be confession of sin right
there. Human good basically is
irresponsibility. It is avoiding
personal responsibility before the Lord and it is placing something in place of
personal responsibility.
And so notice the excuses, he’s got a whole wad of them here. Are any of the excuses wrong by
themselves? No, these are all legitimate
reasons for having trouble. Look at
them. Saul said “because I saw the
people were scattered from me,” my army is going. Is that a legitimate reason to be a little
upset? Sure it is, he’s just been thrown
out of the highlands, he’s at Gilgal, everybody is evaporating, sure it
is. And “you came not within the days
appointed,” he told him he’d be there in seven days and he wasn’t. Was that a legitimate excuse? Sure was.
“And the Philistines gathered themselves together at Michmash,” and
therefore they’re going to come down and attack in Gilgal, is that a legitimate
deduction; it sure is. What’s missing
from this list? One little problem,
remember what Samuel said. Saul, I am
the prophet, you wait for me and I’ll tell you what to do. In other words, he violated the authority of
the Word of God.
The Word of God said wait, no matter how bad it is wait; that was an
appeal for the faith technique to operate.
Now every time the faith technique operates, remember one of the points
about the faith technique is that when you use the faith technique you rebel
against Satan and you declare your allegiance to the Father. Do you know why I put that in there? Because
what is Satan always trying to do? He is
trying to get us to believe that God does not come through on His promises. He is always trying to get us to believe that
God’s character is not what it’s revealed to be in God’s Word. Satan always wants to assassinate the
character of God. Now when you and I say
in the middle of a situation, NO, I am not going to panic at this state, I am
going to wait on the Lord because He promised me that He would provide. Now here is where you honor the Lord. This is actually how you can honor Jesus
Christ. You honor Him by refusing to be
rushed into some response to something and you relax, in this case and you wait
and wait and wait. And what Samuel was
essentially telling Saul, I don’t care if thirty thousand men vaporized across
the Jordan, I don’t care if we’re standing here Saul and the Philistines are
three feet away from you, I told you to wait.
Now it seems a little fierce the discipline that we encounter here in
verses 13-14. Some people who have
studied this remark of how severe God is upon Saul at this point. What did the man do to deserve this? Well first let’s understand what the
discipline is that he gets and then we’ll understand a little bit why it’s
given. It’s a very sad day because later
on a very good man is going to lose his life because of the discipline. Saul is going to lose his son as a result of
verse 13, he is going to watch his son get slaughtered on a day of battle and
this is not very nice for a father to do, particularly Saul who loved his son
Jonathan very much, but Jonathan has just been killed right here, effectively
in verse 13. “You have done foolishly;
you have not kept the commandment of the LORD … for now would the LORD have
established thy kingdom upon Israel forever.”
In other words, what we call the Davidic Covenant would have been given
to Saul. God would have set up this
dynasty of Saul, or the Saulite dynasty, and the son next in line for that
dynasty was Jonathan. Jonathan would
have been king. Now this was the
difference between a king and a judge.
The primary difference between Saul and Samuel and everybody else was
that Saul had the opportunity of setting up a dynasty. That’s what we mean by a monarchy, it is a
royal family that is passed from father to son, father to son, father to son,
father to son. So Saul had the
opportunity of having his son sit on his throne and setting up a Saulite
dynasty. And here is where the death
knoll for that is founded. Had you
trusted the Lord, God would have put Jonathan on the throne.
Now verse 14, “Thy kingdom will not continue,” that means Jonathan is
rejected and he is going to die, slaughtered in battle, a very brave soldier, a
very wonderful man, is going to die because of an idiot father. This is where he just lost his son. And Jonathan is going to be removed from
history by a very tragic set of events, and as a result the Saulite dynasty
will never get going. “The LORD has
sought Him a man after His own heart, and the LORD has commanded him,” these
are all perfect tenses and they are perfects of resolve, and in these verbs we
have a very interesting lesson spiritually.
This reads past tense, “the LORD already has sought,” “the LORD already
has commanded,” but I you’ll hold the place and turn to 1 Samuel 16 you will
see that as a matter of fact God had not yet sought and God had not yet
commanded. So do we have a contradiction
in Scripture. Let’s watch.
