SEA POINT EVANGELICAL CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CAPE TOWN.

MINISTER, Rev. Thomas O. Scarborough.

Samuel: 1 Samuel 3.

Morning Worship, 12 November 2006.

I asked the question last week, “What are the most important choices you will make in life?” And we said that these choices are not the great milestones of life, such as choosing a career, or choosing my life’s partner, but they are the simple choices whereby I choose to obey God, or I choose not to.

That is what guarantees the success and the fruitfulness of my life — and in fact will have consequences for all eternity.

It was a simple message last week. We were looking at the story of the High Priest Eli — and his sons Hophni and Phinehas.

And it’s quite likely that they said to themselves: “My big decision in life is to become a High Priest“ — or “My big decision is to get to the top of my game in all of Israel.”

But God showed them that they had forgotten something. It is God who has all power over people’s destinies, and God was not pleased with the High Priest Eli or his two sons.

We saw that Eli’s sons had become self-centred and abusive individuals — they were quite simply off the rails — and we saw that Eli himself — although He was an uproght man — was self-centred in another kind of way. God said to Eli: “Why do you honour your sons more than Me?”

He had power over everything that happened in the temple — and in the religious life of Israel. But perhaps he was very proud of his sons. Perhaps he had always hoped that they would follow him in the priesthood. Perhaps he hoped they would learn through experience. But whatever it was, he didn’t carry out his responsibility, and he allowed the abuses of his sons.

And finally God — as we saw last week — completely bypassed Eli — the great High Priest — the man who stood between Israel and the Lord — and He spoke to a young boy, Samuel instead. Eli lost the privilege of communion and communication with God.

The same can happen to you and me. We are making all the right choices in life — according to the way the world thinks. We are getting ahead, and we are putting all the big building blocks of life in place — but it will not be blessed at the end of the day if we are ignoring God.

And eventually we risk the situation — as with Eli — where God won’t even communicate with us any more. We down here — and God up there — with the connection broken and gone.

* * * * * * * * * *

Last Sunday we looked only very briefly at God’s threat of judgement against Eli and his sons. And we noted that God, in this story, doesn’t just pounce. He gives not only one warning, but two — we are going to look at the second warning this morning. God is a gracious God — He doesn’t turn against us quickly.

He might not speak to us in just the same way as He did to Eli and his two sons — but He is sure to speak to us.

I have shared the story before of a parachutist whose parachute didn’t open. And he was saved because he fell into the open canopy of someone below him. And even then, he said that he didn’t surrender his life to God — but God gave him another wake-up call, and then he received Jesus as His Saviour.

And incidentally, once we do belong to Christ, He never quits on us. One of the things I tend to hear more often than others in counselling is: “I think God must have left me.” That is not the case, when you have given your life to Christ.

In fact the very opposite might be the case — namely that the Lord loves you with an everlasting love, and is doing marvellous things in your life.

* * * * * * * * * *

So God spoke to a young boy, named Samuel. And let us see what that message was.

The Lord said, in verse 14: “The guilt of Eli’s house will never be atoned for by sacrifice or offering.” Eli and his sons will never be forgiven for their sins.

I don’t believe this means that God does not forgive certain sins. It is not as though, if you commit the same sins as these here, God will never forgive. I believe that God could foresee the future here, and He could foresee that Eli and his sons would never repent — and therefore He said, “Their sins will never be atoned for.”

In Isaiah chapter 38, we find a similar prophecy against King Hezekiah, who had sinned against the Lord. And the Lord said to Hezekiah: “Put your house in order, Hezekiah, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”

But we read that Hezekiah turned his face to the wall, and he wept bitterly, and he repented of his sins. And then the Lord said to Hezekiah: “I have heard your prayer and seen your tears. I will add another 15 years to your life.” In fact Hezekiah became one of the greatest kings of Israel.

But returning the case of Eli, Eli did not repent when they heard the word of the Lord, and neither did his two sons — Hophni and Phinehas.

And Eli said — when he heard the message of judgement from the Lord — in 1 Samuel chapter 3 verse 18 — he said: “He is the Lord. Let Him do what is good in His eyes.”

