Saul’s Incomplete Obedience

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Transcript:

All right, this morning we’re going to be in the book of 1 Samuel. 1 Samuel chapter 15. 1 Samuel is almost halfway through your Bible, if you’re not familiar with it.

If you grab a Bible near you, 1 Samuel is the ninth book of the Bible. So if you see Joshua, Judges, Ruth, keep turning. If you get to 2 Samuel, you’ve gone too far, turn back.

1 Samuel chapter 15. And we’re going to look a little bit more this morning at the life of King Saul, who was the first king of Israel. And God anointed him to be king.

God selected him out of everybody. He was somebody who started out with just incredible potential, incredible opportunities to serve God. And someone who could have been a great king of Israel had it not been for the bad choices that he made.

Things that he did that put him on the sidelines. Instead of being right in the middle of everything, serving God the way he’d been called, he made some really dumb choices. And it’s okay to call them dumb choices.

because I do the same thing. And when I do it, they’re dumb choices too. But he was in such a position that, you know, it’s easier to slide down the pole than it is to climb up it.

So in his great position of power and influence, where he could have served God greatly, where he could have been a great servant of God, he instead made some really dumb decisions that put him on the sidelines. And throughout the month of August on Sunday mornings, we’re going to be looking at some of these mistakes that he made, some of these failures, and to look at them as an example of what not to do, some things for us to avoid. Now, obviously, we live in a different world than he did.

We don’t have priests and sacrifices and tabernacle and all that sort of thing, but there are principles in this that apply to our lives even in this age of God’s grace. And one thing that I do want to bring up to you is the subject of grace, because I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about grace lately, and the importance of grace being at the center of our Christian message. And I’ve been troubled by that this week.

I mean, not by the concept of grace. But here I am preaching messages on failure and the need to obey God and the need to do better. And how does grace fit into that?

So I want to make it very clear where I’m coming from and who I’m talking to and what this is about this morning. These messages on Saul’s failures and what we ought not to do. These things, these messages are geared especially toward people who have already trusted Christ as their Savior.

If you have not trusted Christ as your Savior, there are still things in these passages I think you can learn. But I don’t want anybody to leave here with the idea that the message this morning was just try harder and God will love you. It doesn’t work that way.

The meaning of grace is that we can’t earn God’s love. We can’t earn God’s acceptance. I am a sinner, and when I see the things I’ve done, when I see what goes on in the dark corners of my heart, I realize that I will never be good enough for God.

But God, because He is so loving and because He is so kind, looked at us and said, I want to save them anyway. And so He sent Jesus Christ to the cross to shed His blood and to die in our place, taking responsibility for our sins. And so when we trust Christ as our Savior and say, We believe that he died for our sins.

We believe that he paid for them in full. We believe he’s our one and only Savior. When we put our trust completely in him, we are saved.

We are forgiven. We are assured a place in heaven, not because of any good that we’ve done, not because of anything that we can ever do. We don’t get that relationship with God because of anything good that we can do, and we don’t lose it because of any wrong that we do.

The meaning of grace is that God loves us and God accepts us and God forgives us because of what Jesus Christ did in spite of who we are and what we do. And so as I preach this message on, hey, here’s some things to avoid. The very idea of obedience and serving well, don’t take that to mean that that’s how we get God to love us.

If I can just try harder, God will love me. God loves you, and if you’ve trusted in Christ as your Savior, God forgives you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But speaking to people who have trusted in Christ as their Savior, our desires, the desires of our hearts change.

Again, not because we change them because we’re so good, but because God gives us his Holy Spirit to change our hearts and to change our desires. And I believe that within every Christian there is or should be a desire to honor God. And so when I come to you and say, let’s look at Saul and let’s look at his life as an example of things to avoid.

What I mean is, if you want to serve God well, if you have that desire to serve God well, not avoid this so God will love you. But if you’re somebody who’s been forgiven by the grace of God in Jesus Christ and you have that desire to serve God well, here’s some things to avoid if you want to do that. Now, if you want to fail at serving God, if you want to fail at honoring God, then follow along with Saul.

