Saul was man’s idea of an ideal king; David was God’s choice of a man after His own heart. Once King Saul recognized that David had captured the people’s imagination, he began to envy and to hate David, even seeking to kill him.
Saul fought valiantly against the Amalekites and the Philistines, but would not — and could not — destroy all the Amalekites with their king, and also their animals, as commanded by the LORD. This was because of his own antagonism against God’s anointed one. The Amalekites (in spirit if not identifiable in the flesh) were and are Israel’s enemies, descendants of Esau/Edom, who never reconciled his heart with his brother Jacob/Israel’s inheritance of the covenanted Land of Promise. Yet Saul had within him the same animosity towards David, God’s sovereign choice for the royal lineage in Israel. Saul was eventually killed in battle by the Philistines, spiritual allies with the Amalekites against the people of Israel.
Because of Saul’s fear of man rather than of YHVH, Saul had no moral authority or righteous standing to completely defeat and destroy Israel’s nemesis: the enemy was within Saul’s own character.
But David saw the spiritual reality of the carnality which the Amalekites and Philistines lived by, and there can be no peace and no compromise between the flesh and the spirit. (T. Austin-Sparks wrote this somewhere.) This is the spiritual battle which all believers in Yeshua/Jesus fight within ourselves: agreeing or not with all that God says and intends. Too often, we judge Him, rather than submitting to Him and accepting His judgments about all things.
It seems that today we see the same peoples fighting the same wars within Israel. The ownership and sovereignty over the same land; the lack of peace for Israel and the Jewish people. Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, Iran — all these entities carry within them the same spirit of Amalek and of the Philistines.
Could it be that Israel is like King Saul: valiant in battle but unable, and unwilling, to defeat her avowed and determined nemeses?
Could it be that Israel’s hostility towards Yeshua/Jesus, the Son of David and God’s Anointed One to be King of Israel and King of the Jews, could it be that this unwarranted hostility towards “David”, whose intentions were always for Saul, not against him, be the root sin that continues to beset Israel and the Jewish people, not allowing them to overcome fully their persistent and determined enemies to destroy them?