The King Rejected pt. 1

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a privilege to share the Word of God with the saints of Durbin Memorial Baptist Church.

My one and only son is now 18 months old. It’s crazy how fast he’s growing and learning. But being in this 18 months and really having just the one shot at it, I think it is safe to say that I am now something of a parenting expert. I’m kidding of course! Every day there is something new that throw me for a loop. There is plenty of growth to be had by all parties.

But when I was younger, I would always hear from older brothers in the faith that becoming a dad will change the depth in which I see and understand the actions of God the Father. I always thought that was nonsense because of course I already knew it all. But now, being in this position, I see what they were talking about. Loving my son has helped me understand the love of the Father. Giving gifts to my son has helped me understand the blessings of the Father. Even disciplining my son has helped me understand the discipline of the Father.

Now, just as a side note, obviously not everyone here is called to be a father. That doesn’t make you any less valuable to service or understanding of the Lord. But God uses our unique perspectives to draw us together so that we can support one another. Please don’t tune this out if you aren’t a dad.

But as a dad with a rambunctious toddler, I’ve had to start applying discipline to his life. Why do I do it? Because I love him! Because I want him to be safe and to grow in a healthy home. Because it would not be loving to let him hurt himself or others without consequence.

We need to have firm grasp on this truth because in our primary text this morning we are going to see God give instruction, that instruction be ignored, and consequence to follow.

In our culture we have pacified our view of God’s character in a way that denies His Holy Character. Church, we need to understand that disciplining God of justice is not opposed to a blessing God of love. They are one in the same. God is love and God is just. In fact, it is for our Good that He is so.

We read in Hebrews 12:7-11

Hebrews 12:7–11 ESV

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

In this section of Hebrews, the Holy Spirit is reminding the readers that following the Lord is costly and it is not always comfortable. That is something we have missed in our American church context. Following the Lord is not always comfortable. Being a God honoring church member is not always comfortable. Paul writes multiple times that he STRAINS, AGONIZES, FIGHTS to serve the Lord. Following the Lord faithfully goes directly against our own sin nature and the flesh we still walk in.

So, it is a grace that we can sit under the right handling of the Word. It is a grace that we can build one another up in our groups and classes. And it is grace that God the Father disciplines His children.

In fact in this section of Hebrews we see that being disciplined by the Father is proof we are His children! God is working everything together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. Even the uncomfortable chastisement and reproof.

I say all this because sometimes we think that God being all-loving means that He is the weathered and kind grandpa smiling along as the children rough house in the yard. But that is not the case. He is the active, protective, loving and disciplining Father who lays boundaries that are beneficial for His children and strikes the rod when that is what is needed and beneficial for His children.

He is also the loving Father who protects His children from danger by fending off the attacker. It is an honorable thing for a man to protect his home from someone seeking to harm his goods or his children. How much more honorable is it, then, for God the Father to cast out and punish the wicked?

I wanted to explore the idea of God the Father’s strength this morning because if our understanding of who God is only comes from the upbeat songs they play on the modern radio stations, we are likely only seeing the side of God that showers blessing. And don’t get me wrong here, we do have a God that blesses beyond all measure. But if our focus is only on a God who coddles our desires, then two things happen. 1. We don’t have a true grasp on the God of the Bible. 2. When we come in contact with the true God of the Bible, we cringe! When we read the stories of Judgment in the old testament, were like nah, God can’t be mean like that! We need to understand that God is not mean, He is just. He is not vindictive He is disciplining. In a culture of tolerance we need to understand that God is INtollerant of sin. Having this understanding will allow us to better understand the story we read this morning and instead of being confused by God’s seemingly stern actions, we can learn to praise Him for His justice.

