Where Evil Leads

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Don Filcek; 1 Samuel 22:6-23 Where Evil Leads

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listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series in 1
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Samuel, Timely Prophet, Tragic King. Let's listen in. Well, good morning,
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Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here. We're going to go ahead and get started. So if you can find your seats, that would be awesome.
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Glad that you've come together this morning, and I hope that you're here with the primary purpose of worshiping
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God. But worshiping God together is the point. Now, obviously, you could have sat at home and worshiped
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God there, but the fact of the matter is we need each other, and that's one of the reasons, one of the primary reasons we gather together.
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There are many ways that you can think about what it means to be a part of a church, and if you're listening to our culture and you're listening to the world around us, and many even in church cultures, you can go out and buy a
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Christian book that will tell you that you don't need a church, that you can be spiritual and you can go do your spiritual thing.
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How many of you have heard that message? How many of you have heard the message that you don't really need to be a part of a church, all you need is a relationship with God?
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I disagree. I like the way that my seminary theology professor, by the way, the reason
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I disagree is not primarily because I'm a pastor and I want to see people sitting in these seats. That's not what it's about. It's about what we need and what
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I need and what I recognize that we need community together. My seminary theology professor summarized the value of the church this way.
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He said that gathering together with the body of Christ is one of the only commands that we cannot accomplish alone.
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Think about that. You can't gather together with God's people alone. And we are told to gather together with God's people because God has created us relationally.
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I would add to my theology professor's comment about not being able to fulfill that and say it's not the only command because there are other commands.
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We cannot love one another alone. We cannot exercise our spiritual gifts to serve one another alone.
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We cannot convey the unity to the world around us in the church alone.
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We need to be gathering together as the people of God. We need to be, as we say here at Recast, growing together in faith, growing together in community, and growing together in service.
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And that is the plan that God has for everyone who is a follower of Christ. So I just want to welcome you and say thank you for your personal commitment to growing together in community.
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That's a part of what it means to be here. And I hope that also equally, as much as growing in faith, taking in God's word, getting opportunity to sing to him, but also connecting with others around you as part of it.
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Our text this morning in 1 Samuel 22, we're going to see another reason that we gather together.
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Part and parcel, we don't like to talk about the negative side of things a little bit. We like to say, oh yeah, we need to express love, we need to express concern for one another.
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And a lot of times what that means is when somebody's down, we provide meals for them if they're sick, if they've been in the hospital, we go pray for them, things like that.
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But what about sin? What about sin has you sitting in these seats today?
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What is it about the way that evil would have its way with us without community? What is it about accountability that draws us together in the church?
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How many of you would acknowledge that maybe at times in life, probably not now, but at times in life you've needed someone to give you a swift kick in the rear?
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You've needed somebody to say, hey, brother, sister, you're kind of going off on this a little bit and you need to be brought back in.
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And that's part of what we recognize together in the body of Christ, because the reality is we're going to look at this text this morning, sin is gross, it is ugly, it is disgusting.
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It is a terrifying master. And anybody who has ever had a season of your life where you have been under the control of sin, where you've given your heart over to it, you recognize that it will take you places you do not want to go in your life.
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Consistently, that is the testimony of scripture, that sin will take us down roads we thought we would never travel.
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Sin makes people do things they would never want another person to know. How many of you would testify that you have things in your life that you would not want conveyed on that screen right now?
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That you've done some things, you've thought some things, you don't want everybody else to see. That's the reality of sin. That's the reality of our lives.
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That's a terrifying thought, by the way, isn't it? How many of you get a little cold sweat in the hair and your neck, the thought of everybody seeing all of your thoughts, all of your deeds, all of your behaviors?
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That's a terrifying thought to us. But the fact of the matter is, in our weakest moments, in our incorrect theology, our incorrect thinking about sin, we tend to think of it as a static event, at least for us, right?
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Other people get entrenched in sin. Other people have habits of sin. But for us, it's just a one -off event.
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We kind of had a little moral lapse in judgment. We made a mistake. We can use all kinds of little cutesy words to try to describe our affront against the master of the universe, the one who created us, the one who is the
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God over all of us. So we think of it as just a one -off lapse in judgment, and we trick ourselves into thinking that our sin, we've got under control.
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Our sin is really no big deal. But sins of our heart, that is, the sins that nobody can see, that's ugly inside, the sins of our heart, the things that we think, the things that we would say to others under our breath and nobody would hear, the pride that wells up in us that is not well -based or well -founded.
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And then sins of action, both of those types of sin lead to consequences that we cannot control.
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And we're going to see in our text what we all know to be true here this morning. Sin often leads to more sin that leads to more sin that leads, of course, to even yet deeper sin.
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And in our text, we see a spiral of evil in the life of King Saul. We see it reach not rock bottom, but pretty close to rock bottom.
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Many commentaries identify his behavior in this text, the things that he commands to be done in Israel as a type of anti -Christ.
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He certainly shows himself to be anti -God. Now, he's the king appointed over Israel by the people.
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He is over the very people of God, and he's going to prove himself to be anti -God in the descent, the spiraling descent of his life.
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And this might not surprise many of us who have been around the Bible for a while. You've been through Sunday school or something.
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And even those of you who have been in this book, have been part of this sermon series, it might not surprise you to see the depths to which
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Saul goes here in this text, but it kind of ought to. In a sense, sin should always shock us.
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Sin should always be a scandal. Sin should always be like, oh, that is like, oh, I want to take my eyes away from that.
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That is disgusting and terrible. So Saul gave himself over to the sins of pride and the abuse of power, primarily what we're going to see here.
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But also, we're going to see a little side note that David gave himself over to the sin of dishonesty.
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And we're going to see that the sin of David and the sin of Saul coalesce together to form a tragic massacre in our text.
