You may be seated well. Good morning.
Thank you so much. Who was that?
Good morning. Way back there.
Hey, it's good to see the rest of you, too.
I hope you're awake now. My name is Andrew Evans.
I'm one of the pastors here at Church of the Resurrection.
Let me invite you to open in your Bibles to First Samuel
Chapter 7 that's on page in the Pew Bible 200 and 15215.
We are continuing our series looking at First Samuel, which
is really just the first half of of the book of Samuel, which
tradition over the years is divided into two books, but it's
really just one book. And we're going to be looking
this fall at the story of Samuel, the story of David.
Before we get started, let me pray for us.
Father, you are a God who loves your people.
And you do not leave us alone, but you send us help, You send
us direction, You send us guidance, You send us
leadership. And I pray that you would meet
us in your word and meet us with your Spirit, and point us to our
Savior and our King Jesus. Amen.
The people of Israel, as our passage begins, are in a really
bad spot. They were defeated by the
Philistines in battle 20 years earlier, and the reverberations
from that have been continuing for two decades.
The Tabernacle was likely destroyed.
The Ark was brought back, but for two decades has sat in a
city that's largely inhabited by Canaanites.
The Philistines have continued to enslave and oppress the
Israelites. But one thing that I think is
most striking about the narrative is how for the last
two chapters and how for the last two decades, Israel has
lacked a leader. Last leader, Eli was weak,
conflicted, and when he learned that the Philistines had
captured the ark, he fell and his neck broke.
It's like he was decapitated. And when his head came off, it
was like the entire nation of Israel lost their head.
There was no leader in Israel. So as our passage begins and the
length of this time, the length of his leadership vacuum comes
into focus, we are forced to ask the question, will God provide
his people a leader to save them?
As it happens, this is, in a sense the question that has
animated God's people for hundreds of years at this point.
After the Hebrews grew into a large people in Egypt, the
Egyptians enslaved them. And So what did God do?
God sent a leader, Moses, who led God's people out of slavery.
Moses LED God's people all the way to the border of the
Promised Land. And then God provided another
leader, Joshua, whose name means God saves, to lead Israel the
rest of the way into the Promised Land.
God provided another leader to save his people and to lead them
in conquest of their enemies. Now, Moses and Joshua were great
leaders, there's no doubt about it.
There's a reason Moses is in the Supreme Court chambers on the
wall, some of the greatest leaders ever.
But even in them we start to see some faults.
Moses became angry and sinned. Joshua rashly made a pact with
the people who tricked him, people who happened to live in
the city that we've seen today of Kirioth Jirium.
And Israel failed to complete the conquest of the promised
land. They disobeyed.
And then for 300 years we have story after story of Israel
falling into sin and idolatry and then God sending a judge, a
leader to save them, to rescue them.
Now, these judges, they start out reasonably competent,
reasonably faithful. But the book of Judges is just
this spiraling downward spiral of Israel and its leaders
getting further and further away from God.
There's a reason one of the longest stories and judges is
the story of Samson, who was far from a faithful leader.
And by the end of the book, there's this refrain that keeps
getting repeated that shows us the problem.
There was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in
his own eyes. And so we come now to the book
of Samuel, which comes right after the book of Judges,
actually in some ways overlaps with the time period of the
judges. The people have been starved of
godly leadership for centuries. The time of the judges has been
a disaster. Will God, will God in his mercy,
send another leader to save his people?
And the answer seems to be, at least initially, no Eli, the
latest judge. He's feckless and lazy.
His sons are lecherous thieves. And the result is that the Ark
is taken into captivity. And it actually takes God.
As Dan showed us last week, it takes God re enacting the
plagues of Egypt to bring the Ark back to the Israelites.
The Ark has its own exodus, just like Israel did centuries
before. But the result of these two
exoduses in some ways couldn't be more different.
See, when Moses LED Israel out of Egypt, they come to Mount
Sinai. They received the law.
And then Moses, Aaron and 70 leaders, 70 elders go up the
mountain. They behold God, They eat and
drink. It's it's the climax.
It is the ratification of the covenant, the ratification of
the leadership of God's people. But when the ark is rescued from
captivity, goes on its own exodus, almost the opposite
happens. At the end of chapter 6, the ark
is taken into a city of the Levites.
