1 Samuel 3:1-21

The boy Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli. In those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions.

²One night Eli, whose eyes were becoming so weak that he could barely see, was lying down in his usual place. ³The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. ⁴Then the Lord called Samuel.

Samuel answered, “Here I am.” ⁵And he ran to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.”

But Eli said, “I did not call; go back and lie down.” So he went and lay down.

⁶Again the Lord called, “Samuel!” And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.”

“My son,” Eli said, “I did not call; go back and lie down.”

⁷Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord: The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.

⁸The Lord called Samuel a third time, and Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.”

Then Eli realized that the Lord was calling the boy. ⁹So Eli told Samuel, “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went and lay down in his place.

¹⁰The Lord came and stood there, calling as at the other times, “Samuel! Samuel!”

Then Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

¹¹And the Lord said to Samuel: “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle. ¹²At that time I will carry out against Eli everything I spoke against his family—from beginning to end. ¹³For I told him that I would judge his family forever because of the sin he knew about; his sons made themselves contemptible, and he failed to restrain them. ¹⁴ Therefore, I swore to the house of Eli, ‘The guilt of Eli’s house will never be atoned for by sacrifice or offering.’”

¹⁵Samuel lay down until morning and then opened the doors of the house of the Lord. He was afraid to tell Eli the vision, ¹⁶but Eli called him and said, “Samuel, my son.”

Samuel answered, “Here I am.”

¹⁷“What was it he said to you?” Eli asked. “Do not hide it from me. May God deal with you, be it ever so severely, if you hide from me anything he told you.” ¹⁸ So Samuel told him everything, hiding nothing from him. Then Eli said, “He is the Lord; let him do what is good in his eyes.”

¹⁹The Lord was with Samuel as he grew up, and he let none of his words fall to the ground. ²⁰And all Israel from Dan to Beersheba recognized that Samuel was attested as a prophet of the Lord. ²¹The Lord continued to appear at Shiloh, and there he revealed himself to Samuel through his word.

You may have heard that Oprah has given her full endorsement to Barak Obama. She is pouring large amounts of money into his campaign and will be doing all she can to make certain that Obama becomes the 44^th president of the United States. Not to be outdone, Mike Huckabee has another celebrity on his campaign trail. Huckabee is being endorsed by Chuck Norris. In one commercial, Huckabee is seated next to Chuck and says, “When Chuck Norris does a push-up, he’s not pushing himself up, he is pushing the earth down.” How much impact will Oprah and Norris have upon their respective presidential candidates? I am sure there are some people who will be swayed by these celebrities. You’ll have the occasional person who says, “Walker, Texas Ranger was my favorite TV show, so I’m a votin’ for Huckabee.” Certainly there are few American housewives who credit Oprah for saving their marriage, so they’ll vote for Obama. But in general, I don’t think any celebrity will have all that much impact upon the presidential race. Such celebrities might like to think they have tremendous influence, but reality is a different thing. (But then again, most celebrities have their own version of reality anyway, right?)

Unlike Oprah and Chuck Norris, there is a man who could make or break a person’s rise to power. If this man gave you his endorsement, there was a 100% guarantee that you would become the next leader of the people. If this same man told you that you were finished as a leader, it was a done deal. You could not rise to power without his endorsement and you could not remain in power without his ongoing support. That man was the prophet Samuel. In the coming weeks we will see how Samuel became the king maker and the king breaker. He was the most powerful main in all of Israel, even after anointing two kings and watching one rise to power. But before Samuel would become the king-maker, the Lord needed to mold him into a prophet and leader in his own right.

In the first verse of chapter three we read, The boy Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli. In those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions. Here was the great prophet Samuel, the one to whom God spoke so clearly, the very mouthpiece of the Almighty God, yet he had never heard the Lord speak to him. In fact, God wasn’t speaking much at all in those days. Verse seven says, Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord: The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. In our Christian vernacular, if we say that so and so knows the Lord, what do we mean? We mean that this person is a Christian—a believer. If we say that a certain person does not know the Lord, we all understand that this person is not a believer. We need to be careful that we don’t transport our 21^st century Christian lingo into this three thousand year old passage. When the text says that Samuel did not know the Lord, it does not mean that he did not believe in God—quite the contrary. From the time he was weaned from his mother, Samuel has been trained as a priest in the Temple of the Lord under the tutelage of Eli himself. Chapter 2:18 says, Samuel was ministering before the Lord—a boy wearing a linen ephod. The linen ephod was the garment required of all priests. Samuel would have been taught from the Torah on a daily basis. He would have learned all of the intricacies of the Temple furnishings. He could have told you the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in all their detail. He knew that the God he served in the temple in Shiloh was the same God who rescued his people out of slavery in Egypt and settled them in the promised land. Samuel was a devout follower of Yahweh, but, as verse seven says, The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. In other words, Samuel was a priest in training, but he was not yet a prophet. But that was about to change.

