Looking for God’s Hand

1 Samuel 27-29

            Chapters 27-29, as so often in 1 Samuel, present two contrasting stories. On the one hand we have the story of David, who seems to have had enough of being chased around and being betrayed by his fellow Israelites. He seeks refuge among Israel’s mortal enemies, the Philistines. He had tried that once before, but they weren’t ready to accept him. Now, his troubles with Saul are well-known, and Achish of the Philistines gives David a permanent home. David knows he is in a tricky spot; the Philistines only see him as an enemy of their enemy; they don’t know that David has been picked by the Lord to be the next king of Israel, where all of his loyalties lie. For a while he is able to keep his secret safe, but as chapter 28 opens, it seems like the jig is up: he is called to prove his loyalty and go to war with Israel.

            The story breaks to look at Saul—desperate, hopeless, and without the word of the Lord. In his despair, he turns to a medium to summon the spirit of Samuel. This part of the story raises some really hard questions. Did (do?) mediums like this really call up spirits of the dead? Is this a regular occurrence? Are the spirits of our dead available to us? I have two thoughts. My first is an insight I have about miracles in general: the Bible is filled with miracles because they are the exceptions to how the Lord works, not the normal way He works, in the same way a newspaper reports extraordinary events, not mundane ones. (An hours-long traffic jam because of a terrible accident is worthy of the 10 o’clock news; ordinary rush hour is not.) My second is Revelation 14:13, “Then I heard a voice from heaven say, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “Yes,” says the Spirit, “they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.” They rest from their labors… Revelation 6:9-11 suggest that the saints in heaven are aware of the spiritual conditions on the earth, but even there they are given a white robe and told to wait a little longer, as if to say, “Remember you are redeemed by the blood of Jesus; don’t worry about it.” So, I think we need to think of this as a one-time action from the Lord to allow Samuel’s spirit to deliver one final message to Saul. Which also means we should remember the explanation of the 2^nd Commandment in Luther’s Small Catechism and flee anything that smacks of “satanic arts.”

            I think the larger point to see, though, is how desperate Saul is for a word from the Lord. He has had a history of ignoring or outright disobeying God’s words already, but now he is desperate.

            David, on the other hand, has been a model of a believer, trusting the Lord through very difficult circumstances, and somehow the Lord delivers him from his conundrum through the intervention of the other Philistine commanders, who don’t trust him at their backs. There’s no explicit word from the Lord for David, but his habit of trusting Him pays off yet again as the Lord provides a way out from a real dilemma.

            I’m not quite sure how to summarize all of this. It’s not like the simple fact of being in God’s Word, listening to it, applying it will automatically solve all of life’s problems. And I don’t think we should expect that the Lord will deliver us from every challenging thing as smoothly as He delivered David. However, it does seem like the contrast between David and Saul is seen in the ways they trust God’s Word: Saul has had a lot of words from the Lord’s and hasn’t taken them seriously. David has the promise of his anointing and that single promise has seen him through.