But that’s the premise of this message, because I don’t ever want anybody to lead Trinity Baptist Church thinking that the message was that if I just try harder, God will love me. It doesn’t work that way. And so we come back to King Saul in 1 Samuel 15.

Last week in 1 Samuel 13, we read about how he offered an improper sacrifice. And the big problem with that is that it showed how mixed up his priorities were. that Saul was somebody who said, you know, it really doesn’t matter that I honor God.

It matters that I honor Saul. Saul’s what really matters here. And we talked about how that can be dangerous if I start to think that Jared is the priority instead of God.

So we talked about the improper sacrifice. We talked about the consequences for those things. Chapter 15 that we’re going to look at today takes place just a short time after that.

I would estimate less than a year. And so Saul either didn’t learn his lesson or he’s very forgetful because he comes back and makes yet another boneheaded move when it comes to trying to serve God. Because God sent Samuel, we talked a little bit last week about Samuel, who was a prophet, who God actually sent to anoint Saul to be the king.

God sent Samuel to King Saul with a message, with a command, saying with instructions that he needed to go out and destroy the Amalekites. And if you’re automatically recoiling at the idea of them wiping out a group of people, we’re going to talk about that in just a minute. But God sent him with these instructions that Saul was supposed to go to war against the Amalekites, that he was supposed to destroy everything and everybody, the men, the women, the children, the livestock, the property.

It didn’t matter. God said, go wipe the Amalekites off the face of the earth. If you’re not a little bit horrified by that, then you’re not paying attention.

We should be horrified by that idea. We generally as a society have decided it’s a bad thing when somebody says let’s wipe a group of people off the face of the earth. But there’s a reason why God told him to do that.

This raises objections from modern readers who think that God is some kind of monster for telling them to do this. Well, I don’t think that’s the case. There were reasons why God commanded this, and they weren’t just I hate that group of people, so let’s go wipe them out.

That’s says, oh, I hate that group of people. Let’s go get rid of them, and it’ll be better for us. But modern readers will read that, and a lot of skeptics have said, even if God is true, I wouldn’t want to worship him, because what kind of monster says we should wipe out an entire group of people?

Well, a couple things we need to consider. If we start from the premise that God is just, then even if we don’t understand it, and even if it’s hard to stomach, we have to realize that there’s some justification for what God told them to do. If we start from that idea that God is just, there’s some reason that I don’t understand here.

And I think sometimes people are lacking in humility to say, I don’t understand. We want to think we’ve got everything figured out. But as somebody who believes God is just, I look at that and say, I don’t understand the reason, but there’s some justification for what God is calling them to do.

But a lot of people reject that premise. They say, no, God is a monster, and so there is no good reason. and so they reject any kind of mitigating circumstance and it just reinforces the view they already have of God.

So what I’m saying is if you want to come into this with the view that God is good, you’re going to think, okay, there’s a reason God is still good. If you come into it already thinking God is bad, it’s just going to make you think God is bad. What we need to do is look at the circumstances.

And again, we’ll never completely understand why God does things. God’s ways and thoughts are higher than ours. We can’t understand fully the mind of God because he knows everything.

he’s greater than we are we just have to accept that but there are some things we can understand about the circumstances the Amalekites had been a problem for Israel for a long time the Amalekites were a violent group of people and the Amalekites had a long history of attacking the nation of Israel in Exodus chapter 17 they attacked the Israelites while they were fleeing from Egypt so while this group of refugees had just escaped across the Red Sea in miraculous fashion and now they’re stuck desert of Sinai, the Amalekites say, hey, let’s go kill these people. And so they attacked them at their most vulnerable point, and that was just the start of it.

We see also in Numbers chapter 13 and 14, when God had Moses send spies into the promised land, they saw Amalekites, and they were so terrified by the very presence of the Amalekites that they got the people of Israel whipped up into a frenzy saying, there’s no way God could give us that land. The Amalekites have got to be pretty scary if they’re big enough for you to start thinking, yeah, God can’t do that. So they were terrified of the Amalekites in Numbers chapter 13 and 14.

