Samuel's Farewell Message a Tour of Israel's Geography

Creation Fellowship Introduction and Barry Brittenell’s Background

Nice. Hello, I am Robin, and this is Creation Fellowship Santee, which began at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California, more than a decade ago. Due to the 2020 circumstances, we needed to bring this ministry to Zoom, where we've been meeting online most Thursdays since May 2020.

Our focus is the six-day creation account laid out in the Book of Genesis, but often we stray to other Bible topics. Tonight is another other topic night. Barry Brittenell of Exploring Bible Lands joins us to go over Samuel's farewell message.

Barry's been a student of God's Word his entire life, and was impressed with the Bible's authenticity in regard to geography. Barry now conducts tours of Israel, and that's how I found him on YouTube.

Thank you for joining us tonight, Barry, and let me stop my screen share, and.

Then you are on. All right, let me, I'll start my screen share here, and hit play, and you should be seeing my title slide now for my, I do, my presentation. Well, thank you so much for inviting me to come here tonight.

I'm honored and privileged, feel privileged to be here, and hopefully we can, I can tell you a little bit about the land of Israel, and hopefully you can learn something along the way. As Robin mentioned, my name is Barry Brittenell.

I live in North Alabama. I made my first trip to Israel back in 2010, and since then, I've probably been 13 or 14 times. I have been there on my own, but also in 2014, I started leading tours over there, and I lead about one or two tours a year to Israel.

I've also led tours to Greece and Turkey, and actually this fall, I actually have my very first tour to Egypt, but Israel is actually where my real passion is, especially with touring. I love taking groups over to Israel for a variety of reasons.

Along the way, I was approached by some gentlemen, some Christians, who wanted my assistance in building biblically accurate videos about the stories that we read about in the Bible, and so that company is called Appian Media, and we have released a number of different video series.

We have a 10-episode video series called Following the Messiah, in which we filmed in Israel as we ran around and talked about the life of Jesus. Our second video series was one called Searching for a King, in which we filmed this one also in Israel, and this is about the period of the United Kingdom, so Saul and David and Solomon, that period.

We have another documentary called Trial and Triumph, and this talks about the churches of the Revelation in the first few chapters of the book of Revelation and how the churches, the congregations that we worship in today are very similar to those as well.

We have some of the same problems, and then our fourth major release, we just released actually last Saturday night, so it's only five days ago. It's a documentary called Out of Egypt, and it's about the Exodus.

All of those, with the exception of Out of Egypt, I'll tell you about that in a minute, all of those are available on our YouTube page. You can just look for Appian Media and you can find those. Out of Egypt is currently viewable on our website, so if you go appianmedia .org, you can watch that entire documentary free of charge on our website.

We also have two children's series that I helped with called Lessons from the Land. The first one is Lessons from the Land, the Gospels. Another one is Lessons from the Land, the Kings, and so all those are on our YouTube page.

I would encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube page, just search for Appian Media, and then there are just dozens and dozens of videos that are there for you to watch. Our goal with Appian Media was to create biblically accurate videos and then give them away for free.

We raise most of our money through donations and things like that, and so if you have any questions about that later on, I'll be more than happy to answer them for you. But I also lead tours, as she said, and I have two tours this year.

I have one in July. That one's completely sold out. I actually have another one in August, and we've got a few spots still open for that. If you have any interest, you can contact me as well, and I can give you all the information on that.

I love traveling over to Israel and look forward to getting back there very soon. But tonight's topic is one called Samuel's Farewell Address, and I use this lesson to help introduce people to the land of Israel and the geography, because I truly do believe that if you understand the geography and the climate and a lot of things about the land of Israel, you can understand stories in the Bible even more.

And so that's what we want to do tonight. I want to talk to you about the land, and then I want us to open up our Bibles and reread a passage that I know we've read dozens of times, but I want you to do it this time with fresh eyes, and hopefully it'll mean a lot more to you.

Just before I hit the next button, I'll tell you this picture right here is of the northern half of the Sea of Galilee. So what you see is the plain of Gennesaret there, the bottom left, and the hills of the Golan in the distance, and that is the Sea of Galilee.

I would say 80 percent of the Galilean ministry of Jesus took place within the frame of this picture, and so he spent most of his time in and around the northern part of the lake. Let me begin by asking three questions and answering three questions.

