God Prophesies
Judgment on the House of Eli. 1 Samuel 2:12–36
Opening
Prayer
“Father,
we are thankful for this opportunity to look at these things in Your Word this
evening and to be challenged by the fact that You are the God who controls
history, and that You bring about Your plan and purposes. Even though man may
propose, and man may make all kinds of plans and run away from You in
rebellion, nevertheless, You are still in control. Just as that was true
throughout numerous episodes in the Old Testament periods, so it has been true
in the Church Age, and it is true now that, even though we have a
terrorist-sponsoring state, even the most evil terrorist-sponsoring state in
the world, and they are on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons, we know that
You can intervene, and that You can stop this. Even if they do, we know that
they cannot operate or use them apart from Your permissive will.
Father,
we pray for us as believers that we may truly shine as lights in the midst of a
wicked and perverse generation. We live in the midst of a culture that, for the
most part, has rejected You, has rejected absolutes, has rejected biblical
truth, and is running wild on the arrogance, on the energy of their own
arrogance, and their own ideas of right and wrong. Everyone is doing what is
right in their own eyes.
Father,
we pray that You would give us wisdom to live in this kind of a culture, to
recognize that we are to live for You, and that the critical issue for us as
believers is to recognize all of the assets that Christ has provided for us;
that we are in Him and He is in us, and that He is the One who gives us
strength. Christ is in us, the hope of glory. We should be manifesting that
every day and it should impact our speech. It should impact our attitudes. It should
impact the values and the priorities that animate our lives.
Father,
we pray that as we study Your Word today, that we might have our confidence in
You reinforced through a study of these episodes surrounding the rearing up of
Samuel. As even a young boy who would be the one through whom You would change
the course of the nation Israel and provide for the ultimate arrival of the
Messiah. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen”.
Let’s
open our Bibles to 1 Samuel 2. It has been a couple of weeks, so I want to
remind you a little bit about what we have been looking at in 1 Samuel 2:1–10.
This was
Hannah’s great hymn of praise to God because God is the one Who enabled her to
become pregnant and give birth to a son. That son she has dedicated to YHWH, and she
understands through what she has learned through her own meditation in the
Word, that there is a connection between this child that she has been given and
the future arrival of the Messiah. At the end of her psalm she says, “He will give
strength to his King and exalt the horn of His Anointed, His Messiah”. She
clearly understands this connection.
As we
saw last time at the end of 1 Samuel 1, we have Elkanah
and Hannah. They have brought the infant to the temple to be given over to Eli.
Then they return home. This is where things begin in 1 Samuel 2:11. As we think
about this, it is sometimes important for us to think in terms of big chunks of
Scripture. Often I take time to go through and we drill down, but it is
important to think of the large narratives within Scripture and what is going
on. This is especially true in a lot of literature in the Old Testament, which
tells stories. It is telling the story of how God is working to reverse the
fortunes of Israel.
At this
time Israel is, basically, under the bondage, dominion, and tyranny of the
Philistines. They have become, under the tyranny, even worse. They’ve come
under the tyranny of their own sin nature and depravity. This is the period of
the Judges.
The key
verse in the book of the Judges is, “There was no king in Israel”, which is an
allusion to the fact that there wasn’t a human monarch, and that they had
rejected the divine kingship of YHWH over Israel. Therefore, everyone was doing
what was right in their own eyes. They had become this secularized, pagan
culture where everyone is just doing whatever makes them happy. They are giving
themselves over to all forms of idolatry.
Arrogance
is essentially idolatry because in arrogance we deify ourselves. We are doing
what we think is right—as opposed to what God is doing right. We substitute our
own values for God’s values. That’s the essence of idolatry. You are worshiping
someone other than God. You are submitting to the authority of someone other
than God. This is the state of Israel. They have succumbed culturally to
idolatry.
The same
thing has happened in western civilization and in the United States. We have
succumbed to the idolatry of secularism. We’ve succumbed to the idolatry of
moral relativism. We’ve succumbed to the idolatry of evolution. We are no
longer, as a culture, focused upon the God of the Bible. We are doing the same
thing that Israel did. We are on a course of self-destruction, because
destruction comes from the inside out. Whether it is a nation, or whether it is
an individual, we destroy ourselves by giving reign to our own sin nature, to
our own lust patterns—as ultimate expressions of our own arrogance. The
solution to sin is not to stop sinning. The solution to sin is always to get
focused upon the essence of God.
The
essence of God that we’re focusing on here is on His righteousness and justice,
which is the expression of His holiness. The holiness of God emphasizes His
uniqueness. This is exactly what Hanna brings out in 1 Samuel 2:2, “… there is none
holy like the Lord”. The word “holy” really means to be unique or distinct.
