1 Samuel Lesson 8
Idols and Carnality – 1 Samuel 7
This is the last section of the first large introduction to the book of
1 Samuel; you’ll recall that the first seven chapters of this book are an
introduction to both 1 and 2 Samuel because these first seven chapters show us
what God is doing to prepare the nation for a transformation from simple tribal
confederacy to a monarchy, and during these seven chapters God is constantly
preparing in all the little details, making sure that when the transformation
is begun that it will be successful.
We’ve seen in 1:1-2:10 how God caused Samuel to be born. This was the first step because obviously you
have to have a leader before you can have followers. Then in
But the most important thing about this chapter isn’t just that God
gives a token deliverance to the nation but rather that it shows you the
principles of confession and restoration in the Christian life because we have
here in these verses an account of how the nation confessed their sin nationally
and how the nation was restored nationally.
And the very same principles that
So God the Father, for example, foreknows us, He predestinates us, He
calls us, He justifies us, He glorifies us and He disciplines. Those are at least six things that God the
Father does for us as believers. He does
those whether we like it or not, whether we are with it or not, whether we are
dragging our feet or not, whether we are scintillating personalities or not,
whether we’re educated or not, it doesn’t make any difference, all these things
that God the Father does He does for every believer. And it does not depend on what kind of local
Christian group you happen to be affiliated with, as long as you have
personally accepted Christ as your Savior, then God the Father does these
things for you.
Now God the Son also does things for us.
First of all He furnishes absolute righteousness; He furnishes us a
death or an exit from this world into the next; He furnishes us with
resurrection or an entrance into the next world; He furnishes us with many
other things, including intercession where He daily makes intercession for us
to apply the work of His cross on our behalf; He is seated at the Father’s
right hand and by the doctrine of the session Jesus Christ has reign over
principalities and powers, over the rulers of the darkness of this world. So Jesus Christ does many things and we’ve
listed five that He has done.
Then God the Holy Spirit has regenerated us, He indwells us, baptizes
us, seals us, gives at least one spiritual gift and also makes intercession for
us. So we have six things that God the
Holy Spirit does. These things are
positional truth; they never change. But
what does change in your Christian life in two ways, is what we call the bottom
circle; the bottom circle is the sphere of fellowship that we have at any given
time, so that at any given moment in your Christian life you are in it or out
of it. If you are in fellowship that
means that at that moment in that area of your life you are doing to the best
of your knowledge the will of God, and this means that you have blessing and it
means that you can be relaxed and have peace.
And that is when you are in fellowship.
When you’re out of fellowship then obviously you don’t have these things
and discipline will accrue to your account if you stay out for too long. So you
have then, this problem of in fellowship/out of fellowship, and then you have
the growth problem because as you grow then the area in which you can have
fellowship with the Lord increases as you become a stronger believer. You have confidence in the truth over a
larger and larger area of life.
Now, the nation
So tonight we’re studying how the nation gets back in fellowship. To appreciate the problem we have to get some
background and review, so turn back to Judges 2:11. In Judges
And by the way, when you read this chapter you are reading the first
history book ever written in the history of the human race. This is actually the first analysis of
history ever made. You can read
Chronicles, for example, that is just strict narration of dates, such and such
happened at such and such a time, such and such happened at such and such a
time. But that’s not history, that’s
just sheer narration of data. But Judges
is the first book ever written in the history of man to analyze, put these data
and come up with something that shows us a picture where history is going. And the writer of Judges had three points in
his outline that he saw history moving.
First verses 11-13, “And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of
the LORD, and served Baalim. [12] And they forsook the LORD God of their
fathers, [who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods,
of the gods of the people who were round about them, and bowed themselves unto
them, and provoked the LORD to anger. [13] And they forsook the LORD, and
served Baal and Ashtaroth.]” They forsook the Lord and served Baal, so the
first thing he noticed is that the nation goes on negative volition and
therefore goes into apostasy. So the first
step in his historical analysis is the rise of apostasy in the nation, where
the nation officially, in their religion, goes over to worshiping idols and so
on. Now keep in mind the Christian life. This would be analogous to you as a believer
getting out of fellowship and getting out of fellowship by rebellion and then
picking up something to fill the gap, such as various human viewpoint schemes
and so on. So here’s the picture of a
believer out of fellowship.
Then the writer of Judges says in verses 14-15, he said the next thing
that happened is that “the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, [and He
delivered them into the hands of spoilers who spoiled them, and He sold them
into the hands of their enemies round about, so that they could not any longer
stand before their enemies.
[15]Whithersoever they went out, the hand of the LORD was against them
for evil, as the LORD had said, and as the LORD had sworn unto them; and they
were greatly distressed.”] Namely because God is a personal God, He reacts
personally, and He can get angry. This
is something we have seen with the Psalm series; so the second step in this
historical outline is discipline, that God disciplines the nation, He becomes
angry at the nation and there’s a personal reaction in the Godhead to something
that happened.
Now I’m stressing this point over and over again because if you will
understand that God can get angry at what you do it is good news, not bad news,
because if you can understand why God can get angry at you, you will understand
that you are so significant that you can make the God, the Creator and
sustainer of the universe, angry. Now
this will do something for you because the playing out of this truth in your
life should have telling force because you should understand that if you are so
important that what you do is important to God, then obviously you are a very
important person and therefore obviously you do not have to seek the
approbation of everybody and anybody.
Every person in the plan of God is a VIP from God’s perspective. This means that when God looks at the
believer He has invested something in the believer and He is vitally interested
in the believer. Here, instead of an
elected individual you have an elected nation and so God is very interested in
this elected nation.
