Nothing in the opening of this story looks like the beginning of a kingdom. A man's donkeys wander off, and he sends his son to find them. Saul crosses district after district, finds nothing, and is ready to turn home before his father starts worrying about him instead of the animals. It is one of the least important errands in the Bible, which is the point.
A servant's small suggestion turns everything: ask the seer in the next town. Neither man knows what they are walking into. God had told Samuel the day before: 9:16"Tomorrow about this time I will send to you a man from the land of Benjamin, and you shall anoint him to be prince over my people Israel." Every wrong turn had been herding Saul toward one gate at one hour. Saul thought he was looking for donkeys. God was bringing him a kingdom.
God gives his reason: 9:16"I have seen my people, because their cry has come to me." Israel's demand for a king in chapter 8 was at root an act of unbelief, and God does not answer unbelief by abandoning his people to it. He answers the misdirected cry with compassion, choosing the very king they had wrongly demanded and arranging an ordinary morning's errand to place him where he needed to be. Grace works through disobedience without waiting for it to end.
Samuel treats Saul as a man already crowned. The best portion of the meat is set aside for him, and he sits at the head of thirty guests. Then, alone, Samuel pours oil on his head and asks, 10:1"Has not the LORD anointed you to be prince over his people Israel?" Saul's own earlier reaction shows how unprepared he was: 9:21"Am I not a Benjaminite, from the least of the tribes of Israel?" He cannot imagine why any of this is happening to him.
Samuel gives three signs, each stranger than the last, and promises that the Spirit of the LORD will rush upon Saul so that he is 10:6"turned into another man." Every sign lands as promised. In the middle of that string of fulfillments comes the sentence the passage has been building toward: 9"God gave him another heart." This is a narrower gift than the new heart the prophets later promise, a heart of flesh in place of stone. Here God equips an ordinary man for a specific, enormous task he could not have met on his own. The God who arranged a donkey hunt reaches into Saul to make him fit for what waits beyond the gate.
Then Saul goes home and says almost nothing. His uncle asks for details, and Saul tells him about the donkeys and stops. 16"But about the matter of the kingdom, of which Samuel had spoken, he did not tell him anything." A man just anointed king walks back into ordinary life and keeps it to himself. Whatever Saul's story becomes, this moment shows restraint.
We know what Saul does not yet know, that this heart will not stay faithful. The passage refuses to rush ahead to that. For now it shows what happens when God reaches into the middle of someone's most unremarkable day and turns it into the beginning of something. He did the same for shepherds watching sheep and fishermen mending nets.
Prayer
Father, you have never needed dramatic circumstances to accomplish your purposes. Thank you for the donkeys we have chased, the ordinary errands that turned out to be leading somewhere we could not see. Give us hearts made ready for whatever you have called us to, and the restraint to carry it faithfully. We trust that our smallest days are never outside your notice. In Jesus' name, amen.