Saul struggled with insecurity, but God used him even so.  A town that was still shamed and forgotten received honor and deliverance from God, through king Saul.

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1 Samuel #8.  1 Samuel 10:24 – 11:15

I want to reiterate something that happened at the end of chapter 10, and then we’ll move on to chapter 11. Remember, Samuel anointed Saul as king of Israel when it was just the two of them in private. After being anointed king, Saul went home. As he journeyed back, his anointing was confirmed by several signs that Samuel had prophesied to him before hand.

Even so, Saul did not tell anyone that Samuel had anointed him king. At first glance this looks like it could be humility, and maybe it was. Perhaps he was waiting for God to confirm it before he said anything. And yet – God already did confirm it, through the signs that Samuel prophesied, which came true. So, maybe Saul’s silence about being made king was something else altogether: insecurity.

After some time, Samuel gathered the people together, and they asked the Lord to choose a king by lots. Saul was chosen. This was another powerful confirmation of Saul’s calling, this time in public, for all to see. But Saul hid among the baggage while it was happening. Again, this could be either humility, or insecurity. Actually, I think it is a little bit of both. When we read the texts carefully, we can see that Saul is a very complex, very real person. This is one way the Bible is very different from ancient myths and legends. In other ancient legends (as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, for example) people are portrayed more simplistically. They are either strong or weak, honorable, or shameful. But in the Bible, we find that the people and situations it describes are often complicated – like people are in real life. This helps to give me confidence that what we read in the Bible is real history. It is true.

So, I suspect that Saul had a lot of insecurity, but that he was also capable of genuine humility. I want to point out that his insecurity seems to be because he had trouble believing what God has said. Through Samuel, God told him he would be king. Through the signs, he confirmed it. Through the choices by lot, God confirmed it again. But I suspect, for the reasons I shared last week, that Saul had never really been a man of faith. He did not know God, and had not ever been very interested in Him. It’s hard to believe what God says if you don’t really know God. It’s hard to trust someone you don’t know. If you go your whole life ignoring God, then it is hard to believe it when someone tells you that God has a purpose for your life.

Listen to what happened next:

25 Then Samuel told the people the rights and duties of the kingship, and he wrote them in a book and laid it up before the LORD. Then Samuel sent all the people away, each one to his home. 26 Saul also went to his home at Gibeah, and with him went men of valor whose hearts God had touched. 27 But some worthless fellows said, “How can this man save us?” And they despised him and brought him no present. But he held his peace. (1 Samuel 10:25-27)

Just put yourself in Saul’s situation for a minute. You have just been made king – twice. It has been confirmed by lot and by prophesied signs that came true. A future with possibilities you never dreamed of is opening up in front of you. Everyone shakes your hand and slaps you on the back, and congratulates you…and then they all go home. You look around. It’s time for you to go home also. There’s nothing else to do. I can’t help thinking that this was a major let down for Saul. So he’s king. Big whoop. Now he’s got to go back and plow his fields.

A few warriors felt called to stick with the new king and serve him. The Lord touched them and they believed in him and stuck with him. But there were at least an equal number of people who didn’t believe in him at all, and mocked him and his calling. I think all of this must have been disappointing. It probably fed into his insecurity.

Now, I want to leave Saul for a moment and go back and set the stage for what happened next. I spoke about this a little bit last time, but I want to go into more detail now. Roughly two hundred years before Saul’s lifetime, the residents of a town called Gibeah, in the tribe of Benjamin, had committed an atrocity. Rather than welcome a traveling priest, they had attempted to abuse and rape him. When they were prevented from this they raped and killed his concubine instead. In those days a concubine was considered a wife.

The priest took the dead body of his wife, and cut it up, and sent the pieces to the twelve tribes of Israel as a graphic way of letting the whole nation know what had taken place in Gibeah. Eleven of the tribes assembled, but the tribe of Benjamin did not come, even though Gibeah was in their own territory, and the atrocity had happened on “their turf,” so to speak. The other tribes demanded that the tribe of Benjamin deliver the residents of Gibeah to the rest of the nation so that justice could be done. The whole tribe of Benjamin refused, and they actually fought a war with the other tribes rather than punish the evil-doers. Naturally, there was a great deal of outrage against the tribe of Benjamin. The other Israelites destroyed almost the entire tribe. The only survivors were six hundred Benjamite warriors who escaped into the hills. Everyone else – including women and children, had been killed.