1 Samuel 16:1, if you look at 1 Samuel 16:1 you obviously see, “And the
LORD said unto Samuel, How long will you mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected
him,” Samuel really liked Saul personally.
And he was allowing his personal relationship to affect the spiritual
thing here, “seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel. Fill your horn with oil, and go; I will send
thee to Jesse, the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his
sons.” But David had not yet been
called. See, he isn’t called here by 1
Samuel 16:1. So has God found his
man? Has God commanded the man? No.
But then turning back to 13:14 how are we going to explain the past
tense? And the liberals have a ball with
this, and they say aha, contradiction.
But as usual, if you calm down for five minutes and look at it
spiritually speaking you’ll find the answer.
The perfect tense in the Hebrew can be used of a resolve where a future
act is viewed as finished because I will to view it now. In other words, the perfect tense will be
used as soon as the resolve is made to do it.
So the perfect tense means that God at this point has completely
resolved in His mind to pick a successor to Saul, other than Jonathan. So this
is a perfect of resolve and is not in conflict with 16:1. Chronologically, yes, the king has not been
picked. But in the mind of God he
has. Now why do I stress this
point? Because I want you to see
something that is very powerful here if you understand what I’m trying to get
across. This is one of the most powerful
concepts that the Scriptures give us and this concept is what separates Bible
Christianity from all philosophy and all religion. And it’s this: that the immutable God, the
God who is the same yesterday, today and forever… here’s the essence of God,
God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is
omniscience, omnipresent, omnipotence, immutable and eternal.
God is immutable, it means His character never, never changes. But here’s the amazing thing, in the
Scripture God appears to change His mind.
Now how do we correlate these two strange truths. God on the one hand is the same yesterday,
today and forever, His decrees go on and are never changed and never
touched. They will surely come to
pass. Yet on the other hand, in
Scripture we read passage after passage, like this, God resolved to move in
response to a situation. The answer is
found in immutability. The immutability
is one of His essence. God’s essence
never changes; God’s essence never changes.
His decreed plan, the goal of His plan and the means to the goal never
change. But God on the other hand
personally interacts with history. God
is not somebody that sits here, as many I’m sure feel, and is what’s tubing out
your prayer life, there’s a heresy involved here and this heresy will surely as
night follows day ruin your prayer life completely if you allow it to. And that is the idea that God is omniscient
and God is immutable, and God knows my requests before I ask them, so why
bother and ask Him. In other words, God
just sits here for all eternity knowing completely everything. Yes He does know completely and everything,
but He is not like a computer; He is one who says do this, do this, He’s
directing it. God is not just a producer
of the show, He’s the director of it also.
What does this mean? It means
that in prayer you can actually, as it were, walk into the office of God, stand
in front of His desk and convince Him that He should act thus and such in your
life. And furthermore, God expects you
to be that way in your prayer. He does
not like oh God, anything is fine with me, and that’s what you get,
anything. But if you approach God in prayer
with the idea, now God Your Word says this and I want that in my life, be
demanding upon God on the basis of His Word and He likes that because you’re
active, you’re not just a robot. You
see, Christians oftentimes in prayer, we have a very interesting heresy set up
here and it works both ways. We distort
immutability to make God a machine and the result is every time man makes God a
machine he makes himself a machine.
Watch how it works: God is made a machine, He knows everything,
everything is going around, gears floating, lights turning on and off and there
it is. So therefore what do we do? We sit there and watch the lights. Where’s
our personality? Where’s our interaction
in history; there isn’t anything because when man makes God the machine man
also becomes the machine. That’s the
whole story behind 20th century philosophy.
And right here you have one of those beautiful points in time, in verse
14, the perfect of resolve mood, historically at this moment God let Samuel
know, Samuel, this man has had it; Samuel, I have decided to replace him. In other words, it’s just as simple as this,
Samuel was sitting there in his own room, wherever he was, and the revelation
came to him either verbally or in a dream or in some way God communicated to
Samuel, the God of the universe communicated to Samuel, I am through with this
man; he is going to be replaced.
Something new was added that moment to history. There was a personal interaction. Is Saul a believer? Oh yes, Saul is a believer, but he’s going to
be a believer that screws up and as a result is bounced from his calling in a
very, very tragic way.
