Clough Manhood Series Lesson 29

Saul: Mental Illness – 1 Samuel 20-28

Tonight we continue our study in the doctrine of the Christian man, it turns out to be about the 29^th session, and since we’ve come that far it’s good to review and review on the basis of the divine viewpoint framework; review some of the lessons that we have learned and some of the pictures that the Bible has of men and where they fit spiritually. In the order of the event of the creation, we find that men are pictured as the subduers of the earth under God, that there’s nothing less than subduing the earth that satisfies. And we find therefore that a man’s self-image is not due to some psychological mystery that cannot be unearthed except at the expense of numerous hours of psychotherapy. It’s far easier and far simpler and far more forthright than that. Man’s self-image is related to how well he is or is not subduing the earth. It’s that simple.

In connection with the fall, we saw that man’s most… the greatest problem area for man, where the fall impacts the man the most over and against the woman, is in the area of his job. This is why the curse is phrased in terms of the man’s job, for most men are hit on the job first, before they are hit in the home. We also see in connection with the fall the idea that men, when they are in rebellion spiritually, will show forth the desire to be like Cain, to begin the kingdom of man. In connection with the flood and the covenant, Noah, we saw the family operate as the man’s soul nourishment spiritually; Noah, when it finally turned out had no church to go to; Noah had no Christian group to go to; Noah only had his family to go to. And there is the picture, the classic one, of the family as a spiritual shelter.

Then we went on to the call of Abraham, we saw with the man with two, almost contrary characteristics, toughness and tenderness. Toughness due to the trust, his confidence in the sovereignty of God, and therefore his stick-to-itiveness; his tenderness because he operated on a grace basis and understood that he didn’t deserve anything, and therefore couldn’t look down his nose at anyone else. We saw too, with the call of Abraham, that male leadership is the norm and standard in Scripture, hence, the sign of the covenant is circumcision. We saw also in the call of Abraham how a wife can mislead when the man does not subject her advice to the standards of Scripture, and on the other hand when the man fails to operate his own life under the standards of Scripture, how he can endanger his life.

In connection with the Exodus we saw the battle that every man has to test God with whatever we happen to be occupied with at the moment, his job, his career or so on. Moses had that problem; every man has that problem. All men are basically competitive, and it’s very easy to get your eyes on your contemporaries who (quote) “are being better than you are,” (end quote). So we saw those lessons. We saw how Moses responded as a man, through long and sometimes argumentative prayers with God. And in connection with Sinai we saw that the man’s confidence is the framework of law. We saw there private property ownership, we saw just and unjust violence.

In connection with the conquest and settlement, we’ve looked at many different men. We looked at Joshua and we saw the man who had rank and he had humility that went with the rank. He had confidence in the face of battle and challenge, and also he had what Samuel had, sacred curiosity. Achan was another man we studied; we saw how he wanted to shortcut God’s methods, and there’s the kingdom of man. We saw Ehud, who wanted to deliver men from tyranny, and is a picture of the Christian man operating against tyranny. He gives the enemy his proper presents. Barak, the image of the man who holds hands, the man who fails to be the aggressive leader and hides behind women. Samson, the picture of the little boy, a big body and a little spirit, the man who never learned to control his tantrums while he was an infant, and therefore doesn’t control his tantrums as an adult man. We saw Samuel; we showed how the faith technique can compensate for a weakness that is carried on through him from his home; how Samuel had no stability in his home, yet he became a very stable man. He became so, not because he went back and reformed his home, he couldn’t do that. But because he traditionally, so to speak, replaced his home background with God Himself and his own character, and made God’s immutability his stability; that made Samuel the stable pivot when the nation went through some very, very critical times.

We saw Saul last week, we saw how Saul is a picture of the autonomous man, building the kingdom, with human good, the relative good. We saw Saul basically having these characteristics. He made the summum bonum or the highest good in his life, like Judas Iscariot, the welfare of man rather than the glory of God. We can’t make any compromise here; the person who is “nice,” and socially acceptable in the community is so often a Judas Iscariot. The civic clubs are filled with Judas Iscariots. By this we’re not knocking them, we’re simply saying they’re just collection points in the community for Judas Iscariot types, because Judas Iscariot wants to help the poor, but he always wants to help the poor at the expense and the neglect of the glory of God. We’ll always devote time to help the little boys out on the little league field but we won’t devote the time to teach the same little boys Bible doctrine. We’ll help them hit the baseball, but we won’t teach them how to handle the problems of life. We’ll leave that to “someone else” (quote, end quote) who will take care of that, we don’t do it, we’re big men. And so the Judas Iscariots that run the various civil community functions have as their summum bonum the highest good, the welfare of man.

Saul was like this, and Saul, like Cain, and Judas Iscariot, advanced the kingdom of man. Saul also had another characteristic, shown by one of his failures that we studied last week. He insisted that God’s absolute be turned into relatives. And that God’s absolute meet his absolutes, and therefore if he thought it was too late to wait for Samuel, then that’s too bad, God will have to conform to Saul; the universe rotates around Saul. Now we saw in another one of his failures that we studied last week, how instead of having a stable sacred anger when it came to battle, Saul had a very unstable fleshy anger with the result he gave very stupid orders, and actually lost an opportunity to annihilate the enemy. That’s the picture of the man whose summum bonum is less than God.