He received his first word from the Lord as a young boy. As you have read this story, you may have thought that Samuel was still a little boy, perhaps five or six years old. I don’t think he was that young in chapter three. I estimate that Samuel was about twelve years old at the time. Since Samuel had never heard the Lord’s voice before, the first three times he did not recognize that God was speaking to him. As Eli had faithfully taught him everything else he knew about God, so Eli instructed Samuel that it was in fact the Lord—Yahweh who was calling Samuel.

Has the Lord ever spoken to you? Unless you are employed as a televangelist, very few people claim to have heard an audible voice from God. But we know that God speaks to us. One man told me how God clearly spoke to him about how much money he was supposed to give to the capital campaign. An angel did not appear at the foot of his bed and hold up a golden sign with the amount etched into it, but nevertheless, through an indelible impression, God spoke to him. I would guess that most of you have had these kinds of words from the Lord. I have never heard an audible voice from God, but there were two times when it seemed like a voice spoke clearly to me in my mind. Both of these instances were surrounding the death of my parents. The first came almost immediately after I learned that my mom had died and the other came a short while before my dad died. I know we should always be cautious and discerning about any alleged word from the Lord outside of Scripture, but for me, these words from the Lord were words of great comfort spoken in my time of need.

This is one of the reasons I am surprised by the word of the Lord spoken to Samuel, because it was not a word of comfort. If I were deciding how things should be done, and if I were speaking to my young prophet for the first time, I would have spoken some powerful words of encouragement—maybe something like this.

“Samuel, I have known you since you were being formed in your mother Hannah’s womb. She gave you to me because she loves you, Samuel. I am the God who brought your people Israel out of the land of Egypt and I love you with an everlasting love. This day I am setting you apart as a prophet of the Lord. You will be my mouthpiece to my people and I will let none of your words fall to the ground. Be strong and courageous, Samuel, and my hand of blessing will be with you always.”

Now doesn’t that sound like an encouraging word from the Lord to this new prophet? But that is not at all the content of what God spoke to him. The first word from the Lord, and the first assignment from the Lord, was to speak a prophecy of judgment upon Eli and his house. And the Lord said to Samuel: “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle. ¹²At that time I will carry out against Eli everything I spoke against his family—from beginning to end. ¹³For I told him that I would judge his family forever because of the sin he knew about; his sons made themselves contemptible, and he failed to restrain them. ¹⁴Therefore, I swore to the house of Eli, ‘The guilt of Eli’s house will never be atoned for by sacrifice or offering.’”

That’s a heavy burden for this young prophet to carry. Eli had not only been his mentor and teacher, but he was his father as well. Elkanah and Hannah would visit Samuel once a year when they made heir annual trek to Shiloh, but in terms of day to day parenting, Eli was Samuel’s father. And now Samuel had to tell his own father that God was bringing an eternal judgment upon him. Samuel was taught how to be a priest, but there was no preparation for Samuel to be a prophet, and this first prophecy was more like a final exam.

But Eli knew what was coming. As he sent Samuel back to hear the word of the Lord, Eli knew what the Lord was going to say through Samuel. He knew that God had judged him and found him wanting, because another prophet had already declared this judgment. Look back to chapter 2:33. “…and all your descendants will die will die in the prime of life. And what happens to your two sons, Hophni and Phineas, will be a sign to you—they will both die on the same day. I will raise up for myself a faithful priest, who will do according to what is in my heart and mind.” At this time of the year, we are sued to reading passages about a sign from God, especially the one form Isaiah 7. “The Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel.” That was a good sign, but the prophecy spoke to Samuel was a bad sign.

Here is the summary of the Lord’s message to Eli. I am stripping the priesthood from your family—forever; all of your descendants will die in the prime of their life; I will kill your two sons as a sign of all of this; and oh, by the way, the little boy Samuel you have been raising for all these years, he will replace you as priest and prophet. Samuel never asked for all this and he certainly never desired to take the place of his Eli, but as soon as Samuel told Eli the prophecy from the Lord, Samuel and Eli effectively switched places. The father had begun to serve the son. The old priest Eli must decrease and the young Samuel must increase. One day Samuel would remove King Saul from the throne and replace him with King David, but on this day, Samuel had to remove his father and replace him with himself.

To Eli’s credit, he never once cried out or complained, because he knew it was coming and he knew it was a righteous judgment form the Lord. We learn from chapter two that Eli’s sons were unsurpassed in their wickedness. They abused their power in all manner of obscene ways. Hophni and Phineas were bad seed. They serve as a reminder to the church at large and to Grace Church in particular, to be on guard against abuses in leadership. This past year, Richard Roberts, the son of Oral Roberts and president of Oral Roberts University, was accused of a laundry list of abuses of leadership. On the subject of God speaking to us, Richard claimed that God told him to fight against the accusations because they were false and damaging. Then, after the vast majority of faculty at the university gave Richard a vote of no confidence, he suddenly claimed that God told him to resign his presidency.

A church can make all kinds of mistakes, but when the leaders turn bad, the church is in major trouble. That is why we have a saying here at Grace: as go the leaders, so goes the church. We know we will never be stronger than our leaders. Deb Larrington emailed me this week concerning the congregational meeting. I told her that the congregation would be approving the membership of her family and the Jacksons, and that henceforth, she would now have the power to vote the pastor out of office. I trust that she won’t make use of that right at next Sunday’s meeting, but I am serious about the fact that our church does have regulations for the removal of its leaders, in the awful event that it ever became necessary to do so.