Now verses 16-19 here we have deliverance [“Nevertheless the LORD raised
up judges, who delivered them out of the hand of those who spoiled them. [17] And yet they would not hearken unto
their judges, but they played the harlot with other gods, and bowed themselves
unto them; they turned quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in,
obeying the commandments of the LORD, but they did not so. [18] And when the
LORD raised them up judges, then the LORD was with the judge, and delivered
them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge; for it
repented the LORD because of their groanings by reason of them who oppressed
them and vexed them. [19] And it came to
pass, when the judge was dead, that they returned, and corrupted themselves
more than their fathers, in following other gods to serve them, and to bow down
unto them; they ceased not from their own doings, nor from their stubborn
way.”] This was his third step in his
writing of history and after the nation underwent a chastening experience it
would turn out that somewhere along the line the light would turn on and they’d
realize, you know, we’re not having the blessings of God because we’re just in
rebellion against Him, I think we ought to straighten things out, so they go on
positive volition and they are delivered.
So this is a three point outline on the first history book man has ever
seen: apostasy, discipline and deliverance.
Now that cycle is repeated over and over and over again in the book of
Judges, except the last judge. Now the
last judge in the book of Judges is Samson.
Samuel is not there but Samson is.
Samson and Samuel are pretty much of the same era, they judged about the
same era, both are considered the Philistine menace, and so on. Now Samson was given a very interesting
command in Judges 13:5, when God raised up this man with this gift of
leadership it says something about Samson than it did about all the rest of the
judges. In other words, in every other
case the judge, when he was raised up by God, would act as a leader of liberty
in the nation; he would bring the nation out from servitude and give freedom
back to the people. And Judges 13:5,
however, says, this is instructions to the mother, “For, lo, no razor shall
come on his head; for the child shall be a Nazirite unto God from the
womb. And he shall begin to deliver
Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.”
The key word with Samson is the word “begin.” And it means that Samson is not going to
finish the deliverance. This is an
unfinished beginning, and this judge, the last one, never finishes the
job. Tonight you are about to see one of
the completing steps to what Samson started. Samson started it, Samuel carried
it on, and finally you are going to have the kings finish it. But Samuel is going to give us an idea of
what this is going to work out to in history.
So turn to 1 Samuel 7:2 because we did verse 1 last week. Verse 2, “And it came to pass, while the ark
abode in Kiriath-jearim, that the time was long; for it was twenty years: and
all the house of Israel lamented after the LORD.” Now, the lamenting after the Lord is a sign
of national awakening; it is something that never occurred in the book of
Judges. All the time we read the book of
Judges we had the lament all right, an we had these cycles of deliverance, but
when we got down to the last one we had the nation go down and there was no
deliverance because there was no sign of confession, there was no sign that the
nation wanted to deal drastically with its sin and wanted to get right with the
Lord so therefore no deliverance.
Now this is the first verse you will read where you see something is
happening spiritually. What has
happened? Obviously the previous two
chapters, 5 and 6, have something to do with this lament. Why did the nation lament? The reason the nation lamented was, among
many other reasons, obviously due to God the Holy Spirit illuminating them, but
one of the things that God the Holy Spirit showed them from chapters 5 and 6 is
that God was able, if the ark could be delivered without the help of the armies
of Israel then obviously there was no problem with God; God was able. So therefore the Holy Spirit used the incident,
humorous though it was, God used the incident to show the nation that if they
are still in bondage, guess whose fault it is.
It’s not God’s fault, God hasn’t abandoned them. They have seen the work of God in front of
their eyes. And since they have seen
this then they are convicted, they are brought to a fresh conviction that the
reason why they are in bondage is because of their own foolishness. And this precipitates this national lament.
Now we can see this very often in our lives as believers because you
know as well as I do when you are out in the toulies here and you are out of
fellowship as a believer the last thing you want to meet is a believer that’s
really going with the Lord because he comes bouncing along and either you
bounce with him or you just are completely repelled. And when you are out of fellowship and you
are wallowing in your carnality, you can go one of two ways and this is why you
really don’t like to see God active in another life because it forces you to go
one way or the other. When you see a
believer that’s with it whose actively claiming the promises of the Lord, whose
being blessed and so on, it makes you want to either get back with the Lord and
enjoy the blessing too or you begin to resent it and you develop bitterness and
hatred, etc. and this increases your rebellion against the Lord and you’re
worse off after than before. So this
incident of chapters 5 and 6 is analogous in our Christian life to the
incidence when we see a believer that shows signs of spiritual life and comes
around just at the wrong time.
Now verse 3, “And Samuel spoke unto all the house of Israel,” during
this crisis that had been precipitated by chapters 5 and 6, after the aftermath
of the battle of Aphek, “Samuel spoke unto all the house of Israel, saying, If
ye do return unto the LORD with all your hearts, then put away the strange gods
and Ashtaroth from among you, and prepare your hearts unto the LORD, and serve
Him only; and He will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” Now Samuel’s first message is that you will
return to the Lord with all your heart goes back to the principle of
Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26. These
two chapters promise the nation two things: both Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus
26 say that, first of all, if the nation goes on positive volition and makes
Yahweh or Jehovah the King, then that nation will be blessed. They will have military victory, they will
have economic prosperity, they will occupy the land, and they will have a great
testimony in the world.
