New Excerpt: from Eli and His Sons

(This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Eli and His Sons.)

Our Own Saul

When we consider this spiritually in our own lives, when we come to God and do not yet know who we are, thinking it is about being good and obeying rules, etc., this “Saul” is who we want to reign over us. It is our own selves, our selves that we have always known ourselves to be, helped and improved by God and made into a fit and proper king. Impressive to our friends for our spirituality, and hopefully intimidating to our enemy, the devil. “Make me, Lord, be this and that. Here is this person that I am, Lord. O make me better, give me more love, more patience, more kindness.”

We want to stand up and be the one who is a head taller than everyone else. In our unconsciousness and immaturity, still having only a consciousness of flesh or independent self, we cannot help but think and pray this way. We do not know that we are praying for the kingship of a false hope, for a wisp of self that is a persona the devil has created. Oh, our real self is in there somewhere, and there is the anointing of God, but God is a God who grants our desires, even those which are wrong (in the short-run) sometimes for us, in order to bring us to the fullness of Himself by our failure. And that false independent self-relying self, like Saul, must fail.

Because that self thinks that “it” is where the holiness resides. It is a presumptuous self, a self that takes upon itself the right to sacrifice, thinking, wrongly, that itself is the life of God, in control, the decider.

Now let us step back a moment and consider Saul. He is first, as above, “goodlier” than any other in Israel is. He looks the part, and at first is humbled by the fact he has been chosen of God. Moreover, God puts His Spirit upon him, and anoints him king. Now, why is this so, if God already knew Saul was not going to work out?

This is where this purpose of God to bring us into consciousness of our sonship begins to be revealed. Saul, in ourselves, as I said above, is the false image of ourselves that we are born with, that we know as ourselves all our lives even into our new birth into Christ, and God honors it, anoints it, blesses it, leads it, thus granting our desires in order to finally bring that self to its own self-destruction, as Saul at Gilboa fell on his sword before he was overrun by the Philistines.

The first generation out of Egypt into the wilderness is the same. They are given the law and they all agree to keep the law, which of course they cannot do. They are presumptuous, rebelling against Moses who they think is no better than they are. They complain. Every time they are challenged they revert to their former selves they have always been, but are rescued by God anyway. Even after they refuse to go into the Promised Land the first time, afraid of the giants and great walled cities thereby receiving God’s curse on their generation, by which they must all perish in the wilderness and never see the Promise, STILL God leads them by His Spirit in the form of a cloudy pillar by day and a fiery pillar by night. God honors them, cares for them, leads them by His Spirit, feeds them bread from heaven, gives them Christ in the form of water out of a rock, yet they cannot come to the Promise. They were born in Egypt and are perpetually in consciousness only flesh, so that they cannot touch the mountain of God.

And Saul is this same first generation, ourselves in false independence but which we in our wrong consciousness think is what and who God blesses and uses. And for a time God goes along with that. He blesses this false self, loves it, anoints it, even while it presumes upon itself its own deity. Not consciously in the sense that it believes it is God, but unconsciously in a de facto sense, because its lifelong independence is something it cannot part with, it MUST remain the chooser, the doer, the decider, thereby making itself as God. The false self created by reaching out and taking the fruit cannot change. It can only die – and the moment of its death comes from no effort or resolution of our own, simply because it dies the moment it sees that it never has been in the first place.

How does that happen? When we see Christ our Light, in His totality as our True Self, He in us as one person with us, there is no more room for that false independence. It was actually darkness, and the moment Light shined on it, it dissipated, because it has been a lie about who we are the whole time. But just like that, it’s gone! Not through years of prayer and fasting. Not through self-flagellations. Not through calloused knees bent in constant prayer. Not by daily “dying to self.” It is none of that. It is simply the gift out of heaven from the Lord Jesus, of our true selves, which in our death, we found them hidden in Him, and once we know this New Self is really and truly ours – ours without restraint, it irradiates the entire universe with cleansing and life-giving Light. The devil’s boogieman darkness is gone!