40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 1 Samuel 9:26-10:22 (Episode 233)

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Saul is anointed king and has an interesting interaction with some prophets. He heads home but doesn't recount the whole story when asked. What does it mean that Saul becomes a different person? What does is the meaning of the proverb "Is Saul also among the Prophets?" Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network HWSS Livestream Signup Chad Bird's New Book 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. and while you're over there click on that here we still stand banner or go to the here we still stand section of the website and register for the virtual conference the whole conference is virtual there's no other kind of conference for you to go to as far as here we still stand is concerned this year so you need to sign up so you can get that email where well you will be provided

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If you haven't pre-ordered Unveiling Mercy, Chad Bird's new devotional using the Hebrew language, you've got to do it. You've got to get in there and order that. Seems like the response has been good, Chad. I've been very impressed. yeah pleasantly pleasantly surprised yeah getting a lot of that first day was uh yeah the first day was a killer day you know amazon breaks it down in different categories you know it's just not books but it's like general categories very specific categories so it was a number one new

release in a hebrew bible old testament bible studies old testament devotions and then uh christian devotionals which is a pretty big pretty big category so yeah i was uh i was very very surprised and very very happy about that uh that rollout yeah well don't if you haven't ordered it yet guys don't get don't be left out i mean everyone's doing it you gotta you gotta get the book so i'll put a link in the show notes so you can pre-order it that comes out in early november yeah november 10th is the release date for it yeah so you're just about just about a month away so you might as well pre-order it now in fact you should probably just pre-order a couple copies now so that your christmas presents are taken care of as as i've

said i mean i i know this is true i mean i now i have got some connections uh and at 1517 publishing as you might understand but i'm still ordering copies i'm gonna order copies uh for gifts this year and not because just because i'm trying to you know sell some books for chad but because i actually believe that the people i'm buying these for are gonna are gonna enjoy it and make make use of it so yep unveiling mercy check it out all right chad we left uh saw sleeping on samuel's roof and uh we are we are now i know i sort of said that last last week that the time had come for a king well really the time had come to meet the king who was going to be the king uh now we're going to get ourselves a king yeah it's kind of a sort of a long gone out process when

you look at chapter chapters 9 10 11 and 12 it's really kind of a four chapter process yeah you know and nine is where you meet saul and he uh he runs into samuel by divine appointment you got that going on and then you were about to get to the the anointing and this it's you know it's a public, it's a public choice. But then still later on in chapter 12, you have an even more public affair after Saul has accomplished this great victory. So yeah, it's a long drawn out process. And each point, each chapter has a little bit different perspective to tell us about the king. So yeah, chapter nine is pretty long, 27 verses long. And we meet Saul, we figure out who he is, find out what he looks like he's the big guy you know he's the he's the rock and we find out how

he has this interaction with with samuel and we we left off with verse 25 where he's gonna he's gonna sleep he's gonna spend the night on the roof of the house here in uh in the town that he ended up in where he met samuel so we're gonna find out what happens the next day so uh we'll pick up here at verse 26. It says they got up early in the morning and about daybreak, Samuel called to Saul on the roof saying, get up that I may send you away. So Saul gets up and he and Samuel go out into the street. And they were working their way to the edge of the city, it says, verse 27, when Samuel tells Saul to basically send his servant on ahead. He's got this, you know, He's going to have a private conversation.

No one is going to be privy to this conversation except Samuel and Saul. He's about to, as he says here, proclaim the word of God to him. And I suspect by this point, Saul has a pretty good idea of what this word of God is going to be because he's had some pretty heavy hints dropped by Samuel. And not just the hints, but I mean, he's also, he's put him at the head of the table. He's given him a special cut of meat, and he's suggested that he is the one on whom the hopes of Israel hang. So Saul's got to be pretty dim-witted by this point not to realize that something big is about to go down. So that takes us to the end of chapter 9.