In and of itself it doesn’t have the denotation of moral purity. That is a
connotation that it picks up in some contexts. It has the denotation of that
which is separate and distinct, or that which is unique. The holiness of God
emphasizes His uniqueness, and that is centered on the fact that He is absolute
righteousness and perfect justice. Righteousness is the standard of His
character. He defines that which is right, that which is good, and that which
is moral. It is expressed then through His justice. His justice is the
expression of His righteousness toward His creatures. In combination with that,
we have the other two attributes that I have highlighted on the slide: His
veracity, which means He is absolutely true. Veracity fits together with
righteousness. Righteousness is a standard of absolute integrity. The
expression of that is in the area of truth. Everything that He says is
absolutely true, and because God is truth and He is righteousness; it follows
that he is immutable, because righteousness and truth imply an unchangeable
standard.
Immutability
is that aspect of His character, which means He cannot change. This is what
stands behind the historical events in the history of Israel through 1 Samuel.
It is emphasizing the holiness of God as He is bringing this nation, that is
supposed to be a kingdom of priests, back to Himself. The focal point isn’t on
moving from sinning to not sinning. You can move from being immoral to being
moral, and you can still be in idolatry, and you can still be in failure. Both
morality and immorality can be expressions of a person’s sin nature. The issue
is to conform to the righteousness of God, which can only come when you have a
personal relationship with God, which is in the Mosaic Law. How is that
expressed? You have all these “dos and don’ts” in the Mosaic Law. The first
thing people think of is that to conform to God means that you are going to do
what God says to do, and don’t do what He says not to do. In other words, it
seems on the surface that the way you’re going to conform to God is that you
are going to follow a set of rules. The way to change from being pagan
idolaters is simply to stop doing what you are doing wrong and start doing the
right thing.
But it
goes deeper than that if you read through the Law, because the primary command
in the Law, as Jesus summarized it when He’s asked by the rich young ruler, is
to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Loving
the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength focuses on
what? It focuses on that relationship. You are absorbed with the Lord, with
that relationship with the Lord. In that personal love for God, the outworking
of that is that you are going to live your life in a way that will be pleasing
to Him. That is why you have to get the cause before the effect. That’s why in
the Scripture you see that the barometer of love is obedience. It’s in
Deuteronomy. It’s in Exodus. It’s in John, in the Gospels and the rest of the
New Testament. “If
you love Me you will ...” what? “keep My commandments”. Scripture doesn’t say,
“Keep My commandments and then you will love Me”. The issue isn’t changing from
wrong behavior to right behavior, in the sense of cleaning up disobedient acts
and now having obedient acts. The issue is to focus upon the character of God
and the relationship with God, then, as we come to understand who God is and
what He expects, we love Him. The fallout and result of that is then we live to
obey Him.
It is
just like when people begin dating. They begin developing a relationship. They
begin loving each other. They want to spend time together, and do things that
are going to please the other person. They are not going to do things that are
going to upset the other person. That is a manifestation of that relationship.
As we come to understand who God is and His grace, what do we call that? We
call it doctrinal orientation and grace orientation. Then the fallout from that
is that we love God, and because we love God, that then has the impact of
drawing us toward greater maturity because we want to please Him.
That’s
the backdrop and part of understanding the righteousness and justice of God is
that: when God is obeyed, in the Old Testament under the Mosaic Law, He is
going to bless Israel; when they disobey, God’s righteousness rejects that
disobedience, and in justice He has to condemn that and bring judgment upon it.
We are
going to see two things happening in here, in this section from 1 Samuel 2:11ff.
We will see the contrast between God’s blessing on Hannah and her son Samuel
because of their obedience to Him, and judgment upon the house of Eli because
of their unrighteousness and their disobedience to Him.
This is
the outworking of the blessings and cursing themes in Leviticus 26 and
Deuteronomy 28: that God is not going to bring prosperity to Israel in the land
that He has given them unless they are walking in obedience. This is played out
and illustrated as we go through this. You can look at these things that happen
here, in some ways like a symphony. You have two themes:
These
themes are interwoven so that you have a few verses on one, then a few verses
on the other. Then he comes back, and they are interwoven as it builds to the
climax of the defeat of Israel by the Philistines at Aphek,
the loss of the Ark of the Covenant that comes in 1 Samuel 5, the death of Eli’s
two sons, the death of Eli, and the departure of the glory of God from Israel
at the end of 1 Samuel 4. That gives us kind of the broad perspective here of
what is going on in this wonderful narrative.
I set
this up last time just to remind you that I try to structure my outlines in the
thinking and the expression of what is going on here where God is the subject,
because in any kind of story there is always a hero, and there is always a
villain.
