This was election week. We got to vote for our MEPs. From time to time we have to choose our leaders. Members of Parliament. Councillors. Churches have to choose leaders – choosing the next vicar, who’s on the PCC, and so on.
Many of us also get to be leaders. Leaders at work. Leaders at home. Leaders in the church.
We all know that there are good and bad leaders.
1 Samuel chapter 31 brings to a close the story of the first king of Israel, King Saul. And what we see here is that it’s disastrous for people if they have a leader like him.
But before we get to chapter 31, we’d better catch up with the story of 1 Samuel. Some of us know 1 Samuel quite well, but it would help us all to remind ourselves of the story.
The story of 1 Samuel
Two weeks ago, we were in 1 Samuel chapter 3, the call of Samuel.
If you were here, you’ll remember that God spoke to a young man called Samuel in the middle of the night. God had been almost totally silent in Israel. But then God broke his silence. Samuel learnt to recognise God’s voice, and from then on the people could regularly hear God speak. God would speak to Samuel, and Samuel would relay the messages as reliable words from God.
Samuel’s first message was a chilling one. The leader in Israel at the time was the head priest, a man called Eli. Eli and his sons were abusing their office, exploiting it for their own ends. They were feathering their own nest. Doing what they wanted, and not listening to what God had to say.
God told Samuel that he would destroy Eli’s household. He’d previously said that he wasn’t pleased with Eli and would judge them. Eli hadn’t heeded the warnings. So now it was time for God to act.
And in the very next chapter, 1 Samuel chapter 4, he does. Israel’s neighbours, the Philistines, were attacking Israel. The people knew that only God could defend them. So Eli’s two sons had taken the ark of the covenant, the special gold box that symbolised God’s presence, to the battle field. But everything went wrong. The ark was captured. Eli’s two sons were killed. And Eli himself died when he heard the news of this tragedy.
God did just as he said he would through Samuel. Eli and his sons were dead. And God used the Philistines to do it.
Eventually, the Philistines return the ark. Samuel gets old. The people start to look to the future. They say to Samuel: “Give us a king like the other nations have. They’ve got a visible leader who can rally the troops and bring security and stability to the nation. We want a king like that.”
Samuel’s desperately upset. He takes it personally. Has he not done a good enough job? But God tells him not to take it personally. It’s not actually Samuel they’ve rejected at all. It’s God, who’s their true king and leader.
God gives them a king. He gives them just the kind they asked for – one who’s tall, dark and handsome. His name is Saul.
The cracks start to appear almost immediately. He thinks he knows better than God. God told Saul to wait 7 days in a town called Gilgal, then Samuel would come and offer sacrifices to ask for God’s blessing. The deadline approaches, the Philistine army is massing its troops, and Saul decides it would be better to have the sacrifices than to wait for Samuel.
Then a bit later he does it again. God tells him to conquer a particular town, and he’s to destroy all the cattle as he does so. It’s a specific instruction, and God had a reason for it. Saul realises how useful those cattle could be for God’s worship, so he decides it would be better to spare them.
Saul’s an able leader. But he decides, twice, that his strategic thinking is more important than the word of God. So God rejects him as king. God sends Samuel to anoint Saul’s successor, the second king of Israel, David.
In the rest of 1 Samuel, Saul is still the official king, but David is waiting in the wings.
Saul steadily grows jealous of David’s success and popularity. He starts to hunt David down. Several times he tries to kill him. David, on his part, just waits his time. Twice, he gets the chance to kill Saul, but both times he spares his life. Saul is God’s chosen king. David respects that.
The Battle of Mount Gilboa
Which brings us to chapter 31 God finally catches up with Saul.
Israel is locked into fierce battle with the Philistines. The losses are heavy. Imagine our narrator is using a film camera. He zooms into one small skirmish. It’s Saul’s 3 sons, all killed. Then the camera finds another clash in the battle. This time it’s Saul. He’s surrounded by archers, and he’s badly wounded.
Saul responds true to form. Verse 4: Saul said to his armour-bearer, ‘Draw your sword and run me through, or these uncircumcised fellows will come and run me through and abuse me’. Saul sees how bad things are, and he concludes there’s no happy outcome. The odds are stacked against him. He doesn’t want to become a POW.
What a contrast to David. Just after David was anointed, he found himself facing the Philistines in battle. The odds were equally stacked against him. Little squirt David, versus the giant Goliath. David calls him an uncircumcised Philistine. But David trusts in God. Goliath may be big, but God is bigger.
Whereas Saul’s lifetime habit has been to put his confidence in his military strategy, his fighting skill, his strategic thinking. Surrounded by archers on Mount Gilboa, it’s too late to change. He’s not going to start relying on God at this late stage.
Saul’s people have their confidence there too. Verse 5: When the armour-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he too fell on his sword and died with him. Saul was their champion. Now he’s gone, all hope is lost. The Israelites actually resemble the Philistines in the battle with Goliath. All hopes pinned on their champion.
Then the narrator’s camera zooms right out, wider even than the battlefield. We see the whole nation, even far away over the Jordan. The Israelites are fleeing their towns in panic. The Philistines move in to occupy them. God had given them this land to live in, a land flowing with milk and honey. He graciously displaced the people who lived there to make room for his people. But all of that is now reversed.