If, however, the nation goes on negative volition, then Yahweh is not
going to be the King but the Gentiles will be their king and obviously the gods
behind the Gentiles, who are demons. And
the demon forces will activate entire national entities and these national
entities will be the ones who rule and take the place of Jehovah as King. So therefore in place of military victory
they will have military defeat; in place of economic prosperity they will have
economic catastrophe; in place of occupation of the land they would be thrown
out of the land; in place of a testimony to the world they would be something
very repulsive to the world. And both
those chapters, Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 offer them the choice of this
thing. Right now they are experiencing
this because the Gentile nation that’s over them are the Philistines. So the nation is out of fellowship and they
are experiencing this and they know why and Samuel knows why. And he says listen, Israel, if you if you
will get this straightened up, if you will get your heart attitude straight God
will take care of the rest.
So this is why he says, “If ye do
return unto the LORD with all your hearts,” this includes the mental attitude,
and the mental attitude that is of most concern here is the mental attitude of
loyalty or submission. Now this is the
one key spiritual attitude in the Christian life. Jesus said if you love me you will do what I
told you to do and what I told you to do is in the Word of God. So the way of measuring one’s mental attitude
is to measure it against an objective standard and that objective standard is
the Word of God. So the key to the
attitude reversal here is from rebellion to submission; it’s not passive
submission, it means submission to Jehovah as the right King. There’s an active submission.
So Samuel says, “If ye do return unto the LORD,” and this is in the
participle form, in other words, if you are about to be doing this, it’s what
is known as a future in stem participle which looks at action that is about to
occur, here the observer is and the action is about to occur, Hebrew
participle, continually. So he says if
you want to go through the process of returning to the Lord with all your
heart, then let me give you advice on where to start. Now the first thing we learn about this by
way of principle in the Christian life is that after we are out of fellowship,
the longer we have been out of fellowship, we kind of stir up a whole area of
carnality; that has to be dealt with.
And the further out that we go the more intense this becomes until
finally out here somewhere, if we get really out, then somewhere in here we can
have even a stream of demonic oppression.
In Israel it was done through the nation, it was the Philistine
oppression.
I want you to watch what’s happening here; here you have carnality, a
person is out of fellowship, the longer they’ve been out of fellowship the more
accumulated stuff they’ve got in their minds, all this time they’ve picked up
human viewpoint, they’ve picked up –R learned behavior patterns and they’ve got
quite an accumulation. It is true that
we can be restored to fellowship instantly but this passage warns us that it is
a process of coming back. In other
words, you can start to go back immediately, you can be filled with the Spirit,
but that doesn’t mean that it’s all over in a moment of time. It means that if you have been out of
fellowship for some time that you can get back in fellowship but you’re going
to have to kind of do some crawling to get back out from under all this
pile. And so this Hebrew participle
means that it’s going to take Israel some sequence of acts before they get
reestablished again. And so Samuel gives them one thing they can start with,
and that is to physically remove these idols, just get them out of the
way.
Now this sounds like sanctification by works but if you turn to Matthew
5:23 you’ll see where this operates in the Christian life. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount gives the
same principle, and it says: “If you bring your gift to the altar, and you
there remember that thy brother has ought against thee, [24] Leave there thy
gift before the altar, go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and then
come and offer thy gift.” Now why does Jesus
say that? Does this mean that we have to do things in order to be
restored? No, that’s not the thing at
all. Let’s look at the sequence. Here’s a believer, we’ll start with a
believer out of fellowship and he comes on down and he runs across an incident
in his life, something precipitates an illuminating effect of the Holy
Spirit. The Holy Spirit is finally
making him miserable enough so you realize it’s not God’s will that I be this
way, it’s not God’s will that a believer walk around depressed, it’s not God’s
will that a believer fall apart at the drop of a hat, this isn’t the kind of a
life that God has designed for the Christian.
And so finally he wakes up and sees obviously I’m out of it, I’ve got a
problem somewhere along the line here.
So the first thing is an awareness and he finally realizes the problem
is negative volition and he deals with it, he says all right Lord, I’ve been in
rebellion against what you have wanted me to do. This puts him back in fellowship, so from
this point on he’s in fellowship.
Now in Jesus’ example here this is the person who comes to the
altar. Why is he coming to the altar in
the first place? With his sacrifice because he’s being restored. So the person in verse 22 has already come
into fellowship. He doesn’t have to
get in fellowship by doing
something. It’s all grace, but notice
what happens after he is restored to fellowship. This is why Jesus says therefore if you bring
your gift to the altar and you there
remember. Now the question you should
ask, looking at verse 23 is why didn’t the person remember before he got to the
altar? Why is it that he didn’t remember
this thing until after he got to the altar.
Answer: because when he got to the altar the Holy Spirit was giving him
further illumination and the more the Holy Spirit would illuminate his mind… by
illumination we don’t mean the Holy Spirit is giving you secret messages, don’t
buy this stuff where God spoke to me and He said something. Last time God spoke anywhere was to the
apostle John when he wrote the book of Revelation. All since then is not revelation but
illumination and illumination does not mean verbal communication by an audible
voice. What it means is that God
illuminates your mind to see things that are there already.
In other words, as an illustration, you go through the Bible, you read a
passage, you come back to the passage tomorrow and read it again, read it
again, and maybe the fourth time through all of a sudden you see, wow, look at
what it says there. Now it said that all
along, the data hasn’t changed but you changed.
In other words, your perception has increased so you see what was there
all along; that’s illumination. And how
the Holy Spirit guides us apparently is because in the content of our minds we
have human viewpoint, we have divine viewpoint, a mixture, and what happens is
the Holy Spirit works to illuminate a certain thought here, a certain thought
there and thereby he guides us. But
don’t call that revelation because technically that has nothing to do with God
speaking to you in the way that God spoke to people in the Old Testament. The canon is closed. Now if God spoke to you as to Moses on Mount
Sinai or Paul on the Damascus Road you’d know it. And no one has had that experience so no one
has had God speaking to them. God has illuminated them and if you want to use
the word “speaking” for that, fine, but be careful because you’re using the
word out of its Biblical context. It’s
all right if you’re careful but just be careful you don’t give someone the
wrong impression.
