40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 1 Samuel 10:23-11:15 (Episode 234)

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

The newly anointed King Saul is pulled from hiding and brought before the people. Some are skeptical of him but Saul's moment to prove them wrong is fast approaching. Some Ammonites make some trouble and a foolish agreement. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network HWSS Livestream Signup Chad Bird's New Book 1517 YouTube Donate

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Chad, what's going on, man? well I had a good weekend we got to see our grandkids there you go it's always it's always fun I don't have any of those uh hopefully hopefully not for a while four years yeah what a few more years yeah it was it was fun we got two grandsons got a granddaughter on the way uh be interesting to see what her life is like with two older brothers I'm sure some of our listeners out there have experienced that but uh yeah we had a good time good time with them then uh back to uh back to work yeah back to normality yeah podcasting and doing a little bit of writing this week and all the other fun stuff we get to do yeah awesome well we left uh we left saul

hiding in a bunch of baggage yeah what's up with him yeah he's a strange he is a strange character yeah so samuel's ready to make this dude king and uh it is interesting to tell you something about saul he is he's not at least at the beginning overly excited about this uh he seems at least at the very least he seems nervous yeah at the very least yeah he's a he's an odd guy i mean we we met him looking for his dad's donkeys he almost seems a little bit like dim-witted like he doesn't quite he doesn't have any idea who samuel is and uh he didn't forgot to bring his wallet with him has no money even though his dad is evidently a pretty wealthy guy and uh now when he's finally you know ready to be proclaimed king he's he's hunkered down behind the baggage

i mean this did happen rather quickly i mean he is probably i mean you would imagine you'd have to be shell shock yeah you'd be like a crazy kind of arrogant to be like yeah all right let's do it uh at the very this this is my destiny yeah what sell seems like at least initially is like kind of a simple guy he's like a big old dude that's but like you know he doesn't seem like he's got political aspirations or anything like that just seems like a like a big strong tall good old boy yeah yeah that's precisely he's he is not political uh he's not uh he's not out you know kissing babies and holding political rallies but it and this is significant to stress because what we'll see over time

is that he kind of grows into this, right? So he's kind of different. Some people start out with a lot of ambition and then they get to a certain point and after they get kicked around and bruised a little bit, they have maybe a little bit more humility. And then you have the opposite. You have people who start out with some humility

and just kind of stepping back from things, but they get thrust into a position that they never dreamed they'd be in and then after a while it goes to their head and they become ambitious after the fact so i think in saul's case that's what we're going to see with him so he kind of gets over time he gets pretty comfortable with his office you know and then this uh this new guy comes along this young kid from bethlehem and all the ladies are just gaga over him start making up songs about him and all of a sudden uh saul's like oh don't think i like this you know now all of a sudden now the the one thing he doesn't want to lose

is being king right yeah so anyway but we'll uh we'll get there we'll get there eventually we're yeah we're in the middle of chapter 10 and we have an interesting parallel i think it's a parallel here i don't know if i could convince everyone of this but it's pretty hard not to catch a parallel here with something we have covered before and that's the way that i left us last time, kind of had this lead in, this question to ask you as to what this reminded you of. So we are, let's see, we're at kind of the second half of verse 19 of 1 Samuel 10. So this starts out, this is not a very promising speech. This is Samuel talking about how God brought you out of Egypt. He did all this stuff for you. And then what'd you do? Verse 19. Well,

you rejected God. You rejected the God who delivers you, and the way you rejected him is by asking for a king. Now, if I'm Saul listening to this pretty negative description of kingship, maybe I'd go hide behind the baggage as well. But here's how they find out. Nobody knows, I'm assuming, nobody knows except Samuel and Saul at this point, who the king is actually going to be. None of the people know. So, we're going to go through this whole drawing of casting of lots so that the lot will fall upon the one that God has chosen. So, at the second half of verse 19, they present themselves before the Lord by their tribes and clans. He brings all of them near. They cast lots, and the lot falls to the tribe of Benjamin. Well, they bring all the tribe of