In Judges chapter 3, they were part of a coalition with the Moabites that came in and occupied a really brutal occupation of central Israel in Judges chapter 3. So we don’t know the entire history of the interaction between the Amalekites and the Israelites, but what we do know was incredibly brutal and bloody. These were a bloodthirsty, barbaric people.

They were vicious, and God gave Saul the task of getting rid of them, and hopefully that makes a little bit more sense to us. It’s not God saying, you know, I hate the Amalekites. Go get rid of them.

It was God saying, I’ve given the Amalekites chance after chance after chance after chance to be nice, but they won’t stop the violence, so we’ve got to get rid of them. That makes a little more sense. You know, you don’t just say, oh, we’ve only got three or four rattlesnakes loose in the house somewhere.

We can coexist with them. No, you call somebody. Don’t, Julie, don’t go get them on your own.

Call somebody, but you get rid of them. Either way, you get rid of the rattlesnakes that are in your house. You don’t try to coexist with them, And the Amalekites had shown themselves to be that kind of danger.

They were bent on destroying Israel. So God said, you’ve got to eliminate them. But another objection from the modern reader, why the women, why the children?

It’s because any future generation of Amalekites would have grown up, excuse me, grown up to continue their ancestors’ unprovoked attacks on Israel. They would have continued doing it. And we see that because some of them actually did that in 1 Samuel chapter 30.

They continued to attack Israel because some of them survived this. Okay, so why the animals? Maybe the animal rights people don’t like that God said, go kill all the livestock.

God wanted nothing left for the people to say, we got this from the Amalekites. See that really nice sheep over there? Yeah, I got that from the Amalekites in the war.

God wanted them totally blotted out. God wanted them not to be part of Israel’s history anymore. And so he told them, go get rid of all their property.

Go get rid of the livestock. And here’s where grace comes in again. I know I talked at the very beginning of this message about our gracious God.

And then that gracious God says, go wipe out an entire group of people. God is not lacking in grace because he said, go wipe out the Amalekites. God is gracious because he had given the Amalekites hundreds of years to get their act together.

And over hundreds of years, they had shown time after time how violent they were going to be. And it’s just like at Noah’s flood. We can look at it and say, or the flood during those days, look at it and say how horrible that God would kill everybody and only keep eight people alive.

When you look at how violent mankind was, how wicked and evil they were to each other before the flood, it’s not that amazing that God only left eight people alive. What’s amazing is that God left anybody alive at all. As awful as they were, I wouldn’t blame God if he had just wiped us all out.

So the amazing thing is not that God ordered this attack. The amazing thing is that God was gracious enough not to order this attack hundreds of years earlier after the way they’d acted. God gives us time after time after time to repent.

God is gracious. And so there are a few of these events in Scripture that we need to understand. There are a few events like this where God says, just go destroy everybody.

We need to understand that’s not God’s first step in discipline. God is always giving chance after chance after chance to repent. Stuff like this, because God is gracious, stuff like this is always a last resort effort.

And it was for the purpose of protecting Israel because God had already set Israel aside. He’d already made promises and said that through Israel, he was going to bring salvation to the world. He couldn’t fulfill that promise if he let Israel get wiped out.

That meant he had to deal with the Amalekites. So this is no different. Put it in modern day perspective.

I know we as Christians don’t like the idea of killing. We shouldn’t like the idea of killing. But most of us don’t have any problem with the idea of let’s go wipe out ISIS because they want to attack innocent people unprovoked.

It was the same thing. So I hope that helps you understand why God is not a monster, that he ordered this. He’s trying to prevent further bloodshed.

So he put all this responsibility on Saul’s shoulders, And Saul took 210,000 soldiers and he marched toward the Amalekite territory. And he warned, again Saul wasn’t a monster either, Saul warned some of the nomadic tribes that were living among the Amalekites. He said get out of here because this is going to be brutal and we don’t want innocent people in harm’s way.

And so they evacuated and he went to war against the Amalekites. Then we come to verse 7 of 1 Samuel 15, verse 7. says, and Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur that is over against Egypt.