So the Holy Spirit illuminates.
Now this man comes to the altar, he is now in fellowship, positive
volition, he’s about to worship the Lord, he’s about to… all of a sudden the
Holy Spirit says hey, what about that little argument you had with the other
believer. And so in his mind… it looks
like this, one moment the Holy Spirit has illuminated this much of his mind and
down inside the area that’s not illuminated is this thing that he’s repressed
and suppressed for some time, and so as he comes to the altar the Holy Spirit illuminates
his mind and all of a sudden this stuff appears. Now it appears to his conscious mind, it was
there all along, but as the Holy Spirit increases his perception that thing
becomes exposed.
Now this is why Jesus says to handle it, it says “leave there thy gift
before the altar,” in other words, just stop what you’re doing and deal with
that, get that thing straightened out.
If the Holy Spirit has put a thing on your mind and it’s true guilt and
not just guilt feelings, if it’s true guilt, a very simple solution, and that’s
just simply obey what he’s trying to tell you.
Amazing how the guilt disappears.
But on the other hand you can be like Eli, remember good old Eli, he
just sat there all day long worrying about his guilt. He was a typical believer, he knew what was
wrong, he had all these guilt feelings and he sat there day after day, oh I’m
so miserable, gee, I’m miserable, I’m not right with God, God hates me, the
world hates me, all the other believers don’t like me and this thing goes on and
on. But Eli sat and did nothing, until
finally the news came that God had disciplined his sons and he flipped over and
killed himself in a very unique way.
This was Eli, and a lot of believers are like that. But Jesus says don’t be like that, if God the
Holy Spirit is making an issue out of something, then take care of it, that’s
all; it’s very simple, just take care of it.
Now, turning back to Samuel you’ll see how this works out because the
nation has got to do this on a large scale and there are several things that
they must do and it’s in that spirit that Samuel says in verse 3, put away the
idols, that’s one thing. So obviously by
this time, if you want to diagram the whole nation, the nation has been on negative
volition, they’ve come up to the boundary, they are now on positive volition;
they’re back in fellowship. On the other
side of the fence, after they’ve come into fellowship, they have a
problem. Their first problem is right
here, God says all right, now you’re back in fellowship, you know what I want,
get rid of those idols; get rid of them.
And at this point they could bounce right back out of fellowship. Now this is why recovery of a Christian after
a long term out in the toulies is a delicate thing because what happens is that
God the Holy Spirit brings these things up and every time the Holy Spirit
brings something up there’s a threat, and every time the Holy Spirit brings
something up it means that we can say no, we can do what 1 John 1:10 says, “if
we say we have not sinned we make Him a liar and His truth is not in us.” In other words, we can very easily get out of
fellowship. In fact, when you go back
into fellowship it’s very quick to get back out again, almost immediately
because you get back in fellowship, God brings to your mind awareness of things
that are not right and you rebel, back out again; then you come back in
fellowship, you’re aware of it, bang back out again, instead of handling the
thing biblically and Scripturally. The Bible’s
way is not to suppress it; the Bible’s way is to trot it out and deal with
it.
So this is the problem. The first
one is get rid of the idols, this is what Samuel is saying. This is not to be confused with
sanctification by works. They are not
going to be spiritual because they do this; they already are spiritual and so
Samuel says since you are, and if you are returning with the Lord, if you
really are, then let’s get rid of this stuff.
That’s the first thing. So this
is the beginning of a long process, a long process of time.
The other thing that I want you to pick out of verse 3 which you can use
in your Christian life, is the fact that
this thing of getting the idols involves an overt action. Remember Jesus in Matthew 5:23, there’s an
overt action. What do we mean by an overt action? Because there are two things in your
Christian life, there’s the mental attitude and there’s an overt action. When
you came back into fellowship and God lays something on your heart that ought
to be corrected, you will find that if you will actively do it, whatever it is,
physically do it, then you have enforced the mental attitude and you move
on. Now this is not always possible, you
have to be flexible, this is not always possible because sometimes it’s a
fouled up mental attitude problem but even then you can find something that you
can do that will physically and overtly testify, so to speak, to God that you
mean business. Now this is not a vow,
not a New Year’s resolution, you don’t make vows in the Christian life, that’s
not the idea. The idea is that you see
something that ought to be straightened out and you do it. You’ll find that you have someone wallowing
around in depression and they come to you, I can’t do this and I can’t do that,
oh gee, I’m so depressed. It turns out
nine times out of ten the person frankly has a profound problem and is being
lazy, and because of their laziness they don’t want to do something and so they
are rebelling against the Lord in certain areas so they don’t do it. So what happens? Very mysteriously they are depressed and so
they get this depression but by the time they usually come to you they put the
effect before the cause and so they get all screwed up and say I can’t do that
because I’m too depressed. No, it’s the
other way around, they are depressed because they are not doing it; they are
out of is Scripturally and the way to break the cycle is obviously break it,
just do something, change it. And then
as you go on with a person obviously they train to do this themselves.
We have to train, we all have to be trained, this is a training ground
in the Christian life, God is training us by giving us circumstances and
watching how we carry the ball, drop the ball or something. And when you first learn a lesson, when a
child first learns to walk you don’t say hey kid, walk. You’ve seen children learn to walk, they get
up, fall down, get up, fall down, get up, fall down; take an elementary
subject, show the kid how to write, you have to show him how to write the first
few times and then he catches on and does it himself. It’s all similar here in the Christian life,
often times you can help another believer out of a jam by actively saying you
do this, come one, let’s go, you do it.
