Lessons From Saul

Last week, I gave a sermon in Absalom. And it seemed like sort of a strange sermon in many ways. It's not how we usually put together a sermon. We just went through the story of Absalom. We went through his life and his experiences and saw a rather tragic story.

A tragic story of a man whose sister was terribly abused and it ate away at him. His father, David, King David, didn't seem to really solve the problem. There didn't seem to be any justice. He ends up killing his half-brother. He then has to flee for his own life. He's ostracized from his family. Finally, David brings him back, allows him to come home, but won't have anything to do with him.

He begins to feel as if he has been terribly victimized and there are terrible things that happened. And we watch this man who seems to be at the beginning the hero of a story become a man who murders, who tries to kill his own father and ends up raping the concubines of his own father.

We watch this man deteriorate until eventually he dies a tragic death as he leads an army to try to overthrow the Kingdom of Israel. It's easy to look at those stories because that's a big story in the Bible. There are chapters there. Why? We don't go talk about Absalom very often. Like I said last time, there's a remarkable story here about this real person and what he experienced that we're supposed to learn from.

And what it is to have bad things happen to you. And what it is to have justice that doesn't happen right away. So it seems like justice isn't going to happen and the bad people seem to get away with it. And how that can eat away with it, until we actually become victimized. We think and we see the world as a victim. And at that point spiritually, we begin to lose contact with this power and victory that God gives us. So Absalom has a very important message for Christians.

Today we're going to go through a story, a little different format again, but we're going to go through a story of a man who lived about that time also. We're going to talk about Saul, the first king of Israel. And he's thinking, okay, Saul the first king of Israel. I'm not a king. There can't be a whole lot in that message for me. I'm not a queen. What's this have to do with me?

But just like Absalom, there's this very large section of the Scripture, when you look at how long Scripture is, dedicated to the story of this man. Why? Why? Because in it is a message for all of us. I don't care who we are. It tells us about how something can go wrong in our lives, in our relationship with God. To talk about Saul, we have to first understand the world he lived in. Now for those of you that were into the Dixon and now the White Bluff Bible study, for the 24th of year or so that ended up coming there, we went through a while back the Book of Judges.

To understand Saul, you have to understand the Book of Judges. You have to understand the world Israel lived in. When you look at the Book of Judges, what you have are 13 loosely confederated tribes. During the time of Judges, which was a system that was created by God and given to them by God, you don't have a central government in what we would know today. You have 12 tribes. And over each tribe is a group of elders that are considered the wisest and most righteous men in the tribes, and they become the elders.

Every town, every city, there's not too many cities, every village has a group of elders. And they have Levites that live among them that know the Bible. What they would have known is the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. That's all they would have known. And so what happens is you have a government that's almost entirely judicial. There is a legislative branch because no one makes up any new laws. All the laws come from the Torah, the book of law, or the book of instructions.

That's what they have. And so the elders come together. Say you have a land dispute with your neighbor. Well, you would go to the gates of the city. How many times do you see that in the Scripture? Well, they went to the gates of the city. You would come to the gates of the city, and they would gather around. All the elders would come. And that's where half the town would come to because, you know, this is great entertainment. You get to watch this stuff take place. And the elders would come together with the Levites, and each side would present their case, and they would have to have witnesses.

Even in the case of a capital crime, you could not condemn somebody without two or three witnesses. So someone could witness a murder, and the elders would say, there's not two witnesses. We cannot pass judgment if they obeyed the law specifically. And you have a judicial system with the worship of God governed by and led by the Levites. All during the time of Judges, you have the tabernacle right there. And they would go to the tabernacle to do their sacrifices. And so you have this sort of civil government that's run by the elders, and we have a religious government that's run by the priesthood.

But God would also choose what He called a judge. Now, it's interesting. He's not called a president. He's not called a governor. He's not called a king. He's a judge. Once again, the judicial side of this. And the judge would look at cases. They would judge Israel and decide in accordance with the law whether it was what was right, what was wrong. And he was their military leader. Now, here's what it's like to be the military leader if you're a judge in Israel at the time of Judges. First of all, you have no palace. Second of all, you have zero government offices.

You don't even have a government building. In fact, you don't even have a capital. There's no city that's the capital of Israel. You have no taxes, no police force, no standing army. You have zero power except that people believe you're the judge. God has chosen you to judge us, to tell us what's right and wrong, and to lead us in a military catastrophe. That's what the book of Judges is all about. And when you read the book of Judges, you find Israel will do real fine. They'd have a good judge, and the judge would lead them, and they would have prosperity, and God would save them from their enemies, and things would be great.