Now tonight we come to a problem that’s afflicting more and more men, in connection with Saul, we’ll continue to use him as an illustration, we come to the problem of what about the man who has a nervous breakdown? What about the man who is finally turned out, pathetically in our society, to the funny farm, to live the rest of his life in the cuckoo nest? What about this kind of a man? The man who (quote) “cracks up” end quote, what about this problem of mental illness that is increasing by leaps and bounds, particularly on the very, very men who are leading our society, the men who are the executives, the men who are the leaders in their companies? What makes them crack up? Saul is an illustration of a man cracking up and we’re going to watch, what makes men crack up.

First, what doesn’t make men crack up? There’s no such thing as a nervous breakdown; nerves do not breakdown, unless you have multiple sclerosis or something else, then the nerves do break down. But the nervous breakdown is an allegory and a metaphor. And allegories and metaphors are very dangerous things to talk about because they’re in society and they give the allusion that you’ve said something profound. I was discussing this week with someone who was involved in counseling and they made the statement that well, Dr. So and So, the psychiatrist said, that X,Y, Z, another person, has a very, very severe case of psychoneurosis with depressive tendencies. And I said well how comforting, that this really tells us what the problem is, doesn’t it. Don’t you really get the lead that this really defines the whole problem, doesn’t it, because I’ve got a label on it. Not at all. It doesn’t define a thing; he could have said he’s got the blaz or something, you know, I mean, it’s just sounds better to say that he has psychoneurosis and this connotes an illusion of scientific knowledge. But nobody’s defined what psychoneurosis really is; like no on ever has defined what schizophrenia is. Do you think you know what it is? I challenge you to define it. If you go to a book and you can find any four definitions of the word; there is no definition, it’s just a nice term and people like the term because it seems to make it seem like we really know what we’re talking about. And we don’t.

So therefore when we start out on why men break up or [can’t understand word] break up or fall apart, this kind of thing, we want to review a few candid appraisals of the whole idea of mental illness. One man did a study in the summer of 1971 with a group of African witchdoctors. He studied their techniques of working with the tribesmen and the problems that these tribesmen faced. And after all summer of studying with the witchdoctors this man, Dr. E. Fuller Crowe {sp?} of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in Medical Opinion, (quote) “I, as a psychologist, was using the same mechanisms for caring for my patients as they were, and not surprisingly, I was getting about the same results. Every technique used in western psychiatry can be found in one form or another among the less advanced cultures, such as: drugs; electric shock therapy; group therapy; dream analysis; conditioning techniques; and institutionalization.” Marvelous how much we learn as the advance of science continues.

And so we have the theories that are used by the psychiatrists, the theory of behaviorism based on materialism, which is a theological position in which matter becomes God; matter takes on the divine attribute of eternality. We have phenomenology and this with its flirtation with existentialism, these are the human viewpoint theories that underlie this. One man warns, Dr. Sudamin {sp?} psychiatrist at the University of Manitoba, warns that “it is important to remember that psychology is not a unified branch of accepted knowledge, that it’s a broad term covering a multitude of schools, differing strongly among themselves, [can’t understand word] a classical orientation, methodologies, subject matter, and researched interests. Eminent psychologists tend to disagree among themselves strongly about not trivial issues but basic ones.” So we’re not talking about a nice little tidy objective scientific field, say, like physics.

O Hobart Mallot {sp?}said, “Psychotherapy is today in a state of disarray, as it was nearly two hundred years ago. The success of the Freudian revolution seemed complete; only one thing went wrong, the patients didn’t get any better. Psychotherapy has not yet proved more effective than general medical counseling, including the [can’t understand word] of psychosis.” Now Christians aren’t saying this, I haven’t quoted one Christian yet. This is just stuff you get in the literature. “In general therapy works best with people who are young, well-born, well-educated, and not seriously sick. Surveys say that of the patients who spend upward of three hundred and fifty hours on the psychoanalyst’s couch to get better, two out of three show some improvement after a period of years. The fly in the particular ointment, however, is that the same percent get better without any analysis.”

So what do you do when you face this kind of thing? The New York Dr. Szasz, in his book, The Myth of Mental Illness, went on to say: “Mental health is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter bill of moral conflicts in human relations.” (End quote). Now these are quotations from serious men within the field. They’re not meant originally to be funny, and they’re funny, yes, from our point of view but they’re not meant to be funny by the men who wrote those. They’re meant to be candid appraisals of what’s going, or rather what’s not going on. So when we come to the Bible, then, we make no apologies; we go to the Scriptures.

We go to the Scriptures to find out what makes people crack up because if man is made in God’s image, the way the Bible says, and he’s not just an ape with one more chromosome added, if man is made in God’s image truly, then obviously he’s the only piece of the universe that qualifies for incarnation. In other words, the most complicated piece of machinery in the universe is man. Now how audacious it is, then, for a person to think that they can understand the soul of man apart from the Scriptures. And yet how often does a person get involved in a place where he begins to manifest some things of psychological imbalance and people say oh-oh, better not go to the pastor, stay away from religion, you’d better go where there’s scientific answers to the problem. Check your nearest psychiatrist; there’s where you get competent help. And yet the psychiatrist tells us here that he’s using methods slightly more sophisticated than the African witchdoctors. One thing that the psychiatrist ought to have told the African witchdoctors when he was over there and that is that you can get $50.00 an hour for doing it.

