1 Samuel 10:17-27

Order of Service

• Call to Worship — Psalm 96
• Hymn — For All the Saints
• Prayer of Invocation
• Confession of Sin
• Assurance of Pardon — Proverbs 28:13
• Scripture Reading — Acts 4:23-37
• Pastoral Prayer
• Offering
• Hymn — Arise, My Soul, Arise
• Sermon
• Hymn — Come, My Soul, Thy Suit Prepare
• Benediction — 2 Corinthians 13:14

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Sermon Title: The Concerning Enthronement of the Lord's Anointed

Scripture: 1 Samuel 10:17-27

I. A Concerning Announcement of Enthronement

A. Samuel's ominous opening declaration at Mizpah frames Saul's coronation as an act of Israel's rejection of Yahweh as king

1. Samuel recounts Yahweh's saving acts — deliverance from Egypt and all oppressing kingdoms — as Israel's true Ebenezer ("stone of help")
2. The very place of coronation, Mizpah, carries haunting weight: it was the site of Israel's repentance and deliverance in 1 Samuel 7, marked by the Ebenezer stone; travelers to the coronation would pass that stone on the way
3. Mizpah also echoes Judges 20, where all Israel gathered there to destroy Saul's own tribe of Benjamin and his city of Gibeah

B. Israel's haunting silence in response to Samuel's rebuke mirrors their deeper spiritual rebellion

1. Rather than repenting and reclaiming Yahweh as king, Israel remains obstinately silent
2. This silence foreshadows Israel before Pilate in John 19:14-15: "We have no king but Caesar" — the same desire for a king like the nations

II. A Concerning Process of Enthronement

A. Saul is chosen by lot before all Israel as God's public confirmation of his private anointing

1. Lots in the Old Testament served as God's confirming sign of his will — here making God's choice undeniable before the people
2. The whittling-down process (tribe → clan → individual) publicly confirms what was already done privately through oil and Spirit in 1 Samuel 10:1-7

B. The lot-casting process carries a deeply troubling echo of Judges 7 and the account of Achan

1. The identical narrowing process — nation to tribe to clan to individual — was used in Joshua 7 to identify Achan as guilty and worthy of destruction, not to identify a hero worthy of honor
2. The ironic cry "Long live the king!" rings hollow when the precedent for this process is the exposure and execution of a guilty man
3. Saul's later sin in 1 Samuel 15 — sparing the Amalekite spoil just as Achan took Jericho's spoil — confirms the ominous parallel; Saul is like Achan

III. A Concerning Response to Enthronement

A. Saul's response: hiding among the baggage

1. Despite having been privately anointed, filled with the Spirit, and commanded to act in 1 Samuel 10:7 ("do what your hand finds to do, for God is with you" — echoing the charge to Joshua in Joshua 1), Saul hides
2. Israel must rely on Yahweh simply to locate the tallest man in the nation — an irony that exposes their own folly in rejecting Yahweh as king
3. God in grace provides men of valor whose hearts he has touched to accompany the weak Saul (1 Samuel 10:26)

B. The worthless fellows' response: despising the Lord's anointed

1. Their contempt — "How can this man save us?" — is not merely political cynicism; it is rebellion against Yahweh's own anointed king
2. The rights and duties of the kingship, written and laid before the Lord (1 Samuel 10:25, drawn from Deuteronomy 17:14-20), establish that the king rules under Yahweh — to despise the anointed is to despise Yahweh
3. David's response in 2 Samuel 1:14 — executing the man who killed Saul even though Saul was David's sworn enemy — shows the gravity of harming the Lord's anointed

C. The worthless fellows as a mirror pointing to Christ

1. If David mourned over Saul the anointed, how much more heinous is the rejection and crucifixion of Christ (Christos = the Anointed One), the sinless Lion of Judah
2. Yet in the wisdom of God, the cross is the very throne of the true Anointed One — as Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 2:2, "I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified"
3. At Golgotha our worthlessness is fully exposed AND the Father's love is fully revealed — ugliness and beauty, heaven and hell simultaneously
4. Israel needed not a king who could defeat surrounding enemies, but a king who could defeat their chief enemies: sin and death — and that king is Christ, crucified and risen, enthroned forever at the Father's right hand