And he took Agag, the king of the Amalekites, alive and utterly destroyed 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 fatlings and of the lambs and all that was good and would not utterly destroy them. But everything that was vile and refused, that they utterly destroyed.

So here’s Saul’s mistake. He was obedient in that he went to war against the Amalekites. He took 210,000 soldiers and invaded the Amalekite territory.

He was obeying God there. But here’s where he made his mistake. When he attacked the Amalekites, it says he killed everyone in verse 7, but it says he killed everyone he met on his route from Havala to Shur.

As he marched through this area, everybody he came in contact with he killed, except one it mentions. But there were others that escaped. There were others that because they marched in in one spot, the others who weren’t in that one spot were able to disperse and come back.

So he killed everybody that he came across except one. But he purposely spared Agag, who was the king of the Amalekites. And there are a couple reasons why he might have done this.

I was always taught that because he was a king, he felt sympathy toward Agag and thought, hey, I don’t like the idea of let’s execute the king when the army loses in battle, because that could be turned around on him. It’s also possible that he wanted to parade Agag through Israel as a trophy. They used to do that in the ancient world.

When another king or general lost, they would keep him alive and bring him in a cage or chains and march him through the capital city so everybody could see how strong we were because we defeated this guy. Either way, whether it’s because, hey, I don’t want to be on the wrong end of a noose myself or because I want to show everybody back home what I did, Saul didn’t kill Agag. He spared Agag because Saul wanted to, because it’s what Saul wanted.

His great mistake here is that he mostly obeyed God. If we say that somebody’s mostly obedient to God, we don’t think of that as a mistake, but that’s exactly what his mistake was, that he was mostly obedient to God. Then it says in verse 10, Then came the word of the Lord unto Samuel, saying, It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king, for he has turned back from following me and hath not performed my commandments, And it grieved Samuel, and he cried unto the Lord all night.

This was unacceptable to God, that Saul had spared Agag, and that he’d spared some of the property and kept it for himself. And so God spoke to Samuel. And this brings us around to another tough issue that a lot of times people have questions about.

Because it says here that it repented God that he had made Saul king of Israel. And we know that that word repent means to change our minds, to change our minds about something. But this doesn’t mean that God changed his mind.

We serve a God who doesn’t change. We serve a God who didn’t say, oops, I didn’t see that coming when Saul was disobedient. He knew that Saul freely chose to be disobedient.

But God saw from before the foundation of the world that Saul was going to disobey. I don’t completely understand how those two things work together, but the Bible teaches that they’re true. And so I believe them.

God wasn’t caught off guard by this. And so God didn’t have to change his mind. Instead, God was expressing what was happening in terms that human beings could understand.

God was expressing himself in a way that human beings could identify with. Because what God was saying, he was expressing that since Saul had shown himself to be unwilling and incapable of obeying God, that now things were going to be different. Not that God had changed his mind, but that God’s treatment of Saul was going to shift at this point.

It wasn’t unexpected for God, but God’s treatment of Saul was going to shift at this point. And it’s going to be like when we change our minds. You know, when you think somebody is really wonderful all these years, and you treat them a certain way, and you’re nice to them, and you’re friends with them, and then they do something awful, and they betray you, and you’re like, I can never think about that person the same way again.

You treat them differently, don’t you? I’m not saying you should treat them bad. It’s just human nature.

I’m going to guard myself at the very least. My treatment toward you changes. And it’s because my mind changed about you. Well, God’s mind didn’t change.

But he expressed it in a way that we could understand and identify with. And what he was saying was that his treatment of Saul was going to be different. God had dealt with him as his anointed king up to this point.

Now God was going to be dealing with him as the rebel that he was. And so God’s interaction with Saul was going to be very different from this point on. Because Saul had shown, God already knew it, but Saul had shown to everybody that he wasn’t interested in obeying God.

And so God said, okay, I’m going to deal with him accordingly. I’m going to deal with him as somebody who’s not a servant, but somebody who’s totally disinterested in serving me and just wants to serve himself. And the Bible says that Samuel grieved over this.

Samuel was really upset over this. And I think he grieved for God because God was being disobeyed and God was being dishonored. But I think he also grieved for his king as well.

