In Psalm 51, David’s wonderful prayer of repentance, he asked, “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me” (v 11). Clearly David was not indicating that the Holy Spirit could be entirely removed from him, seeing He had once come to dwell in his heart, for where God has begun a good work in anyone’s soul, that work will be completed. What then was David asking?
Let us begin by considering King Saul. We read that “the Spirit of God came upon Saul when he heard” that Nahash the Ammonite had encamped against Jabesh-gilead, ready to capture it (1 Sam 11). What we have here is the Spirit so working on Saul so that he, as king of Israel, was more able to resist the invader and carry out his other responsibilities as king. It was an enhancement of his natural gifts, not a case of being endowed with any spiritual powers – certainly not with saving grace. Clearly King Saul was not converted, with the Holy Spirit dwelling in his heart, giving him grace to fear God. The Spirit did not transform his life so that he would display a readiness to submit to God’s mind as expressed in the Scriptures and in the directions relayed through God’s prophet Samuel.
The Lord, through Samuel, directed Saul to destroy the Amalekite king, his people and their possessions, because the Amalekites had lain in wait for God’s people, the Children of Israel, after they had come out from Egypt. But Saul’s obedience was only partial; he heard God’s instructions and carried them out only as far as he himself saw fit. That is not how we are to behave, as if we were competent to revise God’s commands and had the authority to do so. But that is how most people react today; they will only accept God’s law as far as they can see that it is reasonable – as far as it conforms to human reason. But they are God’s creatures; that fact is what puts human beings under God’s authority. What is more, they are all fallen creatures; their thinking has been completely warped by sin; human reason is not at all reliable.
Following Saul’s disobedience, young David was anointed king in his place, and “the Spirit of the Lord came upon David” (1 Sam 16:13). But David not only received an enhancement of his natural gifts for reigning as king after Saul’s death, but the Holy Spirit had also come to work savingly in his heart, probably before he was anointed king. Thus he did truly live in the fear of God. And he went through life in dependence on the gracious, all-powerful God who had brought him out of Satan’s kingdom into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Matthew Henry comments, “The anointing of [David] was not an empty ceremony, but a divine power went along with that instituted sign, and he found himself inwardly advanced in wisdom and courage, and concern for the public, with all the qualifications of a prince though not [then] at all advanced in his outward circumstances. This would abundantly satisfy him that his election was of God.” By way of application, Henry goes on to make the point, “The best evidence of our being predestinated to the kingdom of glory is our being sealed with the Spirit of promise, and our experience of a work of grace in our own hearts”.
Dependence characterised the general course of David’s life, but he was not perfect – far from it, as we know from the account in Scripture of his sin with Bathsheba and his arranging to have Uriah killed. (These sins, of course, were what lay behind David writing Psalm 51.) But the Lord restored David, gave him repentance and forgave his sins; He did not take the Holy Spirit away from him entirely; that was impossible. Indeed we are told that “David did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord, and turned not aside from any thing that He commanded him all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite” (1 Ki 15:5).
On the other hand, “the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul”; the consequence was that he no longer possessed the special gifts which had enabled him to rule his country more effectively than his natural abilities would have made possible. Again we quote from Matthew Henry: Saul “having forsaken God and his duty, God, in a way of righteous judgement, withdrew from him those assistances of the good Spirit with which he was directed, animated and encouraged in his government and wars. He lost all his good qualities. This was the effect of his rejecting God, and an evidence of his being rejected by Him. . . . When men grieve and quench the Spirit, by willful sin, He departs and will not always strive.”
It was very obvious that the Lord had left King Saul to himself when, in the absence of any communication from heaven, he consulted a witch. When people are left to themselves, there is no telling how far they may depart from the truth, however loud their professions of religion may have been. No wonder David prayed, “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me”. So should we.
We may now glance at Samson. He had indeed a strange character, and we might well refuse to recognise him as an Israelite indeed if he was not named in Hebrews 11 as one who acted “through faith” and “obtained promises”. Samson lost his supernatural strength when he told Delilah the secret of it. It was no doubt through the Holy Spirit that Samson had been endowed with such remarkable strength, and we may conclude that he lost his strength because the Spirit was, in measure, taken from him. Again we may stress that the seed of saving grace was not taken away, but the special gifts with which he was endowed, to be used for the defence of Israel, were removed. Because the Spirit was not altogether removed from him, he was brought back, and his wonderful gift was restored to him, which he used in his last action on earth against Israel’s enemies.
Yet Samson’s life is a beacon for God’s children, for Samson loved Delilah, who presumably was a Philistine and so one of the Lord’s enemies. So believers should learn the danger of getting too close, especially emotionally, to those who are the Lord’s enemies because they still refuse to come to Christ. The danger is not that the Lord will take away His Spirit in the full sense of the term; that will never happen. But the Spirit may be withdrawn in a degree from believers who are careless about how they live and about their use of the means of grace, public and private.
What need we all have to pray, “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me”. Unbelievers should ask God not to take away the outward restraint He exercises on them through the Holy Spirit, so that they are kept back from many sins which they would otherwise fall into. And believers should join David in asking, as he did, that the Spirit would not be taken away from him, that they would be kept from turning back from the degree of godliness which the Spirit has wrought in their hearts and lives.
Finally we should ask that the Lord would not altogether take His Holy Spirit away from our communities, wherever we may live. Even if there is only one believer in that community, the Spirit dwells in that person’s heart. It is someone who, in one degree or another, should be a living epistle “known and read of all men”, showing something of what it is to live a godly life. And we should ask the Lord not to take His candlestick away from our community, assuming the pure gospel is still preached there.
Similarly we should ask the Lord not to take His Spirit away from whatever nation we belong to. Indeed we should recognise how ready God is, for the sake of Christ, to hear His children asking for greater things. We may ask that preachers would be sent out everywhere with the pure gospel, and for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in every place throughout the world. We should be encouraged to do so because David, though he spent his life under the dimmer revelation of the Old Testament, could pray, “Let the whole earth be filled with [God’s] glory” (Ps 72:19).