Scripture Daily

Context No. 533 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

Context · Reflection

1 Samuel 10:14-19: in context

14Saul’s uncle said to him and to his servant, “Where did you go?” He said, “To seek the donkeys. When we saw that they were not found, we came to Samuel.” 15Saul’s uncle said, “Please tell me what Samuel said to you.” 16Saul said to his uncle, “He told us plainly that the donkeys were found.” But concerning the matter of the kingdom, of which Samuel spoke, he didn’t tell him. 17Samuel called the people together to the LORD to Mizpah; 18and he said to the children of Israel, “The LORD, the God of Israel, says ‘I brought Israel up out of Egypt and I delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians, and out of the hand of all the kingdoms that oppressed you.’ 19But you have today rejected your God, who himself saves you out of all your calamities and your distresses; and you have said to him, ‘No! Set a king over us!’ Now therefore present yourselves before the LORD by your tribes and by your thousands.”

Saul has just been secretly anointed by Samuel as Israel's first king, and when his uncle asks what Samuel said, Saul tells him about the lost donkeys they had been searching for but, the text notes carefully, says nothing about the kingdom. It is a small, becoming detail; the newly anointed king does not go around broadcasting his elevation. But then Samuel gathers the whole nation and, before he presents their king, delivers a blunt word from God that reframes what they are actually doing. I brought Israel up out of Egypt, God says, and delivered you from every kingdom that oppressed you. But you have today rejected your God, who himself saves you out of all your calamities, and have said, set a king over us.

That is a hard verdict on what looked like a reasonable request. The people had asked for a king so they could be like all the other nations, with a visible ruler to lead them and fight their battles. It seemed practical, even sensible. But God names what was underneath it: in demanding a king like everyone else's, they were rejecting him, the God who had actually saved them again and again, in favor of a tangible, conventional substitute they could see. They wanted what the other nations had more than they wanted to keep trusting the invisible God who had never once failed to deliver them. The visible king was, at bottom, a replacement for trusting God directly.

That desire is deeply familiar. I too want something I can see and manage, something like what everyone around me leans on, a tangible source of security I can point to, rather than the harder work of trusting an invisible God who has actually carried me through every past trouble. The craving to be like everyone else, to have the conventional thing others rely on, can quietly be a way of rejecting reliance on God himself. What visible, conventional substitute am I demanding to lean on, because everyone else has one, in place of trusting the God who has already saved me from everything behind me?

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