https://www.truthforlife.

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SEPTEMBER 8, 2019

A Monumental Collapse — Part One

From Series: Give Us a King, Volume 2

by Alistair Begg

1 Samuel 15:1-35 (ID: 3388)

Partial obedience is still disobedience. Saul learned this lesson the hard way when he
failed to execute God’s judgment against the Amalekites, sparing the king and the best
of the sheep and cattle. Instead of a victorious celebration, he met with Samuel’s anger
and the Lord’s regret. Our responses matter to God, teaches Alistair Begg. While we
can be honest with Him about our frustrations, we are not free to change His word to
fit our needs or justify our actions.

Topics: 

 Biblical Figures

 Character of God

 God's Word

 Judgement

 Obedience

 Obeying God

 Wrath of God
 Sermon Transcript: Print

I invite you to turn with me to 1 Samuel and to chapter 15 and follow along as I read.
First Samuel chapter 15 and beginning at the first verse:

“And Samuel said to Saul, ‘The Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel;
now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. 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.”’

“So Saul summoned the people and numbered them in Telaim, two hundred thousand
men on foot, and ten thousand men of Judah. And Saul came to the city of Amalek and
lay in wait in the valley. Then Saul said to the Kenites, ‘Go, depart; go down from
among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them. For you showed kindness to all
the people of Israel when they came up out of Egypt.’ So the Kenites departed from
among the Amalekites. And Saul defeated the Amalekites from Havilah as far as Shur,
which is east of Egypt. 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
… lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them. All that was
despised and worthless they devoted to destruction.

“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. And Samuel rose early to meet
Saul in the morning. And it was told Samuel, ‘Saul came to Carmel, and behold, he set
up a monument for himself and turned and passed on and went down to Gilgal.’ And
Samuel came to Saul, and Saul said to him, ‘Blessed be you to the Lord. I have
performed the commandment of the Lord.’ And Samuel said, ‘What then is this
bleating of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear?’ Saul said,
‘They have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the
sheep and of the oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God, and the rest we[’ve] devoted
to destruction.’ Then Samuel said to Saul, ‘Stop! I will tell you what the Lord said to me
this night.’ And he said to him, ‘Speak.’

“And Samuel said, ‘Though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the
tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. And the Lord sent you on a
mission and said, “Go, devote to destruction 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 pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord?’
And Saul said to Samuel, ‘I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I have gone on the
mission on which the Lord sent me. I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I have
devoted the Amalekites to destruction. But the people took of the spoil, sheep and
oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in
Gilgal.’ And Samuel said,

“‘Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,

 as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
 and to listen than the fat of rams.
For rebellion is as the sin of divination,
 and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of the Lord,
 he has also rejected you from being king.’
“Saul said to Samuel, ‘I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the
Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice. Now
therefore, please pardon my sin and return with me that I may bow before the Lord.’
And Samuel said to Saul, ‘I will not return with you. For you have rejected the word of
the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel.’ As Samuel turned
to go away, Saul seized the skirt of his robe, and it tore. And Samuel said to him, ‘The
Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day and has given it to a neighbor of
yours, who is better than you. And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for
he is not a man, that he should have regret.’ Then he said, ‘I[’ve] sinned; yet honor me
now before the elders of my people and before Israel, and return with me, that I may
bow before the Lord your God.’ So Samuel turned back after Saul, and Saul bowed
before the Lord.

“Then Samuel said, ‘Bring here to me Agag the king of the Amalekites.’ And Agag came
to him cheerfully. Agag said, ‘Surely the bitterness of death is past.’ And Samuel said,
‘As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among
women.’ And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.

“Then Samuel went to Ramah, and Saul went up to his house in Gibeah of Saul. And
Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul.
And the Lord regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel.”

Thanks be to God for his Word.

We bow down before you, great and mighty God, thanking you for the Bible. We
remember the words of your Son, the Lord Jesus: “Sanctify them in the truth; your
word is truth.”[1] Accomplish your purposes, we pray, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Well, we resume our studies here in this chapter, which is a pivotal chapter. There is a
sense in which at the end of 15 and into 16, you move into a whole new phase in the
book 1 Samuel itself. And last time we only began to introduce the matter, pausing
purposefully to acknowledge that the event, this dreadful event that is recorded here,
should not be viewed in isolation from the overarching plan and purpose of God but
should be viewed in light of the fact that God eventually will bring every matter into
judgment.[2] And these terrible events in the Old Testament are in order to accomplish
that very fact, to make us say, “How terrific and terrible is this! And what is it that we
need to learn from it?”

We have referred to the event, in terms of the robbing of Saul of his kingship, as “a
monumental collapse.” He is no longer the king of Israel. Verse 23: “You have rejected
the word of the Lord, [and] he has also rejected you from being king.” Now, we know
why this is, because we’re told. He had been given an assignment. The assignment was
given by God. He knew that was the case. And his assignment is there in verse 3: he
was to execute judgment upon the Amalekites.

Mission Terrible
Now, the way in which this is stated and the language that is used, in keeping with
similar incidents in the Old Testament, is in order that we might recognize as readers
that what is being described here is not simply an invitation to go and wage war
against an enemy. But the way in which the judgment is to be passed and the
command is to be fulfilled is to make sure that everybody understands that there is no
material benefit that accrues to the army—that the spoils of war, that that which is
devoted to destruction, belongs to God himself and not to the victors. It is in that
context that we have described it as a mission that is terrible.

We are not called as Christians to engage in a holy war. The battles that we are
fighting are spiritual battles.

And as I say, it is important to recognize that what we’re dealing with in this incident
and in similar incidents is not a matter, as some would charge, of ethnic cleansing, for
it is not about the ethnicity of the Amalekites; rather, the issue is ethical rather than
ethnic. The Amalekites are to be destroyed not because they are Amalekites but
because they were sinners. And so, when you take this and you stand far enough back
from it, in the unfolding drama of the entire Bible, you realize that these events are to
be viewed in light of the supreme plan of God to provide salvation not in a disobedient
king like Saul but in the obedient King—namely, the Lord Jesus.

