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Sermon by Josh Rice from 1 Samuel 31.
We've arrived at the end and I think that it's fitting that as we get to the end of First Samuel that it's a tragedy because in many ways I kind of feel the tragedy of closing the book on this one. It's been a journey and it's been a lot of fun.
I don't think that I'm being hyperbolic to say it's the most fun I've ever had preaching a book. I hope that that's been reflected. I think there's been energy and enthusiasm and I think the reason why is because God tells the best stories and given the opportunity for a narrative to play out we see all of the themes and the interwoven stuff and so the task with trying to cap off and try to finish a book is for us to look back and look forward and try to see what the Lord had for us and as my dad taught me and actually taught me over and over again repetition is the key to learning and so this morning I hope to repeat a lot of the themes that we've seen as this tragedy comes to an end and I think for me, I don't know, my mom always called me a melancholic guy when I was a teenager and I've always been drawn to the idea of tragedy.
Some of my favorite stories, some of my favorite books are The Grapes of Wrath. If you've ever read that, it's a real kick in the teeth. I mean it's a real downer and another of my very favorite books is Crime and Punishment and I love the book The Brothers Karamazov and what these stories have in common is just dark, death, sin, awfulness.
Many of you guys would know it's often considered the greatest American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and that novel is characterized by tragedy and injustice and death and so we have to ask why are we drawn to this sort of thing?
One of the ancient ones is Macbeth, right? We're drawn to this kind of idea and I think it's because we like to sink our teeth often into a story that makes us sad because the sadness reveals something true about the human condition and the truth about the human condition is that we are in a really sad state before God intervened on our behalf.
It reveals a longing in our hearts for a greater resolution and so with many of these stories, the further down they draw you, the greater the glory of the redemption and I think we should see that in 1 Samuel because as we see the complete loss of potential, Saul could have been so great, right?
It's right there for him and so his ultimate death by suicide, his final act of rebellion against God's law would show us that there has to be a greater resolution out there somewhere because in our hearts, I've often said that the most powerful motivating force in human beings is really justice.
Nothing makes us more angry than injustice. We want to see it put to rights. We are very angry when perceived injustice happens. It's what stirs us into action. It stirs former cowards into being protesters whenever we sense injustice.
It makes everybody angry. We want it all put to rights and 1 Samuel, the way it closes, really just doesn't do that for us and I think that's why the book is a great tragedy and I think that it makes you, the way we've broken it up in our Bible, is it makes you want to turn the page and read 2 Samuel and I will confess that I did that muchly this week and I got to tell you, there's some themes and there's some stuff that comes back that the armor-bearer jumps out at me here, that the armor-bearer was afraid to do something that Saul himself was not afraid to do, right?
And it's a disdain for the law of God and we see David in the first chapter of 2 Samuel still unwilling to touch the Lord's anointed. It's an amazing thing. So as we look back, I think any look at this book and trying to cap it off, we have to look back at what was really going on here and I think when we start, we go from Eli and the story of Eli and his sons and Samuel and then as it transitions into being the story of David and Saul, what we see is potential and godliness and what the world would see as being the power structure and what the world would see as being the top of the mountain and the great hope of Israel is actually an illusion and the real hope of Israel was always the little boy who was left at the altar from his mom as she was granted her request from the beginning of the book.
She was granted her request to have a son and she followed through on her end. She was honest. Hannah was honest and she left her son Samuel at the temple and that act of obedience resulted in the greatest judge that Israel had seen, the great prophet Samuel and we see that from the king like all the other nations, the people of Israel choose Saul who's not the right tribe but he's the right looking guy.
He's very tall, he's very handsome, he's very strong and it seems like he's got all the potential but the real provision that God has given the people of Israel is the youngest boy of a down-and-out guy in the backwoods of Bethlehem who's out just merely tending his father's sheep but this young boy, much like Samuel, hears the Lord and he has a zeal for the Lord that he's not afraid of lions and bears.
You know I was talking to a couple of guys about that last night and I just really don't have the conception of being out in a field looking after sheep and a bear coming in and me engaging in personal combat with the bear.
