Transitions
1 Samuel 14:46–15:4
Opening Prayer
“Our Father, we are thankful
for this time this evening where we can come together to focus upon You and
Your Word—to learn from that which You have revealed to us and preserved down
through the centuries, that we may come to understand how life really works,
that we may come to understand truth about You, truth about us as human beings,
fallen, corrupt, and under the control of our sin nature, and that we can learn
the truth about Your grace and Your goodness—that You have provided everything
for us.
Even though things may look
very dark at times, nevertheless, you still remain in control. You provide for
us. You sustain us. You strengthen us, and as we learn to walk with you, we
come to understand how great and magnificent Your grace really is. Father, we
pray that You would help us to understand the things we are studying tonight,
that the Spirit can use these things that we study to strengthen our spiritual
life. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.”
We are in 1 Samuel 14, and
we are in a transition section. This section began with 1 Samuel 8 where we see
the desire of Israel for a king. We see God revealing to Samuel in 1 Samuel 9
that this king is going to be Saul. Then we are introduced to Saul, and we come
to understand that Saul has certain character flaws. Not unlike everybody else.
It is always sad when people
jump to the conclusion that Saul must not have been a believer because he had
character flaws. If that were true, then we would all be in trouble. Saul is a
perfect picture of the believer who is in disobedience to Him.
Saul is a believer, and that
he will spend eternity in Heaven is clear at the end of 1 Samuel when he goes
to the witch of Endor. The witch of Endor, who goes through her usual charlatan
tricks, her fraud, to bring up the dead and talk to the dead, is totally
surprised by the fact that this time God allowed Samuel to return from the
grave, which really irritated Samuel. He is not happy about that.
But Samuel told Saul, “tomorrow you and
your sons will be with me.” Now that does not mean you are going to be
dead, like I am dead. “With me” has a much tighter connotation. Where Samuel was, that is
where Saul would be, which can only be in Paradise, where Old Testament saints
went when they died prior to the coming of Christ and the cross.
Saul is a great picture for
us, an object lesson, in arrogance and self-absorption and where that leads. We
will see these things as we wrap up 1 Samuel 14.
1 Samuel 15 begins the last
section of 1 Samuel. And in 1 Samuel 15 we see the big transition as we go into
the end of Saul’s dynasty and the lead up to the selection of David, a man
after God’s own heart.
1 Samuel 15 to the end of
the book represents the last section where the focus shifts to David. This is
the transition section.
Now we got to about 1 Samuel
14:46–47 last time. The last part of 1 Samuel 14 is a summary. It wraps up what
is going on and gives us a progress report on Saul.
That is why I think that the
break does not come between 1 Samuel 15 and 16, which is where David becomes
the king. It is because what you get at the end of 1 Samuel 14 is this summary
statement about Saul—basically a progress report.
Normally these statements
are given at the conclusion of a person’s life. But what we see here is at the
conclusion of the period where Saul has a measure of God’s blessing. But from
this point on, he does not have God’s blessing. And in the author’s mind, that
is where the shift occurs.
Here is a reminder of some
of the geography here. This is important. The more I travel in Israel, the more
I am on the ground, the more I look at things, the more I realize how important
it is—especially in these last couple of chapters where we went through the
battle at Michmash and looked at the pictures. And seeing the geography, it
gives us a further dimension to understand what is happening.
What we have here is a basic
map. You can always remember this if you think you are looking north. Just
remember—on the left hand you have the west, the Mediterranean, and on your right
hand you have, the east, the Jordan Valley and the River Jordan. To the north
you are going to have Galilee, and to the south you are going to have Judah.
You picture standing in Jerusalem looking north.
That is what we see here.
Just north of Jerusalem (Jebus on this map) five miles or so, is Gibeah, Saul’s
hometown. A couple of miles further on you have Ramah, which is Samuel’s
hometown. Then it is in that area between Ramah and Bethel, just north of
Ramah, that you have the location for the battle of Michmash. To the northeast
of Gibeah is where you have the location of Geba and Michmash.
