How to Ruin Your Family-A Cautionary Tale

Hannah’s Prayer, Samuel’s Birth, and the Faithfulness of God

All right.

Well, you may have a seat today. As Lanny said, Josh is preaching at Living Hope this morning. So I asked him what his passage is going to be, and he's teaching through something that we learned in Galatians.

So I'm sure that that's going to be a blessing for that congregation this morning. And it's just fun to see him have that opportunity to go to another church and bless them as he opens the word to them this morning.

Today, we are continuing our second week in the book of 1 Samuel. And again, as I opened this book two weeks ago, this is a different way of preaching. It is going into the Old Testament and teaching the Old Testament narratives.

So it's a little bit different because what I've done this week is I've gone into the text, and I've kind of formed the story using the text of the Scriptures. And I encourage you to have your Bible open to 1 Samuel 2.

We're going to start in verse 12, and we're going to go through verses 36, and that's a big section of Scripture. So what we want to do today is we want to be able to move through that Scripture and not be here till Thursday or Friday.

We want to be able to get out of here on time. But we also want to be able to glean from the text in kind of these big chunks. So as we will do is we will begin to tell the next part of the story today.

And for our kids, what we're doing is we created these coloring sheets. And so this was last week, so I don't know who did this, but they did a wonderful job of coloring Hannah here and the text of 1 Samuel.

We have more of those over here this morning. So if your kids want to get up and move over there, Ellie has hers right now, and she's working on it. The three people who are on the coloring sheet are Eli and his two sons, Hophni and Phineas, who we're going to talk about today.

So if you need to get up and move over there, you can. If you mess up your coloring sheet and want a new one, there's some over there. Adults, there's plenty of coloring sheets over there.

All right.

We will, as we begin a new portion of the story, we will go back, of course, and remind ourselves what we heard before. As we look into the book of 1 Samuel, we see that the land of Israel has no king.

In fact, we're soon going to hear that the Lord, that the voice of the Lord, the word of the Lord was rare in those days, and that word rare means that it was highly valued. It was sought after because it was not common.

And last week, we heard the story of Hannah and how her family would take a yearly trip to the tabernacle in Shiloh where they would worship the Lord. This was also a rare thing because as we exit the book of Judges and jump into 1 Samuel, we see that everyone is doing what is right in their own eyes.

And so to have a family who is dedicated to going back year after year to worship the Lord is a rare thing. We see that Hannah is sad because she has no children and her husband has married another.

Woman.

Perhaps she can give him children, and she does. This woman's name was Peninnah, and she was mean to Hannah. She reminded her often that she had no children. The Bible says that God was the one who had closed Hannah's womb so that she couldn't have children, which really seems unfair.

And in response, the Bible tells us that Hannah, instead of complaining, instead of lashing out against the insensitive words of all the men in her life, she instead goes into the temple to pray. She doesn't waste her emotions on people who can't help her.

She goes directly to the one who can. And she cries, and she cries, and cries out to the Lord. She makes promises to the Lord. And Eli the priest is there, and he thinks she's drunk, right? Hannah asks the Lord for two things.

One, remember me. Remember me. Which is so, so good. Because it demonstrates that what she really wants most in her life is God, not just the things that he can give her. And then she says, give me a son.

She makes that promise to God that if he does what she asks, she will give the boy back to the Lord, and he will serve the Lord all the days of his life. Eli gives a blessing to Hannah. He's confused by her, but he ends up doing his job, gives her a blessing.

And upon hearing that blessing, Hannah hears that as coming from the Lord, and she believes in the Lord, and she is not sad anymore. She puts her trust in the Lord. She goes home, and guess what? She gets pregnant.

She has a son. And true to her promise, she brings him back to the tabernacle in Shiloh, and Hannah sings a song telling us that we should always pray to God when we are sad, when we have concerns in our heart.

We go to him. Her song tells us that there is no rock like our God. There's nowhere we can stand but in him. He will not let us down. She tells us also and helps us to understand that we need to be humble before the God who brings us both blessing and distress.

