I Chronicles 10:13

Look at what this verse does — it's a funeral obituary, and it's brutally honest. The Chronicler isn't just reporting that Saul died in battle (that's already been told in verses 1-7). He's telling you why, in God's accounting. "So Saul died for his unfaithfulness" — the Hebrew word underneath "unfaithfulness" is maʻal (H4604), a word that pictures covering something up, acting treacherously behind a veil Strong's. This isn't a slip. It's betrayal dressed up to look like something else.

Then the verse stacks up the evidence like a prosecutor: he did not keep the word of the LORD, and — worse — he consulted a medium for guidance. That last detail is the gut-punch. Saul, the king who once (at least outwardly) enforced God's law against mediums, ends his life sneaking to one in the dark, begging a dead prophet for answers God had stopped giving him.

Easy to miss: the Chronicler is writing this centuries after Saul died, to Jewish exiles rebuilding their identity after the Babylonian conquest and captivity. He doesn't retell Saul's whole reign — he skips straight to the death, because his real interest is what comes next: verse 14 says God "turned the kingdom over to David." Saul's failure is the doorway to David's throne Matthew Henry. This is where the verse sits in the bigger story — it's the hinge between a king who covered up his disobedience and a king "after God's own heart."

Where Christians disagree: some readers wonder whether Saul's specific act of consulting the medium at Endor ( 1 Samuel 28) was itself the fatal sin, or just the last straw revealing a lifetime pattern of half-hearted obedience. Older commentators tend to list Saul's sparing of the Amalekite king ( 1 Samuel 15) alongside this as the compounding offense Jamieson-Fausset-Brown. Either way, the text ties his death directly to unfaithfulness, not just bad military luck.

1 & 2 Chronicles were almost certainly compiled after the Babylonian exile — likely in the 400s BC, after Cyrus the Persian let the Jewish exiles return home to Jerusalem. The audience wasn't people living through Saul's reign; it was a shattered, rebuilding community trying to figure out who they were now that the monarchy was gone and the Temple lay in rubble for a generation. Jewish tradition credits Ezra the scribe with shaping these books, and whether or not he wrote every word, the concerns are his kind of concerns: priesthood, temple worship, and above all, the legitimacy of David's royal line Matthew Henry.

That's why the Chronicler barely mentions Saul's forty-year reign — he jumps straight to Saul's death on Mount Gilboa, where the Philistines (Israel's perennial enemy on the coastal plain) crushed his army and killed his sons. For an exiled community wondering whether God had abandoned his promises to David's house, this chapter answers a burning question: why did the crown pass from Saul's family to David's in the first place? The answer isn't political accident — it's covenant unfaithfulness.

The specific charge, "consulted a medium," points back to a night recorded in 1 Samuel 28: the eve of that final battle, Saul — terrified, unable to get a word from God through dreams, prophets, or the sacred lots — disguised himself and visited a woman at Endor who supposedly summoned the dead. This was not a minor cultural quirk. Mesopotamian and Canaanite religion around Israel was thick with necromancy and divination, and Israel's law ( Leviticus 19:31, Leviticus 20:6) had drawn a hard line against it precisely because it treated God's silence as a lock to be picked rather than a message to be heeded. Saul himself, earlier in his reign, had banned mediums from the land ( 1 Samuel 28:3) — so his final act is not just disobedience, it's hypocrisy collapsing under pressure.

The word translated "unfaithfulness" is מַעַל (maʻal, H4604), coming from a root meaning to cover up or act covertly Strong's. It's not the ordinary Hebrew word for sin — it's specifically used for betrayal, the kind where someone you trusted was secretly working against you the whole time. Think of a business partner quietly siphoning funds while smiling at you across the table. That's the flavor here: Saul's whole reign had a hidden crookedness to it.

"Did not keep" translates שָׁמַר (shâmar, H8104), a word that literally means to hedge something in like a fence around a garden — to guard, watch, protect Strong's. God's word was supposed to be the fence around Saul's life. He didn't just forget it; he let the fence fall.

"Consulted" is דָּרַשׁ (dârash, H1875), a rich word meaning to seek, to search out, even to worship — it's the same word used elsewhere for seeking the LORD in prayer Strong's. That's the tragic irony: the very verb Israel used for devoted seeking after God, Saul aims at a אוֹב (ʼôwb, H178) — a "necromancer," literally connected to a word for a hollow, mumbling sound, like a voice from an empty jar Strong's. He gave to a ghost the seeking that belonged to God alone.

