An Evil Spirit from the Lord

“27ie spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.” — ! SAMUEL xyi. 14.

WE probably should be surprised if we understood how very little people really know about the Bible and what is in it. We deceive our selves regarding our own knowledge. The sacred Book has lain so long upon our tables, and we are so familiar wijh its outside look, that we get a vague idea that we have read it. But if we really brought ourselves to the point we should be amazed at our own inability to tell even the simplest of its stories rightly. And we imagine sometimes that all the rest of the world know more about the Book than we do; but every now and then something gives us a glimpse of what they do know, and we are startled at the imperfectness and carelessness of their know ledge of the richest and most familiar and most important Book in all the world. There are many of you who are eager for each new book, who are anxious if each Saturday night does not find you

read up to the line of the week’s new literature, who ]»ri)l»al)ly .ra|>lii« brilliant,

stirring story of Saul, tin.- iirst Kin:;- «>f Israel, in all your lives. V rin-ulatc tin- Bibl«- !>• million. SOUK- parts of it we read as a reliriuu.- duty. But there are whole hooks of it temin- willi interest which few of us ever touch. One sometime.- feels that some day or other a great increase of the spiritual power of the Bible will come with what will be almost a re-discovery of its literary attractiveness. When people break through the strangt feeling which has gathered around it that it is <lul and unreal, and find that it is the most interesting book in all the world, then they will be open for it* deeper power to lay hold upon their consciences and hearts.

Saul’s life, as it is told to us in the first Book of Samuel, is the perfection of a tragedy. If it wen not the story of a real man who lived in tin- Ji-wisli tribe of Benjamin, it might be the most sublime allegory that ever was written of human lit*- in tin tragical aspect of it, which is always suggesting it self, and sometimes presses itself upon us so urevntlv that we can see no other. There is one chapter, the tenth chapter of the first Book of Samuel, which ijas fresh as a spring morning. A farmer’s boy, lighth-arted, innocent and strong, striding away over the hills to find a flock of asses that had wandered from his father’s fields. He talks with his servant; he questions the group of girls whom he meets at a town gate. At last he meets a venerable prophet. who tells him what fills his young frank eyes with wonder, and makes his heart leap with the mysterious birth of noble ambitions — that he is to be the first King of the new Kingdom of Israel. It is all as fresh and bright as innocence and hope can make it. Then there is another chapter, the twenty-eighth of the same Book, which is like the bleakest, bitterest day when the year is dying in December. The same Saul grown old and wretched, with his country all in confusion, with his conscience tortured by memories, the subject of insane fits of melancholy and frenzy, encamped now with his army on a cold hillside, with the Philistines camped opposite to him, and knowing that he must fight them in the morning, and that they are too strong for him. This Saul at midnight creeps stealthily across the mountain to find a witch, who brings up before him an apparition of Samuel the prophet, the same who had first told him that he should be king; who tells him now out of his ghostly lips that God has become his enemy, and will rend his kingdom out of his hands. All is as dark and bitter as guilt and despair can make it. Jealousy, superstition, frenzy, pride, have closed down together on this ruined man. And what is the misery of this half-savage life, we say, but just, in strong bold colors the picture of what our smoothed and civilized lives are? It is the same thing, only more vivid. The same tragedy of the changing life is everywhere. Everywhere are bright enthusiastic boyhoods turning into the guilty and desperate old age of weary Sauls.

The verse which I have taken for our text this morning contains one siutt-im-nt about this tm history of King Saul, which well deserves our study. It is one of those epitomes of a life which open the deepest questions. It is said that “the spirit of the Lord departed from him, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.” We catch at once tin- character of the representation. It is entirely realistic. There is a vivid picture in it all. God is seen by him who writes it, standing surrounded by spirits who are in His control, to be sent wherever He shall please. Some of them are good and are his spirits pre-eminently; others of them are evil, the spirits that vex and torture and distress the men to whom tin -y come. God sends these spirits as he pleases. He speaks to a spirit of blessing and the spirit flies to make some saint better and happier. He turns to a spirit of evil, and he hurries to do his dreadful work of punishment on some poor sinner. God’s spirit of good has been with Saul, but at one point, one crisis in his life that spirit departed from him, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.

