Can God's Spirit Be Harmful? | Episode 21

Rodney Adams talked about why God gave Saul a harmful spirit in this week's podcast.

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

All right. Welcome back, everybody, to the Year Through the Bible podcast. My name is Rodney Adams. I'm the executive pastor at Asbury Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And normally I'm joined by my uh colleague, Reverend Andrew Forrest, who's the senior pastor here at Asbury Church. But today he has lost his voice, which is an important thing to have when you are shooting a podcast. And so he's not going to be with us. You just got me. What I wanted to do today was I want to recap a little bit of where we are in the Samuels, in 1st and 2 Samuel, just what we've learned about Saul, about David, and just kind of give a broad overview of the narrative. And then I've got a question that basically all of you have that I'm going to answer or at least attempt to answer at the end of this episode. So to get started, let's talk a little bit about just where we are. Now, to me, if you are reading 1st and 2nd Samuel, you can basically follow the narrative. It's written in such a way it is chronicling or narrating the life of the people of God during the kingship period, during the royal period, however you want to say that. And it reads like a soap opera. So if you're reading along every day and there's there's lots you can dive into and things you can um refer to in the old other parts of the Old Testament, things like that. But if you're just following the narrative, just at face value, you're getting the story. There's no, there's nothing really hidden in here. It's as easy as it seems. Now, like I said, there's a lot of things that uh call back to the Old Testament, a lot of things that foreshadow things that will come uh in the New Testament, but at a high level, just read the narrative and follow along. We're moving at such a fast pace that it really is the way to learn this stuff, is just to read every word and just stay with it. But what's been happening is um we've we we sort of came out of the period of the judges. So we read Joshua, then we read Judges, and then 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, and then we're gonna keep going through 1st and 2nd Kings and then the Chronicles. Um, Samuel, as we uh learned in the last few episodes, was the last judge. And we saw that at the beginning of 1 Samuel. So he's born, he gets raised up, and he becomes kind of the last judge. He's last of the judges, period. Um, but things are not going well. There's a lot of chaos during the judges period. Things don't seem to be going well, and the people start to compare themselves to other nations, and they say that they want to have their own king like all the other nations have, which we saw in 1 Samuel 8, 1 Samuel 9. So uh Saul is anointed king and it doesn't go great. They they pick a king or they they seem to identify him as a man that comes from a family of wealth, he's super handsome, he's taller than everybody else, probably a charismatic dude, and he becomes anointed as the first king. Now, God picks him. God's the one that tells Samuel, hey, fill your horn with oil, go and find this guy and anoint him as the king. Now, it doesn't go quite as terrible as the chaos that we saw uh in Judges, but it doesn't go great. Saul has um a lot of insecurities, particularly if there's something about his character that he has some, he thinks of himself as a small man, um, as it says when Samuel eventually rebukes him. And whatever that means, he has some type of insecurity, which leads to a lot of volatility, a lot of bad decisions, a lot of rash decisions, a lot of pettiness. And ultimately it leads to his disobedience, which contributes to God's plan to essentially remove his anointing from Saul as king. And so Saul is Israel's first king, but through his disobedience, God rejects him and removes his anointing from him. And then in 1 Samuel 16, David comes on the scene, and that starts to contribute to Saul's downfall. Now, not right away, David actually ends up in the service of Saul, but because of Saul's disobedience, God removes his anointing from Saul and sort of anoints David. But you'll notice that there's a long, long period where Saul still keeps the kingship, but after God has removed his anointing from him. And David um is not the king while God's anointing is on him until much later. We see David becomes king in in um the first handful of chapters in 2 Samuel. So I guess one thing I would say there is um don't always assume that because God is anointing someone or removing anointing from someone or working through someone, that it's going to correspond exactly with their sort of political power or um influence, their earthly influence. And of course, Jesus is the ultimate example of this, where where the Spirit of God is on Jesus at his baptism, and of course, he begins his ministry and is raised up to be a different kind of king, a king that nobody really expects. And he ultimately has no political power whatsoever during his lifetime. And so don't equate God's anointing with earthly success. They don't often correspond. Now, once uh David is king, there's a lot of back and forth between Saul and David, and