Saul: A Life Built on Sand
Three key takeaways:
Give God's word the first place in your life. Saul treated a clear instruction from God's prophet as advice and took matters into his own hands. Fearing God means trembling at his word: reading it, seeking to understand it and obeying it.
Do not build on outward appearance or extra rules. A faith focused on how things look produces hypocrisy and lays burdens on others that Jesus never gave. The gospel is good news because Jesus fulfils the law for you and comes to live within you.
Let grace make confession possible. Saul blamed others and asked to be honoured in public because he had not grasped the God of grace. When you know your debt is cancelled freely through the cross, you can bring everything to God quickly and honestly.
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What separates a good leader from a bad one? The books of 1 and 2 Samuel, originally a single book, answer by deliberately placing King Saul beside King David. The contrast shows plainly what a good king looks like and what a bad king looks like, and in the end it prepares the reader for the ultimate King, Jesus. Saul comes first, and his life is a tragic picture of what happens when the foundations are wrong.
Why start with Saul?
David is one of the most fully drawn figures in the Bible. You meet him as a teenager and follow his journey as God forms him into maturity and raises him up to be king. You see his strengths and his glaring weaknesses. His prayers in the Psalms, still sung three thousand years later, show not only what God is like but how to cry out to him in distress.
God wants to form every believer in the same way, shaping you into a mature disciple of Jesus. Scripture speaks of Christ being formed in you, of what Jesus is like taking shape in your heart. That is the life of growing as a Christian.
Before that building begins, though, there is groundwork to do. In any DIY project, the first job is often to pull down what has gone wrong: clean the wall before painting, demolish the old shed before building a new one. Build before the foundations are right and you end up in trouble. Saul's whole life is a tragic example.
A king chosen for the wrong reasons
Saul is introduced in 1 Samuel 9:1-2 as the son of Kish, a man of wealth. He was a handsome young man, and no one in Israel was more handsome. From his shoulders upwards he was taller than anyone else.
The context helps. Israel had never had a king. God had raised up leaders such as prophets, who spoke his word to the people, and the idea was that God himself was their king. Then the people complained and asked for a king "like the other nations," like the Philistines and Amalekites, whose kings led them out to war.
The Pull Towards Wordliness
The first problem is motive. The people of God wanted to be more like the world around them, yet God had set them up deliberately to be distinct: with God as their king, his law directing them and prophets speaking his word to them.
The same temptation appears in the church, and it has not merely crept in but been welcomed through the door. In the UK, religious leaders often say that the church needs to get with the times and become more like the world.
The trap of externalism
There is a second thing to notice. Saul's father is rich, and Saul is more handsome and taller than everyone else. These details paint a picture of what the world tends to look for in leadership, and of how the church can get caught up in external things rather than internal values.
The technical term for this is externalism: the belief that what matters is what is on the outside, what people are looking at. Both tendencies have found their way into the church. It is easy to find yourself praising God while wondering what you look like to everyone else. The temptation sits in everyone, and in Saul it proves to be a false foundation.
The Arc of a tragic life
The shape of Saul's story is clear from a quick survey. In chapter 10 he is chosen to be king. In chapter 11 he leads the people with great courage, filled with the Holy Spirit, into an amazing victory. By chapter 13 fear stops him waiting for God, and in chapter 15 it stops him obeying God's command. Jealousy of David follows in chapter 18, attempted murder in chapter 19 and mass slaughter in chapter 22. In chapter 28 he turns to mediums, because God has stopped speaking to him, and chapter 31 records his death in battle. Everything seems great, except it is not.
David's life follows a different pattern. God speaks to him, then slowly builds, tests, challenges and works in him. David is far from perfect, and his flaws are major, but God works in him differently. Three of the chapters where Saul's story goes wrong are especially instructive.
Three Points Where It Goes Wrong
1 Samuel 13: treating God's word lightly
Facing an army of Philistines, the people of Israel are afraid. Samuel the prophet has told Saul to wait seven days until he arrives. The people grow scared, and Saul takes matters into his own hands. He has the burnt offering brought to him and takes the place of the priest and the prophet, because there is no point in waiting around for God any longer.
Saul does not really fear God. He fears what is happening, understandably, but he does not tremble at God's word. Samuel's instruction to wait is treated as advice rather than as a command. Saul is not uninterested in God, but he approaches him lightly, as though it is all up to him. His is a faith that recognises some need of God but treats what God has said as a small thing. That is a foundational flaw.
Compare a Welsh teenager in the 1800s, living at a time when Bibles were hard to come by. She saved for six years, then walked 26 miles barefoot to buy one from a well-known preacher. He was so stirred by her devotion that he set up what is now the Bible Society, which has produced Bibles and teaching for more than 200 years. She knew the word of God was life, gold and dynamite.
This attitude is easy to absorb, because the world around you, and even the church, often treats the word of God lightly. The alternative is a change of attitude. It means making that word central, honouring God in how you think about it because it is the way he has spoken to you, and so reading it, trying to understand it and obeying it. The pages are only paper, but the words come from him.
1 Samuel 14: adding ruled God never gave
During the battle, the army has some success, and Saul begins to make up new rules. He declares that anyone who eats before the battle is over comes under a curse. The rule comes from Saul and not from God, and it makes life harder for soldiers already at war. The irony is large. Saul has just disobeyed God himself, and now he lays an extra burden on top of the commands they already have from the Lord.