Languages, Food, and Safety in Israel

Anytime I give a series of presentations about biblical geography, I notice that people have questions, and they're dying to ask these questions, but they just don't know how to, and so I usually just start off by answering these three questions, because if we answer these three questions, then they're answered, and we're not thinking about them as we're talking about something else.

These questions are not even biblically related, but they're just questions that people have in their minds bouncing around, and the first question is this. What languages are currently spoken in Israel?

Well, for the most part, there are three languages that are spoken, Hebrew, Arabic, and English. If you travel internationally before, I'm sure you've heard this. There's an old joke that says, do you know what you call someone who speaks three languages?

Well, that's trilingual, and do you know what they call someone who speaks two languages? Well, that's bilingual. Do you know what you call someone who speaks one language, and that's an American, and that's truly the way it is.

If you travel internationally before, you know this. Most people across the globe can speak multiple languages and do so with ease. However, I'm American, and so the only thing I speak is English, and I'm from Alabama, so I don't speak English very well at all, but I've never really had a problem when I've traveled in Israel.

Most of the Jewish people, of course, speak Hebrew. Most of the Arabic people speak Arabic, but nearly everybody over there also speaks English, and so I've really never had a problem with it, but when you travel over there, you see things like this.

This is a picture of a gas station near the city of Beersheba. Beersheba is a Jewish town, and so what you have on there is Hebrew writing on the sign. For those of you who are on a math quiz tonight, a math challenge, those prices that you see there are in shekels per liter, so we price our gasoline here in the United States with dollars per gallon, but that is in shekels per liter, so I'll let you go figure out exactly what that is.

I will tell you it's probably not what you expect. Israel is a very expensive country to live in, and this is one of the examples of that. Here's another sign. This is going into the theater at Caesarea Maritima, Caesarea along the sea.

This is the Caesarea that we read about in Paul's Travels and Acts, but you'll see here there's three languages. There's Hebrew on the top, Arabic in the middle, and then English on the bottom there. This is very typical of a street sign that you'll see over there.

Again, Hebrew on top, Arabic in the middle, and English on the bottom, so that kind of answers that question, what people speak. Another question people have is what kind of food do they have in Israel?

Well, I will tell you they have very good food in Israel. One of the things that my travelers tell me all the time is, boy, I thought we were going to lose weight while we were over here with all this walking, and the answer is no.

The food is too good and it's too plentiful for that. They have a number of things over there. They're just delicious. Here's kind of a salad set up. If you've ever traveled to the Middle East before, you know that salads are very popular actually for breakfast.

We use salads mostly for our noon and evening meals, but salads are very popular at all three meals in the Middle East, and so it's not uncommon to walk into a breakfast and they have a huge salad set up.

Some of the best fruit I have ever eaten in my entire life has been while I'm in Israel. You can see here in this, there's apples, there's plums, there's oranges, there's watermelon, there's grapefruit, there's cherries, there's dates, and they are all delicious.

Agriculture is huge in Israel, and these fruits are just fantastic. Along with that, they have a lot of things that are similar to us, although maybe a little change. Here's a Coke can. Yeah, they have Coke over there, and it's written in Arabic there on the side of the can, and then they have some things that are very familiar to us, and yes, McDonald's are over there in Israel as well.

You can't get away from McDonald's. In fact, here is a sign of their menu. There's a couple things I want to point out about this. First of all, Hebrew as well as Arabic are languages that are read right to left.

English is read left to right, but Hebrew and Arabic you read right to left, so if you look very closely at this, you'll see the numbers one and two on the right-hand side, and you kind of read it from right to left.

The other thing that I'll point out here is that when you go to a McDonald's or really any restaurant, especially in Jewish towns, here at this McDonald's, you can get a hamburger, but you cannot get a cheeseburger, and the reason is because it's against kosher law to mix dairy and meats in the same dish, and so as I said, you can go into this McDonald's and get a hamburger, but you cannot get a cheeseburger.

I've eaten at a couple pizza places over there as well, and over here in the United States, my favorite pizza is meat pizza. I love meat lovers pizza and things like that. Well, that's impossible to get over there because you cannot mix meat and cheese.

However, I will tell you that some of the best cheese pizza I've ever eaten in my life has been in Israel. As it turns out, if you make your own dough and you make your own tomato sauce and you make your own cheese, you can make a very good cheese pizza, and so it's just one of those things.

