Big Idea: A preoccupation with one’s own honor can dilute divine blessing.

Understanding the Text

The preceding account ended with the Lord’s giving Israel a great victory, despite Saul’s hesitant actions. In this next story we see Saul continue to retard the action rather than advance it. This account highlights one of Saul’s major weaknesses and leadership flaws—one that has already emerged in earlier accounts and will prove fatal in the next chapter. Saul is preoccupied, perhaps even obsessed, with religious formalism. Certainly ritual and formalism have their place, and perhaps we can view Saul as simply naive. However, the narrator seems to view this tendency in a more negative light. Saul’s preoccupation with worship does not result in his attacking the Philistine outpost (cf. 10:7…