1 Samuel 13:8-15
8 And he tarried seven days, according to the set time that Samuel had appointed: but Samuel came not to Gilgal; and the people were scattered from him.
9 And Saul said, Bring hither a burnt offering to me, and peace offerings. And he offered the burnt offering.
• 10 And it came to pass, that as soon as he had made an end of offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came; and Saul went out to meet him, that he might salute him.
• 11 And Samuel said, What hast thou done? And Saul said, Because I saw that the people were scattered from me, and that thou camest 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, 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 for ever.
• 14 But now thy kingdom shall not continue: the LORD hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the LORD hath commanded him to be captain over his people, because thou hast not kept that which the LORD commanded thee.
• 15 And Samuel arose, and gat him up from Gilgal unto Gibeah of Benjamin. And Saul numbered the people that were present with him, about six hundred men.
• I would like to take a journey into a king’s heart. It’s really a tale of two kings and their 2 hearts. Of all the kings that ruled Israel in her storied history the first two kings stand apart. Together they represent the best and the worst. The greatest and the least. The successes and failures of a king are many and both men had their share of each. But these two kings are so interesting, today, because they provide an excellent study in contrasts.
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• On the one hand you have the first king that Israel ever had.
On the other hand you have the greatest king that Israel ever had. Saul gets the honor of being Israel’s first king. God appointed him to that role.
But he also gets the distinction of being the first king to have his kingdom torn from him by God.
David was Saul’s successor. He was also chosen by God to serve as king, but his kingdom far eclipsed that of his predecessor, Saul. King David is mentioned more in scripture than any other biblical character except Jesus.
While Saul is the unparalleled example of the failure of a king, David is the classic image of the successes of a king.
• When you look at their lives to try to determine the root cause of the extreme differences between them, you might first start with their humanity.
• But you will quickly discover that both men were equally human.
• They both had their faults, character flaws, both sinned
and both failed God at different times and in different ways.
If you really want to explore the differences between the two you have to journey a little deeper.
It all rises and falls on the heart of the king!
First, lets look at Saul as king. Saul became king because Israel demanded a king. They wanted to be like other nations. They had, up to that time been a kingdom that was ruled by God.
God had been their king. And, while that should have been sufficient, they got to looking around them at other nations and they decided they wanted to have a king just like the other nations had a king.
this was a bad idea. The notion of needing a king rises from the notion that, somehow, God isn’t enough – that somehow the prestige of a kingly leader would be preferable to the leadership of God. It was indicative of a backslidden heart on the part of the nation of Israel. God knew this.
The prophet Samuel knew this. But the people could not be made to see this truth.
Could it have been that when God chose Saul, he intentionally selected a king whose heart mirrored the heart of the nation of Israel?
What we see unfold in the story of King Saul is God’s effort to change the heart of the man.
Follow with me. God chose Saul out of all the men of Israel.
When he did he chose a kingly king. He chose a man that was an excellent specimen of stature, strength, and ability.
He was taller than al of his peers, he was stronger than all of his brethren, he was more handsome, more bold, more kingly than all the men of Israel.
He was quite the figure. Exactly what you would expect a king to be, dashing and debonair. He had all the qualities and all the qualifications of a king – except his heart wasn’t right.
Saul’s one great weakness wasn’t physical strength, it wasnt stature or stamina, it wasn’t his intellect or his creativity, his one great shortcoming was the nature of his heart.
From the very first, God set out to change the heart of Saul.
From the very beginning of his reign as king, God began to try to change his character. Saul’s life was the acting out of the spiritual condition of the whole nation. Their heart was not right. They were far from God. They were more enamored with the nations around them than they were with the leadership and guidance of God. And God, when he chose Saul, began a process that was intended to change the heart of the king, even as it changed the heart of the nation.
God first sent Samuel to anoint Saul as king in private. And as he took a vial of oil and poured it upon him in 1 Samuel 10, he gave a prophetic word of the course that Saul was to take when he left that place. Samuel, through the prophetic word of God spells out every step that Saul will take on that journey, telling him where and when he will meet certain people who will bestow certain gifts on him.
It culminates when he is supposed to meet a company of prophets coming down from a high place and these prophets will prophesy over Saul. Verse 6 says: And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man.
In other words, I’m about to change you Saul. You may be the man chosen to be king, you may fill the role of a king, you may seem to meet all the earthly expectations of a king, but you’re not the man that I want you to be – yet!
I’ve chosen you and I’m going to change you! Saul did exactly what Samuel said, things happened just like Samuel said they would and verse 9 tells us that God gave him another heart!
God’s focus was on his heart! There was a heart issue with Saul from the very beginning. In order to understand the problem with Saul’s heart you must go to Gilgal. It’s at Gilgal where the condition of Saul’s heart is revealed. In the second year of Saul’s reign as king the troublesome Philistines rose up against Israel. It was a pretty dire situation.