Okay, the third question I'm asked all the time about Israel is this, is it safe to travel in Israel, and I have to tell you that I have to be a little careful when people ask me this question because I tend to be fairly sarcastic whenever I'm talking with people, and there's almost an implication in this question that I would want to take people on tours to a place that's not safe, and so I have to kind of bite my tongue about that.

The truth of the matter is that it's very safe to travel in Israel, even with the ongoing situation. Even since the terrible events of October 7th, it has been very safe to travel in Israel even since October, and tourism right now is booming in Israel.

The thing that slowed it down over the last three or four or five months has been the air travel was restricted, but now that airlines are flying back to Israel, those airlines and hotels are getting packed very quickly because people are traveling back to Israel, but I do understand why people ask those type of questions, and the reason is because they watch the news and they see pictures like this where people are upset or people are clashing about something.

The truth of the matter is that the news doesn't always tell you all of the story. If I were to watch the local news from each of the hometowns where each of you live, I could probably very easily come to the conclusion that you live in a very dangerous town because if you watch the local news tonight, the first eight or ten stories they're going to have are about things that, let's just say, are not positive, whether they're assaults or convenience store robberies or whatever, but the truth of the matter is that the town where you live in is very safe, and you wouldn't live there if there wasn't, and that's the way it is in Israel.

Israel is extremely safe. In fact, one of the things that people tell me whenever they travel with me is, wow, this isn't anything like what is portrayed on the news, and I say, yeah, I know, but the news is there to tell you what the news is, and unfortunately, this even goes for your local news as well.

The news people are there to make money, and they don't make money off of good news. People tune in, sadly enough, just to see the negative news, and that's the same true in Israel. Let me show you a few things that the news doesn't tell you about Israel.

The news doesn't tell you about this. I took this picture one morning, about 7 .15 in the morning as I was near the Western Wall, and what you see here are young Jewish boys praying at the Western Wall.

Now, they're doing this because learning to pray is part of their secular education. Now, I personally do not believe all the things that the Jewish people believe. However, as a parent who has raised kids, there's a valuable lesson here for me to learn, and the lesson is this.

Before you teach your child reading and writing and arithmetic, you teach your children how to pray, and that's the lesson that you can learn here, but this is not something that's talked about on the news.

The news doesn't talk about the sun rises over the Sea of Galilee. You know, sunrises are beautiful everywhere. They are. I live here in North Alabama. My house faces east. We live out in the country, and across the road, there is a cotton field, and in October, when the cotton field is white and that sun comes up, it is one of the most beautiful scenes in the world, and it's the same here at the Sea of Galilee.

I have seen the sun rise over the Sea of Galilee dozens of times, and every time I think about the disciples of the first century who fished these waters and saw this same sunrise, but this is not something that's talked about on the news.

On the news, they don't talk about the agriculture in Israel. I took this picture of a wheat field on the eastern end of the Jezreel Valley. Agriculture is huge in Israel, especially up in the Galilee, and they can grow just about anything there.

It truly is a land of milk and honey, but the news doesn't talk about that. The news doesn't talk about the opening of ski season in Israel. I don't know if any of you even knew that there was a ski season in Israel, but there is.

This is a picture of Mount Hermon. Mount Hermon sits on the border between Israel and Lebanon and Syria, and it's over nearly 10 ,000 feet in elevation, but there's a huge ski resort up there, and when it snows up there, the Israeli people go to Mount Hermon to ski down those slopes, but again, that's not something that's talked about on the news, so the answer is yes.

Traveling to Israel is extremely safe, and I love going over there, and I love taking people over there, and as I said earlier, if any of you are interested in going, you're welcome to contact me, but enough about that.

Geography, Geography, and God’s Purpose for Israel

Enough about the three questions. Let's get to our topic, and as I said earlier, this is a very important topic to me because I believe that if you understand a little bit about the geography and the climate and the land of Israel, you can understand Bible stories more, and that's what we should all be striving to do is to learn more about God's Word, and that includes the geography, so if we go back to biblical times, most of the people who lived on the earth at that time, not all, but most, lived within the frame of this picture, of this map, and of course, up here to the top left, you have the continent of Europe.

To the upper right, you have the continent of Asia, and of course, down here to the south, you have Africa. Now, think about those promises that God gave to Abraham. He made, God made Abraham several promises, and one of those promises was to give his people, give his family a land.

Now, God ended up giving Abraham's family that piece of land right there, and I'm forced to kind of ask the question, why did he give them that piece of land, and my answer to that question is this. I don't know.

