1 SAMUEL 15
Read 1 Samuel 15:1-35
We see in this chapter the end of the reign of Saul as king. He will still be around for a while but this is the stage at which the Lord rejects him and, as if to emphasise the point, Samuel withdraws his prophetic word as well (v35). The problem can be seen from the beginning of this chapter when Samuel says to Saul, ‘listen now to the message from the Lord’. Saul is told to destroy the Amalekites totally, men, women, children, livestock, but when we read the account of the events, he does not do that, he does not carry out exactly the instruction from the Lord. Samuel makes this point when he says to Saul (who claimed to have carried out the Lord’s instructions to the letter), ‘what is this bleating of sheep in my ears?’ Saul did not do what the Lord told him to do despite his protestations, ‘But I did obey the Lord’ (v20). We saw in the last chapter that Saul had overstepped his role as king by taking on the priestly duties of Samuel. Now he had simply disobeyed God and God’s response through the prophet Samuel was, ‘Because you have rejected the word of the Lord he has rejected you as king’ (v23).
Something that bothers most modern readers (as it did back in Joshua) is the Lord’s command to totally destroy the Amalekites, ‘men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys’ (v3). How can these be the words of a loving God whose compassion is over all that he has made (Psalm 145:9)? It sounds awful to us. And it is awful, but it is God’s judgement and that can sometimes be terrible. Scripture does not portray God as our friendly bearded figure in the sky. God’s wrath can be truly awful (in the old-fashioned sense of the term – God is awesome and his deeds can be awful). But God’s dealings with the Amalekites is his judgement upon them, and he uses Saul and the Israelites to carry out that judgement. When the Israelites came up out of Egypt and before they even reached Sinai, the Amalekites attacked them, ‘How he attacked you on the way, when you faint and weary, and cut off at your rear all who lagged behind you (Dt 25:17-19). This was a vicious and cowardly attack on the weakest’. Samuel refers to the current generation of Amalekites as sinners (v18) and notes that their king, Agag, is responsible for war crimes (v33).
The last verse says that the Lord was grieved that he had made Saul king over Israel. The question is, if God knew that Saul wasn’t up to it, why did he choose him as king? One answer to this is that it was to show the Israelites how foolish they were in demanding a king to be like the other nations. Samuel told them it was a bad idea but they insisted. Sometimes God’s judgement upon sinners is to let them continue in their sin, and Paul explores this in Romans Chapter 1 Verses 18-32.