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So open your Bibles, if you're not already there, to 1 Samuel chapter 22. We're going to be reading verses 6 through 23, and as we're marching through this book, we're kind of taking it off a chunk at a time.
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So 1 Samuel 22, 6 through 23, navigate in your app or your device or in the
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Bible that's under the seat in front of you. I'll give you a second to find that. But recast, this is God's very word to us. It's powerful, it's mighty, it has the power to change us.
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Even though I'm going to spend some time expounding this and walking us through it and explaining it, even in just the reading, don't lose the opportunity that you have in hearing
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God's word read here this morning. To let him, ask him, even right now in the quiet of your own heart, ask him to speak to you through the hearing of his word.
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1 Samuel 22, 6. I don't know if you've been noticing, I'm taking my glasses off. Now I can't see you. That's where my eyesight is heading.
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So it's a little personal sharing from my heart there. I can't even see you laugh, so.
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Now Saul heard that David was discovered and the men who were with him. Saul was sitting at Gibeah under the tamarisk tree on the heights with his spear in his hand.
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And all his servants were standing about him. And Saul said to his servants who stood about him, hear now, people of Benjamin, with the son of Jesse, will the son of Jesse give every one of you fields and vineyards?
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Will he make you all commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds that all of you have conspired against me?
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No one discloses to me when my son makes a covenant with the son of Jesse. None of you is sorry for me or discloses to me that my son has stirred up my servant against me to lie in wait as at this day.
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Then answered Doeg, the Edomite, who stood by the servants of Saul, I saw the son of Jesse coming to Nob, to Ahimelech, the son of Aotab.
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And he inquired of the Lord for him and gave him provision and gave him the sword of Goliath, the Philistine. Then the king sent to summon
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Ahimelech, the priest, the son of Aotab, and all his father's house, the priests who were at Nob, and all of them came to the king.
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And Saul said, Here now, son of Aotab. And he answered, Here I am, my lord. And Saul said to him,
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Why have you conspired against me, you and the son of Jesse, in that you have given him bread and a sword and have inquired of God for him so that he has risen against me to lie in wait as at this day?
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Then Ahimelech answered the king, And who among all your servants is so faithful as David? Who is the king's son -in -law and captain over your bodyguard and honored in your house?
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Is today the first time that I have inquired of God for him? No, let not the king impute anything to his servant or to all the house of my father, for your servant has known nothing of all this, much or little.
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And the king said, You shall surely die, Ahimelech, you and your father's house.
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And the king said to the guard who stood about him, Turn and kill the priests of the Lord, because their hand also is with David, and they knew that he fled and did not disclose it to me, that the servants of the king would not put out their hand to strike the priest of the
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Lord. Then the king said to Doeg, You turn and strike the priest. And Doeg the
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Edomite turned and struck down the priest, and he killed on that day eighty -five persons who wore the linen ephod.
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And Nob, the city of priests, he put to the sword both man and woman, child, infant, ox, donkey, and sheep he put to the sword.
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But one of the sons of Ahimelech, the son of Eotib, named Abiathar, escaped and fled after David. And Abiathar told
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David that Saul had killed the priests of the Lord. And David said to Abiathar, I knew on the day when Doeg the
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Edomite was there that he would surely tell Saul, I have occasioned the death of all the persons of your father's house.
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Stay with me, do not be afraid, for he who seeks my life seeks your life. With me you shall be in safekeeping.
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Let's pray. Father, I want to thank you for your word, the conviction of your word, the direction of your word that leads us down paths that we don't necessarily like to talk about.
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But because we walk through your word, chapter by chapter, section by section, we encounter texts like this that are dark.
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But Father, I pray that they would not merely reveal to us the darkness out there, but they would be used by your spirit to reveal the darkness in here.
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Yeah, even the darkness in our own hearts. Father, sin is so ugly. It is that which displeases you, it is that which is opposed to you, it is that which is not good, and good is defined by you.
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And so Father, I pray that you would even move in our hearts as we have an opportunity to sing as people who are redeemed from sin, who have been set free from the bondage of sin and death.
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Father, that we would sing all the more rejoicing in that we have been set free from the repercussions of our actions, our behaviors, our thoughts.
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Father, that we would be, that you would let loose within our hearts a rejoicing and gladness as we sing songs to you, because you are the one who has done it.
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You are the one who has set us free. But Father, I just pray that as we have an opportunity even this morning to reflect on the darkness, as we see how dark the darkness truly is within us and within our world, that it would just only exalt you more in your salvation and your love for us, that you would love sinners like us.
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And Father, I pray that you would move in us. Father, just give us joy. Give us peace.
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But Father, for those who are here who are not in you, I pray that you would give conviction and a hunger to know more about how they can be set free by the forgiveness provided through Jesus Christ.
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Give us worship to you now, in Jesus' name, amen. Well, thanks a lot to David for leading us in Dave Bunt's absence.
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Grateful for him being willing to step in and help out, and hopefully you were able to enter the throne room of God and worship him this morning through that.
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Remember that at any time you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts while supplies last back there, you can do that and you're not going to distract me.
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I want you to be comfortable, so if you need to get up and stretch your back out or something, take advantage of that too. And then please keep your
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Bibles or your devices open to 1 Samuel chapter 22, verses 6 through 23. Again, we read that earlier, but that's going to be the outline.
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That's where we're going with this text, and I'm going to reference it multiple times during the message, and so we're going to walk through that passage, kind of explaining it and seeing what
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God has for us. Last week, I think it's important to set some of the stages. We're going through these historical books, like 1
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Samuel, to know where we were last week, because where we were last week, it has a massive impact on the message this week.
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Last week, David, who has been anointed to be the next king of Israel, is in this wandering period of his life where he's not yet king.