And I think it’s important just to pick up from last time, lest we’ve missed this. But this
assignment, this “Mission Terrible,” was given to Saul in that context. We are not
called as Christians to these assignments. We are not called as Christians to engage in a
holy war. Islam engages in a holy war. This is one of the immediate distinctions
between Islam and Christianity. The battles that we are fighting are spiritual battles.
Paul makes this clear in his writings. We saw it at the end of Ephesians 6.[3] He says it
in, for example, 2 Corinthians 10: the weapons of our warfare are not physical
weapons.[4] We don’t take up arms and go and fight people. Our weapons are the
proclaiming of the gospel and praying for the intervention of God. Paul is very clear
about this in the very practical chapter of Romans 12. You remember he says at one
point, “As much as it is possible with you, live peaceably with everybody. Live in peace
with everybody. And make sure that you never avenge yourselves; leave that to the
wrath of God.”[5] So, let’s make sure we understand that.

Mission Partial
And then let’s move on to verses 4–9, in what I’m referring to not now as “Mission
Terrible” but as “Mission Partial,” in the sense that it is only partially fulfilled. You will
notice that it is partially fulfilled inasmuch as Saul decides that he’ll give a pass to the
Kenites, because the Kenites were a good group at the period in time when they were
coming out of Egypt, and so he sends word into the context: “You fellows should slip
out now, so that you don’t end up being destroyed along with the Amalekites around
you.”

The real issue, though, of course, is the fact that he just doesn’t do what he’s told. It’s
hard to tell from the text what was in the mind of Saul; in fact, it’s impossible to know
what was in his mind. Whether his partial obedience was premeditated or not—in
other words, whether when he received the command, he said in the back of his mind,
“Well, I’m gonna do some of this, but I’m not going to do all of it”—whether it was
premeditated or not, his partial obedience is unmistakable. And it is this that incurs
God’s displeasure.

The clarity of it can be seen by looking at the straightforward instruction of God in

verse 3. In four words in English: “Do not spare them.” That’s verse 3. Now, again—and
let me reinforce this for us, because it’s very, very important—the extermination that
was to be carried out, that was to be carried into effect, was to be carried out with a
sense of solemnity, the kind of solemnity that would mark, if you like, a judicial
execution. So, in other words, there’s no sense in which this is sort of a flare-up of
animosity, where one group is going to go and punish another group. This is Almighty
God, who is of purer eyes than to look on evil,[6] who has given, from three hundred
years before, instructions concerning the destruction of the Amalekites, now giving
that responsibility to King Saul in order to do what God desires.

“Do not spare them.” Verse 9: “But Saul and the people spared [them].” He identifies
the fact that Agag, the king of the Amalekites, he kept alive. I wonder whether this is
just an opportunity for him to testify to what a good job he’s done. It certainly
would’ve been in keeping with the idea of him raising a monument to himself, which
comes later on. In saving the best of the livestock, what has happened is that the
mission has failed. It has failed as an act of divine, judicial, solemn retribution. I know
that this will cause some of you to deviate from course, but think in terms of the
execution of the death penalty, as opposed to somebody getting angry with somebody
in the Wild West and running out and having a shoot-up to settle a score. It is not the
issue. The issue is that God is God, and therefore, God determines what is to happen.
And Saul is to be the one who executes his judgment.

You have, for example, by the time you get to 1 Peter, that the state uses the sword
for the punishment of those who do wrong and for the praise of those who do right.
[7] The fact that, secularly and philosophically, and in many churches, we are
completely confused about this issue is a separate matter for another occasion. But
the reason I point it out is that the notion that is here was not that these people could
go and maraud against these people and choose whatever they fancied for themselves
and come home and keep parts and take them to their house and save different bits
and pieces. That is the failure. That is the failure. God was not content with that,
because that was not what God had asked them to do. He asked them, “Do not spare
them: man, woman, child, infant, ox, sheep, camel, donkey.” And so what they had
done—to quote Blaikie, the Scottish commentator—gave the appearance of “an
ordinary unprincipled foray, in which the victorious party slew the other, mainly to get
them out of the way, and enable them without opposition to appropriate their
goods.”[8]

Saul had listened to the word of the Lord but had failed to fulfill the mission, making
something clear to us that is clear always in all of Scripture: that partial obedience is
still disobedience. Partial obedience is still disobedience. The clarity of God’s Word that
calls us to obey his Word is not a series of options whereby we can choose the parts
that seem amenable to us and divorce ourselves from the parts that we don’t like. No!
For partial obedience is disobedience.

That may ring very clear for some of us this morning, because we have been operating
on that mistaken notion that God really didn’t mean what he said when he said he
hates divorce,[9] that God didn’t really mean what he said when he said what he said
about human sexuality, that God does not actually mean what he says he means.
Presumably, that is the only way that I can navigate myself to the position where I can
be Saul-like in response to the clear commands of God: “‘Mission Terrible’? I don’t like
it. Well, then, I’ll just do ‘Mission Partial.’”

I don’t sit in judgment on Saul. I hope you don’t.

Mission Result
Now, in verses 10 and 11, we come to what I’m going to suggest is “Mission Result.”
You say, “Well, I’m not sure it’s the result.” I mean the result in this way: that it
resulted in a response first from God and then from Samuel. The response that comes
from God and then from Samuel. “The word of the Lord came to Samuel: ‘I regret that
I have made Saul king.’” Why? “‘He has turned back from following me and has not
performed my commandments.’”

The clarity of God’s Word that calls us to obey is not a series of options whereby
we can choose the parts that seem amenable to us and divorce ourselves from
the parts that we don’t like.

So, the response of Yahweh is to repent of what he has done, in the Authorized
Version; to “regret” it, in the English Standard Version; to be “grieved” by it in the New
International Version.[10] And it is, of course, immediately a dilemma for some of us,
because we think immediately that somehow or another God is admitting to the fact
that he made a bad choice and has had to fix it in time. Well, there is no sense in which
we should understand this as if God were saying, “If I’d known that was going to
happen, I’d never have appointed him,” because clearly God knew it was going to
happen, because God knows everything. God cannot be taken by surprise. That is true
in terms of the past events, of future events, and of present events.