And then the judge would die, and either one or two things would happen. Either a bad judge would come along, or they would just sort of drift away. They would go back to their elder system, because that's what they had, and you'd have 13 tribes, and they would degenerate, and they'd begin to worship idols, and pretty soon God would send others. They would take His protection away from them, and other nations around them would come and begin to conquer them. They would become slaves, and then they would cry out, and God would bring a judge.

And the judge would tell them, well, you have to repent, and then they would repent. And after they repented, God would save them, and then the cycle started all over again. You had one judge that wasn't even selected by God. That didn't turn out well at all. He just made Himself a judge. Actually, a bunch of people made Him a judge, and that didn't work out well at all. So you have this repeated cycle over and over and over again. They continued to live in this with hundreds of years.

And around Israel, two things were happening. You have raiding tribes, like the Amalekites. The Amalekites weren't really a city-state. They were just a moving group of nomadic tribes that would hit them, and raid, and come in, and kill, and loot. But you also have forming around them what we would call countries. The Philistines formed a nation. Five cities formed a nation. They had a king. They had a governmental structure. They had a standing army. Every time Israel had to go to war, the judge had to go out and say, send out messengers and say, anybody want to fight? I don't have an army, but God told me to go fight these people, and I don't even have an army.

That's what they had to do every time. They had a standing army. They had an organized army. They had an organized judicial system, a legislative system, and they had a king. And so these kings, these countries, began to form. Plus you have these nomadic tribes. This is the world in which we enter into in 1 Samuel 8. Now once again, this is a story.

You have to keep up. I know it's easier sometimes when we're going through a subject, when we're going through the Bible in different places. We're basically going to stay within a few chapters here. And I'll explain some of the story. We'll read some of it. But what we do, we'll see, just like Absalom, there's a message for us through the life of Saul. Because he's another tragedy. He's another tragedy.

So 1 Samuel 8. The last of the judges was Samuel. But Samuel, of course, ordained as he got old the next judges. Look what it says in verse 1. Now it came to pass when Samuel was old. He made his sons judges over Israel. The name of his firstborn was Joel. The name of the second, Abijah. And they were judges in Beersheba. But his sons did not walk in his ways. They turned aside after dishonest gains, took bribes, and perverted justice.

This happened. God didn't select them as judges. Samuel did, and they became evil. The people feel oppressed. Verse 4. Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel, and said to him, Look, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now make as a king the judges like the nations. Why would they say the judges like the nations? Because these states are forming. The Middle East is no longer just tribes. They still have a tribal system.

States are forming. We've got to have a king, a king to protect us. But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. So Samuel prayed to the Lord, and the Lord said to Samuel, Heed the voice of the people, and all that they say to you.

For they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. Now the issue here was God said, I will be your king, and this law, this book of laws, the elders and the Levites should be enough. He knew, though, there would come a time they would not accept that system. He said, How do I know that? Well, leave a marker here. Let's go back to Deuteronomy 17.

Deuteronomy 17. And verse 14. This is part of the instructions that God gave through Moses to Israel, and it was written in the book. So if you're a Levite or you're an elder, you were supposed to know all this, and this is how you made your judgments. When you come to the land which the Lord your God is giving you, and possess it and dwell in it, this is verse 14 of Deuteronomy 17, and say, I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me, you shall surely set a king over you, whom the Lord your God chooses.

Run from among your brethren, you shall set his king over you, you shall not set a foreigner over you. Now this is very interesting. God says, Okay, there's going to be a time you want a king, but the only way to work is I choose the king. One thing about Saul we need to remember, God chose Saul, and God did not choose Saul to fail. In other words, God didn't say, Okay, you want a king? I'm going to give you a bad king. That's not what happens here. And He had told them, hundreds of years before, when you get to this point, Okay, I'll let you have a king.

And then He gives all kinds of instructions on what a king of Israel should be like. He should not multiply his horses. And they think, well, that's a... No, okay, why horses? It's interesting. During the time of Judges, Israel had no cavalry and no chariots. They didn't have any. No cavalry and no chariots. He says, You won't build armies like other people have armies. You have to trust in Me. He says, You want to multiply silver and gold.

In other words, the kings were not supposed to become rich over their subjects. He even tells them they can't have lots of wives because they will turn their hearts against God. It's amazing when you read through these instructions how few of the kings of Israel or Judah ever followed any of these instructions. Verse 18 says, we're back in Deuteronomy, Also it shall be when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write for himself a copy of this law in a book, for the one before the priests and the Levites.

