Wait--An Evil Spirit Comes From God?

My daily prayer guide had me in 1 Samuel 16 this morning. Without going too far into the story: the Spirit of God departs from Saul, and an evil spirit from God torments him.

What?

I kept circling back to it all through my prayers. An evil spirit — a harmful spirit — from God. I thought God was all-loving. I thought no evil ever came from God.

Naturally I went looking for an answer. I’m sure people far more scholarly than I am have handled this well. I’m sure Biblical scholar Dan McClellan has a satisfying and appropriately lengthy explanation.

But this morning, the scholarly route wasn’t what my prayer wanted. So instead of soothing my analytical brain, I sat with a psychological reading.

Moment to moment, we choose where to direct our consciousness — and, consequently, our thoughts, our words, our actions.

When the environment around us is turbulent, that choice gets harder. A crime-ridden neighborhood. A war-torn country. A greed-saturated social media feed. It is remarkably easy to get pulled under into hopelessness, despair, even selfishness.

Spend a little time in contemplation and we remember that God is within us. That remembering is ballast. It holds us steady when the world is spinning wildly and out of control.

And on the mornings when we can’t perceive God within us? Simply noticing the anger, the greed, the envy, the lust is enough. Labeling a thought gives us power over it, rather than leaving it with power over us. The Buddha did this. He looked at Mara coloring the reality in front of him and said, plainly, I see you.

But let’s be honest. Sometimes those thoughts — Evagrius called them the logismoi — throw down so much cloud cover that we can hardly perceive God at all. And we are inventive. We find endless ways to occupy our minds and fill our hours rather than turn back toward the One who truly loves us.

That’s Saul’s story. He abandoned his divine role and chose himself over God. Somewhere in there, it started to feel like he had it handled — like he didn’t need God after all.

It’s a tempting thought. I’ve had it. Many times.

And remember: loving God is a choice. We have free will. We don’t have to love God, let alone serve God. But in loving and serving, we keep making more room inside ourselves for God to fill — which leaves less room for the logismoi.

I know, I know. Sometimes what’s required is a little discipline. The Philokalia calls it askesis. The yogis call it tapas.

As often as I tell myself I will write every morning before doing anything else, the gremlins have their own plan. First it’s the NYTimes app — just Wordle, just one puzzle. From there, a video about AI wellness influencers. I get so incensed that I must read the comments, and then I must write one. Where did those 20 minutes go?

It happens exactly like that. We find a hundred excuses not to be still, not to tend the divine garden, not to root out the weeds. And then we wonder why the logismoi have the run of the place.

It happened to Saul. He was anointed king. God set him at the head of the tribes of Israel — and then Saul went and built a monument in his own honor. Hmm. That sounds a little familiar.

Let’s take a few moments each day and examine our hearts. We won’t always get it right. The current of greed around us is strong and it carries people who never meant to be carried.

But we can notice it. And we can turn around.

That’s the beauty of a loving, forgiving God. There is always the chance to begin again.