Now notice back a ways, verse 13 where Samuel says to Saul, “You have
done stupidly” or foolishly. This shows,
and is a divine viewpoint analysis of Saul’s character. It goes back to the concept of chaos in the
heart. Here we have negative
volition. Then as a result of negative
volition we have darkness grow in the heart, lack of illumination of the Holy
Spirit, human viewpoint and then we have hatred toward God, toward people
eventually, and then we have frustration.
Now Saul is beginning to become mentally ill at this point. And we’re going to watch this man wind up as
a psychotic. He becomes demon possessed
and has fantastic symptoms of mental illness.
And here’s where it starts. Now
up to this point he had flaws in his character but he went on negative
volition; he’s been on negative volition because he hasn’t seen the spiritual
obligations of his office, the result is he’s darkened because acting foolishly
means he didn’t think of the Word. I
showed this to you a few weeks ago when they were out looking for the lost
asses, and Saul was looking around and one of the servants said, hey, there’s a
man of God over there, he might possibly be able to help us out. Oh yeah, let’s go over. Who was it that had to think of that
first? The servant, Saul didn’t. And this is characteristic, his spiritual
perception is about the area of a blind man’s physical perception and the
result, human viewpoint begins to move in Saul’s mind. What is the result of human viewpoint? Can’t apply the faith technique. The result of human viewpoint is always
doubt, as the acquisition of divine viewpoint is always confidence in the Word.
So this has demonstrated, verse 13, “Thou hast acted foolishly” means
that in this act Samuel perceives a lot of things happening to Saul’s
character. It’s not just this act, this
goof once; that’s not what’s involved.
It’s what the goof shows, that this man has had an opportunity, he has
been ordained to God’s new office, he has had an opportunity to associate
himself with the prophets. We saw from
chapter 10 he has had the enablement of the Holy Spirit. He has had his position confirmed by numerous
historic evidences, evidences are just all over the place for Saul, but he is
blind to the evidences because of negative volition. As a result, human
viewpoint Samuel sees is growing in this man’s heart and when he gets in a
panic situation he can’t obey the Word.
And he is a loser as far as being a believer is concerned.
So beginning here we have the symptoms of [can’t understand word]. Later on we’re going to step up; up to this
point he’s gone step 1, step 2, step 3 and that’s where he is tonight, step
3. He’s mixed up with human viewpoint,
he can’t apply the Word in a crisis, he won’t listen to the Word and he’s got
this human viewpoint operation excuse.
Now let’s look at some of the defense mechanism that Saul has used in
these excuses. Let’s look at verses 11
and 12 and notice how he gets around the situation. First of all he has rationalization. He rationalizes his disobedience by saying
well, circumstances forced me to do it.
Circumstances were so oppressive that the Word of God didn’t apply in
those circumstances. So that’s the first
defense mechanism, rationalization. The
second defense mechanism that he used is suppression; he suppressed from his
conscious mind 1 Samuel 10:8, that is an order that was given to him and he
suppressed that order. So suppression
was being used; he’s using this as a defense mechanism to destroy the effect of
the conscience on his mind. And finally,
he’s using projection, he is blaming Samuel for being late. You promised me and you didn’t show up, so
Samuel, it’s your fault. See, it’s not
his fault, always somebody else’s fault, it’s the circumstances fault. You watch this, you watch this in your own
character, when you start opening the service here with 1 John 1:9 or when you
think of using 1 John 1:9 in your life and you don’t use it because well, it’s
not really my fault, it’s somebody else’s fault, it’s my husband’s fault, he’s
the biggest cluck you ever saw, and if you had to live with the man I live
with… oh how many times I’ve heard this one.
Or the opposite, if you had to live with that thing and come home to her
every night…
So we have all these excuses, it’s always somebody else’s fault and
that’s human good. It’s always the
feature of human good and Jesus Christ rejected human good. You go back to this the next time this
temptation drops in your lap and just think of the cross of Christ here; that
cross is being removed from your mind every time you buy some sort of a phony
excuse. It’s somebody else’s fault, it’s
the pastor’s fault, etc. Wherever you have people with a maximum amount of
human good they cannot stand grace.
Next week we’ll deal more with Paul and his second failure.