And the first time you are doing the doing but then you train them how
to do it themselves and you’ve accomplished something because you’ve trained
them. And this is how God is doing it
and He’s doing it here through Samuel.
Samuel is telling them what to do.
All right then, the second thing that Samuel does. Verse 4, “Then the children of Israel did put
away Baalim and Ashtaroth, and served the LORD only.” The “im”
on the Baal is the Hebrew plural. The
word “oth” is the Hebrew plural. So if you want to read that it should be the
“Baals and Ashtaroths.” The “oth” is just simply the Hebrew feminine
plural. “…and they served the LORD
only.” Now verse 4, you would expect to
see well, that’s fine, now isn’t that the end of it. No, it’s not the end of it because again
diagramming the situation, here’s the nation, they are on negative volition,
they come back into fellowship, they cross the boundary, the first thing is to
get rid of the idols, all right, idols gotten rid of, next thing. Now the second thing is what Samuel is going to
deal with and that is they must reform the tribal confederacy, sometimes known
in scholarly circles as the [can’t understand word], but they have to come
together and bring the tribes into a political organization.
So the second thing that Samuel says in verse 5 is, “Gather all Israel
to Mizpah, and I will pray for you unto the LORD.” And here is where Samuel is activating the
dead tribal confederacy. It’s been dead
for many, many centuries at this time and he is bringing them back
together. And here you have another
beautiful principle in the Christian life.
And that is how is Christian fellowship produced. All right, let’s watch how Samuel united the
nation. Now Samuel could have done a lot
of human viewpoint like politicians are trying to do, build brotherhood, build
a big national spirit and so on, with all sorts of gimmicks. But you don’t do it that way.
How you build a fellowship or a group of people is to make them have a
center and Samuel says look, the center of our nation is the Lord. So here you have tribes, and what’s going to
happen, if the tribe of… say Benjamin, here’s Benjamin, here’s Judah, here’s
Ephraim, here’s Gad and so on, so let’s take these tribes and let’s see what
happens when, say Judah, gets attracted to the Lord. Where’s Judah going to be? She’s going to be over there. When Benjamin gets right with the Lord,
where’s Benjamin going to be? Over
there. Where are these other tribes
going to be when they get right with the Lord.
Finally what’s going to happen?
Are the tribes going to be together?
Of course they’re going to be together. Why? Because they went out and preached
brotherhood? No, because each one of
them individually got straightened out with the Lord and when they got
straightened out with the Lord they got straightened out with one another. And so this is why Samuel is saying “Gather,”
this is not a temporary meeting in verse 5; this is the real institution of the
tribal confederacy. And so Samuel says
now that you’ve solved the religious issue you are prepared to solve the
political issue.
Remember when I started this book I said this book is going to give you
a tremendous philosophy of politics and the state, and here you have one of the
great principles of all time. Now the
[can’t understand word] dictators of the world have always seen; there has
never in the history of the human race been a man who’s been a great leader who
hasn’t seen this. And that is a man who
is a shrewd leader will always see that somehow the people have a religious
unity. It’s no mistake that in Latin
America they have a state religion. The
people down there made sure of this, and it’s not that the dictators as so
pro-Catholic, it’s simply that they recognize that the religious issue is there
and they’re going to use it.
So once you solve the religious unity problem then you can solve the
political unity problem. Communism does
this; don’t you realize that communism is a religion; communism isn’t a
political system, it’s a religion and so therefore everybody committed to the
materialistic gods of communism and you bring your state together, you pull it
together. And it’s the same thing here,
Samuel is straightening them out by putting away the Baals first, getting the
religious issue settled, and then you have your political. Now in America we see the reverse. The United States of America was adopted on a
Christian consensus, so therefore you had a Christian consensus and although
Jesus Christ was not in the heart of every American when this country began you
had this Christian consensus and it was around this that you built your
political unity. So you have your
political unity built on a Christian consensus.
Now you begin to attack and erode the Christian consensus and what is
your political unity going to be? It
can’t be there any more, it’s got to be some place else, and this is why we
don’t have the solidarity we once had in our own nation, simply because we
don’t have the solid religious thought behind it.
Now as Samuel gathers the nation together he calls them to a
ceremony. In verse 6, “And they gathered
together to Mizpah, and drew water, and poured it out before the LORD, and
fasted on that day, and said there, We have sinned against the LOR. And Samuel judged the children of Israel in
Mizpah.” Now we’ll start with the last
phrase of verse 6, “And Samuel judged the children of Israel in Mizpah,” it
sounds very mundane, but that’s the historic notice to tell you that the tribal
confederacy is once again functioning, that Samuel has taken over all the…
remember what happened in all the other judges that we read up to Samuel; they
were only able to get two or three times together, that was all. Here this is the [can’t understand word],
Samuel has been the first man since Moses, actually, to get those tribes back
together again. Now this is going to
have tremendous repercussions down through history but Samuel was the man who
God used to bring this about and that’s why it says Samuel judged the children
of Israel. He continually did it, the tribal confederacy or whatever you
want to call it was now back functioning.
Now let’s look at some of the details. They gathered together and they
drew water, and they poured it out before the Lord. Now what is this business of pouring water
out and confessing that we have sinned against the Lord. Why are those two things tied together. We have to go through God’s Word a little bit
to pick up the imagery so we understand what the water pouring is. What we’re studying now is the water pouring
and why is it associated with confession.
First of all, what is water?