And it shall be with him, and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, and be careful to observe all the words of this law. To be king, you were supposed to take the book. That would be Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. And the first thing you were supposed to do in your training to be a king was write out by hand what would have been at that time the entire Bible.

You were to write it out by hand if you were a king because this is how you governed. This is how you made your decisions. This is how you related to God. This is how you led the people to relate to God. I'm not sure Saul ever did this. In fact, what's interesting when you look through the history of Israel and Judah, they didn't often do this. At times you'll find they discover the Torah. It's like we didn't even know this existed.

And they'll discover it. They're excited. There's a revival. God did talk to us in the past. So this kept getting lost. These were the instructions that He gave to them. So when God said, I don't want you to have a king, but you're going to want one someday. Okay, but I'll choose the king. Now let's go back to 1 Samuel 8 and continue the story. Because if we're really going to understand how Saul's life applies to us, we have to understand this world he lived in.

Then we're going to have to watch and look at how God chose him, what God did for him, and then why he failed. Why he failed. So what happens is, God tells Samuel, okay, they want a king. I want you to tell them all the things that are going to be bad if you have a king. One, he's going to create a capital, and he's going to hire people to come work for him.

And that's going to create more businesses. And pretty soon, that city, all your children are going to run off to the city to work for the king. So the idea of everybody staying home and working on the farm, which was the basis of Israelite society, says you're going to start losing some of that. Your kids are going to go work for the king. Well, of course, that would just be him personally. I mean, once you get a capital building, all kinds of things, once you have offices, once you have an administration, an bureaucracy, and more and more people come in, and it takes more and more people to feed those people, to build the buildings, you have people leaving the farms.

He says that's going to happen. Plus, they're going to tax you. He says this is going to be above your ties. They're going to tax you. He goes on and he says, you know what else are you going to do? He's going to have a standing army, and your kids are going to draft it into the army. That's what's going to happen to you. So he tells them all these bad things that can happen.

And then in verse 19 it says, nevertheless the people refuse to obey the voice of Samuel. And he said, no, but we will have a king over us. Also that we also may be like the nations, that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles. It was that we need a king to fight for us. When you look at the book of Judges, the Judges fought, but the Judges fought because God won the battles for them.

The book of Judges is about miracle after miracle after miracle. I mean Gideon had to lead the fight. God willed his army down to 300 men. He still had to go out and fight, but he didn't defeat that huge army that was amassed before him, of the Medianites and Ishmaelites. He didn't defeat that huge army. God did. We need a king. We need a city-state. We need what the other nations have. Because how can we stand up against that? And part of this was probably driven by the fact that like the Philistines had entered the Iron Age, that looks like Israel had not. Because you'll see through some of the battles of Saul, they didn't have enough weapons.

And their weapons didn't stand up well. Well, if you're in a Bronze Age, you have a bronze sword, and you're fighting a man with an iron sword, all it takes is about hitting that two or three times, and it snaps in two. So we need to be like them. Our technology needs to catch up. How can we compete in this world?

And God said, don't you understand, I'm the one who works this out. But they felt like they had to work it out. So God then selects Saul. You know, in verse 9, it talks about how God selects him. And Samuel goes to him and says, God's chosen you to be king. This has to be a shock to Saul. A king is not a concept in Israel. But God gives him an important promise in chapter 9, verse 6. First Samuel 9, 6. Just keeping up with the story here. This is important.

All this understanding of this man is going to help us understand his failure. Or we'll never get the lesson. I mean, we read Saul. We read Absalom. We read about these people. And we miss the lessons. And yet, why would God make so much chapters on these people? He says in verse 6... Let me find it here. I'm sorry, 10 verse 6. No wonder it doesn't make sense. 10, 6. I was going to read something in chapter 9, but I don't want to go over time.

10 verse 6. This is what Samuel tells Saul. Then the Spirit of the Lord will come upon you, and you will prophesy with them, and be turned into another man. And let it be, when these signs come to you, that you do as the occasion demands, for God is with you. This is really, really important.

He was given a call, and he was told, God will give you His Spirit. God's Spirit was not poured out on most of the Israelites. Most of the Israelites did not have God's Spirit. You know, a few did. Samuel did. David did. Skip down to verse 9.