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He's following in the footsteps of the wicked and evil King Saul, whose kingdom is being removed from him point by point and chapter by chapter, but it's this slow fade of King Saul and this slow rise of King David, and we get to see the journey that God takes
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David on. Last week, we saw David take a layover in Nob and Gath, and they proved to be low points in his journey.
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You can go back and listen to that message online if you want, but David was motivated by fear rather than faith, and that led him to lie to the priest
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Ahimelech in order to get provisions, bread, food, and a sword, and he told
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Ahimelech he was on a top -secret mission, lied, and said, I'm on a top -secret mission for King Saul.
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Well, no, actually, he's running for his life from King Saul, but he lied and said, I'm actually working for him, and that's how he got the priest to give him the goods.
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And so, David's actually fleeing, and it's important to note that Ahimelech the priest has only ever thought that in serving
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David and giving him the bread and giving him the sword that he actually was serving King Saul.
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That's Ahimelech's perspective. That's the priest's perspective on this, and that's where we're at when we enter chapter six.
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So, we encounter Saul in verse six. It's clear that he has a desire to find and to kill David.
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That's the reality in this text, and that's going to be the reality for the remainder of his life. He's going to want to see
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David dead. He wants his own son, Jonathan, to be the next king, and therefore, he's trying to kill
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David. He's got a personal desire, a personal problem with his desire to maintain power within his own family.
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He's not personally going out and crossing the countryside. When we encounter Saul, he's sitting on a hilltop under a tree, but he sent out spies and servants abroad reporting back to the king, and one of the spies has discovered
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David's location. We get that in verse six, and in verses six through eight, we get a glimpse of the passive -aggressive slash passive,
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I mean aggressive leadership style of King Saul. He can be passive -aggressive at times, and other times, he's just outright aggressive, chucking spears at people.
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But in the text, he's surrounded by servants under a tamarisk tree on a hill in Gibeah. Some scholars actually see the fact that we ought to make much of the fact that he's on a hill outside of Gibeah.
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Often what took place, we don't know for sure, but often what took place on hills in Israel during this time was the worship of foreign gods.
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They would set up these high places, they were called high places, hilltop shrines where people would go and worship pagan gods.
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Now whether or not the text isn't very clear about that, I don't want to make much of that, but it's intriguing to think about where Saul is in his relationship to the one true
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God that he's about to kill all the priests, but he's on a hilltop, and many people see something to read into that.
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But the other thing that I find interesting, and you'll notice this about Saul, we've joked about it a little bit, he's got this one thing in his hand every time we see him in the last few chapters.
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What's he always carrying? His spear, his ever -present spear. One of my kids made notice that his aim, fortunately, is like that of a stormtrooper.
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He can't hit anything, and so he's always carrying his spear, but he's not very accurate in his aim, praise
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God for that, otherwise David would have been skewered, his son would have been skewered, and that would be the end of the story.
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But Saul is there, you get this picture of this dark, brooding individual, eyes always furrowed, and even a little bit whiny and annoying in his question, he might have caught that when
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I was trying to read it with a little bit of emotion of what I studied this week. He's whiny, will
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David give you fields and vineyards? Will he give you authority and power over the soldiers?
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Is that the reason you've conspired against me? Is that why you're opposed to me? And he's kind of asking these questions, does he really want answers, is he really listening to his servants, or is he just kind of being passive -aggressive with these questions?
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You see, I think that what we ought to think in our minds and understand about King Saul is that he's growing in his paranoia,
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I would say he's even got kind of multiple layers and levels of paranoia that are forming in his life.
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Now that paranoia, I think, began with the prophet Samuel coming to him and saying, God has torn your kingdom from you.
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How many of you, if you were working for a boss, and somebody actually, like, credible said, hey,
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I heard the boss talking, and he's gonna take your job from you. How many of you work with paranoia from that point forward? Like, just a little bit, like you might just be a little bit like, okay, somebody on the inside of management has said the boss doesn't like your performance and he wants you gone.
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Okay, paranoid. So there's some justification to Saul's paranoia, but you have to also remember that, who is he paranoid about?
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The Lord's will, the Lord has declared, I'm gonna take your kingdom from you. So what would be the godly response when
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God moves you out of a position? If it's God moving you out of a position, would it not be okay to say, all right, like Jonathan, his son,
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Jonathan, his son, who actually pledges loyalty to David and says, okay, if you're God's chosen, I don't wanna get in the way of that.
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That would be the godly response, but we see Saul holding on. Rather than accept
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God's will, he is dead set on protecting his own reign and rule.
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The wickedness of Saul's heart is one of grasping that which God is trying to take from him, and he's trying to tug a war with God.
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God forbid that any of us would be having a tug of war with the Almighty over things in our lives that he wants to take and that we want to keep, right?
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And that's the nature of our lives often, is the things that, I mean, you can think of things that you wanna cling to, things that you wanna hold onto, don't take my blankie from me, don't take my kids from me, don't take my job from me, don't take, don't take, don't take, right?
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I mean, I'm gonna have some of those things that you can think of right now as I'm talking about it. Things that you don't want God to take, and are you holding onto those things above and beyond the will of God?
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Well, Saul, in his paranoia, thinks that everyone is against him. He thinks everybody was aware that Jonathan and David had covenanted his son and the new up -and -coming king have covenanted together.
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He even assumes that David is lying in wait to kill him. He mentions it twice in the text. He's like confident that David, given the opportunity, would kill
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Saul. Well, now we're gonna see the opposite of that. We're gonna see David get opportunities to kill King Saul, stealing my own thunder.
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Spoiler alert for what's coming down the pipeline, but David's gonna have Saul in his hands, able to kill him, and he's gonna choose not to.
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He's not lying in wait for him at all, but you get a perspective on what sin does in the human heart, the type of paranoia that it produces.
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You see, I believe that one of the first consequences of sin that we see in this text is that sin will corrupt the way you think about others around you.