With that in mind would you open your Bibles to 1 Samuel 15 if you haven’t already. We are entering the final chapter for this stint of 1 Samuel that we have been walking through together as a church. For the past 10 weeks we have seen how Israel desired a King so that they would look like the rest of the nations. Their desire for a king was a rejection of God as their King. Despite their rejection, God gave the people Saul. Saul was the poster child for what they would’ve wanted their king to look like. He was a big, imposing man. Though he did not have battle experience, he had the frame of a warrior. The people thought they finally had a man who could fight their battles for them. But as Saul becomes king, we have seen that it was not his desire to honor the Lord in the position. He was self-serving. He tried to craft situations for his own advantage. Because of this God tells Saul through the prophet Samuel that Saul would be removed from the position. From that point we have seen a struggle between the Philistines and the Israelites where Saul’s son Jonathan shows stronger faith than his father and though Israel does have a victory over the Philistines, Saul’s treatment of the people tempers the victory from what it could have been.

That leads us to where we are picking up this morning in chapter 15.

The first three verses in chapter 15 set up a specific command God has for Saul. Start in verse 2

1 Samuel 15:2–3 ESV

Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ ”

Right off the bat we are confronted with what I was alluding to in our introduction. Your first thought here might be, woh woh woh pastor Brad! There ain’t no way the all-loving God talked about on K-Love told King Saul to not spare anyone at all from the Amalekites. But remember that in His love, God is also just! Expressions of God’s holy justice against an unholy creature is not a violation of His Love. By mentioning the history of the Amalekites with Israel, God is saying that now in His perfect timing, it is time to settle accounts. The sins in the history of the Amalekites are to now be dealt with. This is a call back to what we see happen in the Exodus account. The Lord told Moses in Exodus 17:14 that God was going to blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Why? They were one of the first tribes to attack Israel after their escape from Egypt. While Israel was weak, worn out, and weary, the Amalekites attacked the straggler of the Israelites, likely the women and the children. The Amalekites did not fear the One True God of the Israelites. They had no reverence for the Lord of hosts. It was recorded throughout multiple places in the Old Testament that in His perfect timing, God would wipe them from the earth.

So while the modern reader may read a section of Scripture like this and be shocked, that is only because we are unacquainted with the history surrounding the event, and we are inclined to diminish the seriousness of sin!

In fact, there are some out there that will argue that the God of the Old Testament is completely different God than that of the New Testament. This angry God of the Old Testament, with His grudges and wrath is incompatible with the loving God of the New Testament. Well, first of all, I think that one has to cherry-pick even the New Testament to come to that conclusion. Our Lord Jesus was not a afraid to speak of wrath and the place where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Furthermore, what we are seeing here in the Old Testament account is an example of a truth that we find nestled in the heart of the New Testament.

Galatians 6:7 ESV

Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.

The God of the New Testament who is also the God of the Old Testament will not be mocked. There are repercussions to actions. Whatever anyone sows is what he will reap. The Amalekites were a people not just apathetic to God, but adversarial. Their fate had been proclaimed hundreds of years before where we find ourselves in the text today.

This brings up a couple of interesting points for our practical application:

In 1 Samuel 15:2-3 God is referred to as the Lord of Hosts. We see Him working through one nation to bring judgment on another nation. We should be reminded that in international conflict, God is still in control and is still working things together according to His plans and for His perfect purpose. I’ve mentioned it before but one of my recent memory verses is Revelation 1:5-6 in which Jesus is referred to as the Ruler of king on earth, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever amen. I can’t tell you what is going to happen in the next election. I can’t tell you what the geopolitical landscape is going to look like 50 years from now, but I can tell you that even if the scene looks dark from our perspective, God is in control and Jesus is the Ruler of Kings on earth.

We should not be surprised to see calamity strike a people where there is no fear of the Lord. The Amalekites did not fear the Lord. They did not revere the True God and consequences were to come. God will not be mocked. Even within our own tribe, in our country, if God is not feared we should not be surprised when national judgment follows. And even if times of great national darkness were to come, those who’s hope is in the Lord can hold tight His goodness and know that even that is being used for our good and His glory.