I'm not God. I don't know why he decided them, decided to give them that piece of land. God is God. He could have given them any piece of land on the face of the earth, but he gave them this piece of land, and it makes me wonder about that.

You know, during biblical times, to the west of this land, what you have is the Mediterranean Sea. Now, we do know there was naval activity on the sea during biblical times. We can read about it in the Bible, but this would not have been a way that families or large groups of people would have migrated from one place to another, and to the east of that circle, what you have is desert, and again, you could have gone across there, but that's not the way people would have traveled during that time, so what you have here is a 50-mile-wide land bridge between three continents, between Europe and Asia and Africa, and if you wanted to go from one to the other, you were forced to walk through this tiny little area of land, and that's interesting to me that God decided to place his people right here, and this is kind of a side point, but I kind of wonder what opportunities that would give the people.

Well, as people wandered through there, they would see their houses and their livestock and their crops, and one of the questions I'm sure they would ask is, who is your God that provides all this for you, and that would provide them with opportunities to talk to them about Jehovah, and in doing so, news and word of Jehovah could be spread throughout the entire world, and so maybe that's why God put his people there, so that would give them opportunities to tell others about him, which this is kind of on a side, but that causes me to ask the question, where has God placed you?

Maybe you're in a city or a neighborhood or a state or a job that God expects you to take to have the opportunity to tell others about him, just like he did the Israelites, but let's take a closer look at this piece of land.

We're all familiar with it. You've probably looked at maps for a long time about this, but the land is very, very small. As I said, at its widest point, it's only 50 or 60 miles wide, and it's only 150 miles from Dan to Beersheba, yet within that small area of land, it is incredibly geographically diverse.

Let me kind of explain this to you. If we start on the west side of the land, what you have is the coastal plain, and the coastal plain is exactly what you would think it is. It's fairly flat. It's right along the coast.

It's about 10 miles wide, only 10 miles wide, and it rises from sea level against the Mediterranean Sea up into a couple hundred feet in elevation on the eastern side. Cities like Gaza, Gath, Ekron, Ashkelon, Joppa, Caesarea, all of those cities are in the coastal plain area.

If you come on over to the east a little bit more, what you have is the hill country. Now, whereas the coastal plain was nice and flat, the hill country is basically that high hills and mountains and deep valleys.

Many of the hills in the hill country are over 3 ,000 feet in elevation. The hill country is maybe 20 to 30 miles wide at its widest, but cities like Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, I mean Jerusalem, Shiloh, and then Nazareth on up to the north, all those cities are in the hill country.

Coming on to the east a little bit more, what you have is the Jordan Rift Valley. Now, this valley is colored in red here, and this valley is completely under sea level. It is below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea.

Up there, you have the Sea of Galilee. The Sea of Galilee sits 700 feet below sea level, and of course, it's connected via the Jordan River, which flows all the way to the south to the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is nearly 1 ,350 feet below sea level.

It's the lowest place on earth, and so cities like Jericho are in the Jordan Rift Valley, and we'll talk about Jericho in just a second, and then finally to the east of there, what you have is the Transjordan Plateau, basically a large flat area going way on out to the east.

This is the modern country of Jordan. This is where the Transjordan Plateau is located today. For those of you who are watching carefully, you may have noticed that I skipped a couple of areas on there.

One of those is the Jezreel Valley that runs from east to west. Now that you know about the hill country that runs north and south of the land, I will tell you that east to west traffic, if you wanted to go east to west across the country, it's very difficult to do, given the deep valleys and the high hills.

However, the Jezreel Valley provides easy east-west passage through the land, and so that's why there's a lot of things that happen in biblical times in the Jezreel Valley. The other place that's on here is an area called the Shephelah.

Now the Shephelah is a Hebrew word. In our English Bibles, most of the time that word is translated as lowlands. It's a small area, maybe 10 miles wide by 30 miles north to south, and it's traversed by five valleys.

We read about that area a number of times, especially in the Old Testament. For instance, during the time of the United Kingdom, the Philistines lived out in the coastal plain in their five cities out there, and the Israelites, for the most part, lived in the hill country.

Well, any time or most times they had a battle, that battle took place in the Shephelah. It was the buffer zone between where they lived. In fact, in 1 Samuel 17, the famous story of David and Goliath took place in the Elah Valley, which is one of the valleys that runs through the Shephelah, and so that gives you a little bit of information about the land.