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Sin has a natural consequence of corrupting the way that you view the world.
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It skews the way that you see others. Saul is no longer able to see even the potential for good in people.
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His fear, his pride, and his clinging to his own power has led him to conclude that everyone is just like me.
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Everybody would kill given the opportunity. Everybody would do this or that to hold on to their power, and he thinks everybody is just like that.
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Everyone else must be just as motivated by power as he is, and you see, sin makes it hard to relate well to others around us, but I wanna point out to you, advancing the text there is always, in the wrath and anger of a boss, a doeg.
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There's always a doeg. As the boss rages, as the leader rages, someone will always be there to capitalize on the boss's anger with hopes of advancement.
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This is my chance to get in on his good side. Doeg was there in verse 7, back in chapter 21.
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He was present when David came to Himalek at Nob, when he requested the bread, when he was given the sword, and so he was present there.
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I pointed out he was kind of like the figure in every Western movie, kind of sitting back in the corner with his brim over.
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You couldn't see his eyes, and he's just there, kind of as the dark figure you know is gonna come back later in the text.
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Well, he saw David come to the priest of Nob for help, and so he sees an opportunity to get on the good side of Saul here in our text, and in verses 9 and 10, he tattles on David in Himalek.
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He was there present. He saw it. He saw it. He's an eyewitness. He says, I know where David is. I know what David has done. David went to Himalek, and Himalek helped him.
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Against you, king. So the raging king now has a direction with which to unleash his anger, so he sent for the priests of Nob to come the two miles to Gibeah.
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Only two miles down the road is where the priests of Nob are. All 85 of them come, 86 of them come and make a trip to respond to the king's summons.
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And to understand the drama of this scenario, a Himalek put yourself in his shoes. The king's servant,
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David, showed up at your door and said, I'm on a top -secret mission serving Saul. I need some help. You provide help.
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What do you think this summons from the king is all about? What's your thought when the king summons you?
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I would think commendation. What do you think? What's going on in the priests, and what's going on through their thought?
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We just helped the king. We just helped further his purposes with giving bread and giving weapons to his servant, his right -hand man.
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Of course, this is going to be a commendation from the king. He just assisted the king's servant, supplied him with bread, supplied him with weapons.
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In verse 12, Saul's derogatorily won't utter a Himalek's name, but instead calls him by his father's name, a kind of literary and verbal cue that he's not all good with a
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Himalek. Saul is angry, but a Himalek responds with the phrase, here
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I am, or here am I, a really common biblical response when somebody calls another individual, when somebody in nobility or high up, and the phrase here
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I am doesn't quite cut it. We ought to translate that regularly into English, at your service.
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This is a humble response that a Himalek gives to King Saul, I'm just here at your service, right here at your disposal, do with me as you choose, says a
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Himalek. Now if a Himalek had any doubts about what this meeting was for, as I'm suggesting, Saul doesn't leave him in any suspense.
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There's no drama here at all, he's just out with it, why have you conspired against me giving bread and a sword and guidance from the
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Lord to David, my enemy? A Himalek stands his ground though, he stands strong in verse 14.
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I want to just point out that when we're accused falsely, we can enter into discussion with confidence that comes from a clear conscience.
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How many of you have ever been accused of something you just didn't do? You can enter into that with confidence to enter into a bold assertion of,
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I didn't do this thing, and that's exactly what we see, a Himalek thought fully that he was serving
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Saul in this. Isn't David your most faithful servant, he says?
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Isn't he your son -in -law? Aren't you related? Didn't you give your daughter to him?
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Isn't he captain over your bodyguard, a new title that wasn't previously mentioned, we weren't aware of that role of David until this text?
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But further, a Himalek goes on to assert, is this the first time that I've ever helped David? Is this the first time that I've sought the
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Lord on his behalf? The implication, by the way, that we're going to see over the course of David's life is that he was routinely asking for the
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Lord's guidance. He was routinely going to the priest and saying, what does the Lord want me to do next?
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He's going to prove to be a really good model of that for our lives, going to the Lord with the desires of our heart.
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And so, here in the text, he directly asks for the king, a
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Himalek directly asks the king to take into account his innocence. Of course I've helped David.
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Of course I assisted him. What would you have had me do? Isn't he your servant? In defense, he says,
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I knew nothing, whether great or small, about the rift between you two. I don't know about your petty squabbles. I don't know about your disagreements.
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I thought I was helping you. And I believe that all of that is true. A Himalek didn't know that he was helping a fugitive last week.
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And it seems likely that David's lie to a Himalek, the priest, was intended to protect him to some degree.
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That way he could say, I didn't know any of this. You see, I want to point out to you a little bit of the ins and outs of this lie that David told to a
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Himalek. If David had been honest with a Himalek, then at least the priest could have entered into helping
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David, knowing that he was opposing King Saul. He would have at least known that. He would have had a choice in the matter, right?
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He would have been able to say, okay, well, if I help David, then I'm crossing King Saul. I've got a choice to make here.
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But David removes the choice and forces his hand to just help David. And that's not a good thing.
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David was selfish in his lie in our text last week. David was driven by fear. He was desperate for food.
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He was desperate for a weapon. And so he lied to get what he perceived he needed to help himself survive.
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And the lie was imminently personally self -serving for David. But at what cost?
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Just a little lie. What could one little fib cost? One little lie.
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What would that cost? I mean, just thinking in terms of the big scope of the big picture of what it means to be an affront to God, how many of you can think of worse sins than lying?
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Okay, right? No, trick question, right? You're like, well, you can think of them, but then in God's eyes, are those worse?
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Is that a greater affront? Could your lie result in greater sin than the thing that you just raised your hand about?
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Could it result in worse consequences? We're going to see in this text the types of things, a type of thing that a lie can produce.
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The type of results that sin regularly, God testifies to us that sin leads to what?
