Week 18 1 Chronicles
Yesterday the chronicler was making editorial choices – exclusions and inclusions – and he’s at it again today.
Saul is killed on the battlefield in chapter ten. The chronicler says nothing else about Saul’s life story. Just the battle and his death. Which means king Saul gets a fourteen-verse mention in Chronicles. I page forward and see that David gets the next nineteen chapters. So the chronicler is saying that he has bigger priorities than Saul. He’s laid his Priority-People Cards on the table, interested in some and not others. He’s very interested in David.
Side Note: the last two verses about Saul are pretty heavy: Saul died because he was unfaithful to the Lord. He failed to obey the Lord’s command, and he even consulted a medium instead of asking the Lord for guidance. So the Lord killed him (1 Chronicles 10:13-14 NLT). The last phrase really wakes me up: the Lord killed him. I think about it. Does that make Bible-God a Murderer? I doubt it. Just a couple of days ago I read: all (the Lord) does is just and good (Psalm 111:7 NLT). So it reminds me that however I try to dope out the action the Lord took at the end of Saul’s life it can’t really exclude other things I’ve already read. The sentence says the Lord killed Saul. Now I have to figure out just what that means and how it fits.