Did King Saul have a kind of "Death Bed" Conversion? Newly Discovered Augustine Sermons suggest... maybe?

Have you ever done something you knew was wrong, maybe or maybe didn't feel guilty about it at the time, but then saw in retrospect later that God had used that very failure as an opportunity to bring you back to Him?

There is an old Portuguese proverb that says God writes straight with crooked lines.

It is a comforting phrase until you actually think about what that looks like in a life.

What does it mean for the Author of history to compose meaning through the "all is lost" moment of the story? Even through the grammatical errors and misspellings, that is, our sin?

This brings us to one of the strangest stories in all of Scripture. And newly discovered sermons by St. Augustine actually suggest this might be what was happening there.

A King at the End of His Rope

King Saul is standing at the edge of ruin. The Philistines have gathered against Israel in overwhelming numbers, and Saul, once anointed and full of promise, is now a man haunted. The Spirit of the Lord has departed from him. Samuel, the prophet who anointed him, is dead. And when Saul inquires of the Lord, we are told, "the Lord did not answer him, not by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets" (1 Samuel 28:6).

So he does the unthinkable. He, who had earlier expelled the mediums and wizards from the land in obedience to the Law, now disguises himself and creeps into the darkness to visit a woman at Endor who consorts with the dead. “Consult a spirit for me,” he tells her, “and bring up for me the one whom I name to you” (cf. 1 Samuel 28:8).

The woman does. And to her own terror, Samuel actually appears.

The text doesn't give us as many details as we might like. That's surely by design. The woman isn't exposed as a fraud. It tells us she was genuinely startled. Because the man who appears was a prophet. And before a prophet, everyone involved stands condemned. When Samuel appears, he even drives home the point: "Why then do you ask me, since the Lord has turned from you and become your enemy? ... The Lord has done to you just as he spoke by me ... Moreover the Lord will give Israel along with you into the hands of the Philistines; and tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me" (1 Samuel 28:16-19).

Tomorrow. You and your sons. With me.

Saul falls prostrate on the ground. Out of fear. Also because he had eaten nothing all day and all night (cf. 1 Samuel 28:20).

The Question Theologians have Wrestled with for Centuries

This passage has perplexed interpreters throughout history.

Was it really Samuel? Was it a demon? How could God permit such a thing? Justin Martyr, Origen, and later Augustine all wrestled with it, and their answers do not all agree.

But there is a an intriguing way of reading this, which seems to be reflected in recently discovered sermons attributed to Augustine, that opens a door we might not expect to be there.

What if God permitted this in an effort to save Saul?

That doesn't mean God approved of the witchcraft, or condoned Saul's action going to the medium. That's necromancy. A grave sin. But what if God allowed Samuel to appear, despite all of that, so that the very sin might become a kind of rock-bottom for Saul? Saul had once chased all witches and necromancers from his kingdom. Now he consults them. We see that he's really fallen into such despair on account of his many sins that he's driven to what might be the most horrible of all of them. He falls to precisely the sin he once attacked.

That has to be something of a rock-bottom moment, a wake-up call. But it wasn't something Saul would have come to on his own.

Why would Saul have been seeking Samuel to begin with? Samuel had condemned Saul before. Perhaps, there was at least a part of him, that felt like this was a last desperate act not merely to get his way, to win a battle, but to save his soul. Maybe Saul didn't even realize it, it wasn't conscious. But God knows every part of us, our despair, our depravity, and He is not beyond descending into the depths of it to save us.

After all, the crucifixion of Jesus was the worst sin every committed by anyone in history. For God's people to reject God himself, and not just reject him, but to mock him, to consign him to a death reserved for cursed criminals, to actually murder God.

But that became in the end the very thing that God chose to enter into to save us from the very worst we might ever do.

That is a startling thought. Let it sit with you for a moment.

What if the last, worst, capstone sin of Saul’s long slow apostasy became the occasion for grace to finally find him? What if that's what God has done for us, too?

The Long Arc of a Falling King

To feel the weight of this, we have to remember what has come before. Saul’s story is tragic. But it's a tragedy that unfolds in slow-motion.

He offers a sacrifice he was not authorized to offer (1 Samuel 13). He spares Agag and the best of the Amalekite spoil against God’s command, and when Samuel confronts him, he blames the people (1 Samuel 15). He hurls a spear at David. He murders the priests of Nob. He hunts David through the wilderness for years.

Every chapter is a step into deeper sin, deeper depravity, and every step downward hardens him further.

By the time we get to Endor, Saul is a man who has spent his whole reign fighting for his own way, and ignoring the voice of God. And now, when he finally wants to hear, heaven is silent.

Not because God is spiteful, but because Saul has, through years of chosen deafness, made himself unable to hear.

And despite all of that, notice what happens next.

The Meal at Endor

After Samuel’s terrible pronouncement, the woman, the medium herself, becomes an unlikely instrument of mercy. She sees Saul collapsed and terrified, and she pleads with him to eat. She kills a fatted calf, bakes unleavened bread, and sets it before the king and his servants. And Saul eats (cf. 1 Samuel 28:21-25).

There is something haunting and holy about that meal. A condemned king. A woman whose trade was diabolical. Unleavened bread, the bread of affliction, the bread of Passover. It is a strange, dim, half-lit foreshadowing of another meal where a condemned man would break bread and speak of his own death coming the next day.

I do not want to press the parallel too far. But I do want to notice what the text is doing. It is not letting Saul die yet. It is giving him a meal. It is giving him a night. It is giving him hours in which the finality of tomorrow, the death he knew was coming, could burn through the last defenses of his heart.