Water, since the Garden of Eden, is always a symbol of that which gives
life, life-giving substance. Remember it
says that there was no rain but water came up out of the ground and watered the
whole face of the earth. What does it
say in Revelation… [tape turns]
…trees bloom and so on, water is life-giving substance, so the symbol
throughout Scripture of water is that which gives life. Why is it that they pour the water out when
they confess? Why is this pouring out
process going on? We have a hint in
Lamentations 2:19, here we have the symbolism of the water-pouring and
confession tied together. “Arise, cry
out in the night,” this, by the way, was the time when the nation was once
again in trouble, in fact there was a national disaster that Jeremiah was
living through, and he says “cry out in the night, in the beginning of the
watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the LORD; lift up
thy hands toward Him, for the life of thy young children that faint for hunger
in the top of every street.” The city of
Jerusalem is under tremendous discipline at this time; shortly the Jewish
mothers are going to eat their own babies it is going to become so disastrous. This is prophesied in Leviticus 26 and it
happened three times in history, that and in 586 BC, 721 BC and 70 AD, all
fulfilling this prophecy that of all the families of the earth, the Jewish
people who treasure their own children, will have to eat them. And the pressure was on Jerusalem this
strong, so that the Jewish mothers would actually revert to this kind of
behavior. So the water was poured out
and Jeremiah connects the two, he says “pour out your heart” for the life of
who, for the life of your children.
And the idea of pouring water out at the point of confession means that
you are taking, as it were, your last breath and you are saying to the Lord,
with my last breath I give it back to you, trusting that He will give you the
whole thing back again. The pouring out
of water is a picture of desperation at the point of confession, where you
gather together all that which is life-giving in your own being and you simply
say all this goes the drain if God does not connect me up again. I am not an unlimited supply, so I take that
bit of water that I’ve got left, they used these big jugs and obviously after
the jug was finished they’d pour it and it’d literally go down a drain. In fact in archeology they’ve found some of
these drain holes where it would just drain down into the earth. They’d sit there and they’d pour it and then
they would just hold it there until the water was gone. And when the water was gone that was it, that
was over. So at the confession of the
need for a continual resupply. So the
pouring out means that I take that which God has given and I pour it out and I
openly acknowledge that I do not have the resources on which to live the
Christian life. It is a marvelous
testimony of the creaturehood of a believer where the believer recognizes that
he does not have an unlimited supply and he takes what he has, and he expresses
it, I am limited.
Now the final movement through the Bible is found in John 7 when Jesus
Christ walked into the middle of one of these water-pouring ceremonies. There
was a great feast by the time of Christ, this water pouring that apparently
began in Samuel’s day had become a national holiday and in the temple the
people would, on one of these nights they would pour out all this water and
there’d be a big long parade, actually it occurred seven nights and they’d
parade down to the pool of Siloam and they would load up these gigantic
canisters of water, pottery canisters, and they’d carry it up chanting all the
way, chanting the Psalms of the ascents and they’d walk into the temple and
they would pour this out, confessing their sins, nationally speaking, and
acknowledging that they did not have within themselves that which would give
life. They could only pour out what they
had and that was it.
In the middle of this feast, with hundreds of thousands of people in the
temple courtyard, now this is going to show you how dynamic Jesus Christ
appeared in that generation, right in the middle of this very serious, somber,
solemn religious ceremony when everybody and the high priests with great
dignity, they’re in the middle of this, Christ stands up and says this in John
7:37, “In the last day,” that was the last great day when they had the final
water libation, the pouring out of the water, “in the last day, that great day
of the feast, Jesus stood and shouted,” the Greek says, “ saying, If any man
thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.”
In other words, in the middle of the ceremony when people were pouring
water out, Christ says I have come to give water and those of you who are
thirsty here, those of you who are confessing your sins, showing that you do
not have that which gives life within you, you come to Me and I’ll give you
life.
Now don’t you see what a picture this presents of Christ. And Jesus Christ could not have been anyone
else than who He claimed to be. Yet if
Jesus Christ was not God incarnate, He is crazy, you don’t get up in the middle
of a temple in a feast that is designed to picture what God has given and then
you get up and say if any of you are thirsty, you come to me. Now that’s the background for this remark
that Christ made. So I hope when you
read this in your Bible you don’t just read it over quickly and not understand
the whole culture and history behind it.
It was a titanic statement that Christ made. It was a thing that they must have talked
about in the streets of Jerusalem for weeks.
That crazy carpenter from Nazareth, who does he think he is, coming in
here and butting into one of our religious ceremonies, rude, and so on.
And then Jesus went on in verse 38, notice in verse 37 the them is Christ
said “if any man thirst, you come unto Me and I’ll give you water,” don’t pour
your water out to Me, you have nothing to give to Me, but I’ve got everything
to give to you. When you come to Me you
don’t come giving Me a thing; when you come to Me you come receiving, not
giving, I don’t want anything you have; you should want everything I have,
completely reverse. And then in verse 38
He goes on and picks up the theme and ties it to the festival that was going on
that very hour. “He that believes on Me,
as the Scripture has said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living
water.” This is an answer to the
ceremony that the people were seeing as they poured these pitchers of water out
onto the ground. He said listen, you
come to Me and I’ll give you an unlimited supply of water and you’re never
going to thirst. You can pour water out
from now to eternity and you’ll never run dry.
And those are the people who will believe on me. And then in verse 39 it’s defined, “But this
He spoke of the Holy Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive, for
the Holy Spirit was not yet given because Christ was not yet glorified.” Now this is what Christ… and how He tied this
water confession thing together.
Confession is the idea of acknowledging grace; there’s a need for grace,
for life. And Jesus is saying if you’re
thirsty you come to Me.