I really don't have much conception of that but that's who God had provided and it was always that God looked to the heart. So as we look back we see potential lost because Saul had it all out before him and remember when he was anointed he had been out in the wilderness he was chasing his father's donkey right and he was trying to get there and Samuel comes and grabs him, anoints him, teaches him all night and it looks great.
Saul is anointed king by God and then our first look at him is hiding behind the baggage. But it gets better quickly because Saul, the great king, the king with the handsomeness, with the height, this guy would have been voted president for sure.
He was like a golden god of masculinity that's what he looked like and we see his first military action is he goes and literally kills the serpent, Nahash of the Ammonites, who is messing with the border and it's not by accident that this story comes back to us in the last chapter of 1st Samuel where Saul starts his great reign by defeating the enemies of God by slaying the serpent and everything looks good.
Everything looks good and then we see the potential in Saul's family as Jonathan, we're introduced to him and Jonathan is a man's man and Jonathan is a great heart and a soldier. Jonathan puts fear into the hearts of Israel and God's enemies and we should see in the background through all of 1st Samuel that the real battle going on here is the battle between God, Yahweh and the other idols, the other gods.
Nahash was a stand-in for the other gods. We remember Dagon from early on that he's a stand-in for the other gods and he comes back in this story today. But the problem with Saul is that he could have been the absolute greatest.
He could have been. He had the son that would have carried on his kingdom that would have been a greater king than even Saul was and he had what could have been the greatest military general the world had ever seen who was his servant, his slave.
David never had aspirations to overtake Saul. David was content to be the king's man who would go out and kill his tens of thousands and Saul heard the poem that we've heard over and over again. Saul slain his thousands, David his ten thousands and Saul heard that as a threat instead of what he should have seen was that song should have shown his greatness.
It should have shown, yeah, Saul's killed his thousands but Saul's little man under him has killed his ten thousands. What kind of great man is Saul that he would have a slave like that? That's what Saul should have seen.
But the problem with Saul is that he doesn't care about the Word of God. It's really that simple. He doesn't have faith and Hebrews 11, the great hall of faith that gives us many of the patriarchs and the heroes of the Old Testament, there's one person that is extremely conspicuously absent and that is the first king of God's people.
The first king. Imagine how strange that is, that as the author of Hebrews winds us through this history that's so often done in the New Testament, isn't it? Don't we hear that the call to repentance in the New Testament over and over and over again is recounting the story of God's goodness through Israel?
Even when the come back to a rebuilt Jerusalem, when Nehemiah builds the wall, and we go to Nehemiah chapter 9, when the people are gathered back, what does Nehemiah do? He tells them the whole story of their history.
Because we are a people who float around without remembering where we were and who we serve and what he's done. And so it's a terrible thing, it's a terrible thing that the first king of Israel is not mentioned in these great stories.
He's gone. And the reason he's gone is very simple. Because all the looks, all the strength, all the lineage, all the money, all the military victories, all the great laws that you can pass do nothing if you don't believe the Word of God.
The potential was all there. The magnetism was there. And I think that's why Bart and I have commented over and over again that the commentaries get Saul so wrong. They just don't understand. In our age of emotionalism, what we try to do is we try to elevate the good intentions of people to put them over the top of the law of God and the Word of God.
And so we try to understand people's motivations and think, oh, he was really a good guy. I had a long quotation that I was going to do here. I'm going to suffice it to say this. In the commentary, it was like the final insult.
The Tyndale commentary, a guy said that Saul probably failed as king partially because of his own inner inadequacy, but there were external forces and circumstances that drove him to this. And what I say to that is hogwash.
Hogwash. Saul falls. And this is going to be hard for some of you. Saul falls. Because God was doing an object lesson on Israel, showing them that what you think is going to save you will never save you.
And so Saul was God's instrument. And as Romans would tell us, Saul was an instrument of dishonorable use. He was an instrument that was made to show God's glory and righteousness in judging the wicked.