So it was, when he had turned his back to go from Samuel, that God, look how this is put, God gave him another heart, and all those signs came to pass that day. How do you receive another heart through God's Spirit? This man was called by God not to fail. I've heard people say, well, God chose Saul because he knew he would fail. God was setting them up for failure. That's not true. God chose this man because, well, if you want a king, this is the best guy you got. So I'll call him to be the king. When you read through the rest of this chapter, there's a couple things that come out. First of all, he's a big guy. It says he's head and shoulders taller than everybody else. He's a big man. Now, archaeologists say the ancient Israelites weren't big people. You know, 5'8", 5'9", 5'6". So, you know, he might be 6' tall, which is a big guy. He's a big man. He's a strong man. He is a courageous man, as will come out in many, many cases. But what's interesting is Samuel anoints him king, and then the ceremony comes. All the elders come from all over Israel. Thousands and thousands of people come to see the king be ordained, and they can't find him. He's hiding. He's like, I don't know if I want to be king. What does a king do? Besides, the amount of problems that he's taking us through are enormous, like, where do I live? Where's my capital? Where's my office? There's no king office. Where's my army? Where's my staff? Probably a bodyguard, at least, would be a good idea. He has nothing. He's a man about to be ordained, a king over what probably at this point is a nation of a couple million people. And he has nothing except Samuel. That's who he's got. And this system of elders. But we know how that works because in the time of Judges, sometimes the Israelites fought each other.

So now he's got to bring order out of this, and he's got to follow God, and he's hiding. So we see two things about this that's important. One, there is a humility to the man. He sees the enormous tasks ahead of him, but also there is a self-absorption. I'm going to run and hide. I don't feel like I can do this. So there are two things here. A humility, but also just a lack of confidence in God. And these two things are going to be important in what we see because we're always going to go back to, I gave you my spirit.

I give you my spirit, and I will be with you. That had to be the cornerstone of everything in his life. And if we get nothing out of this, the cornerstone, the core of your life has to be, you have been given God's spirit, and He will be with you because Saul is repeatedly given in possible tasks. The first thing, whoever trained him to be king?

He has nothing here. No training, nothing. You're going to be king. No, he was a capable man. He was a natural leader. That's not a king. So he's made king. What's interesting, if you read through, the very first thing he did was he showed mercy to someone.

He did a merciful act, which the people appreciated. They said, oh, you know, he's not going to be a tyrant. He's a merciful guy. He has strengths. He's chosen by God. He's given God's spirit. But now it begins to unravel. And this is where we have to be careful.

It begins to unravel. So let's start with 1 Samuel 13. I mean, there's a lot of story in here we're skipping over. Because what happens is, for the first year or two of his reign, he just goes around. He creates this army, and he goes around, and he just defeats every enemy of Israel. With God's help, he just drives out everybody. Israel's facing peace. Wow! We've driven out. We fought everybody. We beat everybody. And so he's riding high at this point.

God's with him. He sees God being with him. Verse 1, Saul reigned one year, and when he had reigned two years over Israel, Saul chose for himself 3,000 men of Israel. 2,000 were Saul and Micmash, the other in the mountains of Beth-Yel, and 1,000 were with Jonathan and Gibeah of Benjamin.

The rest he sent home. There's no need to have a standing army. We've already defeated everybody. So you all go home. And he kept 3,000 men to have as his professional army. Okay, well that's just economically brilliant. They've got to go home and work their farms, right, or run their businesses. You go home and we'll call you together if we need you.

Well, there's a problem. Jonathan, his son, believes, you know, he looks at all these other nations, these peoples, that still possess part of the land that God gave to them. And Jonathan's viewpoint is, we've got to go take it back. God gave this to us. Jonathan is a man who is fearless. That'd be another man to be interested to do a sermon on. He has remarkable qualities. Jonathan goes and takes a Philistine garrison, a fortress, that is occupying some of the land that God had given to Israel, and he attacks it and defeats him.

He just poked his fingers in the eye of one of the great superpowers of the region. So now Saul, who's cut his army down to 3,000 men, is faced with fighting the United States. He doesn't have that kind of technology. He doesn't have calvary. He doesn't have chariots.

So verse 5, then the Philistines gather together to fight with Israel. Oh, it couldn't be that big an army, right? It's just the Philistines. 30,000 chariots, 6,000 horsemen, and people as the sand which is on the seashore. Uh-oh. Jonathan's like, let's go get them. But Saul knows he can't do anything without going to God first. And to go to God, he has to do a sacrifice. And only Samuel has qualified to do that sacrifice.

