A Tale of Two Kings...Continued from page 2

God won’t answer him so he turns to the powers of darkness. As we’re told in verses 7 through 14, he calls on the witch of Endor to summon Samuel from the dead. And when Samuel comes up he says to Saul, “‘Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?’ ‘I am in great distress,’ Saul said. ‘The Philistines are fighting against me, and God has turned away from me. He no longer answers me, either by prophets or by dreams. So I have called on you to tell me what to do.’ Samuel said, ‘Why do you con­sult me, now that the Lord has turned away from you and become your enemy? The Lord has done what he predicted through me. The Lord has torn the kingdom out of your hands and given it to one of your neighbors ? to David’” (vv. 15-17).

The word for “great distress” in v. 15 is sar and it literally means to be in a “very tight place.” Here is Israel’s king, facing the biggest crisis of his life and yet God would-n’t answer his prayers or inquiries and had even become his enemy. And that raises some crucial questions with both temporal and eternal implications: Why wouldn’t God answer his prayer? Why had God become his enemy?

As we read the whole story of I Samuel we see that Saul had developed a destruc­tive a pattern of self-reliance. He disobeyed direct commands of God, he made a rash vow against his own son, he attempted to murder David, he eventually murdered the priests at Nob, he chased David down for no good reason and he always rationalized everything he did.

This episode with the witch of Endor is simply one more illustration of Saul’s ongoing lifestyle of self-reliance. It violated God’s law which contained severe commands against dabbling with the powers of dark­ness; it even repudiated his own prior orders as king (v. 3). Throughout his entire life, Saul relied on himself and his gifts; he didn’t care what God wanted or what God demanded ? he cared about what he wanted and the people demanded. And so here, facing the biggest crisis of his life, God abandons him.

We need to recognize that a spiritual law is at work here: we make choices and, over time, those choices make us. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently triv­ial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.”¹