And Saul ultimately becomes the picture of what it looks like when God does not grant repentance. Because when God does not grant repentance, we have no hope whatsoever. None. We want to excuse rebellion against God because that makes us feel better about ourselves.
Because at the end of the day, it's very difficult for us to look in the mirror and say, you are a rebel against God, and but for his work and his grace, you would have nothing. Saul never waited on the Lord.
Never. We never get that in the Scripture, do we? We get Saul being rash and impetuous. We see him doing insane things like throwing a spear at somebody at the dinner table. Right? That kind of puts a damper on the proceedings.
Right? It's not really great. We see Saul, understandably, the commentators, this is when the problem started, is when the problem comes manifest on Saul is that he doesn't wait on the Lord to offer the sacrifice.
He doesn't wait. And you think, wow, it's the last light of the seventh day. Maybe God's word has failed and Saul doesn't wait. And it says that he forced himself to offer a sacrifice before Samuel came.
And that was where the kingdom was taken away from him. And we go, man, that's mean, God. Why did you make him wait so long? And for us, the answer is, we wait until the Lord gives us conviction. Because on our own power and own strength, we have nothing.
Just like Saul, he had nothing. Because Saul, taking on this position and not listening to God and being rash and even waiting till the last hour of the last day, he didn't wait long enough. He went and he offered the sacrifice and that opened the door to the teraphim.
Because chapter 15, which is really the climax in many ways of this book, chapter 15 opens the door for the idolatry. Because what Saul does is he spares Agag and the spoils of the Amalekites. Let's look back.
Samuel says this in verses 22 and 23 of chapter 15. How these words should torment Christians in our pride today. When we come to church and we sing songs and we listen to sermons and we cheer on our celebrity preachers on social media and we amass books for ourselves and an army of library books and we like to, as Reformed people especially, we like to gloat in our theological acumen, knowing that there are other good churches but also knowing that really deep down they're all wrong and not quite as smart as we are.
And we sit and we bask in our knowledge and what we don't remember is that God does not take delight in sacrifices. He takes delight in obedience. And the very core of Christianity is that we will know, they will know the Lord Jesus Christ through our love for one another.
And so I ask first of all, the lesson that we should learn from Saul. Does Saul love his brothers? He does not. He intentionally, over and over again, tries to murder David. He lies to his own son. He invokes an oath, a blood oath, with his own son saying, as the Lord lives, I'm not trying to harm David.
He is absolutely trying to harm David. Saul repeatedly takes the Lord's name in vain. Repeatedly. Ridiculously. He repeatedly tries to murder. He consults with a witch. And then finally, he kills himself because Saul has no hope because Saul will not repent.
He never repents. He gives us an object lesson in what worldly sorrow looks like. I'm sorry that I got caught. I'm sorry that this looked bad. I'm sorry that I made everybody feel bad with this. That was a bad move.
But what he never has is repentance. And we as Christians need to learn how to tell the difference. We need to learn how to tell the difference in ourself when we are hiding our sin with our worldly sorrow and saying, oh I'm so sorry that I did that.
And then the next day, going back to the vomit on the floor to lick it up that we had before and thinking that it tastes like strawberries. It doesn't. And we cover and we're liars and our heart is deceitfully wicked.
But even more than that, and maybe similar to that, we need to start understanding repentance in our betters. We need to start listening to what people say and we need to start judging people by the fruit.
Over and over again, we have people fall out. We have people who influence our thoughts that dishonor the living God. Just like Saul. Do they repent? And I'm going to tell you something. We didn't get there because we don't get to see David's full story in 1 Samuel.
But I think David, when you hear that David is a man after God's own heart, there's so many qualities about him, right? He is dangerous. He is courageous. He is zealous for the Lord. But I think more than any of that, more than any of that, David shows us what it actually looks like to love the law of God so much that when we break it, that we are broken.
Think about it in Psalm 51. It's one of my absolute favorite Psalms. That David talks with desperation about the Lord not taking his spirit from him. That David talks about his iniquity and how it's ground into his bones and how he's about to die.
And we see there the clear difference between David and Saul. The difference is that David will repent and Saul will not. Maybe the longest intro I've done in a long time, but that's the look back. That's where we were.
