Sunday Night, Nov 26, 2017

Some of your faces are just, aww. I was just testing you, just trying to see. Have you had any questions from your Bible study the last two weeks or from conversations that you've had with folks, something that you'd like to ask that would be a good discussion point for us tonight?

Saul, the Amalekites, and the Spirit of the Lord’s Departure

Yes. From the list. Mm-hmm, yeah, that's a good question. So, this is 1 Samuel 16. To understand the story, when you go back to the whole situation, as the people began to demand from Samuel, who was growing old and his sons did not walk in his ways, Samuel was the last of the judges, and the people began to demand for themselves a king like the nations around them.

And this was not something that pleased the Lord at all because of the hardness of their hearts, they would not be content with him as their king. And Samuel gave a warning to the people that this would not ultimately be for their benefit to demand a king in this way, in this kind of selfish manner.

And the story then begins about just how Saul was selected, about the things that God did to bring about Saul as the king of Israel. Now, in chapter 12, when Samuel addresses the people of Israel, they did select Saul as king, and he was head and shoulders above everybody else, so he looked the part, though it was hard to find him on crowning day because he was hiding in the baggage, courageous man.

And he did have some redeeming qualities, he did have a redeeming quality, he was really good at killing Philistines, which is what they needed at the time. And he was pretty good at it, but in other ways, he wasn't so great.

And there's just a litany of issues with Saul all along the way. And Samuel warns them that God would bring judgment upon them because of their selfish, ultimately idolatrous demand. And so even before we get to the time when God sends an evil spirit from the Lord, we have to recognize that God gave Israel what they demanded, a king.

It was not a good desire, it wasn't a good thing that they wanted, but he gave them something to judge them because of their wrong motivation. And now Saul did not listen to Samuel, did not listen to the Lord, did not do what Deuteronomy said in terms of following the law of the Lord.

And he made several huge errors, not least of which when Samuel said to Saul to go kill all the Amalekites, because they were under the judgment of God from long ago when they attacked the rear guard of Israel as they were leaving Egypt.

It was time for their judgment and Saul was the instrument to take the armies of Israel and go kill the Amalekites. And Saul faltered and did not finish the job. He was supposed to, everything of the Amalekites was under the ban.

It was all dedicated to destruction. It was the Lord's call to do that for judgment. And Saul did not follow through and allowed the people to grab spoils of war. And he left Agag, the king of the Amalekites alive.

So Samuel confronted him about this, said that the Lord is going to take the kingdom away from you and give it to a man after his own heart. And Saul was just desperate to not look bad in front of his subjects.

And he grabbed hold of the hem of Samuel's robe and it tore and Samuel said, even as my robe tore, so God is tearing the kingdom away from you. And in all these ways, Saul has been confronted time and time again and told the Lord is no longer blessing you.

The Lord is no longer approving of you. He is going to have, he's going to give the kingdom to somebody else. Now, all throughout the Old Testament, even up to this point, when there was a special servant of God, the spirit of God was upon him.

The spirit of God was upon Moses. It was the spirit of God was upon Joshua. The spirit of God was upon the elders of Israel. The spirit of God was upon the judges of Israel. And the spirit of God was upon the first king of Israel, Saul, because he was specially anointed to do this task.

The spirit of God would anoint prophets, priests, and kings in the Old Testament. The spirit of God came upon the prophet, priest, and king, Messiah, in the New Testament, who is Christ, who fulfilled all the offices.

But with Saul, because of disobedience, he says here in chapter 16, in verse 14, we see that the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul. You see, the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul. He's no longer God's, he's truly not God's anointed anymore because David is God's anointed.

And this is made clear as Samuel has said, Samuel has anointed David with the oil. That was just the physical sign that God had anointed David spiritually to be the new king, God's chosen one. So in the absence of the spirit of the Lord, an evil spirit from the Lord now terrorized him.

Part of the challenge is two things. One is that the word evil in the Hebrew is a very wide range semantically. So it can mean anything from pure black wicked evil to I have an upset stomach, like something that, a malady, something that you're ill or it doesn't, this is, you're sick, something's not right, okay?

So it's a very wide variety in terms of the term. Secondly, God is sovereign over the demons. And if in the, as part of the judgment, if as part of the judgment upon Saul, that Saul is no longer protected from evil spirits, if that's part of the judgment, then that's part of the judgment.

