For the past couple of weeks, I have been leading a class discussion & lesson on the life of David and as part of our study on the journey of David so far, we have had the occasion to look at Saul’s life in parallel as well. In doing so, we’ve run into a couple of spots that raised questions. One in particular is the topic of this post – God’s rejection of Saul as king (1 Sam 15 & 1 Sam 16:14).
Can God’s presence depart from a person?
I think the unequivocal answer is yes, but I would rephrase the question a little bit differently – “Can a person depart from the presence of God?” I believe that it is possible for us to live in a way that is so out of step with God’s nature that we become far removed from Him. I believe that on this great journey called life, we are either journeying towards a closer relationship with God; or sliding away from Him. I believe that when we choose to live a life that is out of step with God, we are making a decision to go on a journey away from Him and we begin to put a spiritual distance between us and Him.
For a lot of us we (every now and again) start to slip away but are still within “earshot” so that we are still able to hear the voice calling us back into love, into safety and into light. We can still ignore the call though and stay on that journey away from Him till we get to that place that we are so far removed from God’s presence that we find ourselves in (as someone put it during our discussions yesterday morning) our own private hell. In some ways, I tend to think of our sinfulness as a pit we dig ourselves into and in which we have made ourselves so comfortable that we expect God to come hang out with us there.
God is holy. We cannot choose evil and yet expect to enjoy the presence of God.
In reading through Saul’s story, I don’t really think that I have come across any part in there that I get any sense of true repentance from Saul. That might bother us because some of our own efforts at repentance are not much better than Saul’s or we find that we resent the fact that “we have to repent before God accepts us again”.
What does it mean to repent anyway? C.S. Lewis puts it this way in “Mere Christianity”:
“Now what was the sort of ‘hole’ man had got himself into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor - that is the only way out of our ‘hole’. This process of surrender – this movement full speed astern – is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death.
…
Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose it: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen.”
[Note: I left out a little bit in the middle there that speaks about perfect repentance but you can read the full thing in the chapter on “The Perfect Penitent”, page 57 in my copy of the book]
So, if this whole deal with repentance is not some kind of hazing that God requires us to go through before we are back in His good graces but what the actual process of going back to God is like, I think we can begin to see how our sin takes us to a place away from the presence of God.
To me the beauty of the grace that we have in Christ is that it seeks, meets and pull us out of the pits of our sin. That it is not looking to meet us there and then just hang out with us there. Somewhere over time, we have come to think of Grace as being this cuddly, indulgent thing that just loves on us no matter what. I believe that God’s grace is His love expressed towards us and that love is interested in making us good, and not just in making us feel good. Sometimes, it is concerned with making us eat our veggies because they are good for us in the long run and will make us better even though we don’t really feel good about what they taste like at the time. Sometimes, we are too proud to eat our veggies.
There are so many ways Saul could have gone when faced with the message that God sent him through Samuel and a question that might help us clarify where he stood is this – Was Saul more concerned about preserving his “kingship” than he was about restoring his relationship with God?
Grace & peace,
Deji.
