Clough Manhood Series Lesson 27

Samuel: Facing Instability – 1 Samuel 8; 16

We’ve gone through various men’s lives, we’ve seen various principles operate and last Sunday night we began with the prophet Samuel. We saw how Samuel was the first in a line of prophets; that God called Samuel to minister to a nation in very deep trouble. Israel as coming, or about to come out of her dark ages, the period of the judges, and toward the end of that time a deliverer was needed. You remember Samson, he wasn’t quite the deliverer, and so Samuel came along. We saw last time, as far as a man is concerned, there’s some interesting features in Samuel’s life. First of all we find that Samuel came out of what one would call today a disadvantaged home. It was a broken home; it was filled with polygamy, fights and conflicts. Samuel came to the temple and was turned over to the temple authorities at an early age. He grew up there, again without benefits of a home environment. He saw corruption in the religious establishment of his day, so we would say that Samuel had very little promise, if we are determinists and if we really believe that the social environment totally determines one’s super station in life. Of course, the Scriptures deny such a heresy; the Scriptures insert that God is free at every point in our lives to move us and to mold us.

So we found several tings about Samuel; we found that Samuel was able to grow spiritually and become the man that God wanted him to be. But that didn’t mean that Samuel grew perfectly. We explained it by revealing two basic principles of spirituality; one is the either/or situation, and the other is the long-term growth situation. And sanctification must be viewed from these two angles, at least. At any given point, if this circle represents God’s obligations toward us then we are either savoring them or we’re not; we’re either in fellowship or out of fellowship, and the Bible recognizes this with the antithetical terminology that you’ll find: light, darkness, walking in the Spirit, or in the flesh, Galatians 5, the power of the Spirit of the power of the flesh and so on. Everywhere you have antithetical terminology; you have this stark either/or; either we are with or we’re not.

But then in addition to that dimension there is the long-term growth thing. And when a person becomes a Christian they start off and they grow and there’s ups and there’s downs to this thing. And so that part is a gradual time problem, and this is why the New Testament cautions against putting novices in charge of high places. A novice is simply opening an entire organization up to heresy and to instability. Why? Nothing personal except that you can’t put babies in charge of adult jobs, and so this is actually what the New Testament teaches with regard to sanctification.

Now we said also to watch how growth operates you can distinguish learned behavior patterns, and these can be distinguished in two terms, what we call +R learned behavior patterns, and –R learned behavior patterns. The +R learned behavior patterns would be behavior patterns that have been conformed to Scripture and to the norms and standards that God sets forth. The –R behavior patterns would be those yet unsanctified. Samuel, in his situation, as all men, had many, many hundreds of –R learned behavior patterns, but the text makes clear at least one and follows that one learned behavior pattern through to the termination of his career, and that was that as a young boy, out of a broken home, as a young boy thrown from one group to another, he never really had a firm natural model; he had no male model of what a man would look like in a family situation. When we traced this out last time to 1 Samuel 8, where at the time he retired his sons turned into the same clods that occupied the religious establishment when he started. And the problem was that he simply reproduced his own home life; the home life that he had known. He too spawned this thing and so in his life he had at least this problem to deal with that the Scripture exposes that was never changed throughout his entire life. But just because Samuel had that problem in his life doesn’t mean God didn’t use him. God used Samuel in a tremendous way and tonight we’ll see exactly how God used him, in at least three major national crisis.

And so one should be encouraged, and every Christian man should be encouraged that you are aren’t asked to be a plaster saint; you are asked to be subordinate to the controls of Scripture, to the extent that you have grown spiritually at that point. And Samuel never grew out of this thing but that didn’t mean Samuel couldn’t do some good things for God and he did; he did many of them. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Samuel the nation would never have come out of it s dark ages. Samuel was as significant to Israel as the Reformers were to western Europe.

How did Samuel operate. We saw last time that Samuel had two great features in his life; both are related. One of the features in his life was he had a tremendous ability to use faith, what we call the faith technique. We can describe what is required in this use and we might as well review some basics tonight as we go on through the series. What is the faith technique? Well, it starts out by the person operating in a biblical framework, intellectually. If you hold to the biblical foundation of the creation and the fall, then you understand the entire universe, including everything in that universe, whether it’s physics, biology, or sociological things or whatever, everything is viewed under the control of creation and fall. If that’s the case, now we’re talking about a world that is open to God, and there is a credible situation where I can trust Him with my problem. Hebrews puts it, “By faith we understand,” I ground, in other words, my knowledge upon the Word of God. And how does the faith come? Paul said “faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.”