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Death. Do you believe that? Do we believe that, or do we just kind of go, yeah, well, just in a general sense, that's what he means by that.
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Or do we believe that it's as dangerous as death when we lie? Do we believe that those little pet sins that we think we've got under control, that we can keep in the closet, and we don't let anybody else know about, do we think that they really don't come to harm?
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That's fine, it's not really hurting anybody, is the notion. And let me just suggest to you,
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I'm not going down the road of saying that the only reason you shouldn't sin is because it produces harm or produces devastating results, it's because it breaks further your relationship with the
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Almighty God. That's the fundamental reason to not sin. There's all kinds of other secondary reasons that should lead us down the road of doing what is right and not what is wrong.
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But in his rage, Saul pronounced the death penalty, the death penalty to Ahimelech and his family of priests, to all of them.
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In this makeshift court, injustice beyond imagining is served by the failed king of Israel.
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The failed king of Israel is just bringing forth a massive injustice.
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You see, Saul was too scared, though, in the text, scared of the consequences to carry out the sentence himself.
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He demonstrates the full knowledge of what he has just commanded, and he won't do it, so he commands his servants to turn and kill the priests of Yahweh, the
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Lord. The word that is used for God there is his personal name, and there is no ambiguity in Saul's mind in verse 17, what he is commanding.
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He knows that he is calling for the slaughter, the murder, the massacre of all the priests of the
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Lord. He uses the personal name of God in this depraved injustice.
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See, he won't do it himself, and neither will his servants. At least they seem to show some respect, fearing the
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Lord more than they fear the king, who is standing there holding what? A spear.
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It's miraculous that he doesn't record for us that he chucked his spear and killed most of his servants here, right?
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Now, he wouldn't have had a good aim anyway, so maybe he just kind of gave up on that, I don't know. But he knows what he's commanding, the servants know what he's commanding, but then he turns to Doeg the
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Edomite. And Doeg the Edomite has, as an Edomite, probably a worshiper of other gods, has no loyalty or allegiance to Yahweh, the
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Lord God Almighty. He is pleased to kill the priests. And he turned and he massacred 85 priests of the
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Lord that day, and further took the fight to the city of Nob, killing all of their families, and all of their cattle, and all of their animals, and everything, a complete extermination of the priesthood, except for one who escapes.
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Abiathar, the son of Ahimelech, escaped and fled to David, the text tells us.
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This massacre, by the way, one thing, I love how this book of 1
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Samuel is going to tie this in for us to teach us another secondary lesson that is fundamental to this. This massacre was prophesied.
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God said this was going to happen way back in 1 Samuel chapter 2, verse 33. It says this, and it should come up on the screen there for you, you don't need to turn over there, but 1
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Samuel 2, 33. Samuel, through the revelation of God, declared this to Eli the priest, who is the grandfather of Ahimelech.
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It says, the only one of you, speaking the words of God and the ultimate judgment of God on Eli's family, said, the only one of you whom
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I shall not cut off from my altar shall be spared to weep his eyes out, to grieve his heart, and all the descendants of your house shall die by the sword of men.
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Every once in a while, I read something in scripture like this, and I think, wow, that's tragic.
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Or I think, wow, that's gruesome. Or I think, wow, that's wicked. And then I just move on to the next paragraph.
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But let me encourage all of you here this morning, as we have an opportunity to focus and mine a little bit deeper into this text, to enter into the shoes of young Abiathar.
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He's a real person. A real person. Enter into his shoes.
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I say young, we don't know his age, but he's going to serve David as priest all of David's life, and on into the reign of his son
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Solomon. And Solomon is going to be the one who dismisses Abiathar from the priesthood. It shows you that he's young enough to actually serve
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King David, who's probably in his late 20s, early 30s at this stage, his entire life.
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So he's young. This young man fled, and he fled massacre.
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He fled alone. He fled as the sole survivor of his entire family.
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His father was cut down. His mother was cut down. His brothers, his sisters, his entire village, his entire way of life.
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Every childhood friend that he had ever known is gone. His house is gone.
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Even were he to have a pet goat, it is gone. All for the arrogant pride of evil
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King Saul. All for the arrogant pride of evil
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King Saul, and all for the convenient lie of David.
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The prophecy declared that one priest would remain. Back in 233, one priest would remain to the text says, weep his eyes out and grieve his heart.
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And I believe that to be an understatement. What we can read here in Madawan so far removed from the events themselves was real life for Abiathar.
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Evil has real life consequences. Has real life consequences in the lives of real flesh and blood people.
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Abiathar fled to David and David took him under his protection. And David owned his own guilt in this saying that I am the one,
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I am guilty. I have occasioned the death of your family. I will protect you with my life.
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David takes on himself the preservation of this young priest Abiathar. The king to be will be the protector of the priest to be with his very life.
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David certainly has a different view of the priesthood than King Saul. The contrast couldn't be greater in the text.
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Saul flippantly murders all of the priests at Nob. But to David, anybody who wants to harm the priest will have to come through him first, he says.
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And David wrote a psalm. I love it as we're going through 1 Samuel, I'm referencing and I'm kind of cross -referencing different parts of scripture.
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And because we have recorded for us the events of 1 Samuel, but then we also have this beautiful thing where David has written psalms and actually put postscripts to those psalms to let us know that during this era, during this time, he wrote
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Psalm 52. So you can go and I'd encourage you this week to go read Psalm 52 in the context of this slaughter and this massacre and see
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David's heart. I'm not going to read the whole thing here, but it is actually what is called an imprecatory psalm.
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How many of you have ever heard of an imprecatory psalm before? Big word, that's your cost of admission pays for that word.
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So it's been sponsored by you. But no, imprecatory psalm is a psalm of calling for the demise or the destruction of someone.