It's kind of a strange chapter break, as we've seen multiple times. but anyway chapter 10 is going to pick up right there where Samuel and Saul are standing together on the outskirts of the city and Samuel is about to finally do the deed he's going to he's going to take out his flask of oil and anoint him as king so if you're I don't know how most people listen I'm assuming most people just listen to this but I know a few people actually follow along in their in their bibles so depending on what translation you're using you've either got like an average length verse or you've got a really long verse so i'm going to read to you what i have a new american standard it says then samuel took the flask of oil and poured it on his

head that is poured it on saul's head kissed him and said has not the lord anointed you a ruler over his inheritance okay that's all i got now if you're following along in something like the esv and probably some other other translations as well it's got a lot more to it it says you know the first part's the same samuel takes the flask he pours it on his head he kisses him says has not the lord anointed you to be prince over his people but then he goes on and you shall this is the extra material, and you shall reign over the people of the Lord, and you will save them from the hand of their surrounding enemies. And this shall be the sign to you that the Lord has anointed you to be prince over his heritage. So depending on which translation you're looking at,

some of these are going to be twice as long as the one that I initially read to you. And the reason is that in the Greek translation, which is called the Septuagint, we have a much longer version than we have in the hebrew so i don't we talk about the septuagint on occasion let me just real briefly for those of you might not be familiar with it tell you exactly what the septuagint or the greek translation is so it's called the septuagint sometimes you'll see it abbreviated as lxx which the roman numerals for for 70 so the name septuagint and of course those Roman numerals, point us to a tradition connected with 70. Why 70? Well, here's the story. This is recorded in an ancient document called the Letter of Aristeas, and here's what the

tradition is described in that letter. It says that during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who started his reign, I think, in 285 BC, so we're looking at the third century BC, and during that particular reign, Ptolemy wanted some books to be added to the library there in Alexandria, Egypt. And one of the books he wanted added was the Hebrew scriptures. So what they did, according to this tradition, is they sent to Israel and they brought back 70 scholars of the torah some later traditions say it was 72 but 70 they brought those back from israel to alexandria in egypt and they according to the tradition they they separated them and each one so each one had like their own little room or something and then they were each given a copy of the torah just

just the first five books, and they translated the Hebrew of the Torah into Greek. And then when they came back together, after their work was all done, lo and behold, every single one of them had the exact same translation, even though they all worked independently. That was thus seen as an attestation of this, of God's imprimatur upon this particular translation, which, yeah, I mean, if the tradition were true, that would certainly stand to reason. So that is where the origins of the 70, the book of the 70, or the Septuagint come from. Now, there's a couple things to keep in mind about that. First of all, that was only, according to this tradition, that was only the Torah that was translated, okay? So what about the other books? Well, over time, real, like over a

lot of time, probably over the next couple of centuries, the other books of the Hebrew Bible were translated by different people with different abilities at different different times and so you have a lot of a lot of differences of translation style a lot of differences in translation quality among all the other other books after the torah most people agree that the septuagint translation of the torah the pentateuch is pretty good it's pretty it's pretty accurate once you get past that Some are better than others. Now, why is all this important? Well, it's important because, for one reason, when you get to the New Testament,

most of the time when New Testament authors will quote in Old Testament text, their quotation is from the majority of times it's from the Septuagint. Because that was kind of like in the 1800s, which translation did everybody use? Which English translation did everybody use? Of course, everybody used the King James Version, right? That was just what everybody used. Well, in the first century, among Greek-speaking Jews, everybody used the Septuagint.

That was just a commonly accepted translation. Greek is the most common language in the modern world at that time, that this is a language that you can go to tons of different places and they speak English, even if it's not the primary language, but everyone learns it because it's it's such a prevalent prevalent language all over the world uh greek is sort of that way right where it's like if you were gonna if you were gonna learn one language in the first century the first century outside of the language outside of your you know native tongue surely it's greek yeah yeah surely it's greek exactly yeah and that's

what had happened you know you you read about the jewish diaspora which was the spreading of jews all of the Roman Empire. Well, they're a long way from the motherland. And what happened is when they were that far separated, well, they began to basically adopt a lot of the customs of the people they lived around. They were living in Greek cities or later Roman cities. And of course, they just learned Greek. And I'm sure many of them learned Latin as well, but they learned Greek. And pretty soon what happened was you had Greek being the liturgy of the synagogue as well as the uh the the reading of the scriptures would have been done in greek as well in some of these some of these synagogues that were in the far-flung parts of the the roman

