That I may Know HIM - A Devotional

Day 8: Invasion From the Past

Day 8: Invasion From the Past

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Foreword

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A  Past ignored against Divine counsel often becomes a ferocious Future. A Today  untamed often grows into a wild Tomorrow.  God does not always explain the Future when He insists so much on the Present.  It is dangerous foolishness therefore, to argue with a seeing Omniscient God towering infinitely above our mortal dwarfness with its circumscribed vision of earthly here-and-nows.

 A Wasted Commission

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Perhaps the first specific divine military  assignment that Saul received after being anointed king of Israel was the campaign on which he got sent against the Amalekites.

2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.

3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass (1 Samuel 15:2-3).

King Saul went out on this military campaign, but failed to carry out his marching orders explicitly.  He spared what appeared to him the best-looking of the abominations that he had been ordered to destroy completely.  He could not see Amalek with the eyes of God.  In his own eyes, there was nothing wrong with Amalek after all.  God was simply asking for too much, so he unilaterally spared some of the ‘finest’ sheep, ostensibly for sacrifice to God, whereas he actually might have been intending them for the traditional after-sacrifice feast, in celebration of ‘his’ victory, by which he would have been taking the glory for a battle that was the Lord’s.

Saul spared not only animals but also some of the people of Amalek, notable among whom was the king himself, Agag, who otherwise should have been the first to go down (vv. 7-9, 15).  The Prophet Samuel had to take it upon himself therefore to execute upon that king the divine sentence of death that, in the rebellious comradely spirit of kings, Saul had meant to avert.

 The Sword of Samuel

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May prophets prepare their swords in the coming season, to slay surviving remnants from previous generations of rebellious indecision and indifference by the throne.  Prophets may not only preach and prophesy.  They may also slay; like Samuel, like Elijah (1 Kings 18:40).  Prophets may not only carry the scroll.  Generations of disobedience will confront them with an imperial anti-Godness that their swords shall slay.  The time is near for prophets to begin to judge the thrones with their sword, that a lingering sentence might come to pass. And if also the word of the Lord be the sword of the Spirit, then may they speak the sentences of death upon those whom compromising kings have spared.  Amen.

Saul’s Unilateral Amnesty

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Samuel slew Agag whom Saul brought back home in disobedience to God’s clear instructions.  But what about the others whom Saul had spared back in Amalek; the others whom, unlike Agag the king, he had not brought along to display as a trophy of his victory?  Those were to linger to become, in future, a pernicious thorn in the sides of subsequent generations of Israelites, as the rest of this story would show.

As Samuel slew Agag, he announced that the king’s mother was thereafter going to be childless just as Agag’s sword had made other women childless (1 Samuel 15:33).  That might suggest a prophetic insight that the aged king-mother had also been spared, but might have been too old for the journey to, and triumphal parade back in, Israel.