Now, I’m not going to delay on this at this point. We’ll come back to it in the evening.
But let’s just acknowledge the challenge that it presents. Elihu, when he’s having his
dialogue or one of his dialogues with Job, says to him on one occasion, “[Hey, Job,] do
you know the balancings of the clouds, [do you know] the wondrous works of him who
is perfect in knowledge?”[11] Now, clearly, the answer to that is “No, I don’t. How
could I?” How could finitude understand and grasp the infinite? How could those of us
who struggle with some elementary aspects of understanding ever understand the
mind of God or become a counselor to God?[12] So, what is being conveyed here is
this: that the response of Saul matters to God. The response of Saul matters to God.
The fact that it wasn’t news to God doesn’t mean that he is incapable of bemoaning a
circumstance that he brought about. He brought it about. He bemoans the fact.

In other words, what we’re confronted with in a verse like this and in passages like this
—you can go all the way back, for example, to the beginning of the world in Genesis
chapter 6, where it says that God regrets that he made Adam and Eve, and you have as
a result of that the flood and so on[13]—what do we need to know? Well, we need to
know this: that God in himself is capable of regretting an act of foreknown evil, and yet
he is able to go ahead and call for it for his own divine and wise reasons.

God is not changing his mind. His response, to bemoan the change in Saul, is to let us
see something of God. It is, if you like, in human language, an endeavor to do what the
teachers are doing in the nursery, and that is to come down to the children where they
are. You don’t expect any of them on the basis of what I’m saying now to go into the
classrooms in the third hour and say, “Children, we’re going to have a discussion this
morning following the talk. We’re going to look together at the issues of impassability
and immutability.” You say, “That’s insanity. No! It’s bad enough up here, let alone
down there.” And so we go down here. And so we’re gonna speak in ways that God,
who is a faithful God and “does[n’t] change like shifting shadows,”[14] still in the
immensity of his being, regrets, is bemoaning, that which he has endeavored to put in
place.

Now, you see, this is one of the ways in which language—remember we said last week
that God reveals himself in act and in word and in person—and in revealing himself
verbally in the Bible, the great challenge, if we can put it that way, is how the Eternal
reveals himself in time and how the Omniscient reveals himself to those of us who
have a hard time even understanding the periodic table of the elements. And he does
this in a number of ways. He does it by, as I say, accommodating himself to us, by using
language that is suitable to our weakness.

Now, you know this. You know this. Now, you may not be alert to it every day, but you
know this to be the case. So, for example, when the psalmist declares, “The Lord is my
rock and [he is] my fortress,”[15] first of all, we know that God is not a rock, and
secondly, what is not being said there is that God is immobile. Immutable, yes;
immobile, no. He’s not lifeless. He’s not static. He’s not unfeeling. What he is doing,
says Augustine, is, by means of these anthropomorphisms, bringing the Bible to us
suitable to babies. Charnock says God condescends to reveal himself in human terms
so that his glory will not harm us but rather heal and help us.[16]

Now, I read the whole chapter, and so you’re already alert to verse 29, and some of
you are saying, “But wait a minute, but what about verse 29? ‘The Glory of Israel will
not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret.’” And you’re just
reading verse 11; it says that God regretted. Well, we’re not at verse 29 yet! We will
be, God willing, this evening.

Let me just say a couple of things, then, before I pick up the narrative. And one—and
this is very straightforward, and it should be obvious to us all; and it is a principle of
biblical interpretation, incidentally—that the author of 1 Samuel clearly was not
unaware of this contradiction. He wrote it. He wrote it purposefully. Twice he says, in
verse 11 and verse 35, that God regretted making him king, and in verse 29, right in the
middle of it, he says, “But God, of course, is not a man that he should regret things in
this way.”

You think Isaiah 55, where God through the prophet says, “You know, your thoughts
are not my thoughts, neither are your ways my ways”[17]—and we might add to that,
“And your regrets are not my regrets. What is expressed by my regret is not
necessarily akin to what you think when you think in terms of regret.” Because most of
our regrets have to do with the fact that we regret it because we didn’t know it would
happen. Since it happened and caught us off guard, we therefore regret it, and if we
could have a further chance, we wouldn’t do it again. That’s perfectly natural for us.
That can’t happen with God. Therefore, it can’t mean that.
It’s a reminder, incidentally—the Westminster Confession is so good, isn’t it, when it
says that “not all things in Scripture are equally plain in themselves or equally clear to
all”? I like that. But all the parts that are “necessary to be known, believed, … observed
for salvation are so clearly stated and explained in one place or another in [the Bible],
that not only the educated but also the uneducated may gain a sufficient
understanding of them by a proper use of the ordinary means.”[18] In other words,
God makes himself known to us in his Word, and surely there are parts that stretch our
minds and paradoxes that unsettle us and things that reveal to us our own finitude.
How could it ever be other than that? It could never be.

So, “Mission Result.” The result in God is that he regrets this, and the result in Samuel
is that he’s angered by it. “And Samuel was angry, and he cried to the Lord all night.”
What a wealth is surely contained in this. Samuel. We’ve been with Samuel now for a
while, haven’t we? Samuel, the one that his mother longed for, and then he came.
Samuel, the wee boy. Samuel, dedicated to the Lord. Samuel, given the assignment,
and so on. And now Samuel in his bedroom, as it were, punching the pillow, getting up,
making the equivalent of a cup of tea, and walking back and forth in the room,
prowling.

I imagine him saying things out loud like “You know, Lord, I wasn’t pleased with this
whole idea when these people asked for a king to judge them. You remember that!
And remember, Lord, you’re the one who told me to go and anoint them. I anointed
him because you said he must. And there’s something else, Lord, while I’m at it: this
guy Saul has not just exactly been a piece of cake to work with—from the very
beginning! And I’ve worked with this fellow. I told him your word. I told him the
problems. I guided him in the path. In fact, I may as well just tell you that on the
evening when I had first thought it was Eli who was calling me, and then I realized it
was you, and I was supposed to go back to my bed as a wee boy and say, ‘Speak, Lord,
for your servant hears’[19]—and I did that, you know that—I never bargained for this. I
never thought it would be like this. And now you regret having made him the king? I
don’t know whether to burst out laughing or dissolve into tears. Here am I! I warned
the people about this. I told the people. ‘If you will not obey the voice of the Lord, but
rebel …, then the hand of the Lord will be against you.’[20] Lord, I’m frustrated, I’m
confused, I’m upset, I’m annoyed.”