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Okay, so it's a pretty violent, imprecatory psalms. How many of you ever read, you turn to the psalms for encouragement, you're like, that wasn't encouraging.
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Like that was actually pretty dark. Can I go to the next one? Are you trying to find an encouraging one? Any of you ever been there in life?
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It's not all encouragement, it's not all rainbows and butterflies and sweet praise songs to God.
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Some of it gets pretty dark. And Psalm 52 is one of those. Because it's an imprecatory psalm against Doeg the
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Edomite. David writing his feelings and his thoughts about his relationship with God and his relationship with this guy who killed all of the priests.
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He's calling for the demise of Doeg to God. And these are inspired words.
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And here are the words that lead you down the road of this being imprecatory or calling for demise. Psalm 52 five, in colorful and flowery language, if you just picture the actual thing happening that this verse is talking about.
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He says this in Psalm 52 five, but God, speaking to Doeg, but God will break you down forever.
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He will snatch and tear you from your tent. He will uproot you from the land of the living.
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Speaking bold words of anger to God. How many of you at times have wanted to pray a prayer and thought it didn't sound quite right?
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It's scripture. God is big enough to handle our anger. Did you know that? If the
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Psalms teach us anything, it's that God can handle your emotions. You're not out of control for him.
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You're not too much for him. When you feel the deep feels, he can handle that.
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And at times we might think, we might be tempted to go with what the church historically has told us, that God can't handle your emotions.
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You need to put those aside. You need to put those in a box and make sure they don't escape. You need to be stoic and rise above.
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There are times when we see in scripture people before God, like Hannah, early in scripture, blowing snot bubbles of tears and weeping before the
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Lord in the tabernacle. We see people pouring out their hearts, and David here is angry.
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Do you think he's justified in his anger that Doeg killed? 85 of the priests. You think that's okay?
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It ought to make us a little angry as we read this. Now, this is a dark text.
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There's a lot of darkness in here. An evil that demonstrates so many lessons to us about sin.
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And I want to conclude this message by plumbing the depths, some of the depths of those lessons that this passage is seeking to teach us.
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Sometimes application is just ultimately what I'm driving for in a message. It's for you to think rightly about things.
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And what I want us to think rightly about is sin this morning. That's not a popular message in our culture, is it?
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Talk about sin. We come to church. Don, I've had a rough week. I was just hoping for a little encouragement.
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It's a little bit dark. It's a little bit down. What in the world does this have to do with me? I was just kind of hoping for a pick -me -up this week.
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And you're up here talking about sin. Scripture is faithful to have some times of exaltation and joy and some times of plumbing the depths of the darkness of our hearts so that we can rejoice all the more when we realize that we've been set free.
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We want to make sure we have both of those. But the first application, really the ultimate application, as we kind of go through this, it's difficult, but a fundamental lesson regarding the sources of evil.
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Evil and wicked actions are complex. Where does evil come from? When you sin, what is the nature of that?
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Where is it coming from? Where is it going? Where is evil leading us? We often want to look at situations like this one in this text and make nice, tidy declarations of justice.
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What does justice look like in this? Who should be held accountable? Doeg sinned and unjustly put to death.
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The innocent, he should pay. End of story, right? Many of you know it's more complex than that. A lot more complex than that.
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So let's trace the course of this very complex, wicked act so that we can think biblically about sin and its consequences.
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And you cannot trace sin without going back to the beginning. That's where it starts.
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You see, we don't think about it this way, but Adam and Eve had something to do with this slaughter. Adam and Eve had something to do with this massacre.
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They had a role to play in this. They introduced disobedience to the command of God into the human race that all of us are born tainted with sin.
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All of us are born with a sinful nature in us. You didn't have to teach your children.
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One person said that the fallenness of man is the most provable of all theology.
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The most clear, objective theological premise is that you're fallen.
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You did not have to teach your kids to take the toy from their friend in the nursery.
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Did you teach them that? Did you teach them to say no to you? Did you teach them to punch the other kid or to bite or to kick?
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No, you didn't have to teach that. It came with the package, right? It's all rolled up in what it means to be born in a sinful world, and Adam and Eve brought us into that.
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Every sin ever committed originated with the fall of humanity in the garden, but that doesn't let us off the hook.
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We can't say, oh, Adam and Eve started it. It's their fault. But we do know that it has an impact on the way that life happens in this world.
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God declared punishment and ongoing corruption and ongoing effects and consequences of sin because of our fall into it.
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Consider Eli the priest from way back in 1 Samuel. He's got a role to play in this. Surprisingly, without the text indicating it, we wouldn't know to go back there.
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But Eli was getting fat. It says by the end of his life, he was fat off the evil stealing of meat from the sacrifices that he was supposed to be giving to God, and his sons were stealing sacrifices in the tabernacle, taking sacrifices from people and threatening them if they didn't give them the best portions of meat that were supposed to be sacrificed to God.
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His sons abused their roles and were even womanizing in the tabernacle, it says. And the prophecy of this very massacre came to Eli as he refused to remove his own sons from the priesthood because of their moral failings.
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Eli is not innocent in this matter of the slaughter of the priest at Nob. His own sins were visited on his descendants.
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And that leads us to ask ourselves reasonably, what's God's role in this? A really confusing aspect of this.
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Did he merely look in his crystal ball and see down to the future of this event and go, well, I see it, so I'm gonna say it.
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I see that it's going to happen. Were his hands tied to a prophecy about things that mankind would choose to do?
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You see, I believe that God does indeed judge sin. And it's well within his prerogative to bring about consequences of sin as he sees fit.
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The actors in these events don't get a pass simply because God used it for judgment.
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We are always responsible for our own sin. But that doesn't mean that God doesn't often use those very sins to correct, to judge, or even bring grace to others.
