The Tragedy of Dying without God

1 Samuel 27–2 Samuel 1

Main Idea: Saul’s death marks the failure of the Saulide dynasty and the horror of dying without the Lord. His death contrasts with the rise of the Davidic house.

1. The Beginning of the End
2. The End Foretold
3. The End of Saul and His House
4. Lessons from Saul, a Religious (and Lost) Man
   1. Saul kept up religious practices without ever knowing God.
   2. Saul never learned how to repent.
   3. Saul died the sinner’s death.

Introduction

Is it possible to be extremely active in God’s church and not really know God at all? For some people this kind of question makes no sense at all. It may not even seem worth asking. How could a person not know God if they are active in God’s church? But consider: Is it possible to be married to someone for 40 years and not really love them? Absolutely. Or does walking through a maternity ward automatically make you pregnant? Of course not. Simply being in the vicinity when God is at work is no guarantee of intimacy with Him.

In fact, as the Bible demonstrates repeatedly, it is often the religiously active who find it most difficult to know the true God. Some of the most self-deceived people in our society are those who are active in our churches. The passage we have in front of us gives us graphic detail of that self-deception and the tragic end of such a life.

The text from 1 Samuel 27–2 Samuel 1 is called the “Accession Narrative” because it shows the downfall of Saul but the accession of David to the throne (Firth, 1 & 2 Samuel, 283). Strange things go on in this narrative. David moves down with the Philistines and lives with them. He becomes a servant of the Philistine king, Achish, who ruled over the city of Gath. Achish gave the city of Ziklag to David as a gift. And David regularly went on raids to the Judean cities. He killed a bunch of people and basically lived as a mercenary under the protection of Achish. Even Achish thinks David is sketchy and says of him, “Since he has made himself detestable to his people Israel, he will be my servant forever” (1 Sam 27:12).

To be honest, it is a strange opening to the accession of David to the throne. The question begins to fester in the mind of the reader: “Is this really the king that God wants? I don’t know what to do with David’s actions!” And we aren’t meant to know what to do with David’s life at this stage. Does God sanction David’s raids and killing? The answer is no. He allows it but does not sanction it. After all, as Firth recognizes, the name of God and the speech of God are not mentioned at all in 1 Samuel 27—an interesting and significant omission (1 & 2 Samuel, 287). David never consults with God or the community. This action is all David. As a result, although the entire narrative from 1 Samuel 27–2 Samuel 1 solidifies Saul’s demise and David’s rise, the text sets a big question mark over David’s reign. The remainder of the Accession Narrative reveals that only God can sort it all out. Furthermore, although we know Saul will not be the true king, we get hints that David will not be the true king, either! Only Jesus will serve as the King God has chosen to bring blessing to all.

But for our purposes, we want to focus on Saul. We have learned much from Saul—generally negative things! Saul’s story is for our instruction, as will be David’s story. These chapters reveal the end of Saul and why the end has come.

The Beginning of the End

Saul had started well. As 1 Samuel 28:3-6 notes, he had eradicated the nation of “mediums and the necromancers” (ESV), those religious experts who practiced magic and communicated with the dead. Contemporary audiences may be prone to view such practices with skepticism, especially considering our own context of sham fortune-tellers and vague newspaper horoscopes. But for those outside of the West, the presence and danger of witchcraft remains immediately relevant. Behind such practices lies a dark reality, a demonic power that we rarely recognize but that Scripture addresses at length. Saul was to be commended for successfully opposing such a demonic force.

Yet when faced with the threat of the Philistine army, Saul’s good start begins to unravel. We see in verse 5 a repetitive theme of Saul’s life—fear. Fear seems to motivate everything in Saul’s life from his military decisions (or indecision) to his raving rampages against the young David. Fear transformed a man who stood head and shoulders above everyone in Israel into a cowering shell, a weakling incapable of following God when his own skin was at stake.

Saul is hardly alone. Fear is one of the defining characteristics of anyone living apart from God, and it seems particularly rampant among religious people. We are afraid of our future, of financial ruin, of possible health problems, of others’ opinions of us, of our impending death. When life is going poorly, we fear that it will always be that way. When it is going well, we fear a turn for the worse. But the presence of persistent fear is a sign, as John says, that the love of God is far from us (cf. 1 John 4:18).