These people should know how to handle the ark, but they again
treat the art with contempt. They try to look inside it and
instead of 70 elders beholding God and eating and drinking in
his presence, 70 Levites die. This is why at the start of our
chapter, the ark is in the city of Kiryat Jarian.
If we weren't sure before, now we are absolutely clear.
God's people have no capable leadership.
Will God provide a leader for his people?
This is a massive problem for Israel, isn't it?
It's just a sociological reality that groups of any size need
leadership. A leader animates, guides,
points people to where they should go, where they should not
go. Leader looks out for dangers.
A leader fights off enemies. We as Christians need good and
godly leadership just like Israel did then.
And as the story of Israel shows, godly leadership leads to
flourishing, but unfaithful leadership leads to oppression
and slavery. Israel here is oppressed and
enslaved. Will God provide a leader to
save his people? Chapter 7 here is, you could
say, the end of the first part of the book of Samuel.
And here we see the prophet Samuel step firmly into the
center of Israel's civic life. And this passage shows us, as
we'll see that that Samuel is the new Moses who will lead his
people out of slavery. But more than that, Samuel
points forward to how God will continue to act to save his
people all the way up to today. He's establishing a pattern or
helping us to see a pattern. God saves his people by sending
a capable leader. God saves his people by sending
a faithful, capable leader. And this culminates in Christ,
the Son of God, the son of the great King David, who will lead
his people just as Samuel leads them here.
So let's walk through this passage together and see how
Samuel both leads God's people here and then points us to our
greater leader, the Lord Jesus. So we learned in verse 2 that
the people of Israel are lamenting after the Lord.
They're feeling the oppression of the Philistines, and so
they're lamenting and looking for salvation from God.
This has been Israel's pattern all through the book of the
Judges, right? Drift from God, become
oppressed, call on God again, and he sends the judge.
They hope. Rinse and repeat.
Will the cycle continue? And we have strong reason to
hope that the cycle could in fact be broken when Samuel steps
in. Samuel is the son of a barren
woman, just like the patriarchs. God has spoken directly to him,
which He hasn't done for anybody else in a very long time.
Samuel is different. Maybe this time will be
different. And what Samuel says in verse 3
here confirms that Israel is on the cusp of a renaissance.
Now look at with me at what he says in verse three.
If you are returning to the Lord with all your heart, then put
away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you and
direct your heart to the Lord and serve Him.
Only then and only then will He save you.
Samuel is calling for true deep heart level repentance and
reformation of God's people. Samuel, the leader of God's
people, is directing their heart.
Now God cares about how we act. Certainly He cares about what's
visible on the outside, but he also cares about what's on the
inside, what other people can't see.
He cares about our hearts, our emotions, our desires, our
thoughts, our inclinations. And so as a result, does the
leader that God sends Samuel here isn't innovating, though.
This isn't a new teaching. He's following the example of
Moses over and over in the book of Deuteronomy, which is Moses
is sort of final sermon to Israel.
Moses calls on the people of Israel to follow God with their
hearts. One of the most famous verses,
perhaps the most famous in Deuteronomy verse in Deuteronomy
here, O Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is 1 You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart.
He says that over and over and over.
The first great leader of God's people wants them to love God
from their heart, not just obey him.
Samuel here is showing himself to be a new Moses, ready to lead
God's people out of slavery by directing their hearts.
And Jesus follows exactly this pattern and does that when he
applies the law to the heart as well.
Perhaps most famous is in the Sermon on the Mount, where he
takes the law and then applies it to your heart, applies it to
our hearts. He is interested in the
condition of our heart. He is the true and final leader
of God's people. And as our leader, he wants our
hearts to be fully devoted to God.
In fact, this is the only way to root out idolatry.
Now, until now, we actually haven't heard about idolatry in
the book of Samuel. We've heard about theft.
We've heard about sexual immorality.
We've heard about presumptuousness.
But underlying all of this sin is idolatry, worshipping other
gods. What was true then is true now
as well. Idolatry drives us away from God
and into sin. And the only way to stop
sinning, the only way to defeat these idols, is not some sort of
outward conformity to rules. It'll work for a little bit of
time, but that will never last. The only way is an inner turning
back to the Lord with our hearts.