Benjamin forward by their families. And the lot falls to the Matrite family. And then they cast lots again, and it falls to Saul, the son of Kish. And then we have this humorous scene where they look for him, but he can't be found. Now, what this should remind you of, the parallel account to this, is what we read in the opening chapters of the book of Joshua, the story of the infamous act of Achan. You'll remember that when the walls of Jericho fell down and they stormed the city, all the soldiers rushing in were given very explicit instructions not to take any of the goods from the city. Everything was to be devoted to cherim, to destruction, or to handing over to the Lord. But, you know, Achan, he's charging in there with his spear or his sword, and he looks

down, and there's some really good stuff that's just kind of sitting around, waiting for somebody to pick it up. So he does. He picks up a few items. He conceals it under the floor of his tent. The next battle, Israel loses. Joshua finds out why they lost it, because somebody took it. And So what do they do? Same thing that we just read. They bring the whole nation near by tribes and it gets narrowed down from one tribe to one family to one man. And that one man is Achan. So if you're watching all of this go down and you know the story of Israel, you're thinking this is not a great parallel to being right here. you know because the last the last guy they got chosen by lot after they went from tribe to family

to individual he got killed so if you're if you're saw watching this you're probably thinking man i don't want to be aching number two this is not a good setup for me yeah you're wondering like i don't know this man of god real well and uh this seems like it came together pretty quick uh maybe this is all a trap yeah you know i mean i mean how convinced are you that he's not going to be like it could be like completely out of the realm of of biblical narrative you know of what we've seen in biblical narratives for like if if then like if samuel calls forward a guy and then and then says in your idolatry and adulterousness you have asked for a king here's what god thinks about your king and cut your head off that would not be unusual in the biblical narrative

no i mean i could totally see that happening yeah so i mean i'm sure so i was like i don't know man yeah so that that's why uh maybe that's why one of the reasons he's hiding he's hiding you know in the military the military baggage this word this hebrew word for baggage is uh it can mean lots of different things but it's often used in military context for you know you're hiding behind the tank or you hide behind the jeep or you hide behind the the boxes of military weaponry whatever it is that's where he's hiding up and this becomes even more humorous because they can't find him you know it's like he's even here where's he at so they have to ask god where's he at which is hilarious which is hilarious i mean i don't even know how you ask god that i mean i understand you

could cast lots it's pretty easy right you cast lots figured out it mean if you believe the casting of lots is the way that god's will is determined well that's pretty easy to imagine how that would happen but how do you like ask god where someone is hiding i should just ask him you say god where is this guy hiding i suppose and then it just says that god told him like i don't know if he just told samuel or he told like this is uh i don't know what i don't know how this worked i don't know either but however it worked that's that's what happened god said well look he's he's over there he's hiding he's hiding himself by the baggage so they all run over and they they take saul and he stands there among the people and we're told that he was taller than any of the

people from his shoulders upward so how tall you think he was one of my commentators said 6 10 i'm like are you just like making that up yeah i mean no i don't think there's any place that tells us exactly how tall he is no i don't think it tells you how tall he is i mean i suppose it's uh they probably are going with the average height of and people were i think people were shorter than as well yeah it was like uh i've read the average i mean of course they can tell this from skeletal remains um but i believe the average height was maybe of an adult male was like five four maybe five five something like that so we're probably not looking at a guy who's 610 I would think so you're 6'5 is that right yeah I'm 6'5 that the I mean he could have been 6'2

yeah my height yeah by and by like from the shoulders up what if whether I mean this is another way of saying he's a head taller than everyone else right so everyone everyone else's head is coming up to his shoulder uh this is not a rare occurrence for me at 6'5 but the you know but you have to be on the short side to only come up to my shoulder I mean you know yeah for me to be a full but that you know this is your probably he's probably eight inches taller than everybody else and so yeah if your your average guy is five five five six he's coming in there at six two but by comparison that's gonna look like a huge guy yeah yeah exactly exactly yeah i mean i'm sure that you know if we could somehow take uh the giant from uh or the mountain from game of thrones