And I think what we have in 1 Samuel 31 in a really brilliant way, we have an anticlimactic fulfillment of a prophecy. And the prophecy we just read in 1 Samuel 15, that the kingdom was going to be taken away.
It's gone. And that was a repeat of a prophecy from earlier. That Saul was going to have his kingdom and his sons were not going to have it. It was going to be stripped away from him. And we get this fulfillment and it's anticlimactic.
That's why I just read. And I think it is for a reason and we're going to look at the literature. So let's read it again. Repetition, right? Verses 1 through 6. Now the Philistines were fighting against Israel and the men of Israel fled from before the Philistines and fell slain on Mount Gilboa.
And the Philistines closely pursued Saul and his sons and the Philistines struck down Jonathan and Abinadab and Malchushua, the sons of Saul. And the battle became heavy against Saul and the archers hit him and he was badly wounded by the archers.
Then Saul said to his armor bearer, draw your sword and pierce me through with it, lest these uncircumcised come and pierce me through and abuse me. But his armor bearer was not willing for he was greatly afraid.
So Saul took his sword and fell on it. Then his armor bearer saw that Saul was dead, so he also fell on his sword and died with him. Thus Saul died with his three sons, his armor bearer and all his men on that day together.
Why is it anticlimactic? Why do I say that? Well because David I think had realized in chapter 26 that Saul was going to be smitten down and it was going to be one of three ways, right? It was either going to be by his enemies, it was going to be by Yahweh, or maybe by old age, but it's actually worse than that.
I think David betrays a little bit of a misunderstanding of Saul in his prediction, and that is it's going to be even lower than that. That Saul is going to be swamped by his enemies, but what he's going to ultimately do is he's going to do his final act of rebellion against God's law by not turning to God and crying out for mercy, but instead by taking matters into his own hands, by taking violence into his own hands and killing himself.
Understand that his armor-bearer has more respect for Saul's life than Saul himself does. Saul says, kill me so that they won't take me and spread me around and dishonor me. More worried about dishonor and death than he is in life, as a pagan king would do, right?
So his armor-bearer will not do it, Saul does it himself, and David had called it, right? David knew, David understood, this prophecy is going to come true without me moving the ball forward here. He abstained.
So Saul fears being made a mockery of by his enemies, and he is not the slightest bit afraid of his own position, what the Lord had told him, what the commands were, and there's so many mirrors in here, right?
There's the mirror of Eli, who early in the book, Eli dies by falling after the people have lost, right? And he despairs and he falls off his chair. There's also maybe a closer mirror of Judges 9 from another wicked, we'll use quote, king, right?
A quote king, Abimelech, who fell on his own sword to spare embarrassment, and he was buried under an oak tree in Judges 9. These things keep happening over and over again. Saul dies with his progeny, and he's lost the kingdom, and it says in verse 7 that the Philistines came in and lived in all these cities.
Saul failed. He failed in every way conceivable. It's a tragedy. He didn't do anything that he was called to do. He didn't defeat the Philistines, he didn't secure his throne, he didn't protect his sons, he didn't leave any sort of legacy except for one.
Man, it's so beautiful. I wish I could do it, I can't, I'm just gonna say it, right? I'm gonna quickly and leave it there. His legacy is actually the future mercy of David toward a crippled boy named Mephibosheth.
That is the legacy of Saul that's actually the legacy of David, right? The mercy of David. Types, shadows, we see them over and over again. And so Saul, the first king, comes to an anticlimactic end because he really had an anticlimactic reign.
His reign was going to be like so many other kings of Israel and Judah. It was going to be marked by idolatry, marked by rebellion against God, marked by faithlessness, marked by cowardice, marked by all kinds of bad advice.
Remember Doeg has him close in the camp, this dog of a man, right? He has these close advisors who are a bunch of lily-livered cowards, right? And when you compare that, the author wants us to see it.
Who are David's advisors? Who are David's close men? They are fearsome warriors who are content to live in caves as long as they can follow their Lord. That's what we get. But as a good tragedy author would do, he keeps piling it on.
