What does it mean to wait on God? In 1 Sam. 13, the Prophet Samuel tells King Saul not to go into battle until he gets there....and then Samuel is late. Was God testing Saul? Oh, yeah. What would Saul do?
Saul went ahead and made a pre-battle sacrifice without waiting for Samuel. Why? He got tired of waiting. His soldiers started to take off for home. He had to keep things together, right? Or they'd get slaughtered.
Well, Samuel showed up a day late, and God wasn't happy with Saul. Saul got scared when things didn't go the way they were supposed to: it's natural. But when Saul's timing didn't match God's timing he started to doubt God's provision. How often do we do the same thing?
A crisis from our perspective doesn't justify disobedience from God's perspective. Is he too small to fix what is going wrong...or not going anywhere at all? He is definitely not too small--and we are not big enough!
And I think that all of this is forgivable up until this point....Like Saul, we screw up: we zig when we should zag, we get scared and go ahead of God, or we freeze and don't act when he tells us to. Saul chose not only to disobey, but then he was unrepentant about it--and that's where God put on the smack down.
The cost of Saul's unrepentence is the throne: God soon appoints David, "a man after his own heart" to rule over Israel, and Saul slowly loses his mind along with God's favor. When we choose self-preservation over obedience to God, there is always a cost.
God help us to remember that you call the shots. Amen.
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