The eight earliest books of the Bible seem to be setting out the fundamentals of faith. One way of looking at the following nine books – Samuel, Kings, Chronicles etc – is as a very practical leadership training manual.
In fact the Latin old testament actually calls 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings the `four books of Kings’; kings, which of course means, leaders.
So that’s where we’ll feed next. `But I’m not a leader`?; well, if we say that, we need to recall immediately that in God’s kingdom a `leader’ is simply someone who serves some others by helping them move a step forward with God; and in this sense God will call each of us to lead sometime, particularly as we grow in Him. But how can I do this well? How can I be the kind of person God can really use to serve others and make things happen?
These books have lots of potential to help us. God uses them to help us learn from many leaders, good and bad. Eli, Samuel, Saul, Jonathan, David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Jeroboam, Elijah, Elisha, and many more: a whole series of worked examples for anyone serious about wanting to be used by God, anyone who wants to know what things mark out the people God uses – and those He can’t. In each case we should ask as we read them (and then pray!): What did this leader do right? What did they do wrong?
Predictably, the starting point of this set of books is God’s grace triumphant even in our weakness. Why is the story of Hannah – whose very name means grace – the one chosen for 1 Samuel’s opening? Why does the book begin with this story of the miraculous power of grace breaking into a despised woman’s despair of infertility – and this, indeed, for a woman belonging to an area (1:1-2) linked to the appalling horrors of Israel’s earlier history in Judges 19? A key theme common to this and the following stories – and what a huge encouragement for us – is that God’s grace isn’t limited by the weaknesses of human leaders; His creative goodness always has ways of starting afresh.
So likewise in 1 Samuel 4 Israel suffer the ultimate humiliation of losing God’s holy Ark to the pagan Philistines, who put it in their temple to honour their own god; but the following two chapters show that God’s power is amply able to take care of that, whatever Israel’s vast failures, and He sorts it out spectacularly. In contrast, big Saul and his tough thugs learn the hard way in 19:18-24 that in the presence of God’s Holy Spirit human strength, and weakness, are simply irrelevant. Oh yes: God `knows how we are formed; He remembers that we [as leaders too] are dust’, David himself wrote. God chooses normal, `weak’ people, damaged people, even (as we’ll see) highly dysfunctional people, and trains and uses us to accomplish purposes glorious beyond our imaginations. The books of Samuel will show us more of this, step by step by God-overseen step.
So God’s grace is where the leadership manual starts. And then it’s very interesting that the first two stories in this book of leadership training have to do with leaders’ families. (So does David’s story, and it isn’t remotely pretty.) After all, the family is often where a leader’s training begins, isn’t it. More about these things these next weeks…
(PS To quote Rob Parsons, these are also books about how leaders handle love affairs, commando raids, incest, the occult… and even what can happen if you pick the wrong public toilet (1 Samuel 24)…!)
