You are listening to the Passion City Church DC podcast to learn more about

Passion City Church, including our gathering times in Atlanta and Washington DC.

Visit us online at passioncitychurch.com. Today's talk comes from Pastor Ben Stewart.

While we're looking today at King Saul, and King Saul, if you don't know, is sort

of the antithesis of King David, who will begin to look out for the rest of the

season. King Saul is the anti-hero to David in some sense. He is the foil, the

Anakin Skywalker, before David's Luke Skywalker. We're gonna see a tragic

hero. Macbeth, Hamlet, Gatsby, Michael Corleone, Scarface, Walter White,

tragic heroes. We're all familiar with these stories. I don't know which one was yours,

but all of us know the arc of a tragic hero. They're the protagonist of the

story. They start with such potential, but they've got a tragic flaw and that

flaw plunges them into chaos and into ruin. And what we're gonna see today is not

the modern gangster tragic hero, not the European English hero. We're gonna go

all the way back to the OG original Hebrew tragic hero, Saul. And I don't know

about you. In high school, I didn't like studying tragic heroes. It was always so

depressing because it scared me because I knew my own flaws. And as my story was

unfolding, I'm like, I don't want the worst things about me to sink me. And yet

that's the gift of passages like this. As we're gonna watch Saul's arc turn

down, it gets to be a warning for us so that by the grace of God we go a different

way. But if you're just picking up in the story, we're in the Old Testament. And

in the Old Testament, the people of God, we saw they were enslaved in Egypt and

God by the grace, his grace set them free. And as they wandered through the desert,

...