That picture of the court of God with its company of various spirits has grown dim No such clear and objective picture stands before us. But the truth still remains, which that picture tried to - press, the truth that the evil spirit, like the good spirit, came out of God’s presence; that when the life of Saul had altered, and the blearing of his early innocence had left him, it was not as if he had l»e«-n cast out 11 region over which God has no control, not ap if had nothing to do with him any longer. As the old blessing had come out of his relationship to God, so the new curse came out of that same relationship. As it was God who made his first life noble and happy, so it was God who made his last life desperate and wretched. He could not get outside of God. Whatever spirit, good or evil, came to him, came to him from the Lord.

This is a strange, perhaps at first it sounds as if it were a dreadful, truth. But we shall understand it better if we look and see what were the circumstances of the change when the evil spirit supplanted the good in the King’s life. There were two acts in Saul’s life, occurring near together, which seemed to mark the point of change. One was the unwarranted performance of a religious rite. The people were in a sad strait. They had been crowded and driven by the Philistines. Saul was waiting, as he had been bidden, for Samuel to come and offer the sacrifice which was to call down God’s blessing on the host as they met their terrible enemy. When Samuel did not come, Saul grew impatient; and by-and-by, neglecting every command, casting every scruple to the winds, he offered the burnt-offering himself. Not long after came the second action. Saul had gone against the Amalekites. Samuel, speaking for the Lord, had bidden him to conquer them and to destroy them. The King did conquer them, but for the ostentatious glory of his own triumph and for a splendid sacrifice to God, he spared the life of their King Agag and the choicest of their sheep and oxen. These were the two. It does not seem that the mad-

302 An Evil Spirit from tlic Lord.

ness and misery were sent in direct punishment for these two actions, but these actions mark the time when the Kind’s life U-^-ins to change. Tin- clouds In uin to gather. God seems to be against him. Tinwinds that used to help him on, blow now in his face, and all grows harder and darker till the bitter end. They seem only trifling actions, but they both mean the same thing. They mean rebellion. Self-will is the essence of them both. They mean that he who had been frankly obedient, only asking to know the will of God that he might do it, now chooses to do his own will. That is the point where the change comes. From the time when he begins to disobey God, God works against him, and the prophet of God, who in the first scene was blessing him and telling him of his great mission, in the last scene appears, rising like a ghost to rebuke him and tell him of his doom; as the hopes and chances of a man’s early youth rise ghostlike before him, when he has grown old, to reproach him with the failure of his life.

Now I think we shall understand this story best if we consider how wide the law of life is that it opens to us. The law is that a beneficent power, if we obey it, blesses and helps us; but the same powt-r. if we disobey it, curses and ruins us. That law inns everywhere. See how most manifestly it is true in nature. There was a time when the inoraiiman divided all natural forces into two hostile ramps. One army was fighting against man. The other army was lihtin tor his good. The sunshine was his friend, the cruel lightning was his enemy. But what have we learnt since, as science has brought us more into the soul of nature? Is it not this, that there is no force which is deliberately set to do man harm; that the most Hostile force, if we can understand and obey it, treat it after its laws and nature, becomes our friend and ally? The cruel lightning carries our tenderest messages like a pitying slave. Everywhere, man says that he rules nature and she does his work. The truth is that she does none of his work except as he obeys her, docilely studies her ways, and suits him self to them. You obey fire, and she will forge your iron and cook your dinner. You disobey fire, and she will sweep your city in a night off the face of the earth. This is the meaning of applied science: man humbly learning nature and by obedience turning her from his enemy into his friend.

The same is true of government and law. Here are you sitting to-day peacefully in your house, with out a fear, and yonder in the jail is some poor wretch for whom there is no escape until the dreadful day when he shall be led out to his dreadful death upon the scaffold. The same government, the same law makes your safety and his danger. The same beneficent power protects your life and takes his life away. The change came with his disobedience. There is something picturesque and awful in the instant change which a sudden crime makes in the whole relation which a man holds to the state he lives in. He has grown up protected by his nation’s law. It cared i’^r him even before his birth, and there has never been a moment in his boyhood, youth or manhood, when its shield has not lpeen over him and its sword drawn to strike down anv one who dared to do him harm. Some clay he does a sudden crime, lie disobeys the law, he takes a brothers life, and instantly, as his dagger pierces and the life-blood flows, every thing alters. The law which has protected him In comes his enemy. Her sword is pointed at his heart. Her shield is spread before him, only lest any one should snatch him from her certain punishment. Instead of trusting in her quiet smile he quails under her pitiless eye. She is transformed the moment that he disobeys.

