Many people think they are morally superior to the God of the Bible. When they read about Him telling someone to kill someone else for example, they are sure there could have been another solution that would be more kind and nice and bring about a happy situation for everyone involved. Some use this idea to reject the Bible overall while others think they can make things better by modifying God’s instructions – “just a little”. The Bible is full of examples where people messed things up by ignoring or modifying God’s instructions but one of these examples took centuries to reveal the bad results.
For about 500 years most people thought one man’s small change to God’s instructions worked out just fine. Even today there are some people who think that the disobedience this ancient King did was a good thing and better than if he had followed God’s instructions precisely. Fortunately God’s plans don’t rely on human obedience and He has backup plans for everything. If He didn’t, the Bible, the Jews and the future Messiah would all have been eliminated 500 years after King Saul’s disobedience over one detail of what God instructed him to do.
The incident is described in I Samuel chapter 15 where Saul is made King and commanded by God to attack an enemy of Israel who God had condemned for past evils. The instructions were to kill everyone but Saul allowed the enemy’s King (Agag) to live. The prophet Samuel killed Agag the following day but from oral history and the appearance of “Haman the Agagite” 500 years later, it is apparent that during that one extra day, King Agag had relations with a maidservant (or his wife) who later, gave birth to a son. That son and future descendants maintained their hatred for Israel until Haman the Agagite had the opportunity and power to destroy them all. (You can read the history of this in the book of Esther).
What if God had been more merciful and allowed some of the enemies to survive? Well we have the answer to that question because that is the result of Saul’s actions. The events in the book of Esther – centuries later - describe how close the annihilation of the Jews came, all due to Saul’s disobedience and this type of thinking. What if Saul had done exactly as he was commanded that day? In such a case, he obviously would have had a different legacy, and the book of Esther would not have ever been written. What we have in I Samuel 15 and the subsequent events that took centuries to play out is an example of how the ideas of humans compare to the ideas of God. Short-sighted, naïve humans end up causing more pain and evil than they intended. Do you want to second guess God?
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