you know put him back in in the days of goliath goliath probably wouldn't have looked quite as big yeah well i've seen i've seen an example of this like i know we were saying that that saul is the rock but he also might be john cena the reason i say that is i was in a i was in a coffee shop one time and uh i was getting coffee and john cena comes like walking in there i was looking at him i'm like that's john cena and uh and i said to the person i was having coffee with i'm like that's john cena over there and he goes are you sure i'm like uh yeah like that guy is enormous and i don't know exactly how tall john cena is but he's just like this formidable guy he's huge i mean he's a huge guy and there's no hiding right like this so so that's how i would

imagine this is that he just like stands out he's bigger and taller than everybody and like i just looking at him and he had a hat on and stuff but i'm like dude there's nowhere for you to hide yeah yeah well that'd be the same with saul i mean it's like he's gonna be uh hunkering behind a suitcase or something like that i was trying to look i was trying to look up to see how tall john cena was while you were talking about i couldn't find it no he is uh i don't know he's not he's not that tall but he still just stands out yeah yeah well we've all been around we've all been around people like that yeah who's the guy from uh dances with wolves uh years ago what's that kevin costner kevin costner yeah i was thinking of that when you

were talking about uh your encounter we were my family and i were in green one time walking along and this guy comes walking to up up to us and and i'm like that guy looks just like kevin costner and somebody else said uh that is kevin costner we were all like starstruck and my wife's the only one actually spoke to her she was she was comfortable yeah well yeah you're not used to seeing people like that you know in real life so it's tongue-tied there for a minute anyway back to Saul and uh and him and his height they uh they bring him out to the people he's standing tall anybody else and here's how Samuel describes him says do you see him whom the Lord has chosen surely there is no one like him among all the people so all the people shouted and said

long live the king i mean actually they didn't say that they i mean that's kind of like a modernizing they said may the king live but that just doesn't sound good no in hebrew it's may the king live but yeah long live the king sounds a whole lot more british it does they just held that over from the from the old uh the old king james it's interesting i mean this is it's quite his statement i mean whatever it is about saul like okay obviously he's tall um but i mean a statement like there is none like him among all the people like it's a pretty bold statement that's a pretty crazy thing to say i mean like that is uh he obviously is a is a dude that must just really stand out yeah i mean he's got to i mean with with uh that kind of like there's no uh

there's no if ands buts i mean nothing like that it's just like a straightforward statement this is the guy nobody's like him yeah he's got he's got that going for him we will we will say that no one and the lord has chosen him that's that's kind of the it's kind of a dialectic going on here between all of these accounts because like it'll move from kingship bad to kingship goes to saul it goes it goes back and forth and we'll see that even in chapter 12 i think all of these kind of uh beginning of saul's reign narratives it'll go from like it's you have a king it's gonna be a bad bad thing he's gonna do all this bad stuff and then it'll shift to like this is the guy this is the one the lord has chosen so it'll seem positive on the one hand and then negative on the other

hand we'll be doing this dance for the next uh next couple chapters and it's gonna be like very confusing if you're saul you're you're he's saying all this negative stuff about kings and kingship and then also he's like and this guy is clearly the guy because look how awesome he is you're like i don't i don't understand what's going on especially if saul is sort of a more simple kind of dude he's got to be very much like like i don't know if i go do i want this do i not want like what is going on here yeah yeah you can understand i mean i don't believe this but you can understand why some critics claim that this is like somebody took all these separate stories about Saul and just kind of glued them all together into this one narrative, because it does

have kind of that disjointed feel when you're reading through it. But I think the message is basically, look, this wasn't what God wanted. It wasn't his idea. They projected God as king, so it is bad. On the other hand, as God often does, he's like, all right, I'll work with that. it's not what i wanted wasn't my plan but i can work with it i'll kind of bring it into we'll grandfather this thing into the covenant we'll make it work uh but just keep in mind this wasn't what i wanted originally right okay so next just to wrap up the chapter samuel told the people the my translation has the ordinances of the kingdom i can't remember what esv had there but it's mishpat in the Hebrew, which, you know, it's usually justice,

