You thought Our Country Was Screwed Up?

You thought Our Country Was Screwed Up?

1 Samuel 4:1-22

     Traditionally I thought of the book of 1^st Samuel as a positive portrayal of the People of Israel coming back to God after the dismal and dark period of the Judges. That’s what I used to think. Thanks to Dr. Jerry Vreeland and his book “The Darker Side of Samuel, Saul and David”, I can’t help but see some of the deep flaws even in the best of human leadership. I am admittedly covering all of chapter 4 today partially because I just want to get past some of this depressing stuff, however, rest assured, there will be more to come. At any rate, on this happy note, let’s take a look!

     God doesn’t like it when you try and use Him as a piñata or a lucky charm. You can’t hit Him with a stick and expect goodies to come out. It sounds ridiculous when put this way but how often do we thing we can manipulate God by being good, praying, or making some kind of sacrifice. We should do these things, God wants us to, but we need to be careful about what we think we are going to get in return. Israel makes this mistake here and it goes very bad for them. They think that if they take the Ark of the Covenant out to battle, that God will give them the victory, as if it’s some kind of a magic spell. 

     Remember who the spiritual leadership is at this time, Eli’s sons Tweedle Dim and Tweedle Dimmer.  The unrighteous leaders and followers think that God will be obligated to give them victory in battle if they bring out this most sacred of religious artifacts. They are fatally mistaken and finally get what they deserve, death. Unfortunately, the entire nation suffers for their greed, arrogance and ineptitude. The battle is lost, the Ark is taken. We even get a depressing story about the wife of one of Eli’s sons giving birth following the news of her husband’s death and actually naming her son “the glory has departed from Israel” (Ichabod). Oh ya, when Eli hears the news of the rout and loss of the Ark he falls over and crushes his neck from his obese body. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Do you feel better? 

Lesson: God wants us to seek him in our distress. He also wants us to seek His glory in our lives. We need to be careful that we don’tsimply use Christianity as a means to have a good family, a nice life, or someother means of blessing. If we do so we will be greatly disappointed when our kids don’t turn out, we get cancer, our 401k goes south etc. We need to give God glory in the good and the bad times. We need to choose to honor and obey him whether our lives are physically good or bad. 

     “God I will serve you, if you will do this” or “If I go to church, give money, serve at the food bank, then God will give me a good wife/husband, obedient children, and comfortable house, etc.” So what happens if you serve God and you never get these things or they go bad? Check your heart. Make sure you are serving God for the right reasons.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Can You Hear Me Now?

1 Samuel 3:1-21

        This is the well-known passage where little Samuel is laying down and keeps mistaking God’s voice for his caretaker’s Eli. At the end he, and Eli, figure it out and God gives him a rather harsh word for Eli to hear.

                It shouldn’t surprise us, after yesterday’s passage, that the opening verse here says “the word of the Lord was rare in those days”. We say “no duh”, when your kids are a sinful, unjust, philandering, disgrace to the priesthood and the nation and you, Eli, do nothing about it, it shouldn’t be a surprise that God wasn’t communicating through you much. Then we see a description of Eli himself, the High Priest, that his “eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see”. On the surface this is probably just a reference to his literal eyesight, however, given the context of this chapter, it is also a reference to his poor spiritual sight.

                This poor spiritual sight proves true when little Samuel hears a voice in the night and goes to Eli to see if he was calling him. Of course we know that it was God not Eli but it takes Eli three times before he figures it out (we’ll cut the little boy Samuel some slack). This continues to follow the theme of God using the humble and unexpected for His glory. God gives little Samuel a serious message to relay to Eli, but God did not give the message to Eli, the High Priest, himself.

The message is that Eli and his sons have royally messed up and disobeyed and dishonored God. They are not only going to pay with their lives but their entire family line will be cut out from the people of Israel. Their family is going to end and they will no longer have an inheritance with the promises of Abraham as the people of God. Big stuff. As you might imagine, little Samuel is a bit hesitant to tell his caretaker this wonderful news but Eli basically forces him to lay it to him strait. He doesn’t argue with it but just says “It is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him.”

From here we see Samuel catapulting into spiritual leadership over Israel and Eli’s house being diminished.

Lesson: What kind of things are in your life that you know you need to change but you let them linger, thinking that they are not really that big of a deal? Don’t put it off any longer. Use this lesson as a wakeup call to get right with God while you still can.

If God has given you the spiritual sight to see your sin then you need to repent of it while your sight lasts. God’s mercy is long but doesn’t last forever, He is also just and will hold you accountable for your sin. Choose this day to be humbly used by God as an instrument for His righteousness!

Worthless Men, the Reason for Failure in the Community of God.