Now this is all very well, and it sounds very good, and very noble. Eli was right to say. “He is the Lord.”

But the crucial question is, “Did Eli humble himself? Did he repent? Did he change his ways?” The Bible does not show us that he ever did. And so the Lord’s judgement was sealed.

Notice how Eli uses beautiful religious language here: “He is Lord. Let Him do what is good.” But there is no change of heart.

You can say all the right things. You can say things that seem to be so spiritually mature. But what matters to the Lord is humility of heart before Him, and our willingness to submit our lives to Him.

Returning to where we started — what matters to God is the everyday, ordinary choices whereby we decide to obey Him, or we decide not to.

And these verses no adds an extra dimension to that. What matters also is the choices we make when we have sinned against Him.

* * * * * * * * * *

Do we say, like Eli, “Well, He is the Lord. It’s in His hands.” Or do we say, “Lord, please help me to get back on track. I want my life to be in submission to You. I commit my life to You. I banish from my life the things that are displeasing to You. I’m going to turn around, and put those things in order which I can put in order.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Well, I’ll make a small detour now, to look at some detail in the text. When the Lord speaks to the young boy Samuel, we notice that He calls him four times before Samuel finally recognises that it is the Lord.

And notice if we read this carefully, it seems that the fourth time the Lord speaks, the Lord seems to have appear to Samuel in person. In verse 10 we read: “The Lord came and stood there.”

But what we notice here is that Samuel didn’t recognise the Lord speaking. The only explanation he had was that this was a human voice — so it had to be Eli — over in the other room. He wasn’t thinking — there is a living God in this.

I wonder how often the Lord has spoken to you and to me, as He did to Samuel, and we did not hear that it was the Lord.

The famous commentator Matthew Henry said (paraphrased – his English is 250 years old): “God calls to us, and we take it only to be the call of the one who brings the call, and answer accordingly. He calls to us by His acts in our lives, and we look at them only at face value.”

Matthew Henry is saying that the Lord’s hand — the Lord’s power — the Lord’s grace — is active in our lives, and we fail to even think that this is of God. In fact the Bible shows us that God is what is everywhere. The Bible says, “He is [You are] the ruler of all things …” (1 Chronicles 29:12).

What we can learn from Samuel is that we need far more of a sense of God’s presence in our lives. We need to see the hand of God in far more areas of our lives than we usually do.

To put it very, very simply — open your eyes. God is speaking to you. God is dealing with you.

* * * * * * * * * *

Now I’m going to move on to the fulfilment of the judgement of God against Eli and his house. But this also takes us a step further with regard to the question of choices. Eli and his sons had been making the wrong choices in life — choices which were not obedient to God — but now we see that this went even deeper in their lives.

Not only should they have been obeying God, but they should have been reverencing God, and surrendering their whole being to Him. Instead — we are going to read in chapter 4 that they had a very much reduced view of God, and they were using God.

We read in chapter 4 that Israel was at war with the Philistines — and so the Israelites decided to take the ark of the covenant into the battle.

Now this is not an ark like Noah’s ark. The ark of the covenant was a container that looked something like a big box. It contained the original stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, it contained a bowl of manna from the wilderness, and it had the rod of Aaron inside. And this ark was Israel’s most sacred religious possession.

But what was important about the ark — that is particularly important to us this morning — is that the ark was the sign of God’s covenant, and the sign of His presence with His people.

Now the ark was not just something that you could move around as you liked. It was far too sacred for that. We see in the Bible that it was God who decided where the ark should go — and Israel was supposed to wait upon the Lord before they moved it.

But Israel was now in trouble — and they believed that by bringing the ark into their midst, they would bring the presence of God into the midst of the battle field, and reverse their situation.

In chapter 4 verses 2 and 3: “The Philistines deployed their forces to meet Israel — and as the battle spread, Israel was defeated by the Philistines, who killed about four thousand of them on the battlefield. When the soldiers returned to camp after their defeat, the elders of Israel asked, ‘Why did the Lord bring defeat upon us today before the Philistines? Let us bring the ark of the Lord’s covenant from Shiloh, so that it may go with us and save us from the hand of our enemies.'”