The third application here is that we must be familiar with the whole scope of the Word to have a grasp on the whole scope of God. I’m not suggesting that our human minds our capable of fully understanding the infinite God, BUT we can use that which He has made known to us to better understand Him! And as we better understand Him, we appreciate Him for who He is. We will see how King Saul responds to God’s request in a moment, but if Saul had had a deeper familiarity with the Word, he would’ve seen the honor it was that God would’ve allowed him to lead the attack on the Amalekites. In our lives if we have a deep understanding of the Word, we will see that God has given those who believe in Him the great honor of being His ambassador! We’d see the seriousness of the state of the Word. We’d hold on to hope though we walk through the valley of the shadow of Death. We must be committed to learning and growing in our faith for it is for our good and God’s glory! One biblical scholar suggests that we forget about making New Year’s resolutions and start making New Day resolutions to be serious and overjoyed to be in the Word. Today and everyday is the day to begin being serious about God’s Word.

God’s Word is so good.

After Saul was given the command to take out the Amalekites let’s see how he responds. He first gathers together over 10,000 men to lead into battle. He goes down into a Valley to wait for the Amalekites. While there you’ll notice that he warns a people group called the Kenites to leave from the presence of the Amalekites so that they would not be harmed in the battle as well. This was a good decision. The Kenites had not been adversarial to the Israelites. Moses’ father-in-law had been a Kenite. There was a kindness between the Israelites and the Kenites so it was good to warn them and have them spared from the calamity to come. The Kenites listen and leave the area. Then in verse 7 Saul makes his attack and we get the impression that everything goes well with the attack. It says the Amalekites were defeated. This is a kid of a “so far so good” moment in the story. But we have to note that being defeated is different than being destroyed. Being defeated in battle does not mean the war was over. Saul was commanded to end the war completely. That’s when we get to verse 8:

1 Samuel 15:8–9 ESV

And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive and devoted to destruction all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fattened calves and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them. All that was despised and worthless they devoted to destruction.

In these verse we see that Saul was partially obedient to what the Lord had told him to do. Saul took down all the Amalekites in this area, but we know he didn’t carry out the full command which was to completely take out the tribe, all the people, even their belongings, their cattle. We know Saul did not obey this completely because of two reasons in the specific text and other biblical history given later Scripture. In just this verse we see that Saul kept king Agag alive and he also kept the best of the cattle. This is goes directly against God’s commands of Saul. We also see later in biblical history that Saul must not have wiped out every single one of the Amalekites at this time because just a few decades later, King David would be bothered by a group of Amalekites in 1 Samuel chapter 30. Also hundreds of years later in the book of Esther you read about a descendant of Agag named Haman who tries to wipe out the entire Jewish population in that time! We can clearly see that Saul was not completely obedient to the task he was given! And church we need to know that partial obedience is complete disobedience.

This morning we had the Lord’s Supper and it was an honor for me to prepare the bread. I know it may not have been the tastiest bread ever made, but there is an interesting illustration in the unleavened bread used for the Lord’s Supper. The original Lord’s Supper was done at Passover and in a tradition Passover meal, the bread was to be unleavened. For the symbology of the meal, the leaven represented sin. Any bit of leaven, any yeast, any sourdough starter, was to be removed from the house. It is the idea of a little bit of leaven leavens the whole lump. So in the Passover meal it is representing a little bit a sin stains the whole of a person and spreads.

I have been making a lot of sourdough bread and it is incredible just how little amount of starter it takes to create a fermented dough. It grows!

Now to connect that back to out ext this morning, God’s calling to completely wipe out the Amalekites is a vivid picture what happens when we allow sin to fester in our lives. Saul was supposed to take them out. He didn’t. Years later they attack David. More years down the road, one of them tries to take out all of the Jewish people in the known world.

When we look at this through the lens of the New Testament we can see this as an example of what happens when we allow something to stick around in our lives that the Lord has called us to kill! Our sin! God’s Word tells us to Mortify! our sin! Put to death therefore what is earthly in you! Why do we do that? Well Christ has assured all those who believe in Him of eternal life, but until we get there the sin that remains in our lives hinders our joy and flattens our mission!

Church, we are not called to half-heartedly eliminate sin in our lives! We are called to whole heartedly destroy it! That is an agonizing, a striving process. One that requires constant reminder and encouragement. Praise be to God that He designed the church to do just that! To be a place where we are reminded of the worthiness of Christ to be served and though we see that we still battle the flesh we are inspired to press on for the victory He has attained for us!