Our hearts must be gods. This is what Samuel is calling
Israel to. It's what Jesus calls us to as
well. So the leader of God's people
first directs our hearts, but he does more than that.
Let's keep looking. The people put away their idols
and then Samuel calls them to Mizpah for a worship service and
a covenant renewal ceremony. Now Samuel here doesn't pretend
that Israel can just go there alone and you know, talk to God
on their own. You know, like they somehow have
this this direct access to the big man upstairs.
Sometimes that's your help here here.
It put that way. Look at verse 5.
Then Samuel said, Gather all Israel to Mizpah, and I will
pray to the Lord for you. Samuel, as their leader, will
stand between them and God, and he will pray for them.
Samuel is the faithful leader, and he as the leader will
represent Israel before God. He will intercede for them.
Now the people confess their sins, and in the Philistines
they sense an opportunity here to strike another blow against
them. And so they start to attack.
Israelites, naturally enough, are afraid.
And so in verse 8 they say to Samuel, do not cease to cry out
to the Lord our God for us, that he may save us from the hand of
the Philistines. And that's exactly what Samuel
does. He intercedes for the people.
He prays to God on their behalf. And again here, Samuel isn't
innovating. This is just what the leaders of
God's people do. Abraham did this.
Moses did this repeatedly. Daniel does this later in the
Old Testament. And all of these examples of the
leaders of God's people point us ultimately to Jesus, who is
always interceding for us before God.
Maybe you have fallen into sin. You know that you're not right
with God. You're feeling distant from him.
And you know deep down that this is because of your sin.
You struggle to pray. You don't really want to read
your Bible. Coming to church makes you
anxious. You're afraid of being called
out, and you wonder in your most honest moments, who will bring
me back into God's presence? Who can restore me to him and to
God's people? My friends, this is what the
leader of God's people does. Samuel here is representing
God's people before God in order to restore them to him.
And as he does this, he is pointing us to Jesus.
Jesus represents you to the Father.
Jesus asks God to forgive you. Who will restore you to God?
Jesus, look to Jesus, call on him.
He will not leave you. He will come with you and stand
before you with the Father. And even now he's interceding
for you. So as Samuel is interceding, the
pressure continues to rise on the Israelites.
Samuel prays and then he offers a sacrifice of an innocent lamb
to atone for the sins of the Israelites.
And just as he's offering the sacrifice, verse 10, the
Philistines drew near to attack Israel.
Well, text is pretty clear that the Israelites knew that the
Philistines were coming. Samuel almost certainly, it's
not almost certainly, certainly knew that they were coming as
well. But what does Samuel not do?
He doesn't draw them up into battle lines, does he?
He doesn't become an army commanders.
Maybe some other judges have done that, but that's not what's
going on right here. He leads them.
Samuel here leads God's people by setting their priorities and
the highest priority, even with the Philistines right there, the
highest priority is becoming reconciled to God.
I think it's so important that we're always asking ourselves if
we are letting Jesus set our priorities.
Just like Samuel here is setting the priorities for Israel.
Now we as a church are setting out on a strategic planning
process. Looking forward to that, I
think. Please pray for us, pray for
your for the pastors, pray for the PC as we work on that
together. Pray specifically that we would
follow the priorities of our leader, Jesus.
We want Jesus, our leader through the Holy Spirit to lead
us, to guide us, to set our priorities, and what is true of
us as a church corporately is true of us as individuals and
families as well. In just a few minutes, we will
be baptizing Rowan Murphy. What a joy, what a privilege to
have you guys here. And we will, we will charge him
and pray for him that he will fight boldly under Christ's
banner, that he will follow the Lord Jesus in his life, that the
Lord Jesus would be his leader. And what's true for him is is
true for all of us. Are we willing to follow Jesus
even when it's inconvenient and even dangerous?
Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to give generously, to
forgive readily, to be hospitable even to strangers.
We must do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with our God.
The world will tell us different things will.
The world will tell us that we are being naive.
But we must let our leader, our Lord Jesus, set our priorities.
We must follow Jesus in our lives.
Our passage here pushes us even deeper, though.
