He the gods destroy they first make mad—Euripides
Don’t you try to justify the scars you left on my heart,
The sun was in the sky, you claimed it was dark—Maverick City, Same Blood
Cursed are those who refuse to do the Lord's work, who hold back their swords from shedding blood! —Jeremiah, Jeremiah 48:10, New Living Translation
And He said, "Go, and tell this people: 'Keep on hearing, but do not understand; Keep on seeing, but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes—God, Isaiah 6:9-10, New King James Version
Working as an aide in King Saul’s royal court had to qualify as one of the most strenuous jobs in antiquity. But how do you do it? Every day at the office had as the highlight reel the bizarre, the unpredictable, and the downright insane. Imagine going to a workplace with no set goals for the day or targets for the future. There was nothing like a vision that determined the to-do lists, the strategies, methods, plans, and tactics that top companies today are known for and are heavily touted in self-help books today.
The court executive council felt no urgency or interest in the personal development of their subordinates. Rarely did they hold group meetings or brainstorming sessions. Most did not even know their juniors on an intimate level. Given that Israel was an intensely close-knit society, they may know some things about the person’s tribe, clan, and family. But as to the individual himself—his goals, dreams, desires, ambitions, questions—they were unbothered about these things. The result was an organization of collectively disillusioned individuals with no sense of direction and purpose, no vision for the future to guide their operations in the present, and no sense of responsibility and commitment.
Such an environment operated on a strict authoritarian hierarchy. The power structure underlined an aide’s level of influence, freedom of action, and degree of contribution. Your place on the table determined how much you could take the initiative for the good of the court. But because the chief aides—thanks to the King’s style—were micro-managers who always gave an opinion on how people should work without as much permitting them to express themselves, most people were not willing to take risks. The first commandment in the court was, "Thou shalt not question the king." Therefore, people came to work without the court in their hearts; self-preservation prevented them from using their ideas to improve the service in the court. They only came to work for the sake of work—and probably job security—and for self-actualization or to fulfil a passion.
In other words, the aides were mercenaries.
Because of this collective of individuals, the royal court was very inefficient. It was, after all, the agency required to implement the King’s policies for the whole of Israel. Whatever vision and plan the King had for the people, they were the ones to make it happen. Ideally, with such a job description, the court should have an inherent culture—a clearly defined way of doing things, ranging from the interactions with the people of Israel, how communication and instructions moved from superiors to juniors, a set way of manifesting goals and targets in line with a vision, a mindset required of every worker, and a peculiar way workers work and relate with themselves. However, nothing like that existed.
There was nothing like a defined pattern of administration or procedural policy. Even the concept of work spillover—the idea that work uncompleted yesterday became part of today’s activity—did not exist. For all they know, projects with promising potential could end without reason, so what was the need to put your idea out there? In the vacuum, the leaders could instantly kickstart new ones in the spur of the moment. With this work structure, the royal court was filled with backlogs of tasks, unfinished goals, substandard work, and exceeded deadlines. In this kind of place, the only motivation that made the civil servants even take the job was the prestige that came with minding the nation’s business and the money that enabled them to survive another month of the rigours of Israelite living.
The toll on the workers must be gruelling indeed. In this toxic, toxic environment, it was a dog-eat-dog world. Trust had fled, truth had died, and competition was the order of the day. Lying was as necessary as breathing, and no one felt it wrong to disparage the other for their exaltation. Dissension and contrary ideas were unpardonable, and infighting was permitted. In time, little rivalries began to form so that they could have increased freedom to act on behalf of the King. Anyone ambitious enough to seek the ears of the King was going to butt heads with the established gatekeepers of the court, who were all too willing to cut off their premature wings. The royal court was the definition of a toxic workplace culture.
As time flowed, recruitment and promotion came not by merit but rather by how they could satisfy an egomaniacal madman with a crown on his head and a throne to sit on. And, speaking of the king.
