Hope From the Word

Guest (Male): Pastor Bill Luebkemann encourages us not to make this often repeated mistake.

Bill Luebkemann: We get off worrying about the outward appearance when God looks at the heart. And here is what matters: what's in the heart. And the heart of these people was they were unwilling to do what God told them to do. They just wanted to get rid of, "Okay, we agree with God on these things, so we'll do that, but on these things we disagree with God." So really they set themselves as a higher authority than the Lord. They had veto power, in effect, over what he told them to do.

Guest (Male): Welcome to Hope From the Word, a ministry of Calvary Chapel of Marlton. We'll hand things back over to Pastor Bill Luebkemann in a moment. For the past few weeks, we've been looking at 1 Samuel. In today's passage, King Saul failed to obey God fully and completely, which resulted in great loss. The same can happen to us. We do well to see where he went wrong so that we don't go down a similar path. So now with Hope From the Word, here's Pastor Bill.

Bill Luebkemann: He promised this hundreds of years have gone by, and there's been no change. They could have repented, they could have changed, but they didn't. Now the Lord says, "Go and attack them and totally destroy." This is critically important that you understand this here, otherwise when Saul doesn't do it and you wonder about his punishment, you're going to wonder why God treated Saul this way.

Well, here's why. In verse 3 it says, "Attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Everything means everything. Totally destroy everything. Do not spare them. Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys." Everything. Everything that breathes needs to be put to death.

So Saul summoned the men and mustered them at Telaim: 200,000 foot soldiers and 10,000 men from Judah. Saul went out—Telaim was a city in the southern part of Israel, and that was where the Amalekites would usually attack from to the south. Saul went to the city of Amalek and set an ambush in the ravine. Then he said to the Kenites, "Go away, leave the Amalekites so that I do not destroy you along with them, for you showed kindness to all the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt." So the Kenites moved away from the Amalekites.

The Kenites were also not Israelites. They were also descended from Esau, but there was a big difference: Moses's father-in-law was a Kenite. Moses married a woman who was a Kenite. These people always were friendly with the Israelites. They always had lent a hand. Moses's father-in-law came when they were at the desert, and he offered to help them and provided a system to them. Some of those people came and lived with the Israelites. They became friendly with them, and so the instruction here was not to kill them but to kill the Amalekites.

Saul said, "Look, you people have been helpful to us. You've been nice to us. You've reached out to us when no one else cared. But you better get out of here because we're going to drop a nuke here, and if you stay around, you're going to get hurt." So he gave them time to leave. He did the right thing here. In fact, I know there's a verse about the Kenites that says something like they're going to prosper and do well. We see God honoring that in this situation here also, and Saul was aware of it. It was known. He probably knew that Moses intermarried with these people and some of them have lived with us all along the way here.

In fact, he said here very clearly, "You showed kindness to all the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt." Here was a bunch of people. The Amalekites could have been like that. They could have shown kindness to them. They weren't interested in kindness; the Amalekites were interested in waging war. Then Saul attacked the Amalekites all the way from Havilah to Shur, to the east of Egypt. He took Agag, king of the Amalekites, alive. And all his people he totally destroyed with the sword.

But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs—everything that was good. These they were unwilling to destroy completely, but everything that was despised and weak they totally destroyed. Look at what Saul did here. He didn't do what God told him to do. What did he do? He spared the best-looking things. They were unwilling to destroy them. Look at that carefully. He attacked them, but he took the king.

Josephus says in his writings—he's a well-known Jewish historian who lived somewhere around the time of Christ—Josephus says that Agag was a handsome dude. He was a tall, good-looking guy, and they didn't want to kill him. They thought, "Surely this guy will fit in somewhere." That's when Saul was anointed king. He was a tall, good-looking guy. "Yeah, he's our king, we want him."

Remember when David was anointed king—we're going to get to that in a few weeks—they had to go through all the sons to find the puniest kid and say, "Well, that's the one God chose because man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart." Some people still don't know that today. They're still busy looking at the outward appearance. And that's what Saul was doing. We know from Josephus with reasonable accuracy that this was the reason why Agag was spared.