Saul raised an army but there were only 3,000 fighting men in Israel. Meanwhile the Philistines, according to 1 Samuel 13:5 brought 30,000 chariots, 6,000 horsemen and people which were as the sand on the sea shore is in multitude. It didn’t look good for the home team. Verse 8 of the same chapter tells us that Samuel had appointed a time for sacrifice before the battle.
If your gonna fight those kind of odds, you better have God on your side. So Saul was supposed to gather his army at Gilgal and wait for Samuel to come and perform a sacrifice. The problems arose when Samuel seemed to be slow in coming.
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Over the course of the 7 days of waiting for the prophet the armies of Israel began to lose their confidence.
They were able to count and no doubt they understood the simple math. The Philistines had 10 times more chariots than they had men. The Philistine horsemen, alone, numbered twice that of the army of Israel and the number of men in the Phillistine camp was innumerable, like sands on the sea shore.
It shook them up a little bit. What they needed was a king
whose confidence was in God. They needed a king that would remind them of Gideon’s great victory. They needed a king that would tell them the stories of old, how Jericho’s walls came tumbling down. Someone who would remind them that God is well able.
But instead, as their confidence crumbled so did Saul’s. Over the course of 7 days the people of Israel began to scatter. We learned in our text that, when it was all done, Saul’s army had shrunk from 3,000 men to just 600 men in 7 days. It was the pivotal moment in Saul’s life. It was the pivotal moment when his heart would be fully revealed.
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He would either place his trust fully in God and believe that God could still save or he would panic and do something rash.
I can just imagine King Saul, looking out over the Philistine camp with its innumerable host and watching his army dwindle day after day. When the seven days began he was facing impossible odds but, with each passing day the situation got worse and worse. It was more than he could bear.
As his army got down to just 600 men, with no evidence that Samuel was going to show up, Saul took it upon himself to offer the sacrifices that Samuel was supposed to offer. He decided that it was up to him to preserve his army and save his nation.
He got impatient with waiting on God and decided to help God out. That’s never a good idea. That was the day that exposed the fundamental problem with Saul’s heart.
His trust was in himself, not in God! His faith was in his own
abilities, not in God. He had more confidence in armies,
horsemen, and chariots than he had in God. That was always the problem with Saul’s heart. It mirrored the heart of Israel.
They had more confidence in a king than they did in God. So Saul offered the sacrifices and as soon as he finished offering the sacrifices, the man of God showed up.
He was never running late. He was never going to abandon Saul. He was always going to be right on time! But when he shows up to offer the sacrifices and deliver the battle into Saul’s hands he discovers the rash actions of Saul. Samuel was beside himself. He knew that God would have delivered more than just a battle to Saul if he had trusted in the Lord, he would have established his throne forever if only he had trusted God.
God delivered the nation of Israel by the hand of Gideon and only 300 men against impossible odds. If he did it before, he could have done it again. God doesn’t need armies to insure victories, God doesn’t need impressive numbers to cause kings to kneel in surrender, he only needs the faith and trust of his own people.
God didn’t need Saul OR his 600 men. If you look ahead to the next chapter you will discover that God won that battle with only 2 men and a mighty earthquake. Jonathan and his armor bearer was all the army that God needed.
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The test at Gilgal wasn’t about the size of the enemy, nor was it about the size of the army of the Lord. The test at Gilgal was about the condition of the king’s heart!
What was revealed there was Saul’s real flaw.
Gilgal was just one event but it was representative of all of Saul’s life.
He didn’t trust God. This was the heart issue that God was trying to address in Saul’s life, from the very beginning. It goes all the way back to the day of Saul’s coronation. After Samuel had anointed Saul to be king, he sent him on the journey we talked about, then back home. Meanwhile, Samuel sent out the word that all of Israel was to gather at a certain place on a certain day and God would reveal who he had chosen to be king.
But when the day came, and all the nation was gathered together, Saul was nowhere to be found. He had already been anointed, he had already had the prophetic encounter that was supposed to change his heart, he already had the divine approval to assume the role of king – but when they got ready to crown him, he hid himself. God had to reveal to Samuel where he was hiding.
The problem was that, after Samuel anointed him king and after his life changing prophetic encounters that were supposed to leave him forever changed, Saul let doubt creep into his heart.
He became little in his own eyes. He recognized that the task of ruling the nation of Israel was bigger than him. He realized that he couldn’t do it. He became intimidated by the job, intimidated by his own lack of ability and he hid himself in a vain hope that God would just pick someone else.
Even then, he revealed the real problem in his heart. The problem wasn’t his inabilities; the problem was his lack of trust in God. He never factored GOD into the equation! Of course he couldn’t rule Israel by himself.
God never intended for him to have to. But he was so fixated on himself that he never even considered the hand of God in it all.