As I said, it's an extremely small piece of land. I encourage you to pull out a map of your local area and look at an area that's 50 miles wide by 150 miles north to south, and you'll see just really truly in how small this is, but especially given the geographical differences that are there.

Now, I want you to do a mental exercise with me. I want us to draw a line kind of through the land, and then what I want us to do is kind of cut the land in half and lay it back on its side, and let's think about an elevation profile of what I just described to you.

So, if you did that, it would look something like this. You'd have the Mediterranean Sea over to the left with the coastal plain rising up into the hill country before going down into the Jordan Rift Valley or rising back up again into the Transjordan Plateau, and these geographical differences create some incredibly interesting weather phenomena.

Now, let me tell you a little bit of a secret about me. I ended up going to Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, and while I was there, I got my degree in meteorology, but even more than that, while I was at Florida State, I met my wife there who was also getting her degree in meteorology, and so, yes, we have a household here with two meteorologists in the household, and so, yeah, we are that boring of people, but because of that, we love talking about weather, and so, let's talk about weather a little bit.

Most of the year, what happens is warm, moist air flows in off of the Mediterranean Sea, and when that warm, moist air reaches the mountains, it rises, and of course, when it does, that moist air cools, and when it does, those water droplets condense and, of course, form clouds.

We see that all the time here in the United States happen nearly every day in the summertime, and of course, when those rain droplets and the clouds get big enough, they will fall as rain, and so, the areas of the hill country get a lot of rain, and then, as the winds continue to blow off the Mediterranean Sea, those clouds will go sink down into the Jordan Rift Valley, and when they do, they warm and they dry up, and so, because you have those differences in the land and the differences of how weather affects it, you have some very interesting weather statistics and weather things going on.

For instance, I mentioned that Jerusalem is in the very top of the hill country. It's at an elevation of nearly 2 ,700 feet in elevation, and it gets an annual rainfall of 26 inches. Now, I live in North Alabama, and we have about 55 inches of rain per year, and so, at some level, that doesn't seem like a lot of rain.

However, it actually is. Let's compare that to something that we all know, and that is, how about London? If you look at a picture of London or video of London, it's always raining in London. I mean, think about the story of Mary Poppins.

When Mary Poppins showed up at the bank's house, she had two things with her. She had a carpet bag, and she had an umbrella, and the reason she had an umbrella is because it always rains in London. Well, London's annual rainfall is 28 inches.

Jerusalem gets almost as much rain every year as London, but for some reason, we don't think about it in that way. Now, as I said, that warm air that rains on the hill country keeps going and then drops down into the Jordan Rift Valley and evaporates.

Therefore, you take a city like Jericho, which is down in the Jordan Rift Valley at an elevation of minus 850 feet, so it's 850 feet below sea level, and it has an annual rainfall of like 5 inches. Now, Jerusalem and Jericho are only 14 miles apart as the crow flies, so I want you to imagine a location that's 14 miles away from you right now, and then think, okay, what if that place got, what if I got five times as much rain as that place only 14 miles away, and that's what you have here with Jerusalem and Jericho.

It rains a lot in Jerusalem, but hardly any in Jericho. Now, I have flooded you with information over the last 15 or 20 minutes, and before all that information kind of leaks out and you forget it, I want us to open up our Bibles to 1 Samuel, the 12th chapter, because there's a story here that I want to read to you, and if you don't have your Bibles, that's okay because I'm going to read it, but in 1 Samuel 12, we have this incredibly interesting story, and if you understand some of the things I just told you, it should make a, it should mean more to you now, but before we begin, let me set up the story here a little bit.

In 1 Samuel, the 11th chapter, the United Kingdom has just started. Saul has been named king, and there is a problem over in Jabesh Gilead, and Saul and the army, they go over there and take care of the problem, and now they're on their way back, and when they're on their way back, they are encamped at Gilgal.

You learn about that at the very end of chapter 11, and while they're there, they're camped. They're not home yet. They're just camped there. While they're there, Samuel wants to tell them something, and then that's where we pick up our story here in 1 Samuel, the 12th chapter, so beginning in verse 1 of 1 Samuel 12, it says, and Samuel said to all of Israel, behold, I have obeyed your voice in all that you've said to me and have made a king over you.