In this map you see through
the lines some of the various troop movements that are taking place in the book
of Samuel. We will concentrate on this center section here right now.
What you have is Ramah,
right by the numeral 1. Geba is slightly north of due east. And north of that
you have Michmash. The ravine in between is the area where Jonathan scaled the
cliffs. You see the movement of the troops in the center section of the map.
This is what we get at the
end of the previous section, 1 Samuel 14:11ff. We see that the Israelites
pursued the Philistines. They pursued them as far as Aijalon, which is to the
west.
If you look at the one blue
arrow pointing to the south, it depicts Saul’s movements sometime later. We do
not know how much time goes by between 1 Samuel 14 and 1 Samuel 15. It could be
a couple of years. It could be a longer period of time. But it is at that time
that Saul moved south against the Amalekites.
But also, as we see in the
summary verse in 1 Samuel 14:47, he moves against the Moabites, the Edomites.
He is going to move this blue arrow north to go against the Arameans in the
north. Saul excels as a military commander in securing the borders and the security
of Israel. He understands that. He is very capable in some areas of his life.
We are told in 1 Samuel
14:31 that they drove the Philistines that day from Michmash all the way to
Aijalon. That is when the people were very faint. That is where the whole
incident with Jonathan tasting the honey in the forest occurred.
The Israelites were so faint
at the end of the day that they were killing animals and eating the blood,
which was disobedience, 1 Samuel 14:31–35.
And in 1 Samuel 14:46 there
is a summary that after they had accomplished this defeat “Saul returned from pursuing the Philistines
and the Philistines went to their own place.”
Now where is “their own”
place? The Philistines go down along the coast. That is where the Philistine
cities were located.
Here is an enlargement of
the map showing the movements after the battle of Michmash where they pursued
them to Aijalon, which is getting down into the area at the edge of the hill
country.
If you have been to Israel,
when you are traveling on the highway to Tel Aviv, it reaches a point where you
start coming out of the hills and start heading down into the low country. The
technical term for all the low country area along the west coast of Israel is
the Shephelah.
As you are coming down into
the Shephelah, that area is where Aijalon was located. This is the same place
where God stilled the sun so Joshua could continue to fight all day. It is
located in that area.
We are told in 1 Samuel
14:47, “So
Saul established his sovereignty over Israel, and fought against all his
enemies on every side, against Moab, against the people of Ammon, against Edom,
against the kings of Zobah, and against the Philistines. Wherever he turned, he
harassed them.”
Now we need to look at this
verse to get the idea of what is going on here. We do not know a whole lot
about the time lapse between 1 Samuel 14:46 and 1 Samuel 15, but this is a
summary that will cover the rest of Saul’s reign, as he brings security to the
borders of the nation.
Here is a principle: For a nation
to exist it has to have secure borders.
This is because if your
borders are not defensible and defended and secure other peoples and other
cultures will overrun you.
You will no longer exist as
a distinct culture and as a distinct nation. This is something that is not
obvious to liberals in this country. Liberals think you can have open borders.
In fact, we are seeing the influence of extreme liberalism in Europe right now.
Our President has just been
in Europe. He has been telling the British that they cannot leave the European
Union (EU). He has been praising the Prime Minister
of Germany, Angela Merkel, and telling her how wonderful it is that she is
letting all of these Assyrians and all of these Middle Eastern and North
African refugees into Europe.
This is liberalism run
amuck. What happens when this takes place is you are overrun as a culture. It
destroys your distinctiveness. You basically let an alien culture come in.
This usually happens from
military force, but it has happened with or without military force down through
the centuries. It is how one nation is transplanted, how one culture is
destroyed by another.
When we look at the Bible,
we know that it teaches that God established in Genesis five different divine
institutions. These institutions are for believer and unbeliever alike. They
are not just for Christians. The first three divine institutions were
established before the Fall.
God gave every human being
personal responsibility and made them accountable for their decisions and for
their actions. Every human being is accountable to God for his decisions.
In the Garden of Eden the
test was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve were told not
to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because
there would be a tremendous, drastic, severe penalty, and in the day that they
ate of it, they would die.
