Hello and welcome to the Scriptures A Real podcast.

This is the podcast where we talk about elements of the scriptures that make them more real to us

because we believe there's a great deal of power in the scriptures and we can draw even more on that power and apply it to our lives better when they become real. I'm your host, Kerry Mielstein, and I'm excited today to do a short cast. Although I don't know that this will be super, super short. We have a lot to cover, but we're going to do a shortcast

today on parts of Samuel. Really, it's the story of Saul. We're going to do all the story of

Saul and it will be just me without a guest, although I would love to have some guests, but we're just

going to cover a lot of information very quickly.

There's a lot to cover in here.

We're going to do chapters that are in the Come Follow Me Reading and some that are not.

So to refresh us and where we are, you remember that as we were ending the last bit,

Samuel has been an amazing prophet and a judge. He's been judging Israel probably for

about, you know, several decades at least at this point. Israel has been very, very tribal.

Under the period of the judges, it's very seldom that they came together. All the tribes, often

it was tribe against tribe and tribe jealous of tribe and sometimes a couple tribes band came together, all the tribes. Often it was tribe against tribe and tribe

jealous of tribe and sometimes a couple tribes banding together, but then if someone came

against someone else, then they would be tribal against the other tribes and so on, very, very

tribal, except for Samuel is judging over all of them. And they're getting a taste for what it's like to have all of the tribes acting together.

They've also had some military success under Samuel, and they're starting to be delivered from the Philistines.

And I think it doesn't say this, so I'm reading into the text, but I suspect that they start to think that that deliverance is not because

they are righteous and have repented and gotten rid of the idols, as we talked about, and are

following this righteous prophetic leader, but because they've come together as a group of tribes

and they feel like, hey, we're pretty powerful when we're all together. While I'm sure that's true, they are, they seem to be ascribing their success and their

power to that rather than to God. And that's probably why they come and ask God for a king.

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