Devotional for Adults November 24, 2016 A Story of Two Saul - 1

Devotional for Adults
November 24, 2016

A Story of Two Saul - 1

"And he had a son whose name was Saul, young and fair. Among the children of Israel there was none more beautiful than he; Of shoulders above surpassed any of the people. " 1 Samuel 9: 2.

WOULD YOU NOT LIKE TODAY to elect the first leaders of the countries in the same way, cast lots? Think of all the acrimony and money we could spare. The names are put on a hat, the territory is removed, the city is extracted, the family is extracted and the individual is extracted. "Ladies and gentlemen, the president!" The first king of Israel was thus "chosen". Tall, dark-haired and handsome, from the tribe of Benjamin: how could one go wrong with someone like that? But they were wrong, terribly.

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins documents the most successful leaders, whom he calls Level 5 leaders: "Leaders of Level 5 are a practical case for duality: modest and stubborn, timid and intrepid. Those who worked with self-surpassing leaders, and those who wrote about them, continually used words such as quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, courteous, gentle, simple, unbelieving press clippings about himself, And so on "(pp. 22-27). The most successful leaders are noted for their humility. How much God would have wanted King Saul to have remained one of them! But, sadly, his story unfolds at an almost vertiginous speed. Chosen because he was small in the vision he had of himself, he was rejected because he came to believe that the center of the world. His is a tragic story of humility and the loss of it.

Given that ignominious antecedent, one might wonder why a mother in the future would want to give her baby boy the name Saul. But in the Roman city of Tarsus, a Hebrew mother and her Pharisee husband chose precisely that name (Saul) for their newborn son, nicknamed "Paul" for his Greco-Roman culture. From such a stick, such a splinter: Saul was sent to a "boarding school" of Jerusalem to become a learned Pharisee in the sacred law, and above brilliant. The stoning of Stephen, the conversion of Saul; The rest is the passionate story of that intrepid champion of Christ.

A story of two Saul: one that began with humility and ended in a suicidal pride; The other who began with proud self-confidence and ended with humility in the likeness of Christ. The fundamental difference? How both responded to adversity. One was led into introversion by her; The other was lifted by her. And in that little-known chapter of Paul's great pain lies the greatest secret of humility of all.