All right, Saul forms a model; a model of how men crack up, and it’s God’s model, it’s not ours. I didn’t write the book of 1 Samuel that we’re studying here. No other preacher wrote it, it’s God’s text and therefore we’re going to look at this text and watch the collapse of a man and watch why he breaks up. The man was not created to have nervous breakdowns. Even after the fall it’s not necessary that a man have a nervous breakdown. How do we know that? Someone ought to challenge that statement. How do we know that it’s not necessary for nervous breakdowns to occur, even after the fall? The reason is because God gives man moral commands to love other people, not hate them. God gives moral commands to control your anger, not ventilate it all over the place and spray the room with it; God gives moral commands not to be depressed, but to be alert and to have joy.

The fact that God gives these commands and involving mental attitudes implies that you’re responsible for that. Yet if we to follow the model that even the Christians who sit in the pews in the average evangelical church follow, we are to read from that that oh yes, but you know there are some times in life when one cannot follow the commands of God. Now that’s a strange thing, to hear Christians say that there are situations in life where we can’t follow the commands of God. That sounds like a violation of 1 Corinthians 10:13. And so we have people who are training pastors and seminary students, who are to operate with the psychiatric models. Even Dallas Seminary has now hired some psychiatrists on the staff. My advice would be to turn them loose in the business department so we don’t get dunned for money. But they won’t do that, their job is to confuse seminary students on how to counsel. How to counsel with an eclectic mix, add the Word of God to a little psychiatry. Or, as Huxley said, mix the black together with the white and you get beautiful shades of gray. And this is what’s happening; we mix the truth of the Word of God together with a little psychiatric jargon, vibes from the philosophers, and you wind up with a diluted mess.

So 1 Samuel 15:22 is where we’re going to begin tonight with the breakup of a man. Saul, the first king of Israel; Saul was a model of how not to do it. Saul is a man that was going to rule the kingdom the way the humanist loves to rule the kingdom. Saul is a humanist at heart and he wants to rule with the summum bonum of the welfare of man. But in verses 22-23 we have Saul’s problem diagnosed. Samuel does not say in verse 22 that Saul’s mother was a domineering woman, she chased him around the house all the time he was growing up and gave him great complexes, and therefore poor Saul, he couldn’t help it. Under the stress of being king he just simply cracked up due to his mother. Or, he had a domineering father, his father spanked him when he was a little boy and warped his personality, and therefore, because his personality is warped he failed as king. There’s nothing like that in the text. In the text the Word of God drives as the sharp two-edged sword to the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit and points out the problem. Away with the psychological jargon; away with blaming it on mother or father, here’s the problem.

I Samuel 15:22, “Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” Away with your human good and all your paraphernalia, get down to the basic heart and aim of sanctification which is loyalty to God. [23] “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, He had rejected you from being king. There is the cause of Saul’s mental illness. It’s diagnosed in two words: stubbornness and rebellion, summarized by rejected the Word. Saul knew the Word; Samuel taught him the Word, but Saul rejected it, and there’s the source of his mental illness.

Now mental illness, people say, runs in families and this becomes an argument; why, you can argue in some circles, why it must be Saul’s heredity, you know do you see families that have seemingly a very high statistical incident of kooky people and you being to wonder. The next time you’re around that, look at the behavior patterns in that family; look at the older people that set off that family and check into the standards that were being used in that family and see if you don’t see the same thing: rebellion. Notice in both verse 22 and 23, that the rebellion did not mean he was a gross individual morally, because in verse 22 he was giving burnt offerings; he was following moral and religious trappings. So the force of mental illness in a family is not gross behavior. In fact, with some of them a little gross behavior might help. The problem is self-righteousness. The problem is faking it, putting out a substitute good for God’s good; human good to replace divine good. Or relative good to replace the Holy Spirit’s righteousness. So remember, and always tie verse 22 to 23; it shows you the problem that rebellion is not being gross.

Now let’s go a little further. 1 Samuel 16:13, it says here, we won’t get into David because we’re looking at Saul but we have to touch on David because he had something to do with it. Samuel anointed, he saw David, there’s a description in verse 12 of David, verse 13, “Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren; and the Spirit of Yahweh came upon David from that day forward. Samuel rose up, and he went to Ramah.” Now we summarize this in detail on the tapes on 1 Samuel, but in those tapes we said that you can plot what’s happening here from 1 Samuel 16 to 2 Samuel 1, that whole expanse of Scripture. You can plot it very simply by saying Saul decreases and David increases. That’s the story, the story of the two dynasties; one house being phased out, the other one being phased in and the conflict and the tension of the times as David replaces Saul. It all starts here.

1 Samuel 16:14, “But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him.” You’ll notice that here you have the first phenomenological description of mental illness. You will notice that the evil spirit that afflicts Saul is not brought into Saul’s life just out of the clear blue; it is not there because of some mystery that we don’t really know why it’s there, it’s just some sort of a chemical imbalance in Saul and that’s led to the spirit. I don’t mean to knock physical sources; there sometimes are chemical imbalances that make people behave queerly. But here it’s not that at all, the text is very clear. The rebellion and stubbornness leads simply to an evil spirit. The cause/effect is that simple… that amazingly simple. Negative volition to the Word of God leads to a situation where the soul becomes pressurized by demonic powers.

