by Chris Alexion, Copyright March 08, 2008, all rights reserved.
"The Lord said to Samuel, 'How long will you grieve over Saul, since I have rejected him from being king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go. I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.'" So begins the story of David, possibly Israel's greatest king, in 1 Samuel 16:1.
David's beginnings weren't auspicious. He wasn't the top draft pick for the next king of Israel. In fact, when Samuel arrives to meet Jesse's sons, no one even thinks to call David in from tending the sheep (16:11). But God's choice was clear. "For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart" (16:7). The best leader isn't always the one we think would make the best leader. God's leaders aren't culled from the ranks of the secular elite, or the most talented, or the most popular. The temptation for today's church is to compromise intellectually and ethically with the secular systems around us, just as Israel clamored for Samuel to "appoint us a king to judge us like all the nations" (8:5).
Not only did David's road to kingship begin humbly, but it didn't accelerate quickly, either. Samuel anoints the young king in chapter 16, but David doesn't inherit a unified Israel until the book of 2 Samuel. The intervening chapters/years are filled with trials, temptations, struggles, hopes, fears, triumphs, and blood.
How does David respond to this long road? More pertinent, what do we get out of David's response? We could take the Sunday School route and point to how faith slays giants. We could also use David's life as some kind of motivational story. But I'd suggest that David's primary witness to us is that young leaders only grow into older, wiser leaders by maintaining faith in God's timing.
Easy to say, but incredibly hard to practice. And what right do I have to say this, anyway? Because I know firsthand how hard it is to live the "young man" part. I don't naturally want to wait for God's timing. I figure I know best. Yet look at David. He was promised the kingdom, but had incredible trials to pass through first. His patience is key.
Still, I don't suppose we could leave David's life without mentioning Goliath. David's battle with the giant Philistine was the breakout moment of his life of leadership, and demonstrated the young man's immense courage (he either didn't fear death, or, more importantly, did his job in spite of fear) and faith. The battle also highlights David's true motivation and the source of his power. "For who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?…The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine" (17:26,37).
The young leader here shows us two very important things: (1) His motivation was God's honor. It wasn't so much that Goliath had insulted Israel; it was that he had defied the living God. This enraged David. (2) His strength wasn't his own. The young David was confident, not cocky; he knew better than to trust his own strength. "This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head…that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear. For the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hand." This will turn out to be a key theme in the Psalms: a horse is vain for safety, no king is saved by his great armies; if the Lord had not been on our side, we would have perished.
So David slew the giant. You'd expect that now his leadership career would be set. He received the priestly anointing and proved himself in combat. But David has one more trial to experience: politics. David doesn't skyrocket to kingship; he has to work his way up the ranks under King Saul, who grows extremely jealous of the young commander (18:8). Saul manipulates circumstances in order to try to get David killed (18:17ff), but God is with David even there.
Finally the threads holding Saul's sanity together begin to snap, and David finds himself a wanted man, hiding in hills and caves (21:1ff). What happened to God's promise? What kind of timing is this? Instead of becoming king over Israel, David is leading a band of rejects in the mountains (22:2). And Saul still wants him dead. Wouldn't many people–many Christians–lose hope and take matters into their own hands? Through everything, however, David trusts in God's timing, even when presented with what looked like golden opportunities to kill Saul and seize the kingdom (24:4ff, 26:10ff).
Young people can wait–and I'm not just talking about sex. We can trust God in a multitude of areas, and the results are always better this way. David's example is incredibly relevant to issues facing young people. Take relationships–some of us are single, maybe coming off a painful relationship that didn't work out. We haven't met "the one," and we don't know when or how we will. Do we stress out and try to take matters in our own hands? Or take career pathing–not all of us know exactly what we're going to do with the rest of our lives. The future is hazy; heck, even the present gets a little foggy. Do we have the patience to live life as it unfolds?
I'm not talking about using faith as an excuse to do nothing. There are obviously things we need to do to take charge in our lives–"waiting on God" shouldn't be code for sitting on our hands. But the question is whether, as we do these things, we rely on our own strength or wisdom to get us through, and whether we get frustrated because we can only see so far ahead. David had only bits and pieces; he was only given enough at one time to take the next step in his life. What made it possible for David was that he knew the One who was doing the unfolding.
Is that good enough for us?
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by Chris Alexion, Copyright March 02, 2008, all rights reserved.