Now Samuel didn’t want a king in the first place. But when God said, it’s okay, it’s fine. Samuel got on board and said, you know, he’s the Lord’s anointed and I’m going to be behind him.

And I think Samuel grieved for his king as well because he realized what Saul had just thrown away, what Saul was squandering. And so the man of God grieved for what he saw going on. And there were consequences for Saul’s disobedience, starting with the fact that now God was going to deal with him differently.

Samuel went down and met Saul at Gilgal. That’s where he was waiting for Samuel when we talked last week. He was down there waiting at Gilgal for Samuel to come and make the offering when he got antsy and said, I’m going to do it myself. Saul was still at Gilgal, and when Samuel got there, Saul was exuberant when he came out.

He had to tell Samuel the way he had obeyed God. He comes out in verses 12 and 13 and talks about how he had obeyed God. Saul came out into him, verse 13, and said, Blessed be thou of the Lord, I have performed the commandment of the Lord.

Just like in the story last week, he came out to meet Samuel. He’s like, look at what I did. Look at what I did for God.

Isn’t it amazing? Aren’t I wonderful? Okay, if it’s so wonderful, Samuel asked him in verse 14, basically, then why do I hear sheep?

Oh, you obeyed God, did you? Then what’s that bleeding I hear in the background? Oops.

Sometimes you don’t even have to say anything. You just ask a question, and our consciences convict our own selves. Our own consciences convict us.

When Samuel asked about the sheep, Saul realized that he was wrong, that he’d been disobedient, and so he tried to justify his behavior. He tries to start making excuses. We see this in verse 15.

He says, I kept those animals for sacrifices. Again with the sacrifices. Again with the disobedient, stinking sacrifices.

Have you learned nothing from last week, Saul? No, he hadn’t. I don’t really believe that he had kept them for sacrifices.

I think maybe he’d convinced himself, but in their day, the more animals you own, the richer you were. Sort of like owning the big truck today and the big house today. You wanted to have a big flock of sheep and a big herd of cattle.

So he said, oh, we just kept those for sacrifices. Yeah, right. And Samuel said, wait a minute, I don’t buy it.

I’m paraphrasing a little bit today. As far as verse by verse, we only have time to go through, what was it, 7 through 11 that we’ve looked at. And I just kind of have to tell you the story.

I encourage you to go back and read the whole thing for yourself and verify. Trust but verify that what I’m telling you is the truth and what it says in God’s word. But he says, I kept it for the sacrifices.

And Samuel told him in verse 16, I don’t buy it. Again, that’s a paraphrase. Not even on double coupon day do I buy that.

He says, God told me already what happened. God told me everything that went down. And so he reminded them, he reminded Saul that God, he says, Saul, God plucked you out of obscurity.

You are a nobody, and God plucked you up out of that and made you king of Israel. And God made you king, but you were too busy jumping at the first opportunity to gather up some free stuff to bother to do the things that God made you to be king for in the first place. I mean, Samuel, it’s dangerous to talk to a king like this in the ancient world.

You can lose your head, but Samuel does it anyway because he’s speaking for God. Saul in verse 20 responded that he had done most of what God sent him there for. He had killed everybody but Agag.

He says, I have obeyed the voice of the Lord and have gone the way which the Lord sent me and have brought Agag, the king of Amalek, and have utterly destroyed the Amalekites. Have you? Have you really?

I did most of what God told me to do. Oh yeah, that flies real well. It’s like when I was a child and used to clean most of my room.

It didn’t work then. And it didn’t work in Saul’s day either. But he realized he was wrong, and so he starts blaming other people.

We see this all through the Bible, and we see it in our own lives. Blaming others is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Adam did it.

Saul did it. I do it. We all do it.

Okay, it’s human nature, and it’s wrong. He blamed the people. Verse 21, he blamed the people.

He said, oh, the people took the spoils of war. They’re the ones that kept the sheep and the cows and everything else. They’re the ones that did it.

They did it for sacrifices. I don’t know what they were thinking, but they did it. And he kept coming back to the idea of the sacrifices.

