The Grief and the Anointing
God working through the cracks of sin
Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.
1 Samuel 15:35
Like the last two weeks, we’re continuing the story told throughout 1 Samuel. It may be Father’s Day, but there’s not much to say about human fathers here, except for Jesse, the proud father of a bunch of boys, offering them as prospective kings, never mind ruddy little David.
But to get why this story matters, we have to focus on the part of the story not told today about Saul. A story of grief, anger, and despair at disobedience, and the worst: disappointment. That was always my least favorite thing my dad could ever say, “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.” The grief of a father is hard to bear.
The Root of Saul’s Problems
Even though God knew Saul’s kingship wasn't going to work, he was still grieving it. It’s still sad. It’s still hard.
Sure, Saul’s kingship was doomed from the start. But there were still glimmers of joy. Saul’s kingship began with a Spirit-filled ecstatic dance, or “prophetic frenzy” (1 Sam 10:9-13), and had plenty of glorious victories.
Before we go all-in on dumping on Saul, let’s be fair. The people seemed to want a king more than Saul wanted to be a king. But after becoming king led to a slow descent into madness and disobedience, insecure Saul did not want to let go. He’s taking authority that wasn’t his, he’s taking winnings that weren’t his, he’s not listening to God over and over throughout his early saga from 1 Sam 9-15. He’s testing God instead of trusting, acting with too much presumption of divine favor instead of fearing disobeying him. Then, when he finally gets an intervention from Samuel in 1 Samuel 15, he repents half-heartedly and immediately asks for Samuel’s vote of confidence to continue kingship. And Samuel says in so many words, “Sorry, but the Lord knows you’re not sorry.”
But what’s the core of Saul’s problems? It wasn’t the mistakes themselves. It was what the mistakes revealed; he did not care about God. The king of Israel was supposed to be a man of Psalm 1, meditating on God’s law day and night. Here is what Deuteronomy says about how Israel’s king is supposed to act as a spiritual leader:
“When he has taken the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself a copy of this law on a scroll in the presence of the Levitical priests. It shall remain with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, diligently observing all the words of this law and these statutes, neither exalting himself above other members of the community nor turning aside from the commandment, either to the right or to the left, so that he and his descendants may reign long over his kingdom in Israel.”
Deut 17:18-20
This does not describe Saul at all. Saul barely hears the Lord and doesn’t really listen. Again, his sins aren’t the problem as much as what the sins reveal. He’s listening to the people, to power, to his insecurity. And it was now clear to Samuel what God already knew: the first king experiment failed. God knew it would all along, but God was still sad about it.
Samuel’s Grief, God’s Grief, Your Grief
Maybe you recognize God’s grief in your own life with a loved one, where you knew something was bound to fail, but you held out hope. Samuel was told as much, but couldn’t have known like God knew. He must have sometimes, in the quiet moments, been hoping to be proven wrong, hoping he misheard God’s bad omen about the king.
But Samuel could no longer deny it was a disaster. And now he, and the rest of Saul’s orbit, has to sit in it.
And God's heart broke.
God's heart breaks when we mess up, even if he sees it coming a mile away. When he tells us, “You don't really want what you think you want,” and maybe we say, “Trust me, God, I do know what I want, and I'm gonna get it,” to which God says, “Alright, you have that freedom. But I know how this is going to go. And it’s still going to break my heart.” As I wrote about last week, he'll let you make the trade you don't know you're making. He’ll try to warn you in wisdom but will let you do your own thing.
Maybe it’s hard to relate to Old Testament stories because most of us don't care about ancient Israelite politics. Maybe you read about all these geopolitical affairs, and maybe you’re like, “I don’t care about the Amalekites or the Kenites or the Whoeverites,” wars long forgotten with people nobody knows anymore, dramas that were the most important life or death thing for the people in them that are just studied by Bible nerds and academics. Maybe any time you read the Old Testament you struggle with thinking, what’s this got to do with me?