They did not die physically,
but they died spiritually. They were separated from God.
That is exhibited in Genesis
3:8 when God came to walk in the Garden. Adam and Eve expected Him. The idea is
that God normally came and spent time with them, teaching them, talking to
them, and enlightening them as to the nature of His Creation. He gave them the
information needed by which they could organize all the empirical data that
they were collecting on a day-to-day basis.
So Adam and Eve ran and hid
from God. That was their response. They were afraid. Up to that time, there had
been a harmonious relationship with God. But their disobedience broke that
relationship, and now they had become accountable for their decision. They
suffered a penalty.
When God rules his Creation,
there is a penalty for disobedience. When man rules under the principles of
liberalism, he tries to ameliorate the consequences. The only ones that get
consequences and reap the ire of the culture are those who are holding to God’s
standards. That is a corollary to the principle of suppressing the truth in
unrighteousness according to Romans 1:18ff.
When people are suppressing
the truth, they are angry. They become more and more angry when anybody reminds
them that what they are doing is wrong, that they cannot do it. Think about a
little kid. Everybody here has had experiences with little kids. You tell that
little kid that he cannot do what he really wants to do and what is his
response?
He gets angry, because you
are trying to control him. You are trying to tell him that he cannot do what he
wants to do. He cannot feed the lust of his sin nature. He wants to be able to
do anything and everything he wants to do whenever he wants to do it, however
he wants to do it.
That is what happens under
liberalism and in post-modernism. You throw off those guards for the arrogant
orientation of our sin nature. Then what happens is that we throw temper
tantrums. We will throw them against God. We will throw them against anybody
else that represents God and His standards, because we do not like that.
To understand the culture is
to understand that the more it gets away from God, the more those who represent
God and represent truth and the absolutes of Scripture are going to become the
objects of scorn, hatred, and anger.
Our response is not to be a
response of bitterness, a response of vindictiveness, or a response of
vengeance. It is to be a response of grace, a response of kindness. A response
that is firm in standing for the truth does not compromise, but we are to have
that level of genuine compassion that we get from Scripture.
Marriage was designed by God
to be between one man and one woman. Anything other than that is always
depicted in Scripture as personally, spiritually, and socially destructive.
The Bible does not come out
and say that polygamy is immoral, or that having a concubine is immoral and a
sin. But what it shows is that when these things were practiced, it was
destructive to the family.
The family is the incubation
of the next generation:
A child has to understand
authority. If a child does not get authority orientation by the time they are
four years old, you are going to have problems as a parent.
Sometimes you will find
parents who want to spoil their young children. Some cultures are that way. But
either you weep when they are one to four years old, because you are having to
punish them, or you are going to weep after they are fourteen, and weeping will
last a lot longer.
Not every child is
necessarily going to respond well. Some are strong willed. But it is the role
of the parents to teach them discipline, because that is what will get them
through the rest of life.
Those divine institutions:
Individual responsibility, Marriage, and Family were all designed before there
was sin, even in the Garden.
That tells us that even in a
perfect society, in an environment of absolute sinless perfection, those three
divine institutions are necessary for stability in the human race.
Then after the Fall, and
after all the horrors of the excessive freedom and autonomy and rebellion that
occurred prior to the Noahic Flood, what you have after the Flood is God
establishing a new divine institution—a fourth divine institution.
God delegates government to man
the responsibility to govern themselves: to have judicial penalties, and to
execute those penalties within society, whether it is something that involves
anything from a misdemeanor, municipal problem, or to some sort of felonious
activity.
After that, some 200–300
years later at the tower of Babel when the human race disobeyed God again, God
then divided them by giving them languages. That is a totally separate divine
institution.
When any of those divine
institutions are being violated, a nation and a culture will collapse.
If you go back and listen to
the series I taught in 2008 on “Decision
Making in the Voting Booth,” that is the framework for understanding
how to make decisions when we vote for candidates.
None of those factors; it
has to do with their belief system—what they believe about those five divine institutions,
plus Israel.
