The first king of Israel dies. And his sons die with him on the same day.
The verse makes it sound like it did not have to end this way. Like maybe, if Saul had followed the Lord, he would not have died in that battle at all.
But he did not follow Him.
He failed to obey God's command. And on top of that, he went looking for guidance somewhere else. He consulted a medium instead of asking God.
It is so easy to read this and get judgmental.
Why would you do that? You are the king. You have access to God in a way most people did not at that time. Why would you go to a medium?
But honestly. How often do we do the same thing in different clothes?
We go to Google.
We go to AI.
We text three different friends to get their opinions.
We poll people on social media.
We ask anyone and everyone, and we never actually stop and ask God.
It does not look like a medium to us. It looks normal. It looks responsible. We tell ourselves we are gathering wisdom or doing our research. But underneath it, the same thing is happening. We are running to every other source first, and God is not even in the conversation.
And then we wonder why we feel scattered. Why we are anxious. Why we make a decision and immediately feel unsettled about it.
The thing that gets me about Saul is that he was the one God chose.
God picked him. Anointed him. Set him up to lead. And it ended like this, with the verse essentially saying he died because he was unfaithful.
Being chosen did not protect him from his own choices.
That is sobering.
You can be called. You can be set apart. You can have every spiritual advantage. And you can still slowly drift, decision by decision, into a place where you are leaning on everything except God.
Saul did not go from king to consulting a medium in a single day. That was the end of a long slide. Lots of small moments where he chose his own way. Lots of small moments where he did not ask.
I want to be the kind of person who asks God first.
Not last. Not after everyone else has weighed in. Not after I have already mostly made the decision and just want it confirmed.
First.