The same is true about a man’s relation to the art he practices. Find out and thoroughly obey its fundamental principles and all the genius of your art is with you. Its history and tradition are the solid backing of your life. Every man who ever worked in it, -or who is working in it to-day, is your ally. But disobey its principles, be wilful, try to excel or shine, not by conformity to its nature but lpy some fantastic violation of it, and all your art eontends against you and balks you at every step.

One illustration more. All this is true about our friends. We obey our nobler friends and their friendshfp helps us. We disobey them, and their friendship harms us. Obedience seems a hard word to use of friendship, and yet there must he obedience, there must lpe docile conformity, a shaping of your life upon that higher life, a reaching Up, a Stretching onl of what you are, to try to match what he is. If there is that, then how his nature ministers to yours; how first as standard, then as impulse, and continually as elevation and as joy he gives himself to you. These are the commonplaces of every ennobling friendship. But if there is no obedience; i£ bound to his higher life by obligation or by that mere liking which may have no relation to your character, you insist on living your own life, what then is the result? How he rebukes you every day. How every deed he does exasperates you. How, by-and-by you hate the goodness which you will not imitate and which builds up a wall between you and your friend, whom you would like to have a man just like yourself. Was not Judas cursed by the same friendship with Jesus that perfected John? And if we try to picture to ourself the life of a man living in constant association with the noblest people, yet absolutely wilful and refusing to conform to any of the higher laws of life which they are always setting before him, we shall surely see him in our imagination growing more and more reckless and defiant. Yes, men are ruined by their best and dearest friends — not simply by wanton indulgence and foolish fondness, but by the noble example that is never followed and the noble invitation never answered.

These are the illustrations of our Law. They show the absolute necessity of obedience everywhere. Obedience is the only key that can unlock the treasures of nature or of man. Obedience has an absolute power. To the obedient man nothing can refuse its richness. Nature flies open and takes man into her inmost heart. Government opens her arms and surrounds him with her most secure protection. The best men make their goodness as much his as theirs. But if obedience is not there, nothing can take its place; no mere excitement of the taste, no rapturous affection can cover over and change tinfact of wilfulness. This was so strongly stated by Samuel in his rebuke to Saul. Saul said that lie had disobeyed God because he honored Him and wanted to do Him supreme reverence. He had saved the sheep and oxen when Jehovah had bade him destroy, in order to sacrifice to Jehovah. “And Samuel sai. 1. Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt-offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? 1 ‘•» - hold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” They are great words. They are words full of the strength of life. If you would be strong you must learn to obey. Self-will is weakness; but to find the nature and will of everything that is higher than you are, and bend yourself to it with complete docility, that makes the richest treasure it possesses, yours. 0 learn to obey, learn to obey! Obedience is the only mastery and strength. And now let us return to the description which is given of the disastrous change in the life of Saul. “The Spirit of the Lord departed from him, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.” This phrase, uan evil spirit from the Lord,” is used aain and a-ain to account for the disturbed and wretched life which the unhappy monarch now began to live. What does it mean but just this truth, lhich we have been studying, brought up and found to be also true in its application to God. The truth is that every beneficent power which helps us so long as we obey it, turns by its own nature and harms and hinders us so soon as we are disobedient. Is this then true of God? If God is the most beneficent of all powers, the central goodness of the universe, it cannot but be true of Him. “I form the light and create darkness,” says Jehovah in Isaiah. “I make peace and create evil.” “They rebelled and vexed his Holy Spirit, therefore He was turned to be their enemy, and He fought against them.” So it is said about God and his people. It is an idea which runs through all the Bible. In many forms it is continually reappearing. It must be so, for God in the Bible is tini versal. He fills all things. No creature of his can creep away out of his sight, and live in a realm with which He has nothing to do. And God in the Bible is positive. No life can lie here close to his life, and not be affected in some way by that power of righteousness. He must be something to us; what he shall be to us depends on what we are to him. Saul is obedient, and God is brightness, courage, hope, happiness. Saul disobeys, and his soul becomes melancholy, gloomy, irritable, suspicious, envious, distracted. Did the God who made the light have anything to do with the making of this darkness afterwards? How shall he think of Saul in his desperate old age? Is that mountain over which he climbs in the dark to find the witch of Endor in her cave, somewhere quite outside the world where God is everything — outside the lorld in wliicli lay tinsunny valleys of I.enjjiniin. alonu; which tin- youn<;- Saul had passed seeking his father’s asses? No. it is the same world; a world capable of holding such diverse scenes because it is all under the same (MM!. Where it opens itself to Him it is He that makes its sun shine. Where it hides

itself from Him it is no less II.- that makes its shadow. Without the sun there could be no more the depth of the shadow than the brightness of the light; and if there had been no God, the bitterness of Saul’s old age would have been as im possible as the beautiful happiness of his boyhood.