What we have seen in our
nation in the last eight years is a tremendous collapse, because the erosion of
those divine institutions went into warp drive about seven years ago. We are
now seeing the consequences of that.
It is going to really hurt
individual Christians in the church in coming years, but the root of all that
is arrogance. Man wants to define his own reality.
And that is Saul’s problem.
Saul is good in some areas. He is bad in other areas. We see this picture of how
he is good and how he is strong. He understood the fifth divine institution.
Today in western
civilization, this influence of liberalism does not understand the importance
of the fifth divine institution of nations. They do not understand that. They want
to have open borders. They want to take down all the barriers of culture. It is
not necessarily in arrogance. It is not that there is prejudice and bigotry,
although that certainly exists in some quarters.
It is recognition that to
have order, prosperity and protection, there has to be consistency within a
certain area.
When you leave your house,
you do not leave the door open for anybody who can to walk in and take up his
residence. Pretty soon you would not have anything, and neither would anybody
else.
This is what Saul
recognizes.
We have the Philistines on
the east. Actually the description on the slide goes counterclockwise. Saul
protects against the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Edomites, and then over to
Philistia and up to the kings of Zobah. Zobah is an area in Syria, which is the
area of Aram; and lastly, the Amalekites. Saul takes care of all the enemies on
every side and defeats them.
Then we are told, “Wherever he
turned he harassed them.” The word for “harassed” is an interesting word.
It is the Hebrew word rasha, which literally means something
having to do with being wicked or condemning. But it is an idiomatic use where
it means that Saul deals harshly with them.
It either means:
So here is a summary of Saul
and application to the Christian life:
We have seen that he is very
concerned about himself. He is not very interested in others. He shows a
remarkable ignorance of priestly things and of the religion of Israel.
Remember when Saul is first
looking for his lost donkeys? It is his servant that tells him as they approach
Ramah, that this is the city of the prophet. Saul has no idea who the prophet
is. Yet Samuel has been the prophet judging Israel for probably 20 years at
that point.
That would be comparable to
someone in this country not knowing that the President lives in Washington D.C. It is
beyond our comprehension.
So Saul is self-absorbed.
And when you are self-absorbed, as you ratchet that up, you become
self-indulgent. You give into yourself. Then, as you go through
self-indulgence, you commit more and more ethically questionable decisions, to
wrong decisions. You justify yourself. You justify all your actions.
In 1 Samuel 15 we are going
to see once again that Saul manifests self-justification. He does two things:
Both Adam and Eve in the
Garden first manifested that. They were blaming each other. Adam, in a
masterful sentence says: “Lord, it is the woman You gave me.” He blamed the woman and God in
one shot.
That is how Saul is. He is
in self-justification, self-deception because when you are suppressing the
truth in unrighteousness, you cannot see what is going on. There is no
objectivity in your own life. You have slipped into irrationality because you
are divorced from reality.
That leads to
self-deification. You are basically worshiping yourself in the place of God.
Saul has compromised his sin nature and let his arrogance run free. Christians
can do that day in and day out.
Saul was told by Samuel at
the beginning of 1 Samuel 15 that they were to slaughter, annihilate all of the
Amalekites. That seems harsh to us, and we will deal with the issues behind
that when we get there. But Saul is told to slaughter all of them—man, woman,
child, infant nursing child, and all their animals. Everybody dies.
When he gets done and Samuel
confronts him, what is Saul’s response? “Well, I did.”
I do not think Saul is
lying. I think in self-deception he thinks he did what he was supposed to do.
He has justified it so much in his own thinking that he is going to use these
animals to worship God and to do it his way that he is blind to the fact that
he has not been obedient. He cannot see the truth for what it is anymore. That
is what happens.
We see this a lot of times
in people’s lives. I do not know how many times I am asked a question by
somebody, “How in the world can that happen? How can those people do what they
are doing? It is not logical.”
But logic is not the issue.
They are in spiritual rebellion. That means they are in irrationality. As a
result of that, you cannot logically explain why they are saying and doing the
things they are doing because it is irrational.
By definition, rationality
cannot explain irrationality. It is a spiritual rebellion of a dark soul.