Saul dies uh eventually and David becomes king uh in the kind of the beginning of 2 Samuel. Now, once David is king, the soap opera continues. Um, but what we start to see is that David is more faithful to God than Saul, but he's not unflawed. So um again, um, one of the things I think is important to note when we particularly when we read the Old Testament is, and I get a lot of questions like this in my household, like what's up with this thing with David and all these wives, or what was up with the thing on this battlefield, or what's going on with David and Bathsheba, or how could David do all these things that that viewing them through a Western 2026, 2000-year post-Jesus, the the Holy Spirit has been given to his church at Pentecost, sort of Western moral code mind. We might, it might seem confusing that David is God's man and and a man after God's own heart, and God is using David to rule over Israel and to begin to restore Israel from the from coming out of the period of the judges. How is it that he's so flawed? You have to remember. Um, I think it is more helpful to compare David's morality and David's life to the period of the judges than to the period that we live in now, because this is pre-Holy Spirit being given to the church. This is definitely post-Mount Sinai and post-the law being given to Israel. But remember in Judges, they basically have forgotten all of this stuff. And and they began to conflate the worship of Yahweh with the worship of Baal. We know that at the tabernacles, the temples or the tents and the tabernacles, there's often this these strange like fertility god practices that have made their way into the temples. The priests have corrupted the sacrificial system. And so what we saw in Judges was that the people of God had forgotten who they were. They've forgotten who they are, and they had forgotten the law of Moses, and they and Saul is the first king coming out of the period of Judges. Doesn't go great, but it goes a little better than some of the judges. And then David um replaces Saul. But but it's you cannot overstate the importance of the period that they lived in, where the these are a people who have forgotten who they are, and God is bringing about restoration through the kingship of David ultimately. And so, yes, David is a flawed guy, but God's hand is on is on him, and he's a man after God's own heart, as we can see as you read through the Psalms, because much of the Psalms are written by David, and they're the prayer book of the people of God. So his raw honesty and his relationship with Yahweh is what characterizes him more so than his earthly flaws with a with his the same sinful heart that everybody else has. With that in mind, let's get to a question that basically all of you have. Now, this struck me, and and this actually precedes this last week's reading. So we're gonna go back a little bit to 1 Samuel. Remember, we're reading through the entire Bible this year. We're about a third of the way through, or something like that, maybe a little over that. And we're reading an Old Testament, a New Testament, a Psalm and a Proverb reading every single day, and we are flying. Like we have moved through 1 Samuel, it feels like so fast. And now we're pretty well on our way into 2 Samuel. But I want to go back to something that stuck out to essentially all of you in 1 Samuel. I'm gonna paraphrase all of your questions here. Sarah asked this, Kathleen asked this, Susie asked this, Andrea asked this, Kara asked this, Kirk asked this. Samuel 16, 14 says that the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and a harmful spirit from the Lord tormented him. I've never heard that phrase before. A harmful spirit from the Lord. What does that mean? That's a great, great question, particularly um if you're reading in a different translation than the ESV. So in the in our ESV translations, which is what our one-year Bibles are, the the sp the harm the word that's used there is a harmful spirit from God. So this is first Samuel chapter 16, verse 14. This is after the Lord has removed his anointing from Saul. Now the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and a harmful spirit from the Lord tormented him. And Saul's servants said to him, Behold, now a harmful spirit from God is tormenting you. Let our Lord now command your servants who are before you to seek out a man who is skillful in playing the lyre, and when the harmful spirit from God is upon you, he will play it, and you will be well. So not only is this just something that Saul has felt inside of himself, but it's even obvious to the folks that are around him that something has changed. A the the spirit of God that was on him during the period of his anointing, which seemed like was good, has now been removed. And it's almost like there's a spiritual vacuum that something has that something has filled. Okay. First and foremost, um, what we have is a translation issue. So this is not um, we're not going to talk around the problem. We're gonna go right at it. But what we have for the most part is a translation issue. So the ESV says that it's a harmful spirit that has entered Saul. The NIV says it's an evil spirit, and I believe the NASB says it's an evil spirit. There are multiple translations, of course, and