So the first need or the first requirement that Samuel had in his life and every Christian man has in his is that he must have the divine viewpoint framework or the foundation given in the Bible, and he must look at the world consciously through that framework. He must understand that faith operates because God has spoken into history and only because God has spoken into history do I really know what I’m doing. If God gives me no verbal direction I have no idea where I’m going in the universe; no possible road map, nothing.

A second thing we learned over the months in the faith technique and we haven’t really explicitly stated it in this series, but you remember that faith can only be observed external to the person by a shift in the behavior pattern. That’s why James said a man is justified by his work; and so there is such a thing as the behavior pattern and that behavior pattern is the external evidence that faith is there; it’s the only one we’ve got.

A third feature of the faith technique that we want to remind you of and review is that faith has two dimensions to it; it has a doing and it has a resting, and one of the great signs of spiritual growth, and none of us ever arrive at this perfectly, is to know when to shut our mouth and when to open it, and when to do something and when to be quiet and rest. Faith doing is when God requires some action and we show our faith by doing something. Noah showed God his faith by building the ark, he didn’t wait for a lifeboat to come down off the clouds, he built his own because God gave him a set of blueprints and said do it. So that’s how Noah showed his faith. But then also there are times when we must rest; the Exodus is a good example of that where Moses just had to park two million people on the west side of the Red Sea and sit and wait to be mowed down by Pharaoh’s chariot force, that is until God moved the waters apart. So that’s a resting situation.

We saw how Samuel used that; Samuel rested when he couldn’t do anything as far as the nation goes, no one would listen to him, so he simply retreated, retired, continued to pray for them, but there was nothing he could do so he simply rested.

And then for the fourth feature of the faith technique that we want to review is that faith can be always described as an individual orienting to God’s grace. If this isn’t there then what we have is some sort of self-hypnosis hocus-pocus, but if in fact I know that I’m a creature and that I am dependent in every point upon my Creator, and if I know that I’ve offended my Creator, and that He’s angry with me and won’t turn His face toward me, unless there is atonement and unless I approach Him through His authorized means, unless I am sure of this basically I can’t go anywhere. And orientation to grace means, in response to this, that I am assured of God’s pleasure. That doesn’t mean that Samuel is perfect, it doesn’t mean that someone who’s using the faith technique is perfect. No one is. What it means is is that the righteousness of Christ has been imputed or credited to our account; we are justified by faith and because of imputed righteousness I can come boldly before the throne of grace.

Now those are some of the features of the faith technique and we’ll see that Samuel as a prophet knew these, daily they meant something to him, and over and over again he trusted the promises of God. Yes, imperfectly but he trusted them and he had a device to handle his problems. He didn’t have forty shrinks waiting to take his fee of $40 an hour to solve all his problems; he had available to him something better than any shrink—he had the promises of the Word of God! And he relaxed and trusted in those promises.

Now the result of this in Samuel’s life, since he was a grace oriented man, he realized he didn’t have anything to commend himself to God, that it was wholly of grace, he had a very gracious attitude toward others and when the nation Israel was having a lot of difficulty and going down in defeat, when they finally came to the place of acknowledging their sins, Samuel didn’t say well, folks, I gave you [can’t understand word]. There wasn’t any of that, none of the snobby response. He was a grace man and he walked in there, he didn’t say I told you so and ha-ha I’m glad you got it; he walked over there and solved their problem and helped them like he could. So there was the mark of a grace oriented man.

Now today we’re going to watch how he puts these things into action at three points in his career. The first point is when the national theocracy is destroyed and replaced with a monarchy. The second one is when he is face to face with a very bad king, the first one, Saul. And the third one, when he is called upon to anoint David. There’s a lot of detail in these stories and the details we covered in the Samuel series, so tonight we only want to go back through these three events, looking for how Samuel is behaving.

