Sermon Tone Analysis

We are continuing today in our series in the book of 1 Samuel.

We have ion recent weeks seen Saul lose the kingdom.

We have seen David anointed by God to be the next king through that spiritual anointing.

And we saw after that very momentous occasion in the history of redemption that once this was all done, everyone went home.

Samuel went home after anointing David.

Saul went back to being the acting king.

David went back out in the fields from where he was called - he was anointed by God and then went back to work.

And while next week we will be looking at one of the most famous events in all the Bible in chapter 17 - the story of David and Goliath - with an exciting battle and salvation by the hand of a sovereign God - we still have the end of chapter 16 to consider.

And here, life just goes on.

David is waiting for God to make him king.

And if we don’t pay close attention, we can miss how God is working out every detail to accomplish His will for David and for His people.

And the same is true for our lives.

I know we want to do great things for God.

We want God to work mightily through us as a church and as individuals.

We pray for God to move supernaturally and give us opportunities to save souls and advance His kingdom.

We want to see Him do great things and we want to do those great things Christ said we would do.

But odds are, after we’re done here today, we are all just going to go home, and life is going to go on.

We will go back to work tomorrow.

And we will likely have to wait to see that God is going great things.

The question is: will we wait in faith?

Because we are called to act in faith - I call us to action from this pulpit every week - to by faith do what God calls us to do.

But what about all those times that what God calls us to do, is wait?

Let’s look at what happens in our passage.

So first we see that the Holy Spirit departed from Saul.

We know he was already rejected as king by God, and now we see that God takes His Spirit from him.

The Holy Spirit in the Old Testament did not operate the same way as in the New Testament.

By that I mean that the indwelling of the Spirit was not what it is today in every case.

Now, the Spirit’s indwelling is Christ’s presence with the elect, and our seal and sign that we are in the New Covenant.

And the Spirit is quite literally God’s presence on earth in each believer and in the church as a whole.

In the Old Testament, God’s presence was physically in one place - in the Tabernacle, then in the Temple - and His people were called to come to Him to be in His presence.

And they had all of the sacrifices they were to make to be able to get into His presence.

But none of those sacrifices, as we know from the book of Hebrews, were able to take away the sin of God’s people and save them.

If you pay attention to the tedious ceremonial laws in the Old Testament, you’ll notice that in most cases, when someone sinned, there was nothing available to them to provide salvation.

In fact, the punishment for most sins was death.

Coming to God and offering sacrifices could not provide salvation for sinners.

So, to provide salvation, God had to come to His people.

And He did.

First in the incarnate Son of God.

He came to atone for our sin and He died in our place so we could be forgiven.

And then, after He completed His work, and ascended to heaven, He sent His Holy Spirit to indwell - to live within - all those He saves.

And He is with us forever.

That was not always the case in the Old Testament.

Now, God did give His Spirit as a permanent indwelling of His presence in the Old Testament.

Like we saw with David last week:

1 Samuel 16:13 (ESV)

Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers.

And the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward.

But often, the Spirit was given under the Old Covenant temporarily to empower people for special tasks.

Like when the Spirit would rush upon Samson to give him supernatural strength.

Or like when we read back in 1 Samuel 10 after Saul was anointed by Samuel, the Spirit of God rushed upon him and he prophesied.

The Spirit was given to Saul to empower him to lead God’s people.

Well, here, God removes His Spirit from Saul.

Because Saul had been rejected as king.

God took His Spirit from Saul - that He granted him in order to lead His people - and gave it to David to lead His people.

So we see here again that spiritual anointing God gave David.

The crown has not passed from Saul to David.

But the Spirit of God has.

What we see here is a transfer of God’s favor from Saul to David.

It is pointing out a turning point in the history of Israel, but even more, a spiritual turning point in the history of salvation.

In the Ancient Near East, when a dynasty would come to an end and a new one would take control of a monarchy, it was believed that the gods brought about the change.

They reject one house, and call another into power.

And the monarchy in Israel had the same belief, only they believed it was YHWH that did the rejecting and the calling.

Here, He rejected Saul by taking the Holy Spirit from him, and called David by anointing him with that same Spirit.

This is why David, after his sin with Bathsheba and Uriah - which we will eventually get to - prays for God not to take His Holy Spirit from him in Psalm 51.

That is not a prayer for God not to reject David from salvation.

It is a prayer not to take the kingdom from him!

Like God takes it from Saul.

Saul made himself an enemy of God, as we saw.

He turned his back on God.

So God takes His Spirit from Saul.

And instead, God sends Him a harmful spirit.

What is this “harmful” spirit?

Harmful = evil (bad, wicked)

The word “spirit” can be a mental or emotional description, not just a spiritual one.

The Bible describes things like a spirit of jealousy or a spirit of justice or a spirit of wisdom.

It refers to a person’s gifting or attributes or demeanor.

But it can also mean a spiritual being.

As this is contrasted with the Holy Spirit here, I would think it is a spiritual being.

God takes the Holy Spirit from Saul, and gives him a harmful spirit instead.

And we see this kind of thing elsewhere in the Old Testament, like when God wants to remove King Ahab from power, and Micaiah the prophet says:

So God uses other divine beings - what we would call angels in our day - to carry out His will.

He uses these spiritual beings as agents of temporal salvation or temporal judgment.

And He does it multiple times to punish kings that fail to lead His people into Godliness.

And that is what is happening here:

And of course, this begs the question - is God doing “evil” here?

And of course, we have all been taught that God does not do “evil.”

God is only ever good.

I say it all the time.

And I believe it.

But we need to understand what the Bible means when it says that God does not do evil.

Like here:

The same word is used here for “evil.”

Or when the Apostle John tells us:

And of course, light is used as a metaphor in the Bible for truth and righteousness, and darkness is used as a metaphor for deception or wickedness.

God is light, and there is no darkness at all in Him.

Yet God also says:

And that “calamity” is the same word usually translated evil, and is translated “harmful” here:

So how do we reconcile all of this?

Well, we need to understand that the wickedness or the evil of creatures is not of God.

When man sins or when a heavenly being sins, that is a willful choice to turn our back on God and follow our own ways.