Take the most insignificant detail of your life. A pebble on the ground before you….a glance into the mirror…a forgotten conversation with a co-worker…the Swanson’s frozen dinner last Monday…the toothpaste you picked up from Walgreen’s on the way home from the dentist. Why did you decide these moments were insignificant? Was it the little attention you paid them, the lack of relevance to anything else you did, the low impact they had on your retirement plans? How come the stock market crash in 1929 led to so many suicides and my four month old daughter spitting up on my shirt went unnoticed and forgotten in both my inner world and the universe at large? What strange magical electrode in your brain sparks and sets off a chime warning “this is important” or more legitimately, what triggers the dump mode, sending so much of experience into the recycle bin of your soul?
If we could be brutally honest just for a moment, most of life is terribly boring. No one cares that you had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch and the TV show you watch tonight with such rapt attention will be completely forgotten next week…or tomorrow. You go to work and you go home and next week you go to work and go home and for forty years you go to work and go home and then you make a major shift, you eat your lunch at home and go to Wall-mart in the afternoon. Six billion of us will live and die and five Billion, nine Hundred and ninety nine million, nine hundred and ninety eight thousand will never know it happened. Or maybe more...
What if you never lived? Would it cause a ripple in the tide or a shift in the alignment of the continents? Of course not! And by your living, does the star Alpha Centauri burn any brighter or democracy shine any more in America? No…So does it really matter what you do or don’t do? Now that is a completely different question. I recently posted on my blog a short discussion on how universal the tendency is to see everything almost exclusively from one’s own perspective. Of course that can be a bad if you are self-centered and ugly about your lack of interest in others but it is the way we are. We cannot really get into anyone else’s head any more than they can get into ours. We live, even with so many all around us, isolated. The most important journey any of us make in life is the one outside our minds, outside our wants and dreams and hopes…it is the journey away from ourselves.
There is a quite strange passage in the Old Testament that took me years to get a handle for understanding. Honestly, most times I read it I came away flummoxed by God’s hardness, His strident harshness. Every criticism leveled against God by unbelievers seems illustrated in this account. God is just mean, He makes big things out of little things, He is all about rules and takes the fun out of life. I think most people who don’t believe in God aren’t so impressed by the evidence He doesn’t exist, it is just they don’t like what they see of God and close their eyes to His presence, creating a network of proofs to do away with the God they don’t want. This incident I am talking about in 1 Samuel is the very sort of thing atheists and agnostics and anti Christians point to as reasons for not believing. If God is God, why would He be like this? Why so stubbornly hard and unbending?
The account is found in 1 Samuel 13. Saul had recently been appointed king over all Israel by Samuel, the prophet of God. Samuel’s authority came from his position as spokesman for the Lord and all the people respected his clear sense of God’s guidance nationally. Israel was formed, not as a democracy, not as a monarchy, not as a socialist state but rather as a people governed by God and every time they strayed from that mooring, the entire country fell into chaos and pain. But now, for the first time, a king was being appointed to lead the people and it was a bittersweet moment. Saul, as the new king had lots of promise. He had a talent for leading large numbers of people. He was tall, good looking and bright. His ability to raise up an army and instill confidence in a vision was becoming clear. The future looked bright for Israel with Saul at the helm.
But if Israel was to be a nation that followed God as ultimate King, then the most crucial skill set Saul had to have was making God king of his own heart. The first great test of this came with the invasion of Israel by the vast army of the Philistines. Saul had been told by the prophet Samuel that God absolutely did not want Saul to just do things on his own. He was to go down to Gilgal and wait seven days until Samuel returned and then Samuel would make a set of burnt offerings and a fellowship offering for all the men and after that, God’s instructions would be handed to Saul.
What follows is most perplexing but not surprising given our understanding of human nature. Saul’s son Jonathon, a courageous and reckless spirit, got the Philistines stirred up by attacking one of their outposts. Saul had already conscripted an army of three thousand men but when the Philistines arrived with their army “as numerous as the sand on the seashore”, Saul faced his first true crisis as king. Wanting to be faithful, Saul waited the seven days for Samuel but when the morning of the seventh day arrived with no Samuel in sight, Saul took matters into his own hands. All week, his men had been deserting. The Philistines, without ever firing off an arrow or swinging a sword were, by just camping nearby, decimating Saul’s fledgling army. As the early morning sun broke across the sky, Saul called for a heifer to be brought him and roasted it on the camp fire as an offering to God. But just as he was finishing, Samuel arrived. Samuel, spying the roasting calf on the skewer asked the king, “What are you doing?”
Listen carefully to Saul’s response. "When I saw that the men were scattering, and that you did not come at the set time, and that the Philistines were assembling at Micmash, I thought, 'Now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal, and I have not sought the LORD's favor.' So I felt compelled to offer the burnt offering." (1 Sam 13:11-12 NIV) As he worked through the crisis he faced, Saul took into account two factors: how others were responding and his own take on things: I saw that the men were scattering and that you did not come….so I felt compelled.
Everything we do, say or think is worked through one of three filters. They are self, others or God. Some would protest that there is a fourth filter through which we live and that is circumstance. What about broken legs and financial windfalls, car wrecks and promotions? Don’t they determine our actions and how we think about things? No situation we face stands alone. Every circumstance is filtered through ourselves, others or God and it is the filter that dominates which determines how we respond. A classic example of this is Paul’s famous assertion in 2 Corinthians 12: 10. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. The circumstance hasn’t determined Paul’s response nor his mental state. Why do some when faced with bankruptcy commit suicide while others seem almost refreshed by the crisis? Of course we realize that it wasn’t what happened that made them act like they did. It was the filter through which they translated it all.