Churches built on externalism produce hypocrites. If the foundation is caring mostly about how things look rather than what is happening within, the result is behaviour like Saul's: ignoring God personally while adding extra rules for others. That is the opposite of Christianity, which is a grace that sets you free from the law.
The life of Jesus shows the same conflict with the Pharisees, whose religion was built on what things look like. When one complained that Jesus had not washed his hands before dinner, he was complaining that Jesus had not kept an extra rule. Jesus' answer, in effect, was that it did not matter: they were thinking about the outside, and he was concerned with the inside.
Saul's rule has consequences. His son Jonathan, not knowing about it, eats some honey, and Saul is willing to put his own son to death for breaking a rule he never knew existed. The man who has just disobeyed God is quick to police other people's obedience without concern for his own. Then the exhausted soldiers eat meat with the blood still in it, which God's law forbade. The extra laws led them to disobey God's actual rules.
This is what extra rules do. People become frustrated and hindered in following Jesus, and quite often they decide it is too hard and turn away from the Lord or fall into temptation. The Pharisees laid burdens on people's backs, while Jesus was trying to take burdens off. There are therefore two ways to dishonour the word of God: by ignoring it, and by adding to it.
You can do this to yourself too. In a moment of zeal, you might make up a new rule, such as praying for half an hour every day. A rule like that usually does not produce good fruit, and failure brings guilt. Churches have done the same to each other, making rules about drinking and dancing. Such rules are often meant to protect people, but they add burdens.
The word "gospel" means good news, and extra rules do not sound like good news. The good news is that Jesus fulfils the law for you. He does not add burdens. He comes to live within you and helps you walk before God in holiness. Saul does not grasp this.
1 Samuel 15: unable to confess and repent
Saul's final failure comes in a battle with the Amalekites. Samuel's command was that everything be destroyed, including the livestock. That detail matters. God was executing judgment on a people for their sin, so the men were acting in obedience, not to get rich.
Saul does not obey. He spares the best and destroys only what is poor and blemished. When Samuel confronts him, Saul's first response is that he has obeyed the Lord, and that it was the people who took the best of the sheep and oxen. In other words, it is not his fault, it is theirs.
Samuel replies that to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. Rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption as iniquity and idolatry. Because Saul has rejected the word of the Lord, the Lord has rejected him as king (1 Samuel 15:19-26). Saul then admits that he has sinned, but explains that he feared the people and obeyed their voice. As Samuel turns to go, Saul seizes his robe and it tears, and Samuel tells him the Lord has torn the kingdom from him and given it to a better neighbour. Saul says once more that he has sinned, but asks that Samuel honour him before the elders and before Israel.
The sequence is sobering. First, it was the people. Then, yes, he did do something wrong. Then, please make sure he is still honoured in public. Having disobeyed the voice of God, Saul does not know how to confess and repent. He shifts the blame, and even when he admits fault he protects his image. Externalism is rooted deeply in him, and you may well see something of yourself in these patterns and instincts.
The Root Problem: Missing the God of Grace
The saddest part is that Saul never grasped the good news about the God of grace. If you struggle to confess and repent, it is usually because you have not fully understood the deal on offer: the God of grace offers to forgive and cleanse freely.
Imagine that someone had donated millions of pounds and you were told that anyone with debt, whether student loans or credit cards, could have it cancelled completely and freely. Anyone with debt would be at the front of the queue. That is the offer Jesus makes in the gospel. Through the cross, he pays your debt and covers your sin, so that you do not have to work your way into forgiveness. If you hear that and believe it, you want to bring everything to him at once, because you will still be in the kingdom of God and still loved, and he will cleanse you and still receive you.
The tragedy is that Saul did not understand this about God. He did not understand that God keeps covenant and is faithful. Whatever his mistakes meant for his continuing as king, he could have come before God and found forgiveness and grace from the God who had called and chosen him. That grace was still available to him, and he missed it. Of everything in Saul's story, this may be the most important lesson.
Point to the ultimate king
Saul is a picture of a man who looks good on the outside while on the inside everything is crumbling. His religion is all about appearance, human strength and making up your own laws. The way of Jesus is to fear God and tremble at his word, to add no extra laws, and to be quick to bring your failures to the Lord, asking him to forgive, cleanse, help and deliver, so that you can walk in freedom and joy.
Deeper still, the primary lesson is not simply whether you are more like Saul or more like David. The whole story paints a picture of the ultimate king, and that king is Jesus. He does not burden you with extra laws. He forgives all your debt. He is concerned not with appearances but with your heart. This is the king on whom the kingdom is built.
At Redemption
At Redemption, the story of Saul raises a question about the kind of church being built: Saul's kind of religion, or David's? Our hope is for a church that fears God and trembles at his word, that does not add burdens Jesus never gave, and that is quick to bring its failures to him for forgiveness and cleansing. We are reading the life of David over the coming months, and beginning with Saul is part of that, because some things need to be pulled down before character can be built for a lifetime. We’re learning to recognise the pull of externalism in our hearts, and to look to Jesus, the king on whom everything is built.