The hero
isn’t Samuel. The hero is not Saul. The hero is not David. The hero is God in
all Old Testament literature. We have to express what is going on here in terms
of what God is doing:
Here is
something I have said again and again and again. I got this principle and I
first understood it in studying Samuel, and that is: God doesn’t do anything in
private that He doesn’t confirm objectively in public.
Think
about that. That means when God appears and gives a prophecy in private (what
we will see here when we come to this last section in 1 Samuel 2:27, “Then a man of God
came to Eli and said to him”, you’ve got a man of God that comes to Eli) it
is just the two of them. Nobody knows what is going on. It is private; however,
God never leaves anything in private. What this shows is that the people who
have said, “Well God spoke to me”, unless they are saying that God spoke to
them through His Word, it is garbage, SKUBALON, horse manure.
Did you
notice in that debate on FOX News last week that Megyn
Kelly had a little gotcha moment with Ted Cruz? Trying to hang him on this,
“well does God speak to you, Senator Cruz”? He answered it perfectly. He said
“Yes, He speaks to me in His Word every day”. “Well, well, that’s not what I
meant”. Well that’s because there are a lot of Christians who don’t understand
that today God doesn’t speak any way other than through His Word, and it is
confirmed objectively.
Here we
have an example of where God is going to send a man of God. He speaks privately
to Eli, and He gives this prophecy of the destruction of the house of Eli. And
this is confirmed through an additional prophecy that’s given through Samuel.
The truth is established by two witnesses, based on the Mosaic Law. It is not
just an independent, private thing.
Anybody
who comes along and says God speaks to them today is in epistemological
antinomianism. I love that phrase. It sounds so high and mighty.
Epistemological has to do with what you know and how you know it. Antinomianism
means that it is not on the basis of any kind of rules and regulations. It’s
just against the law. It is lawless. People who say that “God spoke to
me,”—there is no objective standard to verify whether He has or He hasn’t. That’s
the problem with mysticism. That’s exactly what that is. It is mysticism, and
it’s not any different from the kind of lawlessness you have in moral
relativism and paganism.
Last
time we just looked at the first part:
1. YHWH is
served by Samuel in 1 Samuel 2:11. The emphasis is on “the child ministered to the YHWH before Eli
the priest”.
It is
repeated again in 1 Samuel 2:18 using the same verb. It is not the normal word
that we find for service, but it is a special word that emphasizes service
within the temple.
1 Samuel
2:11 is picked up again by 1 Samuel 2:18. That tells us that the section in
between, from 1 Samuel 2:12–17, is a stand-alone section. 1 Samuel 2:11 then
comes back to develop what God is doing in the life of Samuel in relation to
Israel and how God is going to change Israel because of this.
2. The
second section YHWH
is treated contemptuously by the sons of Eli in 1 Samuel 2:12–17.
They are
the sons of the priest, and they are functioning as priests. We saw that they
are called the sons of Belial. It is translated, “corrupt”, but it means sons
of Belial. “They
did not know the Lord”. There is not an on-going relationship with the
Lord. They are in spiritual rebellion against God.
At that
point I took a couple of minutes just to explain a couple of things:
But as
we go on in this section, we have to understand what’s happening in the
background. This is a fulfillment of prophecy.
We
looked at this chart and we have to understand, this forms the backdrop for
this whole section. What’s happening here is this: you have a prophecy made
back in Numbers 25:11–13, where God says that He is going to make an
everlasting covenant with the house of Phinehas, the
first Phinehas who is the son of Eleazar.
He’s the grandson of Aaron.
We read
this in Numbers 25:11–13, because at this time when the men of Israel are being
seduced by these temple prostitutes, they are entering into the temple
prostitution, the sexual immorality related to the fertility cult, as they are
about to enter the land. This is designed by the king of Moab to destroy the
integrity and the genetic or racial purity of Israel and the spiritual purity
of Israel.
Phinehas stands up, and he’s used by God to kill and execute
those who are committing this adultery, which would be self-destructive to
Israel. He is praised by God because of his stand for God’s holiness and
righteousness. As a result of his actions, God says in Numbers 25:11–12, “Phinehas … turned back My wrath from the children of
Israel, because he was zealous with My zeal among them, so that I did not
consume” them. “Behold, I give to him My covenant of peace”.
It is
further described in Numbers 25:13 as an everlasting covenant and “everlasting
priesthood”. To understand this, we have to look at this genealogy. Here is
Levi. This genealogy (back to slide 9) comes out of Exodus 6:16–25. This is
what is called an open genealogy. I didn’t cover this part last week—an open
genealogy.