Keeping the king happy was more like trying to calm a raging storm. As the years went by and Saul the King became more established in his rule, he started behaving more and more like a petulant, attention-seeking child. His character filled the rumour mills of the palace. To start with, his angry outbursts were like volcanic temper tantrums whose only antidote was the reassuring flattery of sycophants—men whose calling in life was to overlook the glaring big egos and keep reminding them why they were the best thing since the iron chariot of Philistia. Those on the receiving end of his anger have claimed that King Saul looked less and less like a rational man and more like an impulsive beast.
With that personality, the king became more comfortable with people who saw things from his eyes. These people he placed responsibilities and gave them key leadership positions to fulfil his vision—or lack of—while also consolidating his power. His lack of emotional connections with people meant that anyone who contradicted him or fell below expectations did not receive a second chance to try again. The only problem was that Saul was too loose and unpredictable a person and too undisciplined a king to do any tangible things.
The man was known for cooking big projects and grand plans. But these things were always subject to his mood at that moment. So, on some occasions, they were completed. Sometimes, they hung in the air. But King Saul’s nature was not normal at all.
There were times when King Saul acted like someone who drank a gallon of coffee. In those days, he was a very hyperactive person—his mind was alert and articulated, his eyes would twitch uncontrollably, his hands were always touching something and moving, his legs danced a certain way while walking, his voice took a high pitch, and he was unusually gay and optimistic. When the king was in this state, he could be the most charismatic of men. It was easy to work under him—even though his heightened cheerfulness brought subtle pressure to deliver. He looked like a man with the world in his hands, with no one to hold him back from his pursuits, whether devil, man, or God. And he gave off the vibes of a motivational speaker. Oh, King Saul’s optimism combined with his sugarcoated mouth made men fanatical devouts of him. Saul was the man who could sell sand to a man in the desert. He was that good at convincing people in this state.
He would call his workers by name, greet them and talk to them like lost, old friends now reunited to do catch-up. On many occasions, he tended to be generous with the people, bringing unexpected, bountiful gifts that left their mouths agape and caused them to declare his praise. Did not David, his successor, mention that the king clothed the daughters of Israel with choice clothing and adorned their clothes with the best of jewellery?
And his plans and ideas. How grand were they, darkened by a covering of hubris.
There was something subtly fiendish about King Saul. Sure, he was likeable, and he had charisma in excess. But the question we should ask is, what did he think of his people? We already got a clue—how he mobilized the people in the light of the threat Nahash posed. But Saul was not doing this because he genuinely cared for the people and wished for their welfare. He did it to inflate his ego.
He was more concerned about the praises of the people. He loved it when people worshipped him and treated him as God. He may have tried to conceal it, but those under him saw how he desperately craved people’s approval. That was even the reason why he and Samuel had their clash, but more on that later. It was the tonic for his pride. Conceiving those grand plans was just an opportunity to receive an ego boost. Everything he did had a tinge of pride and pure defiance. Saul was a proud man; he had a mistaken sense of self-sufficiency and an assumption that he owed nothing to his past or roots. He was defiant; everything he did to rebel against God. The King of Israel was sponsored by the spirit of Babel.
It is why sometimes he had this imaginary burden of the nation on his shoulders. He felt and acted like the savior of the nation and the superman capable of taking the country to the heights of glory. Gone was the shadow-phobic, unassuming king-elect who did not know how to face his people. Instead, Saul descended into a man that could very well pose as the spiritual descendant of a certain Nimrod, the founder of Babylon.
There was times when Saul’s balloon of an ego forced him to re-interpret and overturn policies and commandments stipulated in the Torah by the God of Israel.
We do not know if this story is true—it was a rumour at the time—but there is a story about how an Israelite servant reported his master to the King on how his master made him work on the Sabbath. Under the Torah, it was illegal to work on the Sabbath, punishable by death. The Sabbath was a day the Israelites held as sacred. They observed it in remembrance of the covenant that YHWH had cut with them. The Sabbath was the seventh day of creation and the day God rested from His creative activity—that rest has not yet ended. Israel was to observe the Sabbath by not engaging in any form of work on that day. It was a way of helping them find time to rest and engage with their Maker.
