Ep 597 – 1 Samuel 18:10-16

How do you learn to be a king? Well, you can always do it by watching another king. And then there’s on-the-job training, where you learn as you go. Both have their pros and cons, but it seems that God was going to allow David to take the first route, allowing him to watch King Saul from an up-close-and-personal vantage point right in the palace. But most of the lessons David would learn from Saul would be of the negative variety. Saul would provide David with more than enough examples of how NOT to reign. And it wasn’t long before David found himself on the receiving end of Saul’s uncontrollable anger, a byproduct of the king’s growing jealousy. All of this was part of God’s divine strategy to provide David with a graduate-level education on kingship. David had been anointed the next king of Israel, but he was not yet on the throne, because he was not yet ready. There were many life lessons David would have to learn before he was ready to wear the crown and assume the responsibility of leading the people of God. His anointing was going to be followed by a period of testing and teaching, and one of the greatest lessons he would learn in the years ahead was the need to rely on and rest in God.