Seeing the king
1 Samuel 16
1 Sam. 16:7 [lit.]: “The Lord sees not as man sees, for man sees according to the eyes, but the Lord sees according to the heart.”
Main Idea: Though the Lord sees differently than we see, he has given us illumination by the Holy Spirit.
I. Seeing According to the Eyes (16:1-6)
Despite the failure of the king the people wanted for themselves, God will provide (lit. ‘see’) for himself a king to rule over his people, from the family of Jessie in Bethlehem.
Why did God not just simply announce to Samuel at the beginning who the new king would be?... Why did he need to have each of Jesse’s many sons presented to him rather than just David? The answer is that this episode is not primarily about the next king, but about God. God looks at people differently from how we do. When Samuel met the first of Jesse’s sons, it seemed as though this was the obvious choice as king. He had the right look and stature. It was as if he’d come straight from central casting. He looked the part. And that’s the point… God tells Samuel something significant here about humanity. We look at outward appearance. Not just that we notice one another’s outward appearance, which is natural and understandable, but that we assess one another by outward appearance... We know there’s more to people than how they look, but we nevertheless resort to making appearance what shapes our estimation of them.
~ Sam Allberry, What God has to Say About our Bodies
II. Seeing According to the Heart (16:7-12)
1 Samuel 13:14: The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be prince over his people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.
“A man after God’s own heart” has been taken in popular Christian jargon to mean a particularly godly man, a man with a heart like God’s. But I do not believe that the words can mean that. “A man after God’s own heart” means a man of God’s own choosing, a man God has set his heart on. “A man after God’s own heart” is—if I can put it like this—talking about the place the man has in God’s heart rather than the place God has in the man’s heart.
~ John Woodhouse, 1 Samuel: Looking for a Leader
Though David has “beautiful eyes” and is “handsome,” he is hardly kingly-material from an earthly valuation; in God’s economy, external appearance and impressiveness neither qualifies nor disqualifies someone. Jesse assumes it must be one of his 7 older sons, not the “youngest” (‘inconsequential’ or ‘insignificant’).
The Lord’s choosing of David as King is consistent with his great work of redemption:
The “insignificant” and “inconsequential” youngest son is precisely who God loves to use for his glory (cf. 1 Cor. 1:27-29)
The menial work of shepherding becomes the primary metaphor for leadership over God’s people (cf. Ps. 23, John 10:11)
This small place (cf. Mic. 5:2) and ordinary family will be the birthplace of the Messiah to come
The greater Son of David appeared to the eyes to be nothing special, but is the long-promised Christ (cf. Isa. 53:2-3, Mk. 6:3)
III. Seeing According to the Spirit (16:13-23)
In the OT, the Holy Spirit came upon particular individuals to empower and authorize them to complete God-given tasks, such as ruling, prophesying, or building. As the Spirit rushes onto David in his anointing (and remains from that day forward), He departs from Saul, removing his authority and ability to be an effective king over God’s people.
From an earthly perspective, David is filled by the Spirit and then immediately put into harm’s way and a dangerous situation. From a divine perspective, this is the consistent pattern of God (cf. Mk. 1:10-12) in order to learn dependency and submission to God. No matter what difficulties David encountered, “the Lord was with him” (16:18).
Yahweh equips David… but no sooner does the Spirit touch David than he is catapulted into endless trouble—the envy, anger, and plots of Saul from chapter 18 on. David, the man with the Spirit, will be hunted and betrayed, trapped and escaping, hiding in caves, living in exile, driven to the edge—right to the end of 1 Samuel. We must see this larger view of verse 13 in the context of the whole: The Spirit comes, the trouble begins … No sooner are we brought into subjection to Jesus than we are swamped in trouble; there may seem no end to the pressures, no relief from the pounding we seem to be taking. But if we remember David and his Descendant we begin to understand that this conflict is not a sign of our sin but a mark of our sonship, that we are under not God’s displeasure but his discipline. The wilderness is not the sign of the Spirit’s absence but the scene of his presence.
~ Dale Ralph Davis, 1 Samuel: Looking on the Heart
Because of the finished work of Christ, we have been given the indwelling Holy Spirit in order to have the “eyes of our hearts enlightened” (Eph. 1:18) to rightly see both our difficult circumstances and rightly behold Jesus.
Psalm 118:22-23:
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.
This is the Lord’s doing;
it is marvelous in our eyes.