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I mean, I think that many of us can point back to a sin that we've dealt with or we've struggled with or that we've committed in our lives that has given us the power and ability to speak into others' lives because of the grace we've received.
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Do you see what I'm saying? And so sometimes grace is indeed a result of sin, that you don't sin so that grace increases, but it is a way that God uses it.
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So what about David in this text? What's his role in sin? His lie is at least partially responsible for this massacre, right?
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Do you see the flow in the text and the way that David is indicted and even owns it? He says, I have occasioned the death of your family,
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Abiathar. Were he to tell the truth to Ahimelech at Nob, the priest could have made up his own mind whether or not to cross
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King Saul. It would have been on his head. It would have been on his shoulders to make the choice. He may have still chosen to help
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David, but have you even considered, I mean, I know we're talking about hypotheticals, but it seems even just possible that Ahimelech may even have fled with David.
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The priesthood may have gone over to David's side. We don't even know. If he had told the truth, maybe that would have been the result, but David's little convenient lie resulted in consequences he could have never predicted.
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David's lie was so, so, so costly.
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It created a cascading avalanche of sin that he had no control over.
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How many of you have seen that in your life enough, but it's still, unfortunately, I've seen it in my life, and it still doesn't quite seem to be enough in the time to stop the temptation?
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Do you know what I'm saying? But you know, you know, if you pause right now in the quiet of your heart in a moment where you're not sinning, hopefully you're not sinning right there, but where you're not engaged in it and you're not feeling an extreme temptation, you can acknowledge that sin is not going to lead you the right direction.
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Do you know that in moments of lucidity when you're thinking it through? Raise your hand if you know that.
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You know that sin isn't gonna carry you where you wanna go. You already know that. You can't dictate the results of it.
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The greatest, I think one of the greatest lies that Satan perpetuates to us today is that we can have the pleasure of sin without those nasty side effects.
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You can have all the benefit without the consequences, and he tells us that all the time. The world tells us that all the time.
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The advertisers tell us that all the time. Your coworkers often tell you that. Your neighbors will tell you that.
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Because this is where we turn to see what the effects of sin are. Without this, we think we can get away with it.
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Or even worse, we think that our good can outweigh our bad, right? That's the worldly mindset.
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We need to turn to the word of God to tell us what is true and what is real, and that is not the case.
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We cannot have the pleasure of sin without the side effects. There will be side effects.
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The little sin you think you can't control will quickly control you until it devours you.
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Even a little convenient lie can shift sideways into places you thought you would never go.
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Lastly, the most direct cause, of course, of this sin, as we're tracing it through, is Saul, Saul's command, and then
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Doeg's obedience to that command. Saul, I just wanna point out, and like we need to think about our own lives, we are not static characters in the story of God.
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A lot of times we take a snapshot of our lives and think that that defines us, and we don't realize how far we've shifted from that.
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Do you know what I'm talking about in that? We don't even recognize, and we need other voices, we need accountability, we need other relationships to identify where we're at, because sometimes we're the worst assessors of our own position.
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Saul has not been static in this book. He has slidden. He is taking his depravity further, chapter by chapter, verse by verse.
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He is reaping the consequences of faithlessness, of self -service, and fear that his kingdom is going to be removed in, clutching at power.
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And the murder of these priests is, in one sense, a logical stop along the pathway of Saul's ongoing moral decline.
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He who began looking for his father's donkeys, where did we first find Saul in this book? Out in the field, looking for dad's donkeys.
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Looking, just doing a common everyday event when he encounters Prophet Samuel, and Prophet Samuel says, you know what, you're gonna be the next king, and anoints him.
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And even at his anointing ceremony, even when he is brought before the people as the king, where does he go?
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Where do they have to go get him from? He's hiding among the luggage. He's completely unpretentious.
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Think about where this guy comes from. From hiding among the baggage, from just out minding his father's business, looking for donkeys.
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Unpretentious, unassuming, not grasping for power. What a picture we have here of a man who can be brought from that, slaughtering all of the priests of God.
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Do you think he set out on that day with that, do you think he set out as a king with the goal of killing all the priests of God?
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No, that's the slide. He's allowed authority and power to corrupt him, and it now has become his all -consuming goal.
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And it is ugly to behold in this text. Saul demonstrates for us in this text the way that internal sin and pride and self -centeredness often produce the most terrifying outward manifestations of sin.
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Saul struggled with anger. Some of us in this room struggle with anger. He struggled with fear.
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Some of us in this room struggle with fear. He struggled with unbelief. Some of us in this room struggle with unbelief.
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He struggled with grasping for his own power, his own authority. If I can use a word that might come a little closer to our own hearts, he struggled with control.
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Control. He wanted to control everything. These are not sins that are foreign to us, recast.
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These are not sins that are like way out there where we can't imagine, you know, acting like King Saul.
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Be honest with yourself. You see these things in you. You know that they're there. These are the things that murdering every priest of the
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Lord is made out of. Anger, control, hunger for power, hunger for fame, hunger for authority.
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Years, I believe, Saul didn't start out as king with the goal of decimating the priesthood.
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Of course he didn't. But years of steeping himself in selfish internal sin cooked him alive from the inside out.
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The corrupting force of sin is so obvious in the life of Saul that he stands as a significant warning for us all. What happened to Saul can happen to you and I if we let sin run us internally.
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If we don't take sin seriously, it will own us. And Doeg's bloody sword stands at the end of this long line of sinful history that we've just expounded all the way from Adam and Eve down to King Saul and his internal struggle.
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And Doeg's sword is just the tip of the spear of all of this history that is going on.
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And I want to remind us all again that God's sovereign plan to wipe out the priestly line of Eli doesn't diminish
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David's responsibility for the lie. It doesn't make Saul a hero of the will of God. He got done what
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God wanted to get done and therefore he did what is good. It doesn't mean that Doeg was compelled to do this wicked deed because God made him.