In addition to the imposing military force bearing down on him, Saul encounters another obstacle that heightens his fear—the silence of God (v. 6). Saul was actively seeking God for some guidance on how to approach his foes. The prophets, however, were silent. His dreams ran dry. Even the Urim, the Old Testament equivalent of a divine roll of the dice, was coming up inconclusive. God was supernaturally withholding an answer from Saul. But Saul simply would not wait.

It is difficult to imagine a more inappropriate course of action than the one Saul pursues in 1 Samuel 28:7-10. Met with silence from God, Saul decides to break a (good) law that he himself had instituted. Apparently his zealous opposition to the demonic was not terribly deep-seated: pragmatism drove out any remnant of integrity.

In just a few verses, the actors in this scene will find themselves overcome with horror. But as readers, we should not need to see what comes of this séance to have that response. The medium rightly has a sense that something is off about this encounter. So to put her at ease, Saul assures her—invoking God’s name twice—that God’s judgment is nothing to worry about (v. 10). Can you imagine the impudence? One wonders where exactly Saul thinks he is garnering such authority. Most likely he is not even thinking about that himself: his fear, and not his reason, is at the helm, driving him blindly onward.

When conducting a Satanic ritual, there is never a particularly good candidate to raise from the dead. But Saul’s decision to conjure up Samuel qualifies as a decidedly dangerous move (v. 11). Samuel had never shrunk from declaring the harsh judgments of God to Saul, so there is no reason to think he would bring sugarcoated news from beyond the grave. Still, Saul is a religious man, and Samuel was the religious leader he knew and trusted. So when he found himself in a pinch, he fell back on his religion, despite the utter foolishness and sheer danger of it. To the very last, as we see with his homage toward Samuel, Saul is meticulous with his religious details.

Samuel dutifully appears at the woman’s summons, apparently to the woman’s surprise (v. 12). (She may not, it seems, have been accustomed to her rituals actually working.) Regardless of her expectations, the clairvoyant is now seeing clearly. As she stands face-to-face with Saul and Samuel, she rightly recognizes that she has gotten herself into an enormous mess. On one hand she has Saul, the man who made her profession punishable by death. On the other hand she has Samuel, a man known to hack the enemies of God into pieces before everyone’s eyes. The situation looks bleak, with no sign of hope on the horizon.

The End Foretold

Fortunately for the medium, Samuel refrains from immediately punishing her and Saul. Maybe as a ghost he literally had no way of touching them. Maybe he was a little groggy from having just woken up. Who knows? In any case he hardly seems pleased by the arrangement Saul and the medium have cooked up, as he makes immediately plain (v. 15).

“Let me get this straight,” Samuel fires at Saul. “God has turned from you and become your enemy. But rather than reconciling with Him, you’re looking for favors from me?” Then Samuel gives Saul a promise no one ever wants to hear from a ghost: “I’ll be seeing you and your kids real soon” (v. 19). I doubt this is how Saul envisioned this scenario playing out.

The key to Saul’s imminent collapse lies in the heart of Samuel’s speech. The answer to Saul’s problem was not to be found in a magical ceremony but in the much more obvious (and much more difficult) path of repentance. As Samuel reminds him, Saul never really owns up to his disobedience (v. 18). Throughout his life Saul shows sorrow when his disobedience leads to disastrous results; but instead of letting that lead him to true repentance, he glosses over any accusation of wrong and refuses to confess. He wants the blessing of God, but he plugs up his ears any time he hears the correcting voice of God.

What Samuel says to Saul he says to us all: A “repentance” that would not change you in life will never save you when death threatens, either.

Saul is seeking God here because his life is in crisis. We all do that. But crisis is not always the best time to seek God because crisis moments push us to be desperate, gullible, and deceitful. We will do or say anything to get ourselves out of a jam. As proof, look at the many promises people make to God during times of crisis that they never fulfill once the crisis passes. They may “repent” but only until the catastrophe dissipates.

Is it wrong to seek God during a crisis? Absolutely not! God often uses those moments to shake us up and open our eyes to our true need. Many people trace their first steps with Christ to a major crisis in their lives. The danger, however, is that we are prone to see God as a vehicle to avoid pain, suffering, or hell. In that case we do not want God on His terms; we want whatever He can give us. But God will not be our spiritual pimp. If our only motivation in seeking God is avoiding hell after we die, we still do not understand repentance. We are still Saul.

