It is not in the power of language to depict a more terrible and hopeless condition for a rational creature to be in than that set forth in these five words of Scripture. And the climax of Paul’s description of man’s unregenerate state is: “Having no hope, and without God in the world.” Let us glance at the true meaning and significance of the words.
1. They do not mean that God has absolved them from all obligation--no longer sustains relations with them--has withdrawn His supervision and feels no concern on their account. For He holds them to strict account the same as with other men; He takes cognizance of their daily conduct, the same as if they were on terms of intimacy.
2. But they do mean:
(1) The toss of God’s favour. They are “aliens” from His love. He has no complacency in them. “God is not in all their thoughts.” They live only by His sufferance.
(2) They do mean the withdrawal of His special presence, His Holy Spirit, the tokens of His favour, the recognition and inward consciousness that He is a friendly power with whom they have to do. There had been no signs or revelations declaring unto him the awful fact. So every ungodly man knows and feels. He needs no spirit to come up from the grave to herald it.
(3) They do mean that all friendly intercourse between God and themselves has ceased. Saul besought the Lord when disaster and calamity came upon him and his kingdom; but he sought in vain.
3. Glance at the awfulness of such a condition!
(1) To be “without God in the world” is to be destitute of every element of true happiness.
(2) To possess a character that has in it not one element of moral worth.
(3) To be at the mercy of all the forces of depravity, human and devilish, with no defence, no shield, nothing to mitigate the evil.
(4) To be not only friendless and miserable “in the world” but “without hope” for eternity. (J. M. Sherwood, D. D.)
Humanity consciously deserted of God
There are two stages in the history of human depravity.
1. Man deserts God. God calls, and man refuses.
2. God deserts man. The Eternal departs from him, which means a discontinuance of the overtures of His love, and His agencies to restore; it is leaving man to himself, to reap the labour of his own hands; it is the physician giving up the patient; the tender father closing the door against his reprobate child. In the first stage, we find the vast majorities of mankind in every age; in the second, we may find some of earth in every period. This stage is hell. The first stage is probation; the second stage is retribution. This second and final stage Saul had reached. All guiding oracles were hushed to him. The Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets. Deep is the necessity he feels for supernatural help. He feels himself deserted by God. This passage presents three considerations concerning mankind in this state.
I. That humanity under a consciousness of God’s desertion will ever be impressed with the need of the forfeited means of Divine communion. There was a time when Saul had communications with his Maker. The prophets were accessible to him. He could consult the Urim on the breast of the high priest; but he had lost all now: he had slain the high priest; Samuel was dead; the Spirit of the Lord forsook him, and the heavens were closed against him. How deep and earnest is the cry, “Bring me up Samuel.” Oh! for one word from God now. Oh! that I could have but one more message from those sealed heavens. The deep cry of humanity, under a consciousness that God had deserted it, is, “Oh! that I knew but where I might, find him.” Captives away in Babylon, how did the Jews value the temple which, perhaps, they often neglected when at home? Sinner, value and improve the means of Divine communion now: God is speaking to you, through ministers, the Bible, and other books.
II. That humanity, under a consciousness of God’s desertion, becomes the subject of fearful delusions. Such delusions seem to me to spring naturally from his excited state of mired.
1. It presented a vivid vision of the teacher whose counsels had been neglected. The imagination of a conscience-stricken sinner will bring old reechoes from their graves, give them voice, and make them speak again.
2. It proclaimed the sin and pronounced the doom. (1Sa_28:18-19.)Imagination now gives a voice of thunder to all this whispering of conscience. Imagination is a terrible faculty, when swayed by a guilty conscience. What visions it can unfold! It can create a subjective world, whose firmament is “black as sackcloth,” whose tenants are fiends, whose stormy atmosphere is rent by lightnings and loaded with shrieks of anguish.
III. That humanity, under a consciousness of God’s desertion, must sink into unmitigated despair. Here is despair prostrating the man. The guilty mind, in despair, loses three elements of power.
1. Hope. What an inspiring element is this! How it sustains under trial! How it stimulates in enterprise!
2. Purpose. Mind is only powerful and happy as it has some purpose to engage its attention and energies: but in despair there is no purpose; the mind looks abroad on the dark universe and finds nothing to do.
