1 Samuel 13
by Pastor David Groendyk
The people of Israel have finally recognized their foolishness in desiring a king for themselves (12:19), and it’s not long before the damning cracks start forming in their brand new king, thus leading God to reject Saul as king over Israel. Saul will win more battles as his time goes on, but from this point onward, he’s a lame duck king who has irrevocably lost God’s favor.
Right off the bat, there’s a strange difficulty in the text. The Hebrew text we have literally says in verse 1, “Saul was one year old when he reigned, and he reigned two years over Israel.” You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to see that the timeline doesn’t seem to add up. A few options have been proposed to make sense of this. One, it could be a sort of theological reference to 1 Samuel 10:6 which says that the Spirit of the Lord made him a new man. Perhaps Saul had been “reborn,” so to speak, and began to reign as king about one year after that rebirth. Two, it could be some sort of idiomatic expression meaning something like, “Saul was a certain age when he began to reign, and he reigned a very short time when he chose three thousand men…” Hebrew can be tricky like that. Three, the original numbers in the Hebrew text have simply been lost to us, and I personally believe this is the most likely option. However, this shouldn’t shake our confidence in our English Bibles at all, and it doesn’t change one bit our understanding of the inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility of Scripture. We have every reason to be totally confident that God has preserved his Word for us over thousands of years and that everything we need to know for salvation and godly living is readily apparent in it.
The heart of this chapter really boils down to verses 8–14. As Israel is at war with the Philistines, the enemy troops are mounting, and the Israelite troops are shaking. Saul had been waiting for Samuel to show up in order to offer some sacrifices and seek the favor of the Lord in war, but Samuel was running late, so Saul decided to take matters into his own hands. Of course, Saul is barely finished lighting the fire when Samuel shows up. While on the face of it, this doesn’t seem like a big no-no, Saul’s unlawful sacrifice demonstrates full disobedience to God on multiple levels. At the very least, Saul directly disobeys the order to wait for Samuel to offer the sacrifice (v. 8). But Saul also disobeys the command that only priests were to offer sacrifices to the Lord (Num. 18:7). And, more generally speaking, Saul should have waited for God’s ordained servant to speak God’s words to him about the battle rather than forcing the issue for himself. Simply put, Saul tried to take matters into his own hands rather than listening to God. In this way, this incident is a microcosm of everything Saul’s kingship represents. He is man’s attempt to live and find success according to what man thinks is best. God’s kingdom ought to be ruled by the word of God, but Saul doesn’t understand that.
Therefore, God officially rejects Saul’s kingship, and he promises to set up someone else in his place. The Lord is seeking “a man after his own heart” (v. 14). The king of God’s own choosing would be someone who would do the will of the Lord rather than his own will (see Acts 13:22). The king of God’s own choosing would be someone who delighted in God’s law rather than decide what was right and wrong for himself. King David would embody these characteristics, albeit imperfectly, and he would point forward to King Jesus who would embody these characteristics perfectly. Jesus fully delighted in God’s law and obeyed it perfectly while also seeking his Father’s will above and beyond even what he himself wanted, even to the point of dying on a cross. And this is the kind of follower that Jesus is looking for. We must be willing to delight in the will of the Lord and obey him even when it is painful or inconvenient for us. Of course, we will only ever do so imperfectly, and so we praise Jesus for his own obedience and fully embodying the man after God’s own heart and gifting us his perfect righteousness in place of our own sin. Praise God for our perfect Savior and King!