Let’s turn to 1 Samuel 8; this, of course, is one of the great political documents of the Scripture, though tonight we’re not interested in that per se, we’re only interested in what Samuel is doing here. You recall at the beginning, in the first four verses, the theocracy has gone on and on and on through the dark ages of the period of the judges. One thing has happened after another. Basically what they’ve got is anarchy. Now there’s an interesting lesson to learn here about history. If people lose their freedom because they can’t control themselves, dictators don’t just happen, they are bred. Daniel puts it as the water that blows across the water and it finally creates waves in the water and out of the swirling of the water comes forth the monster from the sea. And the water there is standing for unstable people; people whose lives are rootless, they have no absolute standard to go by and they are victims of being tossed to and fro. And from this standard lust relativism comes forth tyranny. And this is what happened here; tyranny was there.

And that’s why in 1 Samuel 8:3, “And his sons walked not in his own ways but turned aside after lucre [money] and took bribes, and perverted judgment. [5] Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel at Ramah, [6] And they said unto him, Behold, you are old, and your sons walk not in your says; so make us a king to judge us like all of the nations.” This is a momentous time for Samuel. Here a man, that with time and age, left with his career; now his career, which he was passing on to his sons in the form of the prophetic things, breaks down. What these people are saying is that, Samuel, you haven’t cut it; all the years you spent setting up the line of the prophets, hasn’t worked Samuel. We are still as anarchistic and chaotic as we ever were; you haven’t solved our problem. So now we want a king. And so the people in a situation like this of rootlessness, cry for their stability; they cry for their stability in something.

Now watch what’s happening here. Let’s look at God’s character a moment. God is sovereign, He is righteous, He is just, He is loving, He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal, plus other attributes. But what are the attributes that all men have to have, they have to rely upon, is the attribute of immutability. That means that God does not change. God is unchanging from eternity to eternity. Not static but in His basic character He’s unchanging. And therefore the Bible-believing Christian always relates ultimately to God’s immutability. We don’t place our confidence in the creation.

This is why we don’t deify natural law. We have no problems with the problem of miracles because in the first place we never said that natural law was immutable. The modern day scientist-scientist, the one who follows scientism, insists on deifying natural law. Defying God he replaces God and takes the attribute of immutability down inside the creation and perpetuates natural law. He needs this, he can’t make truth without immutability; you’ve got to have it coming from some source. And so if men hate God and defy His authority, since they still are in fact made in God’s image, they must get this immutability from some place, and so they begin to suck it out of the creation; anything that they can grab onto to replace the true immutability and true source of stability. And so the common things that societies do is to grab hold of the immutability and form a tremendous statism and that’s the origin of tyranny. This best is exemplified in the ancient world by Pharaoh, who, as we have often said, liked to call himself, like Louis XIV, I am the state.

You see, where men have no standards, and no stability, they seek it in the state. And that’s what Israel is doing here; give us a monarchy, they are saying, give us centralized government; we want stability and we’re not going to accept the stability of God’s Word so give us a replacement. And so therefore what we have is a social idolatry; an idolatry of the fourth divine institution or the institution of the state. Now it’s being elevated beyond what it was there to do. You remember in the Scriptures in the morning service we went into the divine institutions; we said that God has all of these divine institutions, the fourth one that we have listed is the institution of state. And the function of the state is to produce judgment, in a limited way, upon evil, epitomized in capital punishment. But the state is limited because the state itself must gain its stability from outside of itself. But what happens here when they say “give us a king.” What they’re saying is that the state is autonomous, the state will be a god in and of itself and we will root and reference all of our emotions, all of our wealth, all of activities to the state.

1 Samuel 8:6, “But the thing displeased Samuel,” and here is a mark of the great man Samuel. Yes, he’s imperfect, yes he’s sinned. So what? He gets on with the job. And one of the problems that Samuel has is what does he do? You can’t, I don’t think, appreciate the problem that Samuel is having here; unless you visualize yourself in the position where everybody’s looking to you and you’ve got nobody to help you outside of you. Here you’ve got 120 people say; well Samuel had a million or so people, and they were looking to him for leadership, and it’s the decision that he has to make. He can’t blame it on somebody else, he doesn’t have a Congress to blame it on, he can’t blame it on the priesthood, he can’t blame it on the king because they don’t have a king yet; it’s all on his shoulders! And so now faced with the crisis, the first crisis, the destruction of the theocracy and the rise of monarchy, here’s what he does.