And he said, it was all so we could make sacrifices to the Lord. You’d think he would have learned his lesson about the sacrifices, but no. And so in verse 22, one of the most important verses in this chapter, Samuel said, Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Okay, hear this.

Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. So Samuel said that God was more interested in obedience than sacrifice. The one thing God is not looking for in his servants is for us to give half-hearted obedience and say, God, I’ll obey you when it’s convenient for me, when it’s what I want to do, and when it’s not, I’m just going to do most of what you say, and then I’ll come back and make it up later with some kind of perfunctory religious ritual thing. Samuel told Saul, God isn’t interested in your sacrifices.

What he wants is your obedience. And he told Saul that he’d rebelled against God and that his rebellion was as the sin of witchcraft. He said that in verse 23.

And witchcraft is one of those things that had been forbidden in Israel. This is where people in early America got the idea of let’s go burn a witch. And I’m not saying that we should still do that.

In Israel, if somebody was practicing witchcraft, they were going to be put to death. And one of the things that Saul was good about was cleansing the land. One of the things where he was obedient was cleansing the land of witchcraft.

And so for Samuel to say, you’ve stood hard against this, that what you’re doing is just as bad. He said, your rebellion is just like the sin of witchcraft. And at that point, the story goes on, and he and Samuel and Saul have words throughout the remainder remainder of the chapter, and Samuel finally gets frustrated with Saul and hacks the king of the Amalekites to pieces.

You can go read about that yourself. But there’s a lesson in here for us, and I think the biggest thing that we take away from this story is that partial obedience is disobedience. Partial obedience is disobedience.

It’s true for Saul. It’s true for me. When God says do this and I go do 80% of it, it’s disobedience.

And it’s true for you as well. Fellow Christians, partial obedience is disobedience. And when we say that we’ll obey God in some areas, the implication is we won’t obey him in some others.

And it’s disobedience. When I tell my child to clear everything from the table, and one of them clears everything but the cups, and they insist that the cups aren’t their job. It’s disobedience.

Same is true for us. We can’t, folks, we can’t treat our service for God, to God. And again, I’m talking specifically to Christians in this part of the message.

If you want to serve God, if you want to honor him the way we’re supposed to, not so he’ll love you, but because he does love you and you desire to glorify him, we can’t treat our service to him like it’s some kind of negotiation. Because to negotiate with God implies some kind of equality. This is a master-servant relationship.

It’s not something where I can say, God, I’ll do this, but I really would rather not do that, so I’ll do this instead, and God and I go back and forth, and we’ve got a real good negotiation going. It doesn’t work that way. If we’re going to serve him, it means obeying him, not negotiating.

For believers, we need to understand that God isn’t looking for negotiations or sacrifices. What he’s looking for, what God wants from us, again, not so that he’ll love us, not so that he’ll forgive us. That’s already a done deal. And there’s nothing we can do to get away from that love or forgiveness.

But if we want to serve him and honor him, what he’s looking for is obedience. And what you and I need to do, my brothers and sisters in Christ, what we need to do this morning to deal with that problem that I think all of us have, of partial obedience, is to ask ourselves, what is the last thing that God told us to do, and have we done it completely? And if you can’t remember what the last thing is God told you to do, ask him to make it clearer.

I have to do that all the time. God, what are you telling me? Because I’m dense.

It’s just the truth. I am oblivious. I have to say, God, what have you told me to do that I’ve missed?

What have you told me to do that I wasn’t paying attention? What have you told me to do that I was so wrapped up in me I didn’t even notice? Go back and find what is the last thing God told you to do.

And if you haven’t done it, or if you’ve only partially done it, it’s as good as not having done it at all. Go do what he’s told you to do. And for those of you this morning who may not be believers, I’m glad you’re here.

Maybe you’re here because somebody dragged you here. Maybe you’re here because you’re curious. Whatever brought you here, I’m glad you’re here.

All of this has not been a recipe. Oh, I have to obey. I have to do exactly this so God will love me.

Not a recipe for God’s love and acceptance. It’s outlining what is a problem for humankind. We don’t like to obey God.

And just becoming Christians doesn’t change that, that we have trouble with ob