A closed
genealogy is when ‘A’ lives 35 years and gives birth to ‘B’, and then ‘A’ lives
another 150 years and dies. The numbers close it. Then when ‘B’ lives 45 years
and gives birth to ‘C’, and then ‘B’ lives another 120 years, and then he dies,
those numbers close the genealogy so there can’t be any gaps in between the
generations.
But in a
number of genealogies you don’t have numbers. You just have a statement like:
Levi is the father of Gershom, Kohath,
and Merari, and then they are the fathers of these
other individuals. And there is no numbers given, and that means there can be
several generations between them.
We have
a similar example in Matthew 1. Matthew gives us a genealogy of Jesus Christ,
but there are numerous gaps in that genealogy. There are no numbers. He’s just
tracing the main figures through that genealogy, not necessarily trying to tell
us every one. In the closed genealogy, the idea is to tell everyone in the line
of the Seed, but that is not the point of this genealogy in Exodus 6. It is
simply to paint with a broad brushstroke the descent of Moses from Amram and Kohath to Levi, demonstrating
that Aaron and Moses are both from the tribe of Levi. It is not trying to give
every person between Levi and Moses.
What we
see here is the line through Kohath is really the
main line that we are focusing on. What we see is that there are two sons of Kohath that are emphasized in the genealogy:
a) Amram who is the ancestor and the father of Aaron and
Moses;
b) then
we have Izhar who is the son of Kohath
and his line goes down through Korah, Nepheg, and Zichri.
Korah is the main run. Korah and his sons lead a
rebellion against Moses when they are out in the wilderness. God doesn’t wipe
out the whole line. God punishes them, and eventually they survive as the sons
of Korah. They are involved in the writing of some of
the Psalms and the singing of some of the Psalms and are mentioned there.
Whereas
the line through Aaron: all the descendants of Levi are Levites, and they are
priests who have the right to serve in the tabernacle or temple, but the high
priest comes only through the line of Aaron. Aaron had four sons: Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar,
and Ithamar. It is through those four sons the line
of descent from the priesthood would take place. The first two sons, Nadab and Abihu, were rebellious
against God. Leviticus 10:1–3 tells us that they brought in illegitimate fire.
They brought in incense that was not sanctified. They brought it into the
tabernacle. This is a sign of rebellion against the authority of God. They were
brought under judgment, and God instantly incinerated and vaporized them as a
result of their rebellion. God’s holiness can’t be breached! Okay? He is making
a standard; His holiness must be preserved. You can’t compromise it. That’s
what their rebellion would have done.
The next
rebellion that is emphasized during the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness
is in Numbers 16:1_3, when Korah, the son of Izhar, the son of Kohath, the son
of Levi, along with Dathan and Abiram,
have a rebellion against Moses and Aaron and their authority. As a result of
that God is going to open up the earth in an earthquake and swallow up 250 of
these rebels with Korah. They are destroyed. The
emphasis is God brings judgment on those who are to be leaders that have been
set apart. They are overtly rebellious against Him. Nadab
and Abihu are wiped out, and then Eleazar
and Ithamar survive. Eli is in the line of Ithamar, but Phinehas, the son of
Eleazar, is the one who is mentioned in Numbers 25 as
having an everlasting covenant. That means that the eternal line of high priest
is going to come from Phinehas, and that will
ultimately be realized in the end times when the priest of the Millennial
Kingdom are the Zadokite priests.
It is
the sons of Zadok that are the ones who are the
sanctified line from God. But Eli is high priest now. So that tells us that
God’s got to fulfill His prophecy. What we are getting at is the end result of
this prophecy doesn’t take place until we get into 1 Kings. We are looking at a
snapshot of the middle. We have the beginning, which is the giving of the
prophecy in Numbers 25:11–13, and then we are going to see the end of it as
described in the prophetic passages in Ezekiel 40–48 dealing with the end times
temple. What we see in the intermediate stages is this event. Then when Abiathar is kicked out of the high priesthood by Solomon he
is replaced by Zadok. That is one of the reasons this
little episode is so important and so significant. We have to pay attention to
that. It is in 1 Kings 2:35 that Solomon is going to replace Abiathar with Zadok.
Let’s go
back to what is happening here in 1 Samuel 2:13–17. We see the corruption—the
reason God is going to bring judgment on the house of Eli at this particular
time. What we see here is a description of how they are abusing the people. There
was a well known (you wouldn’t know his name), healing evangelist back in the
late 1940s and late 1950s who would have these big tent revivals. After he’d
gotten everybody all worked up emotionally, he would say, “I’m the shepherd,
and you’re the sheep. And now it is time for me to fleece the sheep”. That is
exactly what the sons of Eli were doing. They were fleecing the sheep when they
would come to the tabernacle to worship God. They were taking for themselves
that which was to be dedicated to God. That’s the backdrop here. This is what
we are told about.
