the heart of darkness

The Word for today:
1 Samuel 13

The Bible opens with stark contrast, with darkness preceding the entrance of light.

In the book of 1 Samuel, that contrast is personified. We are first introduced to the dark heart of Saul. Then David, the man after God’s own heart, bursts upon the scene.

Saul is a complex figure for whom we develop a real sympathy. But make no mistake about it that Saul is Satan’s man.

The Bible student will also develop some sympathy for Judas Iscariot, who is an echo of Saul, who is an echo of Satan. This should not strike us as strange when we consider David’s continuing regard and respect for Saul (even as Saul psychically disintegrated and spiritually degenerated) and Jesus’ compassion towards Judas to the bitter end.

Just as the heart of God leans out to the lost, emotional “sympathy for the devil,” will be found in the hearts of God’s people -- who were, after all, once children of darkness themselves:

For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. (Ephesians 5:8)

For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son.  (Colossians 1:13)

But while emotional empathy springs from the heart of God, any spiritual compromise with the devil and his delegates lands the child of God in a gray irrelevance, a spiritual no man’s land from which the light of the world will neither extinguish nor shine.

According, then, to the biblical pattern -- and the evening and the morning were the first day (Genesis 1:5) – we are introduced to darkness before the light, Saul before David…

The unholy spirit.
To understand the Holy Spirit it is instructive to be able to recognize his opposite:

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. (Ephesians 2:1-2)

Saul, the temporary king, was Satan's man. He is a type (a prophetic picture) of Satan, who (at God's discretion) is the temporary prince of this present darkness (Ephesians 6:12/RSV). Satan could offer a crown to Jesus in the wilderness, because it was his to give. (Matthew 4:8-10)

Why does God utilize evil?
He has to. It seems that there is no other way. Evil was the only raw material left to him in re-creation. Evil is utilized at the cross for salvation; Jesus Christ became sin for us in order to defeat sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). This was predicted and amplified throughout scripture, from Genesis 50:20 to Romans 8:28.

Some cosmic justice that we are not entirely privy to (1) forced (2) God to utilize evil to effect his ends. Our sin so tied God’s hands (figuratively, and literally on the cross) that in order to defeat evil, God had to get Satan to swallow his own tail; evil defeated itself at the cross.

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Enough of the darkness. Tomorrow, the man after God’s own heart will strike a match and start anew.

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(1)  see Job chapter 1
(2)  Forced is used here in the sense that God seems to have been constrained by his own sense of justice.  Because he could not wink at evil, our forgiveness had to be purchased by the blood of his only Son.