God will help his people out of the mess that they are in, but he's going to do it his way, and he's going to use the people who are willing to do it his way. So for our story today, we have to remember the last line of her song.

He will guard the feet of his faithful ones, but the wicked he shall cut off in darkness, for not by might shall a man prevail. The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken into pieces. Against them he will thunder in the heavens.

And unfortunately, that's what we begin to see today. The last time we met together, the text ended with verse 11 that says, then Elkanah went home to Ramah and the boy was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli the priest.

Kids, I'm going to talk to you right now. Kids, did you just hear that? Hannah and Elkanah, Samuel's parents, left him at church. Left him there. It seems like it would be kind of scary, right, if mom and dad left you at church?

One time, Kristen and I left our son, Isaac, at church. We had driven two different cars, and Isaac decided to hide underneath the table. And so when it was time to go, we just assumed that the other one had Isaac.

And we didn't find out that we were wrong until we got to the restaurant where we were meeting friends, and we said, do you have Isaac? Because I don't have him. And we had to drive back to church to find Isaac.

Well, Samuel's parents didn't have an accident like we had an accident. They left him at church to serve the Lord. So the title of my sermon this morning is, How to Ruin Your Family, A Cautionary Tale.

And a cautionary tale is a tale or is a story that helps us by warning us, by telling us that there's danger. It's also a story that we're going to find is very sad, and it should grieve our hearts. And I believe it grieved the Lord's heart what was happening in this passage that we're about to look at.

Now, Hannah had a son, but also Eli had a couple of sons too. And their names were Hophni and Phinehas. And you're probably coloring their faces right now. We know that in the very beginning words of 1 Samuel, they are introduced.

And it says that the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests of the Lord. So at the very beginning of the book, we know this about them, that they are priests of the Lord. But this chapter, as we begin here with verse 12, it says, now the sons of Eli were worthless.

Men.

Hophni and Phinehas: Sons of Belial Who Despise the Lord’s Offerings

Some of you may have scoundrels in your Bible. Or if we break that down into the Hebrew, it is Ben Belial, which means sons of Belial, or sons of worthlessness. In the New Testament, that name Belial actually comes to represent a demon.

We see that in, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6, what accord or what harmony has Christ with Belial? What portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? So he's demonstrating that whatever Belial is, it is the exact opposite of what Christ.

Is.

And he says, can these two things have anything in common? And the answer is, absolutely not. And so we see that these priests of the Lord are sons of Belial. That's a crazy combination. And in a lot of ways, it doesn't work.

Doesn't work for them, definitely doesn't work for God. It also says then that they did not know the Lord. What's interesting is this echoes something that we see in Exodus chapter 5, as Moses goes before Pharaoh, and Pharaoh says this to Moses, Moses says, let God's people go, and Moses says, who is the Lord that I should obey his voice and let Israel go?

I do not know the Lord, and moreover, I will not let Israel go. I do not know the Lord. I'm not going to do anything he says. And we have this same thing here as it describes Eli, sons of Belial. They did not know the Lord.

In Hebrew, their names have meaning. Hophni means pugilist, which I had to look up because I don't know what a pugilist is. It's English, but I didn't know what it means. It means a fighter, a brawler, a violent person.

That's what his name means. And then his brother Phineas, his name means brazen face, arrogant, maybe even hothead. My question is, as I read that and I do the research, I go, why would anyone call their.

Kids that?

And yet that's what their names mean. It says in verse 17 that the sin of these young men was very great in the Lord's sight. The word great there in the Hebrew is gadol, and it says that their iniquity is what is great in God's sight.

God sees this huge amount of sin when he looks at them. The Bible tells us more about Hophni and Phineas. It says they were treating the Lord's offering with contempt. The word contempt for all the young years here means that they hated God's offering.

They blasphemed it, they desecrated it. Maybe they thought, why are we wasting all of this food? Maybe I should take some of it. And that's exactly what they were doing. In fact, it says in the Bible that whenever someone came to make a sacrifice to be made clean before the Lord, to have communion with the Lord, the priest would come and take a three-pronged fork, and they would try and fish out the biggest piece of meat that they could get out of the boiling pot, and they would keep that meat for themselves.

