As I mentioned in my post on the nature of reciprocal honor, I’ve been teaching through First Samuel recently. Today, I’d like to share a thought about a familiar verse—man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart.
Chapter 15 of First Samuel concluded with Samuel pronouncing God’s judgment on Saul, and then mourning over Saul’s downfall. Chapter 16 then begins with God telling Samuel to get up and move on. God tells him to fill his horn with oil and go to Bethlehem, because the Lord has chosen one of the sons of a Bethlehemite, named Jesse, to be king.
When Samuel arrives in Bethlehem, he invites Jesse and his sons to a sacrifice; and when Jesse’s sons arrive, Samuel begins looking for the one who would be the next king. He sees Jesse’s son, Eliab, who is physically imposing, and Samuel thinks that surely this is the one. But then we get that familiar statement in verse seven. The Lord says to Samuel: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: for man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” A more literal, or formal, translation, would be something like this: “man sees as far as the eyes, but the Lord sees to the heart.” In other words, all we are able to see is the outside, but the Lord is able to see the inner thoughts and motives of the person’s character.
When God gave Saul as Israel’s king, he gave the people the kind of physically, outwardly impressive individual that they, like other nations, would find desirable—someone whose outward stature is striking, with no specific regard for the stature of his soul. The Lord, on the other hand, knows the thoughts of man, as Psalm 94 says, and he is after a man whose inward character is upright, who will thus lead the people righteously.
Humans always tend to look on the outward appearance when evaluating someone’s suitability for a task, but God is more concerned about what is in a man’s soul. However, the point of verse seven in fact isn’t simply that man looks only at the outside but ought to look at the heart. The point is that the outside is all that we can see, but God is able to see the heart.
We don’t have the ability to see a man’s thoughts and motives; we have to make judgments based on people’s words and actions. Even so, we should be able to discern their character to a certain degree by their actions. We should be able to watch the actions of Saul as he repeatedly sloughed off responsibility, and was reluctant to follow the instruction of the Lord, and be able to say that man’s character isn’t what it should be. But the point here is that that’s all we have to go on, whereas the Lord has the ability to see a man’s soul. And while he accommodated himself to the people’s wishes and standards when he selected Saul, he’s going to choose Saul’s replacement in accordance with his own standards. This will be a man after God’s heart, rather than a man after the people’s heart.
That’s what’s going on with this selection process. The contrast is between men choosing someone whose appearance looks like someone they want as king, and God now choosing a man whose heart looks like someone God wants as king. It’s introducing David as the paradigmatic, archetypal model of a righteous and godly king. Unlike man, who only has the ability to see as far as the outward appearance, God can look to the deepest parts of our soul, and evaluate us accordingly.
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