[6] “The thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed to Yahweh.” Now watch it, there he’s using his faith. There he’s exercising the faith technique. He knows that the answer can’t come from within him. He also knows that the revelation given into history to date, that is the Torah, that the Torah doesn’t contain enough instructions on how to establish a monarchy. At this place the Torah doesn’t even say when the monarchy ought to be established. So Samuel is left under a tremendous crisis, needing vital information, and notice what he does. Yes, he’s a prophet but he still prays; a good place to start.

[7] “And the LORD said unto Samuel, go ahead, listen to the voice of the people,” and now notice these words, because these words penetrate to the heart of the matter; the cry for centralized government, whether it’s the Marxist, the left-wing radical or whoever he may be, or the right-wing fascist as he’s called in Europe, it’s always the same theology. Listen, “they have not rejected you,” Samuel, in other words, the more moderate form of government, the theocracy, they haven’t rejected that; but what “they have rejected is Me, that I should not reign over them. [8] According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt, even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken Me, and served other gods,” so go ahead. If they want centralized government if they want to go down the slide, just put a little grease and let them go down faster. If they want centralized government, help them set it up. If they want their tyranny, give it to them for a present. And so this is the great climactic job that Samuel had; giving tyranny to a nation he loved, knowing that the very thing that he would set up would destroy the nation.

So Samuel utters these words, and as I say every time we get into this passage, for those of you who are studying in school, memorize the passage or do something, write it in the margin, write it in the front of your Bible or something because when you get in political discussions, here’s where it’s at. He’s got it all laid out very carefully. Historically 1 Samuel 8 was used by Samuel Rutherford, the status man, who attacked the assessors of the English monarchy, and Samuel’s work, Lex Rex, formed one of the theological foundations for the American Revolution. So you’re looking at a text, a Bible text, that has had a tremendous amount of impact in history. Of course, it doesn’t in the 20^th century because we don’t read the Bible, we might pollute ourselves or something.

Let’s look at 1 Samuel 8:10, “And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people who asked of him a king. [11] And he said, This will be the manner of the king [who shall reign over you],” now you’ve got it all predicted in that the prophet of God is saying this, “he will take your sons, and appoint them for himself,” do you know what translated that’s talking about? Debt; “he will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, for his horsemen; and to run before his chariots.” The picture there is that in the past they had a draft of sorts, they had what we ought to have in this country which his universal military training, and then the army comes along and picks out the toughest guys and they’re the ones that serve; get rid of all the weak sisters and the crybabies and get some men who can fight and you sent them out and you only need one or two of those guys to do your job. So that’s how it used to work in the book of Numbers; that’s what Number means, it means the draft figures. But what’s happening here is something different. Now they’re not being drafted to fight a defensive war or a just war; now what they’re being drafted for is to simply form a perpetuating establishment, to satisfy the whims of the king.

1 Samuel 8:12, “And he will appoint for himself captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set his ear to the ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots,” a great military industrial complex. [13] “He will take your daughters,” you see, the prediction here that women will be enscripturated into the system, and they are. “He will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. [14] And he will take your fields,” look at verse 14, confiscate your private property. Now we call it socialism but then it was confiscation. “…your olive yards, the best of them, and give them to his servants. [15] And he will take the tenth of your seed,” that’s the produce of the farm, he’s ripping off the produce of the farm, private capital, “and of your vineyards, and he will give to his officers, and to his servants. [16] He will take your men servants, and your maidservants, and your best young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. [17] He will take the tenth of your sheep; and ye shall be his servants.” And then the tragedy of verse 18, a tragedy that’s been repeated time and time again in history, “And you will cry out in that day because of your king whom ye shall have chosen; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.” The cries of tyranny will go unheeded.

So how would you like to be a guy who has to tell the people he loves a nice gory message like that. Do you know something about Samuel; it’s very interesting. As a boy he was quite a loner, and I think God used that because he had some very bad news messages for some people he dearly cared for, and that was hard to do. People think it’s easy to tell off somebody, oh, I’d like to tell them off, that kind of thing. No, it isn’t; men like Samuel don’t love to tell people off. It creates tremendous tension in their soul. And this is the mark of a great man who had to face eyeball to eyeball his generation and tell them, you are wrong, and moreover, you are going to be damned. And at the same time he cries in the sense that he was not sympathetic with what was going to happen. His sons were going to be in the next generation. So it’s not done coldly and without any gracious spirit. It’s just done because this is the way history is going to be when men defy God, we pay a price for it.