Let's look ahead in verse 8 through 10. Now it happened on the next day, the Philistines came to strip the slain. And they found Saul and his three sons fallen on Mount Gilboa. Then they cut off his head and stripped off his weapons and sent them all around the land of the Philistines to proclaim the good news to the house of their idols and to the people.
And they placed his weapons in the house of Ashtaroth and fastened his body to the wall of Beth-shan. And we know in 1st Chronicles 10 .10 it says that they fastened Saul's head to the wall in the house of Dagon.
So what did the Philistines do? They take Saul's body and they lay it down as a sacrifice for all their gods. And it says there in verse 9, don't miss it boy, this one jumped out like a beacon to me, the Philistines had their own gospel.
And the Septuagint actually uses that same language, Evangelion. The Philistines told the gospel of the death of Saul. And it's really a perversion of the gospel that would be made by a perverse people, right?
Because the gospel was always the coming news of peace from a new king. That's what it meant. Did you know that the Christians appropriated the word from the Romans, from Caesar Augustus, right? Evangelion was the promise of Pax Romana.
That was the historical root of the word. And then John the Baptist took it and he said, no, the Evangelion is the coming of the prince of peace, the king of kings. It's not Augustus Caesar, it's Jesus the Christ, the Messiah.
But the Philistines used the word to show that there's going to be an appeasement to their gods that have been whipped pretty badly over and over in 1st Samuel, have they not? Think about what happened.
Dagon, the last time we checked in on Dagon, he was laying on the floor with his head cut off and his hands cut off, right? The last time we checked in on the gods of the Ammonites, they were routed by a little village up on the eastern border.
The last time we checked in on the great champion of the Philistines, his head was being paraded around by David and his sword was being shown around like a shrine in the museum and David takes it back and carries it, right?
This legendary sword. But for now, and this is important, right? For now, the Philistines get to bask in the destruction of the enemies of their gods for a time, for a time. And if you'll notice the title of the sermon, it's kind of tongue-in-cheek.
There's actually no triumph in this chapter, but just like the Philistines, they didn't know, right? What they didn't know was what they thought was their triumph here was actually their demise and their death.
Because when you turn the page, you start to understand that the death of Saul was all in the plan of God because there was a greater man coming, a man who loved the Lord, a man who had no fear, a man who was going to route out the Philistines, and a man who so hated idolatry that it never marked his kingdom whatsoever.
David sinned against the Lord, but he did not commit the sin of idolatry. He loved the Lord, his God, and he worshiped the Lord, his God. Friends, we should fear God when we take on his name. Have you thought about that lately?
Over and over, over and over in Scripture, and I've said it over and over the last couple of times I've preached, that we have to fear God, not man. And I think too often what we try to do in our American culture is we're afraid of the call to fear God because what we think is, well, I don't want to be afraid of God.
Friends, you should be afraid of God. He created you, he holds life and death, and when you do wickedness, you should fear him. However, you should also understand that he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins, that he has steadfast love, that he has mercy towards his people.
When we take on his name, make no mistake, we become representatives of him. We are ambassadors for Christ. That means that everywhere we go, we have the mantle on us and the banner before us that says, you are of God, of the Christ.
And so everything that we do represents him, and that should be a sobering thought indeed. Saul takes on the name of God because he is the king of God's people, and he increases the status of false gods because he dared to misrepresent Yahweh.
This is the heart of Saul's wickedness. The heart of Saul's wickedness is that he emboldens the pagan nations through his defiling of the name of God into just another God like Dagon or like any of the others.
Do you take the Lord's name in vain? It doesn't mean saying a cuss word every now and then. Taking the Lord's name in vain is about putting the mantle of God on and misrepresenting him as something that he's not.
You call yourself a Christian, you better be careful. Does your life match the calling that we're given in Christ? You know what we're supposed to do in Christ? We're supposed to keep pressing on like towards a prize.
