The Pride of Saul, Who Offered the Sacrifice

Proverbs 20:11 records that even a child makes himself known by his doings, whether his work is pure, and whether it is right. A child’s actions show what kind of character that child has. Adults, too, are not good at hiding the thoughts they hold in their hearts. Their feelings show plainly on their faces, and as they act those feelings out, people shape their own lives. Wrong deeds and good deeds alike may be hidden for a while, but in the end every fact comes to light. That is because the actions a person shows are that person’s character, and character cannot be hidden. When young children come home from playing outside, their mother can tell at once whether they played nicely at the playground or got into a fight. However hard they try to fool her, their mother knows them well and can judge exactly. In the same way, God sees the hearts of believers, and so he is never deceived. Later, when we stand before God, our own lives will be the evidence, so we cannot tell him lies. That is why we must live each day well. Only when we have the precious character that governs our feelings at every moment will our lives be beautiful.

Proverbs 16:1-2 says that the plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from Yahweh. All the ways of a man may be clean in his own eyes, but Yahweh weighs the motives, and so he is the one who judges good and evil.

Believers can achieve nothing without God. So if they commit all their deeds to Yahweh, they will be able to accomplish what they plan. That is because committing their own plans to God is an act of faith that acknowledges God’s wisdom and power. When children handle something as they please without talking it over with their parents, they do so because they either look down on their parents or do not trust them. There are times when children, unable to see what lies ahead, make hard a problem that would have been easy to solve if they had only talked to their parents.

If someone says they respect their parents but their actions do not follow, those words are a lie made up for their own benefit. In the same way, if you say you fear God but do not live by the Word, that confession is a lie. So your words and your actions must match. Only then can you be trusted by people, by the world and by God, and only then can you carry out more missions and enjoy blessings. A person who never puts anything into action and only keeps making resolutions, or whose feelings change easily, cannot win anyone’s trust, and life alongside such a person is wearisome. So you must always strive to be a consistent person.

At first Saul showed himself sincere, humble and obedient. When God called his name, he showed his humility by hiding among the baggage, and when Samuel anointed him, he obeyed. But after he had won the war against Ammon with God’s help and gained the people’s confidence, he grew proud, as though the victory had come from his own ability. Seeing such a king and such a people, Samuel rebuked them and told them to serve God in truth with all their heart. Everyone resolves to live by faith when they receive grace and answers from God, but it is so sad that as time goes by they forget to be thankful. God called them, raised them up and gave them the power to win, yet when they forget all of that, they cannot help but go the way of evil. Behind Saul’s great victory over Ammon was God’s heart: he wanted to establish Saul fully as king. If we forget such love from God and grow proud, we will be rebuked.

When Saul had been king for two years, he chose for himself three thousand men of Israel. Two thousand of them he kept to guard himself, and one thousand he placed with Jonathan in Gibeah. You will remember that when Saul was called to be king, the third prophecy said that a garrison of the Philistines was in Gibeah. The war began when Jonathan, who had received a thousand soldiers from Saul, attacked that Philistine garrison.

The people were afraid at the news of war, but Saul took Jonathan’s attack on the Philistines as his opportunity and ordered the Hebrews to gather quickly. Here Saul calls Israel “Hebrews,” a name that goes back to Abram crossing the Euphrates River and entering Canaan, the promised land. The word “Hebrew” means “to cross the river.” By crossing the Jabbok, the Red Sea and the Jordan, the people of Israel made that name come true in the history of the Hebrews.

In verse 4, when the people of Israel learned that war with the Philistines could not be avoided, they all gathered at Gilgal to follow Saul. For the war the Philistines prepared thirty thousand chariots and six thousand horsemen, and their soldiers were as many as the sand on the seashore. They encamped at Michmash, east of Beth Aven, and the name “Beth Aven” means “house of wickedness.” When Israel saw the chariots, the horsemen and the soldiers of the Philistines, they were afraid and hid in caves, in thickets and in the clefts of the rocks.