Samuel, then, was a great man who in 1 Samuel 8, at this point functioned in the first national crisis. He saw that you’ve got to go one way or the other; there’s just no middle ground to this. I don’t know why people have such a hard time trying to see it. Either you submit to the authority of the Word of God or you’ve got to have a replacement. It’s one or the other. And I’ve often suggested to you, if you want to see how this works out in history, all you need to do is an experiment; all you have to do is take a map of the world, a bright map of the world and two color crayons, and in one color crayon shade the areas where the Word of God has been taught consistently, in the Reformation countries of northern Europe, Britain and so on, United States, where the power of the political implications of the Word has been felt, Geneva. And then take another color crayon and color the areas where we’ve had constitutional republics that have functioned, and see if you don’t notice, there’s a remarkable correlation. And in the other parts of the world democracy has never seemed to work. The reason is very simple; it’s all here in 1 Samuel 8. In 1 Samuel 8 either you place your confidence for stability in the Word of God or you place it in society; one or the other; and one is the true way to do it and one is the false way to do it.

Samuel, then, got himself and his nation through this crisis, only to find himself in a new one, and we see that in 1 Samuel 9. In 1 Samuel 9 he faces the next problem of ordaining a king. Now I said last week that you want to notice something about the foundation of the prophets. In the Old Testament the prophet is the king maker. King’s don’t happen; kings aren’t elected. Kings are anointed. That’s where we get the word “Christ” from; Christ comes from the Hebrew word mashach, which means to anoint, and the prophet is the one who makes the king. That is the motif that occurs again and again in the Old Testament, and it goes all the way down to the Gospels. That’s why your Gospels don’t start with Jesus, they start with John the Baptist; John the Baptist is the king-making prophet. For the motif wholeness what does he do with Jesus in Jordan, he baptizes Him. John, the prophet of God ordains the Messiah, just like Nathan, ordained David, and Solomon and so Samuel here is going to ordain Saul and the first part on David.

All right, so the prophet is the king maker. We already established the significance of this because that makes political power subject to the Word of God; not subject to the Church but subject to control of the Word of God. All right, the prophet, then, is functioning and in 1 Samuel 9:15 you find historically the first time this institution started to work. We said last week, go ahead and read the ancient histories of the world and I dare you to find another civilization in time and space that ever, without influence from the Scripture, had this idea of monarchy… ever! In all other cases in the ancient world the king was god and if the king wanted to say something the king’s word was it, particularly in Egypt. But in the Old Testament that’s not so, and scholars have been amazed, they’re just amazed. They look at this, and you can read one after another and they say what is going on with Israel’s king, it’s so different from all the other countries. Israel’s king is so secular, He’s so limited in His power. You don’t ever find some Egyptian priest walking into Pharaoh and saying you’re the man. But you find the prophets going in and chewing out the king. Why? Because the Word of God has precedence over all kings.

And 1 Samuel 9:15 is where it all starts. “Now the LORD had told Samuel in his ear a day before Saul came, saying, [16] Tomorrow about this time I will send you a man out of the land of Benjamin, and you will anoint Him,” that’s the word for Messiah or Christ, “you will anoint him to be captain,” or general “over My people Israel, that he may save My people out of the hand of the Philistines;” notice again we’re trying to end the dark ages; that’s the whole thesis here, what’s happening. [17] “And when Samuel saw Saul,” and from this point we have the model of Saul. Saul is given in the Scriptures as a model for us to show you what God doesn’t mean; there’s an arduous interplay between Saul and David. We went through this in detail in the Samuel series but these things fit. Saul represents a man who has all the social qualifications of a king. He is tall, he is handsome, he has the intellectual attributes, he has the social finesse, he has popularity; on George Gallop’s poll he would score very heavily; he has pull with the populous.

There’s only one thing that Saul doesn’t have, and that is he has no intent to submit himself to the authority of Scripture. Saul has a lot of human good, a lot of earthly morality. He’s a man who is very proud of his earthly morality. And so he gets himself in a few scrapes; he gets caught with his pants down in the cave, a few other things like that, which is God’s sense of humor. You’re such a proud man, how about that Saul, go in the cave and David cuts your underwear off while you’re sitting there on the pot. See, you have to catch the sense of humor in 1 Samuel; it’s just humiliating, this very proud man, he’s so dignified, and God’s just cutting him down, that’s all.