Now behold, the king walks before you. I am old and gray, and behold, my sons are with you. I have walked before you from youth until this day. Here I am. Testify against me before the Lord and before his anointed.

Whose ox have I taken? Whose donkey have I taken? Of whom have I defrauded? Whom have I have oppressed? Or from whose hand have I taken a bribe to blind my eyes with it? Testify against me, and I will restore it to you.

And they said, you have not defrauded us or oppressed us or taken anything from any man's hand. And he said, the Lord is witness against you and has anointed his witness, and his anointed is witness this day that you have not found anything in my hand.

And they said, he is witness. So what Samuel is doing here, Samuel has something he wants to tell the people, but he wants to make sure they're going to listen to him. And so he wants to clear the air.

He asked them, he says, I'm old and gray, and I want to ask you, do any of you have anything against me? And they all say, no, we have nothing against you. And so now that he knows that he's got their attention and they're going to listen to him, he's going to talk to him a little bit.

And he starts off with a history lesson. Beginning in verse six, it says, Samuel said to the people, the Lord is witness who appointed Moses and Aaron and brought your fathers out of the land of Egypt.

Now, therefore, stand still that I may plead with you before the Lord concerning all the righteous deeds of the Lord that he performed for you and your fathers. When Jacob went to Egypt and the Egyptians oppressed them, then your fathers cried out to the Lord and the Lord sent Moses and Aaron who brought your fathers out of Egypt and made them dwell in this place.

But they forgot the Lord, their God. And he sold them into the hand of Sisera, commander of the army of Hathor and into the hand of the Philistines and into the hand of the king of Moab. And they fought against him and they cried out to the Lord and said, we have sinned because we have forsaken the Lord and have served the Baals and the Asherah.

But now deliver us out of the hand of our enemies that we may serve you. And the Lord sent Jeroboam and Barak and Jephthah and Samuel and delivered you out of the hand of your enemies on every side and you lived in safety.

So what he does here is he reminds them about all the times throughout history, throughout the nation in which God has been there for them. God was always there for them. And even when they got into trouble, God provided people to help them.

Let's go back to verse 12. And when you saw that Nahash, the king of the Ammonites came against you, you said to me, no, but a king shall rule over us when the Lord, your God was already your king. And now behold the king whom you've chosen for whom you have asked, behold, the Lord has set a king over you.

If you fear the Lord and serve him and obey his voice and will not rebel against the commandment of the Lord, and if both you and the king who reigns over you will follow the Lord, it will be well. But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then the hand of the Lord will be against you and your king.

So what he's saying here is that, look, even though God did all of these things for you, when you got in trouble one more time, you asked for a king when you already had God as your king. Despite all of that, Samuel says, if you obey God, and if your king obeys God, then everything will be just fine.

But if not, there's going to be problems. But then he gets to the end of his talk here, and he says this, now, therefore, stand still and see the great thing that the Lord will do before you this through your eyes.

Is it not the wheat harvest today? I will call upon the Lord that he may send thunder and rain, and you shall know and see that your wickedness is great that you have done in the sight of the Lord and asking for yourselves a king.

So Samuel called upon the Lord, and the Lord sent thunder and rain that day, and all the people greatly feared the Lord and Samuel. This is the end of his speech, and Samuel had prayed, and God has sent thunder and rain.

There's a phrase here at the very end that says that all the people greatly feared the Lord and Samuel. And so I'm kind of forced to ask the question, why did the people react this way? Why did they react this way?

And I think there are three reasons, and then I'll leave the lesson for you. First of all, they reacted this way because God had made it thunder and rain. I mean, try to put yourself in their shoes. They've gone to this battle, and they've come back.

They're not home yet. They're outside. Samuel is talking with them, and he says, to prove to you how serious I am, I'm going to pray to God for thunder and rain. And he does, and it immediately begins to thunder and rain.

I mean, can you imagine what that would have looked like? And that caused the people to greatly fear the Lord and Samuel. But that's not the only reason. Not only did God make it thunder and rain, but God made it thunder and rain at a place where it rarely rains.

Now, remember where they are. They're in Gilgal. Now, we don't know the exact location of Gilgal because it was never a fortified city, but it was very near where Jericho is down in the Jordan Rift Valley.

Remember what we said a few minutes ago about the rain in Jericho? It only rains there four or five inches a year. So not only had God made it thunder and rain, but he had made it thunder and rain at a place where it rarely rains, and the people feared the Lord and Samuel.