As king, he does not have the authority to do that sacrifice. He knows that. But he must do the sacrifice for God's help. And Samuel says, that won't be there for a week. Okay. There's thousands of them, tens of thousands, and there's three thousand, maybe a hundred thousand, hundreds of thousands. Who knows? That many chariots is amazing. Two to three men per chariot? That's 40,000 to 60,000 charioteers. Right? How many did he say? 30,000 chariots, no? That's 60,000 to 90,000.

And he's got 3,000 men, probably with bronze swords. And what happens is, it says... Well, let me read this because I love this passage. There's this verse. When the men of Israel saw that they were in danger, or I think in the Old King James it says, they saw they were in danger, and here it says, when the people were distressed. Yeah, they're distressed just a little bit. And then the people hid in caves and thickets and rocks and holes and pits. It's that some of them were running away.

His army disintegrates. They're hiding. And here he is standing there alone. Before we judge Saul too quickly, and I'm saying he turned it out bad, but let's look at where he was to make sure we don't end up ever in a place like that. God called him. God gave him his spirit.

He was following God. And one day God gives him an impossible task. He's standing there alone. He didn't run away. He didn't run away. But his army's disintegrated. He's probably looking at his few officers, and they're getting real nervous, like, if they attack, I don't think we can outrun them. We have nothing to fight with. As for Saul, he was still in Gilgal, and all the people followed him trembling.

And he waited, this is Saul, seven days according to the time set by Samuel. But Samuel did not come to Gilgal, and the people were scattered from him. So Saul said, bring a bird offering and peace offering here to me. And he offered the bird offering. Now, it happened as soon as he had finished presenting the bird offering that Samuel came. He does the offering himself. I can think of a thousand reasons why. If I was in his shoes, that would be a good idea.

We have to go to God. We're down to nothing. I'm the king. I must take over the priestly duties because he's not here. So I'll do it. It's not because I want to, I must do it. Because God, we must approach God. We have to. It's required that we do this, and it's required that we take the sacrifice. Who knows? Samuel may have been ambushed and dead along the way. We don't know what happened to him. And he doesn't. And God is very upset, as Samuel tells him.

What happened is, Saul gets his eyes off of God because he's in an impossible situation. He looks at how impossible is around him. And in this situation, he decides to do something he can't do. It teaches us something very important here. This is a lesson I've been trying to learn in my life over the years. God is concerned with the methods that we use to fulfill his will. It's not just knowing his will. He's concerned that the methods that we do in fulfilling that will is his methods. And Saul was not given permission to sacrifice. God said, no, no, no, no. I gave that to somebody else. But somebody's got to do it. He's not here. And I'm the king. There's a logic to this. But the point was, God said, no, your methods are important. Your methods are important. So here we have his first failure. Samuel comes and chides him. But God continues to bless him. Even though God says to him, you're not going to have a dynasty. I was going to give you a dynasty. You're not going to have a dynasty. And so he continues now. We find this first lesson from the life of Saul. And that is, in these times of stress and anxiety that we go through, when we're presented with impossible situations, we have to remember. We have to explore for God's will, and we have to follow the methods by which he wants us to follow him. And it's easy to push those boundaries whatever way. God will understand if I do this. How many times have you said that? I know God says this, but he'll understand because if I do this. We have to be careful where we push those boundaries. Now we have the next thing that happens. Let's go to chapter 15. Now this seems strange to some people, but you have to understand once again who the Amalekites were. The Amalekites were tribal people who raided and attacked and had been attacking Israel since the time of Moses. Killing, pillaging, raping. So God tells Saul through Samuel, I'm tired of this. They had been doing this since Moses. He goes back and mentions Moses. They've been to Moses, Joshua, the time of the Judges. These people just keep attacking and pillaging and killing. So what I want you to do is go and wipe out the tribe. This is very important because this is a judgment from God. This is justice. These people have been killing and pillaging and stealing and raping for hundreds of years. And I've had enough of it. So go kill all of them. It's easy to look at it and say, boy, this is a cruel God. I don't know. Hundreds of years he put up with this. He says they've been doing this to the people I'm working with since Moses and that's it. Saul, take your army and go destroy the Amalekites. Just wipe them off as a tribe. But I don't want you to be like them. I don't want you to pillage them because you're not going to pillage the Amalekites. You're going there to do justice. So leave everything. Gold, silver, kill every animal. I want the entire everything they've stolen left to rot because all these people did was steal. So go deal with that. And Saul did. Sort of. He sort of did. He comes back from fighting the Amalekites. Let me pick this up in verse 7 now.