So in 1 Samuel 9:17 he’s anointed. “Samuel saw Saul and the LORD said to him, Behold, the man whom I spoke to you of! He will reign over My people.” Now there’s an interesting conversation that goes on here and right here you see thought patterns in this man’s mind that will work out to his undoing eventually. 1 Samuel 9:18, “Then Saul drew near to Samuel in the gate, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, where the seer’s house is,” that was the old word for prophet. [19] “And Samuel said to Saul, I am the seer: go up before me unto the high place;” that’s the altar, “and you will eat with me today, and tomorrow I will let you go, and I will tell you all that is in your heart.” No [can’t understand word] claim, but you see, a prophet had to show that he was truly supernatural, and this is one of the empirical tests. [20] “As for thine asses that were lost three days ago,” now Samuel doesn’t know anything about the asses that were lost three days ago, but because God informs him verbally he knows this, so he says, “As for your asses that were lost three days ago, set not thy mind on them; for they are found. And on whom is all the desire of Israel?”

Now this is kind of awkward the way it reads in the King James, but the point is this; Saul, you’re a guy that is buried with details; details, details, details! Now there’s one thing you’ve got to know. You are going to be leading people and if leaders get fogged up with the details, they lose the big picture, and if they lose the big picture they don’t lead. It’s that simple. Every leader has to get by himself and ask himself where am I going, because I can’t tell people t go if I don’t know where I’m going. And Saul is a man who is enmeshed in details; you see this again and again in these stories. And one of his details right now, while he’s coming into the prophet of God, it shows you, like some people come into communion, thinking about let’s see, I’ve got a payment due on my Buick tomorrow, and I have to be down at the bank at 9:00 o’clock, and let’s how I can do this, and meanwhile the bread is going by, and then the cup goes by and we’re still thinking about the payment on the Buick and all the rest of it, this kind of stuff. See? Nothing wrong with GM, I just use that as an illustration. But the point is that these kind of details fog us out; you can’t concentrate on things.

And Saul’s that kind of a man. And Samuel knows, he says I’m going to tell you what’s in your heart, three asses, that’s what in your heart right now. Now get the asses out of your heart and get the Lord in, that’s his point, you see? Straighten up Saul, you’re all fouled up and you’re never going to make a great leader until you get first things first. And so he goes on this thing which you see time and time again, who me? “Who me?” Notice verse 21, “And Saul answered and said, Am I not a Benjamite, of the smallest of the tribes of Israel, [and my family the least of all the families of the tribe of Benjamin]?” See, this fake humility, oh, how could God…I’m so honored. And Samuel is just sitting there, just never mind all the jazz, let’s just get down to the point; the point is that God has a role for you and I’m going to tell you what to do.

Well, this is the second great crisis because in 1 Samuel 15 we see the problem. This is that tragic scene, one of the most famous tragedies, probably, in biblical history, the tragedy of Samuel confronting Saul. Now I emphasize this as a crisis to watch you model off of Samuel. We’ve already seen Samuel in one crisis; he’s rejected, his whole family is rejected. In short, they just said Samuel doesn’t score with us so let’s push him off and forget the theocracy and we’re going to go into a monarchy. So that’s real great, his whole life story just goes… but he keeps on; his stability is not in people, his stability is in the promises of the Word of God.

Now we come to this situation with Saul. Samuel actually likes Saul; we have this intimated at many points in the text, which I went through in the Samuel series. Samuel, on the human plain, admired Saul. Saul probably was a nice guy. And so this was very hard for him and here we find a great man again at work. Notice 1 Samuel 15:1, “Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint you to be king over His people, over Israel; now, therefore, hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD.” So he’s going to give him, now, a prophecy, but it’s a prophecy of Saul’s doom, and it was not easy for Samuel to give this prophecy. [2] “Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him [in the way, when he came up from Egypt]. [3] Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have….” Verse 6, “And Saul said unto the Kenites, Go, depart, get down from among the Amalekites….” And so on. [7] “And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until you come to Shur, [that is over against Egypt].” These are problematical geographical places, it’s hard to find them now. [8] “And he took Agag, the king of the Amalekites, alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. [9] But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep….”

