Before the lot falls, Samuel makes sure the crowd hears what this day is. 19"Today you have rejected your God, who saves you from all your calamities and your distresses, and you have said to him, 'Set a king over us.'" A coronation opens with an indictment. Israel came to Mizpah for a celebration, and Samuel makes them stand for a moment in the discomfort of what brought them there.
Then the lot narrows, tribe, clan, family, one name, the way it once narrowed onto Achan (Joshua 7:14-18), a method used before to expose guilt. This time it lands on the man God had already anointed in private. Everyone believes chance is choosing their king. The reader knows God settled this the day Saul went looking for donkeys.
Then the moment goes strangely quiet. But 21"when they sought him, he could not be found." Saul, already anointed, already given three signs, already changed by the Spirit, is not standing ready to be crowned. 22"He has hidden himself among the baggage." Whatever produced that choice, humility or dread, probably both, it echoes his silence to his uncle. A king chosen by God is absent the moment his name is called.
God does not let the absence stand. They inquire again, and the LORD tells them where Saul is. There is something tender in that, God locating the man he chose even in his hiding place and refusing to let reluctance cancel a decision already made. They pull him out, and the crowd sees a man 23"taller than any of the people from his shoulders upward." Samuel says, 24"Do you see him whom the LORD has chosen?" and the people shout, "Long live the king!"
His height produced that shout; the other heart God had given him in private played no part. Israel asked for a king like the nations, and they get one who looks the part exactly as the nations would recognize it. Whether he can be trusted with what God puts in his hands is a question the crowd never asks.
Before sending everyone home, Samuel does something quietly important. He tells the people 25"the rights and duties of the kingship," writes them in a book, and lays it up before the LORD. This king, like every king after him, will answer to something higher than his own will.
The chapter ends with the best thing we see from Saul in the whole book. Some 27"worthless fellows" sneer, "How can this man save us?" and bring him no gift. It is an open insult, daring him to answer. 27"But he held his peace." He defends nothing and punishes no one, though he plainly had standing to do both.
That silence recalls another chosen King who stood mocked and despised, of whom Isaiah wrote, "like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth" (Isaiah 53:7). Saul's restraint would not last. For one afternoon, though, hiding in the baggage and then standing quietly under insult, he shows what it is to receive a calling too large for comfort and to carry it without needing to defend himself.
Ask where you have hidden among the baggage. God knows where you are, and he calls people out of exactly those places.
Prayer
Father, so much of what you call us to feels too large, and our first instinct, like Saul's, is to hide. Thank you that you find us even there and call us by name. Give us the restraint Saul showed for one afternoon, and let it last in us longer than it lasted in him. Above all, thank you for Christ, who bore far greater contempt and answered it in silence, for us. In Jesus' name, amen.