And Satan and the demons cannot do anything without God's permission for them to do. Take Job, for example, okay? And God was testing Job and proving his point to Satan in that instance. So in this sense, it's not God doing evil.

God is unchanging and he is good and he is righteous. Now Saul has repeatedly rejected God, disobeyed God, would not follow through in worshiping God the right way. And this ultimately is the consequence that the spirit of God has been removed from Saul.

And so now there's an evil spirit terrorizing him. Does that help answer the question? We also find, yeah, it's something that it's a part of God being sovereign over everything, but he himself does not commit any evil.

He's sovereign over evil, but he's not committing evil. And in fact, we find that he ends up using evil for good. He turns it on its head. And no greater example than the evil done to Jesus Christ on the cross.

The out of that God brought the greatest good. We also find that when it came time for the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites, God had done the majority of the work. He had sent hornets in before them.

You know, God is sovereign over the hornets and had driven out many of the tribes in the land of Canaan through all those means before the Israelites ever got to them. We see that God is the Lord of hosts and he is sovereign over all things.

And in this sense, there was the necessity, I think, for the people of Israel to see a very stark contrast between Saul and David. And the stories that come later in chapter 17 and 18 are all about the contrast between Saul and David.

Here is Saul tormented. Here is David anointed. And everyone saw the difference. And I think it's part of the judgment of God upon Saul. They were a sort of a Lord. Yeah, yeah. And God orchestrated the judgment of Judah through the Babylonians and then judged the Babylonians later because he said that they had gone beyond his mandate and they had done so in wickedness.

And again, these are things where you come up to the edge of trying to understand just how this all works. But you start with what you know to be clear, that God is righteous, that he cannot commit sin.

He does not tempt anyone to evil. He can do no evil. God is light and in him there's no darkness at all. And all the things that are most clear. And then you come, there's passages like this and there's others.

But it's a matter of judgment upon those who have rejected him. And that God is sovereign over these evil spirits and they go accomplish his act of judgment as sure as the Babylonians would carry out his judgment against Judah and Israel.

So, and just precisely and technically how God is sovereign over evil and not guilty of doing evil is a confessional statement and not exactly, you can't, not a technical readout, just about how that works in the sovereignty of God.

I'm not smart enough to know what that is. I'm not smart enough to fully comprehend the Trinity I can confess the Trinity. I can talk about it. It's not a contradiction of terms, but I can't exhaust it.

I can't exhaust the Godhead or the incarnation for that matter. And those kind, you know, so there's some confessional statements we make and then we have to understand them within those constraints. I mean, later on, you have things like God sending a lying spirit in the mouth of the false prophets.

Is it during Micaiah's time of prophecy? But that's a judgment on them. They had so long been in the business of saying, peace, peace, when there was no peace and telling the king what he wanted to hear and playing the political game and so on and so forth.

And then part of God's judgment upon them was that they would feel that they were being spiritually moved and they thought they were being moved by the spirit of God, but they were being moved by an evil spirit.

And this is the thing about today. There are many false prophets and false teachers today who are absolutely convinced that they are being moved by the Holy Spirit, but they don't believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ and they have long compromised and not followed the scriptures.

And they believe when they see angels of light, that they're being led by Jesus himself. And yet Paul says that Lucifer appears as an angel of light and so his servants also appear likewise. And so in the Old Testament or the New Testament, you find that people can be led by spiritual power, but it's not necessarily the power of the Holy Spirit or something that's good.

God’s Wrath, Reprobate Minds, and Saul’s Similarity to Samson

Yeah, in Romans chapter one, it's part of the judgment of God and that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness because what would be known of God is evident among them, even his eternal power in Godhead so that they were without excuse.

But what do they do? Ultimately, they exchange the truth of God for a lie and worship the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever. Amen. And they continue on in their sin until God turns them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are unfitting.

And that's part of the judgment of God that ultimately that those who demand sin and demand sin and demand sin, God says, okay, have all you can ever want, but then you're lost in it. Well, I think with Saul, I think it's important to understand that Saul was very much like Samson in some ways.

There's a lot of similarities between Saul and Samson. Samson was no faithful believer. God used him to do what he wanted to do. And he had some shining moments, but there were few. And Saul was very much the same way.