“And Samuel was angry, and he cried to the Lord all night.” You know, God is able. God
is able for our rumblings and our ramblings. If you have never rumbled, as it were, in
the night, if you have never rambled, if you have never been angered by these things,
then I wager you’re living in a strange world, for the unfolding drama of God Almighty
is confusing on our best day, is alarming many a day, and is unsettling to us. And here if
nowhere else in Scripture—pointing us forward to Gethsemane itself, where Christ is
dealing with the Father in relationship to the immensity of what’s before him[21]—
here, then, is some justification for us in the silent place, being very real with God. Says
Blaikie the commentator, “It took the whole night” for Samuel to “reconcile” himself
“to the Divine sentence.”[22] Or, in the words of Joyce Baldwin, “The personal cost of
ministry is seen in the life of Samuel, and in this passage in particular.”[23]

Who would ever accept the assignment of the prophet of God? Who would ever say,
“Here I am, Lord. You can take me and use me. I will obey you. I will serve you. I will
follow your word. I will proclaim it, no matter what it means and no matter what it
costs.” Who would ever do that and assume that it would be some tranquil experience
of great grandeur and joy? All of the blessings and encouragements that attend the
exercise of the ministry of the Word of God to the people of God are tempered by the
nighttime—tempered in the nighttime. Next time you have a member of the pastoral
congregation from Basics staying in your home, ask them about this. They may be
honest enough to let you know. “Oh,” says Samuel, “I was angry with God, and I stayed
up the whole night, ’cause I couldn’t put the jigsaw together.”

A clear conscience is not necessarily testimony to our freedom. It may be

testimony to how the blinding nature of sin has settled upon our minds.

Well, the review, then, follows. The report card is going to be given from verse 12 on.
Samuel is about to confront Saul. And as a result of the confrontation, eventually the
confession will come. Many of you operate on the kind of Samuel principle: if you got a
tough case, let’s do it first. If you’ve got somebody you have to meet with in the office
you don’t want to meet with, let’s just do it as early as possible. And there’s something
of that there, surely. He “rose early to meet Saul in the morning.” Of course, he
couldn’t immediately track him down, because, as we noted in passing last time, Saul
had been off erecting a monument for himself.

What an amazing thing, isn’t it? What a time for a monument. Did he put a little
inscription on it—you know, something at the bottom like “To memorialize the fact
that I, King Saul of Israel, took Agag alive”? Would you really memorialize your sin?
Surely it’s conjecture; I understand. Is Saul so oblivious to his disobedience that he fails
to see the incongruity of his actions—so oblivious to his disobedience that if somebody
said to him, “You’re doing a what?”

“Yeah, I’m doing a monument. Yeah.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, weren’t you supposed to spare—”

“Yeah, yeah, of course, but, you know…”

I say again, I don’t sit in judgment. He was, I think, oblivious. Sin will blind you. Sin will
blind you. I would not give you chapter and verse—I would not even tell you the nation
in which it took place—but I can tell you of a fact about a pastor writing a book on
marital fidelity while shacked up with a lover. Sin will blind you to the reality of what’s
going on. And a clear conscience is not necessarily testimony to our freedom. It may be
testimony to how the blinding nature of sin has settled upon our minds.

The judgment of God in verse 11 was that Saul had not performed his commandments.
When he meets Samuel, he tells Samuel, “I have performed the commandment of the
Lord.” You’ll notice that his greeting is enthusiastic, it’s religious, it’s naive. He steps
forward in the misplaced confidence that he’s done what was asked of him. “The
mission is accomplished,” he said. And Samuel said, “Do you hear what I hear? If I’m
not mistaken, there’re a lot of bleating going on here. If you have fulfilled the
command, explain the noise.” And that leads on to further conversation, to which we
will have to come this evening.

Gracious God, help us not to play fast and loose with your Word. Forgive us for
creating in our own minds a divine being who chops and changes, when in actual fact
we know that you do not change like shifting shadows. The brother of Jesus wrote it to
us in his letter. There’s no “shadow of turning” with you.[24] So even when language,
in order to accommodate us to a level of understanding of the nature of you as God—
the unchanging God who yet at the same time bemoans—Lord, we bow down. We
bow down. And may—in the dangerous fringes of speculation—may we not allow the
rambling of our limited intellects to draw us away from the clear call and instruction of
your Word: that all of your warnings are true and real, and all of your promises are
absolutely fixed, so that by the same execution of your judgment you will bring from
the lips of some, expressions of joy, and from the lips of others, the cries of anguish.

Hear our prayers, O God, and let our cry come to you. For Jesus’ sake. Amen
 https://www.truthforlife.org/resources/sermon/monumental-collapse-part-two/

SEPTEMBER 8, 2019

A Monumental Collapse — Part Two

From Series: Give Us a King, Volume 2

by Alistair Begg

1 Samuel 15:1-35 (ID: 3389)

God’s command was clear: Israel was supposed to destroy the Amalekites. King Saul,
blinded by his own sin, failed to complete this task; seeking to justify his actions, he
replaced true obedience with religious formalism. This passage stands as a warning of
sin’s deceitfulness—and also the steadfastness of God and His purposes. As Alistair
Begg points out, while God felt sorrow over Saul’s sin, the Lord is always true to His
word and consistent in dealing with disobedience.

Topics: 

 Biblical Figures

 Character of God

 Effects of Sin

 Judgement

 Obedience

 Obeying God

 Warnings
 Sermon Transcript: Print

First Samuel 15:

“And Samuel said to Saul, ‘The Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel;
now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. 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.”’

“So Saul summoned the people and numbered them in Telaim, two hundred thousand
men on foot, and ten thousand men of Judah. And Saul came to the city of Amalek and
lay in wait in the valley. Then Saul said to the Kenites, ‘Go, depart; go down from
among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them. For you showed kindness to all
the people of Israel when they came up out of Egypt.’ So the Kenites departed from
among the Amalekites. And Saul defeated the Amalekites from Havilah as far as Shur,
which is east of Egypt. 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 [fatted] 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.