Let’s return to King Saul. Saul used two filters, the response of his men and his own intuition to decide he had to offer up the burnt sacrifice before Samuel got to camp. God had told Saul that he must, no questions asked wait until Samuel arrived before any sacrifices were to be offered. When Saul didn’t, he was chastised and punished for his disobedience. “You acted foolishly”, Samuel cried. "You have not kept the command the LORD your God gave you; if you had, he would have established your kingdom over Israel for all time. But now your kingdom will not endure; the LORD has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him leader of his people, because you have not kept the LORD's command." (1 Sam 13:13-14 NIV) Now why do you suppose God punished Saul so severely for such a minor indiscretion? It is all a matter of perspective!
As long as Saul governed with himself at the center, he could never get things right for the people he led. He could not know what they really needed, never understand how to help them, how to lead them, how to set their lives right. His fatal flaw and the one we too possess is that Saul could not enter a single person’s heart, could not ever really know what they thought and how they could be helped. Being isolated, Saul was of no real use to anyone in his kingdom. Every decision he made impacted everyone else in Israel as well as the nations surrounding but his ability to get it right for them was corrupted by his sin. Selfishness combined with a lack of insight into each person he was affecting killed Saul’s value as king. He could never govern well as long as his decisions were based either on what he thought or what he saw in others.
See The Figure on the Left... Self At The Center
See The Figure in the Middle... Others At The Center
Here is the second part of Saul’s painful difficulty. Even if Saul somehow became an expert student of men, made the people the filter governing his behavior, he would be unable to govern himself. Just the extra attention the women of Jerusalem paid David made him jealous and crippled his ability to make wise decisions. He thought he understood what he should do because of what he noticed about David and the response of the people to his kingship but he was completely wrong. Not only that, Saul was surrounded by advisors who were unable to correct him when he began to struggle with his insecurities. Sinners failing to look to God guiding sinners failing to look to God are a bad combination. We either don’t know what to make of others and their actions or we don’t really know who we are nor what we could be.
If you were to nail down the theme of the Bible in one concise sentence, it would be this. All men are sinners and everyone needs a Savior. Everything we do or try to do is corrupted by our sin and it makes us completely scattered and our lives meaningless wanderings. Unable to break free of our lives because we cannot really get outside our own heads, we fail to make good on the promise we had when we first sprung into life. We don’t help others rightly because we can’t and we don’t do much for ourselves either because we too often get that wrong too. We are like a polluted lake with no outlet. Sin corrupts more and more of us the longer we go and it makes a mess of our relationships too. Without a Savior, I live lost.
Saul was not bad because he offered a sacrifice. Saul was bad because he did it without God. While my family was watching one of the episodes from the first season of the TV show Lost, we were stunned by how the story unfolded. The show is about a group of survivors whose plane crashed on an island somewhere in the South Pacific. I am not really certain if the title is more about the state of where the passengers are located or the condition of their lives. As we get to know them one by one, the broken strands of their past reveal just how lost they have been. One of these characters, Charlie is an ex-drug addict who on the island has been freed of his drug cravings. In this episode, Charlie is broken by the capture of his pregnant friend Claire and haunted by the thought that he didn’t do enough to help her escape. He is worried sick that Claire has either been killed or is being tortured by her captors and he has become psychologically wrecked. Rose, who has lost her husband in the crash but is certain he somehow is still alive somewhere on the island comes to Charlie and breaks through to him. She tells Charlie that no one thinks it is his fault Claire was captured and he must stop thinking he is the only one hurting on the island. Tough medicine! But then comes the best part. As Charlie sits beside Rose, weeping uncontrollably, he begs Rose to help him Her response floored me. She tells him that he needs help bigger than her. Immediately a cross comes into focus on the screen.
See the figure on the Right... God At the Center
There is only one filter through which life ever comes into focus. It is through the life of Jesus…through God. What we cannot know, what is best for every person we influence God does. As we pray and look to Him for help, He shifts our actions and corrects our sin corrupted motives. I may not understand why my boss yelled at me but this does happen as I turn to Jesus. I respond to him with God behind what I do. My actions become, through God’s guidance, the very hand of God. In the miracle of Christian faith…in a sense, I become God for him. Not only that, I see myself more clearly too. Saul could not face the women cheering David because he thought that made him smaller. No one can make us small and insignificant because our value is never what others make of it. We are what God sees of us…and that is too big for us to comprehend.
Can we say this more clearly? Your life and mine is a wreck as long as we hold a perspective of any sort other than what God makes it. We can live all our days and in the end nothing will matter but this. Do we have a Savior? Have we followed Him? What passes for good intentions and honest effort to get it right is the fatal flaw of the sinner trapped by his own contained heart. We cannot get it right either for ourselves or others as long as all we do not filter our lives through Jesus. I was visiting with a friend and he was talking about David and God’s description of him as a “man after my own heart”. What made this murderer and adulterer and collector of wives and failing father such a person that God was pleased with him? If you read his life story, you discover that constantly he was calling on God to guide him. The only times he didn’t, David found himself in terrible trouble.
Judas was not such a great sinner because he betrayed Jesus. The truth is we all have done that. He was such a great sinner because when he realized he was, he did not turn to the Savior. When all he would do is filter his life through himself or what others thought of him, he was left with only insane alternatives because nothing is sane that is not done through Jesus. Why is lying so bad, sexual immorality so bad, cheating so bad or selfishness so bad? It is because they leave Jesus out of the picture and that is the basis of an insane life.
What happens when we find God at the center and it is through Him we meet ourselves and others? Look no further than Zacchaeus. Lonely. Selfish. Despised. He took one look at Jesus and decided to pay everyone back that he had overcharged for their taxes four times what he had taken. He gave half of his fortune to the poor. Then he had lunch with Jesus. That sounds to me like how it is when Jesus becomes the center. We love our friends and enemies. We forget about our past sins. We live.
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