We're supposed to run with all we've got like a sprinter who wants to win the crown. We're supposed to bury seed in the ground with hope that God is going to bring that seed to fruition. We're supposed to gird ourself up with armor to go into battle knowing that we could die in battle but knowing that to die in battle is to live because Christ is the Lord of the battle.
Do you actually work out your salvation with fear and trembling or you get up in the morning and swipe on social media first thing without getting on your knees and praying to the Lord of glory? These are things that I do and when I do it, make no mistake, it's taking the Lord's name in vain.
Man, man this is so much heavier than we think, is it not? We bebop around in this Christian life and we never think about who it is that we're serving. We never think about what it means to take on his name and we take out the sin of Saul over and over again and why do we wonder when the nation has no respect for God, they have no respect for Jesus Christ because they look at his people who are constantly all the day long taking his name in vain and blaspheming him.
This is where we live. We have had the mystery of Christ revealed to us and so we take on even more condemnation when we take his name in vain and if we continue to sin, if we continue to sin, at some point we are judged by the fruit that we bear.
We need a lot more examination of fruit in the church today. The fall of Christians, even real ones, but especially fake ones, increase the fealty to false gods because it makes people more and more comfortable in their sins.
When Stephen Lawson falls, it makes people think, hypocrite, I knew it. I knew it. I knew I didn't have to listen to that and when we fall, the lost dying world who loves their sins and hates our God says, see there's nothing special there.
When we fight with each other and when we hate our brothers and all we can think about is how to divide from each other, slander each other, backbite each other, and do nothing, what we tell to the world is, hey come join our club, we're just like yours.
And what's sad about that is that seems to be what we want, is to be just like them. Did you know that God called us to joy? Did you know that it can be fun to be a Christian? Did you know David living in a cave is giving glory to his God and I get from the text, it seems to me like David's having fun in 1st Samuel.
Look, there's hardship but there's also glory. There is no goodness, no relaxation, but there's also brotherhood and we have lost it. So let's end here with a glimmer of hope. I think there is a glimmer of hope.
It's all started well and we see kind of the goodness, the fruit of doing right in this chapter. He gives us just a little glimmer before 2nd Samuel, right? Just a little glimmer, here it is, verses 11 through 13.
Then the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead heard what the Philistines had done to Saul. So all the valiant men arose and walked all night and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the wall of Beth-shan, and they came to Jabesh and burned them there.
And they took their bones and buried them under the tamarisk tree at Jabesh and fasted seven days. Man, so this little village that had been hard put to it by Nahash back in chapter 11, Saul had come and he had rescued them.
He had used tactics like we see later on, right? I mean he had deceived them, okay, and come and taken them out. And this town of Jabesh-Gilead was loyal, right? They were loyal. And so they came and they spared him.
They took great risk on themselves to go take his body parts back. Did Saul know they did this? No, right? He's dead. He's not even mostly dead. He's all the way dead, okay? There's no bringing him back.
There's not going to be a Samuel kind of weird thing going on here. Saul's gone. And so they go back and they take him. And I think what we understand from this is that that good work, what we see over and over again, is that people who take on the name of God and they do some good works, they confuse us all the time, right?
And I think the people of Jabesh Gilead, they're kind of confused in their loyalty because even in their loyalty they've not really heard what's going to happen here, who they should be aligned with.
And they do a brave thing and it's a good thing that they do. It's a good thing. They make war on the enemies of God. But see, in many ways this is what fools us and we need discernment because Saul, from many outside appearances, looked better than David.
You know, a lot of the stuff that we marvel at that looked horrible was kind of going on inside the court. And the normal Israelite wasn't seeing this kind of thing. And what they saw was, look at our king, he's so handsome.
Look at our king. He ran off the Philistines when he was about to take David on that hill, remember? He ran them off. He won victories. He looked the part. He didn't get too religious. He wasn't taking on the the judgment of God by living in caves or finding refuge with God's archenemies.
In many ways, Saul looked like the power structure. It looked good. And isn't that at our heart what we really want in the church? We want leaders who are going to make us feel comfortable, give us more money, and not get too religious, right?