3. Sympathy. A God-deserted mind has no sympathy: all hearts recoil from a sin-convicted soul, and it turns in upon itself. (Homilist.)
Abandoned of God
It is the saddest, the most despairing confession that ever fell from human lips. We can sympathise with the bitterness of the more ordinary losses and bereavements of men. But we cannot rise to the full agony of Saul’s confession, nor sympathise with the sadness and hopelessness of spirit that wail through it, like the winds through the vaults of the dead.
I. We consider the departure of God. There are two sets of moral forces in the world contending with each other for the possession of the spirit of man, called in Scripture the one, the powers of the world to come; the other, the powers of this present evil world. The former is a holy beneficent order of influences which have their source in the nature and life of God; the latter is a destructive, despoiling, degrading order. Now, just as the laws and forces of the material world build up the external economy of things, so do these two sets of influences mould and form human character. They are obviously diametrically opposed to each other in their aim and tendency; they try to bear and pull the spirit of life in each man in opposite directions. What therefore had happened in the experience of Saul was this: that the set of virtues or holy energies that have their origin in God and that pull men Godward, had ceased to strive for the possession of his spirit; and had left him to the undisputed sovereignty of the powers of this present evil world. And look at what happened in the nature of Saul when God had departed from him in this sense--the only sense in which God ever departs from a man. His once fine and brave and manly nature--manly and brave and fine as long as God stayed to make and keep it so--grew suspicious and bitter and restless, and filled with slavish fear. It is a law which holds for all time, which is as fixed and unalterable as the laws of the physical universe; it is an eternal law that separation from God involves moral disorder, and the tyranny of all the destroying influences that prey upon human hearts. Saul’s experience unfolds to us what would happen did God depart from the social life of today, be it village life, or commercial life, or court life; did He depart from any of the spheres of life where men meet and associate and deal with men. Society is impossible without the felt presence of God, warring against sin and keeping it down in the hearts of men. And in the case of the individual, too, every kind of moral disorder and wretchedness is involved in the departure of God. The individual soul is the realm of God’s most holy and blessed activities. Oh, it is fearful when God, as the moral force in the soul, departs from a man; for in this world there is a great conspiracy and confederacy against our truest good, the cunning of which God alone can baffle and God alone can confound. Without Him our very conceptions of righteousness will be unworthy; our consciences will get seared, as though a hot iron had passed over them, deadening their sensitive papillae; our hearts will give birth to bad devices, unholy plans, and thoughts of lawless and forbidden pleasures. Our whole nature will get cankered and corrupted, unless the sweet, refreshing waters of life are ever circulating in us. In short, there is no crime or sin which is not possible to, and likely to happen in, the life of the man from whom God has departed.
II. We have now to consider what Saul had done to compel God to depart. It was Saul’s disobedience and perverseness of temper that drove God away. By the requisite devices of overlooking, despising, rejecting, wearying, and tiring out the reproving presence of God’s spirit in him, he bad succeeded in making complete isolation between his soul and the Soul of souls. He determined against his better reason to keep his sins and his bad heart, and to take his own will and way. Never does the great Father of us all send an evil spirit into the hearts and minds of men. Every spirit that cornea from God, comes of holy ministries of love and blessing; comes to strive to bring bad men under the power of goodness; comes to war a noble warfare with the evil which Saul grappled to his soul as though it were his tried and adopted friend. What is it that turns God into a relentless foe? or, rather, what is it that so throws our eyes off the straight line of moral vision that we seem to see the great loving Father and a tyrant? We say, sin. Yes; but what kind of sin? Such sins as those of Noah, David, and Peter--drunkenness, lust and murder, falsehood and profanity--alienate God till the dark hour of anguish Domes, but do not compel an absolute departure. The sin of Saul must have been the unpardonable one--the resolute refusal to surrender the spirit of our life into God’s hands that we may be formed and shaped by Him. (James Forfar.)
Saul God forsaken
What a complication of calamities! What a deluge of distress and misery!