Before looking at Saul’s actual demise, one last point here bears mentioning. Several chapters back, when Saul refused to destroy Amalek as God had commanded, Samuel had made the strange statement, “Rebellion is as the sin of divination” (1 Sam 15:23 ESV). At the time that probably seemed like an odd comparison for Saul. All Saul had done was keep a little of the spoils of war for himself. Was that really worth comparing to witchcraft and sorcery? Yet here Samuel stands before Saul again, and the comparison has proven literal. Samuel’s warning was not just a poetic image or a hyperbole. Saul’s small compromises have grown into full-orbed dependence on the demonic.

We tend to resist this lesson because we cherish our little areas of compromise, but rebellion always works this way. We may never pray to Satan or visit a witch, but if we compromise in the small areas, we are setting in motion a pattern that will inevitably lead toward more compromise. Every act of rebellion separates us from the security of knowing we are in God’s will, so we seek another source of security to fill that void. In the absence of God, an idol emerges.

This is true for all of us, whether we identify as religious or not. Something will be ultimate in our lives, acting as the source of our happiness, fulfillment, and security. Every step we take away from God’s filling those roles is one we take toward another source of worship. What Saul shows us is that every form of idolatry, whether religious or irreligious, pushes us toward the original author of self-worship, Satan. Either God is our God—with no conditions or qualifications—or we are idolaters on the path of Satan. There simply is no middle ground.

The End of Saul and His House

Just as Samuel predicted, Saul meets his end, sees his sons die before his own eyes, and loses nearly everything that had belonged to Israel in battle to the Philistines (1 Sam 31:1-10). The rout was so total that even the cities Israel had previously occupied are abandoned. And the last image we have of Saul is his headless corpse shamefully lifted and fastened to a wall.

This is the dismal note on which the entire book of 1 Samuel ends. Israel’s earnest desire for a king has led them to a tragic dead end. As Alfred Edersheim vividly summarizes this scene,

And now it was night; and the headless bodies of Saul and his sons, deserted by all, swung in the wind on the walls of Beth-shan, amid the hoarse music of vultures and jackals. (Swindoll, David, 204)

Saul had such promise. Israel looked to him to give them triumph over their enemies, to guide them with courage and wisdom. Yet in the face of the Philistines, he loses ground instead of gaining it. In times of trouble, Saul shows himself to be a coward. His colossal potential dwindles into a life of utter disappointment. It is impossible to imagine a more devastating end to a person’s life.

To add to the insult and shame of Saul’s demise, the temple of Ashtaroth lies in the same region as the place where Saul was crowned. Within eyeshot of Saul’s dangling body, Samuel had proclaimed over him, “You shall reign over the people of the Lord and you will save them from the hand of their surrounding enemies” (1 Sam 10:1 ESV). In place of those glorious promises hangs a lifeless carcass—childless, defeated, forsaken by God.

Lessons from Saul, a Religious (and Lost) Man

Saul’s problem was not the Philistines. Saul’s problem was not Goliath. Saul’s problem was Saul. God could have conquered all his enemies—He had promised it—but Saul refused to trust God. At every turn he trusted in himself. How can we learn from a tragedy like his? How can we keep ourselves from ending our lives in the same disgrace? Saul’s death points up three truths about his life and death, truths that serve as warnings for us.

Saul Kept Up Religious Practices without Ever Knowing God

Saul accomplished a lot during his life. He fought battles against the Philistines, as God had commanded him. He eliminated the witches and sorcerers from the land. He even prayed to God—and earnestly!—when he was in trouble. He was, to modernize the imagery, a churchgoing man who volunteered on the weekend and went on mission trips.

Yet despite his religious activism, Saul was lacking the two essential elements to actually knowing God. First, Saul lacked trust in God. We see this every time he is given an opportunity to obey but follows his own path instead of God’s. Never fully convinced that God’s ways were trustworthy, he could never yield his life to Him. As 1 Chronicles notes, Saul “did not inquire of the Lord” (10:14). In all his prayers, consultations with prophets, and use of the Urim, Saul was after a solution, not after the Lord. He wanted to use God to make his life work. Many of us follow the same pattern.