Hosea 10:5

5The inhabitants of Samaria will be in terror for the calves of Beth Aven; for its people will mourn over it, Along with its priests who rejoiced over it, for its glory, because it has departed from it.

Here Bethel, the house of God, had sunk into a place of idol worship, and so it came to be called Beth Aven, a name that scorned their faith. It is our faith that decides whether Bethel, once the house of God, becomes Beth Aven. It is like this: when the Holy Spirit comes upon your heart, you are a Christian, and when you are ruled by Satan, you become a beast. Whether you will be Bethel or Beth Aven, your life, the life of one who has received God’s grace, will decide.

The Philistines held a wide territory and were armed with many weapons and many soldiers, but Israel had no weapons and no trained soldiers. From the start this war was no contest. At the very time when the people of Israel had seen the enormous Philistine army, lost their will to fight and were busy hiding, Saul was spending anxious hours at Gilgal, waiting for Samuel so that sacrifice could be offered to God.

In verse 8, Saul waited for Samuel for the appointed time, but when Samuel did not come, he had the burnt offering and the peace offerings brought to him and offered the burnt offering himself. And just as Saul finished the sacrifice, Samuel arrived. Samuel asked the king what he had done. Saul answered that the people were scattering out of fear of the Philistines, that Samuel had not come within the appointed days, and that war with the Philistines was about to begin; in so urgent a situation, he said, he had no choice but to offer the sacrifice himself. From the conversation between the two, it seems that Saul had asked Samuel to come to Gilgal and offer sacrifice to God for him.

A burnt offering and peace offerings had to be offered to God to give faith to the scattering people, and when Samuel did not come at the promised time, the king offered the sacrifice. Saul’s words make it sound as if all the fault lay with Samuel. Of course, with the people scattering and the Philistine army coming up, it is easy to understand how anxious he must have been. As Saul said, the nation was in crisis, facing a threat to its very existence in which many people might be killed. In a situation like this, anyone might have done what Saul did.

If you were Saul, what would you decide? Every human being has a time they have set for themselves. We decide that God must help us by this deadline, or at least this far, and we pray for him to answer. And if he does not grant it by the time we have set, we reach, all on our own, the absurd decision that we may then do as we please. Saul, too, was anxious, thinking that if he did not offer the sacrifice at the time he had set, God would not help him. So the king offered the sacrifice that the priest should have offered.

A person who always makes excuses when facing a problem keeps on sinning. In just that way, Saul kept shifting the blame onto Samuel, making the excuse that it had all happened because of Samuel and insisting that he himself had no sin. If Saul had instead honestly confessed his wrong judgment to God and to Samuel and repented, God and Samuel would have helped him. God’s law always comes before the time Saul set. Saul broke it; he did what must never be done. It is God who decides to help people and to answer them. God does not work just because a person has decided. Relying wholly on God is true faith, and if we have made a wrong decision by human judgment, the wise thing is to repent at once.

In verse 13, Samuel told the king that he had done foolishly. He meant that because Saul did not truly fear God, he had acted foolishly. Samuel rebuked him: if the king had tried to keep the command God had given him, he would not have committed the sin of overstepping the limits of his office. Saul also knew that sacrifice was Samuel’s absolute right, but he could not overcome his fear of the world, and he sinned.

Samuel had clearly prophesied that if they did not fear God and serve him in truth with all their heart, both they and their king would be consumed. Even after hearing such a prophecy, Saul did not fear God, and that is why his kingdom did not continue long. Seen from the world’s point of view, this event could be understood as Saul offering sacrifice to God to protect his nation. He did not ask a foreign nation for help, and he did not sacrifice to an idol; he only offered the sacrifice because Samuel had not come and he had no other choice. So one might think it too harsh a curse to say that his kingdom would not continue long. But what matters is whether Saul kept God’s law. We must know that if we do not know God rightly, we can be rejected even after offering sacrifice. Given that God had laid down in his law that he would receive sacrifice only through the priest, he would have protected Israel even if Samuel had not come. For he is not a God who protects Israel only when he receives a sacrifice. If Israel had trusted God to the end, the outcome would have been different.

