It's so easy for us to get together and appoint a King Saul.
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INDEED! Seen it happy multiple times.
And, even a good leader who starts out well and even may be humble and anointed . . . can get puffed up by the miracles God may do through him or her . . . and then become useless or even a liability to the Body of Christ.
God has a history in Scripture of laying such folks aside and/or disciplining them quite seriously. At least He tends to lift the anointing and give it to someone else--if He can find someone--or just withdraw it from blessing mankind, if He can't.
Then explain why He hasn't destroyed the Papacy?
Why didn't David kill Saul when Saul used the cave in which David was hiding to relieve himself?
Why did Paul retract his statement in Acts 23:5?
Here's the danger. If God might just at any time "lift the anointing and give it to someone else", then we would have no way of knowing who has the anointing. Throughout all of redemptive history, "the gifts and calling are irrevocable" (Rom 11:29). That notion that God might just (or maybe just did) "lift the anointing and give it to someone else", disconnects form and matter, word and witness, spirit and sacrament. It is a form of gnosticism that completely undermines the possibility of Church authority, for everyone gets to determine on his own who has the anointing, and that is an entirely subjective endeavor. But Jesus *breathed* on the Apostles. And the Apostles *laid hands* on the bishops. There was a physical endowment of the ordination authority they received through this sacramental act. The Church has always taught that no one who has been validly ordained can be unordained, just as one who has been baptized cannot be unbaptized (even if he renounces his baptism). If he repents and returns to Christ, he is not to be re-baptized, because his baptism remains with him eternally. And so does his ordination gift. That is (in part) why Paul tells Timothy not to be hasty in the laying on of hands. Sacraments cannot be undone.
-A8