Saul's lack of obedience

If there is something to be said about Saul in 1 Samuel, it is that he is ruled by his passions.  In chapter 14, he takes an oath that none of his troops should eat any food before he is avenged on his enemies.   It seems as though he makes this decision based on his own pride and reputation.  So when Jonathan (his son) sees the folly in Saul’s command and eats honey from a honeycomb, Saul is ready to kill him.  Fortunately for Jonathan, the people of Israel were on his side, leading Saul to withhold his rage from his son.  All of this to say, Saul is a man ruled by his passions and in many instances he will make decisions solely based on what the people of Israel will think of him, which eventually leads him to disobedience and disenfranchisement from God.

One telling example of Saul’s disobedience toward God takes place in 1 Samuel chapter 15.  In verse 3 God commands Saul to “attach Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”  This seems like a pretty straightforward command, right?  Well it seems that Saul misunderstood what God required of him.   But when God handed the Amalekites into his hands, Saul left King Agag and the best of the lambs, cattle, and fatlings alive.

When Saul returns with the spoils of the battle at his disposal, Samuel confronts him, asking why Saul brought back King Agag and the spoils when God had clearly “sent you on a mission, and said, ‘Go, utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed’ (Verse 18).”  Saul is taken aback by Samuel’s reprimanding, claiming that he brought back the spoils as a sacrifice to the Lord, but Samuel responds with a statement that is quite telling of Saul’s time as king. He says:

Has the Lord as great delight in

burnt offerings and sacrifices,

as in obedience to the voice of the

Lord?

         Surely, to obey is better than sacrifice,

and to heed than the fat of rams. 

         For rebellion is no less a sin than

divination,

         and stubbornness is like iniquity

and idolatry.

         Because you have rejected the word

of the Lord,

         he has also rejected you from being King. (v. 22-23)

The thing that Saul misunderstands is that the Lord does not solely desire to have homage paid to Him after each battle via burnt offerings and sacrifices.  If that were the case, He would be no different than the gods of the Canaanites.  The Lords desire is for obedience, which Saul proves time and again to misunderstand.  Perhaps this is why God rarely chooses the strongest, best looking, and most talented candidates to do his work in the OT.  This harkens back to Genesis 6, where God utterly rejects the heroes of old, the warriors of renown, and later in Genesis where God chooses the weaker brother Jacob of the stronger Esau.  God’s concern is not for who is the aristoi (the best) among all others, but who will be the most obedient. This is one of the common themes we see with the prominent OT charaters: Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and eventually David’s lives were marked by obedience. 

Of course I am imposing a particular arc on the OT narrative, all of these great heroes of the OT had their shortcomings and moments of disobedience, but overall each of these lived in obedience to God’s commands.  Maybe this is why David is called a man after God’s own heart, while the Lord becomes sorry that he ever made Saul king over Israel (verse 35)

Gideon and 300 guys that drink water like dogs

In the period of the judges, we often see God being very deliberate in proving Himself faithful and powerful to the Hebrews.  The pattern in the period of the Judges tended to be as follows: the Israelites sin and turn to gods other that Yahweh, God allows the Israelites to be besieged and oppressed by their neighbors, the Israelites would cry out to God and He would send a judge to deliver them, then they would sin again.  Because of this, God often finds ways to intentionally show His power and sufficiency to the Israelites.

One such example comes in Judges 7.  Jerubbaal (Gideon) and his troops were preparing to fight against the Midianites, but the Lord had other plans for the group.  In verse 2 he says this to Gideon, “The troops with you are too many for me to give the MIdianites into their hand.  Israel would only take credit away from me, saying, ‘My own hand has delivered me.’”  So the Lord has Gideon dwindle down the troops and allow those who were fearful to return home.  After this, 22,000 of the troops returned home, leaving 10,000 remaining with Gideon.  But God said that this was still too many troops for the task, and he told Gideon to lead the troops to the water, and all those who cupped water in their hands to drink could go home, but those who lapped up the water like a dog should stay.  This left Gideon with 300 troops remaining; this is what God desired for battling the Midianites. 

In the end, the Lord gave these 300 men the strength to defeat the entire company of the Midianites.  The Lord’s interest in this whole situation was to show Himself strong to the Israelites, to make them understand that is only through His hand that they might be delivered.  It seems ridiculous that God would need to do such a thing for the Israelites to put their trust in God, yet over and over again in the period of the judges they would sin and turn away from the rule of Yahweh.  Ultimately they would completely reject God when they ask to have a king like all of their neighbors in 1 Samuel.  This lack of understanding on the part of the Israelites extends all the way back to the wanderings in the desert in which they continually forgot about God’s faithfulness in delivering them from Egypt.  The same concept applies here, although God continually delivers the Israelites from trouble through the judges, the Israelites continue to sin and forget God.

As I have found myself asking often this semester when reading the opening books Scripture, how often do I, like the Israelites, forget God’s power and faithfulness and wander away from Him?  And what can we do as individuals and as the church to avoid these same mistakes that are repeated over and over by the Israelites?  I suppose these are questions that the church must tackle and resolve as a community with a prayerful and humble spirit.

12 Stones in the Jordan

A reoccurring theme that I have noticed in the process of reading the Pentateuch, Joshua, and Judges is that God is constantly leaving “sign-posts” to remind the Israelites of His faithfulness.  We can see these all over the text from Exodus onward, whether it be songs passed down to Israelite descendants, the Law itself, the tablets on which the book of the law were written being placed inside the arc of the covenant, or structures built by the patriarchs, God gives the Israelites many reasons to remember His generosity and faithfulness.

One such “sign post” comes in Joshua chapter 4, after God had allowed the Israelites to cross the Jordan on dry land, He commanded Joshua to say the following:

5 “Pass on before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan, and each of you take up a stone on his shoulder, one for each of the tribes of the Israelites, 6 so that this may be a sign among you.  When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ 7 Then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off in front of the ark of the covenant of the Lord.  When it crossed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off.  So these stones shall be to the Israelites a memorial forever.”

The physical sign of the twelve stones opposite the Jordan River served to remind the Israelites in times long to come of the faithfulness of the Lord in bringing the Israelites to the Promised Land.  The obvious pattern emerging to me from all of these texts is that the Hebrew people, in spite of God’s many acts of faithfulness and even with the signs that serve as reminders of the things He has done, continue to turn away from Him and worship other Gods. 

When I impose my 21^st century perspective on the text, I find myself invariably frustrated with the continual faithlessness from the Hebrews and I almost rejoice in the moments that God allows some enemy nation to lay waste to the Israelites.  But when I take a more serious look at the text, I realize that the majority of my life I am exactly like the Israelites, God has been ever faithful to me, yet I continually turn away from Him with my actions.  Perhaps as Christians, we should take care to be intentional in understanding the “sign-posts” that God leaves us as reminders of His goodness, and constantly be looking for ways in which we may be rebelling against God at any given moment.