1 Samuel
2:13–14, “The
priests’ custom with the people was that when any man offered a sacrifice, the
priest’s servant …” See, they wouldn’t even go in there. They just hired
somebody to do their job for them … “the priest’s servant would come with a
three-pronged fleshhook in his hand while the meat
was boiling”. Then he would take this big meat hook, reach down deep into
the pot, pull out the meat, and take out for the priest everything that he
brought out. Nothing is left for God. This was to be an offering to God. He did
this whenever Israelites would come to Shiloh to the tabernacle in order to
worship.
One of
the things we ought to note about this is that this not a practice that is
legitimized by the Mosaic Law. Nothing like this is described in the Mosaic
Law. These various traditions that are taking place by the priests at Shiloh
don’t have their origin in the Mosaic Law. This is possible for two reasons. I
think both are true:
1. They
were willingly ignorant of the Law. They didn’t know what the Levitical
regulations were. Because of their ignorance of the Word, they were just doing
whatever they wanted to do. They were doing what was right in their own eyes.
2. They
were probably influenced by the practices of the pagan Canaanite priests who
were using the worship at their temples in order to take advantage of the
people. They were following the various practices of the Canaanites. It shows
how the religious practices at the tabernacle of God were already paganized. They were corrupt. That’s why they are called
the sons of Belial.
Then in
1 Samuel 2:15 we read, “Also”…. Notice how that verse begins. In addition to
ripping off God and taking all of the food for themselves, they did something
else, “before
they burned the fat”. “Before”—that is the important term, because what
would happen, according to Levitical rules, is the fat around the entrails,
which was apparently considered a delicacy, was to be burned on the fire as a
burnt offering offered to God. But what they would do is before they burned the
fat, the priest’s servant would come, and basically he is intimidating and
bullying the worshipers that are coming, and demanding and threatening them
that they have to “Give meat for roasting to the priest”. For he wants it raw so he
can cook it however he wants it to be cooked. He wants to take the fat for
himself. The issue here is that it is important to understand the timing
here—that before the fat was burned, the priest’s servant would come to demand
all of the meat for the benefit of the priest. This shows how self-centered
they were.
In 1
Samuel 2:16 we read, “And if the man said to him …” The worshiper comes in. He is
bringing his meat for a sacrifice. Then the bully from Phinehas
comes and says, “give me all of the meat”. He says. “No, this is the way it is
supposed to be done. I have to ‘burn the fat first’ as an offering to God”. Then
the servant would intimidate and threaten him. He would (if the man says “burn the fat
first; then you may take as much as your heart desires.”), he would then
answer him. “No,
but you must give it now; and if not, I will take it by force”.
He’s
ready to beat the man into submission and threatens him physically with
violence. This is a typical example of what happens under paganism. This is
developed all through my study on Judges a number of years ago. As a culture
gets further and further away from the God of the Bible, human beings are
treated with less and less individual dignity and value. That is because only
in the Judeo-Christian heritage do we have a basis for treating every person as
unique and distinct and with real dignity, because they are created in the
image and likeness of God.
Under
paganism, without any influence from the Old Testament, man becomes nothing
more than part of nature. He becomes nothing more than part of nature. This is
exactly what we’re seeing happen now as you see this shift that has taken place
over the last 150 years with Darwinism. In Darwinism, human beings are animals.
You and I are viewed just as a higher order of animal, but there’s nothing
really that distinguishes human beings from other animals. The assumption of
evolutionary thought is that man is just part of this chain of being and just a
higher form of animal life.
In
contrast to that, the Bible teaches that man is a distinct and higher order of
creature than the animals because he is in the image and likeness of God.
Therefore man is expected to live as a moral creature, and he is accountable
for moral decisions. He is to live at a higher level than that of the animals.
He’s held to a higher moral order, a higher ethical order, so that social life
among human beings is to reflect the value of the imageness
of God in each and every creature.
This
should affect every relationship. This is the foundation for integrity. You
lose that foundation for integrity under evolution. There is no basis for it
other than that which is pragmatic or utilitarian.
But
there is an essential metaphysical foundation to it within Christianity,
because you want to treat everybody of value. If you don’t, you are making a
blasphemous statement, because you are being rude to someone who is in the
image of God. That’s why when you look at the death penalty in Genesis 9 in the
Noahic Covenant, the reason a murderer is executed is not because it is a
deterrent. It is not because it is less expensive than keeping them alive in
prison. It is not for any of those reasons. The reason you execute someone who
commits murder is because they have murdered someone who is in the image of
God. They have made a blasphemous statement against God Himself by murdering an
image bearer.