And notice: he "did not keep the word of the LORD" — דָּבָר (dâbâr, H1697), meaning word, matter, thing — the very substance of what God had spoken Strong's. Saul's death is framed entirely around a broken relationship to God's speech: he wouldn't listen to it, and then went looking for a voice from the grave instead.

Saul is Israel's first king, and he becomes a kind of dark photographic negative of the King who was coming. Saul sought guidance in the dark, from the dead, because the living God had gone silent to him ( 1 Samuel 28:6). Compare that to Jesus in Gethsemane — also facing death, also in agony, also praying urgently — but he never once turns from his Father to seek another voice. "Not my will, but yours be done" ( Luke 22:42) is the anti-Saul prayer: total trust exactly where trust costs the most.

There's also the bigger shape of the story: God rejects Saul and hands the kingdom to David ( 1 Chronicles 10:14), and it's through David's line — the line Saul's failure makes room for — that Jesus eventually comes ( Matthew 1:1, Matthew 1:6). Saul's unfaithfulness is, strangely, the hinge God uses to move history toward Bethlehem. That doesn't excuse Saul — Chronicles never softens the verdict — but it shows you how God works even through a king's ruin to keep his promise to build an eternal house through David ( 2 Samuel 7:16), a promise that lands, finally, on Christ.

And there's a quieter echo worth naming honestly, not forcing: where Saul dug up a dead man's ghost for answers he had no right to demand, the gospel tells you of a Man who actually rose from the dead — not summoned, not conjured, but raised by God's own power — who now speaks with living authority ( Hebrews 1:1-2). You don't need a medium groping in the dark. You have a risen Christ who has already spoken, and who prays for you even now ( Romans 8:34). Saul's tragedy is what it looks like to seek without trusting God's actual word; Jesus is what it looks like to trust the Father's word all the way to death and beyond it.

Here's the uncomfortable question this verse puts to you: what do you do when God seems silent? Saul's core sin wasn't curiosity — it was refusing to sit in the silence and trust God anyway. When the answers didn't come the way he wanted, he went shopping for a different voice. He didn't reject God loudly; he just quietly went around him.

That's more common than we admit. You don't need a séance to do what Saul did. You do it every time you're anxious about a decision and you'd rather scroll for an "answer" — a horoscope, a search algorithm curating what you want to hear, a friend who'll just validate the choice you've already made — than sit with God in prayer and wait. You do it when obedience feels too slow and you go looking for a shortcut that lets you keep control while feeling spiritual about it.

The cost this verse asks of you is patience with God's actual pace and God's actual word — even when it's quieter than you want, even when it doesn't hand you the outcome you're bargaining for. Saul wanted certainty on his own timetable more than he wanted God himself. That's the real diagnosis under "unfaithfulness" — not one dramatic midnight visit to a witch, but a whole life of treating God's word as optional whenever it got inconvenient John Gill.

So ask yourself plainly: where in your life right now are you tempted to go around God instead of to him? Don't dress it up. Name it. And then bring it — not to a substitute, not to a shortcut, but to the God who has already spoken through his Son, and who has not gone silent, whatever it feels like today.

• Lord, forgive me for the times I've gone looking for answers everywhere except from you — show me where I do that without even noticing.
• Give me patience to wait for your word instead of chasing a quicker, easier voice when you seem silent.
• Root out any "covering up" in me — any place where I'm managing an appearance of obedience while quietly doing my own thing.
• Thank you that in Christ I don't have to grope in the dark for answers; teach me to actually trust what you've already spoken.
• Where I've built a whole life around getting my own way while looking religious, expose it and change me.

• When was the last time God felt silent to you, and what did you do instead of waiting on him?
• Is there an area of your life where your outward obedience is covering over a private, ongoing disobedience — your own version of Saul's "unfaithfulness"?
• What "mediums" do you consult today — sources you trust more instinctively than you trust prayer or Scripture?
• If God let the natural consequences of your current choices play out the way he let Saul's play out, what would that look like?
• Do you actually believe God has spoken clearly enough in Christ, or are you secretly waiting for a louder, different sign before you'll trust him?