Saul, the first king of Israel, was People magazine's choice for "King of the Year." Well, not exactly. But he was the people's choice. He was "a handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he. From his shoulders upward he was taller than any of the people" (9:2). Apart from his Matt-Damonesque looks, Saul apparently had spirituality and humility. He prophesied (10:10) and at first shied away from the honor of kingship (10:22).
Saul was also a valiant warrior; his rule was marked by incredible military success. First he came to the rescue of one of Israel's cities and whipped the Ammonites (ch. 11). Then he and his sturdy son Jonathan fought successfully against the Philistines (ch. 13-14). To sum up, "When Saul had taken the kingship over Israel, he fought against all his enemies on every side, against Moab, against the Ammonites, against Edom, against the kings of Zobah, and against the Philistines. Wherever he turned he routed them. And he did valiantly and struck the Amalekites and delivered Israel out of the hands of those who plundered them" (14:47-48).
So far, so good. A mighty and patriotic leader. The headquarters of modern-day Israel's intelligence service is even located on a boulevard in Tel Aviv named for King Saul. But something was wrong. Maybe it was present all along; maybe it began to grow in Saul only after he became king. Maybe it was pride; mabye it was rebellion; maybe emotional problems were involved. Whatever it was, Saul failed to do what had made Samuel great: He failed to listen to God.
Saul's dark side first surfaces in chapter 13. Saul is about to battle the Philistines and is waiting for Samuel to arrive so the sacrifice to the Lord can be offered. Saul is not a priest, and he was specifically instructed to wait for Samuel. Samuel doesn't show. Saul waits. Still Samuel doesn't come. Finally Saul offers the sacrifice himself. In a twist of irony we read, "As soon as he had finished offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came" (13:10). Saul tries to make an excuse, but as we saw in the last post, Samuel confronts him plainly with his disobedience and prophesies the loss of Saul's kingdom.
You might think Saul would learn from this experience. Yet sometime later, after his victory over the Amalekites, he disobeys God again. God had commanded, for reasons of His justice, that the nation of Amalek be completely destroyed, livestock and all. No one was to be spared. Saul, however, knows better. He takes the king, Agag, as a prisoner of war and keeps the livestock for his army. "All that was despised and worthless," however, "they devoted to destruction" (15:9). God had, of course, explicitly forbidden this, and again it falls to Samuel to rebuke the wayward king.
Even though the past two failures had determined the end of Saul's reign, the end was still a ways off. Saul continues as king, and his spiritual condition worsens. Things even start to go poorly militarily, until a young man named David appears and slays a Philistine giant named Goliath. Saul welcomes David; his son Jonathan treats David like his own brother. But a new evil springs up in Saul. Before, he was disobedient to God; now he's jealous of his fellow man. His blood boils when he hears the Jewish women singing, "Saul has struck down his thousands / and David his ten thousands" (18:7). He'd thought he was People's hottest man of the year; who is this David to take his place?
Saul's life quickly spirals out of control. A "harmful spirit from God rushed upon" him (18:10), robbing him at times of his own sanity. He attempts to kill both David (18:11, 19:10-17) and Jonathan (20:33). He still pursues David, even though David spares Saul's life twice. He dabbles in witchcraft (ch 28), a perfect complement to his rebellious spirit. Eventually Saul, the great warrior, falls on his own sword after losing both a battle and his three sons (31:4).
What do we take away from Saul's life story? What most grips us about his rule and its violent end? It seems shallow to say "Saul should have listened to God" or "Saul should have been less self-absorbed," because we know deep down that we don't listen to God, and that we're just as self-absorbed–only in "nicer" forms. These PowerPoint cliches don't cut past the surface. It's like watching Training Day and then saying, "Don't do drugs."
Maybe it would be more worthwhile to put ourselves in Saul's place and try to identify the places where our leadership choices line up with his. When was the last time we judged success by victory on the "battlefield" of dollars or stats? Where have we predicted a good leader based on appearances? Why did we throw that verbal barb at someone whose success threatened ours? Where have we cut corners, ethically, to get ahead? What "accepted," "expected," and "common" things have we done along with everyone else?
All of this self-judgment, of course, can't be separated from the Gospel of redemption. It's redemption that Saul's life, ended by his own sword on a bloody field, so sorely lacks. Saul's choices made him more and more of an enemy of God. That's us. We were God's enemies, until, as Paul reminds us, "while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son" (Romans 5:10).
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by Chris Alexion, Copyright February 29, 2008, all rights reserved.