And in the next verse — verse 4 — we read that the ark of the covenant was brought into the camp of the Israelites, “and Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were there with the ark of the covenant of the Lord.”

Let’s notice this specific mention of Hophni and Phinehas. There would have been no need to mention who was standing with the ark. But the Bible makes a point here of mentioning their names. It was Hophni and Phinehas, the two sons of Eli — the two sons who despised the Lord, as we read in chapter 2.

Hophni and Phinehas were living in disobedience to God — and yet — here they stood with the ark of God, hoping on God’s presence to save them. I think you can see that this story is not going to end well.

This whole event of bringing the ark of God into the camp was a portent of trouble from the start.

And a further sign of trouble is the words of the elders in verse 3. “Why did the Lord bring defeat upon us today?” And we see that instead of looking into their own hearts — instead of considering their own ways — they simply thought that the answer lay in fetching in ark of the covenant. They didn’t see that the problem lay in the fact that they had lost their honour of God.

* * * * * * * * * *

Now in some way, the way that these elders analysed their situation was right. They rightly felt that they needed the presence of God. That presence of God was symbolised by the ark — and so they thought that If only they had the ark with them, then their troubles would be over.

But somehow they missed the real point. The personal obedience — the personal humility — the personal reverence for a mighty, living God — was not there.

Last Sunday I quoted the Scriptures where the Lord says: “For this is what high and lofty One says — He who lives forever, whose name is Holy: I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit.” “I live … with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit.” (In Isaiah 57:15). And if that contrition and lowliness is missing, then God will not be there.

A critical place where Israel went wrong is that they tried to use God for their own purposes. One of Israel’s biggest mistakes in this whole affair was that they thought that God was there for their benefit, and not they for His.

They didn’t want to give themselves to God — they didn’t offer anything to Him — but they wanted God to be useful to them.

Again, let’s not forget that God is a sovereign God. That means that God has absolute power and absolute authority, and you and I can’t possibly use Him for our own purposes.

But Israel here thought that they could use God. They seemed to think that they owed Him nothing — but He owed them victory.

In verse 4 of chapter 4, we read that the people went to fetch the ark of the covenant of the Lord — and it says here, “the ark of the covenant of the Lord Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim – the angels”.

The Israelites were trying to use the Lord Almighty, who is enthroned in glory, among the angels — the cherubim — the sovereign God of heaven and earth. They wanted to pick up His presence in the ark of the covenant and carry it into the battle. They were trying to use God to their own advantage.

Now before we sit in judgement on the Israelites, I would like us to think of ourselves for a moment this morning.

How often do we go to Church in the hope that I will derive some benefit or some blessing from God, rather than going for His sake — to worship Him, and glorify Him, and to offer myself to Him, and to obey Him? In fact the Bible shows us that going to Church on a Sunday is an act of obedience. Because He is the Almighty God.

How often do we want God to be useful to us — rather than we ourselves being useful to God?

Many people want God so that He can give them this or to give them that — but how far are they willing to give to the Lord what the Lord demands — namely their lives, their conduct, their service to God, their tithes of what they have, and so on?

Do we want God on our terms — or are we truly willing to present ourselves to Him on His terms?

What is important in the Bible is first whether we are serving God because He is God — not because of what we will benefit from Him.

Of course, the Bible also speaks about blessing upon blessing if we will obey Him — but those blessings are not what it is first all about — and this is where some Christians get it wrong, with the so-called prosperity gospel. It is first about the fact that God is God, and we need to acknowledge that by making ourselves completely available to Him.

* * * * * * * * * *

So the biggest choice in life — even beyond all the other choices to choose His ways, or to obey His commands — is the great choice to reverence Him with my whole life — the choice to give Him the supreme place in my life.

Eli and Hophni and Phinehas didn’t do that, and so all their hopes and plans fell apart — because they didn’t put first things first — and because God’s blessing was not upon them. If you want to read exactly what happened to them, you will find that in 1 Samuel chapter 4.

Are you willing to give yourself to Him on His terms? That is the ultimate choice in life. God is the sovereign God of heaven and earth, and it is our duty first to be here for His sake, and not Him for ours.

AMEN.