Now let’s turn back to Samuel and see the original historical incident
again for this incident apparently began here because this is the first
Scriptural intimation that we’ve got of this kind of thing. So Samuel judges all of Israel and during
this they say we have sinned against the Lord and it’s an acknowledgment that
their power comes from above. Now you
would have thought that it would all stop at verse 6, isn’t this a nice story,
it should end here, we can all close our Bibles and go home because this is a
very nice story, how Israel came to an awareness of their sin, they came, they
confessed their sin and they’re restored.
But the story doesn’t end there, it goes on to cite another dramatic
incident that happened that day that they poured the water out.
Verse 7, now I will try to picture for you the time element in this;
it’s hard because the Hebrew flip-flops back and forth. The Hebrew, when he’s narrating time he’ll
tell you about something and then he’ll go over here and tell you about
something else. So let’s see if we can
work through this and get the timing right.
And when you see the timing you’ll see the power of this incident. “And when the Philistines that the children
of Israel were gathered together in Mizpah, the lords of the Philistines went
up against Israel. And when the children
of Israel heard it, they were afraid of the Philistines. [8] And the children
of Israel said to Samuel, Cease not to cry unto the LORD our God for us, that
He will save us out of the hand of the Philistines. [9] And Samuel took a
suckling lamb, and offered it for a burnt offering wholly unto the LORD. And Samuel cried unto the LORD for Israel;
and the LORD heard him.”
Now here’s what happened time wise.
Samuel called the confederacy, the first step, the tribal
confederacy. Second step, the people
come to Mizpah and for some time, probably weeks, the tribal confederacy starts
to operate. That is, the elders of the
various tribes are meeting there, the Philistine spy intelligence system
notices that there’s a coalescing of the population. Now at this time the Philistines, who control
the territory, because remember they’ve disarmed the Jews, they were the first
ones to push registration of firearms, and the Philistines have disarmed the
Jews and they’ve gotten rid of all the weapons.
So obviously the Jews have nothing to fight with, which is the sad
tragedy of everyone who turns in their firearms. They had absolutely nothing to fight
with. Now, they come, because they
notice something. See, they’re operating in this territory. It’d be just like, for example, Russia
controls Eastern Europe and all of a sudden they begin to notice all the
Hungarians are gathering together here and we’ve got to just kind of keep on
top of this thing.
Well, the intelligence system of the Philistines spots this activity,
they were all coalescing at Mizpah, and so verse 7 is actually talking about some
time. And then finally the Philistines
order a force up to break this thing up.
And so they begin to move up to Mizpah and surround the place. And probably you can just imagine the
Philistine generals gloating because now only have they got the tribal
confederacy but they apparently appear over the brow of a hill at just the time
they’re having this confession ceremony.
And who should be there besides the elders of all the tribes but Samuel
himself. So you can just well imagine
the Philistine commanders saying aha, we’re not going to zap the tribal
confederacy at this time, we’re going to get this trouble-maker Samuel out of
the way, he’s the one that’s nationalizing the country again; we should
dispense with the whole thing. So they
gather together and they’re going to attack.
Now that’s the setting. The
Philistines have for months or for weeks been planning this attack and they
come onto the attack at just the time that Samuel is in the middle of offering
the sacrifice. Now you’ve got to catch
the timing or you’ll lose the impact of what’s going to happen here.
So in verse 8, “And the children of Israel said to Samuel,” now this
wasn’t casually done, Samuel is in the middle of offering the sacrifice and all
of a sudden… it’d be a tremendous film, shooting the camera over at Samuel,
watching these people suddenly look around and they see the Philistines
maneuvering in the background. And as
they see this they say to Samuel, “Cease not to cry unto the LORD our God,”
Samuel is already in the middle of doing this because it’s a Hebrew participle,
Samuel is crying, this particular word means urgent prayer. So Samuel is already in the middle of a
prayer and these elders are looking around and say holy mackerel, look what’s
coming up. So they come over and say
Samuel, hurry up, don’t stop praying now.
And this is the timing of this thing, Samuel is in the middle of the
prayer, the word “don’t stop” means he’s doing it already, don’t stop, just
keep on. Now this shows you that the
nation has rebounded in the sense that they’re back at least in divine
viewpoint, they realize maybe it’s by desperation, they have no weapons and
they’re surrounded, so they’ve only got two options, fight or surrender, or
some supernatural thing will happen. So
they’ve really only got three options available; there’s nothing around and
they’re all surrounded at this time. So
the urgent cry goes out to Samuel, keep on praying Samuel, “that God will save
us out of the hand of the Philistines.”
[9, “And Samuel took a sucking lamb, and offered it for a burnt offering
wholly unto the LORD. And Samuel cried
unto the LORD for Israel; and the LORD heard him.”]
Now verse 10, “And as Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the
Philistines drew near to battle against Israel,” except in the Hebrew it’s more
immediate than this. It should read,
“Samuel was in the process of offering up the burnt offering,” that’s the first
point. The man is drawing a picture for
you for this action that’s occurring that he’s going to give you in different
sentences, but to get the picture you’ve got to watch the tense of the
verbs. The first thing he says is motion
picture tense, here’s the participle, “Samuel is offering.” So the first thing you see about the picture
is Samuel is in the middle of this offering, it’s going on continually. The second verb is in the past tense, and it
says, “the Philistines had already drawn near to battle,” so this is in the
past tense, it heightens the suspense of the thing, that the Philistines have
drawn close to battle, they are ready to go, and Samuel is in the process of
offering an offering. Now it doesn’t
strike you as they are in a very militarily advantageous position, with the
Philistine armies on the brow of the hill and Samuel is worried about a sacrifice. From the human perspective it looks
ridiculous, but watch what’s going to happen.
