Saul and David: I desire Mercy and not Sacrifice

God's story is a story of judgment and of grace, of death and of life, of failure and redemption, of rejection and then acceptance.  It is a hard story to wrap our heads around, I think because in our minds that isn't how the narrative should go.  I am going to try and tell His story today.  Starting with a giant of a man, in every way, named Saul.  This is from 1 Samuel 13.

Saul reigned one year; and when he had reigned two years over Israel, Saul chose for himself three thousand men of Israel. Two thousand were with Saul in Michmash and in the mountains of Bethel, and a thousand were with Jonathan in Gibeah of Benjamin. The rest of the people he sent away, every man to his tent.
And Jonathan attacked the garrison of the Philistines that was in Geba, and the Philistines heard of it. Then Saul blew the trumpet throughout all the land, saying, “Let the Hebrews hear!” Now all Israel heard it said that Saul had attacked a garrison of the Philistines, and that Israel had also become an abomination to the Philistines. And the people were called together to Saul at Gilgal.
Then the Philistines gathered together to fight with Israel, thirty thousand chariots and six thousand horsemen, and people as the sand which is on the seashore in multitude. And they came up and encamped in Michmash, to the east of Beth Aven. When the men of Israel saw that they were in danger (for the people were distressed), then the people hid in caves, in thickets, in rocks, in holes, and in pits. And some of the Hebrews crossed over the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead.
As for Saul, he was still in Gilgal, and all the people followed him trembling.  Then he waited seven days, according to the time set by Samuel.

 Saul, and his son Jonathon, were not afraid of the enemies of Israel, the enemies of the Lord.  As David would later say of them they were faster than eagles and stronger than lions, they set out bravely, valiantly to do the job for which Saul had been made king to do.  The Philistines were militarily and economically vastly superior to the Israelites, I don't see how picking a fight with them could have been anything other than an act of faith.  You see Saul didn't just pick a fight with a superior enemy, he picked a fight and then sat there, in their face and waited on the Lord, represented by His Prophet Samuel.  

But Samuel did not come to Gilgal; and the people were scattered from him.

Samuel had promised to be there, had promised that the Lord wouldn't leave Saul to fight on his own.  Saul was trying to keep the army together until the Lord showed up, a terrifying position, and when the appointed time came and went things were looking really bad for Saul.  He had brought all these men to the place of life and death because he had a promise from the Lord that He would be there.  Saul rose to the occasion.  Saul knew that although the enemy was overwhelming to his pitiful band of terrified farmers/turned soldiers they were an insignificant thing to the Lord of Hosts.  So, Saul called on the name of the Lord.  He wasn't afraid of the enemy, only of facing the enemy without God.

So Saul said, “Bring a burnt offering and peace offerings here to me.” And he offered the burnt offering. Now it happened, as soon as he had finished presenting the burnt offering, that Samuel came; and Saul went out to meet him, that he might greet him.And Samuel said, “What have you done?”Saul said, “When I saw that the people were scattered from me, and that you did not come within the days appointed, and that the Philistines gathered together at Michmash, then I said, ‘The Philistines will now come down on me at Gilgal, and I have not made supplication to the Lord.’ Therefore I felt compelled, and offered a burnt offering.”

Saul had stood there in the Philistines face for a full week.  Maybe it wasn't so bad until his army started slinking away.  Every morning his army was smaller, it wouldn't be long until the Philistines came and there would be no one to fight them.  They were waiting letting Saul's army get smaller and more afraid so that they could wipe them out without an effort.  With Saul crushed it would be a long time before Israel gave them anymore trouble.  Saul saw what the Philistines saw, but he also knew that the Lord's presence would make nonsense out of the odds.  So Saul, the Lord's Anointed, Chosen by God to lead Israel for Him, showed the people that His hope was in the Lord.  He didn't think of fleeing or negotiating with the enemy, He didn't, as far as we can tell, focus on some kind of unconventional strategy to even the odds.  He begged the Lord to come and deliver Him, by offering a sacrifice.  He put his money where his mouth was.