You know, the junk, they burned. The good stuff, they kept. In other words, they just went and did an Amalekite. Probably the first time in history the word Amalekites ever been used as a verb. They just went and Amalekited the Amalekites. Okay? We go in and we kill you and we steal your stuff. How's that? This was an act of justice by God. This was not go pillage them.

But He did. He pillaged them. But it says, Him and the people. Verse 10. Now the word of the Lord came to Samuel saying, I greatly regret that I have set up Saul as king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments. It grieves Samuel. You read through all this, you'll see over and over again. Samuel grieves, but Saul's the best we got.

Finally God commands him, don't grieve about him anymore. You can't help this man.

And so Samuel comes up and Saul says, Look, this is a well-known story, so you probably all know this one. Look, I did what you said. I did what God said. He's looking for a pat on the back. He's looking for acceptance. There's something about that man who hid, and I don't know, it doesn't tell us. There's something about that man who hid in the baggage trade when it was time to coordinate and for him to be crowned king, his coronation. There's something about the insecurity of that man. Look, Samuel, I bet you're proud of me.

I'm kingly, and God's been with me. I did what he said.

But Samuel said, What is this then, the bleeding of the sheep in my ears, the loathing of the oxen which I hear? And Saul said, They have brought them from the Malachites, for the people spared the best of the sheep and the oxen, the sacrifice of the Lord your God, and the rest we have utterly destroyed.

Well, okay, I understand, but you know, come on. I know God said, Kill all these things, but look at these people. These are good soldiers. They wanted this. Besides, you know what, I can't just take care of it. I'm going to have them do this giant sacrifice. We'll be sacrificing for days. Sacrificing to God, won't he be so happy? Because, you know, I really want them to follow me. I really want them to like me. These people... And Samuel says, God is furious with you. God is furious with you. He told you to go do justice. And Samuel doesn't...or Saul doesn't get it. He just doesn't understand. There's an interesting verse here. And verse 17. I want to read verse 17, because there's this give and take between Samuel and Saul. That's very important in understanding. Verse 17 says, So Samuel said, When you were little in your own eyes, were you not the head of the tribes of Israel? Now that can mean, look, you used to be a very humble man. But you're supposed to be a king here. In other words, humility is not...it is an important quality. Without it, you can't be king. But you've got to also step up when you're king and do what you're told. In the Jewish Publication Society, because this can be translated another way. It doesn't really change the meaning, but it changed the emphasis a little bit. And it appears this way in a number of translations. So let me read this. He says, And Samuel said...that's what Samuel says to him, You may look small to yourself, but you are the head of the tribes of Israel. The Lord anointed you king over Israel, which is the next statement here in the King James 2. The Lord anointed you. The point he's making is, okay. You were small-minded and humble, but now you're just small-minded and stupid. Because you're so little, you have forgotten God made you king. And this is where the problem is. And it started back when the problems got so big, I'll have to do this. I'll have to make this sacrifice. He wasn't thinking of God. He's not thinking of God. He's thinking of the things he has to do to fix the problems. And here he is, once again, faced with, But I did everything right, Samuel, except... Okay, I didn't kill all the animals, but you know, come on, the people wanted to keep them. But I tell you what, I'll just take them and sacrifice them. How's that? I have a solution to this. It's okay. It's not okay. It's not okay because it's not what God wanted you to do. And you're so small-minded, you're missing the point. The point is, God made you the king. So when God says to do something, go do what God says. The people will follow you because they will see God with you. He finds out that God's going to remove him from being the king. He doesn't do it right away. He doesn't do it right away. But now, his life begins to collapse. At one point in this story, Samuel can't find him. It's because he went to build a statue to himself or a monument to himself.

See, I am king. I really am somebody. I am important. See, I'm king. I just built a monument to myself. And then the tragedy happens. Chapter 16, verse 14. But the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and his distressing spirit from the Lord troubled him. When God removed his spirit from Saul, he is now troubled by demonic spirits. God took his spirit from him. This is why this is a message for us today. We have God's Spirit. We know, I mean, it takes a lot, but we know from the book of Hebrews that if we trample upon the throne of grace, God can take his spirit away. Here's a man that we actually watch what happened to him when God took his spirit from him. He began to slide into insanity. He no longer had any trust in God. What about his abilities? Do you know what happens next? The super power attacks again. The Philistines. They line up on a set of hills, and Saul takes his army out, and they line up on a set of hills opposite. There's a big valley in between, and in between, a guy that would scare Shaq to death comes out and challenges them to a fight.

