Greetings to you in the name of Jesus Christ. I am getting back into using the Treasury of Daily Prayer as one of my daily devotions. If you are not familiar with this work, it is fantastic. It has a Psalm, an Old and New Testament reading, a selection from either the Book of Concord or one of the early church father's writings, a verse from a hymn, and a prayer for each day. So this morning I read it and I always appreciate the including of a psalm, but also like that the Old and New Testament selections connect from one day to the next to work through a book of the Bible. So this morning's Old Testament was from 1 Samuel 15. This is where Saul was supposed to completely wipe out the Amalekites. However, Saul has his army kill the people but save the king and take their best sheep and cattle from the plunder to sacrifice to the Lord. Now this doesn't seem like that big of a deal. They are going to kill all of these sheep and cattle anyway, why not kill them in the temple and sacrifice them to the Lord to give Him thanks for the victory? Just then, Samuel comes to Saul and gives him the bad news that God has rejected him. Wait, what? Saul is going to sacrifice all of these animals to the Lord and the Lord rejects him as king for it? Samuel tells Saul that the Lord prefers to be obeyed over receiving sacrifices. God told them to kill everything and that is what He wanted done. Saul disobeyed by bringing home the plunder, even if it was to sacrifice to the Lord. Also, is it really a sacrifice if they are not your animals. That would be like stealing money from your work place to put it in the offering plate at church on Sunday. Sure it looks like you are doing a good thing giving money to God, except you broke one of His commandments of stealing to do it. So Saul hears from Samuel that he has been rejected as the king of Israel and that is the last time Saul will see Samuel until the day of his death.
That was just a little background on the story in case you are not familiar with every story from the Old Testament. The part that really caught my attention was Samuel's actions in this chapter. After Samuel has told Saul the bad news and why he is being rejected as king, he orders the king of the Amalekites be brought to him. Now this king was supposed to already be dead, because Saul's army was suppose to kill him just like all the other Amalekites. So Samuel, the prophet of the Lord who was called by God as a child, has the king brought before him and HACKS HIM TO PIECES! Samuel tells the king, "As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women." I understand he kills the king because this is what God has said to do from the very beginning. However, Samuel doesn't just kill him, he hacks him to pieces. I mean I know most of us don't fight with swords anymore, so I think we don't really stop to think about how gruesome of a death it is to die by the sword. It would be a bloody messy if Samuel would have even just stabbed him. It would be an even bigger mess if he even just chopped off his head. But no, Samuel hacks him into pieces. Think about the effort it would take to swing a sword hard enough to cut through skin, muscles, and bones. Think about how many swings it would take to just cut him in half, let alone into even more pieces. Think about the amount of blood and chunks of meat on the floor. This is not a death scene where the camera turns away and you see the shadows of the sword being swung and a few drops of blood are splattered on the way to give you the idea. No, this is a death scene from the Saw movies where you see the body parts being hacked off, the blood spraying everywhere, you hear the screams of pain and the grunts of Samuel swinging the sword. This is a brutal and horrific death! But why? Why would Samuel, the prophet of the Lord hack him into pieces? I cannot say this is the exact reason, but my guess is to set the example for the other people. Saul was supposed to bring complete destruction to the Amelakites and he didn't. He set the wrong example for the people of Israel. So in order to set a positive example of obeying the Lord, Samuel brings complete and utter destruction upon the king. He doesn't just kill him, he destroys him past the point of recognition. He is showing the people (possibly over-dramatically but it does get the point across) that when God tells you to do something, you do it! So I give thanks that in my first week as an ordained pastor I haven't had to hack anybody into pieces. However, I do imagine there will be times in my ministry I will need to go to the extreme to get the point across to the people. The world is setting the example that it doesn't matter if you listen to God's word or not, so we need to make sure we set the positive example of obeying God to the fullest. Thanks be to Him who gave us His Word and His Son so that we may obey Him and live as His people. Amen.
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