empire including alexandria egypt so that's kind of a long long explanation with regard to this first but i wanted to put that out there because we don't really we don't probably always talk about the the background of the septuagint even though we mentioned it on occasion but that's it So all of that to say that when you compare what we now have in our Hebrew Bibles with what's found in the Septuagint, sometimes you will find differences. Sometimes you will find these longer versions, which probably at one point reflected a longer version of the Hebrew that the Septuagint was translating. So if you're usually with modern Bibles that will footnote that, mine actually does not. I don't know if the ESV has that footnoted that the longer part of it comes from the Septuagint, but that is, that is the reason. Okay.

So anyway, uh, back to the story itself, what's significant here is as far as the, the actions is that this is the first time that anybody gets anointed besides a priest. So we've had, we've had anointed priest in the past, but this is the first time that somebody gets anointed, not just to be a king but any non-priest gets anointed usually there was an anointing of the high priest perhaps the other priest this was the the way in which they were designated as god's chosen representative before him and before the people now it's going to be expanded outward

and so saul is anointed he's kissed and he is proclaimed to be the lord's messiah with a with the small case m messiah just meaning anointed so he's anointed to be the nagid which is like the the prince slash ruler uh the kind of the the guy in charge we might say over over god's inheritance this is kind of a crazy thing if you put yourself in saul's position it's not like saul is like a career politician or something this would be a crazy 24 hours for you uh if you if you just like just some guy it's like you're king looking for your donkeys yeah you're king now i mean it'd be like i mean i don't know maybe it's not the same as like president but like i don't know chad if all of a sudden someone just showed if you were like out doing something and then someone said

guess what you're the governor of texas going forward you'd be like what i'd be with saul i'd be hiding behind the baggage if that was the case yeah you're uh you're exactly right i mean all this happens within a two-day period right more or less he shows up and uh he has this conversation with with samuel and the next day he gets up and samuel says hey you know what you're gonna be the ruler you're the guy so so let's talk about a sudden change of life yeah for saul and then uh as if to i guess to confirm to make sure that saul has confirmation of the fact that he is indeed the lord's anointed that god has chosen him he's given several signs that follow this and there's there's three of these three of these in all so samuel says to

him here's what's going to happen so you're going to leave and when you get close to rachel's tomb which is in the territory of benjamin these two guys are going to come up and they're going to tell you that those donkeys that you were looking for they have been found and now your dad is no longer worried about the donkeys he's worried about he's worried about you so that's the first sign that saul's going to have and then goes on verse three it says you're going to go a little bit further, you're going to come as far as the the oak of Tabor, and you're going to see three guys. Notice there's a progression. He goes from the one guy, Samuel, to the two guys that he meets at Rachel's tomb, to the three guys that he's going to meet going up to God at Bethel, and then

the next one's going to be a whole band of prophets. So there's a gradual escalation in number as well. But these three men are going to be going up to God at Bethel. So they're going up uh to worship at uh at bethel and and they're going to be carrying uh three goat three baby goats one's going to be carrying three baby goats i i would like to see that i was reading this i was thinking i don't really know how that works i've never never tried to carry two baby goats but three's got to be a real challenge anyway this guy's gonna be maybe they're really really baby goats like maybe so like maybe he's got them tied up like real small goats yeah must be but anyway it's gonna be hard to miss i mean if you meet a guy carrying three baby goats it's yeah

be pretty obvious and another one's gonna be carrying three loaves of bread and another one is gonna carry a jug of wine so they got the bread they got the goats they got the wine and they're gonna greet you samuel says and they're gonna give you two loaves of bread which you will accept from their hand. Now, why is this important? Well, it's important because think about this. These three guys have got the goats, which are presumably going to be a sacrifice. They've got the bread, which is going to be probably given over to the priest, and they've got the wine, which will probably be offered as well. This is probably going to be some sort of communal sacrifice, like the peace offerings, where they're going to give part of that to the priest,

