The Ideal Candidate
Thursday (September (25)
The Ideal Candidate
1 Samuel 9:1-2
There was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish, … a Benjaminite, a man of wealth. And he had a son whose name was Saul, a handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he. From his shoulders upward he was taller than any of the people.
Let’s be careful not to read these glowing descriptions of Saul through the lens of the LORD’s later words to Samuel in 1 Samuel 16:7, “The LORD sees not as man sees: man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart,” and mistakenly deem these apparent natural giftings as curses. Saul is more handsome and taller than all the other men in his society, which isn’t a bad thing on its face. But because we’re familiar with that word from Paul
in 1 Corinthians 1:27, that “God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the strong,” and because we’re awestruck by the fact that Christ chose an unattractive face and a poor occupation when incarnating into our humanity, we can sort of diminish and devalue qualities like wealth and physical beauty and height. Yet, these are God-given gifts, not curses; and men who possess them have an added responsibility to steward them well.
Friend, if you inherited wealth from the hard work of your predecessors, or if you’ve built a business from the ground up, think of all the good you can do with that financial affluency. If God endowed you with a beautiful appearance and people want to be around you, or He gave you a magnetic personality and others are drawn to you, you can use that influence for His glory. Poverty isn’t better than riches, nor is plainness better than beauty that isn’t the point here. The point is that God can use both. He can use Eric Lidell’s lightning speed to honor Him through victory at the Olympic games, and, likewise, He can use Joni Erickson Tada’s paralysis as a means of drawing many to Him.
The truth is before we know anything about whether this Saul has the spiritual mettle to lead God’s people, before we have a clue as to whether he’ll be a great king or a bad king, let’s admit that from all appearances he really does seem like the ideal candidate.