And Samuel said to Saul, “You have done foolishly. You have not kept the commandment of the Lord your God, which He commanded you. For now the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever. But now your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought for Himself a man after His own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be commander over His people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.”

I don't know if Saul understood where he had failed so badly.  I have a hard time seeing it myself.  It's true that Saul wasn't technically a priest, but he had been anointed by God, the Holy Spirit had fallen on him and he had prophesied.  Where was he so wrong?  Another story, this one is from chapter 21 of 1 Samuel.

 Now David came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest. And Ahimelech was afraid when he met David, and said to him, “Why are you alone, and no one is with you?”
So David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king has ordered me on some business, and said to me, ‘Do not let anyone know anything about the business on which I send you, or what I have commanded you.’ And I have directed my young men to such and such a place. Now therefore, what have you on hand? Give me five loaves of bread in my hand, or whatever can be found.”

When this story takes place, David was a captain in Saul's army.  When the priest saw David he assumed that he was there on some business of Saul, but David didn't have his soldiers with him except for a handful.  I guess Ahimelech thought David was on some kind of covert mission, and he was afraid, and it suited David to have him believe that, because the truth is that David was on the run.  Saul had become so jealous of David that he tried to kill him, actually he tried to kill him several times, and now David had had enough, he was fleeing the country.  So David completely lied to the priest.  But it gets worse. 

And the priest answered David and said, “There is no common bread on hand; but there is holy bread, if the young men have at least kept themselves from women.”
Then David answered the priest, and said to him, “Truly, women have been kept from us about three days since I came out. And the vessels of the young men are holy, and the bread is in effect common, even though it was consecrated in the vessel this day.”
So the priest gave him holy bread; for there was no bread there but the showbread which had been taken from before the Lord, in order to put hot bread in its place on the day when it was taken away.

I don't remember exactly why, and I am too lazy to look it up, but bread was kept on the altar of the Lord.  And the priests changed it out everyday with fresh bread.  When the bread was taken down the priests could eat it.  Nobody else, only the priests.  The law was very clear.  But David didn't care.  He comes up with some bull to justify taking it and that is what he does.  He knew it was wrong.   

And David said to Ahimelech, “Is there not here on hand a spear or a sword? For I have brought neither my sword nor my weapons with me, because the king’s business required haste.”
So the priest said, “The sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom you killed in the Valley of Elah, there it is, wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod. If you will take that, take it. For there is no other except that one here.”
And David said, “There is none like it; give it to me.”

So, David takes everything that he thinks will help him in his flight without a second thought.  If he gave the Lord or his law a second thought it isn't recorded in Scripture.  To me, to every way that I know to look at it, David doesn't look any better than Saul, in some ways worse.  To give away the punchline, Our Lord says out of His own mouth that David is right.  And that problem, the problem of Saul's rejection and David's acceptance is what I want us to look at today.

 At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. And His disciples were hungry, and began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath!”
But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the showbread which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless? Yet I say to you that in this place there is One greater than the temple. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” from Matthew 12

So, Jesus says plainly that David broke the Law, but says that he is blameless.  He points out a problem in the Law, that work in the temple doesn't stop on the Sabbath but that the priests who work in the temple on the Sabbath are guiltless.  So, I think that I have set up the problem pretty clearly.  And my mind presented with a problem like this demands a solution.  Why is one wrong and seemingly everyone else is right?  Why does the Lord justify everybody but Saul?  We know that the Law is all one piece and that to break the smallest point is to break the whole, so there can be no question of what Saul did being worse than what the others did.  And now that I think about it all of the kinds of solutions that occur to me are solutions that divide the Law, that say this unlawful act is ok but that one isn't.  But somehow the answers, I think must be in Christ's words.

