1 SAMUEL 31
So, forty years after Saul became king of Israel, it’s all over. The Philistines killed him and his three sons, thus leaving no direct heirs to the throne. Israel was once more kingless, and the stage set for David to take his anointed place on the throne.
However, before Saul fades into obscurity, it seemed prudent to point out two things. First, the Philistines cut off Saul’s head and nailed his body to the wall of the pagan temple in Beth Shan. This was in Jabesh where, incidentally, Saul had made his debut as king forty years earlier. Second, even though the Israelites had accepted Saul as their king in order to fight the Philistines, and even though Saul had spent his forty years running an ongoing military campaign, at the king’s death, the people of Israel were in virtually the same place with regard to the Philistines as they had been four decades earlier.
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The point? When we don’t have God in our lives, we go in circles. It is God who moves us forward into new horizons, and without Him, we won’t get anywhere. In the end, we will land right back where we started—having made no lasting and significant progress toward our goals. Given our state of mind (as it is clouded by sin), we need the influence of God—whose ways are different from our ways and whose thoughts are higher than our thoughts (Isa 55:8)—to move us in a meaningful direction.
If we reject Him, we might as well consider it a dead end. Without Him, we ain’t goin’ nowhere!
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