The whole point here is holy war; in holy war you are to eliminate everything God tells you to eliminate under the principle of charem; the charem principle. It meant, not that you necessarily had any personal vendetta against the people, but God said these people are cancerous. Now it’s God’s prerogative, He can pronounce certain civilizations and groups of people to be cancerous. And the Canaanites are cancerous. You and I wouldn’t be here tonight if Israel hadn’t have bumped off the Canaanites; they would have so polluted, they were a religious sewer in the world. And God had to plug it up and the only way He could plug it up was simply eliminate them, by force. And so this is why we have just war. All violence is not wrong; only unjust violence is wrong. And so we have this just war and part of just war is you don’t take booty, because the soldiers get paid with the booty. And so therefore if we go in here and what am I going to pay my soldiers; here this guy has gold coins coming out his closet, look at that, booty, British sovereigns, the Austrian kroners and so on, and I can’t take a few of those coins, they’d be worth value, they always increase with time so why not rip off a few. And soldiers traditionally have been paid with booty. But now in the holy war they can’t; you see, they’re forced to trust the Lord for the provisions. They go into war with their life and they get nothing back. Holy war isn’t what it first appears to be when you first read it in the Bible.

Well, Saul wanted to keep a little bit of this; you know, it was (quote) “reasonable,” it was the nice thing to do, after all, Agag maybe he parted his hair on the right side of his head and he had a nice personality, and so therefore he ought to be saved. Well, [1 Samuel 15:10] “then came the word of the Lord to Samuel,” now imagine how Samuel feels about this. [11] “It repents me that I have set up Saul to be king; for he has turned back from following me, and he has not performed my commandments. And it grieved Samuel ...” You see the impact that had. Notice what he does as a strong Christian leader, “it grieved him, and he cried unto the LORD all night.” It didn’t come automatically, that he just tripped out of his little prophet house or whatever it was, and went over to the king and king and said king, you’re fired. It wasn’t that simple. He grieved; he had a personal relationship with Saul. You just don’t cream the personal relationship, and so he had to play this thing through and think it through, it takes time. Be encouraged if you have problems like this; think of Samuel here; it took time to resolve this.

So finally he goes in and notice in 1 Samuel 15:13, Saul starts out with his usual, “Oh, Blessed be thou of the LORD; [I have performed the commandment of the LORD]” you know, dear brother this and dear brother that and all the rest of it. [14] “And Samuel said,” he gets to the point, I hear noise of sheep, everything is supposed to be destroyed. In verse 16, “Then Samuel said to Saul, Stay, and I will tell you what the LORD has said to me,” and he goes on, and he finally concludes in verse 22-23, here is one of the greatest sets of verses on sin in the Old Testament. “And Samuel said, “Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” And now look at this, [23] “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you rejected the word of the Lord, he rejects you.” Over and out! Or should I say in the days of Caesar, [can’t understand words] See, end of message, that’s it. All right, so that was the second great crisis that Samuel had to face, telling his friend it’s all over… it’s all over, you’ve just blown it.

So now the third crisis, 1 Samuel 16. The third crisis has to be understood in the light of the Ancient Near East in the time in which it was written. This third crisis in Samuel’s life is a crisis that can only be understood when you understand the danger of competing dynasties. If you have an established dynasty that is ruling the country in a monarchial type system and you start a counter dynasty here, do you know what you’ve got? You’ve got treason. It’s like the succession of the states in the Civil War. You can’t have two White Houses and you can’t have two dynasties. And so the act of anointing another king while the old king still lives and he doesn’t grant permission to this is an act of treason. That’s the tension that’s going on at this point in the story.

1 Samuel 16:1, “And the LORD said to Samuel, How long will you mourn for Saul,” see again, it wasn’t easy for Samuel. “How long will you mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go; I will send thee to Jesse, the Bethlehemite….” He goes to Bethlehem, where another Savior a thousand years later will come into the world. [2] “And Samuel said, How can I go? If Saul hear it, he will kill me.” God gives him instructions on how to go, and he finally, in verse 6 “And it came to pass, when they were come, that he looked on Eliab,” Jesse and his sons come out to be reviewed. He lines his sons up and says ten-hut and we have the prophet here now, pay attention, and so everybody stands up and here comes Samuel out to inspect; we want to find out which one of you jokers is going to be king.