That's confirmed here because it says that the things that were good was what they spared. He destroyed everything else, but Saul and the army spared the king and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs—everything that was good. So the word of God tells us the king fits in with this category of good. What they saw with their eyes that they deemed to be good, the best of the animals—whatever the criteria was—the king fit into that, and that's what they spared.

It's not that they just had any reason other than this: "These they were unwilling to destroy completely, but everything that was despised and weak they totally destroyed." Basically they followed God as long as it was convenient for them. They did what God wanted them to do as long as it fit in with what they thought they should do. God said destroy everything. "Okay, we'll go along with that but only to the extent that we agree with it. Only to the extent that these things are weak or imperfect or despised, then we'll get rid of them. But the strong and the good and those kind of things, we're going to overrule God on those things here. We're just going to follow him partway."

We're going to take what God said, and we're going to apply our own human intellect to that, our own reasoning, and say, "Wow, what a shame it would be to kill these beautiful animals here. That would make a delicious meal. Why should I? I wouldn't want to kill that. That will provide enough meat for a Big Mac attack for the next five years. And this king here, maybe he'll come in useful for something."

So we're going to take the outward appearance. People today just get off on this whole outward appearance thing way too much. They're concerned with what you look like, with how good-looking you are, with how well you're dressed. Whether the pastor should really be wearing short pants to church or, my wife says, "Why do you call them short pants? They're just shorts." They're pants and they're short.

Look, we get off worrying about the outward appearance when God looks at the heart. And here's what matters: what's in the heart. And the heart of these people was they were unwilling to do what God told them to do. They just wanted to get rid of, "Okay, we agree with God on these things, so we'll do that, but on these things we disagree with God." So really they set themselves as a higher authority than the Lord. They had veto power, in effect, over what he told them to do.

Verse 10: Then the word of the Lord came to Samuel. "I am grieved that I have made Saul king because he has turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions." Samuel was troubled, and he cried out to the Lord all that night. Some people take this verse here, the Lord saying he's grieved, and they twist that around and say, "See, God doesn't know the future. God didn't know what was going to happen. He's grieved because he was hoping something better would happen, and it didn't."

But the truth of the matter is the Bible consistently speaks to the fact God knows the past, present, and future. He knew what mankind was going to do before he made Adam and Eve. He knew the sacrifice of his son would be necessary before Adam and Eve were created. He knows the whole thing. But that doesn't mean he can't be grieved anyway by what happens. You can know something in advance is going to happen. You ever see somebody making a mistake? You know they're going to make a mistake.

You watch them, and you say, "That's a mistake, they're making the wrong decision, they're going to regret it later," and they do. To a limited degree, we might be able to know the future if we see someone making a mistake maybe because we've been there and done that. And that still can cause us to be grieved. God was grieved here. He wasn't having second thoughts. God wasn't sitting up there saying, "Oh, I shouldn't have—I knew I shouldn't have done this. Why did I do that? I should have just skipped and gone to David."

The Lord knew what the deal was, he knew it ahead of time, and he knew he was going to be grieved ahead of time. This was all part of his plan. Somehow this has been put in words so we can understand it to some limited degree, us humans who are confined to time and space. Don't try to understand the whole thing. You can't figure out why God would make mankind knowing that they were going to sin. Why did he make all those people to perish in the flood in the time of Noah?

There are people who try to explain all this away with all kinds of reasons. Much of this stuff you just can't understand. God knows the future. He does things his way, and he has a purpose in what he does. Sometimes his purpose is apparent, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes we know what it is now, sometimes we find out later, and sometimes we might not find out until we get to heaven what God's purpose is. And by the time we get to heaven, maybe we won't care.

But God was grieved. He said, "I'm grieved that I did it because he has turned away from me and he's not carried out my instructions." Samuel was troubled, and he cried out to the Lord all night. Samuel was really good at praying for people. That's one of the things this guy was really good at. He didn't just go home and say a five-minute prayer and then go to bed. Samuel prayed all night. Samuel wasn't sick, he didn't get bad news from the doctor, and he wasn't in trouble with God. Samuel was grieved and he was troubled that this guy Saul just wasn't working out. Samuel liked Saul. I think he liked him his whole life, but he was troubled by the fact that Saul would do these things. And he cried out to the Lord all night.