It says in the Bible, it says this was the custom of the priest. And I go, what's wrong with this picture? What's wrong with this picture? And this is why I encourage all of us to read your Bible daily, even those hard sections like the book of Leviticus, right?

Because if you read the book of Leviticus, and you make it a common practice in your life year after year, you would read this and you would go, that just seems really odd and weird, okay? First let's talk about the three-pronged fork.

Where did that come from, okay? Now I remember from my studies from reading through Exodus that the children of Israel were given instructions to build a tabernacle, and the altar, and all these things, and along with that, there were some utensils that were supposed to go with the altar.

Exodus 27 .3, you shall make pots for it to receive the ashes from the altar, and shovels, and a basin, and forks, and firepans. You shall make all its utensils of bronze. So they were commanded to make forks, right?

So I go, how do you get from this to a three-pronged fork? Well, you do this right here. I was going to bring a pair of pliers. You just bend these prongs, right? You bend them, and you kind of make something that looks like this, right?

So they get that out of it. What have they done? They took the fork utensil from the altar, and they distorted it, made it useful for their own ends, okay? I look at that, and I go, huh, that's weird.

And then I think about the sacrifice, and I go, something is also wrong with the way that they're officiating the sacrifice. So it led me back to read the first part of Leviticus, chapters one through seven, and the different sacrifices that are lined out there.

And this sacrifice that they're talking about seems like it fits best with the peace offering, okay? And we find this in Leviticus three, and we find it in Leviticus chapter seven. So the peace offering was this communal meal between God and His people.

It was a celebration of the fellowship between God, the priest, and the people coming to offer the sacrifice. So the people would bring a live animal to the altar at the entrance of the tabernacle. They could bring a cow, they could bring sheep, they could bring a goat.

And it could be male or female, but it had to be without defect. And then they would lay their hands on the animal's head, and then they would kill the animal, okay? This is what the people would do. So if you were gonna bring your peace offering, you would bring that animal to the front of the tabernacle, right there where the altar was.

That's as far as you could go. And then you'd put your hands on the animal's head, and you would slay that animal, okay? Now then, the priest would take the blood of the animal, he would sprinkle it on the sides of the altar in a way of sanctifying even the altar to make it holy for this sacrifice.

The Lord's portion was taken from the animal, that was the kidneys, the lobe of the liver, and the fat that covered the organs. And this portion was put on top of the altar, onto the coals, and it was burned completely.

Then the priest was to take, the priest portion was the breast, and that may have been given to the high priest, okay? So they would cut that part off. Then the right thigh could be cut off and given to the priest who was officiating the.

Meal.

And then whatever was left over was for the people to take and eat as a communion meal. So they would eat that, they had two days to eat it, and any of the leftovers, after two days they were to destroy them, they were to burn them.

This is probably what we read about in 1 Samuel 1, when Elkanah comes and he gives portions.

To his wives.

Portions out of that communal meal there, what was left over, the sacrifice. So what the priests are doing, what we read in 1 Samuel 2, is that they are stealing from the peace offering that the people were supposed to eat, from the sacrifice that they offered.

They would come and they would use their newly made instrument, and they would dig down in there and they'd pull out something for themselves. Now God had already given them something from this sacrifice, and yet they want more, right?

So they're going in for more. The Bible says that they also tried to catch people before they brought the sacrifice,.

Okay?

So it gets even worse. So it says, as they were on their way, the priest's servants would demand the best parts of the meat along with the fat. They would say this, give the priest some meat to roast.

He's not going to accept your boiled meat. He only wants the raw meat. Now they didn't know the Lord, but they should have known this, because even the people know.

This.

And the people respond and they say, well, wait a second. Let the fat be burned first, right? Then take whatever you want. And the priest's servants would say, no, hand it over now. And if you don't, I'm going to take it.