I was in Ripley's Believe It or Not. I think it was in Texas. And they had a cut-out cupboard of a man who was almost nine feet tall. It was like in the 1920s. He actually died young because his body could not handle the weight of how big he was because he was too thin.

I'm a short guy, so I'm used to looking up to people. I'm not used to looking so much naval.

Now, if he weighed three or four hundred pounds or five hundred pounds, I don't know what Goliath weighed. I forget what it is, but it's big. You're looking at this huge man. It's anywhere from nine to twelve feet tall, depending on how much cubit you use.

And Saul has nothing left. God isn't with him anymore. He's facing another impossible situation. And the last couple of times he faced it with God, and he's facing it without God, and he doesn't do anything. And he watches his army begin to get demoralized, and he demoralizes every day Goliath comes up.

David knows when David comes, David doesn't tell him, Oh, I'm a big bad guy. I'll go kill him. David says, God will give him to me. He knew where the victory came from.

You and I face Goliath in our lives more than once. He faced impossible situations more than once.

You never kill a Goliath, God does.

You may be standing out there alone with a slingshot, but you don't kill him. God does. And Saul had nothing left to give. He couldn't go face him. He's just a guy. And he might be bigger than all the other Israelites, but he's puny compared to that guy.

David comes along, he's even punier. He tried to put his armor on him and it was too heavy. It's like, I can't even move in this stuff. So they had to go out without armor, because Saul's armor was too heavy for him.

It's often been said, David faced Goliath once. Saul faced him a thousand times.

You wonder how many times he woke up screaming in the middle of the night.

Oh, what if I would have stayed close to God? What if? What if? What if? Look what God has done to me. Look how much David has done to me. Look how everybody had this stacked against me. I can't help him. It was so big. You can't imagine the torture that man went through. And he went on and on and on.

You and I, at some point in this, begin to understand we don't do this.

Now, we do our part. We walk out into the valley with our little sling with some rocks in it.

But we actually don't. We just go to our part. And God says, go out there. I'll do it through you.

He had lost that. There was no way to get that back at this point.

That doesn't mean every time we fail, God says, oh, that's enough. No, no. This is an attitude that he has.

You're not going to fail a lot.

You know, I don't have faith a lot.

And he still stays with us. That's not the issue. The issue here is an attitude that says, I have no confidence and... But I've got to get people to like me. I've got to get people to have confidence in me. And what happens is he's now controlled by everything else, but he's not controlled by God.

And a need to prove himself. And a need...

A need to show that I am king.

He was king because God made him king.

That's Samuel's argument. But God made you king.

And he grieved and grieved over him. He wanted him to be a good king.

He wasn't set up to fail.

What happens to him now is that he becomes consumed with envy and jealousy.

Everybody's against him. Saul becomes absolutely paranoid.

So that he thinks that David is out to get him. Now David is remarkable when these days we're going to go through... Before the end of the summer, we'll go through David. We're going through Absalom Saul and David.

David knows he's been ordained king.

But he does nothing to dispose of Saul. Because he's a goddess to dispose of him.

Saul, on the other hand, all he wants to do is kill David.

Saul gets to the place where people have to come in to play soothing music to just calm down the craziness that's in him.

How paranoid does he get?

He tries to kill David a couple of times. Finally, instead of taking care of Israel, he's leading an army all over the place chasing David all over the country. Trying to kill him. Trying to kill him. Trying to kill him. I've got to kill that man. Then he tried to kill his own son Jonathan. And Jonathan still stayed loyal to him.

Then he found that there were some priests that had given some bread to David. So he went in and he killed 85 priests of God.

Remember how he watched Absalom deteriorate to he commit terrible sins and terrible crimes as he deteriorated? Saul now is in that state. There's no repentance. There's just a hatred.

A hatred that drives him.

Finally, the insanity reaches the point that after Samuel dies, he goes to a witch and asks her, is there any way to contact the dead? And he contacts the demonic spirit because God won't talk to me, but Samuel was my friend. And so he talks to a demon as he tries to find some purpose left in his life.

He leads Israel in the battle without God's help. They lose the battle. He's wounded. And he ends up committing suicide.

That's the tragic story of Saul.

Now, God did not call us to end up like Saul, but there's a reason the story is there.

It's for us to remember these important points.

In times of absolute stress and anxiety, when you don't have the solutions to the problems, zero in your whole concentration on God.

What would have happened if Samuel showed up, and it's seven days later, and there was Saul and his whole army always generals, everybody there on their knees praying. And he says, yeah, we've been fasting and praying for the last three days because we knew you had to show up to do the... How would that would have changed things? To be concentrating on God.