In their rage, the other tribes had sworn an oath to not allow their daughters to marry any Benjamite. That meant that within a few years, there would be no more tribe of Benjamin. But after the war, the Israelites began to mourn for the loss of the twelfth tribe. They looked for a way to get wives for the few remaining men of Benjamin without violating their oaths, so that the tribe could be eventually restored. They found that one city in Israel had refused to go to war along with the other people – the city of Jabesh-Gilead, on the other side of the Jordan river Valley. In effect, Jabesh-Gilead had also been defending the evildoers, at least passively, by refusing to fight for justice. So the rest of the Israelites took all of the unmarried women in that city, and gave them to the Benjamites to be their wives. If this sounds brutal and awful, it is. The Bible does not say that what they did in this situation was good and right. It just tells us what actually happened. And we know from historical studies that those kinds of thing certainly did happen all throughout the region in those days.

Last week I explained that I think the Lord’s choice of Saul was in part to remove the shame of the tribe of Benjamin. Not only was Saul from Benjamin, but he was actually from the town of Gibeah – the very town that had committed such shameful acts. The Lord was saying to them, “You are no longer under a cloud of shame. You are not second-class in my eyes. Your forgiveness is complete.”

But there was another group that was still under a cloud of shame for that incident – the city of Jabesh-Gilead. They too, had defended the evil act of Benjamin, even if only passively. When Saul was made king, the shame of Benjamin and of Gibeah was finally removed. But it appeared that Jabesh-Gilead was forgotten by God in all this. Their sin had not been as great, but they had suffered too, and they still lived under a cloud of shame. God was finally noticing Benjamin and Gibeah, but no one seemed to remember poor Jabesh-Gilead.

Now, after Saul was chosen as king, things got even worse for Jabesh-Gilead. The foreign nation of Ammon came up to besiege the city. You can almost see the low self-esteem born of 200 years of shame. They didn’t even pretend they had the courage to fight, and they were pretty sure none of the other Israelites would be interested in coming to their aid. They started negotiating a surrender right away, ready to give up their freedom in order to keep their lives. As often happens when a bully encounters someone with a poor sense of self-worth, the bully senses weakness, and begins to pile it on. Surrender wasn’t good enough for the Ammonites. They wanted to rub the faces of their enemies in it. They demanded that all the men have their right eyes gouged out, as one of the conditions of surrender.

The next exchange of messages sounds strange to us who are used to modern warfare. The city of Jabesh-Gilead asked for seven days to see if anyone would help them. The strange thing is that the Ammonites granted them the time. But there are three reasons for this. First, if the Ammonites didn’t grant the time they would end up having to fight for sure, but if they waited, there was still a chance of a bloodless victory. Second, the Ammonites probably felt that the other Israelite tribes were too disorganized to do anything within seven days anyway. Third, both the Ammonites and the people of Jabesh-Gilead seemed doubtful that anyone would help them. They were the black sheep of the family. Of any town in Israel, they were the least likely to be helped.

Their messengers went all over Israel. When the messengers got to Gibeah, Saul’s home town, no one thought to go get the king. In fact, his royal majesty was plowing a field at that moment. He just happened to come to town as the people were weeping over the fate of Jabesh-Gilead.

6 And the Spirit of God rushed upon Saul when he heard these words, and his anger was greatly kindled. 7 He took a yoke of oxen and cut them in pieces and sent them throughout all the territory of Israel by the hand of messengers, saying, “Whoever does not come out after Saul and Samuel, so shall it be done to his oxen!” Then the dread of the LORD fell upon the people, and they came out as one man. (1 Samuel 11:6)

Years ago my wife Kari did an exhaustive study on the Holy Spirit. She has pointed out to me many times that when the Holy Spirit comes on people in the Old Testament, it often seems to be almost an external thing, and God seems to use people whether or not they are close to him or in tune with him. For instance, the hero Samson was clearly ignorant of God, and lived a sinful life – and yet God used him. After Jesus came, however, the Holy Spirit stopped working in that external way, and now he is connected with all who believe in Jesus through a spirit-to-spirit connection. Now the spirit is within everyone who trusts Jesus, and he flows through us and does his work from the inside out.

Saul was living in those Old Testament times, however, and in spite of his deficiencies, God used him. The Spirit came on him, and he acted. Even as God was using him, however, we can see his insecurity. First, he called the people not only in his own name, but also the name of Samuel, as if he was afraid they wouldn’t come for the summons of the king alone.

The next thing he did was somewhat typical of ancient Middle Eastern leaders, except with a few surprising differences. In those days, when people swore allegiance to a king or leader, that leader would confiscate someone’s cow or goat, and cause it to be cut in pieces. Then the leader would declare something like this: “Unless you fulfill your oaths of loyalty to me, I will come and cut you into pieces, just as this animal has been cut to pieces.”

