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DEALING WITH GOD PEOPLE GONE BAD

DEALING WITH GOD PEOPLE GONE BAD

Last updated on: October 22, 2026 at 9:31 am by Pastor Kelly M. Williams

DEALING WITH GOD PEOPLE GONE BAD 2026-10-22T09:31:21-06:00 Pastor Kelly M. Williams

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God people gone bad often don’t abandon their place in God’s kingdom or give up their positions of authority too quickly. Instead, they turn from God and start using their positions of authority and their influence to destroy you and what God has called you to do. They begin to influence those who once trusted you to destroy you and your effectiveness for the Lord. No one understood this better than young David with King Saul.

At an early age David just wanted to serve God and he was willing to sacrifice himself when it came to God’s place in his life. This is commendable. This is admirable. Most importantly, this is God-honoring. This is how every follower of Jesus should want to live their life for God. But unfortunately, there are people in God’s Kingdom who claim Him but go bad. And their “badness” somehow becomes your fault and your problem. Your “goodness” for God becomes a threat to expose their “badness.” And when this occurs, they must rid God’s kingdom of you, to maintain their position of authority and influence over others. They sadly see God’s calling on their life as a means of controlling the narrative of their significance in God’s kingdom. King Saul emulates this self-destructive behavior and takes it out on David after he courageously stands up to Goliath in the Valley of Elah.

God people gone bad will be threatened by the true righteous favor from God to you. Because your righteous favor from God becomes a threat to them being able to hide their secrets. King Saul had a secret. He disobeyed Samuel’s order from God and offered unauthorized sacrifice to God so he could go to war for God. And when he went to war, he refused to do what God asked him to do and allowed the people to horde the plunder that was meant for destruction. When Samuel confronted Saul, he simply said, “the people were scattering.” (1 Samuel 13:11-12) He then said to Samuel in 1 Samuel 15:30,

“…honor me now before the elders of my people and before Israel, and return with me, that I may bow before the Lord your God.”

God was no longer Saul’s God.

God people gone bad claim God for pragmatic reasons like Saul. They continue to perform the perfunctory duties of their calling, but their hearts have left the presence of Almighty God and His influence over their intentions. Their vision remains intact for God, but their hearts are far from God. They appear the same person externally but internally they have lost their will to obey God and to support those who do.

King Saul benefited from David’s victory in the valley of Elah over Goliath, but the people he represented began to sing songs of victory of David that eclipsed their songs of victory of him. 1 Samuel 18:7 says,

And the women sang to one another as they celebrated, “Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” And Saul was very angry, and this saying displeased him.

The spirit of jealousy appears to be one of the first things to take over. It appears to be where the God people gone bad go. Your obedience to God and other people’s reaction and praise to your obedience exposes the spirit of fear that has controlled their dominate actions.

When God people gone bad feel threatened by your obedience to God, they immediately leverage their relationships to silence you, control you, falsely accuse you, or simply discredit you. They do this maybe unknowingly to restore their world and those in it to fit the narrative they want everyone to first believe about them and to protect their secrets that threaten their own demise.

King Saul was fearful that David’s success would cost him his kingship position, so he leveraged his relationship with his own daughter Michael. 1 Samuel 18:20,

“Let me give her to him that she may be a snare for him…21 Saul said to David, “You shall now be my son in law.”

God people gone bad see the relationships around them sadly as a means to leverage against those who threaten them. These people trust the God people gone bad and turn on you, sadly. This secondary effect is often very demoralizing and destructive to you and your life. And the God people gone bad use these secondary relationships gone bad as a means to justify their defense against you. This is high level spiritual warfare orchestrated by the enemy himself, the Devil. He loves to kill, steal, and destroy the abundant life God has created for you and the relationships that are meaningful to your life. (John 10:10)

Eventually the subtle nature of God people gone bad gives way to blatant sinful demands of the relationships near them that they leverage to destroy you. 1 Samuel 19:1 shows this about King Saul to David,

“And Saul spoke to Jonathan his son, and to all his servants, they should kill David.”

The Enemy wants you dead and he will use God people gone bad to do it.

The subtilties of God people gone bad wanting to destroy you gives way to diabolical secretive tactics to eliminate you. 1 Samuel 19:11 says,

“Saul sent messengers to David’s house to watch him, that he might kill him…But Michal, David’s wife, told him ‘If you do not escape with your life tonight, tomorrow you will be killed”

This sort of diabolical secretive attack on your existence and God’s calling on your life can sadly, if you are not careful, turn you into a defensive God person tempted to go bad like them and go after them as they have gone after you.

