The Rational Spirit

There was a time in ancient Israel when God refused to answer the prayers of King Saul. Saul prayed and fasted but God did not respond through any of the traditional means of dreams, visions or even the prophets. Now it should be noted at this point, that God had suffered long with Saul’s wickedness including two attempts to murder David, a man God loved, and his refusal to execute the King of Amalek, one of the most evil men on earth.

So the prayers of Saul, even though accompanied by a fast, were not enough to convince God to respond. I guess even the patience of God has an end.

In desperation Saul consulted a woman with a familiar spirit, otherwise known as the Witch of Endor. The woman was able to bring up the spirit of Samuel the Prophet who told Saul that he and his sons and all the army of Israel would die in battle the next day.

There are many questions that arise from this story but I want to deal with only one. Why did Saul go into battle knowing that he would die? Why not pack up the army, return home and live to fight another day?

There is a strange characteristic of human beings that causes us to respond in irrational ways when we become part of a machine. We lose, as it were, the ability of critical thought, a key characteristic of free men.

In a rather famous experiment in 1961 students were instructed to give electric shocks to fake subjects who answered questions incorrectly. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist from Yale University designed the experiment just after the beginning of the Nazi War Criminal Trial in Jerusalem of Adolph Eichmann. He wrote, “I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.” In reality no shock was being given. The student who thought he was administering shocks was the focus of the experiment. The experimenters wanted to know how far the average person would go in obeying orders. The dial controlling the supposed volt meter ranged from “mild” to “Danger: Severe Shock.” Experimenters speculated that ten per cent of the students would follow directions to the extent that death would result. They were surprised by the findings.

Approximately two-thirds of the people were willing to inflict enough voltage to cause the subject to die. Milgram’s conclusion was that “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.^”

It is sad enough that average people will follow orders to kill innocent humans. But there’s a strange irony about the death camps of Germany. One of the questions that arose from the holocaust is how a relative handful of German guards could kill eleven million people. The sheer number defies logic: a few thousand killing millions! The truth is that it required the help of those being killed. There weren’t enough Nazi guards so Jews were used to herd fellow Jews into the gas chambers. And they did it knowing that they too would one day be victims of the same fate.

Why do human beings react this way? What is it about the “system” that makes us act like automatons? Well, humans have a need for structure. We need laws that define the boundaries of right and wrong. But right and wrong is determined by a higher source than human courts. If a man does not connect with the Spirit of God, he is doomed to a life in subjection to tyrants.

King Saul was never willing to listen to the Spirit of God. He was too caught up in his own power structure. God had been talking to Saul for several years but he had turned a deaf ear. No wonder then, he could not respond to the last warning of his life, that the battle the next day would be his last.

This Sunday Christians will observe Pentecost, the day when the Spirit of God was first poured out on individuals from a variety of backgrounds. It is the same Spirit that has revealed the Laws of God, the true boundaries of life, to those willing to listen and respond. We acknowledge by this observance that the Spirit of God is that rational Spirit that reveals right and wrong. And that “as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.” (Romans 8:14)

Until next time,