God's Anointed, Humiliated

In 1 Samuel we read the story of the first king of Israel and, more importantly, the second.  Saul, who is chosen as the first king, turns out to be a bad one.  Almost from the get-go he shows himself to be more concerned with his own will than that of God.  He is quick to forget his anointing, and thus quick to forget what God is capable of, and so tries to win the battles of Israel on his own terms.  Seeing this, God decides it's time to anoint another king, a good one, and that man is David.

Saul's problem is selfishness, and his conduct after Israel's battle with the Philistines, in which David kills Goliath, typifies his character.  If you'll remember, in that battle David slays Goliath, and then the Israelites rout the Philistines.  It's a great victory, and on the return trip home women of Israel come out to meet the army dancing and singing,

Saul has killed his thousands,
and David his ten thousands

Saul's reaction is to immediately distrust David, and it is interesting to note that Saul does not know what we know.  He does not know that David has been anointed and will be king.  He doesn't know that the Spirit of the Lord has left him and resides on David.  But he doesn't have to know this to hate David, because he sees David as a threat to his own glory.  It doesn't matter to Saul that David serves him, because he doesn't recognize his fortune in having David in his service.  He sees only the threat, not the blessing.

In many ways Saul represents our own flesh.  With David on his side, mighty warrior that he proves to be, Saul should be a proud and satisfied king.  But as it is he would rather risk failure by driving David off than risk victory without personal glory.  This is what we so often do.  Many times we would rather fail than be humiliated; that is, we would rather struggle to the end and fail then fail without a fight, because we could put our name on the struggle and at least go out in a blaze of glory.

But God wants us to be humiliated once in a while.  As you might guess, the words humiliate and humble share a common Latin root.  The Latin root word humus means "ground, earth, or soil".  In the sense of being humiliated or humbled, we are really being taken back to what we are in the flesh: dust.  God formed man from the dust (our flesh) and breathed life in to man (our spirit), and the human condition is this attempt on the part of the flesh to achieve the splendor of the spirit.  And since God is spirit, our flesh is really after the achievement of Godlike status.  So we necessarily (and often) need to return our flesh to it's root, the dust.  We need to be humbled or humiliated, and if we will not accept the former we will experience the latter.

Being humiliated is always more painful than being humbled.  The difference is a matter of choice, and subsequently a measure of our resistance to being brought low.  Humiliation happens against our will; we do not choose humiliation, it's forced on us, and we are forced down.  Into the dust.  But humbling comes more gently, because when we are humbled we are shown--perhaps in circumstances exactly like those that could be humiliating--that we are less than we made ourselves out to be, and so we accept that we are dust.  You see, humiliation is our being pushed into the dust, waylaid, and humbling is us bending down to the dust, prostrating ourselves.

Here is what I realized as I was reading about David and Saul, about Saul's angry pursuit of David and David's long and circuitous flight from Saul.  David was God's anointed.  From even before he met Saul, David was the anointed king of Israel, but it took years for him to experience the fullness of that position.  But in the process of fleeing for his life from Saul, David was being built up--in character, in reputation, in faith and trust in the Lord.  The anointing did not preclude trouble.  The anointing was not a guarantee of circumstances, it was a guarantee of identity.

We are anointed, we who are believers in Jesus Christ, and similarly we are kings (and queens)--sons and daughters of the King of Kings.  And regardless of how things are going in our lives, we are anointed and we carry the title and identity of kingship (or queenship).  And because we are still living, breathing human beings, we have this flesh that we carry around, and so we must remember that we are dust.  But we don't have to be humiliated.  We do, however, have to be humble.

David, in the course of his life, experiences both humiliation and humblings.  But even after his humiliations; even after his failures and sins and spiritual wanderings; even after he is thrown into the dust and trampled, he calls on God and is raised up again.  The anointed of God will be called a man (or woman) after God's own heart.