We want politicians. Many in the church claim, we want politicians that'll lower our taxes, get us out of wars, and not get too religious. And then we wonder, we wonder, why are we in the state we're in?
It's not that hard. Here's the however, right? Saul looked good in many quarters. One of the main themes of this book, though, is that God sees deeper. Here's the parallel passage, 1st Chronicles 10, 13, and 14.
It says, thus Saul died for his unfaithfulness, man, which he committed against Yahweh, because of the word of Yahweh which he did not keep, and also because he asked counsel of a medium, making inquiry of it, and did not inquire of Yahweh.
Therefore he put him to death and turned the kingdom to David, the son of Jesse. You notice how God, in his scripture, uses the son of Jesse in a way that kind of is opposite of how Saul kept using it, right?
Saul kept using it as an insult, but God uses it in Chronicles. He uses it as an endearing thing, right? I will raise up even this son of Jesse. And I struck down Saul. That's what God says. Look, it has to make his question right.
Did Saul not kill himself? He did, right? And yet in 1st Chronicles, it says, therefore he put him to death. That's God. Therefore God put him to death. There's a lesson that we need to remember, and it's the key to discernment, is that God does not judge his man.
He looks into the heart. Saul didn't follow the first commandment, and therefore he broke all of them with reckless abandon. Check yourself. Do you love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, with all of your strength, or are you playing a game here?
If you're playing a game here, you will break all the other commandments with reckless abandon, because what you're doing is you are playing a very dangerous game, a fake game. That's what Saul was doing.
Why is David a dangerous man? It's because he fears God. He waits on God. He knows God. Over and over again at the end of this book, we get David doing what? Asking the priest. Asking God, are you going to give them to me?
And God answers him. The most important thing that David does, though, is that he loves God. He loves him. The lessons from 1st Samuel are wide. They're plentiful, but I think they really boil down to this core thing that really is the Christian life in a nutshell, and that question is this, do you really love God?
Do you really? And do you define love the way the Bible does? Love is not a gooey feeling. It's not an ethereal thing. It's not a fairy tale with a bunch of twinkly dust falling down on you. Love is a sober analysis of our thoughts and actions and our words that our hearts desires build to.
If the words that come out of your mouth are curses and coarse jesting, it betrays a heart that desires those things. But if your words exhort, encourage, rebuke, build up, that reveals a heart that loves his brother, right?
Do we fear man? To fear man is to not trust God. It's to not love him. It's not understand. Are we envious of others? Are we afraid of death? Do we love our possessions and our comforts? How much do they get in our way?
Do you love your secret sins that you think are oh so secret? Men, do you love your pornography? I know you won't say it with your mouth, but your actions say it every single day. You love it, and you don't fear your God, and you tell yourself lies thinking that he doesn't see your hidden sins and your secret sins, but God sees them all.
And we know this. Integrity is what you do when no one's watching, right? So if you really love God, you're a man of integrity. You tell the truth when it's unpopular to do so. Do we depend on Christ?
Do we look at the lesson of David? Do we really depend on him? Would you die if God's spirit was taken away from you? Would you die? Would that be the end of it? I think for us, really, I just kind of, what are we really living for?
What are we living for? At the end of the day, Saul's tragedy, and it is a tragedy, it gives way to the greatest king that Israel would ever see until the coming of the greatest king who anyone would ever see.
This king would open the floodgates, this greatest king opens the floodgates to all people, establishing the new Israel whose boundaries are not Canaan but the whole world. And so now, marching orders, as we end this book, here's what I think we got to see.
Men and women, we have to have clean consciences. We have to. We have to make absolute holy war on those bastions of sin that we hide in our hearts and that we keep to ourselves. If you're doing that, you'll never be any good on the battlefield because the enemy knows, and more importantly, you know.
And if you're holding that, it's like worm tongue whispering in your ear, and it's making you a coward, and it's making your hair shrivel up, and it's making you weak and feeble. But men who have a clean conscience cannot be steered, and they're dangerous.
That's why the enemy attacks us at this front over and over and over again. The enemy wants you to do the pleasures, the fleeting pleasures of life that could be accomplished in a prison cell. He wants you to stream Netflix all day long.