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That's not how the sovereignty of God works. You see, scripture simultaneously indicates that God is indeed sovereign and humanity is indeed responsible for sin.
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And if you lack one side of that equation, you are not saying the same thing that the Bible says about reality.
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It's both. God is sovereign. Not a little sovereign.
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Not just a skosh sovereign. He is completely sovereign. And humans are not just a little responsible for sin but ultimately 100 % responsible for sin.
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And if that boggles your mind, it should because that is the mystery. If you can explain that, you can explain
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God. And I want to hear it. If you've got a solution for God and reality,
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I want to hear it. I want to hear your understanding about how there is both evil and a good
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God over it all. But I would suggest to you that it is all part of his plan. Take what scripture says about it.
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Make sure that only ever what you say about God's sovereignty and human responsibility comes from here.
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And if my answers here this morning are not sufficient for you, which maybe they aren't for you, I would love to enter that conversation.
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You could set up a time and meet with me. I would love to enter that conversation. So let me conclude with this primary exhortation from this dark text.
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We're running out of time here. The fundamental point here is flee from sin.
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If you don't walk away from this with anything, I've painted you a dark picture of where sin led Saul, where sin led
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David. Run from it. Flee from sin. Let that be the thing that you walk away and do this week.
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Run from it. Ask for accountability. Come and talk with me. I'm not gonna judge you. I wanna help you out of it if you're stuck in it, if you're in a place where you can't grow anymore and you're going,
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I am being owned by something. Don't sit in that darkness alone. Come and get the light shed on it.
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Flee from sin. Study the word to know what defines sin and then run to God for merciful forgiveness and protection.
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His love and forgiveness is the only sanctuary available from the ravaging effects of sin.
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I love this quote. From ex -pastor Ted Haggard. Any of you recognize the name
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Ted Haggard? He used to be the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, pastor of very large churches.
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Fell from grace, fell from ministry. The context of the circumstances of his writing, what I'm about to quote, are astounding.
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He wrote a book for his sons called Foolish No More. Foolish No More is the title of the book.
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It was published in 2005 and he wrote this in there. Kinda claims it for his own. I can find quotes of it before 2005, so he didn't originate it, but anyways.
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This is the quote. Sin will take you further than you wanna go, cost you more than you wanna pay, and keep you longer than you wanna stay.
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How many of you think that's a great message? That's truth. And in 2006, sin took him further than he wanted to go.
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Cost Ted Haggard more than he wanted to pay and kept him longer than he wanted to stay. When it was uncovered that he was into drug abuse and soliciting male prostitutes, sin took him further than he wanted to go.
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I don't tell that story to bash Ted Haggard, but to bring that message home to our hearts.
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What's your solution? What is your hope? What is your help? Ted Haggard was a pastor of a huge church.
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I don't doubt for a second that he wanted to love Jesus. It's very easy for us to dismiss these high profile figures as probably charlatans in the first place.
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I believe that he set out to want to love God. So what is our hope? What is our help?
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Sin and temptation is around us and even inside us. The deck seems to be stacked against us.
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We have a genuine enemy who works through the world system to keep us moving away from our creator. If you just bob along with the flow of the river of history, how many of you know you're not heading towards God?
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You're not heading towards God if you're just bobbing along. At the very end of David's strong condemnation of Doeg the
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Edomite in Psalm 52, he declares the place of his hope. David, who was in this, was a link in the chain of this sin of killing these 85 priests.
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In Psalm 52, he declares, but I am like a green olive tree in the house of God, meaning he has a lot of room for growth.
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He was humble. I've got a lot of room to grow, but he goes on to say, I trust in the steadfast love of God forever.
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Please hang with me. This is the solution. If you're sitting there and you're going, how could I be better than Saul? How could
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I do better than David? Well, you can't on your own, but the solution is that David understood that even.
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And he says, I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever. I will thank you forever because you have done it.
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You see, David's hope and trust wasn't in his own ability to remedy his problem of sin. He was trusting in the steadfast love of God.
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And further, he goes on, he's trusting in him. And he ends with,
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I will wait for your name for it is good in the presence of the godly.
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Rather than get busy trying to do religious duties to overcome his sin, David leaned back harder on the grace of God.
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He waits for the Lord. He doubled down on trust that the Lord is good.
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And he says, I will surround myself with the godly. I will surround myself with the godly. Are you surrounding yourself with the godly?
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Like David's solution. Accountable to others. Here surrounded in the presence of the godly, here at Recast Church, let's take communion together to reflect on the only hope for sinful humans like us.
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The only place that we can make sense of this darkness is in the light given to us in Christ.
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The steadfast love of the Lord has been expressed toward all who come to him by faith, trusting that his mercy has been expressed through Jesus Christ, his son.
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He died for us so that we can be set free from sin and he has granted hope for us in this battle.
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This daily battle that's gonna start this afternoon. It's gonna start as soon as you walk out. You're gonna be back in the fray again.
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Sin is strong, but Recast Church grace is stronger. If you're all in with Christ, consider this as you come to take the cracker to remember his body broken for you and take the juice to remember his blood shed for you.
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That, Recast, is how much he has loved you. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your grace and your mercy.
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I pray that you would help us all to take sin seriously, that you would not allow us to walk out of here with a flipping attitude towards the sins that we commit, but recognizing with fear, with a holy fear given to us by your spirit that sin is indeed corrupting and will indeed take us down if we don't deal with it and ask for forgiveness and seek accountability and work to love you.
59:05
That work only comes in recognizing what you have done for us. So I pray that as we come to these tables, that nobody would come to those tables with a sense of their duty, but a sense of accepting what you have done for us.
59:17
Father, the key is that you have done it, not that we can do it ourselves, not that we can fix ourselves, but that by your grace you provide a grace upon grace toward those who are sinners just like us.