Excuses of the Heart
When Jesse called David in from the sheep to stand before Samuel, David came. When God called Saul to stand before Israel as king, he was hiding in the baggage. But we tend to sympathize with Saul. After all, maybe he didn’t want to be king.
When Saul sacrificed to God instead of waiting for Samuel, we can understand his predicament because he was scared. And when he swore an oath in the heat of battle that anyone who ate before the Philistine army was overtaken would be killed, well everyone has lapses of judgement. And when Saul was supposed to kill King Agag and destroy all the Amalekites and all their stuff, but he didn’t, well he as good as did it. I mean he defeated them, right?
Saul’s life is a long decline of disobedience. Every disobedient act seems small and excusable, especially in the light of what David did to Bathsheba and Uriah. David’s sin seems so awful (and it was) whereas Saul’s sins seem so pathetic. So, he didn’t kill a king, so what?
And yet God’s removal of Saul as king was just and good. Samuel put it succinctly: “Has the Lord as great a delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord?”
God did not want a show of religiosity from Israel’s king. He wanted the king’s heart. In Psalm 50, the psalmist Asaph quotes God along very similar lines: “Not for sacrifices do I rebuke you; your burnt offerings are continually before me . . . Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving” [my emphasis].
God’s contention was not only with Israel’s king but with Israel herself. He never wanted a simple performance of the sacrificial system, but a performance with the sacrifice of thanksgiving coming from hearts that understood what the offense and the penalty of sin truly was, and how much it really cost to pay it.
David understood this. He wrote in Psalm 51 about his own sin concerning Bathsheba and Uriah: “For you will not delight in sacrifice or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken spirit and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
Saul never grasped this. His heart always had an excuse, just like the ones we want to make for him. To Saul, the Lord was always Samuel’s God, not his. In fact, as the story plays out, Saul’s faith was more in Samuel as a kind of shaman than in God himself. It was perhaps a sly bit of prophecy on Samuel’s part when he said to Saul, “Rebellion is as the sin of divination.”
The night before Saul killed himself on the field of battle, he sought out a witch to bring up the spirit of Samuel to tell him what he should do (Saul did not need her to know the dreadful army he was facing). But Samuel had long ago told Saul everything he needed to hear, and long ago Saul had refused to hear it.
