Scripture Daily

Context No. 567 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

Context · Reflection

1 Samuel 10:20-27: in context

20So Samuel brought all the tribes of Israel near, and the tribe of Benjamin was chosen. 21He brought the tribe of Benjamin near by their families and the family of the Matrites was chosen. Then Saul the son of Kish was chosen; but when they looked for him, he could not be found. 22Therefore they asked of the LORD further, “Is there yet a man to come here?” The LORD answered, “Behold, he has hidden himself among the baggage.” 23They ran and got him there. When he stood among the people, he was higher than any of the people from his shoulders and upward. 24Samuel said to all the people, “Do you see him whom the LORD has chosen, that there is no one like him among all the people?” All the people shouted and said, “Long live the king!” 25Then Samuel told the people the regulations of the kingdom, and wrote it in a book and laid it up before the LORD. Samuel sent all the people away, every man to his house. 26Saul also went to his house in Gibeah; and the army went with him, whose hearts God had touched. 27But certain worthless fellows said, “How could this man save us?” They despised him, and brought him no tribute. But he held his peace.

The day has come for Israel's first king to be publicly revealed, and Samuel narrows it down by lot, tribe by tribe, family by family, until the lot falls on Saul son of Kish. There is just one problem: when they look for him, he is nowhere to be found. They have to ask God where he is, and the answer is almost comic: behold, he has hidden himself among the baggage. On the very day of his calling, the man chosen to be king is crouching out of sight among the supplies and gear, hiding from the thing God has appointed him to. They have to run and drag him out, and when he stands up he is a head taller than everyone, the most obviously capable-looking man there, who had been hiding all the same.

There is something deeply human in that picture. Saul was tall, impressive, from a good family, exactly the sort of man you would expect to be confident. And when the calling actually came, he hid. Whether from fear, from a sense of inadequacy, from wanting to avoid the exposure and the weight of it, he tried to disappear among the baggage rather than step into what God was calling him to. And God simply told them where he was hiding. The calling did not evaporate because Saul hid from it; it found him among the luggage and called him out into the open.

That names something I do more often than I admit. When God calls me toward something that feels too big, too exposed, too likely to reveal my inadequacy, my instinct is to hide among the baggage, to make myself small and unavailable, to busy myself with lesser things so the calling passes to someone else. But God sees the hiding place. The thing he is calling me to does not disappear because I have ducked out of sight. Where am I hiding among the baggage from something God is calling me to, and if he already knows exactly where I am crouching, what would it mean to let myself be called out into the open?

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