“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. And Samuel rose early to meet
Saul in the morning. And it was told Samuel, ‘Saul came to Carmel, and behold, he set
up a monument for himself and turned and passed on and went down to Gilgal.’ And
Samuel came to Saul, and Saul said to him, ‘Blessed be you to the Lord. I have
performed the commandment of the Lord.’ And Samuel said, ‘What then is this
bleating of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear?’ Saul said,
‘They have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the
sheep and of the oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God, and the rest we have devoted
to destruction.’ Then Samuel said to Saul, ‘Stop! I will tell you what the Lord said to me
this night.’ And he said to him, ‘Speak.’

“And Samuel said, ‘Though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the
tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. And the Lord sent you on a
mission and said, ‘Go, devote to destruction 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 pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord?’
And Saul said to Samuel, ‘I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I have gone on the
mission on which the Lord sent me. I[’ve] brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I[’ve]
devoted the Amalekites to destruction. But the people took of the spoil, sheep and
oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in
Gilgal.’ And Samuel said,

“‘Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,

 as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
 and to listen than the fat of rams.
For rebellion is as the sin of divination,
 and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of the Lord,
 he has also rejected you from being king.’
“Saul said to Samuel, ‘I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the
Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice. Now
therefore, please pardon my sin and return with me that I may bow before the Lord.’
And Samuel said to Saul, ‘I will not return with you. For you have rejected the word of
the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel.’ As Samuel turned
to go away, Saul seized the skirt of his robe, and it tore. And Samuel said to him, ‘The
Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day and has given it to a neighbor of
yours, who[’s] better than you. And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret,
for he is not a man, that he should have regret.’ Then he said, ‘I have sinned; yet honor
me now before the elders of my people and before Israel, and return with me, that I
may bow before the Lord your God.’ So Samuel turned back after Saul, and Saul bowed
before the Lord.

“Then Samuel said, ‘Bring here to me Agag the king of the Amalekites.’ And Agag came
to him cheerfully. Agag said, ‘Surely the bitterness of death is past.’ And Samuel said,
‘As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among
women.’ And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.

“Then Samuel went to Ramah, and Saul went up to his house in Gibeah of Saul. And
Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul.
And the Lord regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel.”

Help us now, Lord, as we turn to your Word. We bow down underneath its authority
and its truthfulness. Grant that we might hear your voice and, in hearing it, submit and
gladly obey. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

You can tell that I’ve determined that we should come back this evening to the study
that we left off this morning. We haven’t actually done that, I think, in this study in
Samuel at all. But there are reasons for it, not least of all the fact that next Sunday
evening is our prayer time, and therefore, we will not be able to study it then. And
next Sunday morning, I will have the privilege of leading the services, but our preacher
will be Christopher Ash from England. And so, rather than leave a long gap between
the opening part of the chapter and then this concluding section, I determined that I
should return to it.

I recognize that that has some challenges, not least of all for those who have not been
here for the first part of it. I could say to you, “You can see it online if you choose,” but
I wouldn’t press that upon you. But it will be there if you want to backtrack on it. What
we have done to this point is notice that the command of God—the commission, the
mission—that has been established by God for Samuel to fulfill he has not fulfilled.
He’s done it partially, and his partial obedience is an expression of his disobedience.
And despite the fact that he is so clearly in violation of what God has told him to do
—“Spare nobody,” and he spared people and spared the king—he’s blinded, it would
seem, to the predicament in which he finds himself. And he’s so oblivious that he’s
prepared to even erect a monument to himself, reminding us of the great danger of
the deceitfulness of sin. And what he’s actually done is he’s turned his back on the
living God. It is no marginal thing. It is absolutely crucial. And we left off somewhere
around verse 12 or 13, where Samuel and Saul now link up with one another,
interestingly, at Gilgal. That’s there at the end of verse 12: “And [he] turned and
passed on and went down to Gilgal.”

Gilgal has already become significant for us. Back in chapter 11, it was where the
kingdom was renewed. Remember, all the people got together at Gilgal, and they
declared, “Saul is the king.”[1] It is in Gilgal that the announcement of the loss of Saul’s
dynasty was conveyed in chapter 13: “You no longer are going to be in charge of this,
Saul; your son will not follow you.”[2] And now, it is here, in chapter 15, once again in
Gilgal, that the king is rejected.

Now, fascinatingly, he determines that he can approach Samuel somewhat

enthusiastically, religiously, and at the same time naively, declaring there, as it is
recorded in the text, “Blessed be you to the Lord. I have performed the commandment
of the Lord.” And the answer, of course, that Samuel gives is “[Well, then, if you’ve
done that,] what then”—verse 14—“is this bleating of the sheep in my ears and the
lowing of the oxen that I hear?”

Now, again, this ties back to the very clear directive that God had given. It wasn’t
simply that there was to be a removal of the political structures of the Amalekites. It
was that there was to be a wholesale destruction of the Amalekites, and that it
involved not only people but it also involved the beasts. And therefore, the presence of
the beasts and the noise that they inevitably made testified to the fact that Saul was in
violation of the command of God. God had said, “I don’t want you to spare anyone,”
and Saul had decided that he would spare someone.
And so it is in light of that that the blame game begins. And in verse 15, you will notice
—and we’ll just follow the narrative to keep us on track this evening—in verse 15, you
will notice that Saul, who is very fond of the first-person singular, “I,” immediately
employs “they”: “Saul said, ‘They have brought them from the Amalekites.’” Now,
none of the commentators say this, but it occurred to me that it may well be that in
the immediacy of that context, Saul was actually pointing at somebody. He might have
been pointing and saying, “They’re the ones that brought these creatures over here.”
And then, as he follows up on that, he says, “Because it was”—notice—“the people
who spared the best of the sheep” and so on. “God said, ‘Don’t spare anybody,’ but
they went ahead and did it.”