and then the priest will give part of it back to them and they're going to have a communal meal so they're carrying all of this stuff to worship yahweh but what do they do with some of the food they give two loaves of bread to saul now why is that important because he just has been declared the lord's anointed and i mentioned that was only in the past applied to priest now in the second sign, he's going to be given priestly food. He's been given these two loaves of bread, which ordinarily would be given to the priest. So this is a subtle way of indicating that the kingly office, even though it is not a priestly office, is also intimately bound up with the priestly office. So, you know, we have our separation of powers in the American form

democracy, which is fine, and we understand that, but we should not apply that to kind of a separation of powers in Israel. It's not the way it worked. It wasn't like you had your priestly branch, then you had your regal branch, you had your prophetic branch, and all these three had to kind of cooperate. Not the way it happened. In fact, the prophets, the prophetic authority was really over the king's authority. I mean, how many times do the prophets tell the kings what to do and what not to do. In fact, that's exactly what's happening here in the case of Samuel and Saul. So the kings were not, as it were, some sort of independent power, nor were they working together in some sort of democratic way with the priest and the prophets. No, it was like, basically,

the prophet was over the kings as well as the priest, calling them to account. And the king had a sort of, had a sacred office. And you could, I guess you could say that the priest had a sort of regal office as well. I mean, they were dressed like they were kings. So there was a, I don't know what the word would be, sort of a symbiosis, this real intimate connection between the priestly and the kingly office. At least ideally, that was the way it was supposed to happen. So that's the significance of him receiving this bread, which was for the priest, now given to Saul. And he says, you are to accept it. So that's the second sign. The next one is they're going to get to this place called Gibiath Elohim, which means the hill of God. There's a Philistine garrison there.

You know, the Philistines controlled a lot of the territory. This was probably just a place where they stationed troops to make sure that the locals were not going to rebel, I'm assuming. So they got a Philistine garrison there. And Samuel says that when you get to the city, now this is where things get strange. There's going to be a group of prophets coming down from the high place and they got all these instruments they got harps tambourines flutes and a lyre and presumably they're playing all these instruments and they will be prophesying then it goes on to say that the spirit of the lord will come upon you mightily and you shall prophesy with them and be changed into another man we'll come back to that but let me just finish

out this section. Samuel goes on to say that when these signs come to you, do for yourself what the occasion requires, because God is with you. And then he wraps it up by saying, you shall go down before me to Gilgal, and I will come to you to offer burnt offerings and sacrifice peace offerings. You're to wait seven days until I come to you and show you what you should do. Now, I'll be completely honest with you. I do not know what to make of the prophesying and the musical instruments. I mean, I've studied this. I had a graduate class on prophets. We looked at this back then. I've read books on prophets. I've read the commentaries on 1 Samuel, and this stuff still throws me for a little bit for a loop, because I think part of the reason is, first of all, this doesn't match

what we usually think about when we think of prophets, right? When we think prophets, we think Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. And yes, they have visions and they do strange things, but pretty much what they do is they preach. Prophets are preachers. These guys are more like sort of, I don't know, they're what, musicians and singers of some sort. They've got the musical instruments, you know they've got their harps and tambourines and flutes and lyres and they're and they're prophesying what does it mean they're prophesying it's a prophetic jam band now i understand there's something there's something real grateful dead about this whole thing like where it's like and these hippies are gonna come down from the hills and yeah

you know this is a real lord of the rings kind of stuff going on here but the you always want to surround yourself with people that at least every once in a while are like i don't know that's what you want like we had this happen in 30 minutes in the new testament we were going through first corinthians and he's paul's talking about head coverings and stuff and he's making the argument uh you know and he says you know because of the angels right right and i just throws it out there like you know everybody because of the angels yeah and i we had this eric and i we had to be straight with people like no idea what he's talking about like no no paul i don't know because of the angels i have no idea what that has to do with anything and i you know