Do you know that I sometimes pray that God would kill our church? I prayed this prayer at the last elder meeting. I prayed, “God, please kill our church…if we ever replace the gospel of Jesus Christ with a man-made, pragmatic gospel.” It’s better that our church should die than to have it bring harm to the gospel message. This is true of our own lives as well. I am not suggesting that you ask the Lord to kill you, but ask God to please stop you before you do something really stupid—and therefore, really harmful.

This passage also reminds us of the necessity to restrain evil. Eli was not guilty of the same sins as his sons were, but in Samuel’s prophecy, God said that Eli failed to restrain his sons. In chapter two we are told that Eli did talk to his sons and warn them about their sin, but they did not listen. We need to understand that the sins of which his sons were guilty was the same sin that caused Eleazar to drive a spear through the bodies of two people in Numbers chapter 25. The sins of Hophni and Phineas deserved the death penalty, but at the very least, Eli should have removed them from their priestly office, but he did not. So we as Christians need to restrain the evil in our midst. We do this through the loving discipline of our children. We restrain evil by practicing Biblical church discipline. We restrain evil by being on guard for false teaching and removing it immediately. As Tim Chaffey said a few weeks ago, false teaching is like cancer—it will spread and kill everything around it.

Actually, Christians tend to work really hard at restraining evil, but the problem is that most of our work includes the unbelieving world. (“Stop It” video) We look at the world and yell at the top of our lungs: “Stop sinning! What’s wrong with you people? Why do you keep having sex, taking drugs and watching pornography? Just stop it!” We want to restrain the evil in the world yet we ignore the evil in our churches. If we spent half the time restraining our own sin as we do the sin of others—especially the sins of the world—we would become a vibrantly, holy and healthy church. Eli was not judged for not being able to restrain the evil of their pagan neighbors. Eli was not even judged for his inability to restrain the evil of the nation of Israel, but he was held accountable for refusing to restrain the evil in his own household and in his own priesthood. Eli’s complicity with the sins of his sons brought judgment upon himself. Because he could have stopped it but did not, it’s as if he is guilty of the sins themselves.

What if I was running a prostitution business out the church office and regularly stealing from the church treasury and Tony knew about it? (which is toughly equivalent to the sins of Hophni and Phineas) What would Tony’s responsibility be in this matter? He should do everything in his power to restrain this gross evil. What if Tony told me to stop doing these things, but I didn’t listen to him? Then, three years later it is revealed to everyone that I had been doing these awful things? Forget about me for a moment—what are you gong to think about Tony? You would go to him, shake him by the shoulders and yell, “What the matter with you, Tony? Why didn’t you do something? Why did you just look the other way?!” Would Tony be just as guilty as me? Almost…almost.

But just like it will do me no good to open my front door and scream to the neighbors, “Stop sinning,” so it does no good to stand up here as a preacher and say the same thing. Men, are you looking at pornography? Stop it! Wives, are you disrespecting your husband? Stop it! Children, are you disobeying your parents? Stop it! There is simply no power in that phrase. If I am struggling with a sin then the first thing I need is the law which tells this thing is a sin. The law is good when it is used in this way. But if you tell me to stop sinning, it is like hitting me with the law again. You might as well say, “What’s wrong with you, don’t you know this is a sin?” The law has already told me it is a sin, but giving me more of the law won’t help me stop sinning. What do I need? I need grace. I need what the Lord mentions in verse fourteen. I need atonement. I need what Hophni and Phineas needed. They needed to repent of their sin and receive atonement for their sin from God. They needed someone to cover their sin and to wash away their sin. But here is the amazing thing. Hophni and Phineas were priests who offered daily sacrifices and sacrifices of atonement for sin. More than anyone else in all of Israel, Hophni and Phineas should have understood the Biblical concept of atonement of sin—but they did not. Atonement for their sins was right under their noses, but they missed it. As they spilled out the blood of each animal and burned the carcass on the altar, they should have seen it. They should have asked the question, “What is all of this blood for?” And what should have been burned in their hearts and minds a thousand times over is this: I can’ do it. The blood of these other animals is for me, because I can’t cover my own sins. I am helpless and lost on my own.

What Hophni and Phineas missed is exactly what you and I need—the atonement; the power of the cross, the most powerful force in the universe. We can’t do it ourselves. We can’t live the Christian life in our own strength. If you are caught in a sin, no matter how small or great, it does no good to yell at you to “stop it!” Yes, we need to now what God requires of us—we need the law—but after that, we need grace. We need to know that Jesus Christ, the perfect atoner for sins, is waiting to receive our confession. Our kids need this. Parents need this. Husbands need this. Wives need this. We need grace and mercy so that we can in turn be instruments of grace and mercy. You will never be able to forgive another person until you are certain you have been forgiven yourself.

Rich Maurer

December 9, 2007