II Samuel 18:10: “And it came to pass on the morrow that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul and he prophesied in the midst of the house.”
“There is no witness so terrible, no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.” – Sophocles
The spelling for the word ra’ah (evil) is identical for an adjective or a verb. As an adjective the root word would be ra’a. Ra’a is an evil which results from envy and causes sorrow or sadness. As a verb the root word would be ra’ah which is something that consumes you or feeds upon you.
The syntax is very ambiguous in this passage. Most your modern translations will take a traditional approach and render this as an adjective expressed as an evil spirit from God. However, a literal rendering would say: “The spirit of God was evil to Saul.” Or take the nature of evil used in ra’ah and you would say: “The Spirit of God was consuming or feeding on Saul.
We automatically think of a demonic spirit when we read the words evil spirit. I believe the Bible does clearly teach the existence of demonic spirits, but I do not see that to be the case in this passage. I find it very hard to believe God would order a demon to take control of Saul. I personally believe that God did not need to send a demonic spirit upon Saul; he just needed to fire up the old conscience. A guilty conscience can conjure up a good sense of depression, fear or anger. Saul had once worshipped God with all his heart and he had once loved God with all his heart. But when sin and disobedience entered his life and heart there grew a separation between himself and God. God often uses our conscience or the conviction of the Holy Spirit to awaken us to our disobedience or sin. You see ra’ah does not need to be rendered as evil in English; in fact it is sometimes used for the word shepherd as in Psalms 1:1 or even as friend. Ra’ah is merely a consuming passion. To render this word as evil is not incorrect, it is just misleading. In reality what this Spirit that came upon Saul and made him depressed and angry could very well have been the Spirit of God. God was wooing Saul back to Him through the conviction of the Holy Spirit and like many who resist the loving persuasion of the Holy Spirit they become depressed or angry because they often interpret the conviction or consuming passion of the Spirit of God as just a guilty conscience. Such moves by the Holy Spirit will either bring us to repentance or cause us to rebel all the more and do exactly what Saul did. He began to prophesy
Now we need to look at this word prophesy. We all know that this is basically speaking the will of God. However, in this particular form this word in the Hebrew is in a Hithpael form, a reflexive form. In other words the rendering should be: “He prophesied in his own name to the house.” I am not too sure just exactly what that means. Either he tried to justify his own sins or he was sort of like the preacher who is secretly into pornography and will preach powerful sermons on the wickedness of pornography to try and cover his own sin. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher said in his book, The True Believer, that “the one who is most opposed to a system is the one who has been in that system and left it.” In other words one who is committing a sin is often the most vocal critic against that sin because he is trying to convince himself he is not guilty of that very sin. Nonetheless, from this rendering it would appear that God put Saul on one major guilt trip.
Again, to determine which rendering I would personally use, I would go for the one that speaks to me personally. Saul, being hounded by some demonic spirit that God sends on him just does not speak to me personally. If I find myself willfully sinning I find I am living in mental torment and anguish over my separation from God and rather than just give up this sin, I try to justify it and convince myself I am doing no wrong. Yet, the more I try to convince myself that it is not wrong the more glaring the evil intent of my sin becomes until I either become very irritable, angry, depressed or I just simply repent. Such is the nasty way God deals with our sin. He doesn’t torment us; He just keeps reminding us that what we are doing is evil. It is we drive ourselves into torment by our refusing God’s loving plea to repeat and reunite ourselves with Him. Saul being tormented by just the presence of God’s spirit which awakened the realization of his own sin is something I can understand. David talked of his sin being before him day and night, same thing, same nasty little tactic used by God to bring us to repentance. A Christian can sin and when he does God will give him no rest until he either confesses the sin like David or prophesies to himself or convinces his heart, like Saul, saying that it was not really a sin at all and even if it was, it didn’t hurt anyone and was surely not such a bad sin.
Thus I tend to shy away from the traditional interpretation of this passage as it suggests that God can send an evil spirit upon a Christian to torment them. It is not that I do not believe in the presence of evil spirits, I just don’t believe that this is the proper rendering from the Hebrew in this case.
When we read this passage as God sending a demonic spirit on Saul our natural response to that is that this is something awfully drastic and surely Saul must have been very sinful to deserve such a thing. But, behold, I am not so wicked or perhaps we live in a new dispensation and as such God would never do such a thing to me. As a result we just blow off this passage as another passage that has no personal application. Yet, when you casually forget to add that little hidden extra income on your IRS form and God sends his ra’ah spirit upon you, that convicting work of the Holy Spirit such that you either can’t sleep until you amend your tax form or you begin to pull a Saul and begin to prophesy to your own heart, and you tell your heart, “Heart, just look at this this way the government is evil they will just use it to purchase bombs to kill innocent people, why, behold, we are doing a righteous thing by lying on our tax forms, surely God will bless us.” Indeed God does bless you, He blesses you with His presence such that you feel so guilty that you pull a Jonah and run away from His presence because you just don’t want to part with that extra money you owe your rich Uncle (Sam).
You could call this spirit that tormented Saul a demonic spirit, but if you do you could be shutting yourself off to a very important lesson. By letting sin enter your life the presence of God will have the opposite effect on you. Instead of bringing you that warm fuzzy feeling of love and peace, it will react to the sin in your life bringing you misery, depression, fear and anger. The Jesus that you invited into your life cannot sit in unity with sin. There will be a clash. David responded to the intrusion of sin into his life by embracing God. Saul responded by embracing the sin. The results has been public record for over 3,000 years.
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