1 Samuel 2:12-36

                Eli was the High Priest of Israel. He had the responsibility to teach and serve the people spiritually and yet his sons, also in the priesthood, are described here as “worthless men”. They were cheating the people who were bringing their sacrifices to the Lord and they were sexually taking advantage of the women serving around the Tabernacle. They were using their spiritual, God given authority to only serve themselves. Apparently they weren’t even doing it secretly but right out in the open. No wonder the people of Israel were tuning away to other god’s.

                What’s worse is that their father, their boss, gave them little more than a slap on the wrist. They had committed sins that were punishable by death and they were allowed to continue to “serve” the Lord. An entire nation suffered and fell away from God because of it.

                God doesn’t let this continue forever, thank God. A “man of God” (Where does this guy come from?) shows up and in no uncertain terms lets Eli know that things are going to go bad for him and his sons for what they have done. Eli might not have done anything overtly wrong, but he let evil go on when he had the power and authority to stop it.

                Fortunately, there are some bright spots in this section as well. We see that Hannah, the lowly but faithful women and wife, continues to be blessed by God and has several more children after Samuel. God blesses her for her unusual faithfulness and she flourishes. Samuel also is specifically marked out as growing “in stature and in favor with the Lord and also with man.” Samuel the boy, who was nobody, was being blessed by God, honoring Him, and growing. Eli and his boys, who had the authority to do good and influence people, were doing the opposite and going in the opposite direction.

Lessons: We have to take responsibility for the injustice we see around us, especially in the church. There are absolutely no excuses for us to put up with sin. Yes we need to be merciful and forgiving, but that is no excuse for not holding people, especially leaders, accountable for their actions. When we let things slip we do God, and the people of God a disservice and the consequences could be devastating.

                By contrast, no matter who we are, we can rely on God and we can make a difference in the world when we do so in God’s strength. Be a force for good wherever youare. Be confident that God will use you and give Him the glory. 

Who Gets the Credit? Do You Actually Say It?

1 Samuel 2:1-11

You just have to love ancient Semitic women who choose to live for God. At the end of chapter one Hannah does the hard, but right, thing and gives Samuel over to the priests at the Tabernacle as she had promised God. I can’t even imagine what giving up your only child would feel like. So what does she do? She praises God for the amazing blessing that He has given her. In her song to the Lord we see the major themes of the book come alive. Verse 4 sums it up

“The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble bind on strength.” (ESV)

                God helps those who recognize their state without Him and who seek His strength for their lives. He is going to continue to help those who are ready and willing to be used. We will also see others who should have everything they need, status, physical giftedness, position etc. who fail because they trust in themselves or others instead of God.

Lesson: We need to remember to praise God for the good He does in our lives. Too often we are quick to come go God with requests but when He answers them, we move on to the next with very little intentional gratitude. Let’s be intentional in praising God for the specific things He is doing and has done in our lives!

Interesting side note: When you read this song did you notice how Hannah seems to take the opportunity here to kind of dis her rival wife Peninah who had been teasing her? I wonder how well a Chris Tomlin song would go over if he put down certain people right in the middle of the song and gave God credit for it?

God Doesn’t Need You

God Doesn’t Need You

1 Samuel 1:9-20

                God doesn’t need you but will you let Him use you? We talked about Hannah’s plight yesterday, how God as put her in a position where she is now ripe for God to act in a way that only He (not us) can do. Hannah brings her sorrows before the Lord. She pours out her deep longings and makes God a promise. Now, we can’t bargain with God, we shouldn't say “If you will do this God, then I will do this”, “if you give me what I want, then I will follow you”. That’s not what Hannah is doing here. If God would gift her with a child, she promises to gift that child back to God.  This gets back to the major theme that we see in this book. Those who have nothing, or at least view that everything that they have is directly from God himself, will freely use it for or give it back to God. God should be the one who receives the glory, and Hannah is happy to give it to Him.

                Now a word about Eli in this section. We’ve already talked about the shaky spiritual state of affairs in the nation at this time and Eli, the High Priest, proves the point. We see here that Eli, who has the high spiritual position, is without spiritual insight. Hannah, a lowly, barren woman, is the one who know, how to appropriately come before God. You want to see God work? Come before Him humbly. Proud, lazy spiritual leadership will lose their spiritual vision. God doesn’t need them, God doesn’t need us. He chooses to use us, he wants to hear from us, if we will let Him.

1 Samuel 1:21-28

                It’s very important for us to see that Hannah makes good on her promise to God. How any of us have promised something to God when we were in crisis, only to forget about it when life got easy again? Am I the only one?