Verse 10, “And as Samuel was in the middle of the offering … the LORD
thundered with a great thunder on that day upon the Philistines, and
discomfited [routed] them and they were smitten before
So this is not a thunderstorm, it’s not some actual every day
event. There is something we do not
understand, but there was some tremendous miracle that occurred that day with a
tremendous roaring. In other passages in
Scripture this word “thunder” is used synonymously with a verb “the earth
shakes.” It may be that the word
“thunder” is actually a tremendous earthquake that’s going on, and of course,
if you’ve ever been in an earthquake you know that you have a terrific roar in
the earth, it just kind of shakes beneath you and it gives a roar out from the
earth. Now this may be what set off the
thunder, but there was a tremendous event.
And the beautiful thing is that this happened just precisely at the
right time, and notice the principle.
Just as the ark delivered itself in chapters 5 and 6, here God delivers
the Jews and the Jews don’t have one weapon.
The Jewish army hasn’t got anything, there isn’t any army, they’ve been
disarmed, and yet God has delivered.
God has delivered.
Now look at the sequence backwards a minute. Here’s the Jews, they were out of
fellowship. Let’s tie this with the
Christian life. They went on positive
volition, they began to cope with areas of carnality, and idolatry in their
life. They put those things away, they
began to move further and get back with the normal Christian activities, such
as taking in the Word of God and so on.
And then after those two steps, then they dealt with a satanic enemy and
they were delivered, God gave them the deliverance, but notice the order. First the response, the clearing up of what
they could clear up, and then finally the deliverance from the satanic
oppression through the Philistines. [11, “And the men of
Now what is Samuel’s response.
Verse 12, “Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpah and
Shen,” actually it should be Beth-Shen, “and called the name of it Eben-ezer,
saying, Hitherto has the LORD helped us.”
Now “Ebon-ezer” is an interesting word.
“Eben” is the Hebrew word for
stone, and “ezer” is the word for
helper, it’s the word used for “wife” in Genesis 2. And so it means the stone that marks the
place of the help. This marked the
location. There’s something else to
this, and that is do you notice the passion of the Old Testament saint for
historic evidences for this faith. Do
you notice that when a miracle occurs what does the Jew in the Old Testament
do, always? He sets up a monument. So that he can say look, my faith doesn’t
hang on some concept, my faith hangs on what happened at this point at this
place at one time in history, right there it happened. Now that is the passion of the Jew for historic
truth and He will not believe unless there was historic truth there.
Now if we as Christians should take the same thing, Jesus Christ we must
say, lived at a certain point in time and said the certain things the Bible
says He did, and if He didn’t let’s be honest and chuck the whole thing. But it is foolish and unbiblical to say well
I like the morals of Jesus, He said love thy neighbor and that’s such a sweet
thought, so I’ll keep that sweet thought of Jesus and dump Jesus down the
drain. Well you can’t separate the man
from His words, it’s impossible.
So here, “Eben-ezer, saying, Hitherto has the LORD helped us.” But notice the word “hitherto,” God has
helped us up to that point, now this I said was only a token delivery, they are
going to have a greater deliverance when the king comes and they will lead
their own armies into battle. But God
has given them a token deliverance to show them the principle. This same kind of teaching God used back in
the days of the conquest. All during the
days of the conquest the Jews fought battles with their own spears, with their
own swords, with their own means, except two.
Anybody remember the two that they didn’t?
And so therefore we come to a final point about the faith
technique. Faith has two elements, doing
and resting. You will find incidents
like Jericho, Aijalon, and the one tonight; what God does, He [can’t understand
word] off the doing part of faith, down so it’s very, very small, the people do
something always because otherwise we’d have the first divine institution
destroyed, even if it’s just choosing, they do something. All right, the people chose to remain there,
they could have just surrendered but they didn’t; they chose to stick it out
with Samuel. So that’s all God asked
them to do, just do that submissive to Me, and I’ll do the rest, just
relax. Now that is why in these dramatic
instances of deliverance God is demonstrating the resting part of faith, the
faith-rest, that we can relax in what He is doing for us, knowing that He is
going to do it. And this is something
that will straighten you out in many areas of your Christian life if you will
go back to these spectacular deliverances to get the principle that you can apply
later on.
Now it may be that you’re looking for a job or something, and so you go
out, and it doesn’t mean… faith involves doing and resting. All right, here’s a Christian out looking for
a job; what does it mean? He’s going to
do some things, prepare a resume, look at the jobs available and so on,
there’ll be some things that he’s going to do but if you’ll think back to the
spectacular deliverances he will always have in the back of his mind God does
most of it. God does the part that
really gets the credit, so I’m just going to rest in that. I do what I can and then just trust the
Lord. And if you believe in a literal
Bible, and only if you believe in a literal Bible, that if you believe in a
literal Bible that is not self-hypnosis, that is not just psychological gimmick
of relieving strain in the mind. That is
an act of trusting in that which is true.
Why can I rest? Because I believe
the universe is a supernatural universe.
That’s why. That’s my reason, I
have a reason for resting, not just psychological feeling.
Finally the chapter concludes with verses 13-14, the Philistines never
bothered the land during the days of Samuel.
[“So the Philistines were subdued, and they came no more into the border
of
Samuel is the last judge, and now we are ready for the next time when
we’ll deal with one of the greatest political speeches in the history of man,
given in 1 Samuel 8; this is cited as one of the great classics of all
time. It rates with many of the great
addresses given down through history on the topic of government. With our heads bowed…