Let's start with his comment about being greater than the temple.  It seems that what He means is that the temple is more important than the Law and that He is greater than the temple.  Serving the temple was sufficient to justify breaking the Sabbath, and the whole Law with it.  Why?

Two things happened in the temple.  Sacrifices were offered and sins were forgiven.  And we connect the two because they both happened in the same place.  There is often a correlation between sacrifice and forgiveness but we must always remember that correlation is not causation, just because two things are often seen together does not mean that one causes the other.  Sacrifice does not, cannot ever lead to the forgiveness of sins.  Now we have moved on from bloody sacrifices of animals, in Christianity we have sacrificing of time, and money, and whatever, we sacrifice our way, sacrifice doing what we want for what God wants, any kind of changing, getting our life straight, any kind of working for the Kingdom, the church, whatever is conceptually a form of sacrifice.  There is a connection between sacrifice and forgiveness but there is no causal link.  Sacrifice is essentially confession.  It is saying to God and to ourselves that we quite literally have blood on our hands, that we are failures.  When we offer sacrifice, when we do anything to try and obtain God's favor rather than believing the proof of His favor we already have in Christ, we have moved into pagan territory.  Sacrifice is the confession that we need God's grace, but it cannot in any way move God.  His reasons for being good to us are all internal to Himself and don’t in any way depend on who we are, rather He is good to us in direct defiance of who we are and what we deserve.  Sacrifice cannot go up into heaven to bring Christ down, sacrifice is the knowledge of our own evil, and when separated from that confession and used as a form of propitiation it is a denial of God.  There is nothing that we can do to make God propitious to us.  Sacrifice is good when it shows us our need for grace, when it teaches us that we deserve a death that God is not inflicting on us, when it reminds us that He has accepted a substitute in our place.  But He doesn't delight in the death of the substitute, He is grieved by the death of the substitute, and to sacrifice needlessly, or worse to sacrifice, whether life or self or whatever, as if God enjoyed death and would favor us because blood is on our hands is to sin against the temple and against the one greater than the temple.

So, by sacrifice, by the Law is the knowledge of evil, of our sin, and God does not desire sacrifice.  He desires mercy.  The Pharisees didn't understand what it meant that God desires mercy and not sacrifice and we still don't.  The proof that we don't is that we still condemn those that God has justified.  The proof that I don't is that I still condemn myself, that I still see myself, and you, as unrighteous when God has declared us just by the resurrection of the Second Adam, Our Head, His Son. 

 I have an idea where we go wrong though.  Pharisees engaged in acts of mercy to try and please God, just like we do today.  And they were wrong and so are we.  I have already said that God doesn't desire us to offer sacrifice but He also doesn't desire us to engage in acts of mercy.  I mean He isn't against us being merciful but He isn't telling us to be merciful here.  That isn't what this is about.  Our misunderstanding comes from the idea that what He desires, He expects from us.  But He doesn’t.  He doesn't want our merciful actions or our sacrificial actions.  He wants to BE merciful.  We should read: I desire to be merciful and not sacrificial.  I desire to offer true grace, to be actually forgiving, not just to shuffle blame around but to actually do away with it.  I desire to condemn condemnation, to tell damnation to go to hell, to rob death itself of its sting, to lock captivity, enslavement, and addiction up and throw away the key and freely give gifts to men.  Saul is condemned, ultimately, because he sought God’s favor, counterintuitive but true.  His seeking success was the cause of his failure, seeking victory was the cause of his defeat, seeking life was the cause of his death.  David on the other hand trusted that he already had the favor of God, he took God’s bread like a child taking crackers from daddy’s hand, certain that it was his for the unimpeachable reason that it belonged to his Father.  And that is how I want to invite everyone to the communion table, know that it is yours, because it is Christ’s.  Know that God’s favor rests on you because it rests on His Beloved Son with whom you have been united in death and will certainly be united in the Resurrection.