you read commentaries and at some point you're like i feel like this is all speculation and conjecture and and you're like i i think this one's lost on me i think i had to have been there for this yeah i do think i mean most i will tell you most people explain this that that this kind of prophesying is you slip into some sort of like ecstatic kind of trance-like uh state i suppose and you're prophesying but even to me that's speculative too because it doesn't say that right i mean it does say you'll be you'll be changed into another man but there's a there's different ways that we can take that that doesn't mean like all of a sudden you're gonna like you're gonna be saying and doing all sorts of really weird stuff like you're high on

something and in that way you're gonna be changing to another man it doesn't necessarily mean that the idea that the spirit would come and change you into another man it's not something that we can't wrap our heads around obviously there's a new man we know about that we know about this right happens all the time sure yeah all the time this doesn't mean now no one standing next to you is gonna say that guy used to be this man and now he's this man it would be obviously we're not taking it that literally but you know i mean obviously samuel is no doubt implying that you weren't a king before and you're gonna be a king now well that's a different sort of man i mean there's a difference between a guy looking for donkeys and a king like those aren't the same

guy usually right yeah yeah yeah it just struck me in this conversation you know this is a So another fascinating angle to this. I've already mentioned that there's this connection between the kingly office and the priestly office. Well, lo and behold, look, now that we have another connection, because here we have a guy who is just chosen as king, and who's going to receive priestly bread. And then the next thing you know, what's he going to be doing? He's going to be hanging out prophesying with prophets. yeah so he really does in in some sort of way have aspects of all three of these callings of these divine callings i mean he is he's going to be a king for sure but he also is going to have a prophetic aspect to his vocation he's going to have a priestly aspect to his vocation so we're used to kind of separating these three out but there's there's an element of a combination of these in the in the leader of israel i mean i don't think it's i mean it's not it's not stretching the language too far to say that saul is going to walk away from this a different person

i mean we would we would say we would use we understand how this like this kind of language works right you know someone experiences something and like they said oh that they were completely different after that they were you know uh someone goes to war and you say they came back a different person or they got married i've said this about my little one of my younger brothers um like man when he got after he got married like he was a completely different person in a positive way by the way uh it's an improvement but um but yeah but we know we know what that kind of language is like where and this is going i mean can you think of a more radical change than this like you're you're gonna walk away from this whole deal uh a very different man than you walked in

yeah yeah absolutely and i think that's that's you know we can speculate back and forth as to exactly what's going on here with the musicians and the and the prophesying but that is is no doubt the message that is intended to be conveyed the all of this is happening to Saul because yeah I mean he's he is uh he's he's starting out in a in a calling that nothing could have prepared him for so it really does to be need to be going through these these highly charged highly emotional highly transformative experiences because that is the only thing that's going to ready him for what what's coming up so anyway this is what happens uh it says that well then he goes then let me wrap up Saul I mean Samuel goes on to say you know all these things are going to happen and then in seven

days I'm going to meet you at Gilgal so that takes us through verse eight now here's what happened afterward it says that after all these things after all these things were spoken when Saul turned his back to leave Samuel, God changed his heart. And all those signs came about on that day. And I was interested because I, I wondered, I wonder if that's the same Hebrew, Hebrew verb that's used. It is. So if you look in verse six, where it says, become another man or be changed into another man. And then in verse nine, where God changed his heart, same, same word, same verb. it usually means overturn but it can be you know it can be used in the sense of change so God is maybe we could say he you know he flipped him over he uh he turned him around to be a

different kind of person so it wasn't just that the the experience of these things changed him rather God himself was the one who was behind this and he was changing he was changing Saul to ready him for what was to take place now in the in the section that follows this which is 10 through 16, there's no recording of the first of those two signs happening. There's no recording of the two guys that meet him and say, hey, where you been? You know, we found the donkeys. Your dad is really worried about you. There's no recording of that, nor is a recording of the three guys with the wine and the bread and the goats. We just assume, of course, that happened. But what is recorded is when Saul meets the prophets. So it says they came to the hill

and a group of prophets met him and the spirit of God came upon him mightily so that he prophesied among them. So this was just in fulfillment of what Samuel had said. And here's the reaction to the people. It says that all who knew Saul previously saw how he prophesied now with the prophets. And the people said to one another, understandably, they said, what's happened to the son of Kish, is Saul also among the prophets? And there was one guy who said, now who is their father? Therefore it became a proverb, is Saul also among the prophets? When he finished prophesying, he came to the high place, is the way that section wraps up. Now this too has been taken a lot of different ways. Like when it says it became a proverb, is Saul also among the prophets? Usually