I’m biased to say there are lots of things that have to do with you, but for now I just want to invite you into this ancient world, into Samuel’s grief and God’s grief. I want to invite you to think about the most disappointed you've ever been in somebody. Maybe your kids, maybe a co-worker, maybe a friend, whoever. If you can't think of the scenarios, maybe you can remember the feelings of grief, the anger, all that. Maybe it’s not just disappointed in them but disappointed in yourself that you couldn’t make it better. Maybe there is still pain that that’s part of your story and theirs. While God is in so many ways not like us, maybe that’s something like what God was feeling.
But God can use that. That’s what he does. He uses the sins of our past, the mistakes and the evil of the world, and weaves them into something new. From the very start of this ancient library called the Bible, God is working with sinners, we lumpy clay.
Forget the times we’ve been disappointed. Maybe sometimes we might have been Saul when we messed up, skimmed off the top, and taken what we shouldn’t. We might have been caught up in our hubris, thinking we could do no wrong. We might have put other people in danger with our hubris. We might have given ourselves authority that we didn’t have the right to.
If we ever have been like Saul, we don’t want to ever repent like Saul. Saul doesn’t even really repent, he just says what he thinks are the right “I’m sorry” words and seek Samuel’s re-approval of his status. His heart has not really fully changed, he is not ready to listen to God, he just wants to keep his power. Samuel knows this, and perhaps this is what makes his heart break along with God’s more than Saul’s mistakes. For the rest of his life, the first prophet of God would grieve over God’s first king. Maybe Samuel grieved that he didn’t do more, maybe he grieved that he played some role, maybe Samuel cried to God some nights, “I hate this, I hate everything about this.”
The Shoot from the Stump
The Lord said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul? I have rejected him from being king over Israel. Fill your horn with oil and set out; I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.
When they came, Samuel looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely his anointed is now before the Lord.” But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him, for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
Samuel said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” And he said, “There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.” And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send and bring him, for we will not sit down until he comes here.” He sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome. The Lord said, “Rise and anoint him, for this is the one.”
Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers, and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.
1 Samuel 16:1, 6-7, 11-13
While we are deep in our grief, God is busy. He is already looking to find the cracks in sin to break through. And even if we don’t know how we could get out of something, we can put our faith in God that he will.
We might think like Samuel, looking for the tallest, fittest, most obviously skilled person. And God says, nah, I’m about ruddy little David, the shoot that sprouts from Jesse, that little sapling, because he’s got that heart I’m after.
That’s all I need, says the Lord, just the smallest bit of leverage. “I don’t need king Saul to be successful, and I don’t even need this next king David to be perfect, I just need a way in.”
Some who have been fathers have felt emboldened by that fatherly love of God, always finding a way for your kids when it seems like it’s impossible. Some of us aren’t fathers but have had fathers who did that for us. And some of us have grieved not having fathers like that.
In the case of our heavenly father, the Lord says, “I just need time. I just need time until evil cracks enough again to let the good come through. And if you have faith in me and my time, you will see that evil never has the last word.”
The Lord will not undo evil or make it un-happen. But this is even better. He doesn’t erase history, he transforms it. For us, the forgiveness of our sins doesn’t erase them or our story, it transforms us.
The deep tragedy, the ongoing grief that meant Samuel could never talk with Saul again, is that Saul doesn’t want to be transformed. Saul is tormented by a spirit that makes him just want power. Saul doesn’t want to pay the price of listening to God and making the trade he’s been offered, he just wants God to want what he wants: power, power, power. And while Saul’s evil is not yet over at this point of the story, it’s the beginning of its end thanks to a little imperfect boy with a big spiritual heart.
For God will always find a way to bend evil towards something good. He will always find the leverage. He will always find the little shoot from a stump. That day, that shoot was named David. And another day, from that same seed, the shoot would be named Jesus.
In 1 Samuel, just like all moments, God has seen the sin of his people, grieved the mess we made, and found another way. And he will keep finding the cracks in evil’s pavement. For he sees the mess we’re in as a whole humanity, and his heart is breaking, but he’s also offering us a new covenant, always trying to show us once and for all that nothing in life and death, good or evil, nor any tragic failure can keep us from his love.