but mishpat can mean kind of the way things are going to work, right? Yeah, I think the ESV is rights and duties. Yeah, that's a pretty good translation. I mean, we don't know what this was exactly. Could be just sort of a summary of Deuteronomy 17, you know where the king is uh is not to multiply his uh his harem is not to multiply his horses and he's not to multiply his gold and silver well none of that will happen yeah money women horses those evidently were the three temptations of uh of the kings so at least two of those still remain

for uh political uh political leaders at least the money and the women part i don't know about the horses part maybe we'll just uh at the uh cars today or yeah jets none of the none of the kings of israel will ever uh multiply those things to themselves no yeah certainly not solomon they also should have you know made sure to tell the king you also cannot multiply gods and temples to your gods in your inner city in fact i know i've mentioned this before but it's worth repeating, the only positive duty of the king in Deuteronomy 17, the only thing, I mean, he's not told like to make sure the economy stays good or even to wage war against enemy nations, nothing like that. There's only one positive command given to the king in Deuteronomy 17,

and that is he is to make a copy of the book of the law and to study it all the time, period. that's it i guess because moses knew god knew that you know if he doesn't do something like that if he's not meditating day and night upon the word of god then he's gonna be meditating upon his harem i mean meditating upon his horses or meditating upon whatever is going to distract him from the duties that god's uh that god's given to him anyway that's what happens here he writes it in a in the in the scroll not book i don't know why english translations do that they always translate scroll as book i suppose because yeah we don't use scrolls anymore but books were not there was no such thing as a book until oh i don't know maybe the fifth sixth seventh century

i can't remember my history there but the codex uh had not been invented until well after after the time of christ so everything back then was a scroll if it was any kind of big document writes it in a scroll puts it before the lord samuel sends all the people away saul goes home too i mean there is no like there's no capital city there's no jerusalem i mean what there jerusalem has not yet been added to israelite territory so yeah it's a new king and he just kind of goes home he's from gibeah and a bunch of guys go with him it says valiant men's valiant men whose hearts god had touched went with him so valiant can also mean powerful uh it can mean prosperous we're not exactly sure what is implied here when it talks about these these particular

men anyway influential men or powerful men they go with him but there were detractors there were these uh sons of baliel worthless men as we translate that and they said how can this one deliver us yeah he may be the rock you know he may be head and shoulders tall everybody else but how is this guy gonna be able to deliver us and it could be you know saul was for the tribe of benjamin the tribe of benjamin had a bad reputation they uh they were the ones who about got wiped out at the end of book of judges and keep in mind too gibia that's where the whole uh gang rape of the of the girl happened to book of judges too gibia was a bad place so maybe these sons of are thinking this guy look where he's from and look what tribe he's from how in the world is

he going to be able to deliver us yeah if you take this uh sometimes out of the mouth of worthless fellows i guess if you ask the question like is this guy going to be able to save us well depending on what you mean by by save us uh you're not wrong uh no no this guy is is not going to do that right uh in fact uh neither is uh neither is his lineage uh that's yeah this is uh so it's it's an interesting statement right you have these sort of worthless fellows that are like this guy's no savior yeah yeah yeah it's it's it's a great example of how you can look at in context and take it one way or you can lift it out and just kind of look at it face value and be like oh yeah that's exactly right you know so they meant it as like a jibe against saul but we can

also read it to be like actually you're right you're more right than you realize when you you said it yeah and of course i like this that uh that says that that saul held his peace and i think i assume that what this means is that he didn't kill them all right there that would be precisely it yeah and we'll find out at the end of the next chapter that he had a chance to do that and he was actually uh he was actually magnanimous at that point okay well let's let's jump into the it's pretty short chapter chapter 11 is only 15 verses and it's all about this this uh kind of strange threat and how Saul comes riding to the rescue so we uh we start off the chapter with a guy who has a a very unusual name so in English it looks like it's we would pronounce it Nahash

nahash which i guess we can pronounce it that way but in the in the hebrew it's nahash like you would write it in a c-h-a-s-h now it's a strange name because nahash is the hebrew word for serpent like if you go back and read genesis 3 the serpent that's there is the nahash so the the guy the leader is the serpent general or serpent king we might call him anyway we'll call him nahash because i think that's probably the way that most people are are used to hearing it and he's an ammonite you remember the ammonites where they came from not a very uh not a very good beginning ammon was ammon as a nation traced its way back to ben ami and ben ami was the son of the incestuous union of lot and his youngest daughter so lot his daughters go to the cave they get him

