Read Time: 9 minutes1 Samuel 9
The chapter introduces Saul, and every detail of the introduction is the people’s idea of a king made flesh. His very name is the verdict: Saul means asked — from sha’al, the same root by which the people asked for a king, and the same root that named Samuel “asked of Yahweh.” But where Samuel was the asked-for prophet given in grace, Saul is the asked-for king demanded in unbelief; the nation gets a man named after their own request. He is the son of a mighty man of wealth, “a choice young man, and a goodly: and there was not among the children of Israel a goodlier person than he: from his shoulders and upward he was higher than any of the people.” This is exactly what a king like all the nations looks like — tall, handsome, head and shoulders above the crowd, the king the eye would choose. Saul is the king after the flesh, and in that he stands as the standing type of natural Israel itself: chosen by sight, impressive in stature, given every advantage, and unable to keep what he was given. Israel asked for a king they could see, and Yahweh gives them one who is all surface, the most visible man in the nation. The chapter is quietly setting up the lesson that the Lord looks not as man looks; the king chosen for his height will be measured by his heart and found wanting.
What strikes the reader is how small the errand is that brings Saul to Samuel. He is out looking for his father’s lost donkeys — wandering through the hill country, unable to find them, ready to give up and go home. The future king of Israel is introduced chasing strayed livestock and failing to find them. There is no grandeur in the call; the man who will wear the crown cannot locate his father’s donkeys without a servant’s prompting and a seer’s help. The contrast with the true Shepherd-King is already implicit: this is a man who cannot keep track of beasts, not one who lays down his life for the sheep.
It is the servant, not Saul, who thinks of the man of God, and even then they nearly turn back for lack of a gift to bring. The detail is telling — Saul does not know the seer who is in his own land, does not know where to turn, must be led every step by those around him. Yahweh, meanwhile, has already told Samuel the day before: “To morrow about this time I will send thee a man out of the land of Benjamin, and thou shalt anoint him to be captain over my people.” The whole apparent accident of the lost donkeys is Yahweh’s appointment; the man stumbling through the hills is being walked, without knowing it, straight to his anointing.
Samuel receives him with a strange honor — sets him at the head of the invited guests, gives him the portion that had been kept back for this moment, tells him the donkeys are found and that “on whom is all the desire of Israel? Is it not on thee, and on all thy father’s house?” Saul’s reply is the becoming modesty of a man not yet spoiled: “Am not I a Benjamite, of the smallest of the tribes of Israel?” There is real humility in the young Saul, and that makes the later ruin sadder. He begins low in his own eyes; he will end grasping and jealous. The beginning is not the problem; the keeping is.
The king the eye would choose is found chasing lost donkeys and led by a servant’s word — Saul, the “asked-for” king, natural Israel in one man: head and shoulders above the people, given every advantage, and measured at last by the heart. He begins humble in his own eyes; remember that the keeping, not the beginning, is the test.
Isaiah 53
This is the heart of the prophets, the chapter that lays open how the Servant saves. It opens in disbelief — “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of Yahweh revealed?” — because what is about to be told overturns every expectation of how deliverance comes. The arm of Yahweh, the saving strength called to awake in chapter 51, is revealed not in might but in a man despised. “He shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground; he hath no form nor comeliness… no beauty that we should desire him.” Set against tall Saul of the chapter before, the contrast could not be sharper: the king Israel wanted was all height and form; the King Yahweh sends has no form that the eye would choose. He is “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”
The middle of the chapter is the gospel in the prophets, and it must be read carefully, because the way the Servant bears sin is easy to mishear. “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows… he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.” The Servant is not a third party placated by punishment; he is one of us, sharing our very nature and condition, who takes our sin upon himself by bearing it in the flesh he shares with us and putting it to death in his own obedience and offering. “Yahweh hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” — not that an innocent is punished so the guilty go free by a transaction, but that the kinsman takes hold of his family’s burden as his own and carries it through death to bring the family out. He is the near one, the brother, the representative head — and we are healed because we are in him, joined to the one who bore it.
The Servant’s silence is the chapter’s most piercing note: “he was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” The lamb led silent to the slaughter is the willing offering of chapter 50’s set face, the back given to the smiters without resistance. It is this verse the Ethiopian was reading when Philip “began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus” (Acts 8:35) — the chapter the early community read straight through as the passion of the Lord. He made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death, “because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.” The line divides with uncanny precision, and history split it exactly: condemned as a criminal between two malefactors, he was due a felon’s grave with the wicked — yet in his death he was laid in the new, unused tomb of Joseph the rich man of Arimathaea, the wicked and the rich each claiming their half of the prophecy.
And then the turn from death to life and fruit. “When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days… he shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.” The offering does not end in the grave; the Servant lives again to see a seed, a multitude born of his travail — the very thing the barren-womb pattern has been reaching toward all month. He pours out his soul unto death, is numbered with the transgressors, “and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” The One brought low is divided a portion with the great; the One who carried the iniquity of all becomes the father of an uncountable seed. Death is the soil; the resurrection-life bears the harvest.
The arm of Yahweh is revealed in a man with no beauty we would desire — the kinsman who carried our burden to bring his family out. He poured out his soul unto death, and lives to see his seed; with his stripes we are healed because we are in him.