But the people who saw Saul offering the sacrifice would have thought it only natural for the king to offer it, since Samuel had not come, and they would have thought that now that the sacrifice had been offered, God would help them. Yet even if people approve, it is no use if God does not approve. For if we cannot tell whether we acted on our own ideas or according to God’s word, in the end we cannot walk the way of truth. If we think just a little about who is receiving the sacrifice Saul has just offered, we will easily see what sin he committed.

Verse 22: they had to fight the Philistines right away, but only Saul and Jonathan had weapons. This was because the Philistines had a policy of keeping iron to themselves so that Israel could not have weapons. When the people have no weapons like this, the war is lost without a fight. With only Saul and Jonathan armed, there was no way for Israel to defeat the Philistines, whatever they tried.

When Israel was conquering Canaan, God said in Deuteronomy 20:20 that they should cut down the trees that are not trees for food and use them as weapons until the city that made war with them fell. God knew that Canaan already had chariots of iron, and yet he commanded them to make weapons of wood and go to war. Can you understand a God like this? He is saying: do not mind what weapons the enemy has or how many they are; go to war against them with wooden swords. Looking at a God like this, we would find our faith shaken. Churchgoers whose faith says that only doing well in the world counts as strength would not be able to understand a God who tells them to make wooden swords. Their honest feeling would probably be that they will not believe in a God like this.

But those who believe in the God who gives victory even when they have nothing will work hard at making wooden swords, since they do not know where God will use them, and they will entrust their lives to God. Believers today do not listen to God’s word, even though it is God’s word, if it does not help them get on in the world. That is because they have the worldly thought that God, if he is God, ought to lift them up. But we must know that God does not choose people like this.

Saul did not have absolute faith in God. He had belonged to Benjamin, the smallest of all the tribes, and he failed to trust the God who had made him king, so he needed to repent thoroughly. Only then could he receive God’s forgiveness and grace. If he abandoned the God who had called him, the smallest, and set him in the highest place, and acted as though he had become king by his own ability, he would be stripped of all the grace and power he had received from God. In the end, this foolish behavior of Saul’s drove his sons to their deaths.

I hope you will take Saul as a mirror and have a faith that is true and honest. Even if the enemy is armed with chariots and horsemen, only a faith that trusts the God who is above their power can receive blessing. May you always obey the Word and wait patiently until God works. I bless you in the name of Jesus Christ.

1 Samuel 14:6-15

6Jonathan said to the young man who bore his armor, “Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. It may be that Yahweh will work for us; for there is no restraint on Yahweh to save by many or by few.” 7His armor bearer said to him, “Do all that is in your heart. Turn and, behold, I am with you according to your heart.” 8Then Jonathan said, “Behold, we will pass over to the men, and we will reveal ourselves to them. 9If they say thus to us, ‘Wait until we come to you!’ then we will stand still in our place, and will not go up to them. 10But if they say this, ‘Come up to us!’ then we will go up; for Yahweh has delivered them into our hand. This shall be the sign to us.” 11Both of them revealed themselves to the garrison of the Philistines: and the Philistines said, “Behold, the Hebrews are coming out of the holes where they had hidden themselves!” 12The men of the garrison answered Jonathan and his armor bearer, and said, “Come up to us, and we will show you something!” Jonathan said to his armor bearer, “Come up after me; for Yahweh has delivered them into the hand of Israel.” 13Jonathan climbed up on his hands and on his feet, and his armor bearer after him: and they fell before Jonathan; and his armor bearer killed them after him. 14That first slaughter, which Jonathan and his armor bearer made, was about twenty men, within as it were half a furrow’s length in an acre of land. 15There was a trembling in the camp, in the field, and among all the people; the garrison, and the raiders, also trembled; and the earth quaked, so there was an exceedingly great trembling.