Scripture Daily

Context No. 4299 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

Context · Reflection

1 Samuel 16:1-6: in context

1The LORD said to Samuel, “How long will you mourn for Saul, since I have rejected him from being king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go. I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided a king for myself among his sons.” 2Samuel said, “How can I go? If Saul hears it, he will kill me.” The LORD said, “Take a heifer with you, and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.’ 3Call Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do. You shall anoint to me him whom I name to you.” 4Samuel did that which the LORD spoke, and came to Bethlehem. The elders of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, “Do you come peaceably?” 5He said, “Peaceably; I have come to sacrifice to the LORD. Sanctify yourselves, and come with me to the sacrifice.” He sanctified Jesse and his sons, and called them to the sacrifice. 6When they had come, he looked at Eliab, and said, “Surely the LORD’s anointed is before him.”

The prophet Samuel is grieving over Saul, the king who has failed and been rejected. But God comes to him with a gentle challenge and a call forward: how long will you mourn for Saul, since I have rejected him? Fill your horn with oil and go; I am sending you to Jesse, for I have provided a king for myself among his sons. God does not despise Samuel's grief, but he calls him to move on to the new thing he has prepared.

What stands out is God's summons out of prolonged mourning into a new work. Samuel's grief over Saul was real and understandable, but there came a point where God said, in effect, it is time to move forward; I have provided something new. God had not been defeated by Saul's failure; he had already prepared a king. The call was to stop grieving what was lost and to step into what God was now doing.

God does not despise our mourning, but neither does he mean us to stay in it forever. There comes a time when he calls us, as he called Samuel, to lift our eyes from what is lost to what he has provided, to move forward into the new thing he is preparing. God is never at the end of his purposes; beyond our losses, he has already provided. The call is to let him lead us from mourning into the new work of his hand.

Am I lingering in grief over a loss beyond the point where God is calling me forward, and will I let him lift my eyes, as he did Samuel's, from what is lost to the new thing he has already provided, trusting that his purposes are not defeated by what I have lost?

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