What we
learn from this is human beings are to behave socially according to the higher
standard. Human beings, therefore, have established certain standards of
behavior in different cultures that we call etiquette or good manners. Some
years ago I read in Emily Post that the reason that etiquette and good manners
were developed was to control the baser selfish instincts of human beings.
What is
interesting is that a well known historian at the turn of the last century,
nearly 20th century, by the name of Arnold Toynbee, who wrote
volumes dealing with the history of the world, was not in favor of
Christianity. He was not pro-Christian, but he was an observer of human history
to a certain degree. He recognized that over the course of history, that what
you find in a developing, growing civilization is that there is a constant
improvement of these social, etiquette and manners—that as a civilization is
advancing, the lower social economic classes are imitating the higher
socioeconomic classesBut when a civilization is in
reversal and in decline, the upper classes, the wealthier classes, the
aristocratic classes, are imitating the values, standards, and trends that are
set by the lower socioeconomic classes.
You can
think about this just a little bit within your own frame of reference. If you
think back, if you watch any sort of drama on television, if you ever saw the
musical “Oliver” which was set in Victorian England, and you look at some of
these different kinds of stories … If you ever read Dickens, you look at even
the people on the street. You look at Fagan, who is the arch villain in Oliver Twist,
and he dresses in a coat and tie. You look at the women on the street, and they
always have on gloves and hats. No self-respecting woman, even into the early
60s, would ever go out in public without wearing gloves and a hat. That was the
standard. But what happens when a culture goes into decline is all of a sudden
your higher socioeconomic classes start dressing like the ghetto. The ghetto
sets the standard. The gangs set the standards. We see this today. You see high
school kids and junior high school kids, and they don’t want to dress up to
emulate those who are successful. They don’t want to dress like Donald Trump.
They don’t want to dress like businessmen who are successful. They want to
dress more along the lines of drug dealers and those in the ghetto. They want
to look in the opposite direction.
But you
don’t find people like a Clarence Thomas or a Ben Carson dressing like some
street punk. They are going to dress for success. That’s one of the things that
we have to understand. We live in a culture that is in decline, and so
everything moves toward greater and greater informality.
I’ve
made it a point over the course of my ministry to try to fight against this.
I’m tilting at windmills because that’s the trend of our whole culture. It is
to be as informal as possible. Unlike many of my peers, I still wear a coat and
tie on Sunday morning, but I would say the vast majority of pastors today just
dress in what might be called business casual, not even a sport coat. Many of
them may show up just in blue jeans and sandals on Sunday morning. I think that
brings us down to a lower level.
Also
recognizing that there is certain protocol for how, in certain situations,
you’re going to address one another. In the academic world you would address
people as Pastor or as Doctor. Even if you are friends with them, in a formal
situation, you are going to address them according to their appropriate title.
But we’ve lost that so much I find that it is interesting. In many cases I hear
people refer to pastors as Mr. So-and-So all the time. They are not churched,
and they don’t know any better. They don’t know what the appropriate title is.
If anything, just call him Pastor or Reverend, but they don’t do that because
they are not trained socially. That just shows the decline.
This is
exactly what we see here. It is that this culture has just deteriorated and
declined. They’ve become just a bunch of bullies. They are not even trying to
have a veneer of civilization about their activities. In fact, we are told as a
summary to this in 1 Samuel 2:17, “Therefore the sin of the young men was very great
before the Lord, for men abhorred the offering of the Lord”. This is an
interesting Hebrew word which means they despised it. They scorned it. This is
an example of Romans 1:17–18, they are suppressing the truth in
unrighteousness. They are fools who are rejecting the reality of God. They
treat Him with the height of disrespect. This will be the cause of judgment on
this house.
3. The
third movement shifts us back to how God is blessing the family of Hannah, 1
Samuel 2:18–21. This is just a great story because Hannah went through
difficult times (we studied that for probably 10–15 years). She is the barren
wife who can’t have children. She’s persecuted by the second wife, Peninnah, her rival. She is made to feel like she’s
completely and totally worthless because she can’t have any children. She goes
through a miserable existence for a number of years. She pours out her heart to
God promising that she will give to the Lord and dedicate her son if God would
open her womb and give her a son. This is what happens. God is going to bless
her.
We are
told in 1 Samuel 2:18 that, “Samuel ministered before the Lord”. There is that word again that
we saw earlier, indicating this higher level of service within the tabernacle
or temple even as a child. This would be before he became an adult, at the age
of 13, which today would be called Bar Mitzvahed. “He wore a linen
ephod”. A linen ephod was like a tunic. It was made of linen that only a
priest could wear. Only the high priest or priest could wear this linen ephod.
This indicated his office, his role, as a priest. He has a linen ephod.
