There are three lessons we can learn from the life of King Saul. First, obey the Lord and seek to do His will. From the very start of his reign, Saul had the perfect opportunity to be the benchmark by which all future kings could be measured. All he had to do was to seek the Lord wholeheartedly, obey God's commandments, and align his will with that of God’s, and his rule would have been a God-honoring one. However, like so many others, Saul chose a different path and strayed away from God. We find a perfect example of his disobedience in the incident where God commanded him to kill all the Amalekites, but Saul kept the king and some of the spoils of war. Haman the Agagite, who would later seek to kill the Jews (see the
book of Esther), was a descendant of the king whose life Saul spared. Saul compounded his troubles by lying to Samuel over the incident. He claimed that the soldiers had saved the best of the animals in order to sacrifice them to God (
1 Samuel 15). This act, plus many others over the course of his rule, emphasized the fact that he could not be trusted to be an instrument of God’s will.