You know what Saul did? He ordered the poor Israelite to work for the master and declared the holiday a work-filled day for everyone (it’s probably a rumour—Samuel would have challenged him or written about it). According to Saul, no one had the right to be lazy and rest when the country had not attained its era of glory. What nerve for the king to lay aside a tradition that ran for generations. The nerve of the king to claim to be God by blasphemously revising the policies of his Suzerain was the height of disrespect. But again, Saul’s madness knew no limits.
Perhaps the crowning moment of Saul’s craze—and the time God’s patience finally ran out—was in his estrangement with Samuel, his on-and-off mentor. As Samuel tells us, after the first conflict—the one that involved the Philistines, of course—YHWH decided to give Saul a second chance.
Years since that rift, Saul managed to deal decisive blows to several of Israel’s enemies to give them momentary peace. But now the time had come in God’s sovereign calendar to exterminate the Amalekites for the way they had opposed Israel after they left Egypt. When the Israelites were at Rephidim, which was around Sinai, the Amalekites attacked Jacob’s descendants. It was not like Israel had done something to provoke Amalek or that they were encroaching on their territory.
With Israel, God was about to kickstart His program for redemption for all of us to become His children, Amalekites included. By their actions, the Amalekites were trying to frustrate God’s purposes, clearly showing they were not interested. But it was much worse than that—if successful, their wickedness would have wrecked God’s plans (it wasn’t even possible) and the eternal salvation of all in jeopardy. In other words, their attack on Israel marked them as God’s enemy.
In addition, the Amalekites had years and centuries to repent of their coup attempts and be reconciled with God, as all of us do. But every generation that came from the attackers became more hardened and determined to terminate the Israel project. They harassed them in the Promised Land and were among those nations who made the Israelites’ honeymoon stage in Canaan a time of untold suffering and misery. For that and their numerous barbaric cultural practices, Heaven saw the ethnic group as a cancer that needed a brutal surgery. There was no way blood would not flow for their crimes against divinity.
And the unique privilege of being the Lord’s enforcer of justice fell on the lap of Saul as the king of Israel. The instruction was clear and precise: destroy every single thing relating to the Amalekites—their people, their cities, their property. Nothing was to remain of their culture and identity. Saul and his army were to ensure that the name “Amalek” was completely erased from history and the earth. Samuel had taken pains to expressly communicate to Saul what to do and not to do. You would have expected Saul to at least do something to impress God. But typical Saul…
As Saul wielded the sword of judgment, he did something he should have never done. Woe betides the man who puts the drawn sword back into his sheath! In doing so, the instrument of God declares that YHWH is wrong in executing judgment on this issue. How proud to say the Just One was wrong to make such a command or give such an opinion! Who are you to counsel the Holy, All-wise, All-seeing One? Where were you when He saw their secret and open acts? Do you have the eyes to see through their heart? Do you have the evidence He has in His hands? Do you have access to the violent thoughts running in their minds? Can you predict what they will do in the future if you let them be?
But Saul’s hubris was too blind to see this. It was a case of questioning whether God was good and just in decreeing what we know as ethnic cleansing.
But the thing is, it was a matter of instructions and not an issue of opinion or belief. You do not expect a soldier to express his displeasure at the ideology of his superior or the Commander-in-Chief. Which soldier questions the instructions of his commander? Military units are generally apolitical. That means their minds are to be a blank sheet that has no existing political theory, philosophy or ideology. The government determines what they believe and do, as God expects of all His people. Only civilians have those things. They owe their loyalty not to their convictions but to their leader and the country, whether or not his views are right or wrong.
It is a dilemma fighting a war that you think is not just. Do you think every soldier in Israel currently battling Hamas in Gaza agrees with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s views on the way the war is going? As brutal and distorted Putin’s idea of Ukraine is, you don’t expect his soldiers to mutiny against him. Their opinion does not count because it violates their oath to Russia. From the day you remove your civilian clothes, wear military fatigues and swear an oath to the Constitution, you lose the right to have an opinion. Your opinions, views, motives, ambitions, and beliefs count for nothing. Your allegiance is tied to the country and the leader, regardless of his convictions and character. If he decides to mobilize the soldiers against even the people, military ethics forbid the soldier to say no.