Proverbs are pretty straightforward and pretty clear this one is is not so much so what what does it mean how is it proverbial to say is Saul also among the prophets I mean you could take it to mean is uh that this guy is acting completely contrary to everything that we associate with him right so you see a guy and he's like like from the last time you saw him to now he's just he's either he's either a completely different person in a bad way or a good way and so you might say to your buddy is Saul also among the prophets meaning you know is is what's up with this guy he's he's he's a different person one commentator I read this was actually uh attractive to me he read this this whole story as as as if to say that Saul is now no longer really so much the son of

Kish as he is the adopted son of Samuel. So when they say, what has happened to the son of Kish, they're implying by that he doesn't really seem to be Kish's son anymore. In fact, he seems to be acting like Samuel, who is the father of the prophets. So I find that particularly attractive. I don't know that we can necessarily say one is correct and one is not. But at least my reaction from their words is to say that because Saul is acting in a way that seems very un-Saul-like, people are astounded. And because of this, they make up this proverb to kind of encapsulate what it means for someone to become a different person than what they were before. Yeah, it almost seems like it becomes a saying that you could apply to anybody who is doing something that seems

Contrary to what they would normally do Right so In the New Testament when they roll out Can anything good come from Nazareth This is a saying He didn't just make it up It's like a saying And they just say it

And so yeah He had some guy that never built something Ever in his whole life And all of a sudden he goes and builds a house You might say It's all among the prophets Right yeah We need to resurrect this proverb

we do we need to just start we'll just like throw it in more randomly in these in the next uh next few narratives that we cover where something unexpected happens whoo you saw awesome with the prophets yeah that's that's probably what they said when david struck eliah if they were like a prophet right now right right so anyway uh the uh the three signs yeah they were they were all fulfilled the first two were just not mentioned but this third one that's that's what happened when he met the prophets. Then he gets home. We have another kind of strange exchange here. So this is 14 through 16. He gets home and Saul's uncle says to him and to his servant, where'd you go? Presumably like, dude, you've been gone days. Where were you? Where did you go?

And he said, no, I went to look for the donkeys. And when we saw they couldn't be found, we went to samuel and then well i just that was probably not the good the good answer because i just peaked saul's uncle's interest he's like oh yeah well tell me what samuel said to you and this is all saul told him he said oh he told us plainly that the donkeys have been found yeah that's that's what he said that's all he said that's all he said well it's not a lie i mean it's not it's certainly not the whole truth but it's not a lie he did tell him hey the donkey's been found then then it clarifies it says he did not tell him about the matter of the kingdom which samuel had mentioned yeah yeah that's it's pretty obvious he you know he decided he would hold hold back on

that particular uh bit of information yeah i mean you have to think or saul's gotta be in this situation like oh he told me uh i was uh i was gonna be king like that's you know his uncle would laugh yeah it's like that's not how are you gonna tell somebody that yeah like you really need samuel to tell somebody that yeah you can imagine if saul's like recounting well here's what happened you know i met samuel he told me i was gonna be a king and then all this other stuff went down and his uncle be looking at him like kid there's no way no way all this probably said to him were you hanging out with those prophets on that mountain right right with the mushrooms what are you talking about yeah so uh anyway we don't know why by the way we don't know why this

as Saul's uncle. The guy I mentioned earlier who thought that Samuel had adopted Saul as his son thinks this was actually Saul's dad, but because he had been, as it were, adopted now that he's called his uncle. Yeah, okay. I mean, that's one of those, it sounds good. You can't necessarily prove it. It sounds good. I don't think there's any reason really to understand this as anybody but his uncle, you know, maybe his dad's doing something else that day. And so only his uncle's home. Anyway, that takes us through the middle of the chapter. So let's figure out what happens next. We're coming up to a big event here. So verse 17, Samuel called everybody together at Mizpah, which is ironic because if you remember the end of Judges chapter 20, the last time that