Now these demonic powers are in the atmosphere all around us and the reason we all don’t act queerly is because God protects us from them. But the prince of the power of the air hates men; we are the rightful subduers of the earth; he and his realm aren’t and he knows that. Anything he can do, therefore, to stop the sons of Adam from their dominion is a plus for him. And so the evil spirits are only too willing to aid in deranging human beings. They have various ways they do this.

Turn to the New Testament for a little more guidance on how they do this. Turn to James 3:14, “if you have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. [15] This wisdom descends not from above, but is earthly, sensual, and” the last word in verse 15, “demonic.” Note the word, “demonic.” [16] “For where envying and strife are, there is confusion and every evil work. [17] But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable,” notice that, moral righteousness first, “then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. [18] And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by them that make peace.”

Now there’s the contrast, but what we’re looking at is in verse 14-15, the same cause/effect we observed with Saul. “If you have bitter envying,” then know that we have demonic activity at work. The word “demonic” is there; we may not like the word to be there, but the word is there nevertheless, and it’s a word we have to understand. Now our modern psychiatrists and psychologists friends say oh, this gets into the area where we can’t control if scientifically and therefore we refrain from getting involved in the spiritual area. Well not that’s a magnanimous statement, because he just got through discussing the fact that they don’t even know how to handle normal human behavior scientifically. Well, then what’s the gripe about handling demonic behavior; if you’re not going to handle it scientifically then just be consistent and not handle any of it scientifically.

The Bible insists that you cannot separate, in other words, mental attitude sins from demonic influences. The two are mish mashed together. I have no idea how to separate them and the Word of God gives, as far as I know, no way to separate them. We know that Peter, during times of his life as a regenerate person was subject to great demonic control. Demons were able to use Peter’s mouth to say Jesus, You’re not going to the cross, and Jesus looked into Peter’s eyes and said Satan, get you behind Me. So we obviously know that Satan does have entrée, to a degree, with believers. Now what we’re talking about in mental illness is where we have a greater degree of entrée. And the reason for that is discipline. God turns us over to the powers of darkness to be worked over.

This is why, I am convinced, and the more I work with this the more convinced I am, this is why the average psychologist and psychiatrist does handstands about Christianity causing mental illness. Now he’s got a right observation but he’s got a wrong conclusion. Time and time and time and time again practicing psychiatrists will say these people get screwy on the Bible, get the Bible away from them and they calm down. And so this is why on psychiatric floors Bibles aren’t permitted often times, by any of the doctors. The authorities will prevent a Bible from being up there, because they observe that when the person gets around the Bible he really flips out, he goes nuts. Now we can agree with that observation, except we attach a totally different interpretation to it. Why are they flipping out when they’re around the Word of God? Because the spiritual pressure is increased, that’s why. And in a way, the Bible has caused the mental illness; in a very real way it has, because the Bible is exposing the will of God and they rebel, and every time you bring the will of God into their presence, they flip out again, because it makes alive once again the basic sin in their life. So we would agree, yes, the Bible does cause mental illness. Yes, religion does cause nuts.

But then having said all that, let’s define what we mean by cause; we don’t mean in the same way the psychiatrist means it. The way we mean it is that it’s the precipitating cause of it; that is, because a person has chosen to rebel against the Word of God, like Saul, stubborn, rejecting the Word of God, yes, the Word of God, since it does not return void, causes something to happen in these people. And this is why I am also firmly convinced that many, many if not most of the people in psychiatric institutions are believers. Tragedy upon tragedy, they’re believers being worked over because of their rebellion against God. The tragedy is there’s no one around in authority to be able to spot what’s really going on and the horrible tumult in their life, can’t diagnose it properly because there’s no tools available to diagnose it outside the canon of Scripture, and the professional training of the people in charge does not include a theological education. And so therefore these people rot in the institutions around the United States. They’re just human debris sitting in padded cells.

Well, that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about tonight with Saul. Let’s turn back to 1 Samuel 16, for an evil spirit comes upon him. And the word at the end of verse 14 shows the evil spirit was from Yahweh. Now let’s look at that one for a minute; just look at that text carefully. “…from Yahweh,” or “from the Lord.” Under whose sovereign control is the mental illness? God’s control. Now that places the whole episode in another light, doesn’t it, because no sooner do you get around a person’s who’s really flipping out you begin to hurry up, the person’s going to kill himself. And there’s a panic, oh, doctor, do something, hurry, do something. I mean not with a gun, I mean with a needle, but do something to this guy, because he’s going to kill himself, he’s going to kill everyone else, he going to [can’t understand words].

Now just a minute, to react that way itself is simply studying the mental illness, isn’t it. You’ve got one person flipped out in chaos, and now everybody else around them, they start flipping out in chaos; it’s contagious. Somewhere in the environment when you have that kind of a situation somebody has got to take their stand on the sovereignty of God and say NO, [can’t understand word] is not in charge here, God is in charge, and if that person blows his brains that solves his problem, but we’re going to take this thing gradually and orderly and godly, and we’re not going to get bummed twice into some panicky makeshift solution because (quote) “we’re afraid of what they’re going to do.” Just that, the introduction of the calm certainty in the sovereignty of God itself has a fantastic therapeutic immediately, because now we’ve got control of the situation. The evil is from God, so we might go back to God’s Word and pray a little bit to see if we can get tuned into God’s frequency in the matter.

