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Transcript 233B — Was King Saul Saved?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum
CALLER: Hello. I have a question regarding whether or not Saul was saved. In I Samuel 28:19, where Saul is talking with the medium, and he calls up Samuel, and then Samuel says in verse 19, when he's telling Saul that he will be killed, he says, "Tomorrow you and your sons will be with me." And then the next reference is in II Samuel 1:23, where David is talking about Saul and Jonathan, and then he says, "In death they were not parted." I would like for you to speak to that.
HC: The question is raised concerning the salvation of Saul. And this is speaking not of Saul of Tarsus in the New Testament, although he also was a Benjaminite and was a very important man in God's program. But this is King Saul in the Old Testament, the first king over the tribes of Israel. Was he saved or not?
And the language of the Bible is somewhat difficult to follow. We read, to complicate the question further than what has been raised in the question, when we go to I Samuel 10, in verse 6, "Then the Spirit of the Lord will come mightily upon you [this is Samuel talking to Saul, when he's just anointed him to be king], and you shall prophesy with them and be turned into another man." And we read in verse 9, "When he turned his back to leave Samuel, God gave him [that is, Saul] another heart. And all these signs came to pass that day." So that sounds like he was saved.
Again, as has been pointed out, in I Samuel 28 the witch of Endor declared, through this apparition which appeared to be Samuel but who was not Samuel, "Tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me." Now this whole business of I Samuel 28 is another question altogether. This actually is not Samuel speaking. This was an apparition conjured up by Satan himself, because this medium was an ambassador of Satan. But Saul was convinced that it was Samuel. Actually, this statement, "Tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me," had some truth in it, in that death did come to Saul and his sons the next day. But as to whether Saul and his sons all went to be with the Lord, as Samuel had, that's another question altogether.
Now this statement in II Samuel 1, where David indicates in verse 23, "Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely, in life and in death they were not divided. They were swifter than eagles. They were stronger than lions," suggests, too, that maybe Saul was saved, because Jonathan was a very personal friend of David. We don't read anything negative about Jonathan. And we could conclude that Jonathan probably was saved. And if in death they were not divided, the suggestion might be that Saul also was saved. However, this verse is not conclusive at all, because it is true that in the grave they were not divided. And in that sense death claimed them. This is not a discourse on everything that happened after death.
If Jonathan was saved he went to be with Christ in his soul, and if Saul was unsaved, his soul went into another place, called Hades. But the very fact that it says, "In death they were not divided" could refer to their bodies, that they were both buried in the same grave, in the same tomb.
But there's other language in the Bible that suggests very strongly that Saul was not saved. It's very very strong language. We read in Psalm 18, I believe it is, where David is indicating these words, and the heading of this psalm, which is part of the Holy Canon also "A Psalm of David, the servant of the Lord, who addressed the words of this psalm to the Lord on the day when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul."
And then he goes on to speak as if he were the Messiah. This is a Messianic psalm. It says in verse 4, "The cords of death encompassed me. The torrents of perdition assailed me. The cords of Sheol entangled me. The snares of death confronted me." This is the language of Christ going to the cross. And of course Christ went to the cross to pay for our sins, but also there He was delivered from all of the hands of His enemies, because He rose from the grave. He was saved from this once He had paid for our sins. And it was His enemies who had brought Him to the cross.
And so Psalm 18 is putting Saul in the same class with Satan, with those who are totally antagonistic toward God. And we see this also in Saul's life. For the last ten or fifteen years of his life he sought constantly to kill David. And a murderer is not one that has eternal life.
Now this language of I Samuel 10 probably refers to the fact that Saul was qualified by the Holy Spirit to be a king. You must bear in mind that before Saul became king, Israel had no king, it had no court, it had no palace, it had no protocol, it had no army. It had nothing at all of this nature. It was led by God, and the servant of God was a man like Samuel, who was a prophet, who just kind of went in and out amongst the people. But there was no regal ruling of any kind.
And so here Saul is a farm boy. He really was a farm boy. And God now is going to make him king. And so this was a very very large change, where there was no preparation of any kind. And God qualified Saul to be king by giving him another heart, not in the sense of being born again, but in the sense of giving him the ability to rule wisely.
Now Saul actually was a pretty good king. He did rule quite wisely. The only trouble is, he rebelled against God very quickly, and therefore God took the throne away from him and eventually gave it to King David. And when we look at the rulers over Israel, they really begin with David. David is the line that began the real rule over Israel, even though Saul had reigned forty years before David.
I really believe that Saul was not saved. I really believe that the burden of the evidence is that he was not saved. And when the witch of Endor was prophesying through an evil spirit that tomorrow you and your sons would supposedly be with Samuel, this was true in the sense that they would be dead tomorrow, but not true in the sense that they would all be in Heaven with Christ. And I think that the passage in II Samuel, where David says, "Saul and Jonathan, in life and in death they were not divided," can easily be explained if we think of death in terms of the grave rather than in terms of the place where their souls went.