He wants you to be lazy. He wants you to look at pornography. He wants you to smoke weed. He wants you to be intoxicated. He wants you to think nothing about your future generations, but instead amass nice cars and trucks for ourselves, nice toys, get a nicer house, fill it with nicer things, eat sweet meats and rich delicacies so that we can leave nothing to our children and say, hey, good luck, buddy.
Hope it's okay for you. Hope you enjoy your $300 ,000 starter home, right? Good luck on that down payment, chief. But look at this. I just got a new truck. Wee! This is what has made us crippled and impotent in the church, is that we are grabbed by the heart, by this wickedness.
And David, I don't think it's any surprise. It shouldn't make us wonder that David's power is established through living in caves. He was not tempted by the fleeting passions and pleasures of this world, but instead he had his eyes focused on the prize.
And so what is our prize? What is our prize? Men, if we are men of clean conscience, where we have our friends that know our feelings, that our friends don't sit around in a pity circle with us saying, oh, I understand, brother.
We all struggle the same way. No, what good friends say is, friend, you have to make mortal battle against that, and I'm gonna upbraid you severely if you come back here and bring that again. And you better bring it again because you're a liar if you don't and you don't have a friend anymore.
Men, we have to talk to each other like men again. We have to be honest, we have to be direct, we have to be blunt. I hopefully am trying to lead in this way. I feel the same clutches of fake diplomacy and fear of man to try to smooth it all over with a big old, you know, buttercream icing, thick layer of niceness.
But instead what we need to do is we need to have the voice that sounds more like the Prophet that's saying, you got to stop, man, you got to stop. And men, we have to be present with our children. We have to discipline them.
We have to define the boundaries for them. We have to lead our wives. We have to lead our wives. We have to lead our children. We have to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. That does not merely mean quiet time.
What that also means is that we gear all of our time and treasure to promote His kingdom. And that doesn't merely mean stuffing the offering box with tithes in this place. What it means is thinking about the future inheritance of your people and carrying them on.
Giving your money and your time not to increase your comfort, but to increase the legacy of Christ in your home. That's what it takes. And you'll never do it if you're crippled by sin that entangles us.
It's a weight that has to be thrown off. Women, you're not going to like what He's about to do. And so the call to women is this. You have to encourage your husband, and you have to have faith in God that he's going to have to be dangerous, and he's going to have to take risks, and it's going to make you uncomfortable.
But you are going to show your godliness by encouraging him, by telling him, yeah, you can't sit in here. You have to get dangerous. And men, this is not for all of you to be pastors and deacons. We need political leaders.
We need people who take over city council. We need people who sit in the institutions and the halls of power. We need good mechanics. We need good lawyers. We need good doctors. We need people everywhere who are pressing the crown rites of Christ into every place that we go.
And we have had no vision for that in the church whatsoever. For many of you who are sitting here, you've probably never heard anything like that before. And here's the thing. The task is great. And what gives me great hope is when I look at David, I see the youngest son of Jesse who was out doing the lowest thing societally that you could do, which was watching a bunch of sheep.
And I look at us, and I see a bunch of weak men out here, myself included. And I think, oh, yeah, God's got him right where he wants him right now. Because he does the greatest things through the weakest men.
Because we men do not get in the way of his glory when we're weak. Because we serve a glorious God who is jealous for his own glory, and he is the only being in the universe who's right and righteous to be jealous for his glory.
And so we go out, and we understand in humility that we're to love one another. We understand in humility that we are to deny ourselves, and there's going to be hard times. And we understand in humility that through our weakness, God will be glorified because that's the way he's always done it, over and over again.
And I hope that that's the lessons that we get from 1 Samuel. I hope that it's been an encouragement to you people. It certainly has been an encouragement to me. You know, I'm even going along here because I want to hold on to it.
And I know when I pray that we're done for a good time. You know, you're not David, but we really should have aspirations to act that way. We really should. Don't be like Saul. Don't think that you've got it covered, and don't reach for carnal weapons.