About eight hundred years after Abraham’s descendants entered Egypt, by God’s command, the prophet Samuel anointed Saul as the first king of Israel.
King Saul ascended to the throne after the Israelites had restored 400 years of slavery in Egypt by going through a 400-year of judges to do so. During his 40-year reign, Saul was to establish the foundation of the faith by restoring the 40 years Moses spent in Pharaoh’s palace. Thereafter, Saul had to build the temple. However, he fell into unbelief.
In the Bible, it says that God commanded the Israelites to destroy the seven Canaanite tribes. When Saul disobeyed Him, leaving some of the Amalekites and their livestock alive, God punished him severely (1 Samuel 15:18-23).
King Saul was to carry out a horizontal restoration by indemnity of Moses’ 40-day period of fasting, which served to restore the Word God had written on tablets of stone. To achieve this, Saul had to build the temple during his 40-year reign.
If Saul had erected the temple as an image of the Messiah and praised it, and if the chosen people of Israel had stood on that foundation and shown absolute obedience to their king by praising the temple, a substantive foundation had been laid. In this case, the foundation for the Messiah would have been established at that time. However, King Saul rebelled against God’s commands revealed to him by the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 15:1-23) and lost the opportunity to build the temple. So, he was placed in the position of Moses, who had failed in the first way of rebuilding Canaan.
God, seeing King Saul’s unbelief, repented for making him king (1 Samuel 15:11). These verses confirm that evil did not arise because it was predestined by God, but because the people failed in their responsibility and fell into the power of Satan.
As God’s will for Abraham was done through Isaac and Jacob, God’s will for King Saul to build the temple was done in King Solomon’s time, after King David’s reign had passed.