Verse 12: Early in the morning Samuel got up and went to meet Saul. But he was told, "Saul has gone to Carmel. There he has set up a monument in his own honor and has turned and gone on down to Gilgal." When Samuel reached him, Saul said, "The Lord bless you. I have carried out the Lord's instructions." You just got to wonder what is wrong with this guy? What is his problem? Why doesn't he get it?

Notice here Samuel didn't waste any time at all. He got up early in the morning, he was on top of this. He cried out to God all night, he got a little bit of shut-eye, and he was on the case first thing in the morning. He went to find Saul. And what did they tell him? "Oh, he's gone over there, but while he was there, he set up a monument in his honor." Not God's honor—his honor. He set up a monument to himself. He took credit when Jonathan beat the enemy, and now he's taking credit for this, and he hasn't even done the whole job.

He did half the job, and he's taking credit for the whole thing. Really God did the work. You see Samuel setting up monuments a few times—they were always monuments to the Lord. This guy Saul, pride always deceives people, or it certainly can. Saul was either being deceived by pride or he was just really stupid. I think it was the pride because I don't think anybody could be this stupid. But he was actually down there building a monument.

This was the guy that was hiding in the supplies and wouldn't come out when they wanted to make him king. But now that he's been king for a few years and had a few victories and God has worked through him, he's let it go to his head. He had a success here, he didn't do the whole thing, but then he went off, "I'm so great, I'm Saul the greatest, I'm going to make a monument here so people can remember who I am." Then he comes out to Samuel and says, "The Lord bless you, I've carried out the Lord's instructions."

Not all of them. If you carry out just one of three instructions, even your mom and dad wouldn't have been happy when you were a kid. If you just do part of it, that doesn't count. "But I did take out the trash." Well, you only took it out from the one bathroom, not from all the bathrooms in the house. You only did it once this week, not every week. He doesn't get it, and he actually says to Samuel, "The Lord bless you, I have carried out the Lord's instructions."

But Samuel said, "What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears? What is this lowing of cattle that I hear?" It's kind of like the kid with the chocolate all around their mouth. "Who ate the chocolate cake?" "Oh, not me." "Well, what is that all around—" "Oh, not me, no, not me." I can remember when my kids were young, they used to think if they covered their eyes you couldn't see them. If this wasn't so sad, this would be funny. It is funny, but it's also sad. Really? You did the—"What are the animals I hear? Excuse me, but didn't God say to kill them all? Where did all them sheep come from? What about the cattle that I hear?"

Saul answered in verse 15, "The soldiers brought them from the Amalekites. They spared the best of the sheep and cattle to sacrifice to the Lord your God, but we totally destroyed the rest." We could spend the whole rest of the night here in this one verse. We're not going to, but remember what Adam said: "That woman you gave me. She did it." Passing the buck here. That's the very first thing he did. The soldiers did it.

Wait, you're the king. You're leading the soldiers. So you had to either let them do it or at least approve of it because you could have stopped it if you wanted to. You either said it was okay or somehow non-verbally they figured out it was okay, or even if you told them not to do it, you didn't stop them until now. They're still here. You could be out there killing them yourself. Samuel could have arrived and found Saul there killing the animals himself. But he doesn't, and he passes the buck. "It's them soldiers, they did it. They brought them from the Amalekites. But they only spared the best of the sheep and cattle. And oh, did I tell you, it's to sacrifice to the Lord your God."

A few chapters earlier, Saul used to say "the Lord my God." Now he's saying "the Lord your God," so we see that his relationship with God is moving in the wrong direction here. No longer "the Lord my God," he's "the Lord your God," and pretty soon he'll be "the Lord some other person's God," and then he won't be the Lord God anymore. So the soldiers did it, number one. Number two, they only spared the best. And number three, oh, by the way, we were going to sacrifice them to the Lord your God.

Well, obedience is better than sacrifice. The Lord wants obedience here. He doesn't want sacrifice. "Stop!" Samuel said to Saul. "Let me tell you what the Lord said to me last night." Saul's just blabbing on and on, and Samuel says, "Shut up. Let me tell you what God said to me last night." "Tell me," Saul replied. Samuel said, "Although you were once small in your own eyes—remember, hiding in the supplies—did you not become the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel.