Saul’s lack of trust stemmed from the second critical element that was missing: satisfaction in God. God was never really enough for Saul. So when God told him he should refrain from enriching himself off the Amalekites, Saul effectively answered by saying, “Being God’s king is not enough. I also need to be rich. I need a few monuments.” When David arose as the next king of Israel, Saul effectively answered, “Being God’s anointed now is not enough. I need to ensure that I never have to share the praise I am due.”

Trust in God and satisfaction in God—these two elements are indispensible if we are going to know God truly. Saul teaches us that those who do not grasp those two elements do not know God, regardless of their religious fervor.

All of our spiritual problems can be traced back to a lack of trust or a lack of satisfaction in God. Either we do not know God’s gracious love for us, or we do not grasp the value of that love. When Jesus sends people away from Him on the last day, His rebuke will not be, “You didn’t perform enough religious activities.” His rebuke will be, “I never knew you” (Matt 7:21-23). To know Christ is to know how He feels about us and to rest in His work on our behalf.

Saul Never Learned How to Repent

Saul may have looked like a repentant man: he said he was sorry, performed religious rites to absolve himself from past mistakes, and even wept bitterly over his sins. Yet at the end of his life, Samuel points the finger at him and says, “You never repented.”

Saul may have fooled a lot of people around him that he had repented. Tragically he may have even fooled himself since he repeatedly expressed surprise at God’s growing distance from him. Saul was just going through the motions of repentance—confession, prayer, religious activity—but he had never dealt with the root issues of idolatry. He never trusted God enough to fully surrender to Him, nor did he value God enough to be satisfied in Him. Repentance is full trust in God and complete satisfaction with God that leads to unconditional surrender to God.

Saul’s failure to repent raises the question for us: Do we know how to repent? We might feel terrible. We might vow to change. And yet we may, like Saul, be missing the heart of true repentance. Thankfully, we have the capacity to discern true repentance from the charade. False repentance is always accompanied by one or more telltale signs.

First, false repentance often manifests in rationalization or blame shifting. We will admit that our actions are not upright. We crossed lines. We made mistakes. But we also point out that our wrongdoing was justified if viewed under the right light. I may have taken some money from the company, but I’m really hard up right now, so I needed it. I may have had that brief fling with the woman at work, but my wife isn’t showing me the love I deserve. I may be refusing forgiveness toward a friend, but I’ve just been hurt so much before. The excuses are endless, but the heart behind them is the same: I was justified in what I did. And a rationalizing, self-justifying attitude leaves no room for repentance.

Second, false repentance manifests in unchanged behavior. Real repentance is not shown in an emotional catharsis (as nice as that may feel) but in a life that looks different. So, if our mouth confesses Jesus, does our life back up that claim? The most certain test to discern whether we have really repented is to look at our lives. If there is no change—not perfection but change—then there is no Jesus.

Third, false repentance produces the wrong kind of sorrow. As the apostle Paul says, “For godly grief produces a repentance not to be regretted and leading to salvation, but worldly grief produces death” (2 Cor 7:10). Worldly sorrow and godly sorrow both cry over sin, but only one leads to salvation. The difference between the two is the cause behind the sorrow. Godly sorrow grieves because it has hurt an eternally loving, kind, good God. But worldly sorrow reacts to consequences. It arises out of fear of getting caught, out of shame for what others might think, or out of self-pity. Until our repentance and confession are motivated by a desire to return to our God, the most elaborate display of emotion will be utterly fruitless.

Fourth, false repentance sometimes manifests in conditional obedience. We start to bargain with God, as if we could assuage Him with a clever deal. The folly in this should be self-evident. God is hardly impressed with our obedience to Him under the conditions we set ourselves. He is after an entirely different sort of obedience—that of a doting child. So long as we try to buy God off with promises of obedience, we are still miles away from true repentance.

Fifth and finally, false repentance manifests in partial obedience. This is a close cousin to conditional obedience. We begin to obey God passionately in one area, but we refuse to let Him exert His lordship over our entire lives. So we read our Bibles diligently and tell others about Jesus but won’t give a cent to the church. Or we continually say no to the call of God to engage in missions. Or we nurse a secret pornography habit we think is “no big deal.”