What does a man think about in those hours? What does he say to God when he knows exactly how many hours he has left?

The text does not tell us. That's why this is ultimately an interpretation that can't be totally proven. As said, it's speculative. But I think Augustine was on to something. And having read a fair share of his writings, he tends to be right more often than not.

Scripture does not leave things hanging in silence without a purpose. Sometimes the brilliance of God's Word is precisely in that which it doesn't say. So the very uncertainty of Saul's eternal destination is a part of the point. It invites us to wonder, to hope. To consider. How far have I fallen? What If I were to hear that I had one night left to get right with God?

Because most of us don't receive that kind of extraordinary grace. Death itself comes like a thief in the night. It doesn't usually come with heralds. Sometimes people know death is coming, and they have an opportunity for a death-bed conversion or reversion. But that's not an opportunity afforded everyone. So what will we do with it now? Will we heed the voice of the Prophets, the Apostles, Christ Himself? Will we return to the Lord while we still have the time? Or will we remain at rock-bottom, in the pit, until the dirt covers us?

“Tomorrow You Shall Be With Me”

Here is the phrase that, based on what's been reported, opened the text to St. Augustine to think in terms of grace and hope: ”tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me” (1 Samuel 28:19).

With me. With Samuel. In Sheol, yes, in the shadowy realm of the dead as the Old Testament understands it. The place where Christ liberated the captive spirits and opened heaven to them.

But with Samuel.

Not cast into a separate darkness. Not cut off from the righteous. With the prophet who anointed him, who loved him. The prophet who loved him enough to call him out on his sin. The prophet who mourned for him even after their painful parting.

This is the phrase that has caused some ancient interpreters, and apparently Augustine, to hesitate before pronouncing eternal condemnation on Saul. It is thin evidence, and no one should build a doctrine on it.

But it is at the very least a crack, an opening, where grace might have entered. It's not not nothing. The prophet who condemns him also, in the same breath, seems to call him home.

Could it be that in those final hours, in the wreckage of everything he had tried to build by his own will, Saul finally did what he had refused to do for decades? Could he have wept? Could he have said, at last, the word he had never truly said: I have sinned, and I cannot save myself?

We won't know until we're in heaven and find out if he's there with us.

But the possibility is enough to make stand in awe at the unexpected mercies of God.

What This Means for Us

If you are still with me, I want to name what is at stake in this meditation, because it is not merely a curious interpretation about a difficult text and an Old Testament king.

It is about you. And it is about the people you love.

Some of us carry, somewhere in our heart, a private list of failures. Things we struggle to surrender to God. Sins committed. Words spoken. Doors slammed that we should have left open. Choices made in the panic of a moment we would give anything to have back. And most of us know, too, someone we love whose life has been a long series of Saul-like fallings away.

We have wondered whether grace can still reach them.

The story at Endor whispers that God in his deployment of His grace is more resourceful than we know.

Not that sin does not matter. Not that we should presume upon mercy. Saul’s story is a warning as much as it is a hope, a long tragedy of a man who ignored a thousand invitations before. A story of a man who committed what was the most blasphemous, if not the most grievous, of his sins when he was most desperate.

But it is also a testimony that even the last, worst, most humiliating collapse can be taken up into the mysterious economy of a God who will use even our failures, even the worst of them, in His never-failing desire to save us.

Saint Paul wrote: "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). The Fathers were quick to notice that Paul says all things. Not the good ones. All of them. Even the crooked lines. Even the ones we drew ourselves out of impure or, sometimes in extreme circumstances, evil motives.

Practical Steps for Living This

Let me offer three things we can learn from this. Three steps we might take to apply this lesson today.

First, examine your conscience tonight. Not only for individual sins, but for the small hardenings of your heart, the small movements away, that took you further from God than you'd ever thought you could go. Saul’s tragedy was not one moment at Endor. It was a decade of not listening. Ask the Lord to show you where you have begun, quietly, to stop listening. And turn around. Listen again.

Second, when you sin, do not run from the shame into further darkness, as Saul did. Run into it, toward the Lord. The distance between Saul and David was not the size of their sins; it was the direction they ran afterward. David sinned monstrously and wrote Psalm 51. Saul sinned and hid, blamed others, and finally consulted a medium. When the shame comes, don't wallow in it. Let it be rock bottom that, when you fall on your back in shame, you finally are looking up at the light that still shines down at you even in the depths of the very hole you dug yourself into. God has a reach of infinite length, and will gladly pull you out of that hole if only you fix your eyes again on His light, and take His hand.

Third, do not despair of anyone. Not of yourself in your worst memory, not of the loved one you have almost given up on. Pray for them by name tonight. If God could work even through the sins of a witch at Endor, and Saul's blasphemous turn to her, He is not less capable now. The God who used a forbidden séance to preach a final sermon to a dying king is more than able to reach into whatever ruined room your loved one is sitting in tonight.

The last thing Samuel said to Saul was, in effect, you are coming to me. Perhaps the last thing the Lord is saying, even now, to every prodigal is exactly the same. Come home. Even from Endor. Even from this. Come home.

The message here was never to minimize the sin. It is, in fact, precisely because the sin at Endor was so grievous that God finally descends into the very depths of the depravity of the moment to bring light in a moment that would otherwise be the darkest of all nights. Because if that's what it takes, if it takes the gravest failure you can imagine, to leave you on your back in the pit, seeing the light, God will allow it. Not because he approves of the evil. On the contrary, so that you can see, finally, that no evil is too great for our Lord to overcome in grace.

 

P.S. You can find today's message posted HERE>>>