some of them say that an evil spirit had entered Saul. So I'm not a Hebrew scholar. I don't um speak a word of it. I know how to look things up when I need to. Um, and this will this will kind of help us make sense of that, and then we can move on through the rest of the passage. So um, the word there for harmful, the Hebrew word is ra-a. You could you could say like it's like R-A-A-H, Ra-a, something like that. The essence or the or the the connotation or the sense of that word is very difficult to translate one for one in the English. But you might a better translation might be like a bad spirit, just something that's not good. But the combo of that word, that adjective, and another word is can be used in the Hebrew more like to describe an outcome as a result of that spirit or that thing than than the its essence or its nature. So the the Ra-a spirit, the bad spirit, um, is more like it's more describing what is going to be um happen as a result of God removing his anointing and a new spirit sort of taking over in Saul's life, as opposed to the essence of the spirit. God is not going to um give you or give Saul something that is evil, right? God is good. God is a good God who gives good gifts, and so ultimately what he gives is not an evil spirit. Somehow, when when through Saul's disobedience and when this the anointing spirit of God was removed from him, it's like this the spirit of Yahweh that sort of entered Saul's life and contrasted his disobedience was the type of spirit that that um accelerated the natural outcome of Saul's disobedience and and sort of brought judgment onto him. And what we see is that he began to unravel, particularly um with David. You'll see later on at the end of 1 Samuel and the early parts of 2 Samuel that it's Saul, it's it's almost like David's presence and the spirit, the helpful spirit of the Lord that's on David begins to be the thing that kind of unravels Saul. So to give you a few examples here, um you might equate it or or um you could consider it related to like the what happened to um Pharaoh's hardened heart in um the book of Exodus when when God sort of continued to harden Pharaoh's heart. It was he wasn't um doing evil upon Pharaoh, but he's almost like accelerating Pharaoh, the natural outcome of a hard heart or a disobedient heart and leading to some someone's destruction as a mat as a um means of judgment. So um it happened uh the way the I was reading something that Tim Mackey from the Bible Project was was teaching on this, and um, this sort of harmful spirit was first brought up in Judges. Uh Judges 9, when Abimelech, who was Gideon's son, um, basically murdered all of his brothers. Gideon had a bunch of wives, he had 70 sons. Uh Abimelech like murders all of them except for one, and chaos ensues, and he's kind of he's part of the the last part of the judges that just descend into total chaos. And so when a harmful spirit was brought between Gideon and the people of Sheshem or Shechem, and that began to sort of turn against Abimelech and bring his downfall. And so um, again, just to say it more plainly, this is not an evil spirit like God has like cast an evil spell on Saul or something like that. It's like he he imparted the uh a spirit from himself that contrasted Saul's disobedience to the point where it accelerated the natural outcome of disobedience and brought judgment on Saul and eventually downfall. So that's that's what that's about. One of you had asked, you know, is this something that's gonna happen to me? Like, is that is God gonna bring an evil spirit upon me or something like that? He's not. He's a good father, he gives good gifts, he's given his Holy Spirit to his church, uh starting in Acts 2 at Pentecost, which we just celebrated this last Sunday at our church. And um, you are if you are a believer and in Christ Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit of God uh who that dwells in you. And now our obedience matters, and how we participate with the Spirit of God matters. Um, and you can be filled with the Spirit through participating in the life of Christ and in the life of and by um being indwelled by the Holy Spirit. God is not going to like bring an evil spirit upon you, but um our obedience does actually matter, and so you have to be careful not to um let yourself get caught in this cycle of disobedience that draws you further and further away from Christ. That's ultimately how you should think about it uh in your life today. So that's it. Very, very, very good question. Um, hope that was a helpful quick overview of first uh in 1 Samuel and then the early parts of 2 Samuel. And then I hope that kind of helped address some of the questions around that really strange passage in 1 Samuel 16. Um that's all I have for today. Again, my name is Rodney Adams. I'm the executive pastor at Asbury Church here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Uh hopefully next week we'll have uh our uh senior pastor Andrew Forrest with us. Keep asking your questions, send them in. Um, it's really, really fun to see when a lot of you have the same question because I'm getting them too in my household, and that's kind of when a light bulb goes off and says, okay, we need to address this. So that's it for today. We'll see you next time.