It bewilders us to think how far-reaching this truth is. So long as God is in the universe, every soul that is in the universe must feel His power. N space can be so wide, no time so long as to exhaust His influence. He that obeys, must feel the ever- ’ present God in joy. He that disobeys must feel Him in pain everywhere and forever. These are the terrible necessities of obedience and disobedience. We may state it; the Bible often does state it judicially. We may speak of God’s vengeance. It may seem to be the angry revenge of one who has been insulted and ignored. We may picture to ourselves His wrath. With realistic fancy we may imagine to ourselves the flames of His anger consuming the rebellious souls, which yet are so like him who punishes them that they can never die. Such pictures have their power, as the crudest, coarsest representatives of the essential truth that to the disobedient God must come in suffering, as He comes to the obedient in joy. The essential truth of heaven and hell is ineradicable in the universe. But greater and truer than any picture of angry vengeance, more solemn, more sublime, more impressive to the fear of a reasonable and thoughtful man, there is the mighty image of God standing in the centre of all things. And all things have to touch Him. And as all things touch Him, according to their characters, he becomes to them blessing or curse. He is the happiness of obedience, and the misery of disobedience throughout his world. He looks with sympathetic joy or with profoundest pity on the souls He judges, but the judgments both come from Him. The right hand and the left hand, are both His. Burning there like the sun of all the world, He must be a comforting and guiding light, or a consuming fire — one or the other — to every soul.

Is this all theory? At the best is it all a revelation of something of which otherwise we could have had no knowledge? Or is there anything in our experience that testifies to such a double power belonging necessarily to the very existence of a God? If in our lives there has been any difference between those days in which we tried and those in which we did not try to do God’s will; any such difference as made us feel on the first set of days thankful and glad, and on the other class of days wretched and almost indignant that there was a God in heaven; then we do know this truth of Saul’s life in our own life. You do wrong. You have chosen to do wrong. You are sitting here with your bad choice enshrined in vour heart. You did it vesterday. You mean to do it again to-morrow. You are deliberately and wilfully disobedient. Tell me, is it the same to you that in the heavens, and pervading all the earth, there is a power of righteousness, a gn-at pure, dear Being, whose child you are, who loves you, who has a right to your obedience, whom you are disobeying — is it all the same to you as if there were no God, as if that choice of yours wen; a mere whim of your own fancy, made in the face of no eternal righteousness and against the protest of no pleading love? Would it be then as dogged, as obstinate, as bitter, as poisonous a thing in all your life as it is now? Ah, a man has to hug his sin very tight that the almost despotic love of God may not wrest it from him. He has to hide its venom very deep in his blood, that the great physician may not find it out and kill it. And just so far as you are worse to-day for living under the grace of a God who has been trying all these years to make you better, just so far as the truth that you have heard has made you more callous, and the duties you have had put before you have made you more faith less, just so far as you have not merely lost the freshness of your youth but have grown hard and bitter from living in a world that teemed forever with the invitations to truth and charity, just so far that has come to you which came to King Saul. Not merely “the spirit of the Lord has departed from you,’’ but “an evil spirit from the Lord has troubled you.”

Here is the fatal power of disobedience, <»f self-will. It m.iikfs (Jod our ninny and turns His ]»MV.T against us. Not that the worst sin you or I can do will make him cease to love us. Ah, that cannot be! And that is the tragicalness of it all; the certainty that he loves us still, even while he “is turned to be our enemy.” Do you see Jesus sitting on the Mount of Olives, looking down upon Jerusalem? Does he love that fair and rebellious city? We do not begin to know how He loved her. We must be the God he was, and the man he was or we cannot begin to know. Can he save her? If he could, he surely would not be sitting here! But, such is the mystery of moral nature and of responsibility, it is himself he cannot save her from. And what is the essence of her curse? Why is this city on the Syrian Hills doomed to a fall of which no other city in the world is capable? Because of his feet that have trod her pavement, and his words that have sounded in her ears. “0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem! “** If I had not come and spoken unto them they had not had sin.” Here is the fatal power of disobedience. Without quenching the unquenchable love, it turns the divine nature against us, in the same overwhelmingness, by the same necessity with which, if we were only obedient, that nature would help us and bring us to perfection.