But Saul changed the ceremony. First, he didn’t confiscate anyone else’s oxen. He cut up his own animals – shooting himself in the foot, you might say. And then, he did not say: “I will come and do this to you, if you do not fulfill your oaths to support me and send warriors to help me.” Instead, he said: “I will do this to your oxen.” It’s almost humorous. He has already destroyed his own oxen, and now he threatens not the people, but their cattle. Again, even in his boldness, we see glimpses of insecurity.

Verse seven describes a large number of people who responded: three-hundred thousand men from “Israel,” plus thirty thousand from Judah.

I struggle with the actual numbers here. In World War Two, the famous American Third Army, led by General Patton, was about three hundred thousand men. But even in the days of Patton, it was a massive effort to keep so many men fed, supplied, and organized. The supplies were measured in thousands of tons. I find it difficult to believe that there was such a massive army in the days of king Saul, which was at the very beginning of the Iron Age.

Thankfully, there is a very easy explanation. The Hebrew word for “thousands” is written exactly the same way as another word that could mean “war leaders” or “chieftains,” or “family leaders.” In those days, relatively few people had weapons of bronze or iron. You had to be somewhat wealthy or influential in order to obtain such things. So battles were organized around a few well-armed warriors who had swords, spears, shields, and so on that were made of bronze or iron. These well armed warriors were each supported by a few followers who were more lightly armed with clubs, slings and perhaps farming implements.

Therefore, rather than a number, the word “thousands” could mean “well armed war leader and his followers.” Especially at this point in history, the word more likely meant something like that, rather than “thousands.”

So I think it is reasonable to read it that there were three hundred well-armed war leaders from Israel, plus another thirty from Judah, plus somewhere between five and twenty lightly armed followers for each leader. Therefore, my best guess is that this represents maybe two or three thousand men total.

In any case, they assembled for battle and went up and destroyed the Ammonites, saving the city of Jabesh-Gilead. This no-account, shame-filled place has now been protected and defended by the most powerful people in the country. As with the tribe of Benjamin and the city of Gibeah, they have been forgiven, and their shame removed.

I have pointed out some of Saul’s faults, and unfortunately, we’ll see even more in the future, but as I said last week, God was not just trying to mess up the Israelites for rejecting the Lord as their king. Saul, among all the tribes of Israel, would have been more sensitive to the shame and disgrace of Jabesh-Gilead than anyone else. His own tribe and clan had been under that same cloud until he was chosen as king. I am reminded again of 1 Corinthians, written by another man from the tribe of Benjamin, who was also (originally) called Saul:

26 Brothers, consider your calling: Not many are wise from a human perspective, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. 27 Instead, God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. 28 God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world — what is viewed as nothing — to bring to nothing what is viewed as something, 29 so that no one can boast in His presence. (1Cor 1:26-29, HCSB)

Saul was chosen by the Lord. He started out well. God graciously gave him opportunity after opportunity to respond in faith. In this instance, he did.

What does all this mean for you right now?

Maybe, like Saul, you are facing confusion, hurt and disappointment with God. Perhaps the Lord has given you a calling or done something in your life that seemed momentous. It seemed like it was all heading somewhere. But now everyone is turning out the lights and heading home, and you are left to make your way back to life as usual, and you don’t understand. You wonder what it was all about, if all these ways in which God seemed to be at work amount to nothing. I don’t have every answer for you. But I do know that Saul experienced that. In time, however, God showed him what to do and opened up the opportunity to step fully into his calling. Trust the Lord that he will do that for you also, even if it looks like it is all over right now.

On the other hand, maybe you have been dealing with insecurity, like Saul. The Lord has shown you he is real. He has spoken to your heart, revealed himself through the Bible. But you aren’t sure if you can trust him. Maybe you are afraid to step up to God’s calling. Perhaps that is because you don’t yet know him very well. Here, you can take a different path than Saul. Seek the Lord. Seek him by reading the bible, or listening to recordings of scripture passages. Seek him in music, in fellowship with other Christians, in worship. And make a decision to trust him and trust that what he says is true. Trusting means you act in accordance with that trust.

You might be someone who feels like the city of Jabesh-Gilead. For a while maybe other people shared your shame or humiliation. But now they’ve been able to move on, and you are stuck in the same old place. You feel forgotten. Maybe things have even gotten worse lately. You’ve gone from a bad place to a really dangerous or horrible place. I think the Lord would say to you, through this scripture, “Do not fear! Do not give up hope. I never forget you. Sometimes I let things get a lot worse so I can then make them far, far better than ever before.”

Pause for a few moments now, and listen to what the Lord is saying. Thank him for it, and receive it with the choice of faith.