Then we
are told that his mother every year would come to him. She would make him a
robe and bring it to him whenever she and Elkanah
would come to Shiloh to offer the yearly sacrifice. We see how the mother is
still doing what she can to influence and to talk to her son and to maintain
that relationship.
Each
time we see a glimmer of hope in Eli that he still recognizes that part of his
responsibility is being the high priest. He “would bless Elkanah
and his wife, and say, ‘The Lord give you descendants form this woman for the
loan that was given to the Lord’ ”. God then answered that.
We are
told in 1 Samuel 2:21 that “the Lord visited Hannah, so that she conceived and bore three sons and
two daughters”. In total she had six children. That is why back in the hymn
when she talks about “the barren woman has born seven”, that is not talking about what
she gave birth to because she actually only gave
birth to
six. It is using the term seven there as a representative number of that which
is reaching fulfillment. That is, that which is complete.
“… so she conceived
and bore three sons and two daughter. Meanwhile …” We get another status
report of Samuel. “… the child Samuel grew before the Lord”. I want you to notice this.
If you have a pen you can connect the dots here. At the end of this little
section we have some foreshadowing that takes place in that last line.
Notice
it says, “Meanwhile
the child Samuel grew before the Lord”. Look over at 1 Samuel 2:26. We have
another status report on Samuel. “And the child Samuel grew in stature, and in favor
both with the Lord and men”. Now we see that he grows more. It gives us
more detail rather than just growing before the Lord. Now he is growing “in stature, and
favor with both the Lord and with men”. This is going to continue.
If you
skip over to 1 Samuel 3:19 we read, “So Samuel grew, and the Lord was with him and let
none of his words fall to the ground”. In other words, when he spoke that
this was what the Lord said, that was what the Lord said. And God fulfilled His
prophecy. We have this other status report.
4. We
come to 1 Samuel 2:22–25. This is the fourth movement. YHWH determines to judge
the house of Eli.
Some
time goes by between 1 Samuel 2:21 and 1 Samuel 2:22 because as we began in 1
Samuel 2:22, we are told, “Now Eli was very old”. Now he is much closer to the end of his
life. He is very old “and he has heard” all these rumors about his abusive sons and how
his sons are taking advantage and fleecing the people and ripping off God.
He’s
heard all this “and
he heard everything his sons did to all Israel, and how they lay …” They
forced the women who served at the tabernacle. “… and assembled at the door of the tabernacle
of meeting” to have sexual relations with them. They were trying to force
them to become like the temple prostitutes in the Canaanite and pagan
religions.
They
weren’t just simply taking advantage of them sexually. They were trying to
convert them over to the kind of practice that would be found in a pagan
temple. This is what is emphasized here. We see the contrast between the evil
of Eli’s sons and how God is blessing Samuel and his family. That contrast is
brought out.
This
just emphasizes the further degeneracy that comes in paganism. One of the
things that is interesting is as peoples’ sin natures become less and less
restrained, it is interesting how, although it doesn’t always end up this way,
but in cultures they tend to end up with this sexual degeneracy. It happened in
the antediluvian world. The sons of god, the demons, came down and took the
daughters of men as their wives. That was a corrupt sexual sin according to
Jude.
Then we
look at Sodom and Gomorrah. We look at the Canaanites. We look at the
Phoenicians, and again and again and again, when their sin natures became
unrestrained. That doesn’t mean everyone became sexually degenerate, but it
became a characteristic of the degeneracy of the culture that dominates. That’s
what we are seeing in our culture again and again and again. We are obsessed
with sex whether it is heterosexual or whether it is homosexual sex. This just
dominates things. In fact there is a little video that was going around today
of an encounter over in Baytown, I think yesterday or the day before, between
Senator Cruz and a reporter. The reporter kept asking questions related to the
same-sex decision, and he tried to side step it by saying aren’t there a lot of
other issues? Finally Senator Cruz said, well are you just consumed with sex?
Is that the issue? Then the reporter said why do you hate homosexuals? Senator
Cruz masterfully responded by saying, “it seems to me that as a Christian I am
to love everybody, but you seem to hate Christians”. I loved the way he flipped
that back on him. That is exactly how we should respond.
Christians
don’t hate homosexuals. But why do you hate Christians? The Christian standard
is to love one another, which is not permissiveness by the way. Anyone who says
love is permissiveness would make a lousy parent, because parents understand
that love means that you restrict the behavior of your children so that they
don’t do the things that are harmful for them and will destroy their lives.
So Eli
is dealing with the fact that he had got these sexually perverted sons who are
raping the women who are coming to the tabernacle. We have examples of women
serving at the tabernacle. For example, Exodus 38:8 says that there are “serving women who
assembled at the door of the tabernacle of meeting”.