What we see is that Saul’s
spiritual life does not impact his professional life for a very, very long
time. But eventually it does. And there are disastrous consequences, not only
for himself, but also for his family and for the entire nation.
So what is missing?
God is missing from this
evaluation because God is missing from Saul’s life. The absence of God in this
summary statement speaks volumes.
One side note that I want to
make you aware of as we go through this on-going, never-ending, horrible
election season, this spring of 2016:
You have often heard me say
that a nation often gets the leader that they deserve. A democratic culture is
going to vote for somebody who goes along with its values. The leaders that we
get are often the leaders that we deserve. That is in God’s permissive will. He
lets that happen so that we can experience judgment.
But every now and then, God
gives us leaders we do not deserve. And that is what happens with Israel. They
are going to get David, whom they do not deserve. They wanted a king like all
the other nations, and they got one. They do not see the problem. Spiritually
they have not improved.
We have not seen anything
yet to talk about the people having refocused their thinking upon God and
turning back to God at all. But what we do see is Saul representing the
self-destructive orientation and arrogance of the nation.
Saul is harassing these
peoples, which means he is defeating them. He is bringing them down. 1 Samuel
14:48 “And he
gathered an army and attacked the Amalekites, and delivered Israel from the
hands of those who plundered them.” We will talk more about the Amalekites
when we get into the beginning of 1 Samuel 15.
The Amalekites arguably are
Israel’s worst enemy, and their longest sustained enemy in the Old Testament.
In fact, when you talk in the Jewish community, when they identify an enemy,
whether it is the modern day Iranians or whether it is the Nazi’s under
Hitler—what term do they use to refer to their enemy? They are Amalek. They are
all Amalek.
That is the term that they
use to define the ongoing enemy in the world that is the present manifestation
of anti-Semitism. Remember, in Esther we see the opposition there against the
Israelites. Haman is a descendant of Agag, who is the king of the Amalekites.
Amalek becomes the definitive term that Jews use to describe their enemy.
The last one listed is the
territory of Amalek. It is not defined in Scripture. The Amalekites were first
encountered as Israel came out of Egypt on their way to Mt. Sinai (Exodus 17).
The Amalekites seem to be a roving band of terrorists, not unlike ISIS today.
The Amalekites are a roving band, quite populous, a large group.
The Amalekites basically
settled down after the Exodus somewhere in the area of the Sinai Peninsula
south of Israel in the area of the Negev.
Remember, all this area is
the area of the desert. To the south is Kadesh Barnea. This whole area is the
area where the Israelites were for forty years before God allowed them
eventually to cross over, go around Edom and Moab, then come to Mt. Nebo, and
enter into Israel.
This map is showing the
movements of Saul after the battle of the Amalekites, which is in the south.
Saul will take off and go to Carmel. This is not the Mt. Carmel of Elijah. That
is up in the north near Haifa. This is another Carmel in the south.
What we see is that Saul is
going to be chosen by God to be given the privilege of fulfilling Old Testament
prophecy to destroy the Amalekites.
God had promised this to
Israel, to Moses, back in Exodus. It had been restated in Deuteronomy, and yet
throughout all this time period the Amalekites were a problem. Saul is going to
deliver Israel.
There are two key words in 1
Samuel 14:48.
Natsal is used in parallelism with yasha in
Psalm 7:1, but in that context it means “physical deliverance,” as yasha does in
many passages, the same as SOZO does in the New Testament.
In Psalm 39:8 it clearly has
spiritual overtones, as it does in Psalm 51:14 and Psalm 79:9. This is a word
that can picture spiritual salvation, but here it is picturing a physical
deliverance from this enemy.
1 Samuel 14:49–51 is a
summary of Saul’s family. There is a genealogical reference here, but I am not
going to deal with all the issues related to this.
It is confusing. The first
problem has to do with Saul’s sons in the first three verses (of the five
verses) on the slide:
These five passages list
Saul’s sons. The first three verses are grouped together coming out of 1
Samuel, and 1 Chronicles is the parallel.