Now, we know already that—down in verse 9—that Saul was complicit in this. In fact,
he was the leader in this: “But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the
sheep and … the oxen.” You were involved in this, Saul; that’s the point. You can’t now
simply say that it was the people that did it. And will you notice as well what is a very
sad word there: they “spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen to sacrifice to the
Lord your God.” “Your God.”

Now, you see, when you turn your back on the living God, when you start to willfully
sin against the command of God, it will become apparent. It will become apparent in
conversation. It will become apparent in lifestyle. And it is apparent here that Saul has
already, even in the expression of these public elements, begun to drift away from the
Lord who has anointed him as the king. He’s not just made a foolish decision. He has
turned back from following Yahweh. And as I said this morning, he stands, at least in
this regard, as a warning to all of us to heed the word of Hebrews: “See to it … that
none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns” back, or “turns away from the
living God.”[3]

And then he says, “But, of course, I know that this has happened, but nevertheless,
you’ll notice that we spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen to sacrifice to the
Lord your God, and the rest, the stuff that we found to be worthy of destruction, we
went ahead and destroyed.” And Samuel, he can’t stand it any longer, and he simply
shouts, “Stop!” “Stop!” I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that in the text of
Scripture at all. I suppose a concordance could help me. “Then Samuel said to Saul,
‘Stop!’” Okay. “Stop! in the name of love, before you break my heart.”[4] Right?
“You’re driving me nuts, Saul! That’s enough. Just don’t even say anything else. Just
stop! Because I’m gonna tell you what the Lord said to me this night. What you need to
do, Saul, is do what I told you at the beginning of the chapter: listen to what the Lord
says. And when you don’t listen to what the Lord says, the Lord will come and make
himself known to you in ways that will get you to the point where you’re forced to
listen. And so I’m going to tell you.” And what else can Saul say except “Speak”? And
then, in verse 17, Samuel picks it up.

Now, if we had time (and we don’t this evening) and we were in another context, then
we could have some dialogue about this opening sentence—indeed, the opening half
of the sentence: “Though you are little in your own eyes…” Now, what does that
mean? What does he mean by that? Is this ironic? You know, “Though you are little in
your own eyes…” Like, “Yeah, monument builder.” You know, “You’re a very humble
fellow, just having come from building your monument.” Or is it actually an
acknowledgment of where Saul started from? Because at the beginning, there’s no
question that he was diffident. He was tall, he was handsome, he was striking, he was
the one set apart, and yet he was the one hanging around, hiding in the baggage. And
it may well be that Samuel is picking up from that, and he’s making the contrast
between the beginning of Saul and now what is essentially the end of Saul. Could be
that too.

Or it may be—and I’m inclined to this, and I wouldn’t fight for it—but it may well be
that he’s picking up on what he’s saying. Because remember what he said: “They—
those people—did this. The people did this.” It may well be that he’s saying to him,
“Now, you, although in your eyes you’re only a little bit of the problem, you’re only a
small part of the program… That’s what you’re saying; you’re saying that ‘it’s not really
me; it’s the people.’ So, though you are only a little part of the problem, the fact is,
Saul, aren’t you the head of the tribes of Israel? Aren’t you the king of Israel? And
hasn’t your mission been made unambiguously clear to you? And haven’t you failed in
the mission?”

Well, of course, the answer to that is absolutely yes. “The Lord sent you on a mission,”
verse 18. “He told you, ‘Go, devote to destruction the sinners, the Amalekites, and
fight against them until they are consumed.’ But let me ask you a question, Saul: Why
then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? It can’t be because it wasn’t clear. Why?
Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord?”

Now, we’ve already seen this word “pounce,” haven’t we, back in 14? You remember
when after they weren’t allowed to eat the sugar stuff, the honey stick stuff, they went
just ravenously into eating all of these creatures, slaughtering them, and the word
there is the same word. And so, they “pounced” on all of that.[5] They pounced on it
all. And so he says, “Why have you gone ahead and pounced on this?”

It speaks to the absolute senselessness of sin. You see, sin is represented to us as being
quite attractive. You know, “I think it’s a far more sensible approach to go in this way,
if you would consider it, you know.” You could rationalize various things. “God doesn’t
really mean extermination. ‘Extermination’ doesn’t mean extermination. ‘Destruction
of everything’ doesn’t actually mean destruction of everything.” Well, yes, it actually
does. “Why did you do this? Why have you pounced? You haven’t just made a silly
choice. You have done evil in the sight of the Lord.”

Now, what happens is that as Samuel gives to Saul his report card, Saul now is
prepared still to go on the defensive. And in verse 20, look at it: “I have obeyed. I have
obeyed the voice of the Lord.” Well, strictly speaking, you obeyed some of it. “I have
gone on the mission.” Well, yes, you did go on the mission. Why he says “I have
brought Agag the king of Amalek [back]” I don’t know, because that’s not a plus. You
know, sometimes I think it is, like, you know, with your children, when they’ve got a
bad one, they try and slip it in, in the middle of two or three good ones. You know
what I mean? When they don’t want you to know they’ve done something wrong, but
they might have to acknowledge it, then what they can do is they can say, “And I went
over to Joe’s house, like I said, and I did help his mother with the groceries,” and then
they just slip in the other little piece that has something to do with it. It may be that. I
don’t know. Otherwise he’s just nuts. Because why would you do that? The judgment
of God is against you for it!

Formal worship can’t be substituted for a life of heartfelt obedience.

“And I have devoted the Amalekites to destruction.” And then, once again, he throws
the people under the bus. Verse 21. What kind of leadership is this? Who would want
this fellow as a king? “The people took the spoil, the sheep, the oxen. It was the good
stuff, though, Samuel—the best of the things devoted to destruction, so that they
could sacrifice.”

You see? It’s wonderful if you can couch your sin and your rebellion in the language of
devotion: “The only reason that they did this was so that they could do what they
ought to do. The only reason they have sinned is in order that they might sin for a very
good reason!” See? They stole from the cash register in Heinen’s so that they could put
the money in the offering! That’s the kind of illogicality that sin employs. And that is
exactly what he’s doing.

