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1 Samuel 9:1-2  There was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish, the son of Abiel, son of Zeror, son of Becorath, son of Aphiah, a Benjaminite, a man of wealth.  And he had a son whose name was Saul, a handsome young man.  There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he.  From his shoulders upward he was taller than any of the people.

In the previous chapter, Scripture deals with one of the many struggles the great prophet/priest, Samuel, was having with God’s covenant people.  The people had wanted a king, ‘like all the other nations’, but God’s faithful spokesman had warned them of the problems they would have with a king  – he will be a greedy, self-serving tyrant, a control-freak who will want to run their lives for his own advantage, and it will signify their blatant rejection of the LORD’s rightful leadership of their lives – he alone is their King.

But God in his Sovereign Grace allows Samuel to grant their request in order to teach them, albeit as usual, the hard way.  And now into the historical record comes something that they would see as good news. God has found someone of whom they would highly approve, of whom they would be justly proud – Saul: tall, dark and handsome, someone they could literally look up to, and make them the envy of all the other nations!  Saul ticked all the ‘outward appearance’ boxes – “Watch out nations, here we come in power”.

How sad it is that such thinking has dominated every worldview that rejects God’s rightful rule in his world ever since, including. and especially, our own culture!  We, too, are learning the hard way, although the lessons are abundant in Scripture.  When Saul, their ‘looked up to’ King failed them time-and-time-again, God, in his great mercy, gave them David, ‘who found favour before God’ (Acts 7:46), who didn’t even make the first cut in a search for Saul’s successor because he was only a ‘little kid’ whose job was to look after sheep because he was apparently not capable of anything more demanding (1 Samuel 16)!  And David changed the nation’s whole culture as its ‘greatest ever’ king and set the pattern for what it meant to ‘fear the Lord’ in obedience to his Word, as they waited for their one, true, perfect, Anointed Messah King.

Sadly, history repeated itself, as it inevitably does, and the culture of God’s covenant people then descended back into its old humanistic ways, so when King Jesus (Christ/Messiah) finally came among them, he too, as Isaiah had predicted, “was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah53:3)!  Whenever will the nations (including, and especially, the Jewish people today – let us continue to pray) learn, in the face of all the clear evidence, that the humble, contrite ‘way of the Cross’ is always best, no matter how counter-culture it might seem to us, and no matter how hard it might seem to be to ‘swim against the tide’ of strong, aggressive, humanistic public opinion.

– Bruce Christian