The Downfall of Saul
By Audrey Stallsmith
Recently our pastor pointed out what can happen when a man in leadership develops an unhealthy obsession about something—or someone—whom he blames for all his troubles. For Israel’s first king, Saul, that was David. For Hitler, it was the Jews. For Putin, it is Ukraine, even though that country isn’t the only one which seceded from the old Soviet Union. Far from it!
We can guess that the Russian people are going along with Putin’s obsession for the same reason that the Israelis went along with Saul’s pursuit of David. They were afraid not to after they saw what happened to the priests who inadvertently assisted David.
I, frankly, never have been all that impressed by David either, since he did many awful things during his lifetime too. In fact, what happened to the priests was partly his responsibility, because he had lied to them by claiming he was on the king’s business at the time that they helped him.
I’ve always had a sneaking preference for Jonathan, who seemed the more likeable—and more honorable—of the two friends. He kept doing the right thing even when that meant forfeiting what would have been his kingdom after his father’s death. However, we don’t know as much about Jonathan as we do about David. And God, who does know men’s hearts, chose David to be king in Jonathan’s place—though that probably wasn’t so much a rejection of Jonathan as a rejection of Saul.
I’ve been trying to figure out what reduced Saul to such a state of jealousy, paranoia, and hatred that he actually would attempt to wipe out God’s representatives. The man, after all, had originally been so meek that he’d hidden among the baggage when the people wanted to make him king.
And he had been highly popular at the beginning of his reign when the spirit of the Lord was still with him and helped him save Jabesh-Gilead. At that time, he apparently was pretty much a “regular guy” and had continued farming right up until the time righteous anger stirred him to lead his first battle. Afterward, he was even forgiving of the people who hadn’t wanted him to be king.
I’m guessing that victory encouraged Samuel, whose own sons had disappointed him, to hope for great things from Saul. But Samuel himself had the advantage that he had lived out self-discipline and dedication to God from childhood, following the sacrificial example of his mother. Saul hadn’t. The fact that his neighbors said “What? Saul a prophet? With a father like his?” indicates that he probably didn’t come from the godliest or most respected of homes!
But he did have the size and good looks that would draw people to him. He apparently just didn’t have the confidence that makes for charisma. He could manage as long as Samuel was around to tell him what to do but tended to fall apart when left to his own devices.
Perhaps, simply because his family hadn’t been respected before, once he finally had won the people’s approval, it became far too important to him—more important than God’s approval. It was after their songs began to favor another man, after all, that Saul’s long black bout with jealousy began.
However, he already had begun to suffer from depression before that and from what the King James version of the Bible calls an evil spirit from God. Since God doesn’t deal in evil, we can guess that the later translations, which describe it as a “tormenting” spirit are more correct. Probably what we would call “conviction” today.
At the time the blessing spirit of the Lord left him, apparently much of his courage did too, since he took 3,000 men with him to hunt down 400! So perhaps what drives men to be dictators often can be insecurity rather than narcissism. But it still is self-centeredness since they become single minded about preserving their own power at any cost.
I’m guessing that Saul’s original losing himself among the luggage may have been as much about timidity as meekness. After all, being the largest man in Israel, he later would have been the obvious choice to take on Goliath but allowed David to do so instead.
However, God seems to prefer to draft less than confident people. He could have used Saul anyway, as he also used the hesitant Moses, had Saul allowed Him to do so. As Timothy Keller writes in Judges for You, “It is not our lack of strength that prevents us from enjoying God’s blessings. . .it is our lack of faith in his strength.”
Saul obviously had more faith in numbers than he did in God. He panicked when his men began to desert him, offering a sacrifice himself rather than waiting for the priest Samuel to do it, so he could get on with the battle before he lost of all of his army. I’m guessing that his actions then were due more to fear than to presumption. In that case, it was Jonathan who had to swashbuckle a victory out of what seemed like certain defeat.
And Saul would continue to disobey in the matter of the Amalekites. If that disobedience had been due to moral qualms, we could understand it. After all, we ourselves can’t comprehend the old holy wars where entire nations such as the Amalekites were supposed to be wiped out as a judgement from God.
But Saul’s qualms apparently weren’t about killing people since he claimed he only had spared the king of the Amalekites. (Perhaps to give him some clues as to how a king was supposed to look and act, since Saul had no predecessor to clue him in on that.) Judging from the number of Amalekites who turned up later, though, I’m guessing Saul’s claim about them was as much a prevarication as the claim that he’d only saved the best of the livestock to sacrifice.