I. Reflect a moment on the language of his complaint. “The Philistines are come upon me.” However disproportionate the forces of a defending army, a Christian king and a Christian people are secure. “A thousand shall fall at their side, and ten thousand at their right hand, but it shall not Dome nigh them.” But when a man forsakes the Lord until the season of distress, who can wonder if his repentance is destitute of the character of sincerity, and he is left to perish. “If ye walk contrary to me, I will walk contrary to you,” is the threatening of that God who has justice as well as mercy.
1. But still, listen to his cry, “The Lord hath forsaken me.” This is indescribably dreadful! Better that all the world should leave us, better that we lose our health, our strength, our property, our friends, than be forsaken of Him whose smile is Heaven, whose frown is hell. What a state of abandonment, what a state of orphanage! With no eye to pity, with no arm to save. But what follows from such withdrawment of the greatest and the best of Beings? Penal blindness of mind, hardness of heart, the uncontrolled sway of evil passions, left a prey to the tempter, and to the influence and associations of wicked men. But this is not all; hear him yet again: “And the Lord answers me not, neither by prophets nor by dreams.” This, if possible, is still more distressing and dreadful than before. What a privilege is prayer! What must it be to have our prayers rejected.
II. The method which he adopted to obtain relief. What a wretched expedient for soothing the anguish of a guilty conscience! And yet how often do we see subterfuges, equally untenable and unsafe, resorted to by transgressors to stifle conviction, to prevent reflection, to silence the accusations of a guilty mind, and to obtain a little temporary relief.
III. Let us now contemplate his overthrow--his monitory death. What does this subject suggest for our mutual improvement?
1. How possible it is to live and die without hope in the world though surrounded by religious advantages.
2. We learn the awful consequences of rebellion against God. (B. Leach.)
Reprobation
I desire to set before you the end to which in this world allowed sin brings finally the impenitent man. Now that state is spoken of in God’s Word under various awful descriptions. It is described as one in which the heart is hardened; as one in which a man is “given over to a reprobate mind;” in which he is “to every good work reprobate;” in which men “have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.” They are spoken of as “reprobate concerning the faith;” as having “treasured up” for themselves “wrath against the day of wrath;” as having “grieved,”--yea, and “quenched,”--the “Holy Spirit of God.” Now these passages of God’s Word suffice of themselves to show that there is here in this world such a state as that of final impenitence: and what can be added to those words to describe its misery and horror! Yet it may be well for us, instead of simply resting in them, to examine more in detail wherein their fearfulness consists; that so, of God’s mercy, we may be driven by the sight to cry to Him with greater earnestness to save us from all danger of failing ourselves into this most deadly state.
1. Now, in entering on this subject, we must remember what is involved in that certain truth which is set before us from one end of the Bible to the other, namely, that we, in this world, are really in a state of probation.
2. Now, mark how that probation is accomplished:
(1) We are placed amongst a multitude of outward things, which perpetually force us to choose whether we will act in this way or in that; and every one of these choices must agree with the holy and perfect Will of God, or be opposed to it.
(2) But then, further: the especial trial of us Christians consists in our being placed amongst these temptations under the personal influence of God the Holy Ghost; so that in every such distinct act of choice, there is either a direct yielding or a direct opposition to His secret suggestions. Moreover, these secret influences of His are described as the Power which does effectually mould those who yield to them. Thus it is said that He “guides them into all truth.” So that evermore He is with us; touching the inmost springs of our being; upholding and renewing our life in its highest fountainhead of existence; acting on us by restraint, by solicitation, by suggestion, by assistance in every choice.
(3) This, then, being our moral and spiritual probation, not only is every voluntary acting of our spirit in contradiction to God’s Will a fixing of our will in opposition to His Will; but, further, it is in us a direct personal resistance to the action upon our souls of God the Holy Ghost. And the necessary consequence of every such act of resistance must, by a twofold process, carry us on towards final impenitence. For first, by our own moral constitution, the breaking through any restraint from evil, or the resisting any suggestion of good, carries us by an inevitable reaction somewhat farther than we were before in the opposite direction. This first; and then, and far beyond this, by thus resisting the Holy Spirit we cause Him to withdraw from us those influences for good in which is alone for us the spring and possibility of amendment. This is the awful truth contained in such exhortations as that of the Apostle.
“Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God.” Now the effect of such conduct on an earthly friend would be that it would lead him to withdraw himself from the intimate relationship of an undisturbed affection; and so we are taught that from the heart so resisting Him the Holy One withdraws Himself. Now as a necessary consequence of such a withdrawal, the progress of the forsaken soul towards final hardness is inevitable. The injured quality of the soil makes it need more urgently than before, if it is to yield any good upgrowth, the refreshment of cooling showers, and at that very time the decree has gone forth to the clouds of heaven that they rain no rain upon it.
3. What the downward process of such a soul must be we may see at once by recalling what we saw to be the Spirit’s gracious influences upon one whom He was sanctifying, and so estimating the consequences of their withdrawal. For reproofs for sin would in such a heart sink first into a whisper, and then die out in silence. And as they expired the conscience would be struck with dumbness, and the first cause therefore of a saving penitence would be removed. Next, the secret voice teaching the heart, and reminding it of the words of Christ, would cease to speak; and with this would fail also those first drawings of the affections towards God, which are as the tender bud of a future penitence, and which can awaken only beneath the Cross of Christ, and within the sound of His words of love, as the Blessed Spirit reveals them to the soul. So that there would be in such a heart nothing to begin that work of true repentance, which without the aid of the good Spirit cannot originate in fallen man. Nor is even this all. For in this heart there would be no shedding abroad the sweet reviving influences of love; there would be no sealing it by the pressure of a moulding hand to the day of redemption. So that such a heart must harden daily. The law of evil must daily pervade it more thoroughly, until it comes to choose sin as sin: whilst from such a state there is nothing to awaken it. And this is the awful, hopeless, rayless, outer darkness of the full and final impenitence of a reasonable soul which has failed utterly in its moral probation. Here, then, we reach the consummation of this course. It leads down to an impenitent despair. At this point, then, let us for a moment pause, and see the conclusion we have reached. It is, that this state of final, hopeless impenitence is the natural conclusion of a life spent under the influences of God’s Blessed Spirit by a reasonable moral agent, who by his neglect of or resistance to them, makes them turn into his uttermost condemnation. For as death can come to no man by chance, as the time of closing his day of trial must be exactly and certainly fixed for every man by God’s sovereign Will, does it not necessarily follow from the fact of God having placed him in this probation, that no man is taken from his life of trial with the trial incomplete? that no branch in the living Vine is taken away until it is indeed certain that it will bear no fruit. In fine, instead of its being a rare and uncommon thing for men to reach a state of final impenitence, it is the real and most awful secret of every hopeless death. And if this be so, with what a dreadful character does this truth invest every allowance of wilful sin in us Christians! That probation differs, of course, necessarily in every different man. The same act of sin may embody in itself, in the case of two different men, utterly different degrees of resistance to the Holy Spirit. Such is the lesson taught us by the examples set before us in God’s Word. Yet two such examples at least there are set before us in its pages--that of Saul in the Old Testament, and that of Judas in the New. In the history of Saul are traced with minuteness of detail the gifts of grace against which his sins of self-will and rebellion against Gad had been committed, until “the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.” Thenceforward the features of one whose heart was hardening look ever out upon us from his life. And to what an end does all this bring him! Who can read unmoved the record of those wild throbbings of despair which drove him, who in his better day had cut off those that had familiar spirits and the wizards from the land, to the sorceress at Endor; or the history of all that there awaited him? The deceitful tempter, now turned into the merciless accuser, took up the fierce utterance of that still hard though broken heart--“I am sore distressed,” etc. Here is no mingling of mercy with judgment, no call to repentance, no sweet whisper of pardon. These, then, are our lessons from this fearful subject. First, that we strive diligently to maintain such a temper of watchful observance for the motions of the Blessed Spirit as that we may never unawares resist or neglect any of His lightest intimations. Without this watchful observance we are sure to interrupt His work. For if the soul be heated with worldliness, or covered with the dust of the earth, how shall it receive those heavenly colours with which He would brighten and adorn it? if it be perpetually distracted by ten thousand cares, how shall it be ready to entertain His presence? Lastly, if through our exceeding feebleness we have fallen, let us learn to look straight to the cross of Christ, and strive diligently in His strength to arise again; that we fly to Him as for our lives, crying only to Him out of our low estate, “Forsake not, O Lord, the work of Thine own hands: Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit, from me.” (Bishop Wilberforce.)
