“Saul foolishly sought God’s favor with sacrifices gained through disobedience; an act that belittles God and treats him as not-holy. Such presumption reframes Saul’s partial obedience as total rebellion. We are not immune to such folly. Sin always wants to hide itself from discovery, and so we, like Saul, are prone to relabelling our failures to obey as partial obedience and then calling them a success. This happens when we fail to share the gospel and call it wisdom, because we might lose influence. We disobey God by cheating on our taxes, and then say that it is so that we can give more and be more generous…There are many such examples where we are prone to sanitizing our sin and calling it a win. We disobey and call it love. We disobey and call it wisdom. Like Saul, we trust our own motives, trust our own wisdom. We disobey and then take a victory lap announcing our success in obedience….”

“Because of Saul’s unfaithfulness, God will give his kingdom to another; ‘a man after his own heart’ to whom He will grant an eternal covenant and promise an eternal kingdom. God’s response to human failure, time and again, is to establish and renew covenant with his people on the basis of God’s own faithfulness. This is the awesome mercy of God.”….Why was Saul rejected while David was accepted? The author emphasizes their similarities, not their differences. The story of David is not that God has finally found a better human who would be a better king. It is a story of God’s grace.”

“I, like Saul, am my own worst enemy. I give myself the benefit of the doubt when it comes to my own thoughts and intentions. We naturally trust in our own plans, sometimes even to the extent that we fail to seek God’s timeless instruction in his word, and fail to seek the timely leading of his Holy Spirit. Like Saul, we add to God’s word what we think are pious behaviors. We can add to the list of observances, and teach others to do the same. Or we prohibit ourselves activities and pleasures which God has not restricted. Such activities make us feel spiritual, but are the seeds of man-made religion and the fruit of pride…

But like Saul, there is a greater King above me. Christ our perfect King has already won the victory on our behalf, and teaches us to walk in it through obedience. His favor is already ours, expressed in his victory over sin and death on our behalf.  He has rescued us from ourselves; slavery to our own sin and the oppression of our own man-made religions. Christ has established our victory and set before us a path of continual triumph and joy (no matter what circumstance and suffering come our way). And our Great King makes no foolish oaths to my detriment; no well-intended but stupid rules. All of his commands are good, leading to my greatest pleasure and abundant life.”

“Jonathan takes half of Israel’s armory - the One Sword he has - and sneaks out with his young ‘armor bearer’ — You know, he’s carrying all the sling-shots and sharpened sticks; maybe a club — And Jonathan, then, presents the dumbest plan in military history: first they will intentionally give up the element of surprise: ‘we will cross over to the men, and we will show ourselves to them.’ Then, they would not fight if the Philistines were foolish enough to abandon their position of strategic superiority on the hilltop, and then exhaust themselves coming down to them. But, he would attack if the Philistines invited them to scale the sheer rock wall to fight them outnumbered and exhausted. The brilliance of Jonathan’s strategy is that it is so absurd that if it did succeed it could only be because ‘the Lord has given them into our hands’.…The victory was brought about by Yahweh, not by Saul and his pitifully tiny and under equipped army, not even by Jonathan or anyone else, though many joined in for the mop-up action. As in the case of David’s fight with Goliath the battle is the Lord's…”

“The problem wasn’t that Israel wanted a king. The problem was the reasons why they wanted a human king…They wanted a king to bring them influence and status, order and prosperity, safety and security, without having to rely on the unseen work of God and his provision of daily bread…And so when God consents to this idolatrous request, it is our natural human reasoning to assume that God will show them the errors of ways by providing them a terrible king, with disastrous results, so that they will see just how much better off they were under God’s own direct rule. But that is not what we see here in these four chapters at all! In fact, I’ve somewhat controversially titled this message: God Gives Israel a Good King…No, Saul did not end well…But that should not color our reading of these chapters. God did set Saul up for failure, nor did he spitefully shackle Israel with a loser king. In a shocking act of mercy and grace, God set Israel up for success!”

“God, for his part, graciously condescends to the people’s desire. But tells Samuel to warn them of what a human king will do. ‘The way of kings’ is characterized by the key words take and best. ‘The way of kings’, by nature, is parasitic rather than giving. And kings are never satisfied with the worst. Various aspects of ‘the way of kings’ would soon be implemented by Saul, Israel’s first king. But it would be David's son Solomon who would literally put tens of thousands of his own people to forced labor. ‘The way of kings’, to take the best is contrasted with the heavenly King, who takes nothing from his people…”

“Do I have trust in some talisman, trapping of religion, but not a person?” Tune in to hear Pastor Josh preach through a long, but necessarily connected, narrative concluding Eli’s story, and further our understanding of God’s desire for relationship, not just a religious rigour.

“The Sunday School version of this, which always has to have a moral of the story and an application, will tell us that we should be like Samuel: Listen for God’s voice and answer. Speak, Lord, I’m listening. But that is not at all the message of this passage. We are meant to see God’s faithfulness to his covenant people despite the rampant sin and rebellion taking place at that spiritually benighted worship center. No priest was ministering before the Lord. They had left a small child to fulfill their duties. One who did not even fulfill the requirements to be a priest on many specific points of OT law, who had been dressed by his mom, and placed there by the will of God and according to Hannah’s oath. A child, of whom it says he ‘did not yet know the Lord(v.7)…We should not see Samuel as doing (or being) anything special here. We should see only that “...God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. (1 Corinthians 1:27-28)”