I think it's been — thinking of it in an emotional sense. What do the times require of you? What do the times require of me? Specifically, what season are you in, and what do the times of that season require from you emotionally speaking? Hold that in your mind as we go through. It makes everything relevant in a different way, because we're starting out in the book of Second Samuel today.
We've covered most of First Samuel, and like First Samuel as we went through, we're not gonna cover every single passage. So I'd encourage you, with your family or with your friends, to read the passages we don't cover, because we're just gonna be hitting major turns of events as we go through. And we're gonna look at it today under two headings here in the first chapter: first, the death of Saul, and secondly, David's elegy.
And we find out in the very first verse, "after the death of Saul." Saul has died. We didn't talk about this in the last series, so we'll cover it today. The book of Samuel was originally one long story — there was no First and Second Samuel, it was just Samuel. And so the scribes, they seem to not have had enough room on a scroll, and so they decided that they had to cut it somewhere. And they decided to cut it right here at the death of Saul, because it seemed like a good place, because there are other biblical books in the Old Testament that begin "after the death of" and then fill in the blank. So for instance, Joshua and Judges begin "after the death of Moses" and "after the death of Joshua."
And First Samuel is all about Samuel and his judgment of Israel, his leadership of Israel, and then Saul and his judgment of Israel and his leadership of Israel, and then their eventual deaths. And so Second Samuel begins with this pregnant question: what is gonna happen? What is Israel gonna do now that the leader has died? How are God's promises of the land and the people and the nation gonna be fulfilled going forward? Is David going to rise up and be the king? Are there gonna be factions within the country that split the kingdom? What is gonna happen?
And right away we hear this phrase, "after the death of Saul." And what happened to Saul — if we were to turn back a page and look at First Samuel 31 — is he is fighting the Philistines on Mount Gilboa. And he's got his sons with him. The way that they would fight back then, all of the most important people, like the king and his attendants, would be in their own little entourage, somewhere most safe on the battlefield. But we're told that the archers of the enemy find Saul. And we don't know how many times he got shot, but he knows instinctively that he is mortally wounded and he's not gonna make it out of this one alive. And so he turns to his armor bearer, and he says, "Finish me off, please. I'm not gonna make it." And the armor bearer has such respect for the office of the king and love for Saul — he can't bring himself to do this. He says, "I couldn't do it." And so Saul takes his own life and falls on his sword and dies tragically on the battlefield.
And then his sons are also slaughtered, including Jonathan, and many of the army flees, and the battle is lost. And the Philistines come across his body, and they behead him. They take it, and along with his sons, they hang it outside of one of their cities, as a public shaming and a public warning to Israel. And the very last thing in First Samuel is some of the Israelite faithful coming and taking the bodies down and giving them a proper burial — kind of a little mini-raid in the night.
And then we get this phrase, "after the death of Saul." And that's very important to think about how he died, because we're gonna get a different version of events from this messenger that comes in a moment.
But the next phrase that shows up is, "when David had returned from striking down the Amalekites, he remained two days at Ziklag." And David was striking down the Amalekites because Saul had been hunting him. And so he had kind of run into the wilderness of the southern part of Judah, and he was trying to protect his own people. He had kind of settled in this city, Ziklag. And the Amalekites are some of the ancient enemies of Israel — they are plunderers and raiders. And what they do is they would come in — they've been doing this for centuries at this point against the Israelites — and they come in, they burn a city, they capture everybody, take all the plunder, and they run away before they can get caught.
And so David is out doing something and his men, his 600 men, are with him. And the Amalekite raiders come, and they raid Ziklag, and they take David's wives — unfortunately for them — because David finds out about this when he comes back, sees the city burning. And they find an enemy and they interrogate him, and they figure out what had happened. And he then, with his 600 men, pursues them, gets his wives, and saves everybody. They didn't kill any of the inhabitants. They bring them all back, they take all the plunder, and they're there in Ziklag for two days. And they're there waiting to hear how it went with the Philistines. What's gonna happen with all those questions? What's gonna happen with the kingdom? Did they win the battle? How do I respond to these times?
And then there's that beautifully pregnant biblical phrase in verse 2: "on the third day." And all of us readers of the Bible immediately are thinking, the third day is the day that Jesus resurrected. And it clues us in — just to take a pause for a moment and remember, or think about the fact — that many of us will find, at some point in our lives, ourselves in those two days in Ziklag, as it were. Where there are tensions in our lives that are unresolved, where there is a sense that the battle is over but we're not sure if it's a victory, and there's this strategic pause that's happening, and we're waiting to hear the news. We're waiting for more data, we're waiting for more information, and we're just having to wait.
And David does the right thing. He stays in that place. He does not do anything rash. He doesn't make the situation worse. He waits — which is very different than Saul. Remember, one of the reasons Saul was ousted as king is because he didn't wait for Samuel to come and do the sacrifice. He did the sacrifice himself. And so immediately, the author is cueing us into David being a better king than Saul, probably.
The other thing we're gonna see as we go through is that David is also a flawed king. But the difference between him and Saul is that Saul never repented — and that's why he ends up being cast away as the king, and dead.