In this truth of ours lies certainly one key to a question which theologians have very much debated. Wherein lay the power of the life and death of Jesus? What was the atonement he accomplished? Did the change which he wrought come in God or man? But we have seen how man’s disobedience inevitably made a change in God — not to destroy His love, lput to set His loving nature into hostility to the soul that would not do his will. And if the life and d — ath of Jesus breaks down in penitence, as we know it does, the self-will of man, and make him once more gratefully, loyally obedient, what then? The change in God must follow. Not the restoral of a love that was withheld, but the free utterance for help and culture of a love that has been never held 1 but which has, by the man’s false position, been compelled to work against him. The wind is blowing all the time. The man is walking dead against it, and it buffets him and is his enemy. You turn the man round and set him walking with the wind. The wind blows on just as before. But now it is the man’s friend. The wind has not changed, and yd, with the man’s change, how completely the wind has changed for him.

How clear this makes the great question of every man’s life. Is God with you or against you, 0 my friend? Is the power which comes out from Him to you a power of help or harm? It must be one or the other. Over a broad open plain there blows a strong steady wind. It never stops, it never changes. All over the plain there are men and women on their journeys. Hear them cry out. “This wind, this dreadful wind!” cries one, all out of breath and gasping. “How bitter it is, how cruel, how it hates me!” “This wind, this blessed wind!” cries another, within hail of him. “How kind it is, how helpful, how it loves me!” Are there two winds, or has the one fickle wind its favorites? No, the one constant wind is blowing steadily and is no respecter of persons; but one man has set his face against it and the other man is walking with it. That is the reason why it seems to hate the one and love the other.

Through this great open world moves God like a strong wind or spirit, finding out all the public and the secret places of the life of man. In the breath of that spirit we are all journeying; no one can escape for a moment. But while your brother at your side is full of the sense of God’s love, to you God seems the hindrance of your life; His righteousness defeats your plans, His purity rebukes your lust, His nature and being smite you in the face like a blast that blows bitter and cold from a far off judgment day. Does God hate you and love your brother? No, he loves you both: but you with your disobedience are setting yourself against His love. You must turn round. You must be converted. And then, when your will is by obedience confederate with the will of God, every breath of His presence shall be your joy and salvation.

If there were not some such law as this discernible, how terrible life would be! If man went on, and whether he were good or bad, whether he obeyed or disobeyed, there came no change in God’s attitude to him, only one long, weak, un discriminating indulgence, where would be any limit to the depth of wickedness into which man might fall? What a moral chaos everywhere! You tremble when you think of

314 An Evil Spirit front the Lord.

all that happening in your own family. We cannot picture to ourselves how dreadful it would be in the great family of God.

My friends, my mission is — and more and more do I delight in it — to preach to you the love of God. I have preached that love to you to-day. But I have spoken to you, not as if you were sick children who must hear nothing but the tenderest words, but as if you were reasonable, responsible men and women, who want to face the facts of life, and who know that the truth is best. I have tried to show you out of the story of the old Hebrew King, that however God has chosen a soul, and given it great tasks, and surrounded it with privileges, and apparently made it necessary to His designs, He will not, cannot keep that soul, if it is disobedient. He must let it go its way and take another for His work. There is no privilege which we may not turn into a curse. God does love you, and never will cease to love you, no matter where you go, no matter what you are, no matter through what depths of vice your soul may plunge in any world whose possibilities we cannot guess; but His love shall be to you a spirit of help or a spirit of harm, according to your obedience or disobedience to Him.

This is the truth to preach to men and women who are in the midst of the reality and the solemnity of life. It is strong, manly doctrine. The Bible rings with it. All powerful and vital Christianity is full of it. It is not hard and cruel. It is not weak and sentimental. I beg you to take this truth. Let it fill, your life. Let it make you serious, brave, thoughtful, hopeful and fearful both. Let it make you men of God, living in His service, rejoicing in His love, and feeling already in your obedient souls the power of His everlasting life.