drunk two successive nights he impregnates both of them one of the children is ben ami he becomes the father of the ammonites and so nahash the serpent guy he is an ammonite so it's kind of a this is one of these kind of strange extended family type deals yeah because the ammonites are you know they're like your third cousin that shows up in the family reunion but you always get in a fight with them that's kind of the ammonites and the israelites are so i always thought the ammonites probably had this uh this is just me like i always i always feel bad for people but you know maybe this is not the case at all but almost like you were born outside like you're outside the family by no fault of your own right right you're like i didn't choose this like

um but it's like oh you're an ammonite man yeah you know you only got something to prove yeah yeah like this i mean you can see how this could like give you an attitude oh yeah absolutely yeah psychologically that would that would have an impact like you always had to prove listen you know i am more than the product of a necessitous union between lot and his daughter right yeah man yeah yeah you could you could definitely see that yeah you can see how they'd be like yeah our our distant cousins think they're so much holier and more and so much uh you know they're just god's chosen people la-di-da uh you can see how this could go oh absolutely absolutely so he's kind of he's an odd duck because so he he goes up

and uh he and his army they they lay siege to a place called uh jabesh gilead come back to that in a second and all the men of jabesh say to nahash make a covenant with us and we'll serve you in other words they realize there's no way they're going to get out of this victorious so they're like tell you what let's just let's make a deal we'll sign a peace treaty and everything will you know we'll be okay well nahash is like he's okay with that on one condition he said all right we'll make peace with you but here's the one condition i'm gonna gouge out the right eye of every single one of you so that I will make it a reproach on all Israel.

Yeah, so this is why I say there's like an attitude towards Israel here that is not the same as, you know, if just some pagan group is rolling in with no connection to Israel whatsoever, they're just like, either they kill these guys or they make a treaty with these guys. They're like, yeah, fine, join it.

Like, yeah, we'd love to have you serve us. Like, come on in. that's not what this dude like old old uh old snake king is interested in what for blood or an eye well he's out for shame too yeah uh because he's someone who is dealing with shame or he's from a people who are constantly being reminded by these other people no doubt like you know where you came from and he's like well how about this how about i just gouge out all your eyes you can walk around like that and then we'll see uh you know we'll see who's who's got the shame right yeah great point great point so uh that i mean that's that's understandable the next part's a

little a little odd because the elders are like okay tell you what just uh give us seven days leave us alone for seven days and here's what we're gonna do we're gonna send messengers throughout all the territory of israel and we're gonna see if there's anybody who's gonna be able to deliver us and evidently nahash is like down with that and i have no idea why unless maybe he's just so he's so confident that there's no one who's going to be able to deliver them he's like yeah i'll give you i'll give you two weeks if you want it because you know you're not going to be able to find anybody so you can send them send your messengers wherever you want them to go but it's not going to do you any good either way he lets them go so what do they do they don't go

through all the territory of Israel. They make a beeline for Gibeah, where Saul lives, and they tell all the people there the threat that they're under, and all the people lift up their voices and weep. All right, so bad situation, but they go to the right place. Saul is out plowing a field. Strange thing for a king to do, right? But at this point, I guess, what else is the king going to do? doesn't have a palace doesn't have uh all the the kingly duties that later kings are going to have so he just goes back home and it's time to plow the field so he yokes the oxen and he starts plowing his field this whole scenario is weird by the way i mean yeah that you would be like all right so the here's the options that are presented all right let us think about it uh for seven days

and if we can't find anyone to come in here and work you over then you know maybe we'll probably go with it but like give us a chance to find someone that can fight you this is this is an interesting proposal it is

I'll be honest if I was in this scenario I don't know that it would occur to me be like can you give me seven days to try to see if there's an army sitting around that could come save us yeah you gotta give it to these guys I mean, they were creative, and they must have been pretty persuasive, too, because Nahash is like, yeah, okay, cool, whatever.