Ephesians 4, Spiritual Warfare, and the Difference Between Demons and Mental Illness

Now, when Ephesians where it says, don't give place to the devil, don't let the sun go down on your anger, Paul's writing to Christians who are possessed by the Holy Spirit. And there's no chance at all for them to ever be possessed by demons.

What Paul meant there, and he's saying this not too far away from his context of spiritual warfare, was to resist the temptations of the devil, to resist all his trickery, all of the ways that he might seek to cause us to stumble as we follow Christ and as we fight for the truth.

And of course, anger is one of those things that is just full of opportunity to sin, full of opportunity to stumble when we're angry. We also do see that Jesus, when he was talking to the Gerasene demoniac, that we are legion for we are many.

But that seems to be something of a unique case. We don't see that all the time, not necessarily all the time, as Jesus deals with the demon possessed in his ministry. But he does give the warning in the story about the demon who was cast out and the man put everything in order, but then the demon comes back and brings seven of us with him, a warning about the need to follow through in repentance and not just basic deliverance.

Jesus was very keen in that story about the demon who left and then came back with more. Jesus was trying as he did in many ways to emphasize that his message of the gospel was about repent and believe and not just get me out of my problems.

Because Jesus would go through and he would heal and deliver people from demons and so on and so forth. And then he'd tell them what? Don't tell anyone. Why? Because they had not seen the full message yet.

They had not seen the full message of Christ's suffering and death and resurrection. And he didn't want them to be spreading half a gospel, going around deliverance from sickness, deliverance from disease, deliverance from demons, the end.

No, Jesus was going to go die on the cross and be raised from the dead and call us into this death and resurrection, a death to sin and a new life in righteousness. And he didn't want people running around telling half the story as if there was no suffering, no death to self, no resurrection, spiritual resurrection.

And so that story, I think he was illustrating, you may be excited about getting delivered from a demon, but what you need is repentance and faith. And if your life is empty, maybe set in order, behavior modification, but there is no Christ.

If there's no faith in Christ, no union with Christ, then you're laying yourself open to even worse things to come down and come further. So I think that was kind of where he was going with that. A lot of strange stuff in Samuel, first and second Samuel.

I think someone asked about the witch of Endor a couple of weeks ago. But there is a lot of things about this evil spirit, terrorizing Saul is something that ultimately Saul was left to and exposed to because of his constant rejection and grieving of the Holy Spirit who was upon him.

And he kept on disobeying God, disobeying God, disobeying God. And this ultimately is a very fitting judgment from God on Saul. It's a very good question. Does it answer your question? Maybe there's some lingering nagging.

Well, yeah, it's just that the an evil spirit is actively terrorizing or bothering Saul. I would say that'd be the closest and the most clear reading of the text. If it's something else, I'm okay if it's something else.

I'm just saying the clearest reading of the text would lead us to that. He tried to kill his own son. He tried to kill his own son. And he would, and you can see that Saul he's a very unstable, he was a very unstable man in that he would promise something.

And I'm never, I'll never go back after you again, David. I won't kill you. And then he would try it again anyway. And he would tell Jonathan something and then he'll go back on it later. And so he was very unstable in that way.

And I think some people can see some mental illness there, but it's also best to stick with the clearest reading of the text. And it is something I think that may be a little bit instructive that sometimes we read our modern terminology back into the text to try to explain things that we have to be a little bit careful about.

And we definitely don't want to do a disservice to folks struggling with mental health by doing that and reading it back in and saying, because then it casts the shadow of demonology over people that have struggled with mental health.

And I don't think that's, I don't think it's wise. I think you can have mental difficulties, mental health struggles and not be demon possessed. And I think it's important to have those two things separate, just like you can have a broken arm and it wasn't the devil that made it happen, you know?

So I think it'd be, I think it would be good to kind of separate those two and have them where they're supposed to be.

A harmful spirit from God, this torment, how did they know that? Or it is, let's have David come and point on the liar and that will make you better. Sure. Go back to chapter 15 with failed to be obedient and others coming out, Pamela Tice and John Killing, A-Gag and all of that.

Our judgment comes on Paul. Was Saul then from that point, or maybe, I don't know, was he very lenient?

