And moreover in time past, even when Saul was king …
1 Chronicles 11:2.
A while ago, the streets had filled with excited singers and dancers celebrating a new king. Music and colours everywhere. The oil was still fresh upon his humble head. Congratulations poured in from distant lands. Everyone was on his side, except the notorious few, the “children of Belial,” but he had been too honoured to care (1 Samuel 10:27). Saul was that king.
With time, that king grew so powerful that even the prophet Samuel who had ordained him into the throne dreaded him so much that God had to give him an excuse to proceed on his mission to anoint a replacement. The tender lamb of yesterday had grown into a dreaded dragon (1 Samuel 11:12-13; 16: 1-4). Even the witches also feared him, for a different reason (1 Samuel 28:9).
Today, the narrative has changed. The headlines have gone terribly silent. That once-powerful king is spoken of very casually in the past tense: “when Saul WAS king…” The pomp and pageantry gone, the throne for which he so much fought any potential rival and even killed many priests of God now vacated, occupied by the very youngster he had desperately resisted. His tenure has faded into history, like many before him, and many after.
While the trumpets hailed him “… in time past,” it never seemed as if a day like this would ever come; and himself never lived like someone who looked to such a day when he would be reported of as an “ex-,” a “former” this or that, another datum in the merciless archives of history. Sometimes precious goods come with an expiry date, and thrones too. But not everyone cares to read that.
Thrones and dominions will come and go. Only Jesus has an “everlasting dominion” (Psalm 145:13; Daniel 4:3, 34). It is He the increase of whose Kingdom there shall be no end (Isaiah 9:7). Sometimes monarchs and privileged great men and women boast as if history would always stand still for them. But a day comes in the future that casts them pitifully into the past, as if they never were; an indifferent future that makes them a pathetic dark shadow of their ancient glamours.
Lucifer is a remarkable lesson in that respect – that great angel who flew so high then fell so low; the proud prince of whom it was proclaimed, “thy pomp is brought down”; the mighty one at whose mighty fall the world was to wonder, “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble”? (Isaiah 14:11-17).
Does such a day of perplexing paradoxes come, when the world is forced to wonder, “Is this the man…!” Does that resemble you or someone you know? “…when Saul was king” … and the clock still clicks … with History watching on …
From The Preacher’s diary,
May 31, 2024.
Abba, teach us to revere You. Power belongs to You alone🙇.
Thank you Prof for reminding us to know our place and time and apply our hearts to wisdom
Simple, precise and inspiring. God bless.
Help us to number our days and apply our hearts unto wisdom.
It’s PRICELESS to be SOBERLY humble by PAPA’S GRACE AND applying our hearts to Wisdom INDEED. Thank you. You are a GIFT to The Body of CHRIST. God bless you sir. HOLY SPIRIT YOU ARE AMAZINGLY AWESOME my FATHER, GOD AND LORD.
Vintage Sir! Flowing with penetrating truth, poignant poetry, and sobering revelations.
We, too, will one day be gone from this earth and its toiling, as the hymn-writer penned down, only to be remembered by what we had done.
Thank you, dear Preacher, for your ever enlightening and inspiring words. You unlock Scriptures like one with a master-key. God bless you, Sir.
Oh Lord, teach me to number my days in order to apply my heart unto wisdom
Sir, I thank you for that financial analysis on the gift of David in David’s epitaph. It really humbled me as to how much a man can give to his or her God freely without being coerced. May the oil never run dry