Success and Failure in God’s Sight

September 23, 2026/Ayrian Yasar/
Photo Credit: MargaretW / iStock.com

Photo Credit: MargaretW / iStock.com

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What does failure look like? What about success? Many people compare themselves to society’s standards, family standards, or community standards to see if they are measuring up, if they are succeeding or failing. Yet, the Scriptures remind us that failure and success in the eyes of God often look different from what we would expect. The lives of Saul, the first king of Israel, and his son Jonathan are a case in point.

Initially, King Saul seemed like he had a successful life.

In 1 Samuel 14:47-52, we have a summary of Saul’s life and achievements: he has a wife and several children (one of them, Jonathan, was outstanding), and he is doing the work of a king as he fights Israel’s battles. To the onlooker, Saul would seem to be quite successful, not a failure at all!

Dale Ralph Davis points out in his commentary 1 Samuel: Looking on the Heart:

History’s judgement is that external human calculation of a person’s life and work. It’s what folks can observe. By such a standard, Saul had made his mark and made it well. (p. 149)

How many of us today measure success and failure by our career goals being met, being happily married, or having great kids? Or perhaps there are other standards we use to measure success or failure. Many times, we feel as if we have failed because we are comparing ourselves to others’ external life situations. Maybe our career didn’t take off the way we thought it would, we are single rather than married, or our children aren’t excelling like other people’s kids. There are, of course, endless situations we could use to measure our lives by and come up feeling like a failure.

In fact, Saul was not successful in God’s sight.

Yet, 1 Samuel 14 does not just leave us with a summary of a successful Saul. Rather, this seemingly “successful” summary concludes a narrative that demonstrates how Saul was not in fact successful in God’s sight but instead a failure. 1 Samuel 13 narrates how Saul failed to follow through and wait upon the Lord. His failure stemmed from not waiting upon the word of the Lord that was coming through Samuel. Davis writes,

Samuel was the bearer of Yahweh’s word, and Saul’s task was to wait for it…. Saul’s was an act of insubordination, a failure to submit to Yahweh’s word through his prophet. By his action Saul confessed that certain emergencies rendered Yahweh’s word unnecessary. (p. 136)

1 Samuel 13 then gives us God’s assessment of Saul, a king who failed because he would not wait for and trust in God’s word and guidance.

Even though Saul’s son Jonathan was royal material, he chose to serve rather than seize power.

In contrast, the life of Saul’s son Jonathan, a valiant and faithful man who ends up playing second fiddle to David, seems like a failure in the modern sense. He was, as Davis points out, “royal material.” We see his qualities as he fought the Philistines, inspired the loyalty of the Israelites, and most importantly trusted God (see 1 Samuel 14). Yet, he did not receive the kingship. Was Jonathan then a failure? Davis points out,

For Jonathan, then, the kingdom was not his to seize, not his to rule, but his to serve…. Maybe a tragic life isn’t tragic if it’s lived in fidelity to what Christ asks of us in the circumstances he gives us. (pp. 147-48)

Our minds and hearts are to be centered on what God calls success.

In our modern circumstances, we frequently examine our résumé to see if it looks like Saul’s—great career, great family, etc. Yet we forget to look at what God calls success: living faithfully before him in the circumstances he puts in our lives, waiting on his word as we live before the face of God (see Jonathan’s act of faith in 1 Samuel 14). If we are doing this, we may have great accomplishments according to society’s standards—or not—but in God’s sight we are not failures but instead his faithful children.

This article was originally featured in BCL’s October 2025 monthly newsletter “Failure.”

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