Israel gathered at Mizpah, not the last time, but when they gathered at Mizpah in Judges 20, it was to go destroy the people of Gibeah, where there had been the horrendous rape scene. So now they're gathering at Mizpah for a very different reason. So he gathers them at Mizpah and he addresses them. Now this address is not positive. This is not like, glad you're all here because God's got a gift for you yeah this is a very this is a very different kind of sermon thus says the lord the god of israel i brought you i brought israel up from egypt and i delivered you from the hand of the egyptians and from the power of all the kingdoms that were oppressing you but anytime there's like that lead and then it says but it's like oh this is not gonna what follows this is

not gonna be good here's what you don't want like there's two butts okay there's two butts and the but that you don't want is god saying something good then but that's not that's never good the but that you like is when god says you're a rebellious horrible treacherous idolatrous people but and you're like okay good okay good this is so this one is it's all about whether the positive or the negative comes first and if the positive comes first followed by a but this is not good yeah that's that's a very good paradigm by which to interpret all sorts of things like this so yeah the first part is great yeah i did all this for you but all right well what follows the but but you today rejected your god wow you rejected your god who delivers you

from all your calamities and your distresses yet you have said no but set a king over us now therefore present yourselves before the lord by your tribes and by your clans so god did all this but here's what you did and this takes us back to the chapter where we had samuel basically trying to talk the people out of getting a king right they said set a king over us because uh number one we want to be like all the nations and number two your sons are are not like you are, Samuel. I mean, you're a good guy. You've done great things for Israel. But here's the problem. Your sons are corrupt and they're not fit to rule over us. So we want a king. And of course, Samuel goes through all of the things the king is going to take from them. He's going

to take your crops. He's going to take your sons. He's going to take your daughters. He's going to take all these things from you. But the people steadfastly refused to change their mind. So what does he do? Samuel brought all the tribes of Israel near, and they cast lots, and the tribe of Benjamin was taken by lot. And then he brought the tribe of Benjamin near by its families, and they cast lots, and the Matrite family was taken by lot. And Saul, the son of, then they cast lots, you know, for all the individual members of that family. And Saul, the son of Kish, was taken. And the next line you would expect would be, and Saul stood up, right? And he was ready to be king, but that's not what happens.

It says, when they looked for him, he could not be found. So they, you know, started asking around, and then they inquired of the Lord. And so they can't even find, that's the funny part, they can't even find him. Like, nobody knows where he is. God's the only one. and so god says oh he's hiding behind he's hiding himself by the baggage this whole thing is fascinating because samuel knows that this is the guy he's already told him he's the guy he's already like anointed him and he's like all right let's do this lots thing

and yeah there's only two explanations either samuel's got this whole thing rigged or he's just real confident that that's how these lots are going to go right right now i know we're we're at our 40 minute mark so let me let me leave you here with a little teaser here now so i'll test your memory you uh you longtime listeners if you were with us for quite a while and you've been with us through you know first samuel and ruth and uh and judges and all the way back into joshua so go back into Joshua and see if you can remember a time when the tribes are brought forward and lots are cast and then clans and then families and then finally the lot fell to a very specific person so test your memory there and and see what you can find in the book of Joshua where that

where that happened and then compare it with with all that happens here and see if maybe you can put those put those two together and come up with uh with an explanation as to how they might fit together and then we'll unpack that when we come back next week look at this guys teaser i was gonna say so i was about to say something and comment on it but now but i can't now now now he's left it right wait can't give things i can't i can't uh i can't try to give answers here guys thanks for joining us for the podcast today make sure you go and register for here we still stay in virtual conference uh we'd love to hang out with all of you guys it is in the show notes as well as the link for the pre-order

for Chad's new book, Unveiling Mercy. Make sure you do that as well. Chad, I'll see you next week. All right, we'll see you then.