Yeah, and maybe he's just like, and maybe Nahash is just so confident. He's like, yeah, you go get somebody. You bring him in here. Yeah. You go right ahead. Bring the biggest guy. Let's see what he can do. Yeah.

So they go, and everybody weeps, and then Saul, he comes up. He's got this oxen, and he's like, what's going on? Why is everybody crying? so they tell him what the men of Jabesh had said and then it's like we're back in the book of judges here because the spirit of the Lord came upon Saul mightily when he heard these words so this is just like straight out of the book of judges here and his nose burned exceedingly in the Hebrew he uh he got real hot he got real mad he became very angry now we have something else that looks like it's straight out of the book of judges because you remember you remember

the terrible story remember those dark days when we were in the book of judges when we had this levite who either killed his is almost dead concubine or took his dead concubine and he cut her up in 12 pieces and sent those 12 pieces throughout the land of israel and everybody's you know understandably freaking out like what's going on here well that's not the only time something like that happened because guess what saul's about to do he takes these poor oxen that have just been working in the field and he cuts them up he just cut them up and he sent the pieces throughout the territory of israel by the hand of messengers like handing a skull to this one messenger now here's a shank to another

messenger i don't know how this worked uh but these probably runners i mean they had the armies had runners back then they you know delivered messages back and forth and so i guess these guys take off you know they got this bloody shank they're running along and they run from town to town and here's the message whoever does not come out after saul and after samuel so shall it be done to his oxen this in my mind they they relay this message to saul he gets enraged and he's just like this enormous guy and he like pulls out a sword and by the end this this dude has got to be just covered in blood he's like giving parts of oxen to people and telling them that i mean if you like the people have got to be like okay this guy is the

guy like this yeah at this point if there's any doubt it disappeared yeah i mean like today they would like send a passive-aggressive email yeah not no not not an old testament man they just send a bloody shank with a messenger saying, listen, you want this done to your oxen? No? Okay. Well, you better get over there to Gibeah and help out Saul because he's about to go kick some butt and deliver these people. But it worked. It said the dread of the Lord fell on the people. I'm sure it did. So they all show up and there's a bunch of them. There's a split here. You got 300 000 sons of israel so that's kind of the northern tribes and you got 30 000 men of judah that division of israel and judah were more accustomed to hearing about that later like

after the division of the kingdoms but evidently even back then there was some sort of division like this anyway you got 300 total 330 000 guys plenty of soldiers no doubt so they uh they said to the messengers who had come thus you shall say to the men of jabesh gilead tomorrow by the time the sun is hot you shall have deliverance so the messengers went and told the men of jabesh and in the understatement of the year it says they were glad they were glad yeah yeah do you think there's so if saul hears these dudes be like this guy can't save us and then he he sends this message out to get muster all these troops and then his word is in the way that the in the esv translates it exactly this way that yeah by the time the sun is hot you shall have salvation

yeah and you have to wonder if this is part of what he's doing like all right um like yes he's upset about the whole thing and people coming in and invading and making insane threats but but also being like, I'm going to show you just how, just how savior like I can be. Yeah. Oh yeah. You know that this had to have been in Saul's mind. All right. Like this is the chance for me to prove that I got what it takes. This is, this is my opportunity and you're about, you're about to see it. And I forgot to mention, this is a, this is a very ironic. Okay.

So Jabesh Gilead, that might ring a bell to you. That's if it does, It's because if you go back to the last couple chapters of the book of Judges, remember after that, the whole terrible thing happened at Gibeah and they summoned everybody to come and to all the tribes of Israel, all the people were supposed to show up and they were going to attack the tribe of Benjamin, right? After all this happened, well, the tribe of Benjamin is almost wiped out and these guys have no wives, right? they're all single single guys and so like we got to do something because otherwise the tribe benjamin's going to die out so what can we do and they're like you know what who didn't show up who was like the one city that didn't show up to go with us to battle against the uh the benjaminites and they're like oh yeah it was the people of jabesh gilead didn't show up so they go to jabesh gilead they wipe out everybody there except like 400 virgins or i don't remember how many there

