The In the Old Testament, King Saul's reign begins with great promise and potential,

but as we'll see today on Truth for Life, it has a not so great ending to the story.

What can we learn from this Old Testament tragedy?

Alistairbegg delves into this question as he concludes our study in 1st Samuel we're looking at chapter 31.

Well if like me and I know some of you are like me you read obituaries you know that the best of them are like many biographies and I learn a tremendous amount and so do you if you read them about

people in relatively short order. The saddest of them give to us the account of an individual whose life was brimful of

promise and potential in the early days.

And then as we read on, we discover that that potential was never realized, in certain cases

it was actually squandered, and in the end the record is one of desperate sadness. Now the life of Saul I think

actually fits that description. It's quite a while since we were introduced to him.

He was a handsome young man, no one more so.

And from his shoulders upward, he was taller than any of the people. So a tremendous start. He received an anointing, he

received a divine commission, and his divine commission was to save Israel

from the hand of the Philistians. And we have to understand that

he did want to do that. But along the way it has all gone terribly wrong. And by the time we reach this final

chapter we find him very different from standing head and shoulders above but

rather dying on the battlefield before those who he was asked to go and

vanquish. I had just two pictures in my mind and triggered because of this reference to the tamarist tree in verse 31.

You will perhaps remember that one of the pictures not so long ago in chapter 22 was of him sitting under the tamarous tree with his

spear in his hand and surrounded by his servants. So still with potential, still with a measure of authority, still heading forward. So there he sits under the Tamarix tree and now with his body burned his bones are buried under the Tamorous tree.

It's a fairly short chapter compared to many of them and so we work our way through it. In verse one we have a

summary of the Philistine victory. Let's just understand this, that while this is happening in Chapter 31, the events that we have seen in Chapter 30

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