David - A Heart After God Series

We are continuing on with The Story. The Story of God as found in the Bible. Last week we looked at the story of a guy named Samuel. Samuel was a guy who was a priest, a prophet, and also technically known as the last judge of Israel. He was faced with the difficult assignment of transferring the nation of Israel from a nation of judges to a nation of kings. You may recall he wasn’t too excited about that because it really wasn’t his idea. It was the people’s idea. They decided they wanted a king because they wanted to be like all the other nations. Samuel heard this and went to God and complained about it because he felt like the people were rejecting Samuel as a judge. God said it is not about you. They are not rejecting you. They are really rejecting me. God decided to give the people a king and give them what they wanted or at least what they think they wanted rather than what they really needed. So God anointed a king named King Saul. As we know, King Saul started out pretty good and was filled with the spirit of God. He had a lot of the character traits you would look for in a king. As time went on, the whole idea of being a king went to his head. He got a big head about it. He decided to make his own decisions without consulting Samuel or God. You may recall the story last week was that God had told Saul to go out and destroy the Amalekites and instead of wiping them out completely, he decided to take the king of the Amalekites as a prisoner and keep some of the good stuff to himself. When Samuel called him on it, Saul tried to backpedal and make excuses. He said I kept some of the good stuff, but I offered that stuff up as a sacrifice to God. We know that Samuel didn’t buy into that. He said to Saul that when it comes to God, obedience is better than sacrifice. In other words, I don’t really care about your sacrifices. What I do care about is obedience.

Following that event, pretty much it was all downhill for Saul. He was about to lose his kingdom at some point. He didn’t know when. At some point, God said to Saul through Samuel “But now your kingdom will not endure. The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him leader of his people because you have not kept the Lord’s command.” So he sought out another king. That king’s name would be David. At this particular time in the story, little is known about David. In fact, Samuel had never even heard of David. What God does is tell Samuel to go to the town of Bethlehem, which we know as the place where Jesus was to be born several thousand years later, and look for a man named Jesse and invite Jesse to a sacrifice. Invite his sons to the sacrifice also. That is what he did. He went to Bethlehem, found this guy named Jesse, invited him to the sacrifice and told him to bring his sons. When his sons showed up, Samuel makes an assumption. He sees the oldest son named Eliab. He assumes he is going to be the king because he is the tallest, oldest, carries himself well. At about that time, God speaks to Samuel and says “Do not consider his appearance or his height for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance but the Lord God looks at the heart.” Right now it is the second indication that God’s criteria for choosing a leader is different than man’s criteria. Often in the world we look at a whole list of criteria when we are trying to choose a leader in the business world or in the church. A lot of times we look at the outward appearance. How does that person carry themselves? How do they speak? How tall are they? What kind of clothes do they wear? Those are all outward things. We know from this passage that God does not look at the outward things. God looks at the things on the inside and specifically the heart. Samuel should know based on Saul’s experience that looking at things from the outside is not that good. We know that Saul had all the outward qualifications to be king, but we know that inside his heart was really quite corrupt. In this case, God began to look at David differently. He looked in the heart and saw that he had a better heart than Saul. In fact, he had a heart that would chase after God.