We are told in 1 Samuel
14:49, “The
sons of Saul were Jonathan, Jishui (Ishvi), and Malchishua.”
There is one that is not
listed. That is Ishbosheth. He is not listed.
1 Samuel 31:2 is the battle
of Mt. Gilboa, when Saul kills himself. Jonathan is killed, and the other sons
are killed. We read that list:
“Then the Philistines followed hard after
Saul and his sons. And the Philistines killed Jonathan, Abinadab, and
Malchishua.”
Wait a minute. Abinadab is
not mentioned in that previous list.
How do we do that? How do we
pull those together? 1 Chronicles 10:2 lists the three sons as: Jonathan, Abinadab, and Malchishua.
People back then, as they do
today, had two or three names sometimes. It is believed by most scholars that
Ishvi, mentioned in 1 Samuel 14:49, is the same person as Abinadab. Here are
the options:
But to do that, as some
scholars do, they have to change the reading of the Hebrew text from the name Ishvi to Esh-Yo, and
there is no textual support for that anywhere. There is no variant listed in
any manuscript that could possibly do that. That is pure conjecture and making
it up as you go along.
In these scholars’ view, Ishvi should
be read as a “man of Yahweh.” “Ish” being the Hebrew word for “man.” “Vi” would be the second syllable in Yahweh. Man
of Yahweh
would be parallel to “man of Baal.”
We normally think of Baal as the
god in the Canaanite pantheon, who is the son of El. But Baal was also a Canaanite or Hebrew word
for “lord.” Ishvi would be “man of Yahweh” and the scholars would translate that
“man of Baal.”
What this boils down to is
these are the kinds of things liberals attack conservatives on and say that there
are contradictions in the Bible. Sometimes we have to take a little time and
say, “look there are other explanations.” The best solution for this is that
these three sons—Jonathan, Ishvi, and Malchishua—are all adults in this second
part of 1 Samuel.
But what happens is we come
to 2 Samuel 2:10 and we are told that Ishbosheth, Saul’s son that survives, was
40 years old when he began to reign over Israel.
If Saul reigned 40 years,
when is Ishbosheth born? When Saul begins to reign.
It is at this point when you
have these genealogical listings in 1 Samuel 14:49, Ishbosheth is a baby, maybe
one year old. He does not count yet. You do not even know at that time if he is
going to live and survive. He would have been an infant at that time.
Who are being listed here
are the adult sons. Those are the adult sons that are fighting in the army.
They are the ones who were killed. This resolves the problem. Ishbosheth is the
fourth son who came along later in life for Saul. He is an infant early in
Samuel. That makes sense. That is an easy resolution.
There are some other
problems that I am not going to get into. These have to do with some of the
relationships in Saul’s family, whether Ner is his uncle or his cousin.
1 Samuel 14:50, “The name of
Saul’s wife was Ahinoam the daughter of Ahimaaz. And the name of the commander
of his army was Abner the son of Ner, Saul’s uncle.” But the question here:
is Abner Saul’s uncle, or is Ner Saul’s uncle? Think about that for a while and do
some work on this one.
1 Samuel 14:51, “Kish was the
father of Saul, and Ner the father of Abner was the son of Abiel.”
Here is a most common
genealogy. There are a couple of others. They try to work this out. But you
have Abiel who is Saul’s grandfather. He has two sons, Ner and Kish. Ab is the
Hebrew word for “father.”
Remember, the New Testament
tells us that the Holy Spirit is in us crying out “Abba, Father.” In Hebrew, if you go to
Israel, “daddy” is abba. Ab is the word for father. “My father is Ner” would be Abbi Ner or
Abner. Abner is the son of Ner and is Saul’s cousin. And he is Saul’s general.
When Saul dies on Mt. Gilboa
Abner is going to take over. He is going to go to the fourth son, Ishbosheth,
not listed here, and make him king. Abner is going to be Ishbosheth’s basic strength.
So you have the three adult
sons at this time: Jonathan, Ishvi, and Malchishua, and then two daughters,
Mirab and Michal. Michal is a funny word. Everyone has trouble pronouncing it
because we look at it and think it is Michael, but Michael is a different term.