And then it also says something else; it says “an evil from God,” “from the LORD,” this evil spirit “troubled him,” and the word means terrify. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a person who is really terrified; I have, I’ve seen it on a number of occasions. And I’m here to tell you that I don’t care how big and tough that man may be, I have seen a man who in the early years of my ministry here was a man who was a son of one of the New Orleans mafia; he grew up in gang war. He had personally killed people in bar room brawls that were not just bar room brawls but were just hit situations, and he grew up in that kind of environment. And one night I was called to an apartment just north of Texas Tech, and if I had never seen a terrified man I saw one that night. There was the spirit of terror, and there was a very, very tough, very normally competent man, a very, very tough fighter, but faced with spiritual terror he was a bowl full of jelly. It will dissolve anyone; not one person here including myself has the assets within themselves to withstand an onslaught of the spirit of terror. It will completely dismember you. The only assets that we have are in Christ.

And Saul just cut himself off from those assets, and therefore he was thoroughly terrified, just thoroughly terrified. And now we begin to have what we call neurotic behavior which will eventually degenerate to psychotic behavior on this man’s part. But notice the cause/effect; we’ll look more and more at this man; we’ll see how this mental illness proceeds and you’ll notice very clearly that the Word of God is not blaming it on environment.

In 1 Samuel 16:16, “Let now,” it says, “our Lord command thy servants, who are before thee, to seek out a man, who is skillful player on a harp; and it shall come to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon thee, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shalt be well. [17] And Saul said unto his servants, Provide me now a man that can play well,” and this is of course the entrée for David into the court; it’s part of God’s sovereign working, but we’re not interested in David tonight, we’re just interested in the fact that here you have an ancient form of therapy for (quote) “mental illness,” the use of music. It’s a very key passage in the Bible because it shows you the power of music. This is why here at Lubbock Bible Church we’re spending more and more attention and time and money in music, much I’m sure to the upset of a few individuals. But the point still remains that we have biblical reasons for this and it’s tied to passages like this. Music is not neutral. Now watch this.

1 Samuel 16:19, “Saul sent messengers to Jesse, and said, Send me David, thy son, who is with the sheep. [21] And so David came to Saul, and stood before him; and he loved him greatly; and he became his armor-bearer. [22] And Saul said to Jesse, Let David, I pray thee, stand before me; for he has found grace in my sight. [23] And it came to pass when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand; so that Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.” Music, in other words, this music therapy had a soothing effect upon him.

Now we know that music has moral qualities to it. We’re not talking now about lyrics; we’re talking about music itself. We’re seeing this, and anyone who is in music theory can give testimony to this fact, that there’s all sorts of tests and comments, one comment came from the former head of the Eastern Rochester School of Music, who said that music is not neutral, I know better than that, it has its moral quality. If you don’t like modern works you can go back to Plato in his Republic, Book III, and Plato knew this too, and so when he designed his perfect society, what was the one thing that Plato argued for? We ought not to seek out complex systems of meter but rather to discover what rhythms of the expressions or a courageous and harmonious life. I say that music training is more potent instrument than any other because rhythm and harmony find their way to the inward phases of the soul.

So music was used in the early days of Saul’s illness and eventually David, who is the author of this, used it again and again and again and again. But Saul got worse; the music was only a help. It was a help because the basic cause of Saul’s mental illness, the negative volition, his stubbornness and the rebellion against the Scriptures, that hadn’t been changed. Yes, can drugs help? Can tranquilizers help? Yes, temporarily. Can music help? Yes, it’s acting here as a tranquilizer. In Proverbs 30 there’s a passage about a depressed man, give him to drink. See, the Bible doesn’t say that all drug therapy is wrong. But the Bible’s very realistic and says all it is is a conditioner that works temporarily until the basic condition is cleared up. And the basic condition is sin.

Now let’s watch the progress of Saul’s mental illness. 1 Samuel 18:10, we’re now going to look at the seven assassination attempts that Saul makes against David. Now there’s a remarkable thing to notice about this. And before we get into the details of the individual assassination attempts, let’s back off a moment and just look at the matter generally. In the Saul/David section of the Scripture, you have this constant playing back and forth. What you’ve got here is an adumbration of Satan and Christ. It’s looking forward to that time when Satan is the god of this world, Christ has been anointed, Satan must decrease and Christ must increase, and Christ, like David, is not yet sitting on his throne, though he’s in the shaft, that is, he’s been anointed. And so Christ patiently waits for God to give Him His throne like David patiently waited for Yahweh to give him his throne. And Saul is a picture of a satanic occupier of the throne.