It’s devastating. Not just for Saul – for the people. They had pinned their all hopes on Saul. Saul’s confidence was in himself, such that he had no time for the word of God. The people were badly let down; it was totally misplaced confidence.
The Philistines come to steal their trophy. They find the bodies of Saul and his sons, and they take those bodies to display in the temples of their gods. “Look how strong we are”, they say. We’re the biggest and the strongest. We even overcame the mighty Saul.
In many ways, this battle reflects the one in which Eli and his sons died. Samuel directly prophesied the outcome. Eli and Saul died on the same day as their sons, because of a battle with the Philistines. The Philistines came to steal a trophy. Only there’s a difference. When Eli died, they stole the ark of the covenant. This time, they steal the body of the king. “Look how strong we are; we’ve got their God” has become “Look how strong we are; we’ve got their king.” Yet again, we see where the people’s confidence lay.
In 1 Samuel, the ark had centre-stage up to the point when the people ask for a king. From that moment on, the ark is absent from the account, apart from one instance when Saul asks for it out of superstition.
The Philistines are wrong of course. This doesn’t prove that they’re stronger than Israel’s king or their God. They won this battle because God gave it to them. There’s a lovely detail in there. After the battle was over, verse 9, they sent messenger throughout the land of the Philistine to proclaim the news in the temple of their idols and among their people. Run quickly; tell the people we won, and tell our gods to, because they haven’t yet heard the news. Some gods!
No, this battle was not won because of the superior strength of the Philistines. That was Saul’s mistake, thinking that everything was decided on such a superficial basis. No, the battle was the Lord’s. And if only Saul had realised that. But instead, he misplaced his confidence. He trusted himself. And the people gladly colluded in this.
The people of Jabesh-Gilead
Before, the story closes, there’s a little cameo of something nobler.
Jabesh-Gilead was Saul’s town. His first act as king was to rescue this town from a Philistine blockade. These people didn’t know that Saul had died because God had abandoned him. Frankly they didn’t care. Saul was still their king. And they were going to make sure he got a dignified burial.
What they did was enormously brave. We’re told in verse 12 that these were valiant men, and so they were. They expressed their loyalty to the conquered Saul. That would put them and their town at the top of the list of pockets of resistance to clean up. That was brave. So they broke into the Philistine temple, and stole their war-trophy from under their noses. This took great courage, and David was later to praise them for it.
These men warn us not to play judge. God may have abandoned Saul and judged him, but he remained king. Like David before them, the residents of Jabesh-Gilead new Saul was to be respected as long as he was king.
Even today, God will sometimes bring disaster on leaders who put their confidence in themselves. Sometimes, their people get hurt in the process. How easily we could drift to being judgemental. We cheer inwardly when we see the leader topple. The men of Jabesh-Gilead show us a better way. We don’t judge. We respect our leaders.
Jesus – the king we all need
All this must make you wonder if there are any leaders in the world who qualify. Are there leaders who sit humbly beneath God’s word, and don’t rely on how strong or clever they are?
Israel must have wondered. David was the king who was more like this than any other. After David, things went downhill. The kings after David looked even more like Saul than Saul did.
But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, you will read of a promise God made to David. One day, there would be another king from David’s line of descendants. This king would be like David, only even better. And this one would rule the whole world, and would do so forever.
We need a king who will recognise that his strength is in God, who doesn’t put his confidence in how strategic or strong he is, who puts his confidence in the word of God.
At the start of Jesus’ public ministry he spent 40 days in the desert. 3 times, the Devil tempted him. Why bother with the cross? Why not just worship Satan and test God? Then Jesus could be king over the world now, the easy way. Saul would have said yes. Jesus said no. He was going to be king, but he was going to do it God’s way.
At the end of Jesus’ public ministry, he knelt in prayer in a garden. 3 times he prayed: I’m about to drink the cup of God’s righteous anger. I’m about to die on that cross. If there’s any other way to save the world, please: I’m the Son of God, get me out of here. But, no, I know there isn’t. How then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must be this way. Let your word be done. Let your will be done.
Confidence
The end of Saul’s life was a tragedy. His self-confidence didn’t only mean the end of him. It meant awful losses for the people who had put their trust in him.
Where’s your confidence in life? Where do you look for leadership? So many people today pin their hopes on figures like Saul Great leaders. Exuding confidence. But it’s self-confidence, rather than a humble, confident submission to the Word of God.
Ultimately, Jesus is the only one deserving of our trust. To pin your hopes on anyone else is to set yourself on the path to ruin. The people of Israel learnt this the hard way on the slopes of Mount Gilboa.
And then we look for other leaders. Leaders of our nation. Especially: Leaders of our churches. We must seek out leaders like Jesus. Those of us in leadership must be leaders like Jesus. Like David. Not like Saul. Leaders who sit humbly under the Word of God, who know that God holds ever church, every nation in his hands. Leaders who put their confidence there, and not in their great rhetoric, their strength, or their excellent strategies.