Saul’s heart issue was that he didn’t trust in God. From the beginning to the end, he never trusted God. At Gilgal, Samuel pronounced the judgment of God on Saul because of the condition of his heart. But even then Saul didn’t trust the word of God. After Samuel was dead and gone he paid the witch of Endor to call Samuel from the grave for no other reason than to confirm the word of God which he had already spoken to Saul!
Saul never trusted God.
David
David, on the other hand, was a king that placed his trust in God. The pivitol moment in David’s life was when he faced Goliath. Just like Saul, he stood in an impossible place. Just like Saul, he was given every opportunity to place his trust in something other than God. As a matter of fact, it was Saul that tried to get him to trust in armor and swords instead of God.
But David had an unwavering trust in God. When he stood before King Saul he declared, in 1 Samuel 17:37, “The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine.”
When he stood before Goliath he declared, in verse 46, “This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand…” He goes on in the next verse, “And all the assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear: for the battle is the Lord’s…”
In that single event in David’s life, you get the stark contrast between the hearts of the two kings. David possessed the faith
that Saul never had. That’s why Saul hated him so much. That’s why Saul was so afraid of him. He recognized in David the very heart that God had desired to place in him. He knew that it was his own lack of faith that had caused him to be judged by God and he recognized the presence of that faith in the life of David.
Everything that David did was permeated by faith in God. David looked at everything in his life as service to God. He even had the audacity to believe that tending his father’s sheep was God’s business. He believed that God was with him, even on the back 40 when it was just him and his daddy’s sheep.
When the lion came and the bear came, David just believed that God cared about his daddy’s sheep. I know this is the case because he doesn’t attribute his victories in these things to himself.
It was God, he says, that delivered him from the paw of the Lion. It was God, that delivered him from the Paw of the bear.
David believed that God cared about every aspect of his life.
Even the mundane task of keeping his daddy’s sheep. It wasn’t just bravery, or courage, that caused David to grab a lion by its beard. It was the unwavering faith that he was about God’s business and that God was well able to take care of his own business. He just had enough gall to believe that, if he stood his ground, that God cared about a single little sheep in his daddy’s flocks!
When he stood before the giant, it was no different than standing before the lion and the bear. As far as he was concerned, this was God’s business and God was well able to take care of his own business!
David understood something, before he ever became king, that Saul never understood even after he was king. David understood that he was God’s man. He understood that God cared about ever aspect of his life. He understood that his life was not his own it belonged to God.
He understood that the victories and the defeats that the good times and the bad that the mountain tops and the valleys,
that the whole of his life belonged to God.
That it was God’s business and God was well able to take care of his own business!Saul never understood that. God chose Saul. Out of all of Israel, God chose Saul! Saul never grasped the significance of that fact. He thought it was his job to make it all work. He thought that the success or failure of the kingdom was upon his shoulders. He never understood the significance of having been CALLED BY GOD!
David understood what it meant to be God’s man. He understood that God will not fail. He knew, by the certainty of his faith, that as long as he was God’s man, as long as his trust was in God, that God was going to take care of him.
David had this confidence that, if God can’t fail, then neither can I as long as I’m God’s man!
This is the confidence that is characteristic of all of David’s life and all of his reign as king. Even when he sinned, even when he failed miserably, he threw himself at the mercy of God because he understood the value of being God’s man.
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Saul sinned too. Both kings had their failures. But only one of them understood the significance of being God’s man. When mutiny arose in the kingdom, David withdrew from battle.
He didn’t run out to defend his throne, because he understood the significance of being God’s man. Nobody could take that away from him as long as it was God’s will for his life
and if it wasn’t God’s will then somebody else needed to have it.
So he steps back and lets God work the thing out! Because he trusts in God!
Do you realize the significance of God’s calling upon your life?
God has called you according to his purpose. God has a plan and a purpose for your life. You, sir, are God’s man. Lady of God, you are God’s woman! God has a divinely ordained purpose for your life.
Are you trying to work things out on your own? Are you relying on your resources and your talents? Are you focused on yourself and your abilities or lack thereof? Or do you recognize the true significance of what it means to be God’s man or God’s woman?
God is well able to take care of his own business. And your life, if you belong to him, is his business. All of it. Every portion of it. If you will trust in him and walk by faith instead of by sight or human reasoning, he is well able to take care of his own business in your life.
You might say, but Pastor, this problem has to do with my job, not something related to the church. Can I remind you that God cared about the very sheep that David was tending.
There’s nothing in your life that doesn’t matter to God.
Why don’t you surrender it all to him and let him truly be God in your life?
STAND
• Two kings.
o Two hearts.
• Two widely different outcomes.
• One was blessed, one was cursed.
o One prospered, one failed.
• Today, you have the ability to choose which one you will follow.
o What kind of heart will you have?
• A heart that trusts in God or one that trusts in its own devices?
• Let me encourage you tonight to choose God!