Saul knew this as vividly as any other military soldier today. He was a man of war and a commander; would he expect his juniors to refrain from shedding blood when he instructed them to? That meant they questioned his judgement, which was unacceptable. And yet, Saul did the same thing to God that no soldier dared do to him. As the soldiers massacred the Amalekites, Saul decided to spare a just few things—Agag, king of Amalek, and the best of their livestock. What effrontery coming from the King of Israel to defy the God that made him.
But Saul did not mind. Instead, he decided to spin the narrative to suit his ends. Rather than having a repentant heart, the king lied to himself and to the people that he had obeyed God and ordered a monument to be built in his name to crown his achievement of destroying the Amalekites. He kept telling himself until he believed it, even when it was not true. Is that not a symptom of madness?
With this event, Saul had done something unimaginable. He had mastered the ability to twist, pervert, and distort reality to his views till it suited his purposes. In that situation, the lie took hold of truth, silenced it, twisted it, choked it, and used it for its nefarious purposes. Every evidence to suggest otherwise is destroyed and buried to make it look like nothing happened. Any objective person observing the situation would have felt like a lunatic because what his eyes saw differed from what his ears heard.
In today’s society, we call it ‘gas-lighting’ and that is the trademark of wicked dictators and madmen. Twisting the reality to the point that it never existed. The consequences of this callousness are too dark to imagine. In such a world, truth and injustice will die and oppression will move unrestrained. The victors of conquest become free to construct the events of history as they see fit. Haven’t we heard that history is written by the victors? That we never have a chance to hear the account of the vanquished?
Saul was doing the very same thing. With the monument built, he could dictate how he wanted posterity and generations unborn to know and remember: the exterminator of the Amalekites, the terror of Agag, and the Anointed One of Israel. And which Amalekite was alive to let the real truth be known?
Indeed, living in denial and unreality is the chief characteristic of the madman. The lunatic refuses to see and agree with the truth. In his efforts to hide from truth and the consequences thereof, he refutes the truth. Afterwards, he develops the habit of distorting reality and bending it to fit his worldview, which is incoherent and woefully inadequate to fully account for the complexities that make up life. But the problem is that it is hard to convince them otherwise. They are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is how life should be, even when others see it differently. In their exclusive, intolerant state, they lash out violently against anyone who attempts to throw a brick at their worldview of glass.
But at the same time, they cannot live without this original state of affairs. So that puts them into a tension that they relax by simply fusing their beliefs with God’s truth. To do this, they take out the beautiful parts of truth—the parts they agree with—remove the parts they find unappealing or primitive and edit them using their beliefs to fill out gaps. After tearing and mending, the result is a caricature of reality that is nothing but syncretic.
Regardless, every madman is like a fish who refuses to stay in water because it finds that the water is too wet. As it tries to get off the surface onto land, it discovers that doing that is suicidal—the very survival of the fish and its flourishing rely on staying within the water. So, the best thing the fish can do is to pretend there is no water around it while still living in it.
But that is a hallucination when other fish use gills to breathe and fins to swim against the water currents. While every other person thinks the madman is mad for his syncretic view of reality, he sees himself as the right-thinking one—every other person who counters his views ought to be in the asylum instead. It is a sad state of self-delusion; hope is far from such a person.
This is why the combination of lunatics and power is a deadly cocktail of blood, violence, and carnage. We have seen this play out in brutal ways—Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, the North Korea of the repressive Kim dynasty, Russia’s war in Ukraine, Communist China, the war in Gaza, the slavery and colonization project in Africa, and many more untold tales of suffering, misery, and destruction. It is the fruit of Babylon.
But Samuel and God were not fooled.
Amidst the cheers of men and bleats of goats and rams, Samuel, the Lord’s spokesman, came to the soldiers' camp to see if King Saul had obeyed the instruction. What he saw made him burning with divine, righteous anger, and rightfully so. How can someone under instruction be this obstinate and decide to do what they like? So, what does the kingmaker do? He shut the king up—only a man who owed nothing to the king could do that.