I have found this temptation to be very real and easily justified in my mind.

This too is the work of the Enemy to destroy you as he uses them to destroy you.

David had numerous chances to kill King Saul. He wanted to. He planned to. But when the moment presented itself in a cave where Saul was relieving himself, he couldn’t do it. Had this courageous warrior for God become a wimp in God’s kingdom? Had he lost his Valley of Elah Giant killing swagger? David knew an important truth. David killed Goliath for God. David’s desire to kill Saul would have been for himself. Goliath was defiant to God and threatened to eliminate all of God’s people. David’s anger toward Goliath was God honoring. David’s anger toward Saul was self-honoring. David fought Goliath for King Saul. David’s fight with King Saul would have been for David. God had not called David to kill Saul. Instead, Saul represented God and secretly sought to eliminate David as a threat to his representation for God.

But here is the problem for King Saul, David was for God and Saul had become a God person gone bad.

Maybe David reasoned in his mind, “Saul will kill me. I am for God therefore God would have me kill Saul.” So, David approaches Saul in the cave to kill him, instead he just cut off part of his garment. Listen to David’s response to doing this in 1 Samuel 24:6,

“The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my Lord, the Lord’s anointed.”

David understood that he served God and King Saul represented God. David didn’t spare Saul because he thought Saul deserved it. He spared him because he feared God and respected God’s authority. He knew Saul’s anointing was from God and God would have to remove Saul from the place God had placed Him.

God people gone bad think God’s authority becomes their authority, and they can use it as they will. This is never the case with true God people seeking to honor and obey God and David knew this.

King Saul knew David was anointed by God but was willing to use his God position to eliminate God’s anointing in David’s life to protect his control over God’s kingdom. Fear consumes God people gone bad and they use their authority to pacify those fears through aggression toward those who threaten their grasp of control over God’s kingdom.

But this never works.

David straight up confronts King Saul in 1 Samuel 24:12,

May the Lord judge between me and you, may the Lord avenge me against you, but my hand shall not be against you. 13 As the proverb of the ancients says, “Out of the wicked comes wickedness.’ But my hand shall not be against you.’”

David confronted King Saul with the truth of God. David respected the anointing of God, the office of authority from God, and more importantly here he trusted the justice of God.

God is the avenger of the God people’s gone bad actions toward you as His representative in this world. The Lord says in Romans 12:19,

“Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’”

God is in the revenge business toward God people gone bad. He will take care of the injustices they have done to you at His appointed time.

David knows this and escapes to a safe place while he waits for God to act on his behalf.

Eventually King Saul stops pursuing him, but this does not eliminate King Saul’s problem.

David was not King Saul’s biggest problem, God was. 1 Samuel 28:6,

“…Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him, either by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets.”

King Saul knew he was called to do the Lord’s work and needed the wisdom of the Lord to do it, but God turned off the Divine spigot to Saul’s soul, and this paralyzed his ability to hear from Him and lead God’s people.

King Saul decided to go to a female medium, a fortuneteller, a necromancer to call up from the dead the prophet Samuel to tell him what to do for God.

It worked.

But not like King Saul hoped.

Samuel from the dead told King Saul in 1 Samuel 28:16,

“…the Lord has turned from you and become your enemy.”

Ah oh!

Then Samuel said in 1 Samuel 28:19,

“…the Lord will give…you into the hand of the Philistines, and tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me.”

The next day Samuel’s words came true. King Saul was badly wounded in battle by the Philistines and Saul took his own sword in 1 Samuel 31 and fell on it and killed himself. David defended Saul in the Valley of Elah and God took Saul’s life in the Valley of Jezreel.

Poetic justice wrought by God for His servant David.

If you are for God, God will eliminate in His time those God people who have gone bad against you.

Their departure will possibly be blamed on you, especially by those who feel the need to defend the reputations of the God people gone bad.

But the people for God, will rise and anoint you for greater works for the Lord as God did for David.

Let go of the malice in your heart toward the God people gone bad in your life and embrace the new anointing God has for this next season of your life.

Resign from the vengeance business and get back to serving the God of the Valley.

More giants await you!

And God’s people need you, again!

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