It is spelled almost the same except it is a little different. The “I” in
Michal is pronounced like an “e.”
Here’s what we read in
closing out, and then a final comment: 1 Samuel 14:52, “Now there was fierce war with the
Philistines all the days of Saul.” The Philistines are responsible for the
death of Saul at Mt. Gilboa.
“And when Saul saw any strong man or any
valiant man, he took him for himself.” What is happening here? It is foreshadowing. Who is going
to be the strong man to come along in 1 Samuel 16?
In 1 Samuel 17 we are going
to see David and Goliath. What is going to happen with David? David is going to
be brought into Saul’s family.
What we are seeing is
foreshadowing of what is coming up, but apparently what Saul was good at was
identifying the good warriors, the good fighters, and he is strengthening his
military. He understands that much.
That made him a good leader
as far as protecting the security of Israel was concerned. That ends this
second section of the book, 1 Samuel 8–14.
The next section begins with
1 Samuel 15 where the focus is on arrogance. The focus is on human beings who
are in rebellion against God, and human beings who want to write their own
rules. This is always a problem in the human race. We always have these leaders
and people who want to do it their way.
You have two different
problems:
This is where we want to go
through the external formalities. We think that as long as we cross our “t’s”
and dot our “i’s” and follow our set of rules, whether it is the terrible two
or the nasty nine, whatever it is, as long as we do that we are “okay” in God’s
eyes, because we are “okay” in our eyes.
That is “formalism.”
Everybody has either a trend toward that or they have a trend towards out and
out lasciviousness and licentiousness in the other direction. But the problem
we are dealing with here with Saul is a problem of:
Saul wants to do everything
right externally, but his heart is not toward God. He is not a man after God’s
heart. He is just following the external codes. He is going to face a
condemnation from Samuel in this chapter.
In 1 Samuel 15:22 Samuel
says, “Has the
Lord as great a delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the
voice of the Lord?”
What is better: to go
through the external rituals like you are supposed to, or to obey the Lord? “Behold, to obey
is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams.”
The sacrifices in the
sacrificial law of the Torah were designed to teach spiritual principles about
a person’s real relationship with God, understanding that sin makes us unclean
before God. We are separated from God because of any kind of sin or uncleanness
that makes us distinct from God. We have to recover, and there has to be a
cleansing.
We find this principle all
the way through Scripture. The formalism of the sacrificial code is designed not
to be an end in and of itself but to be teaching principles of ongoing
relationships.
We see passages like Hosea,
who condemns Judah in his generation.
Hosea 6:6, “For I desire
mercy and not sacrifice, (says the Lord) and the knowledge of God more than
burnt offerings.”
God wants a person who has a
personal relationship with Him, even in the Old Testament, a person who is
concerned about a relationship, walking with the Lord and walking in obedience,
more so than the formal structures of the Mosaic Law.
David recognized this in
Psalm 51, in his great confession for his sin with Bathsheba and conspiring to
kill Uriah the Hittite. David says to God in Psalm 51:16, “For You do not desire sacrifice, or else
I would give it; You do not delight in burnt offering.”
The sacrifices of God
ultimately are a broken spirit (Psalm 51:17). What David means by
that is submission to God’s authority. “A broken and contrite heart.” Another way of
talking about submission to God’s authority, obeying Him.
Saul, on the other hand, is
not submissive and obedient. He is going to be rebellious. He is going to be
condemned for his rebelliousness because that is like the sin of witchcraft. It
is Satan’s sin.
David says in Psalm 51:17, “The sacrifices
of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart—These, O God, You will
not despise.”
Proverbs 21:3, “To do righteousness
and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.”
Wait a minute. You have all
these commands in Torah to sacrifice. Yes, but that is simply to be an external
reflection of an internal reality. This was the basis for Isaiah’s condemnation
of Israel.
Hold your place and let’s
turn to Isaiah 1:11. Isaiah is indicting Israel because they are going through
all the external ritual, all the formality, but there is no internal desire to
obey God or to come to know God.
