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- Want to add weight to your waiting? This'll do the trick
Want to add weight to your waiting? This'll do the trick
A guide to burdening oneself further
Nathan Harrison
September 1st, 2022
Some people really enjoy a challenge.
There exists within our society today a subset of people who like to make life harder for themselves, priding themselves in 'doing hard things.' I'd like to oblige them for a moment. If you're into making life harder, running on fumes, and carrying heavier burdens, I present to you a guide for adding weight to your waiting.
You'll want to pay particular attention to an account from King Saul's reign in 1 Samuel 13, as it provides some tips for burdening yourself more than necessary.
The impatient king
Saul has just been anointed and confirmed king of Israel, and is awaiting God's blessing to go into battle against the Philistines. Samuel the prophet has specifically given the instruction:
"Go down ahead of me to Gilgal. I will surely come down to you to sacrifice burnt offerings, but you must wait seven days until I come to you and tell you what you are to do."
Simple and clear, right? Not so fast.
By the time we get to 1 Samuel 13, seven days have passed. The situation has grown critical for the Israelites. They've been outnumbered by the Philistines. Saul's men are beginning to scatter. And there's no sign of Samuel's arrival.
What's a king "quaking with fear" (1 Samuel 13:7) to do?
A handful of factors seized him, adding weight to his waiting, and dooming his decision-making. In hopes of entering battle with God's blessing, Saul offers up the burnt offering before Samuel arrives, only for Samuel to show up as Saul finishes.
Listen to his response when Samuel asks what he'd done:
“When I saw that the men were scattering, and that you did not come at the set time, and that the Philistines were assembling at Mikmash, I thought, ‘Now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal, and I have not sought the Lord’s favor.’ So I felt compelled to offer the burnt offering.”
Saul's response unearths some all-too-human factors at play within all of us when we find ourselves in a time of waiting. And they burden us more as we wait on what God is up to.
"...the men were scattering..."
Ever been abandoned?
If you have, you know it's enough to make you do all you can to make sure you never experience that feeling again. Anything that even slightly resembles that situation puts a knot in your stomach. Rather than sit and watch yet another person leave, Saul sees an opportunity to take action, in hopes of delaying their exit.
Ultimately it's a band-aid on a gaping wound.
"...you did not come at the set time..."
Last I checked, a day had 24 hours.
Yet I can relate to what Saul was thinking. We can get tunnel-vision on something quantifiable (in this case 7 days) and start imagining "extra conditions." In our minds, these conditions easily become the absolutes by which God is going to act. They fill out our "best-case scenario," and anything less causes us to tell ourselves a worst-case story.
And how do we cope when those conditions appear to not be met? By taking things into our own hands.
"...the Philistines were assembling..."
Where's the courage that had instigated Israel's enemy?
One moment, Saul allowed and even announced an Israelite attack on a Philistine outpost, going as far as taking credit for it (1 Samuel 13:3-4). But now? Fear was in charge, and it chased the Israelites into caves, thickets, amongst rocks, and into nearby pits and cisterns.
The desperation of the situation was shifting Saul's confidence from God's hands to his own hands.
"I thought...I was compelled..."
The natural next step when we're in over our heads is to begin forecasting, and that's exactly what Saul did. He couldn't imagine God's solution, so he was compelled toward his own. The lesson here?
When waiting, you either obey with God's assurance, or you're compelled by your conditions.
In other words: one way knows God is the source of salvation. The other sees oneself as that source.
An account like this - if nothing else - provides both a warning and an awareness of the factors that can delude us when we're in a time or season of waiting.
For those who like doing hard things - by all means, follow the lead of those around you, insert some conditions by which God should act, and emphasize your enemy. You'll add all kinds of weight to the waiting.
But for those looking for a lighter way forward - the awareness of those factors surrounding Saul (and the reality of those factors around us) can tune us in to our need for a Savior, and the abundance of that Savior's presence...even in the waiting.
Especially in the waiting.
More on that next time,
Nathan