Yeah, and that's a really great question because when you go back to chapter 13, Saul waits seven days in verse eight to wait for Samuel to come to sacrifice the offering. He was done waiting. He felt like the people were gonna abandon him.

He was always very concerned about what the people thought, very insecure. And so he thought, I'm just gonna go ahead and offer this offering so they won't all scatter. So he did that. And verse 10 is just tragic.

As soon as he finished offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came. And Saul went out to meet him and greet him, but Samuel said to him, what have you done? And Saul gives his excuses. Now verse 13, Samuel said to Saul, you have acted foolishly.

You have not kept the commandment of the Lord your God, which he commanded you. For now the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever, but now your kingdom shall not endure. The Lord has sought out for himself a man after his own heart, and the Lord has appointed him as ruler over his people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.

So even in chapter 13, Samuel had said this. And this is just after chapter 12 and Samuel's essentially Samuel preaching to them and saying, you're gonna get a king and you're not gonna like it. And so Saul starts off on the wrong foot.

Then comes more war with the Philistines. And where is Saul now? He's resting under the pomegranate tree. When the Philistines, their camp is to be taken. He's supposed to be doing the job of a king. He's not.

So his son has to go do it with his armor bearer and they have to sneak away because Saul's under the pomegranate tree talking to the high priest with the Urim and the Thummim saying, roll the dice, see if I'm supposed to go attack.

Just, you don't have to ask. You know what you're supposed to do. That's your job. And he's lollygagging under the pomegranate tree. So Jonathan and his armor bearer go up there and they take care of business.

And Saul in his pride, he has to try to take the credit for himself. And so, oh, now, yeah, we'll go get them. And no one's allowed to eat until we kill them all. That was a really dumb idea because now all your troops are going to be famished and they can't fight.

And Jonathan wasn't there when Saul made that oath. And so Jonathan eats because he didn't know. And oh, now he's ready to kill his own son because of his own foolish oath. You see a lot of echoes of the judges in the life of Saul.

And then again, he messes up with the Amalekites and it was just over and over again that we have Saul one misstep after another. You know, we never really, he did well here and there, but you never see him really fulfilling that role of God's anointed king until we come to the time wherein it's made very clear that it's just not, you know, God is not going to leave his blessing.

And in fact, the only way Saul is gonna be able to function well is when David is around because David is the Lord's anointed. And David plays the harp. He plays, and we read the Psalms, and who's he singing about most of the time?

He's singing about the Messiah most of the time. He's singing about the one Hannah sang about in chapter, prayed about in chapter two of 1 Samuel. And he's singing about Christ. And yeah, the demon leaves.

When God's anointed one is in the room and he's singing about Jesus Christ. Yeah, the evil spirit leaves. And Saul obviously is refreshing like, oh, thank goodness. You know, I feel a lot better. But notice who David is to Saul.

David is the guy who comes, plays the harps and makes him feel better. And then David is the guy who bails Saul out when Goliath challenges the people of Israel in chapter 17. Goliath comes out 40 days in a row and says, send me out your champion.

I'm the champion of the Philistines. Let's just settle this warrior versus warrior. And whoever loses will become the slaves of the other side. I wonder in all the land of Israel, who would be the best candidate to go out there and represent Israel as their champion and fight the champion of the Philistines?

Who is head and shoulders taller than everybody else in all of Israel and has a really nice set of armor? The guy who likes sitting under the pomegranate tree. And Saul's sitting there day after day after day, not going out to fight Goliath.

Day after day, 40 days, he doesn't go fight Goliath. And then comes God's anointed, David. And he goes and fights Goliath. And he does what the people of Israel cannot do for themselves. And he slays the giant as God's anointed.

And then the army rallies around David in chapter 18. Jonathan acts as David's armor bearer. Everyone's rallying around David. David's God's anointed one. And that doesn't really bless Saul. And Saul just, then he goes into his murderous.

He continues in his murderous ways, murderous rage. It's not the same story, but if you, I guess if you parsed it out into a similar narrative, you're gonna find Saul acting in the role of Pharaoh. How many times does God come to Pharaoh and say, this shall you do?

And he says, okay, no, that's Saul. Again and again and again, until finally destruction comes. And you see that in the life of Saul as well. Okay, I was gonna talk about rainbows, but we're out of time.

Maybe next time. Let's go ahead and close by singing the doxology. Praise God from whom all blessings flow