Isaiah 1:11, “ ‘To what purpose
is the multitude of your sacrifices to Me?’ says the Lord. ‘I have had enough
of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle. I do not delight in the
blood of bulls, or of lambs or goats.’ ”
I am sick of it! You are
doing everything right for all the wrong reasons. You are going through the
step-by-step procedures, but there is no personal relationship with Me.
Isaiah 1:12, “ ‘When you come
to appear before Me, who has required this from your hand, to trample My
courts?’ ”
You know, you have added
other things as well.
Isaiah 1:13, “ ‘Bring no more
futile sacrifices; incense is an abomination to Me. The New Moons, the
Sabbaths, and the calling of assemblies— I cannot endure iniquity and the
sacred meeting.’ ”
Isaiah 1:14–15, “ ‘Your New Moons
and Your appointed feasts My soul hates;’— that means He rejects them—‘they are a
trouble to Me. I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I
will hide My eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not hear.
Your hands are full of blood.
Isaiah 1:16–17, “ ‘Wash
yourselves,’—that is confession, but it does not stop with confession—‘make yourselves
clean; put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil.’
—Do not just give sacrifices. God is calling upon them to turn, teshuvah, to
turn back to Him— ‘Learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor; defend the
fatherless, plead for the widow.’ ”
What is going to happen is
that Samuel is going to give God’s instructions to Saul.
1 Samuel 15:3, “ ‘Now go and
attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them.
But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and
donkey.’ ” Kill everything. Wipe out their economy. Do not take any
plunder. Kill every one of them. Why is that?
It is because God has given
Amalek time and opportunity to turn to Him, but the Amalekites have continued
to become a blight on humanity. It is time to discipline them, judge them, and
remove them from history.
What is Saul going to do? He
is going to completely blow it.
In 1 Samuel 15:18–19 Samuel
says, “Now the
Lord sent you on a mission, and said, ‘Go, and utterly destroy the sinners, the
Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed.’ Why then did you
not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you swoop down on the spoil, and do
evil in the sight of the Lord?” That is Saul’s condemnation. But Saul says,
I did it, I did what the Lord said to do!
1 Samuel 15:22, “So 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 heed than
the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is
as iniquity and idolatry.’
Just stop there and think
about this for a while. We are going to be here for a couple of weeks.
Rebellion is like demonism. When we disobey God’s authority, in little things
or big things, it is like demonism.
It sounds like a harsh
statement does it not? But what was Satan’s original sin? “I want to be like
God, replacing God’s authority with his (Satan’s) own authority.”
That is the original
sin—rebellion against God. This is why the Bible emphasizes obedience to
authority over and over and over again because the person who is not obedient
to authority, the person questions authority, is setting himself up to be a
god. It’s not that there are not legitimate times for us to question authority,
but generally we are to be obedient.
Why? Because when we are
not, we are setting ourselves up to be a god.
It is self-idolatry. It is
that fifth arrogance skill, self-deification.
“Stubbornness” is not just general stubbornness. That is
the person that is stubborn in their resistance to God. “ ‘Stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, He also has rejected you from
being king.’ ”
The horrible consequences.
Next time we are going to
come back. We need to take some time to remind ourselves why Amalek deserves
such a horrible punishment. We will look at Exodus 17, Deuteronomy, and a few
other passages. Right now the lesson tonight is the dangers and the
self-destruction of arrogance.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this
opportunity to study these things tonight and to be reminded that often we
become comfortable with our own sin. We become comfortable with our own
arrogance. We are blind to the realities that are going on in our own soul. As a
result, we are blind to the realities going on in the world around us.
Father, we pray that You
would open our eyes that we can see objectively our own behavior—that under the
ministry of the Holy Spirit in Your Word, that Your Word will sanctify us and challenge
us in terms of our need to obey You and to deal with the sin that so easily
besets every one of us. We pray that we might come to understand grace and
genuine humility that can only be produced in us through the Holy Spirit, and
that we might be willing to submit to Your authority and the authority of Your
Word. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”