Divided Hearts Series

Good morning. Spring has sprung! Amen. We are going to spring right into our sermon series again which is called The Story, which is basically the story of God found in the Bible story. As I mentioned before, because of the amount of content, we have to do a high flyover of all the stories in the Bible, which means that we can’t spend a lot of time on any one particular book. Last week, we dove into the book of Judges. The person we talked about was the first female judge, Deborah.

Today, we are going to talk about the last judge and his name was Samuel. Basically, what we are really going to talk about is the transition from the period of judges over to the period of kings. We find that transition documented in the book of 1 Samuel. The book of 1 Samuel is obviously named after Samuel. The Samuel who was a judge but he was also a priest and a prophet. He heard from God and was the mouthpiece of God. We know from the very early ages that God had his hand on Samuel even as a young boy. The story goes that his mother Hannah was unable to conceive a child so year after year she would go to the tabernacle and meet with Eli and pray and offer sacrifices, but she couldn’t conceive of a child. Apparently, one day she went there and made a vow to God. Reading from 1 Samuel 1:11 she says “LORD Almighty, if you will only look on your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the LORD for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever be used on his head.” It basically says she was going to give him over to the Lord for his work. After she conceived, she writes this phenomenal prayer back to God that we see in chapter 2. She brings little baby Samuel up to Eli and says he is yours. Train him up. So basically Eli becomes the mentor of Samuel. As the mentor he teaches Samuel some of the basics. He teaches him how to perform the priestly duties and what it is like to be a judge. And he teaches little Samuel how to hear the word of God.

We don’t know a whole lot about the early years of Samuel, but we do know Samuel grew in stature and favor with the Lord and with men. When you think about it, isn’t that what we would like all of our kids to do. Not just grow up in stature but grow up in the favor of Lord and then men. That is basically that vertical and horizontal thing going on there. Under the mentoring of Eli, Samuel was able to grow up into spiritual maturity. Although Eli did a good job raising up Samuel, he really didn’t do too good of a job of raising his two kids, Phinehas and Hophni. We don’t have time to look at it on the screen, but they were bad kids. They were actually working for Eli doing priestly functions. What happened was people would bring their offerings and they would steal the offerings form the people. When people complained, they would threaten physical violence on the people. Not only that, they would perform elicit sexual activity in the tabernacle with the women in the tabernacle. This was a bad time. This was a very dark time. Consistent with the theme we saw in Judges, people were doing evil in the eyes of the Lord big time. It had gotten all the way to the tabernacle. Consistent with the theme of Judges, we see when you have a situation like that, when people are doing evil, what would often happen is God would bring in some outside oppressors, some of the enemies of the people to deal with the people. Not in the sense to make their life miserable but just to show the people what their life is like outside of God. In this particular case, the people that God used against the Hebrew people to teach them a lesson were the Philistines. The Philistines were a bad people. They were very well armed and very aggressive. They would go after the Hebrew people unprovoked and harass them, slaughter them, and take them into slavery. The Israelites would fight back and try to defend themselves.

As the story goes, one day, they decided they were going to take matters into their own hands, and they are going to go up and try to fight the Philistines on their own. We find out in the early chapters that it didn’t work too well. In fact, 4,000 Hebrews were slaughtered on one particular day. As the story goes, all the surviving men go back to the camp and meet with the leaders of the tabernacle, the elders and the leaders of the different tribes, and they try to figure out what went wrong. I guess somebody suggest that maybe it had to do with the presence of God not being with them when they went into battle. Somebody says why don’t we bring the Ark of the Covenant with us this time. You may recall from earlier sermons that we talked about the Ark of the Covenant was the fancy, ornate cabinet that was basically used to hold the remaining portions of the Ten Commandments, some manna from the desert, and Aaron’s staff. It was believed that God’s presence would surround this Ark. As logic goes, if we take the Ark with us into battle, we are going to have God with us. It is pretty good logic except unfortunately they had Eli’s two sons go with them and carry the Ark. They were basically using it as some sort of a good luck charm. God would have nothing like that. He allowed the Philistines to pretty much demolish them. It goes on to say “The slaughter was very great. Israel lost thirty thousand foot soldiers. The ark of God was captured, and Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, died.” Apparently, one of the messengers came back and told Eli about the problem. He told him about his sons being killed and that was a bad thing. But after he told him the Ark of the Covenant was taken over by the Philistines, Eli dropped dead on the spot. Then the story goes on to say that Phinehas’ widow immediately went into labor, had the child and named the child Ichabod, which basically means the Glory of the Lord has departed. It was a very, very dark time during that latter period of the judges.