May we be committed this morning to leave no enemy of sin left standing! But to do so, we must be on guard! One pastor noted, “A particular sin may leave the believer alone for awhile to make him think he is rid of it. But it can come back with a hellish fury if he is not on guard. Sin perpetually stalks him; he must be continually mortifying it. This is a duty he cannot rest from until he rests in glory. Give sin an inch, it will take a mile.”

This is certainly true. I will also add that this is not a novel idea to the preaching from this pulpit or hearing you probably have heard in the past. Why then do we not mortify the sin that is in us?

Well it’s likely the same reasons Saul did not completely wipe out the Amalekites and their belongings. I’ll present three quick reasons.

We don’t see the seriousness of allowing it to stay. Saul didn’t have the foresight to see what would happen if he allowed some of the Amalekites to live. He thought his victory was good enough. He didn’t think that any remaining contingent would be crafty enough to scheme against Israel in the future. We too often think that things are less of a big deal than they actually are. Just look at the moral and sexual revolution happening around us in our modern culture and see how a little bit of leaven has affected everything.

Our pride gets the best of us. Saul wanted to keep King Agag alive because that was a way to flaunt his victory. This was a fairly common practice between fighting tribes. Showing off the emasculated king of another tribe was a way to show the superiority of one’s own tribe. We love visible monuments of our own success as much as Saul did. How does this play out in our lives? It can in a variety of different ways but maybe when you came to faith God convicted you on some business dealings that weren’t quite above board. Ethical lines had been blurred in the past. Now that you know Jesus you also know that when you work you are not working as if serving men, but the Lord! So you clean up your business. But then an opportunity comes that will be too good. Too lucrative. So you cross the line, someone may has been taken advantage. They may be non the wiser, but even still the Lord is not honored in that transaction. It also becomes easier to cross the line again the next time it arises. Listen, any sin we commit even well after knowing Christ as Lord, has been paid for on the cross, but when we disobey for personal pride or gain, we give no honor to the Lord and it is a sad affair.

The third reason we allow sin to stick around is that In our flesh, sin still looks good. Saul looked at the cattle the Lord told him to destroy and said it was too good to get rid of. One of the biggest lies told and bought in this world is that “If it makes you happy it is good for you.” So many marriages are broken because someone looked outside their marriage and saw someone else they deemed to be better than what they had. Church, our hearts are deceitful. In our flesh, on this side of glory, there are going to be things that look very good to us that we have business being involved with. God has already told Saul, don’t mess with those wipe it out. But as Saul got close he said, but it looks so good, I’m gonna keep it.

So what happened to Saul? What was the response to his disobedience. Well, we’re going to get into this more deeply next week, but for now, look at the next two verses:

1 Samuel 15:10–11 ESV

The word of the Lord came to Samuel: “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments.” And Samuel was angry, and he cried to the Lord all night.

We’re gonna get into what it means when the Lord says “I regret that I have made Saul king” in great detail next week. Don’t look past that, just put a circle around it and note that we’re coming back to it.

The over arching idea we need to take in this moment is the overwhelming sense of mourning, despair, and frustration there is in response to sin. That is where all sin leads! Samuel in verse 11 is distraught. We don’t know if he’s angry at Saul, the situation, or everything in between. We just know that he is crying to the Lord all night. And there is something excellent we can learn from that moment.

When you are confronted with the effects of sin, cry out to God.

Three Circles

When we see the brokenness there is around us, take hope because though Saul was a faltering King, there was a better King coming. Christ the King.

That King Christ is said in Scripture to be the one to whom God has appointed judge over all the living and the damned. And he will take sin so seriously. But for everyone who believes in Him, made evident through turning from sin and confessing Him as Lord, to those who believe in Him, they shall have eternal life. Reconciled to the Father whom their sin had cut them off from. Instead of wrath, they receive grace. That can be you. It doesn’t depend on your goodness. You aren’t the king who stepped out of heaven and you never will be. We are saved when we see Christ for the King He is. When we have the God given desire to serve Him and begin putting that sin that is in our flesh to death. Is that you today?