I Have Been Reading Myself Into Saul

He knows the passages. That is the whole trouble.

A man who has read the Bible carelessly can be reassured by somebody quoting a verse at him. A man who has read it carefully has already met the difficult ones and has already worked out where he sits in them, and he cannot be talked out of a text he can find in eleven seconds.

So he knows 1 Samuel 16:14. He knows what happened to Saul, and he knows it did not happen all at once, and he knows the man went on being king for years afterwards, holding a position that no longer had anything behind it.

He knows Psalm 51 too. Take not your Holy Spirit from me. Written by David, who had every reason to think it was possible, and who was asking not to be the next one.

And he has spent about eighteen months quietly filing himself under those passages.

He would not put it that way to anybody. If you asked him he would give you a clean answer about the difference between the Old and New Covenants, and it would be an accurate answer, and he could source it.

But at half past five in the morning, which is when this happens to him, the accurate answer is somewhere else in the house and what he has instead is a picture. A man still holding an office. Still doing everything he did before. And the thing that used to be behind it gone, quietly, without an announcement, some time before anybody noticed.

He does not have a scandal. There is nothing he is hiding. What he has is a growing sense that something has thinned out, plus two texts that describe exactly what he fears, and the two of them have been in the same room together for a year and a half.

And that is you at half past five, or you would not still be reading.

Jesus adds a word those passages do not have

You will want the text handled properly rather than waved away, so let me do the thing you would do, which is compare the arrangements.

Even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.John 14:17

Two prepositions and a change of covenant sits between them.

Dwells with you. Present tense, and that is the arrangement the men in that room had known their whole lives, and it is the arrangement Saul had: the Spirit coming upon a man for an office, resting on him for a work, and capable of being lifted from that office the way an appointment is ended. Every departure passage you know is inside that arrangement.

Will be in you. That is the new one, and Jesus announces it as a change. Not upon. In. And in the sentence just before it He fixes the duration of the new arrangement with a word the old one never carried: to be with you forever (John 14:16).

You have been applying the terms of an appointment to a residency.

You are indwelt under an arrangement Jesus announced as different, and the passages you fear are describing the other one. It is written that He dwells with you and will be in you (John 14:17), with the change of preposition marking the change of covenant. The Holy Spirit is in a man at half past five in the morning, not resting upon an office he might lose.

Now let me handle Psalm 51 directly, because half-handling it would be worse than leaving it alone.

David asks not to have the Holy Spirit taken from him. He asks it honestly and he asks it as a man under the arrangement he lived in, where it was a live possibility and he had watched it happen to his predecessor. The prayer is entirely appropriate to David. It is not a promise to you, and it is not a warning to you, because you are not standing where David stood: the New Testament never once instructs a Christian to pray that prayer, and it would be a strange omission if the danger had carried over.

You are not standing where David stood, and no letter in the New Testament ever asks you to pray his prayer. It is written that you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it (Ephesians 1:13-14), which sets a term the apostles were content to state plainly. The Holy Spirit was never on loan to you against your performance in an office.

And the last of it, flat, with nothing after it.

He is in you this morning. Not resting on you conditionally, not evaluating the thinning, not somewhere in the house.

You are not cast off, and the eighteen months changed nothing about that. It is written that He has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never is the word the apostles chose after the change of covenant, knowing exactly what the older passages said. The Holy Spirit has been in you through every one of those five thirty mornings.