And so Samuel challenges that kind of faulty thinking. Immediately he responds, and in
words that are familiar to those of us who know our Bible, he says, “Has the Lord as
great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord?” See
why language is important, why you need to know the English language if you’re going
to read an English Bible? He doesn’t say, “Has the Lord delight in burnt offerings?” He
clearly does. The “as” comes twice. “Has the Lord as great delight … as in obeying the
voice of the Lord?” It’s relative here.

God does not delight in sacrifices that come unaccompanied by obedience. That’s the
point that’s being made. It’s made throughout all of Scripture. God has introduced
these sacrifices for the good and for the well-being of his people. But he doesn’t
expect that the formal acts, the routines, the regulations of religion, may be used as a
mechanism to stand back from a heart, core obedience to the clear instruction of God
himself. In other words, what Samuel is saying is formal worship can’t be substituted
for a life of heartfelt obedience.
Now, again, this is something which just is through the whole Bible. Paul, fascinatingly,
both begins and ends the book of Romans with this very emphasis. You don’t need to
turn to it, but in his opening paragraph, speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ, he says,
“Through [Jesus] we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience
of faith.”[6] “To bring about the obedience of faith.” And when you go to the end of
Romans—I didn’t notice this until I went looking for it this week—but when you get to
the end of Romans (at least it was there on Friday; I hope it’s still there now): “but
[now has] been disclosed and through the prophetic writings … made known to all
[the] nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about”—the
second-last verse of Romans—“to bring about the obedience of faith.”[7]

Now, what he then says in verse 23 is inescapable, because he says disobedience,

which is “rebellion,” “is as the sin of divination.” Well, we’ve already seen the
divination, because the enemies of Israel were involved in divination, back in 6:2: “And
the Philistines called for the priests and the diviners and [they] said, ‘What shall we do
with the ark of the Lord?’” So what he’s saying is that divination was a manifold
expression of an individual or a nation’s rejection of God. Divination was tied to the
worship of foreign deities. Divination was tied to the very antithesis of obedience to
the living God. And furthermore, presuming that I can be selective in my obedience, he
says, is akin to idolatry. The presumption that says, “You know, it doesn’t really matter;
I can pick and choose.” In other words, all the bleating and all the burning declared
that Saul had rejected God and, in doing so, had disqualified himself from kingship in
Israel.

I wonder if we could put it in just contemporary terms this evening: you can’t get away
with flat-out disobedience by showing up for Communion. There’s not a service that
can cover for the absence of an obedient heart. That is why the Communion table is
surrounded so clearly by the calls for an unstinting commitment to turn from sin, to
live in fellowship with Christ and with our neighbors, and to take seriously the fact that
when God says something, he absolutely means it.

This is a sobering chapter. I recognize it—and so do you.

And so, verse 24, Saul finally comes clean. And then I put a dash in my notes, and I
wrote, “Sort of!” Because he does and he doesn’t. “I have sinned, for I[’ve]
transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, because I feared the
people and obeyed their voice.” Sounds like Pilate, doesn’t it? Do you know how many
of us have fallen into sin because we fear the people in our office, fear the people in
our school, fear the people that said, you know, “You’re such a little pathetic little
Christian; if you had any backbone to you at all, you would come and join us and do all
these things”? And the voice of the people sounded so loudly in our ears that we went
with it. What was the problem? The Saul problem. We refused to listen to the voice of
God. We listened to the voices in our heads. “I feared the people.” “The fear of man
bring[s] a snare.”[8] “The fear of [God] is the beginning of wisdom.”[9] “I … obeyed
their voice.” Well, there you have it.
And so he says, “Now that I’ve got that over with,” verse 25, “could you please pardon
my sin and return with me, that I may bow before the Lord?” It’s a sort of “Can we just
move on?” We’re familiar with this kind of confession on TV—sports personalities and
so on. They stand up and said, “I made a bit of a mess of it. Now, let’s get on; can I
have my sponsorship back again?” There’s a very great difference between a sort of
repentance that is there on the fact that I have been rumbled and a repentance which
reveals itself in godly sorrow. The kind of repentance that reveals itself in godly sorrow
does not immediately ask for reinstatement, I guarantee you. I’ve said to my elders
many times, “If I were to violate the call of God in my life, if I were to violate my
marital bonds, I would never, under any circumstances, ever reappear to say, ‘Could
you please put me back where I was?’ You would not be able to find me. I would have
buried myself.”

“Now, I have listened to their voice; I have done this. Now can we just get on with
things, and can I go back to where I was?” Samuel says, “No chance.” Remember,
Samuel speaks as God. Samuel speaks as the prophet of God. Samuel has been
entrusted by God to speak the word of God to the anointed king of Israel, whose
kingdom is collapsing before his very eyes. And the judgment of God here, which has
been expressed, is now reinforced. It’s tragic stuff. “I will not return with you. For you
have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you [as the] king [of]
Israel.” It’s all over now. Nothing left to say. Just his dreams. And the orchestra’s
playing, and the tune has turned plaintive, and the melody is in a minor key.

And what a picture in verse 27. In fact, I hope you, along with me, could burst into
tears in reading verse 27. And “Samuel turned to go away,” and Saul grabbed him,
grabbed his robe. The last vestige and possibility of restoration and of usefulness is
leaving through the door, and he lays hold of him. It’s an amazing picture. I think if I
could paint, I’d paint this picture. No one would like the picture, but it doesn’t matter,
’cause I can’t paint. But I can read. And as he turned to go away, Saul—Saul didn’t go,
“Well, okay, fine. It was worth a try, you know? I was gonna ask. I thought I could ask.
It doesn’t really matter.” No, no! He tore his robe.

The kind of repentance that reveals itself in godly sorrow does not immediately
ask for reinstatement.

The robe comes all the way through, doesn’t it? Samuel’s robe. His mom made it for
him every year.[10] Samuel is identified by his robe on the day of his death. And the
robe appears now, torn, as a metaphor of the kingdom being taken from Saul. Torn to
give to another, and this is final.

That’s the significance of verse 29: “And also the Glory of Israel,” he says, “will not lie
or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret.” This doesn’t mean,
incidentally, that Saul is beyond personal recovery. What it does mean is that his
kingship is rejected irrevocably. Ralph Davis, in a wonderful sentence, says—no, I think
it’s Woodhouse—Saul’s soul could have found a remedy if he had bowed beneath
God’s judgment of rejection; that the very judgment of God in rejecting him was a
mercy, if he could only have seen it.