                The beginning of this section causes us to wonder as we see Hannah not bring Samuel to the Tabernacle right away but says she will do so “as soon as the child is weaned”. Is she reneging on her promise?  Is she growing so attached to her child that she is now making excuses to not obey what she had promised? There is a bit of tension here but it is short lived as we then see that she does, indeed give the child over to be a servant of God with the priests at the Tabernacle. Her greatest gift, she gives back to God. God is going to use this gift in an amazing way.

                What gifts has God given you that you are afraid to give back to Him? What excuses to you make for not giving back to God what He is due? If you were to give back the great gifts that God has given you, how might God use those to change the world?

                Far too many of us are like Eli, we are spiritually fat, lazy and proud. We believe the right stuff and think that is pleasing to God. We are so satisfied with our spiritual condition that we have blinded ourselves to the needs of the hurting both physical and spiritual. Ask God for spiritual sight, act on what He shows you, use what He gives you.

Adversity is Opportunity for God’s Glory to Shine

1^st Take on 1^st Samuel

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged regularly but I think I’m back on the wagon. The rules will be basically the same. This blog will be, more or less, a “first take” on the passage in focus for the day as we work strait through the book. So, let’s begin!

Even though this is generally a “first take” I still think we need to do some basic contextual work as we begin. The Prophet/Judge/King Maker Samuel is generally considered to be the author of the book with the time frame being that of the end of the period of the Judges. The nation of Israel had severely stubbed Its toe after a generally good start in the book of Joshua. In the “good start” they were following God and conquering the land that God had given them but, as is human nature, when life started to get a little easier and as time passed, they lost their focus and began preoccupying themselves with other things. This led to a continuous cycle in the book of Judges where the People of God would do their own thing (not follow God), be oppressed by other nations, call out to God in their distress, God send a Judge to help lead them back to Him (God) and out of oppression, things would get better, they would stop following God, and so the cycle goes. Unfortunately this was, in general, an downward cycle so that by the end of the book of Judges things are just about as bad as they can get (As bad as Sodom and Gomorrah) and most people don’t even know how to serve God appropriately even if they wanted to. This is the very brief historical context at which we find the beginning of 1^st Samuel. Whew!

1 Samuel 1:1-2

As with any good story we find main characters introduced, protagonists, antagonists etc. right off the bat. We have a man with his basic lineage described, his two wives listed, and a problem. The problem is that one wife is able to produce children and the other one cannot. Now to us the fact that this guy has two wives probably seems pretty weird and while the Bible never outright condemns polygamy, each and every case of polygamy in the Bible is wrought with problems. Even though the idea of polygamy is offensive in our current culture, it might make a little bit more sense in this case if we consider the historical context a bit further.

Remember that we are in a time period where Israel has lost a lot of battles and have been oppressed by the surrounding nations. When you lose a lot of battles, you have a lot of men, married or of marginable age die, leaving a lot of women widowed or without many prospects to every get married. So there was likely a huge imbalance in the male to female ratio here. Now, if you wanted to grow a nation and have a large family (large families were good for a lot of reasons back then), it might just make practical sense to have more than one wife. As we’ll see, however, this isn’t exactly a recipe for marital bliss.

1 Samuel 1:3-8

It is worth noting that this Elkanah guy seems to actually serving the Lord and trying to live right (not a lot of people doing this at the time!). However, he’s got problems between his two wives. One is having kids and the other one isn’t. This is a huge, huge deal. Kids are a symbol of God’s covenantal blessing to the people of Israel, they are extra hands around the house and in the field that you don’t have to pay for, they are extra body guards to protect your land or to help you “ensure” that no one take advantage of you or your family. They are what carries on your linage and protects your stake in the land that God has promised you. If you are not having children, you don’t have any of these things and culturally, you are not seen as being blessed or as having as much value.

This is exactly where Hannah finds herself, disgraced, and distraught. This story , however, is purposely placed here to debunk what would have otherwise been the cultural norm. Hannah’s barrenness was not a curse from God but was purposely used by God so that His glory might be shown in her life and the life of her family. This is going to be a major theme of the book of First Samuel. God will help the helpless, those who realize they must rely on God and God alone for help. This is where Hannah finds herself, helpless, a place where God can get the credit for doing a great work.

Application:

We need to realize, no matter where we are in life, good or bad, that we can do nothing without God’s help and power. God is ready and willing to use those who fully rely on Him for their strength. We need to acknowledge our helplessness, ask God for His strength, and give Him the credit for all this is good in our lives. God has created us for His glory and we operate best when we give it to Him.

This may sound obvious but too often, especially when life is easy, we forget to give God the glory for all He has done in our lives. Seek God when life is good and seek God when life is bad. Give Him the glory either way.