Now the interesting thing about negative volition and any movement of Satan is that it always begins to hate any righteous principle in the environment. For the reason that I said, that’s why people get kooky when you give them a Bible at a funny farm. It’s because the Bible has a potency about it, and it is dangerous; it represents absolute righteousness which they intuitively know they’ve broken and violated. Now in this section what you’ve got is Saul because of negative volition, which initially was against +R, that is God’s righteousness, there was the initial decision, up there, but because that was carried out and not corrected in his life, any reminder of righteousness gets it. So he starts spraying the environment, looking for anything that will remind him of God’s standards. Now guess who happens to be the most potent reminder of God’s sovereign plan? This little young upstart prince, David, who already is threatening his whole dynasty.

So now watch a man crack up real good. It starts off with just simple stubbornness; okay, so the guy’s stubborn, all men have a steak in them like this. But now it escalates; now the stubbornness stops him from confessing his sin, stops him from dealing with the sin problem, and now the stubbornness, to that is added another new mental attitude sin, sin piled on top of mental attitude sin, like an onion skin, now we have anger and hate, spite, vindictiveness in the organization, to get certain men. Why? Any rational reason? No. You know, David can ask… gosh, the guy’s barely out of his adolescence here, what’s the king after me for? What little threat is a teenager against Saul? Because Saul knows at heart God’s plan; he knows at heart that he’s been rejected. He knows at base that David is a threat to him under God, and because Saul hates God but Saul can’t personally attack God, he attacks God’s representative, and God’s representative is David. So we have seven assassination attempts. Notice.

1 Samuel 18:10-12, “And it came to pass on the next day, that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house; and David played with his hand as at other times; and there was a javelin in Saul’s hand. [11] And Saul cast the javelin; for he said, I will smite David to the wall. And David escaped from his presence twice.” Two assassination attempts. You’ll notice, incidentally, that it is premeditated. Now I know that there are problems sometimes, in cases when acts of violence are committed and people will plead insanity, temporary insanity. But I would rather suspect, in the average courtroom if Saul were tried, with the average lawyer and the judicial situation the way it is, this case would be tried on temporary insanity. Can’t you hear the whole situation; can’t you hear the defense attorney; well now look, the king, he was undergoing psychotherapy and this kid bothered him. Now what did the kid do, he was just playing harp. But that bothered him, the king is not responsible because he’s undergoing official psychotherapy. So therefore we plead temporary insanity. But you’ll notice the text, because the text can’t be fooled with psychological jargon. The Holy Spirit wrote the text and he clears way all this façade stuff and he gets at the real thing. What does it say in verse 11, “Saul said, I will kill David.” That’s not temporary insanity; that is anger and it’s a mental attitude sin and it’s deliberate and premeditated. He may be foaming at the mouth while he’s doing it but it is a premeditated attempt at murder and there’s no temporary insanity bit.

Let’s look at 1 Samuel 18:20-25, watch the collapse of this man as we take you from assassination attempt to assassination attempt. You’re watching a man tear himself to pieces; you’re watching a man come unglued. Verse 20, “And Michal, Saul’s daughter, loved David; and they told Saul, and the thing please him.” See, at times Saul could be a nice guy; in fact, Saul is very well liked in Israel. Extra biblical tradition tells this man was.. sometimes, in some traditions that he was better liked than David himself. Personality wise Saul had a much better personality. It’s just as these fluky times he flipped out. We know why but the average Israelite didn’t. Michal, then, loved David, [21] “And so Saul said, I will give him her, that she may be a snare to him,” temporary insanity? Not at all. “…that the hand of the Philistines may be against him. Wherefore Saul said to David, Thou shalt this day be my son-in-law. [22] And Saul commanded his servants, saying, Speak with David secretly, and say, Behold, the king has delight in you, and all his servants love thee; now, therefore, be the king’s son-in-law.” And the negotiations go on until verse 25, “Thus shall ye say to David, the king desires not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king’s enemies. But Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines.

Now we have something else that’s interesting as a man breaks down. Here we have a man plotting. Now it’s not just a spur of the moment, the javelin happened to be there and he just got this urge to kill, and it was a spontaneous thing. That’s the first two assassination attempts, but now we’ve got something more serious. Here is a deliberate attempt to plot using secondary agents to get rid of one’s enemy. And you’ll notice, has he failed because David went and he killed them, he killed two hundred, verse 27. You know, the old man wanted a hundred, I’ll give him a double blessing. And so he came back with two hundred.

And then what is Saul going to do. How embarrassing it was to his daughter, all the great socialite circles around Jerusalem, the princess telling about the glories of their dowries, and his daughter has to tell well, I got a bag of foreskins. That’s how God took care of Saul and his proud daughter. But you’ll notice the result of this in verse 29. “And Saul was yet more afraid of David, and Saul became David’s enemy continually.” Do you see how it eats away and eats away at the man as he’s mentally disintegrating. Why is he mentally disintegrating? Because he’s expending his psychic energies to destroy righteousness, that’s why. That’s why men crack up. They chose to defy the Word of God and then because they can’t get rid of the Word of God, because it keeps pressing in and pressing in and pressing in, they seek to dismantle it. And how are you going to dismantle the Word of God? And so every attempt at assassination is an attempt to eliminate God from his environment. And he can’t; every attempt that he does to eradicate God from his environment comes back against him. And so therefore there’s an acceleration of Saul’s anger.