And he sent you on a mission, saying, 'Go and completely destroy those wicked people, the Amalekites. Make war on them until you have wiped them out.' Why did you not obey the Lord? Why did you pounce on the plunder and do evil in the eyes of the Lord?" You know, he's saying here, "Look, you were a small guy once. You were even humble in your own mind, but the Lord made you king and now it's gone to your head. You're so proud of yourself."

All this position that you have, all that you are as king, it's everything that the Lord gave you. In other words, you're only in this position because the Lord put you here. Don't be proud of it yourself. And that goes for us today. Any of us today, we're only here because he put us here. Anything we do, we're only able to do because he allowed us to do it, because he gave us to do it, because he enabled us and empowered us. Anything we can do without him, we're nothing.

You got everything you got because of him, because he put you here, and he sent you on this one mission, and he said, "Go and wipe out all these people. Make war on them until you have wiped them out," and you did not obey. In engineering we call this a Boolean function. It's either true or false. It's a one or a zero. It can't be both. It doesn't have any numeric value. It's like a switch in your dining room—the light is either on or off. There's no in between. Forget that. This is a Boolean function: off, on, off, on.

You either obeyed the Lord or you didn't obey the Lord. You either did what he said or you didn't do. Partial credit doesn't count. There's no extra credit on this exam, no partial credit. This is one of those pass-or-fail exams. You either pass or you fail. It's a zero or a 100. Saul got a zero. Samuel said to him, "Why did you not obey the Lord? Why did you pounce on the plunder and do evil in the eyes of the Lord?" It was very common for the soldiers to take the plunder.

In this time, that was often what their pay was. They got to take the plunder, that was their salary. We're going to kill the enemy and take away their stuff, and that's going to be our pay. And the Lord let them do that many times, but not every time, and this was one of the times when that wasn't going to be permitted. But Saul pretends not to get it here. Verse 20: "But I did obey the Lord," Saul said. Sounds like a kid here. "But I did obey the Lord. I went on the mission the Lord assigned me. I completely destroyed the Amalekites and brought back Agag their king."

He thinks partial obedience is okay. He thinks it's okay to do as much as you feel like doing. "I did that. I went on the mission the Lord assigned me. I completely destroyed—" what is this all about? "I completely destroyed the Amalekites and brought back Agag their king." Let me rephrase that sentence: "I completely destroyed the Amalekites and did not completely destroy the Amalekites." It's like telling your mother, "I ate all my dinner except the green beans." Well, you either ate it all or you didn't eat it all.

"I completely destroyed them except for what I didn't destroy. I did the whole job except for what I didn't do." I answered all the questions on the test except the ones I didn't know the answer to. If you have kids you can think of lots of times when this applies. "The soldiers took sheep and cattle from the plunder, the best of what was devoted to God, in order to sacrifice them to the Lord your God at Gilgal." So again we see blaming the soldiers, but it was only the best, but we brought them back to sacrifice to your God. Well, God didn't want a sacrifice. He wanted you to kill them to get rid of them.

Verse 22: But Samuel replied, "Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams. For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you as king." That is something that you never want to hear as a believer, that he has rejected you.

The question is rhetorical here; the answer is no. Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord? No, he does not. The Lord doesn't need anything we have. We can give him all the burnt offerings we want. That doesn't make up for it. He wants us to do what he wants us to do. Obedience is where it's at. To obey is better than sacrifice. You don't want to not obey and then make some sacrifice to make up for it because you can't make a sacrifice good enough to make up for your lack of obedience.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in a study of 1 Samuel. You can hear this message or more Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann by going to ccmarlton.org. Pastor Bill's messages can also be found by downloading the Hope FM app on your smartphone or tablet. Or if you prefer to listen via podcast, you can find Hope From the Word wherever you find your podcasts.

We'd love to have you join us at Calvary Chapel of Marlton either in person or online. Our Sunday service begins at 10:00 AM, and there's a Wednesday evening service at 7:00. To catch us online, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton or just go to our website for the link at ccmarlton.org.

And if you take a moment to write to Pastor Bill, it would be such a blessing to us. We're thankful each and every time we hear what God is doing in our listeners' lives, and we want to pray for you too. Either email us through the website at ccmarlton.org or call 856-983-1662. We'll continue our study of 1 Samuel next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann, a presentation of Calvary Chapel of Marlton.