Before David ever held a sword, before Nathan spoke a single word of promise, there was Saul. Tall, chosen, Spirit-filled — and ultimately a lesson. The people of Israel demanded a king on their own terms, and God let them have what they asked for. Saul was not a mistake God failed to prevent. He was a detour God permitted so Israel would learn what kind of king they actually needed.
Walter Kaiser Jr. traces this arc carefully in The Promise-Plan of God, showing that Saul’s incomparability — the declaration in 1 Samuel 10:24 that there was no one like him among all the people — was real and divinely granted, but provisional. Kaiser argues that God designedly allowed Saul’s kingship to demonstrate that Israel still had a theocracy, where any king ruled merely as a viceroy of the heavenly Sovereign. When Saul departed from the Lord, he did not just lose his throne. He revealed why God’s promise required a different kind of man entirely.
“There Is No One Like Him”
Thus the lesson was designedly allowed by God to show Israel that God alone was the supreme king and that any government had to function under his authority.
1 Samuel hinges on this single lesson. When Saul fails, Samuel drops a bombshell: God is looking for a man after His own heart. Not a crowd-pleaser. Not a model from central casting. God wanted someone whose internal character matched His external mission. David was the “forgotten” son, the one Jesse didn’t even bother to bring to the meeting. But God’s eyes see differently. When the oil hit David’s head while his brothers watched in silence, it was a clear signal: the Kingdom’s future had found its new address.
Hannah saw it too. Her prayer in 1 Samuel 2 reaches past her own son to the king who had not yet been born: He will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed one. She spoke those words before Israel had a king at all. The promise was already in motion.
Saul looked exactly like what a king should look like. He was head and shoulders above everyone else, chosen by God, filled with the Spirit — and the wrong man. God was not fooled by the appearance, and he is not fooled by ours. He looks at the heart.
Security that is rooted in performance or appearance is exactly what Saul built his reign on. When performance failed, everything collapsed. The only security that holds is the kind David carried — not confidence in his own record, but in the God who chose him before his own father thought to call him in from the field.³³
Where are you measuring your worth by performance or appearance right now — and what would it look like to let God define you instead?
Think of someone in your life who is carrying a label that does not match who God made them to be — overlooked, underestimated, passed over the way David was passed over by his own father when Samuel came to Bethlehem. Jesse did not even call him in from the sheep.
The God of 1 Samuel sees what everyone else misses. He looked past seven brothers and found the one nobody nominated. When you speak truth about who someone actually is — not what they have performed, not what the crowd has decided — you are doing what Samuel did. You are calling them in from the field.³⁴
Who in your life has been overlooked or mislabeled — and what is one true thing you could say to them this week that calls out who God made them to be?
Every household has its Saul season — a time when the thing that looked right turned out to be the wrong thing, or the person everyone expected to lead stepped back and someone unexpected stepped forward. God uses those seasons. He uses the wrong starts to clarify what he was always building toward.
As you disciple the people around you, teach them that God’s delays are not God’s denials. Saul’s years did not derail the promise. They set the stage for it. The anointed one Hannah prophesied was coming — and he came exactly when God intended.
Where in your life are you waiting for God to raise up the right person or the right thing — and what would it look like to trust his timing instead of forcing your own?
Write about a time when God’s choice looked nothing like what you expected. What did that reveal about how you were measuring things — and what did it reveal about how God measures them?
³² Walter C. Kaiser Jr., The Promise-Plan of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), Chapter 5: The Davidic Era.
³³ “The 84 to 87 Story,” vimeo.com/kathykoch.
³⁴ “The Power of Labels,” vimeo.com/kathykoch.