Give it to us or we're going to beat you up. These guys were bullies. Remember, hofni means brawler, fighter. So what's wrong with this picture? Why are the people responding this way? Well, in Leviticus 7, again, it says, for every person who eats of the fat of the animal of which a food offering may be made to the Lord shall be cut off from his people.

Why are they to be cut off? Leviticus 3 .16, and the priest shall burn them on the altars as a food offering with a pleasing aroma. And then it says, all the fat belongs to the Lord. All the fat belongs to the Lord.

It's not yours. You eat it, you get cut off. What's it for? It's to make a pleasing aroma. I made bacon this morning. I can almost still smell it on my collar, right? The burning of that fat was pleasing to the Lord.

It belonged to Him. Not only were Eli's sons stealing from the people, but they were stealing from God. And just like in the Garden of Eden, which is a type of temple, you know, it was on a high place.

It was holy to the Lord. That's where God dwelled there in the Garden of Eden. When sin enters into that holy place, God expels it. He kicks it out. We also learned that they are acting very inappropriately with women to whom they are not married.

Okay?

I put that in a very PG way. You can read the text actually there. It's a little bit more explicit, just for our kids who are in the room. Don't want you to have to have that conversation today if you're not ready for it.

They were copying the temple practices of pagan nations around them who had cult prostitutes. So under the leadership of Hophni and Phinehas, the worship of God was being done their way, not God's way.

They were transforming the worship of God to something that they preferred, something that benefited them. It reminds me of recent news. Maybe you've heard this week about Mark Driscoll calling out a men's conference in Springfield, Missouri at James River Assembly because they thought it was a good idea to have a half-naked man provocatively doing a sword dance on a pole in their church.

And I go, I'm just confused by this whole thing, right? It's like when God begins to use someone like Mark Driscoll to call out the church, I'm like, are we... Well, this isn't a new thing. People always do what is right in their own eyes.

And it happens within the church. People like Hophni and Phinehas, this is not just a rare occurrence. This can happen in any church. You have people, they must be just pretending, pretending to serve the living God, but benefiting, but stealing, but perverting His worship.

Samuel Grows in the Presence of the Lord

The story changes during the telling of all these awful things that Eli's sons are doing, and it gives us a brief glimpse of Samuel, right? And it's kind of like this, oh, that is just what's happening there.

And here's what it tells us about Samuel. It says that Samuel grew up in the tabernacle working and ministering before the Lord. He was just a boy, but he's wearing the outfit of a priest, okay? And each year his mom and dad are coming back to visit him and they're bringing him a new jacket, a new robe to go over his uniform.

And Eli continues to offer them a blessing, or to Elkanah and Hannah. He says this, he says, may the Lord give you children by this woman to take the place of the one she prayed for and gave to the Lord.

And the Bible says that God was gracious to Hannah and gave her three more sons and two.

Daughters.

We look at verse 21, it says, meanwhile, the boy Samuel grew in the presence of the Lord. There's something interesting in the Hebrew language here. The word grew there is not the typical word for growing.

It is that same word that we heard applied to Hophni and Phinehas, gadol. Not only did he grow, meaning not only did he grow taller, but he was becoming greater. He grew great in the presence of the Lord.

He grew great in the presence of the Lord. Verse 26 says, and the boy Samuel continued to grow in stature and in favor with the Lord and with the people. Does that remind you of something that maybe you've heard somewhere else in the Scriptures?

Maybe yeah, Luke applied to Jesus, right? That Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and men. In the same way, it's kind of giving us a little foreshadowing of how Jesus is going to grow.

Samuel, we find is in a place where he's exposed to the wickedness of Eli's two wicked sons, but he's growing in the Lord. He's growing in the Lord. He's growing close to the Lord. He's seeing terrible things.

In fact, Samuel's written this book. Think about that. So all of the things that we just talked about Eli's sons were doing, he was seeing. That must have been really hard for Hannah to continue to trust the Lord and leave her son in that environment, knowing that that's what he was growing up with.

And it gives me hope, right? As our children grow up in a wicked and perverse generation, that they can continue to grow close to the Lord. They can continue to grow close to the Lord. They can grow great in the presence of the Lord.