were but anyway all these virgins and they bring them back to be the wives of the benjaminite men so this is the place so it's it's kind of a strange turn of events now where these people need deliverance now anyway uh that's the background of that of that particular city so what happens well uh the next morning saul divides all these people up into three different companies they came into the camp and they just struck down the ammonites left and right it says until the heat of the day which i'm guessing is basically they rolled up in there and they just killed amorites all morning yeah basically yeah that's what was going on they're just wiping out ammonites left or right until the heat of the day and yeah there were a few survivors but it says

no two were left together so they were just like you know running running away any direction they could to get away from the from the battle and this is a complete victory and as it always goes uh when you know i mean because you have you have that it's implied that god is involved in this right i mean like the dread of the lord falls on me i mean like he so god is gonna is at work and so of course what you end up with is no body count for for israel like it may and they do this obviously because they want you to know just how big a wipeout this is now i don't know how many guys these amorites have but 330 000 a lot of dudes it's a lot of dudes yeah yeah and there's like it makes it sound as if not a single israelite even needed a band-aid like they're

they're good you know no problem this is a this is a this is a a big tactical error giving them the seven days yeah that was yeah on second thought uh nahash should not have agreed to this particular uh plan of affairs so he uh the serpents the head gets crushed we might say uh one commentator i think quite uh uh creatively said that saul is sort of being raised up here as a a second adam an adam type figure right and the question is will he crush the head of nahash the serpent well he did he uh he crushed that head and we just wrap up the chapter uh before we're out of time here the people said to samuel so samuel just shows up all of a sudden i guess he was there who is he that was saying shall saul reign over us so these are these

sons of bailey we heard about bring the man that we both put him to death now i don't know what samuel would have said but saul steps forward and in a in a brilliant move i think at least brilliant move politically learning fast yeah he is learning fast he's like no no you guys listen listen today the lord has accomplished salvation in israel he's pretty sneaky tear too notice he he he puts he puts the uh the finger on it he says the lord he doesn't say i right the lord has accomplished so he's giving god the glory god has done this so because that's happened he says not a man shall be put to death this day yeah

the way I read this is yes it's like a good political move yes then he's like giving God the credit which is just a good move in general and but but he's also he's also implying like hey look we went

to war with these guys no Israelites died so no Israelites are going to die today yeah Yeah. Yeah, as it should be, right? I mean, this is smart theologically, smart politically. It's a smart way to proceed. So good for Saul. I mean, as far as like his first real action as a king, it's pretty hard to do any better than this. sent a very powerful, clear message. And then to finish the chapter, Samuel says to the people, you know what? Let's all go down to Gilgal. I don't know why Gilgal. That was like the initial

headquarters of Israel when they entered into the Holy Land. Maybe it was still an important site for that reason, but it says, let's go to Gilgal and renew the kingdom there. So they do. All the people go to Gilgal. They made Saul king before the Lord in Gilgal, and they offered sacrifices of peace offerings before the lord and saul and all the men of israel rejoiced greatly yeah this this this seems to end this chapter seems to end with sort of everyone's on board now right like i mean because even the guys that were doubting probably are at this point they're on board like and uh and you could know that everyone else is on board because they're so on board that they're like if anyone's not down with this guy we'll kill him right now they're they're on the team

fully at this point yeah yeah i mean and if this is all we you know this all we kind of knew about uh about saul man the guy gets gold stars right yeah he did great off to a good start off to a good start he's empowered by the spirit of god he's he's he's shown exemplary humility he is leading israel in their battles which is what they wanted right that's why they wanted a king we want a king who's going to go out and defeat our enemies well got what they wanted and everybody is is unified at the end they go to worship they go to church and everybody's happy we we actually ended a positive note yeah well we'll see how long it lasts being the bible probably not long probably not long all right well that is it guys we are we are beyond time so uh we will be back

with uh with chapter 12 uh next week make sure you go and register for that here we still stand virtual conference and uh pre-order chad's book man you got to get on that book train chad i will see you next week all right see you then