The Poison of Partial Obedience Text: 1 Samuel 15:1-9
Introduction: The King We Asked For
We have now arrived at the great moral and spiritual pivot in the life of King Saul. What we witness here is not simply one man's failure on one particular Tuesday. Rather, this is the anatomy of a kingdom's collapse, the unraveling of a man who had the outward appearance of a king but lacked the one thing necessary: a heart of obedience. Israel had demanded a king "like all the nations," and in Saul, God gave them exactly what they asked for. He was tall, he was handsome, he looked the part. But God was teaching His people, and us, a lesson that runs through the entire Bible: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.
The issue before us is the nature of obedience. We live in an age that despises the very concept of absolute authority and therefore cannot comprehend absolute obedience. Our modern world wants a God who makes suggestions, not a God who gives commands. We want a customizable religion, a faith where we can pick and choose, where we can obey the parts that seem reasonable to us and discard the rest as culturally conditioned artifacts. In short, we want to be king. We want to be Saul.
This chapter is a direct assault on that entire way of thinking. The command God gives to Saul is stark, it is severe, and it is offensive to our delicate modern ears. And Saul's response is a master class in the kind of disobedience that masquerades as piety. He obeys, but only mostly. He follows the instructions, but with his own editorial improvements. And in so doing, he reveals that his heart is not submitted to God, but to the idol of self, and to the fear of man. This is the sin that cost Saul his kingdom, and it is the same sin that will cost any man his soul if he does not repent of it. We must understand that to God, partial obedience is just a pretty word for rebellion.
The Text
Then Samuel said to Saul, "Yahweh sent me to anoint you as king over His people, over Israel; so now, obey the voice of the words of Yahweh. Thus says Yahweh of hosts, 'I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, infant and nursing baby, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.' "
Then Saul summoned the people and numbered them in Telaim, 200,000 foot soldiers and 10,000 men of Judah. And Saul came to the city of Amalek and set an ambush in the valley. And Saul said to the Kenites, "Go, depart; go down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them; you showed lovingkindness to all the sons of Israel when they came up from Egypt." So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites. So Saul struck the Amalekites, from Havilah as you go to Shur, which is east of Egypt. And he seized Agag the king of the Amalekites alive and devoted to destruction all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs, and all that was good, and they were not willing to devote them to destruction; but everything despised and worthless, that they utterly destroyed.
(1 Samuel 15:1-9 LSB)
A Clear Command, A Long Memory (vv. 1-3)
The scene opens with Samuel delivering a message that is grounded in history and authority.
"Then Samuel said to Saul, 'Yahweh sent me to anoint you as king over His people, over Israel; so now, obey the voice of the words of Yahweh.'" (1 Samuel 15:1)
Samuel begins by reminding Saul of the source of his authority. "Yahweh sent me to anoint you." Saul's kingship was not his own achievement. He didn't win an election or seize power in a coup. He was chosen and anointed by God, through God's prophet. Therefore, the logical consequence, the "so now," is that he must obey God. Authority flows from God to the king, not the other way around. The king is under the law, not above it. This is the fundamental principle of biblical government, and it is the very thing Saul is about to trample underfoot.
"Thus says Yahweh of hosts, 'I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt.'" (1 Samuel 15:2)
God has a long memory. This is not some arbitrary, spur of the moment command. This is the settling of a very old account. Four hundred years prior, as Israel was a vulnerable, newborn nation coming out of Egypt, the Amalekites launched a cowardly, predatory attack, picking off the stragglers, the weak, and the faint at the rear of the column (Exodus 17:8-16; Deut. 25:17-19). In response, God swore an oath that He would be at war with Amalek from generation to generation and that He would one day "blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven."
This is corporate solidarity through time. Amalek as a people had identified themselves with this foundational act of treachery against God's covenant people. They never repented of it. They were a festering wound of rebellion, a nation built on the principle of preying on the weak. And now, the bill has come due. God is the God of history, and He is a God of justice. He does not forget.
"Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, infant and nursing baby, ox and sheep, camel and donkey." (1 Samuel 15:3)
Here is the command of herem, or "the ban." It means to devote something entirely to God through its destruction. This is holy war, where the spoils are not for the victors but for God. Now, this is where the modern objector gets very agitated. This sounds like genocide. But we must think biblically. First, God is the author of life, and He has the absolute right to take it. He is not a cosmic bully; He is the sovereign Lord. Second, this was a unique historical judgment, not a standing order for all warfare. This was God using Israel as His scalpel to cut out a cancerous tumor from humanity. The Amalekites were a culture so saturated with evil, so identified with their corporate sin, that God commanded their removal. The infants and children were not judged for their personal sins, but as part of the corporate whole. Just as Achan's sin brought judgment on his entire family (Joshua 7), so the corporate sin of Amalek brought this corporate judgment. This is a terrifying and sobering reality, but it is the reality of a world governed by a holy God.
Obedience with an Editor's Pen (vv. 4-9)
Saul begins by seeming to obey. He musters the army, he travels to the city, he even shows a degree of discernment by warning the Kenites to leave.
"So Saul struck the Amalekites... And he seized Agag the king of the Amalekites alive and devoted to destruction all the people with the edge of the sword." (1 Samuel 15:7-8)
So far, so good. Or so it seems. He wins the military victory. He carries out the sentence on "all the people." If you were just reading the headlines, you would think Saul had obeyed. He did about 90 percent of what God commanded. And this is the very nature of worldly wisdom. It's the religion of "close enough." But God does not grade on a curve.
"But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs, and all that was good, and they were not willing to devote them to destruction; but everything despised and worthless, that they utterly destroyed." (1 Samuel 15:9)
Here is the "but." This is the word that unravels everything. "But Saul... spared Agag." Why? Kings in the ancient world would parade captured kings as trophies. Sparing Agag was a monument to Saul's own glory, not God's. It was a pagan practice, a way of saying, "Look what a mighty king I am." He wanted to erect a monument to himself, and Agag was the cornerstone.
And they spared "the best of the sheep, the oxen." Why? The text is plain: they "were not willing" to destroy them. It was good stuff. It looked like a waste. This is the logic of pragmatism and greed dressed up in religious clothes. They applied their own cost-benefit analysis to God's absolute command. They decided that God couldn't possibly have meant they should destroy perfectly good livestock. So they "utterly destroyed" only what was "despised and worthless."
This is the heart of the sin. They substituted their own judgment for God's clear word. They obeyed the parts that made sense to them, the parts that cost them nothing. But when the command clashed with their pride (sparing Agag) and their greed (sparing the best animals), they edited God's command. They treated the word of the Lord as a rough draft that they were free to improve upon. This is not obedience. This is arrogance. This is rebellion wearing a smile.
The Gospel of True Obedience
The story of Saul is a dark and tragic backdrop against which the story of the true King shines all the more brightly. Saul was the king the people wanted, a king from their own midst who ultimately was governed by the same fears and desires that governed them. He was a man-pleaser who filtered God's commands through the grid of public opinion and personal advantage.
God rejected Saul for his disobedience, and in his place, He chose a man after His own heart, David. And yet, even David, for all his glories, would fail. He too would disobey. The story of Israel's kings is a repeating story of failure, pointing to our need for a perfect King, a King who would obey perfectly.
And that King is Jesus Christ. When Jesus came, He was given a command from His Father that was far more difficult than the one given to Saul. He was commanded to go to the cross and be utterly devoted to destruction for the sins of His people. He was to bear the full force of the herem of God's wrath. There was no part of that cup He was permitted to spare. He had to drink it all.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, His flesh recoiled from the horror of it. He prayed, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me." This was the moment of testing. Would He, like Saul, spare Himself? Would He edit the Father's command? No. He said, "Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done" (Luke 22:42). That is perfect obedience. That is true kingship.
Saul spared the best of the plunder and destroyed the worthless. At the cross, God did the opposite. He took His best, His only beloved Son, who was perfect and good, and devoted Him to destruction. And He spared us, who were worthless and despised in our sin. Saul's disobedience shows us the bankruptcy of our own attempts at self-salvation. Christ's perfect obedience is the only ground of our hope. We are not saved by our partial, Saul-like efforts. We are saved by trusting in the finished work of the King who obeyed all the way to the end, even to the point of death, death on a cross.