Today I’m in 1 Samuel 28, which provides an eerie but insightful peek into another spiritual ecosystem: that of witchcraft. In this scene, King Saul consults a spiritist in a desperate attempt to gain direction and insight on the eve of a terrifying battle against the Philistines. In this passage we see the irony of Saul who had in his zeal for the spiritual purity of his people expelled spiritists from Israel now seeking the guidance of a witch. I can imagine the shadowy room in a hovel lit by a couple smoking lanterns. Saul, weak from fasting but frantic sits across from the disheveled woman awakened in the middle of the night. After assuring her she would not bear the consequences of channeling the dead, he asks her to bring up his former mentor, Samuel. Only the woman could see the shadowy figure of Samuel coming up from the ground and she channeled his voice.
After confirming the woman was really seeing Samuel by asking her about his appearance, Saul explained his desperate plight to Samuel: “I am in great distress,” Saul said. “The Philistines are fighting against me, and God has departed from me. He no longer answers me, either by prophets or by dreams. So I have called on you to tell me what to do.”
Samuel has no encouragement for Saul and assures him that “tomorrow, you will be here with me.” Saul collapses with grief and exhaustion. It is only with the insistence of his companions that Saul is willing to receive the kindness of the spiritist in feeding him what may have been Saul’s last meal. The next day, both Saul and his sons were killed in battle.
What strikes me in this passage is the contrast of Saul in chapter 10 and the one we find 18 chapters later. In 1 Samuel 10, Samuel gives Saul the blessing of kingship with the anointing of oil and a kiss saying, “Has not the Lord anointed you ruler over his inheritance?” Then Samuel gives an unusually descriptive prediction of events to come that would assure Saul that God was working and anointing him for this task. All this things were fulfilled with divine precision, including a supernatural overriding of Saul’s natural will in an Acts-like visitation of the Holy Spirit, Saul’s prophesying, and transformation into “a different person.”
I love what Samuel says to Saul by way of instruction: “Once these signs are fulfilled, do whatever your hand finds to do, for God is with you.” Don’t you love that? When God is with us, transforming your essential character, we can essentially do what comes to us, trusting the security of our position in God’s presence and the transformation of our person.
So what went wrong with Saul?
As I think about the episode in chapter 28, I can see the ways in which Saul’s earlier spiritual journey was consistent with his final conclusion. I believe Saul found himself dabbling in witchcraft because of a series of choices, but none of these choices were inconsistent with Saul’s basic desires and natural inclinations. And in some ways, the episode in chapter 10 flows naturally into chapter 28. Think of the things Saul would may have quietly understood from his unusual spiritual encounter in chapter 10
- God speaks to me primarily through someone else.
- The pursuit of spiritual power is connected to my security and blessing in my calling.
- God’s power is separate from the free exercise of my will.
What we see its a rapid amplification of destiny affirmed by a dramatic encounter with God but not accompanied by the slow formation of character through a consistent personal relationship with God. Is is any wonder that when Samuel dies, Saul seems desperate to connect to God in the only way he knows how: through somebody else? In contrast, our early images of King David are of a young shepherd cultivating a love relationship with God in private and channeling the power of God through the exercise of his will (i.e. his willingness to go against Goliath).
Although Saul did not have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a New Testament sense, I think we can draw many parallels to the ways in which we process our relationship with God as Christians.
How many of us have had an experience of God through another person, whether a friend or a public figure… and then believed that the best manifestation of God’s presence would only come through the intervention or guidance of a specific mentor, friend, or spiritual figure? While I think Christians are supposed to act as bridges (priests) to connect others to the heart and presence of God, I also see friends getting stuck in the emotional belief that they are somehow unqualified or not “anointed” enough to receive a strong connection with God through their private relationship with him. Maybe the most common manifestation of this is that the role of praying, whether for a meal, a church service, or a sick person often falls to the pastor because people assume that a pastor’s prayers are more likely to be answered that that of “ordinary” people. I’ve been guilty of this myself at times and while I do think we can receive specific blessings attached to the anointing and faith of certain people, we should be careful about placing the weight of our spiritual wellbeing on the shoulders of a “more spiritual” person.
I’m also mindful that the pursuit of the miraculous as a source of encouragement and security in our calling and destiny is a strong temptation for many of us. We all experience disconnection and discouragement in our journey at time. But instead of pressing into the discomfort of those emotions and talking with God about it, we often go hunting for a sign or a demonstration of power to assure us that we are still blessed, chosen, anointed, even saved. We end up quietly testing God to see if really is there with us. In one sense this is natural. We all look for signs in our relationships that we are safe, favored, and accepted. If those signs are never there, our relationship has a problems. But often we look for assurance only in the ways in which we are conditioned to receive them.
I think about my relationship with my oldest daughter Annabel. There is nothing I want more than for her to rest in my secure affection and love for her. I want her to know that I’ll bend over backwards to care for, protect, and provide for her. But she is hardwired to receive love through gifts. But if that becomes the only way for her to know my favor and affection, then she’ll only feel loved a few times a year. As a dad, when I see my daughter testing my love, feeling insecure in my affection for her, I feel an intense love-anger; a jealousy for her to know that I like her, that I’m on her side. I imagine God feels that towards me as well. But as long as I’m testing our connection through my experience of the overwhelmingly supernatural, any hope of an actually secure connection is ill-fated.
Finally, I think we have a common misconception that a genuine God encounter should override my will. For instance, I prayed for a long time that God would strike me with the gift of tongues. I was sympathetic towards spiritual gifts though I hadn’t experienced much myself. I think I assumed that anything supernatural would have to come through the overriding of my will. Certainly I spoke with some folks who described their experiences in this way. I figured if God wanted me operating in the supernatural, he knows where I live and he knows how to get ahold of me. But the more I began to operate in the supernatural, the more I found out what a unique dance it is between our decisions and God’s power. Without God’s power, our efforts quickly become manipulation. But somehow, God has wired us to channel his power more often than not through the mechanism of our choices. So I pray for people even when I don’t “feel the Spirit” and often the Spirit shows up! I make decisions based on my best understanding of God’s heart and often discover “random coincidences” that affirm God’s presence in that decision. While I try to stay pliable to God totally changing my schedule, often when I ask him what he wants me to do that day, he’ll simply say, “You’re plan is good. Go for it.”
I think we often want God to show up without the exercise of discipline. We hear crazy stories of people encountering God in amazing ways. What we don’t hear about is the months and years of faithful Christian discipline that many of these people went through in pursuit of a deeper life with God. The exercise of discipline is not our way of manipulating God. It’s our way of “knocking” as we trust that the door will opened to us. As I think over the tremendous growth both in my internal reality and the anointing on my life I’ve experienced the last couple years, I realize that it has been accompanied by the greatest exercise of personal discipline I’ve ever practiced. It started small, but the more God responded, the greater my discipline became. The secret is that at the time, it didn’t feel like discipline. My brain actually processed it as delight. And in the end what I have is a wonderfully secure friendship with God.
We say we want God to take over, to override our faculties, and in the short term that may feel good. But I think God knows that to build a close, secure relationship with us, it needs to be reciprocal and private in a long-term relationship that slowly loses its conditionality and takes us deep into the language relational delight. In that space, we flow freely in his power and security of our sanctification as we walk with Him.