Repentance results in obedience—not conditional obedience and not partial obedience. Anything less than this is simply offensive. Think of it like this: imagine a husband who was having multiple affairs, a different woman every day of the week. As often happens, his wife finds out and confronts him. What if he were to respond, “Oh, I’m so sorry! What was I thinking? I’ll quit sleeping with the girl on Tuesday . . . and the one on Friday. And you know what, to show you I’m serious, I’ll even call it off with the one on Thursday.” We can all anticipate what kind of response he might get.

A man cannot be “mostly faithful” to his wife. She is either his one-and-only or she is not. This is one of the key analogies God uses to describe our relationship to Him. He wants to wed Himself to us. Our response cannot be halfhearted approval. If Jesus is actually Lord, then that lordship is either total or it is a complete sham. As it is often said, Jesus is either Lord of all, or He is not Lord at all.

Saul Died the Sinner’s Death

Saul died as all sinners do. He was hung up in shame on a wall, forsaken by God. The Philistines mocked God at Saul’s death because it appeared as if they had conquered Yahweh’s king. Here was Saul, stripped of his armor and displayed ignobly for the whole world to see. Without God death truly is a tragic end to a beleaguered life.

There is, however, a faint glimmer of hope in the dark cloud of Saul’s demise. With the death of Saul comes the rise of another king, one who was being prepared for this role even as Saul was flailing in his downward spiral. Silently in the shadows God has been preparing a man named David, who would bring salvation to the nation in the wake of Israel’s moment of immense shame.

David’s ascension to the throne teaches us how a later king, God’s ultimate King, would take the throne. Jesus, like David, would assume His throne only after the faithless ones had stirred up shame and rejected God. The part of Saul would be played by us, humans who refused to fully trust and delight in God. And like Saul we would be condemned to die the death of the sinner.

The twist in Jesus’ kingship, however, is that He would go to the place of death in our place. He would die a shameful death, fastened to a tree, and put on display for all to see. The enemies of God would triumph at His death—not ours—as they stripped Him of His armor and mocked Him. “Was this not the King of the Jews? He could not even save Himself!” Yet through that shameful death, salvation came to us all. Just as salvation could only come to Israel through Saul’s death, so eternal salvation could only come to humanity through Jesus’ death. Jesus was killed like Saul so He could reign like David.

Contemporary minds struggle to accept this counterintuitive method of salvation. When modern Jews are asked why they do not believe Jesus was the Messiah, for instance, they will inevitably respond, “The primary promise for the Messiah was that He would end all wars and bring peace to the earth. That has not happened, so Jesus could not have been the Messiah.” This is not just a stumbling block for Jews, either. Ask ardent skeptics what it would take to believe in Jesus, and many will say, as Bart Ehrman did during a recent debate, “If Jesus had brought peace on earth, I’d believe he was who he said he was.”

What the rabbis and Dr. Ehrman fail to see is that our deepest problem in the world is never the Philistines. We do not only need “peace on earth” in regard to famines or poverty or nuclear weapons. The peace we need lies within the reach of each of us. We need a Savior who can remove the spirit of Saul that is lodged in the heart of every last one of us. Until God deals with the sin within us, no government, however savvy, resourceful, and beneficent, will bring peace to our broken world.

The cultured experts of our society desire a savior. But they desire a savior like Saul. God cannot build His kingdom and fill it with people like Saul, like us, who refuse to acknowledge God as our King. His rescue project is much more radical, creating new people altogether. So before Jesus can solve problems “out there,” He has to solve the problems “in here.” Before David can sit on the throne, Saul has to die.

Reflect and Discuss

1. How does this passage help you understand God?
2. How does this passage of Scripture exalt Jesus?
3. Does it make sense that someone can be in the vicinity of God but not experience intimacy in relationship with Him? Why or why not?
4. In what ways did Saul know or not know God? Where did he go wrong?
5. Does this story resonate with you? Are you guilty of associating with Jesus at church but not really knowing Him as your Savior and Lord?
6. Saul lived a life of fear. Do you live a life of fear like he did? Write down your thoughts.
7. If you resonate with the story of Saul’s tragic end, would you like to commit once and for all to Jesus and allow Him to forgive you?
8. In what ways does the notion of “false repentance” ring true in your life? Do you see false repentance in the lives of those around you?
9. Take time to ask the Lord to grant a heart of true repentance.
10. Who in your life do you know like Saul, dying without really knowing the Lord? Take time to pray for their salvation and commit to share the good news of Jesus with them.