So he goes down, and he walks down the path and he starts to look physically at each one of the boys. [7] “And the LORD said to Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on his height of his stature, because I have refused him; for the LORD sees not as man sees; for man looks on the outward appearance but the LORD looks on the heart.” [8] Then Jesse called Abinadab, and made him pass before Samuel,” and it goes on and you know the story, one after another and so on. And then in verse 11, “And Samuel said unto Jesse, Are these all your children? And he said,” oh yeah, “There remains yet the youngest one, he’s out keeping the sheep.” Do you know what he just said? Basically he stinks and I don’t want him in here. Now its Oriental manners that you sit down and abide by your guests; they’re much more touchy than in the West, but watch what Samuel does. “And Samuel said unto Jesse, Send and fetch him; for we will not sit down until he comes.”

Now you see, he’s got total revelation and he’s got the empirical data out here and he’s got to get them together. And so he does get them together, because obviously if you only have seven people and you eliminate six you’ve got one left and that must be the boy. So finally when the boy does come in, it’s interesting in the light of verse 7 where God kind of says well don’t look on the outward appearance, that we have one of the few descriptions we do of how a person looked in the Bible.

It’s very remarkable, I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of this, but isn’t it remarkable that of all the hundreds of people we meet in the pages of Scripture we have very, very little data, such that if you were a Christian artist and you wanted to paint a picture of one of these guys you’d know how to paint him. Don’t think of Holman Hunt; Holman Hunt wasn’t the fifth prophet, he didn’t get some extra scoop that you don’t have out of the pages of the Gospel. Holman Hunt just saw one of the first hippies and he painted Him with long hair and ever since then Jesus had long hair but the Bible doesn’t say that.

Well, here we have this boy who comes in and he’s described. 1 Samuel 16:12, “…he was ruddy,” that means he was red-haired, we know the color of David’s hair. “…he was red-haired, and he was of a beautiful countenance, and good to look at [handsome],” and later on we discover a lot of the girls liked it, in fact a few of them went a little too far, “and the LORD said, Arise, anoint him; for this is he. [13] And Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him,” and the word there is Christ, the messiah, “he anointed him in the midst of his brethren,” and you look carefully at verse 13, “he anointed him in the midst of his brethren,” you will find that in the New Testament repeated, and what it’s doing is a reference back because what you’ve got here is a Christ-type that’s being developed in history, so when Jesus Christ finally does come in history I’ve got some categories to work with it, I understand what’s happening by looking back at David. “… and the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day forward. So Samuel rose up, and went to Ramah.”

So the third crisis has just begun; he starts two competing dynasties. We want to draw it to a close because tonight we’ve run out of time on this section and so we want to tie together the main point in Samuel’s life as a Christian man or as a man who is a believer in the Scriptures, in the Word of God.

One feature that has been seen in all three of these crises is that Samuel’s stability was time and time challenged to stay with God’s character. When he would develop a personal relationship with a nation, when he was trying to develop a line of prophets that would take care of the nation, God said nope, sorry. These people reject it. So if he had put his stability in society he would have been a very disappointed man. He comes along here and anoints, in the second crisis Saul. He develops a friendship with Saul. Wouldn’t that have been neat, a nice personal relationship, chief prophet, chief king, got along fine together, a good stable element for the country. What happened? Disobedience to the Scripture and that relationship gets severed.

Now he comes here and he starts a bucket of worms; the whole rest of 1 Samuel and all of 2 Samuel, chapter after chapter after chapter is written because of these competing dynasties, the house of Saul and the house of David, and they compete all the way down, even after David is anointed king. A bucket of worms has begun. So surely all through these crises are at least arguing that the stability has to be in God’s character, it cannot be in people; it cannot be in tyrannical government; it cannot be in any human institution. Samuel’s stability has to be in God.

In conclusion let’s remember, where did Samuel come from? Do you remember where he came from? A broken home. We would have said it’s a broken home, it was a polygamous home, as you know, the Chinese symbol for trouble is two women under the same roof, so it was a broken home basically. He came out of that situation and where as a young boy do you suppose the little fellow got any stability from? He certainly didn’t get it because he relied on his mother and father. He didn’t have that kind of stability. As a young boy when he was growing up, did have it in Eli, his mentor, his tutor? No, he didn’t have it in him because he was all fouled up. So from his childhood at least one lesson this guy got together, and that was in this life you don’t put your ultimate trust in anyone. You put your ultimate trust in God; you’ll never be disappointed!