And verse 29 is here to speak to us of the fixity of the purposes of God. If verses 11 and
35, about the regret of God in making him king, express to us the feeling, if you like, of
God, then this is here as the counterbalance, to let us understand that on the one
hand, God is not immobile. He’s immutable, but he’s not rocklike; he’s not unfeeling.
But nor is he ebbing and flowing in relationship to his promises and to his warnings and
to his judgments. God was grieved by Saul’s disobedience—a disobedience he knew
was coming. But his intentions hadn’t changed. In fact, everything is actually unfolding
as God had said through his prophet it would unfold: “If you will not obey the voice of
the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then the hand of the Lord
will be against you and [against] your king.”[11]

Now, I don’t want to delay at this point in the evening; our time is close to gone. I can
leave you to follow up on these things on your own. Those of you who want to stumble
unduly over this contradiction between a God who is expressing regret in 11 and
unable to regret in verse 29: it is a paradox, and it does challenge us, but we shouldn’t
be surprised by it. And the whole approach that we need to take in these kind of things
is to make sure that we don’t allow some detail in the story of the Bible to create such
a problem for us so as to prevent us from paying close attention to what isn’t a
problem for us and what is so clearly spoken.

Because we do know this: that God is consistent in his dealings, and he’s also sorrowful
in his response. And frankly, only a God who is true to his warnings and his promises
and yet who is described for us as being grieved by the disobedience, that is the only
God, actually, who’s worthy of our praise and our worship. We can’t have a God who’s
blowing hot and cold: “Oh, well, I don’t think I’ll fulfill my promise this time. Oh, well,
things have changed. Well, I think I’ll have to do it differently. No, the warning, I’ve
removed the warning.” God is not like that. He can’t be like that. He isn’t like that. The
Bible makes it perfectly clear.

And so he comes back to it again, and he says, verse 30, “[Well,] I have sinned; yet
honor me now before the elders of my people.” Now, the commentators say, “Well,
this is his last vestige of hope.” He says, “Well, at least let me go back, you know, and
move amongst my people, and come with me, so that, you know, I’m not just a
complete and utter disaster.” I take it that that’s really what he’s hoping for now.
There’s no question of there being any restoration of his kingship. He’s already given
up on that. And what he had in mind in asking that in verse 30, and why Samuel
accedes to this second request, I don’t know—and neither do you, ’cause we’re not
told. “So Samuel turned back after Saul, and Saul bowed before the Lord.”
Well, wouldn’t it just be fine if it ended there? But no, there’s another matter. There is
unfinished business. And it falls now to the prophet of God to do what the king, the
anointed of God, was called to do and in his disobedience wouldn’t do. The terrible
sentence is fully deserved. As we said in the morning and tried to reinforce, we’re not
dealing here with murder. We’re dealing with the righteous judicial judgment of God.
Saul has failed to do it, and Samuel steps forward. And surely, without anything other
than a grim commitment to obey the command of God, he destroys Agag “before the
Lord in Gilgal.”

Again, you see, as we said last Sunday morning, we struggle with this because of our
culture; because of the philosophical underpinnings of our worldviews; because, in
some cases, of our sheer unbelief; because we say, “I don’t like this, I don’t want this, I
don’t want to believe this.” Ultimately, what we’re saying is we don’t believe the Bible.
We don’t believe that God is God. We don’t believe that God does not express regret
like a man. We want him to be made in our image so that we can represent him to a
world that is in need of God.

I was reading yesterday to Sue some material. She was very gracious to keep listening
to me. I was reading from early nineteenth-century Scottish history. She actually
looked as if she was enjoying it, but I was reading to her, and I was telling her about
how in early nineteenth-century Scotland, the battle for Presbyterianism in Scotland
was waging between a moderate view of God and the Bible and what would be
regarded as an immoderate view of God and the Bible, so that moderate clergy were
securing positions. And they were explaining to people that God is not like this, that
God doesn’t do this, that this is a different kind of thing. And eventually, in one great
gathering of the assembly in Edinburgh, 451 men stood up and walked out and said,
“We will sacrifice our homes, we will sacrifice our buildings, we may even sacrifice
ourselves to uphold the name of the living God, who doesn’t change like shifting
shadows.”[12]

And loved ones, this is now the twenty-first century. The battle remains, and the issue
is the same. And the fundamental underlying reality is the question of the Evil One in
the garden: “Did God really say this?”[13] And the problem was, yes, he did. And Saul
understood it. But he wouldn’t do it, and Samuel had to step forward.

“Well,” you say, “well, that was all a long time ago. The Old Testament stuff again.” No.
Remember the apostles. When Peter is explaining, at the house of Cornelius, what’s
going on, he says to the gathered assembly, “And [Jesus] commanded us to preach to
the people and to testify that he is the one appointed … to … judge … the living and the
dead.”[14] That was his message: Jesus, the one appointed to judge the living and the
dead. When Paul writes to Timothy and charges him with a proclamation of the gospel
in the first century, he says, “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus,
who is to judge the living and the dead.”[15]
And so, chapter 15 ends, the music fades, the characters depart. It is for sure the stuff
of tragedy. Saul didn’t listen, and now, without Samuel, there will be no one to speak
and nothing to hear. Gibeah and Ramah were only ten miles apart. Now, admittedly,
they weren’t able to shoot up and down on a motorbike, but ten miles is not a long
way. What an unbelievable tragedy with which the chapter closes.

What do you find yourself saying? I tell you, my only retreat in all of this—and I
suppose it is a retreat in order to advance—is to find myself along with Paul when he
tries to make sense of all of the wonder of God’s purposes from all of eternity. And
eventually, after he’s wrestled with it—and he had a big brain and a big heart and a
great capacity, such as none of us can equal—but eventually, he just casts himself on
God and says,

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are
his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,

 or who has been his counselor?”
“Or who has given a gift to him
 that he might be repaid?”

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever [and
ever]. Amen