That’s the third attempt of assassination. 1 Samuel 19:1-6, “And Saul spoke to Jonathan,” this is the fourth attempt at assassination, “his son,” this is the royal prince, “and to all his servants, that they should kill David.” So now we’re going to have it done through the official bureaucracy, this is an organizational plot now. [2] “But Jonathan, Saul’s son, delighted much in David; and Jonathan told David saying, Saul, my father, seeks to kill you, now I pray you, take heed to yourself until the morning, stay in a secret place, and hide yourself. [3] And I will go out and stand beside my father in the field where you are, and I will talk with my father of you, and what I see, that I will tell you. [4] And Jonathan spoke good of David to Saul, his father, and said unto him, Let not the king sin against his servant, against David; because he has not sinned against you, and because his works have been toward you very good. [5] For he did put his life in his hand, and slew the Philistine, and the LORD wrought a great salvation for all Israel. You saw it, you rejoiced; why, then, will you sin against innocent blood, to slay David, without a cause.”

Now incidentally, there is a beautiful model of how to handle someone who is cracking up. Do you notice what Jonathan is doing to that person? He’s pointing out you are sinning and you have no excuse. Look at this. Look at the reasoning in verse 4 and verse 5. Don’t excuse yourself, dad, because you haven’t got a leg to stand on. You’ve got no reason to act this way. You haven’t got one legal charge against it and you know better than that. And so Jonathan attacks the conscience of his father. And that’s the way he drives the point home. The target in counseling with people who are flipping out is the same target you look at when you’re witnessing to them; get to their conscience! They know what is right, and you have to go over that and over and over that and over that. They know the difference even though they might pretend they don’t. But don’t buy that, that’s just fig leaf stuff; tear the fig leaves off and get down to what’s right and what’s wrong.

And so verse 6, “And Saul hearkened unto the voice of Jonathan; and Saul swore, As the LORD lives, he shall not be slain.” Very rash oath, because he’s going to try it three more times. [7] “And Jonathan called David, and Jonathan showed him all those things,” and so on. So we now have the fourth attempt. The result, by the way, of this negotiation, if you turn to 1 Samuel 20:30, you will see this man who, as he cracks up, expands his hatred, not now just to David but now who’s the recipient of the hate? His own son, Jonathan. Why is Jonathan the recipient of his father’s hatred? Because Jonathan has approached his father’s conscience, and now Jonathan is a representative of God’s righteousness in the environment and he lets swing it at Jonathan, and sling it he does. [30] “And Saul’s anger was kindled against Jonathan, and he said unto him, You son of a bitch,” that that’s exactly the way it reads, “do not I know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to thine own shame, and unto the shame of thy mother’s nakedness? [31] For as long as the son of Jesse lives upon the ground, thou shalt never be established, nor thy kingdom.” So now he hates his own son. Great progress!

Turn back to chapter 19, the fifth assassination attempt, 1 Samuel 19:9, we’re back to the javelin now, haven’t tried that recently. “And the evil spirit from the LORD was upon Saul, as he sat in his house with his javelin in his hand, and David played with his hand. [10] And Saul sought to smite David even to the will with the javelin, but he slipped away out of Saul’s presence; and he smote the javelin into the wall.” He’s trying to impale him. So this is attempted assassination number five.

1 Samuel 19:11-17, attempted assassination number six. “Saul also sent messengers unto David’s house to watch him and to slay him in the morning, and Michal, David’s wife, told him, saying, If you do not save your life tonight, tomorrow you’re going to die. [12] So Michal let David down through a window; and he went, and fled, and escaped. [13] And Michal took an image, and laid in it the bed, and put a pillow of goat’s hair for its head, and covered it with a cloth. [14] And when Saul sent messengers to take David, she said He is sick. [15] And Saul sent the messengers again to see David, saying, Bring him to me in the bed, that I may slay him. [16] And when the messengers were come in, behold, there was an image in the bed,” and now verse 17, Saul’s hatred expands now to his own daughter. “And Saul said unto Michal, Why have you deceived me, and sent mine enemy away, that he is escaped? And Michal answered Saul, He said unto me, Let me go; why should I kill you.” But now Michal becomes the source of her father’s anger, or an object of her father’s anger. That was assassination attempt number six.

Now 1 Samuel 19:18-24, assassination attempt number seven. “So David fled, and escaped, and came to Samuel at Ramah,” now God, you’ll notice, all during this thing has ways of putting down Saul. And this is one of the humorous ways He has because God has to laugh once in a while, you know, it must get dull looking at us all the time. And so for His own sense of humor God will arrange certain interesting things, so watch what happens this time. “And he escaped, and he came to Samuel at Ramah, and told him all that Saul had done to him. And he and Samuel went and dwelt in Naioth. [19] And it was told Saul, saying, Behold, David is at Naioth in Ramah. [20] And Saul sent messengers to take David. And when they saw the company of the prophets prophesying, and Samuel standing as appointed over them, the Spirit of God was upon the messengers of Saul, and they also prophesied. [21] And when it was told Saul, he sent other messengers, and they prophesied likewise.” This is an ecstatic prophesy, this would be close to what passes for the charismatic thing. “…and Saul sent messengers again the third time, they prophesied also. [22] Then went he down to Ramah, and he came to a great well that is in Secu; and he asked and said, Where are Samuel and David? And they said they are at Ramah. [23] So he went there,” now in verse 24 look what God’s Spirit did to him. “And he stripped off his clothes also, and he prophesied [before Samuel in like manner] and lay down naked all that day and all that night.” Now he ever outdid the charismatics.