In 1
Samuel 2:25 we have this interesting little play on words, as I mentioned
earlier, where Eli is talking to his sons in 1 Samuel 2:23–24. He says, “Why do you do
such things? For I hear of your evil dealings from all the people”. He
said, “No, my sons!” It is a little late when you’re probably 80 years old and
your kids are 55 or 60 years old; it is a little late to try to teach them a
little self-discipline. My mother would have tried anyhow! She would have been
successful. He wasn’t, because he had no basis for ever teaching discipline or
self-control to his sons.
This is
the principle. It says in 1 Samuel 2:25, “If one man sins against another, God will judge him”.
Here is the point, if you offend somebody else, if you do something against somebody
else, then that can be brought to court, and the judge will adjudicate between
you and bring about justice. “If one man sins against another, God will judge him”. Not directly,
but intermediately through the government that God has established.
Then we
have one of those examples where you sort of lose the thrust of this with the
way it is translated, “But if a man sins against the Lord, who will intercede for him”?
What is interesting here is you have a play on words that you miss when one
word is translated “judge” and the other word is translated “intercede”,
because we don’t really have the kind of cognate or word system that the Jews
used. Both cases use the root word palal. In the first case it is in
the piel stem, which shows an intensification of
action, and it means in the piel to intercede or to
mediate. It should be translated, to get the thrust of this, “if one man sins
against another, God will provide a mediator between the two men”. But then
the next line is where it gets fun, “but if a man sins against YHWH, who will intercede
for him”? That is not the same word. It is not a piel
stem there. It shifts to the hiphel stem, which is
the causative stem. In the hiphel stem the word is
normally translated prayer or intercession. It has the idea primarily, in the
Old Testament, to pray.
If we
are going to put it into modern English vernacular it would read like this: “If
one man sins against another, God will judge him or intercede for them. But if
a man sins against the Lord, he doesn’t have a prayer”. That is an accurate
translation. That is the point. It is that God then, if that sin is against
God, God is the One who will bring judgment. One of the things that come out of
this, as a reminder, is not the same word, but it is a reminder, is in Job
9:33. Job talks about the fact that if there was only someone to mediate
between us, then we could talk with God, emphasizing the need of a mediator. We
connect that to the fact that God has provided a Mediator between us so that when
we sin against God, there is a Mediator.
Paul
speaks of this in 1 Timothy 2:5, that “there is one God and one Mediator, the man Christ
Jesus”. The answer to this is that we don’t have a prayer, because of sin,
except for Jesus Christ, who is our Intercessor, our Mediator, who took the sin
upon Himself.
The last
clause in 1 Samuel 2:25 (I will finish up here) is that the writer of 1 Samuel
gives us a conclusion: “Nevertheless, they did not heed the voice of their father, because the
Lord desired to kill them”. The idea here is that they had already
committed a capital crime.
In
Leviticus 7:25 we are told that “whoever eats the fat of the animal of which men
offer an offering made by fire to the Lord, the person who eats it shall be cut
off from his people”.
In
Leviticus 22:9, “They
shall therefore keep My ordinance, lest they bear sin for it and die thereby,
if they profane it”. They
committed a capital crime by the way they are abusing the tabernacle sacrifices
and taking the food and the fat for themselves. They are already under a
sentence of death from the Supreme Court of Heaven. God is simply warning them
of what will happen. He’s not giving them an opportunity to recover because
they’ve already crossed the line of no return. They are under the sin unto
death. This is what is being emphasized here: that their disobedience is just a
sign of the fact that they’ve already hardened themselves into disobedience.
The meaning here isn’t as harsh, that the Lord desired to kill them, but the
Lord’s will was now that they be executed for their sin. That is the idea here.
But the
implication that we learn from this, in talking about who will be the mediator,
is to remind us that today we have a Mediator between God and us, who is Jesus
Christ, and that salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone. When we trust in
Him, then we have eternal life. Our sins are wiped clean at the Cross, but we
have to realize that through regeneration by trusting in Christ for salvation.
Closing
Prayer
“Father,
we thank You for this opportunity to study through this to see that there are
real implications for sin, and that when a culture or an individual continue in
carnality, there will be an internal chaos and collapse as a result of
arrogance and a result of the carnality. This will go from bad to worse unless
there is a correction from Your grace.
Father,
we pray for our nation because our culture is sliding rapidly into the same
sort of relativistic chaos and moral and ethical perversion that we see in
Israel in the Old Testament here. And the only solution is Your grace. Just as
Your grace turned the tide during this time, so Your grace can turn things
around in this time. For with You there is nothing that is impossible. Father,
we trust in You, that You would give us wise leaders in this country—that you
would raise up wise Christian leaders who can have a significant impact on the
direction of this nation. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen”.