But that's not what I do. That's not what you do, do we? We run around like Saul. I've got to do it then. I've got to do it then. I've got to take care of everything myself. I guess God's not going to do it. We rush around.

These impossible situations come on every once in a while, and in that stress, we cannot presume to know God's will.

We have to search for God's will, and then we have to make sure our methods are God's will, too.

Secondly, we have to submit to God's standards and commands in spite of the fact that, in doing so, some people may not like us.

This is what's so hard sometimes when you're young. But if I do that, this person won't like me.

All of us want to be liked.

It's hard sometimes.

It's hard sometimes. You follow God and somebody doesn't like you.

Saul, they liked him. He was king. He had proved it. He didn't have to hide in the baggage anymore. He was conquering every army that came against him. Well, yes. Sure. I know. But these are such fat, good sheep, and there's thousands of them. Why would you just kill them and leave them out there? Why would it be better? Everybody said, let's keep them. But look, we're just going to kill them, okay, to God. Is that good? I did good, Samuel. It's always like he was begging Samuel, please, please go to God for me. He was always begging for this affirmation. Instead of going to God Himself, Samuel, I need you to like me. I need you to show me what to do. Go to God for me.

Ask Him to forgive me.

Samuel said, you go ask God for forgiveness.

There's something tragic about that. I can't figure out entirely. There's not enough information here. He's a hard man, and He's a stubborn man. But there's something inside of Him that just...

No matter what God does, it never is enough to believe God made me king.

Until it's too late, now He's being driven by anger and hatred without God's Spirit.

The third thing is just realize that no matter what abilities God's given you, someday Goliath shows up.

And you can't beat Him. I can't beat Him. He shows up in life.

And our abilities fade, you know?

I know when you're 25 out there, and you hit that ball, and it goes to the wall, and you stretch that in the park home run, sliding head first, covered with dirt.

I remember doing that like it was yesterday.

I can't hit the ball to the wall, and if I can, I can't even run to first base.

The abilities go. You know, if I get to fight Goliath, he better be a two-foot nidget with no arms, okay? Otherwise, I'm going to lose.

I'm going to lose.

There's a point where you have to trust God that Goliath's are going to come, because Goliath will make all of our abilities useless.

And then the last point, and this is important, Saul's preoccupation with himself, instead of seeing God, it's very early in the story, and it just gets worse and worse until he can't see God. God's removed himself from him. He can't find God.

He can't find him.

Preoccupation with self, so that our opinions, our feelings, how other people look at me, everything is about me, it becomes so absorbing that it leads to this emptiness of jealousy and envy and paranoia. When you get paranoid, everything is against me because everything is about me. What's the old saying when you're 15?

You're worried about what everybody thinks about you.

When you're 35, you don't care what they're thinking about you.

When you're 55, you finally realize they were never thinking about you to begin with.

And there's a lot of truth in that!

No one ever noticed you were there anyway, so what's, you know...

The self-absorption that he had would not let him get out of the way and let God do anything. What God wanted to do in Saul. God wanted him to succeed.

Samuel wanted him to succeed. Samuel replaced his own sons with... You think about Samuel. My sons are bad. This man's good. He replaced his own sons with this man.

As far as being as leadership.

Ask God to give you a humble spirit. We have to ask for that.

Help us to have a humble spirit before Him.

Ask Him to fight your Goliath. I can't do this. There's no...

God says, I knew that all along. When Jesus Christ said, I can't do this, how in the world can we?

How arrogant are we when Jesus Christ said, I can do nothing except the Father in me? How arrogant are we? Oh, I can do it. Yeah.

We can find... Now, physically, I'm not talking about physical things, but spiritually, we can't do this. God does say, do this.

Keep a constant guard against being so preoccupied with ourself and our own feelings, our own ideas, our own thoughts, that we lose track of interacting with God.

And then be careful about envy and jealousy.

That paranoia that He became is a dangerous thing.

Because all we see others is, is we don't see other people as people to serve and love. We see them as competition.

We see nothing more as competition.

Another tragic story, and yet the lessons are real.

So I told Kim, I said, wow, this is the second depressing story I've told in two weeks here.

But sometime here this summer, we're going to have a third story.

We're going to go through the life of David.

And we're going to see a man who messed up as bad as Absalom, who messed up as bad as Saul, and yet, his story turns out really, really good.

And there's reasons why.

And in David, we'll understand the positiveness of what God can do through us when we do look to Him and have faith in Him and put our lives in His hand.