So you have a situation now where God is literally laughing at the man; that’s what’s happening. He’s reduced to a pitiable condition… a pitiable condition, this is a the king of Israel that we’re talking about, equivalent to the Pharaoh of Egypt. And he’s lying there naked babbling away like an idiot. So that’s the portrait the Word of God gives us.

But there’s something else before Saul dies that we want to observe. Two other passages, 1 Samuel 24:11; this is the passage where he gets caught in the cave, since you all know that episode by now we will point the end part of that episode. I discovered incidentally, when I exegeted Samuel that that is the most potent book against legalistic stiffs that you can imagine. By the time I finished 1 Samuel we had purged this congregation of a number of families who would sit there, frozen, I never saw anything like it, I would come to a passage like this and it’d be just downright hilarious, this one in particular, and they would sit there, everybody else would be having a good time and… you’re not supposed to laugh in church. Why not. What are you supposed to do when you come to this passage. All I can do is laugh at it, I don’t know what anybody else can do. But they just never made it. Okay.

1 Samuel 24:11, “Moreover, my father, see the skirt,” now this is David approaching and confronting Saul with his sin, and I show you this passage and the next one because it shows you what characteristic that after a while, after compound carnality has gone on for a time and you really have serious mental derangement, and the person is well on their way to cracking up, I don’t know how to explain this except this is the way the text presents it, that their confession of sin becomes almost impossible. You watch. David confronts him in verse 11, showing that he had him in a position where he could have killed him, to show him that in fact David cared enough not to kill him. And therefore in verse 12, “The LORD judge between me and you, and the LORD avenge me of you; but my hand has not been upon you. [13] And as saith the proverb says, Wickedness proceeds from the wicked; but my hand shall not be upon you.”

Now boy, there’s a good illustration of a young man using the faith technique. His throne was about eighteen inches away; all he had to do was take his sword and stick him, that’s all it would take, and David would have had the throne. But he didn’t; if he’s going to get to the throne God will give him his throne the right way. [14] “After whom is the king of Israel come out? After whom are you pursuing?” You have the appeal of David to Saul. “Are you coming after a dead dog! After a flea! [15] The LORD, therefore, be judge, and judge between me and you, and see, and plead my cause, and deliver me out of you hand. [16] And it came to pass, when David had ceased speaking these words unto Saul, that Saul said, Is this thy voice, my son, David? And Saul lifted up his voice and he wept”

Now there you have an emotional response to sin, but don’t be deceived. It’s like the alcoholic that weeps because he went out and he bombed out again last night, soused himself up good, and he feels bad and he cries about it in the morning. But has there been a genuine repentance? Watch. 1 Samuel 24:14 “And he said to David, You are more righteous than I; for you have rewarded me good, whereas I have rewarded thee evil. [18] You have showed this day how that you have dealt well with me; forasmuch as when the LORD had delivered me into your hand, you did not kill me. [19] For if a man find his enemy, will he let him go well away? Wherefore, the LORD reward thee with good for what you have done to me this day. [20] I know well that you shall surely be king, and that the kingdom of Israel shall be established in thy hand. [21] Swear now, therefore, unto me by the LORD, that you will not cut off my seed after me [and that thy will not destroy my name out of my father’s house. [22] And David swore unto Saul” but then look what David did, very smart move, “Saul went home; but David and his men went to the stronghold.”

“David went to the stronghold,” because he wasn’t influenced. A person that’s this weird, that’s this far along you can’t trust superficial concessions. You don’t buy it; he had too long a history of acting with hatred and mental attitude sin and they’re not going to be cured overnight. So you don’t trust them is basically what you do; you don’t trust them. And David didn’t, he went back to the stronghold. Watch again another reference.

1 Samuel 26:21, the battle had gone on, once again David has Saul in a compromising position and once again he spares his life. “Then said Saul, I have sinned:,” look at this, “I have sinned, return, my son, David; for I will no more do thee harm,: now that’s about the eighth time he’s said that, see, “because my soul was precious in thine eyes this day. Behold, I have played the fool, and have erred exceedingly.” But there’s no repentance. And finally in 1 Samuel 31 he dies, a tragic end to a tragic man. Saul is one of the greatest tragedies of history. In the literature of the world the tragedy of Saul is a tragedy of far more profound significance than any of Shakespeare’s tragedies, because this tragedy goes to the heart of why there are tragedies. This tragedy shows you why there’s such a thing as mental illness. Stubbornness and rebellion against Scripture, and the reason for the mental illness is we’re always trying to [can’t understand word] out.

We’ll close tonight by turning to 1 Corinthians 10:13, and those of you with the King James Version, we’re all going to read 1 Corinthians 10:13 together because this one verse basically discredits the whole concept of environmentally caused sin. It’s tough, but I can’t help it, don’t look at me, I didn’t write; it’s just as tough with me as it is with you, you know. Let’s read together, let’s just read it slowly, make sure we all understand this. “There has no temptation taken you, but such as is common to man, but God is faithful, who will not permit you to be tempted above that which you are able, but will, with the temptation, also make a way of escape, that we may be able to bear it.” That’s the answer to mental illness.