Eli’s Failure to Restrain His Sons and the Word of Judgment

The story changes back to Eli, and the Bible tells us that Eli heard everything that his sons were doing. So he calls them in and he says, what are you doing? Why are you doing these things? I've heard from all the people about your wicked deeds.

He says, no, my sons, the report I hear is spreading among the Lord's people and it's not good. And Eli asked them, if a person sins against another person, God can mediate. He can help them to solve this problem.

But if anyone sins against the Lord, who's gonna step in and help them solve that problem? He's saying, you are sinning against God, and this is very bad. You're putting yourself in a place where no one can help you.

No one can intercede. The Bible says that Eli's sons did not listen to their father's warning though. And then it says this, which is very difficult, because it was the Lord's will to put them to death.

That's hard.

You go, wow, what's going on there? Their listening or their stubborn refusal not to listen to their father's warning is not why they are being judged. They were wicked, and this is a demonstration of God's passive judgment, allowing their hearts to grow harder and harder, more wicked and more wicked.

That's God saying, hey, I'm just gonna step back a little bit and let you have what you want. And that wickedness is gonna keep working in your life. It's gonna keep working into your life. Your hearts are gonna grow harder and harder and harder, and when someone comes to rebuke you, you won't even listen.

That's God's passive judgment. His active judgment would be to cut them off from the land of the living. They were going to be put to death and removed for disrespecting God's house. Sometime later, a man of God comes to Eli.

We don't know his name. Perhaps it's just unknown to Samuel. Maybe Eli knows his name. We don't know. This man comes to Eli, and he tells him, he says, this is what the Lord says to you. This is not a message that comes from me.

This is from the Lord. And he begins to ask Eli a set of questions. He said, did I not clearly reveal myself to your ancestors' family when they were in Egypt under Pharaoh? And the answer is yes, okay?

Who was that ancestor? It was Aaron, the priest with Moses' brother. Eli, he chose, he says, I chose your ancestor out of all the tribes of Israel to be my priest, to go up to my altar, to burn incense, to wear the ephod in my presence.

I also gave your ancestors' family all the food offerings presented by the Israelites. He's telling Eli that God gave you food. He's supplied your need. There's no reason to be greedy. Then he asked Eli another question.

This one's a hard one. Why do you, and that is plural, why do you all, or as we say, y 'all, why do y 'all scorn my sacrifice and offering that I prescribed for my dwelling? Why do you honor your sons more than me by fattening yourselves on the choice parts made by my people Israel?

Why?

Well, wait a second, didn't Eli go to his sons? Didn't Eli confront them? He did, but we learned something here from this. He didn't do anything about it. In fact, he kept eating the fat, making himself fat.

Now he is fat. And that's all the response that is needed. Eli's guilty. He can't deny it. And we're gonna see later that that fat results in his death. So the man of God doesn't wait for Eli to respond.

He just pronounces judgment, God's judgment. God says, I promised that the members of your family would minister before me forever, but now far be it from me. Those who honor me, I will honor, but those who despise me will be disdained.

Whoa, that's a powerful verse right here in the middle of this story. So here's what's gonna happen, Eli. God says he's gonna cut short your strength and the strength of your priestly house so that now no one in your family will ever get old.

Your descendants will die in their youth. He says, I'm gonna cut off some of your family from the line of serving me as priest, and the ones that I spare are gonna grieve your heart. Eli, it's gonna be like a car accident.

You don't even know what that is, but you won't be able to look away. It's gonna be so tragic. It will consume your eyes. And then he says, here's the sign that you will know that this is gonna happen.

Your two sons, Hophni and Phineas, they will both die on the same day. And then a little glimmer, a shining light, as God proclaims, I will raise up for myself a faithful priest who will do according to what is in my heart and mind, and I will firmly establish his priestly house, and they will minister before my anointed one always.

Then everyone left in your family line will come and bow down before him for a piece of silver or a loaf of bread and plead, appoint me to some priestly duty so that I can have food to eat. He says, the faithful one will have a house firmly established, but your house, Eli, will beg in poverty.