The way to stop such a person is to prevent them from talking about their deluded unreality. Do not allow them to speak out their lies and force the truth out of them. Samuel took control of the situation, called Saul to a private meeting—in honour of him as the king and to prevent the people from publicly doubting Saul’s authority—and questioned the astonished king why he did what he did.
Of course, Saul refused to give in at first and stuck to his lie. He even brazenly mentioned that the soldiers had planned to sacrifice the livestock to God in appreciation of their victory. But that flattery was not enough to convince the prophet. So, the spokesperson said this in response:
1 Sam 15:22-23 NIV
"Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
To obey is better than sacrifice,
and to heed is better than the fat of rams.
For rebellion is like the sin of divination,
and arrogance like the evil of idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of the Lord,
he has rejected you as king."
In other words, Saul was now a figurehead king. As far as God was concerned, the throne was vacant. Now, He was on the lookout for a replacement.
Seeing the consequences of his actions, the king finally came clean and confessed his evil. But he didn’t accept responsibility. Instead, his vanity, desire to please people, and win the people's worship caused him to give in to the soldiers. Again, Saul keeps pushing the bounds of military commonsense. How on earth is that a tenable excuse? Here was the king of Israel and the commander-in-chief, for goodness’ sake. How could the people challenge his instruction? How could the people dare disobey him or say they wanted something else? Was this not the same person who so decisively forced and mobilized them to defeat Nahash? So, what happened?
His heart was blackened by sin. And this is why Saul had been increasingly funny over the years. But that’s not even the half of it.
To be continued…
UNIMPORTANT INFORMATION (For the curious cats)
Okay, so I get the question running in your minds. “Where did you get this in the Bible? Were you there? Did God take you to Heaven to see them?” Truth is, I didn’t get most of these things from the Bible. I simply studied Saul’s personality in the Bible and compared him to another world leader who had his tendencies. So, the parallel I used was Adolf Hitler whose personality and style of leadership were very, very similar to King Saul’s. The “Fuhrer” as he was called back then was a power-hungry, deluded person who tolerated no form of dissent and felt his view of life was the best. We see that in King Saul, in the way he dealt with Jonathan after the son told him David wasn’t attending the festival (of course Saul wanted to kill him). So even if it is not explicitly written in Scriptures since the author glossed over these things, it is very plausible that Saul’s civil service was toxic. Again, this is a reconstruction, not a factual description. Certain things may be wrong and that is fine—we are talking about people who lived four thousand years ago. But in all, I advise that you should READ YOUR BIBLE.
Nimrod was a man mentioned in the book of Genesis. He is regarded as a hunter, a great man before the Lord, and the founder of Shinar, that is Babylon. But someone is regarded as “great” does not mean he was good. His name means ‘rebel’ and that was all he spent his life doing. Biblical commentators, theologians, and scholars all unanimously agree that Nimrod was a hunter of men. He went after towns, villages, and nations and warred against them. After beating them, he made slaves of the survivors. Being the founder of Babylon, Nimrod was one of the chief figures in the tower of Babel. Babylon stands as a kingdom instituted on contradicting and perverting all that God stands for. Babylon is a virtual reality that has sin at the centre of its worldview. It makes sense, given that his name means rebel, to live deliberately set on challenging God’s authority. That spirit that spurred Nimrod has constantly found its way on different types of men in history.
I wrote a bit on the Amalekites. Stories like the destruction of the Amalekites tend to be uncomfortable subjects for people. Unbelievers cannot fathom why a good God would instruct someone to murder the other, and Christians find it difficult to explain to them why, or at the very best, they evade the issue. But it is the Bible and there is a reason God wants us to know them. And in time to come, I will offer a more comprehensive story on this issue. But I want us to trust God. He is just in His ways and accurate in His assessment of the situation. He would never do anything if it didn’t lead to some good in the end. And yes, I’m in 100% support of His decisions in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. They are very defensible.
On the two questions I posted two weeks ago, an answer will come next week. It will be a dose of theology. Don’t worry, you won’t sleep.
Recommended Reading
Story telling at its peak!
Lessons that get reinforced for me — ask questions, ask questions, ask questions people are uncomfortable asking and exercise due diligence to find the answers.
Not the one that sits well with you or not, but the truth