The life of Samuel, one of Israel's greatest prophets, begings with a unique story. We start with an average Jewish man and his two wives (we won't go there right now). One wife, Peninnah, has children, and the other wife, Hannah, is childless but beloved by her husband.
Now, Peninnah is a little jealous. Even though she bore her husband children (the ultimate goal or status symbol of a woman in that particular culture), she's upset that childless Hannah gets a double portion of the ritual meal during the yearly sacrifice. A bitter Peninnah routinely taunts and provokes Hannah. This goes on for years.
Hannah can only bear so much; she weeps and can't eat. Her husband Elkanah asks, "Hannah, why do you weep? … And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?" (1:8). Now it's a little unclear how to take Elkanah's question here. Elkanah probably means well, even if he spits a somewhat lofty view of his own game. But Hannah is unconsoled. "She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly" (1:10).
It doesn't help that Eli originally misunderstands her fervent, silent prayers, thinking she's drunk. But when he learns of her situation, he gives her his blessing. God soon gives His, and Hannah has a son she names Samuel. Hannah keeps her word–she had promised that she would dedicate this son to God's service, and when Samuel is just a few years old (the text says as soon as he was weaned), she takes him back to the temple and leaves him there to learn from Eli and serve God.
Out of this unique background comes Samuel the prophet. I recap the story because it shows that God's providential hand works behind the scenes in the formation of a leader. God uses our circumstances–including even mundane elements of childhood–to shape and mold us. Hannah's story also shows the role of faith and prayer in the preparation of a leader, as well as the crucial role a godly mother plays. No Hannah, no Samuel.
The first "plot point," if you will, of Samuel's career occurs when he's a "young man" (3:1). It was a sign of Israel's decline that "the word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision." Yet one night Samuel hears an audible voice waking him from sleep: "Samuel!" At first Samuel thinks the old priest Eli is calling him, but Eli eventually realizes (after Samuel is called for the third time) that the Lord is the one calling Samuel. "Go, lie down, and if he calls you, you shall say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant hears'" (3:9).
Samuel does listen, and what he hears is the chilling curse on Eli's house we saw in the last post. Listening to God is another key trait of a good leader. Depending on our own wisdom, strength, insight, or panache won't cut it. We need the "word of the Lord." As we'll see later in 1 Samuel, the godly leader David frequently sought and accepted God's counsel on important decisions–and sometimes his life depended on hearing from God.
This may sound simplistic. But if it's so simple, why do we neglect it so much? We tell ourselves that we too would listen to God more if we could call for a priest to bring the ephod so we'd know His will. But we already have a much greater revelation. It's written in our language, written by men moved by the Holy Spirit, and shame on us if we don't listen to it, whether for our home, church, or work life. How often do we say, "Speak, Lord, for your servant hears"?
We also learn from Samuel that a godly leader isn't afraid to speak what he's heard. The next morning, Eli asks Samuel what God had said. Samuel, of course, knew Eli wouldn't enjoy hearing the truth. But Eli charges him, "Do not hide it from me. May God do so to you and more also if you hide anything from me of all that he told you" (3:17).
Young Samuel does repeat God's words for Eli, and begins his career of prophetic confrontation. Later he will confront unruly Israel over their demand for a secular king: "And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have choses for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day" (8:18). He will also confront rebellious King Saul, who broke a clear command from God: "You have done foolishly. You have not kept the command of the Lord your God. . . . [N]ow your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be prince over his people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you. . . . The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you" (13:13-14; 15:28).
Learning the art of skillful confrontation is a must. While certainly confronting someone requires caution–a pugnacious leader is a disgrace (Titus 1:7)–there are times when refusing to confront sin is itself a sin. Eli was guilty of this offense, and, sadly, even Samuel wasn't in the clear. The apostle Paul's standards for leadership include that one's children "are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination."
A leader with kids, in other words, has a responsibility to be a good father. While there's no specific guarantee that the children of Christians will automatically become saved, we do have a right to expect that a godly leader will bring up his children in the "discipline and instruction of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4). Samuel, unfortunately, had sons who "did not walk in his ways but turned aside after gain. They took bribes and perverted justice" (8:3). This gross misconduct contributed to Israel's desire for a king: "Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, 'Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations'" (8:4-5).
This doesn't excuse the elders of Israel from rejecting God for a king. But you can almost see their point. And that hammers home one more thing: Leadership begins at home.
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