This prophecy for Eli's family will unfold in two weeks in 1 Samuel 4, and Eli will see the sign that he was given actually happen. Both of his sons will die before his own death. The prophecy actually is fully accomplished, and this is crazy, right, after David is king.

And David dies, and he passes the throne on to his son Solomon. Of course, that was kind of a weird transition of power because Abiathar, the priest, one of Eli's descendants from the race of Ithamar, who was a son of Aaron, gets removed from the priesthood by Solomon because he commits treason.

He and Joab work with Adonijah to take the throne away from Solomon, but Aaron had two.

Sons.

He had Ithamar and Eleazar, and so Solomon appoints Zadok, who's a descendant from Eleazar, the son of Aaron, to be high priest over Israel. And that is God fulfilling the promise that he made to Eli.

Your descendants are going to be taken out of this job, out of this role. So for a sermon called How to Ruin Your Family, a cautionary tale, what we can learn from this story, one of the ways that we ruin our families, or we can ruin our families, is to believe the lie that our sin doesn't affect anyone but ourselves.

The reality is, is that our sin affects our fathers and our mothers, our siblings, and our children for generations. Listen to what God says in Exodus 34, 6 through 7, the Lord, the Lord God, he is compassionate and gracious.

He's slow to anger. He's abounding in love, loving devotion, and faithfulness, maintaining loving devotion to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, transgressions, and sin.

That is so good.

That is so amazing. What a promise. But he continues, he says, yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. He will visit the iniquities of the fathers on their children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.

Sins like a bomb that goes off. And there's a lot of collateral damage. It gets everywhere. He says so much in our passage today. He says, those who honor me, I will honor, but those who despise me will be disdained.

We honor God when we obey him. We honor God when we do things the way that he has instructed us. That's how we honor God. Our story shows us two examples, Samuel and Eli's sons. It says to about one, their sin grew great in the eyes of the Lord.

And to the other, they grew great in the presence of the Lord. It matters. It matters how we live and how we live affects our families for generations. Another way that we can ruin our family is to honor our sons and daughters before God.

Now, this is just plain and simple idolatry, right? You can do this with anything. You can honor your career more than God. You can honor money or your fancy car more than God. You can honor your wife more than God or your husband more than God.

We create idols so quickly and so easily. So if you're not a parent in here today, apply it that way. But if you are a parent in here today, how easy is it for us to honor our children above.

The Lord?

We love them, we invest in them, and we cherish that relationship and we don't want anything to harm it. And yet, Eli couldn't do it. The antithesis or the opposite of this story is the story of Abraham and Isaac, right, in the Bible.

You guys remember that story. God commands, Abraham, take your son, your only son Isaac, and offer him to me. And we read of the long story of them getting there and Isaac asking his father, where's.

The sacrifice?

And Abraham's saying, God will provide the sacrifice. His son has to carry the wood upon his shoulders up that hill to the place of the sacrifice. And as Abraham, obedient to the Lord, raises the knife, God spares his son.

He says, nope, you know what, Abraham, that's good, good enough. I know that you honor me over your son. And as we look at this story, we see at the very least, Eli should have removed his two sons from their job.

He was their boss, right? He could have said, y 'all are fired. You're not doing this right. You're failing at your job, right? You're becoming a disgrace in the eyes of all the people, right? Go tend some sheep or something, do something else.

He should have done that, at the very least. At the most, there was a law in the land that if you had a stubborn and rebellious son, you were to take them to the elders of the community. And they would pass judgment on these sons, and the greatest penalty would be their lives.

They would take them out and stone them, okay? Now, I'm not saying this morning that you should take your kids out and stone them. That was the law in the land then, but we should look at that law and we should ask the question, well, what principle do we bring forward into our time now?

How do we find a general equity to this law that we should apply that shows us this is what God expects of His people, right? How do we live in that? And I think at the very least, we could say, I think that sometimes we need help as parents.

I think sometimes we need to look to the elders of our community, the elders of our church,.