When Samuel focuses on reconciliation with God here,
he's revealing what should be our highest priority as well.
My friends, there is nothing more important for you and for
everybody else in this world than to be reconciled to God.
It may feel like the Philistines are breathing down your neck.
Maybe work is overwhelming your marriage on the rocks.
Health crisis has left you spinning.
Maybe current events have left you angry and anxious, and the
saving work of Jesus to reconcile us to God through his
death and resurrection feels like a distant and frankly
irrelevant abstraction from the needs of the day.
But think about the situation of Israel when Jesus actually came.
Jesus came to a people who were oppressed by outside forces led
by corrupt leaders. Sounds an awful lot like the
Israelites here, doesn't it? His disciples and so many other
people expected him to be a great political leader.
But instead of raising up an army, Jesus became an innocent
lamb. It was slaughtered to atone for
our sins. All seemed lost.
What a waste. But it is precisely here, in the
atoning death and resurrection of Jesus that the greatest
victory over the powers of the world took place.
Jesus conquered your greatest enemies.
You were no longer enslaved to the world, the flesh, and the
devil. You are a new person because of
Christ and what He did for you on the cross and in the empty
tomb. If you were looking to Him in
faith, He is working now to set all things right, and He will
finish that work and He calls you to rest in that promise.
The greatest need that we have is to be reconciled to God.
The greatest need that the world has is to be reconciled to God.
My friends look to Christ in faith, receive that
reconciliation from him, bring other people to the Lord so that
they might look to him and receive that reconciliation.
Christ's atoning sacrifice is the wellspring of all that this
world needs, just like it was the wellspring for what Israel
needed as well. The Philistines.
They're closing in on the worshipping Israelites.
Just as the Paschal lamb dies, God thunders against the
Philistines and throws them into confusion.
They are defeated before Israel. All Israel then has to do is to
chase them away. The result is that the land is
free from oppression and slavery.
God won the victory. God saved his people who were
trusting in him. And as if to drive this point
home, look with me at what's highlighted in verse 14.
The victory is so great that Israel actually reclaims several
cities that they had lost. Cities from Ekron to Gath.
Now, we've already seen these cities in this narrative.
They're the same cities that had passed the ark between them,
cities owned by the Philistines. But when they pass the ark
through them, God demonstrated his power and defeated them by
sending plagues and reclaiming these cities for Israel.
Here is only finalizing the victory that God alone won many
years earlier. God won the victory.
He fought here for his people, and he'd been fighting for years
actually for them. And as a result, Samuel sets up
a monument near the place of Israel's covenant renewal, and
he calls it Ebenezer Stone of help.
Thus far, the Lord has helped us.
He marks a place. He wants Israel to remember
where their salvation comes from.
It's not from him that salvation comes from the Lord.
Now, of course, though, there is a sense in which it did come
through him, right? Samuel is the leader whom God
used, just like God used Moses, just like you would use kings
later. The problem though is that all
of these leaders will fail. None of them are God.
For them to exalt themselves would be blasphemy until Jesus.
Jesus is the perfect leader, He never fails and he is God by
drawing people to himself while saying look to me, put your
faith in me. He's pointing them to the very
one who saves them. Jesus wants all people to be
reconciled to God, and that means for him, unlike for
Samuel, pointing people to himself, the cross in the empty
tomb, the places of of Christ's passion and victory are the
greatest Ebenezer friends right now, so many of us are anxious
and angry. We're worried about our jobs,
worried about our friends, worried about our city, worried
about our country. It can feel like the Philistines
are attacking us right when we are most vulnerable.
We so desperately need a leader, one who will guide us and guard
us and gather us together. Many people offer themselves as
that leader. Pretenders to the throne have
always existed, and they always will.
But we have a leader, the greater Samuel, the greater
Moses, Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the son of King David.
We have a leader who took the attack of the Philistines, who
absorbed its blow, and who now stands victorious, ready to lead
us. He directs our hearts, He
intercedes for us, He sets our priorities.
And then he calls us to himself, for he is the one who saves us.
There is no leader who is better to follow.
There is no leader who is more faithful.
He will never fail you. He will never be defeated, so
let's follow Him and follow him always, in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.