The Tragedy of Dying without God

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.

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 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 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 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.