Revelation 15–16
Chapter 15 is a brief, solemn hinge before the last plagues — “seven angels having the seven last plagues; for in them is filled up the wrath of God.” The count is the point: seven is the number of covenant-completion, and in these seven the wrath is filled up — not arbitrary fury but the full, finished measure of judgment, the last of it, brought to its covenant end. John sees those who had gotten the victory over the beast standing on “a sea of glass mingled with fire,” and they sing “the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb.” The two songs are one: Moses’s song at the Red Sea, sung when the redeemed had passed through the waters and seen their oppressor drowned, joined to the song of the Lamb who leads a greater exodus through a greater sea. The victory over the beast is the new Red Sea crossing; the redeemed stand on the far shore — the glassy sea now mingled with the fire of judgment — and sing the deliverance, “Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways.”
Then the temple is opened and the seven angels come out with the seven golden vials, “full of the wrath of God,” and no man can enter the temple until the plagues are fulfilled. The seven vials of chapter 16 are poured on the earth, the sea, the rivers, the sun, the throne of the beast, the great river Euphrates, and the air — and the echoes of the plagues of Egypt are unmistakable: the sores, the waters turned to blood, the darkness, the frogs. The God who brought Israel out by plagues on Egypt brings his people out of the world-system by plagues on the beast-empire. The judgments fall on the seat of the beast and its kingdom is “full of darkness,” yet still men “blasphemed the God of heaven… and repented not of their deeds” — the same hardness Pharaoh showed, the same the trumpet-survivors showed, the heart that judgment alone cannot soften.
The sixth vial dries up the Euphrates “that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared,” and out of the mouths of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet come three unclean spirits like frogs, the spirits of devils working miracles, “to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.” This is the gathering of the nations to Armageddon — Har-Megiddo, the mountain of Megiddo, the plain that was Israel’s ancient battlefield, now the name for the last muster of the world’s powers against Yahweh and his anointed. It is the same gathering the prophets set at the threshold of the kingdom: the confederacy of Gog of Magog drawn down upon the mountains of Israel (Ezek 38–39), the nations assembled only to be broken there. Into the middle of this the voice of the Lord breaks like a thief: “Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.” Even in the account of the last battle, the word to the saint is personal — keep your garments, stay awake.
The seventh vial is poured into the air, and a great voice from the throne says, “It is done.” The great city is divided, the cities of the nations fall, “and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath.” The cup returns — the cup of trembling Isaiah said would be taken from Jerusalem’s hand and put into the hand of her afflicters is now pressed to Babylon’s lips. Every island flees, the mountains are not found, a great hail falls, and men blaspheme still. The wrath is filled up; the system that wore the mark and demanded the worship drinks the cup to the dregs. The stage is set for chapters 17–18, the fall of the harlot.
The redeemed stand on the far shore and sing the song of Moses and the Lamb — the beast is the new Egypt, the victory the new Red Sea. The cup comes round to Babylon at last; watch and keep thy garments, for he comes as a thief.
Synthesis and Exhortation
The center of today’s readings is the chapter at the center of the prophets, and everything around it bends toward the same truth: the arm of Yahweh saves through a Servant the eye would never choose. Saul is the king Israel wanted — tall, handsome, head and shoulders above the people — and the next chapter sets beside him the King Yahweh sends, who has no form nor comeliness, no beauty that we should desire him. The whole month’s pattern of strength-through-weakness reaches its depth here: the captured ark that conquered, the marred Servant lifted high, the Lamb who was slain. Israel chose by the eye and got Saul; Yahweh saves by the despised and rejected One, and we are healed by his stripes because we are joined to him, not because an innocent man was punished in our place.
The way the Servant bears sin is the hinge of the whole hope, and it must be held rightly. He is not a stranger placated by suffering; he is the kinsman who took our burden into the very nature he shares with us and carried it through death to bring his family out. Yahweh laid on him the iniquity of us all — the brother taking hold of the family debt as his own, the representative head dying so that those in him die and rise with him. And the offering does not end in the grave: he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days. The pouring out of his soul unto death is the soil from which an uncountable seed is born — the same barren-womb-to-multitude reversal that began with Hannah, brought now to its source. Death is the seed-ground; the resurrection bears the harvest.
The hope across the readings is held future and earthly and patient. The Servant shall see his seed and be satisfied — the harvest is coming, not yet gathered. The redeemed in Revelation stand on the far shore singing the deliverance, but the last plagues are still being poured and Babylon’s cup is only now coming round. The voice in the middle of Armageddon says I come as a thief — still future, still calling for watchfulness. The saint lives where Saul’s story is still young and the keeping is the test, where the Servant has borne the sin but the seed is still being gathered, where the song of Moses and the Lamb is sung in hope of a crossing not yet complete.
So the exhortation is to choose the King the eye would not choose, to be found in the Servant who bore the iniquity, and to keep your garments through the pouring of the vials. Do not measure kings by their height; remember that the keeping, not the beginning, is the test, and that the only King who saves is the one who poured out his soul. Be joined to him by faith so that his stripes are your healing and his seed your hope. And in the long account of plagues and the gathering to the last battle, hear the personal word that breaks through it: behold, I come as a thief; blessed is he that watcheth. Watch, keep clean, and stand on the far shore with those who sing the song of Moses and the Lamb.
The King the eye rejects is the arm of Yahweh revealed. Be found in the kinsman who bore the iniquity and lives to see his seed — and through the pouring of the vials, watch and keep thy garments, for he comes as a thief.