"The Chosen One" - 1 Samuel 16:1-13

For those of you who don't know, my name's Jason.

I'm one of the co-lead pastors here at the Oceanside Sanctuary, and we started a new series last week with a bit of a community dialogue around this question, what does it mean for David from the Hebrew Bible to be a man after God's own heart? We sort of unpacked in a little bit of a dialogue with each other how that phrase is a bit problematic from 1 Samuel and also in the New Testament, where it seems to be that that phrase that David, this epic hero from the Hebrew Bible, was a man after God's own heart, seems to sort of condone or gloss over or excuse a lot of immoral or unethical behavior on his part.

And how, I don't know if you've noticed, but that same sort of narrative tends to be parroted today in our political life in the United States.

People, usually men, who behave in fairly destructive and harmful ways are sometimes called like David and What's sort of being invoked there? Is that all of their behavior is excusable because, you know, they're a man after God's own heart.

And so we sort of are asking the question, what does that mean? What does ancient Hebrew scripture mean when it talks about that notion? And so today I want to share two brief passages with you.

The first is from 1 Samuel 5.

1 Samuel 16, verse 18.

I just want to read this, start, excuse me, 1 Samuel 16, verses, we're going to start with one through three.

I want to read this with you today.

And then I have a couple of other passages to share with you and also want to share just kind of my perspective as we begin to jump in to this series it says first samuel chapter 16 verse 1 says this the lord said to samuel how long will you grieve over saul i've rejected him from being king over israel fill your horn with oil and set out and i will send you to jesse the bethlehemite for i have provided for myself a king among his sons just pause there for a second What's going on here, because we've jumped into the middle of 1 Samuel, is that Samuel's sort of the state prophet, right? Like, he's the guy who is in charge of being sort of the mouthpiece for God in this ancient Israelite kingdom, right? And Saul is the current king and Saul is a problem.

He's acting in all kinds of immoral and harmful and destructive ways.

And so as a consequence of this, God has moved on from Saul as the ancient Hebrew king.

And he's saying to Samuel, who's sort of his, you know, ambassador, I have a new king coming.

So I want you to go out and anoint this new king.

All right, so that's kind of what's going on here.

Samuel says to God, how can I go? If Saul hears of it, he will kill me.

The Lord said, take a heifer with you that is a bull and say, I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.

Invite Jesse to the sacrifice and I will show you what you shall do and you shall anoint for me the one whom I named to you.

And so if you're not picking up on this, The short version is God conspires with Samuel to deceive Saul about what's going on.

Samuel says, hey, if I go out and I anoint a new king, the current king, you know, the one who's in charge of the army might not be happy about that.

And he might, you know, kill me.

Because we've already seen that he's willing to do all kinds of terrible things with his power.

And so God says, that's okay, I've got a little ruse for you.

Just go out and tell everybody that you're planning to sacrifice this heifer, that you're planning to have this sort of, you know, little worship gathering and make sure to invite Jesse and his household.

And so when this little ruse is happening, I will reveal to you who the real king is.