As we leave 1 Samuel – what do we learn from it? Here’s an overall summary, the whole book in one post – I’m hoping it might help (or be worth filing!) for if we’re wanting (or asked) to introduce this remarkable book, to make it available to our church… Because presenting its basic story can give our brothers and sisters courage to go exploring it…
What do we learn from this book? Lots of things. The earliest books of the Bible seem to be setting out the fundamentals of faith, of salvation and walking with God. But one way of looking at the next ones – 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah – is as a leadership manual. (In fact the early Latin old testament called 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings the `four books of Kings’; kings, that is, leaders.) Now we need to remember immediately that in God’s kingdom a `leader’ is merely someone who serves some others somewhere by helping them move forward with God; and in this sense all of us should expect to serve God as `leaders’ at some stages of our lives.
But then we want to do it well! And in these books we learn from many leaders, good and bad. Eli, Samuel, Saul, Jonathan, David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Jeroboam, Elijah: a whole series of lessons for anyone who is serious about wanting to be used by God; anyone who wants to know what kinds of things mark out the people God uses – and those He can’t.
The lessons are straightforward but striking. We saw how Eli (chs 2-5) was an example of a good man whose life was ultimately fruitless because he proved unable to apply holiness in his relationships with those closest to him. From Samuel, in contrast, we learned the key aspects of leading God’s people back into repentance (ch7). Then followed 1 Samuel 8 and 12, key chapters for understanding leadership in principle; because they mark the Israelites’ transition from servant-hearted `judges’ to (too often) dominating `kings’; these chapters help us understand the two alternative kinds of leaders (or parents, teachers, managers) we can be. And we watched how God respects the people’s freewill, and works creatively within what they’ve chosen; even though their choice has been explicitly to ignore His warnings of what a king will be like – warnings which were to come all too true in the disastrous later part of Solomon’s reign, of course.
Then there’s Jonathan, a classic example of adventurous courage rooted in faith: what kind of person is this whom God can use so strikingly? Ch14 gave us some ideas. More centrally, there’s Saul. Saul is a great tragic figure. He starts so well (ch9), but deep down he doesn’t have a gut-level, passionate concern for careful obedience to the Word of God (chs13,15); and in the end (ch15) he has to be set permanently aside from God’s creative purposes. (Lord, please keep us, keep me, from that…) And yet that wasn’t the end of Saul’s story; maybe some repentance was still possible for him; but instead we watched Saul’s jealousy of David slowly flowering, step by step, into murder (chs 18-20) – step by step downward till finally Saul gets what he wants in ch27, and David is driven in exhaustion out of Israel and over to the Philistine side. And Saul himself now faces the ultimate horror of the silence of God, as we saw last time, and turns catastrophically to the occult (ch28). And 1 Samuel closes in ch31 with the tragic death of this king who started out so well; the tragic death of Saul, and his sons, and the subjugation of Israel by the godless Philistines.…. It’s a stark progression of a man living increasingly in the sphere of tragedy, not in the sphere of God’s `kingdom’ where God is both obeyed and reigns.
And then there’s David. A damaged, dysfunctional kid from a dysfunctional family, as we’ve seen, a family who leave him out with the sheep (and lions) when there’s a big celebration on (ch16; and see 17:28). And those wounds never quite heal; scratch David and you periodically encounter a thug (see the Nabal incident (ch25), or the way he acts even at the end of his life in 1 Kings 2). It’s vital that we are pre-Pentecost here, when the Spirit is not yet come in the way we know Him now, revealing His colossal power to interrupt and transform this tragic determinism of our broken world that can rebound down a family line from generation to generation. Instead, as we look at 2 Samuel we see David’s family’s dysfunctionality replayed in the next generations (chs13,15), in a way that shows clearly what traditions of family behaviour had been handed down through David’s clan.
And yet, astonishingly, God chooses David; indeed the point 1 Samuel makes, over and over again, is that God doesn’t choose the naturally impressive guy – whether it’s Saul in 9:2 or the huge Goliath; he chooses the `weak things of the world, the lowly things, the despised things’ when He wants to do something that will last (1 Corinthians 1:27-28). God chooses and uses damaged people to do something glorious; and that should inspire many of us to worship and thanksgiving! Even more astonishingly, Jesus chose to define himself as the `son of David’, and in 1 Samuel we’ve seen ways in which David foreshadows his far greater `son’: the rejected king biding his time while the `natural’ (indeed God-ordained) power-system works out its history of futility – but meanwhile building (and again from the most unpromising material) an `alternative community’, malcontents (22:1-2) turned into `mighty men’, with whom he will share his kingdom when its time is finally come. And meanwhile he teaches them the ways, the tactics, of the new kingdom, tactics reminiscent of the sermon on the mount (ch24). Yet at the same time David (like us?) remains only a very incomplete picture of Jesus. And so ch25, for instance, is a study of anger gone way over the top
And as we saw last week, there’s another vital lesson in all this, another to turn into worship: in the end no one can really be the true Leader we need, except Jesus Himself. We’ve seen this lesson earlier: Joseph rescued Israel temporarily, but at the end of Genesis he’s dead and Israel are headed into slavery; Moses rescues Israel even more effectively, but at the end of Deuteronomy he’s dead also, unable to bring his people into the promised land. And so it is in 1 Samuel too. Saul is, as kings go, not a bad king (eg 11:13,14:47-48); but the book’s last chapter shows him having failed completely and utterly. David will be an even better king; but 2 Samuel’s last chapter will show him lapsing into conceited folly highly destructive of the nation. (And Solomon, the wisest king Israel would ever have, died leaving a situation where Israel would be torn permanently into two pieces.) Only Jesus is able lastingly to be the Saviour and King we so badly need.
But we’ve also seen that God’s grace isn’t limited to the weaknesses of human leaders; His creative goodness always has ways of starting afresh. In 1 Sam 4 Israel suffered the ultimate humiliation of losing God’s Ark to the pagan Philistines, who put it in their temple to honour their own god; but the next two chapters showed that God’s power is amply able to handle that, whatever Israel’s vast failures, and He sorts it out spectacularly. Similarly Saul and his elite thugs learned the hard way in 19:18-24 that God’s Holy Spirit’s power is something no human being should play casual games with. Even the very first chapter of 1 Samuel points the same lesson. After all, why is the story of Hannah – whose name means grace – the story chosen for this book’s opening? Why does the whole book begin with this story of miraculous grace breaking into a despised woman’s despair of infertility – and this, indeed, for a woman from an area (1:1-2) linked to the darkest horrors of Israel’s earlier history in Judges 19?
God `knows how we are formed; He remembers that we are dust’, David himself wrote. And God chooses normal, `weak’ people, damaged people, even highly dysfunctional people, and trains and uses us to accomplish purposes glorious beyond our imaginations. 1 Samuel shows us more of this, step by step by God-overseen step. Share it, preach it!