Perhaps, after he attained the admiration of the people, he desperately wanted to hang onto it, and pleasing them became more important to him than pleasing God. Once headed down that pathway, he never seemed to repent of that attitude. He just found excuses for it.
However, when Saul killed the priests—or, rather, when he convinced Doeg to do it—he carried out that slaughter as though it were a holy war itself, destroying the priests’ families and animals as well as the men themselves. In other words, he had gone from being too meek to accept the mantle of authority to arrogating to himself the right to decide matters which only God could decide.
Modern psychologists probably would say that Saul’s lashing out at the priests actually was a lashing out at Samuel—also a priest, the father figure who had first demanded of him more than he could deliver and then deserted and betrayed him by anointing David. It also could be conceived as a lashing out at the larger Father figure who never seemed satisfied with him. In fact, because neither God nor Samuel had originally been in favor of Israel having a king, Saul might have suspected that they had set him up to fail.
However, Samuel actually hadn’t wanted to anoint David, since he still was mourning over Saul at the time. And he seems to have stayed well clear of both men afterwards. But Saul’s persecution of David, who had stolen the people’s admiration from him, probably just revealed the king’s desperation and cost him more of that admiration, reducing him to keeping the kingdom by sheer intimidation.
Such totalitarianism requires paranoia, which could be why Putin often seems to be sitting at a distance from everyone else in his photos. People who base their whole lives on holding onto power have to be suspicious of everyone around them if they want to keep that power. As Saul found out, it makes for a lonely existence.
But we need to remember that the apostle Paul’s name once was Saul. And that New Testament Saul, too, rabidly pursued and persecuted the people he blamed for all his troubles—the early Christians. The difference is that—when confronted by Christ—he humbled himself and began doing what God told him to. Paul always had been dedicated to doing what God wanted, after all, just mistaken about what that was.
But I’m guessing that in the Old Testament, too, the spirit of God coming upon someone depended on that person’s willingness to receive it. Perhaps Saul was just too much of a regular guy in that he found religion, with its implication that he needed help, embarrassing.
He does seem to have continued to enforce God’s rules on most things, including the prohibition of witches, fortune tellers, and the like. But he had to abandon that legalism, too, at the end of his life, when he was reduced to consulting the dead Samuel for reassurance which never came. It seems likely that God allowed the medium, who seemed startled by her own success, to bring up Samuel’s spirit simply to give Saul one final chance to repent.
At that point, even the medium and the men accompanying Saul felt sorry for him, but they couldn’t really help him. And, ironically enough, it may hae been one of those still-existing Amalekites who eventually killed Saul at his own request. (Depending on whether that man's story was true which some commentators doubt!)
Many of the Israelites probably eventually had come to despise their king for his weaknesses, one of which was trying too hard to please them. But the people of Jabesh-Gilead remained grateful to the man who had saved them at the beginning of his reign. They even risked their own lives to retrieve the bodies of him and his sons from the Philistines to give those bodies a proper burial. They remembered what Saul once had been and could have continued to be if he just had continued to obey God—and allowed God to allay his fears.
Being a timid sort myself, I’d never actually considered that a sin before I took a closer look at Saul’s life. But I’m seeing now that it can be if self-protection keeps us from doing what God wants us to do because it prevents us from trusting him fully.
Fortunately, most of us aren’t going to attain the kind of power that a dictator has. And those who do are likely to end up as Saul and Hitler did, trying to kill themselves before they are captured so they can say they still are in control. Probably knowing deep down that even suicide won’t save them from the One who really is in charge.
But, as with Saul, it could be our disobediences which kill us in the end—perhaps not literally but spiritually. As Keller notes, “God’s judgement throughout history is to give people over to the consequences of the life they have chosen.”
So, if we too base our lives on pleasing men rather than on pleasing God, we also are likely to turn defensive and paranoid in the struggle to keep that popularity. A businessman might well become suspicious and resentful of the person who is most likely to be his successor, while we creative types know that there always are plenty of younger writers, artists, etc. out there who are better than we are.
It is ironic that the word “succeed” can mean “come after” as well as “achieve the desired aim.” Because there always is going to be somebody else coming after all of us—perhaps in more ways than one!
The allegiance of people is fickle, after all, and nobody remains the king of the mountain for very long, as David found out for himself when his son Absalom captured the public’s fancy. So, we need to have our lives grounded in the One who always will stick with us as long as we stick with Him.