Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

1 Samuel 7: Liturgical Warfare and Repentance

It’s unusual to sing the particular psalms we’re singing today in many churches. You’ll notice that Psalm 83 was written by Asaph. The entire psalter was really produced for the liturgy or worship of the church, but very specifically Asaph led the musicians. This song is particularly pointed out to us as one of those that is to be used in the worship of God and was used.

Psalm 149—we sing that. That’s the only version we know of it. The tune’s okay. I think I’d like it better if we had a through-composed tune to it because as we move from the whirling dance of worship and the praising of God in worship to then the sharp two-edged sword being in our hands to strike the kings of the earth and remain obedient to God, there probably should be a shift in the musical style there.

But it’s a wonderful thing to be able to sing Psalm 149 and see the relationship of the worship of God to the judgments of God upon the kings. That’ll be our focus today in 1 Samuel 7. You’ll notice on the front of your orders of worship a rather violent looking picture. Notice at the top of that picture, we have worship going on. And then we have the angels of God, the angel of God, Michael the Archangel, striking against demonic forces on earth as worship is going on in heaven.

This is from the book of Revelation. That’s what we’ll be talking about today. But it’s very easy to talk about these things and for people to misunderstand what we’re saying and to think that we’re filled with pride and self-righteousness. It’s easy for our young men to love to sing Psalm 83 as they do, and that’s a good thing. But it’s easy for them to give way to the flesh and their desire to strike out against not just God’s enemies, but their enemies and just be kind of macho about the whole thing.

1 Samuel 7 is about liturgical warfare, but it sets it in a context that I think is always important to set this in. So, let’s stand and we’ll read from 1 Samuel 7. We won’t read quite the whole chapter—through verse 14 or 15, I guess. And may God bless the reading of his word.

1 Samuel 7, beginning at verse 1:

Then the men of Kirjath Jearim came and took the ark of the Lord and brought it into the house of Abinadab on the hill and consecrated Eleazar his son to keep the ark of the Lord. So it was that the ark remained in Kirjath Jearim a long time. It was there 20 years. All the house of Israel lamented after the Lord.

Then Samuel spoke to all the house of Israel, saying, “If you return to the Lord with all your hearts, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you, and prepare your hearts for the Lord, and serve him only, and he will deliver you from the hand of the Philistines.” So the children of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtaroth, and served the Lord only.

And Samuel said, “Gather all Israel to Mizpah, and I will pray to the Lord for you.”

So they gathered together at Mizpah, drew water, and poured it out before the Lord. And they fasted that day, and said there, “We have sinned against the Lord.” And Samuel judged the children of Israel at Mizpah.

Now when the Philistines heard that the children of Israel had gathered together at Mizpah, the lords of the Philistines went up against Israel. When the children of Israel heard of it, they were afraid of the Philistines. So the children of Israel said to Samuel, “Do not cease to cry out to the Lord our God for us that he may save us from the hand of the Philistines.”

And Samuel took a suckling lamb and offered it as a whole burnt offering to the Lord. And then Samuel cried out to the Lord for Israel, and the Lord answered him.

Now, as Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the Philistines drew near to battle against Israel. But the Lord thundered with a loud thunder upon the Philistines that day and so confused them that they were overcome before Israel. And the men of Israel went out of Mizpah and pursued the Philistines and drove them back as far as below Bethcar.

And then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer, saying, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.” So the Philistines were subdued, and they did not come anymore into the territory of Israel. And the hand of the Lord was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel.

And then the cities which the Philistines had taken from Israel were restored to Israel from Ekron to Gath. And Israel recovered its territory from the hands of the Philistines. Also, there was peace between Israel and the Amorites. And Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for your scriptures. Thank you that they are always a sure word. We need not doubt them. We thank you, Lord God, for your inspiration, that they are infallibly produced by you. And we thank you, Lord God, that they are a sure word to us today and a very relevant one as well. Thank you that your word is eternal and relevant to us. May your Holy Spirit open up our hearts to see its relevance, to make application in our lives, transform us, Lord God, that the wickedness of our country may be rolled back.

In Jesus name we ask it. And for the sake of his kingdom, amen.

Please be seated.

How long will this go on here at RCC? Since our beginning in 1983—one Sunday in January, the one closest to the Supreme Court anniversary, which is today, January 22nd, I believe—we have observed a liturgy of malediction in the context of this commemoration since 1983. Twenty-two years.

Now the text before us said it was a long time and then talks about how the ark was there 20 years before the people of God lamented. A long time—20 years. Long time. For 22 years in this country, abortion on demand has been legal since 1973. Thirty-two years. And an even much longer time that abortion was not punished as the murder of pre-born children. And so a long time. How long will this go on?

Well, we don’t know precisely. We know that in Egypt, the war against God’s seed that Pharaoh carried out went on for, I think, 40 years before God brought deliverance through Moses. We don’t know how long, but it’ll be long enough for the Lord God to work out his purposes that accompany these things.

God uses sin sinlessly for his purposes. And today’s text, I think, gives us some indication of what the sort of things were that ended their long period of time mourning—over the exile of God, with the ark not being with them and the resultant oppression by the Philistines. Long time, and then a sequence of events happened. I think we can make application of that same sequence of events to talk about how long it will be here.

Now it’s almost as if we’re preaching through the book of 1 Samuel. We’ve had Doug H. talk about 1 Samuel and Hannah’s prayer in reference to Mary and Elizabeth. And last week I talked about 1 Samuel, the next few chapters, about the sins of Eli’s sons. We could look at that and profitably think of the judgments of God against a people whose priests are no longer committed to holiness, who steal and commit adultery and have idolatrous relationships as it were that are imaged in what their actual sins are. We talked about that and how it’s important to put God first at the beginning of the new year.

That’s just exactly what Eli’s sons didn’t do. They didn’t put the fat first—God’s offering. And it’s exactly what Elkanah and Hannah did do. They put God first in their family. Their firstborn son was dedicated in a special way to God. The end of that narrative—we didn’t stress it last week, but the outline I had showed the little structure there at the end—the last verse showing that God reveals himself by his word. There had been a famine of God’s word with the people of God as the priests had not ministered God’s word.

Today we’ll see that Samuel ministers God’s word and prays. So he’s a priest and a prophet, and God’s pastors were supposed to be like that. So we’ll see that because of Samuel, God’s word is put preeminent in the people. One of the best ways we can put God first this new year is to commit ourselves to reading our Bibles regularly. What a wonderful thing if our children would image their parents reading the scriptures every day, putting God’s word first in terms of forming our understanding of our events and times.

That’s what I want to do today—take this biblical narrative and help us to think through what’s going on.

Now, we’re at the tail end of a little structure here that’s gone on for several chapters. After the prophecies that we talked about last week, they were actually fulfilled. The Philistines came at the battle of Aphek. God’s ark went into captivity. Eli’s sons were killed. He fell over backwards—as the front of our orders of worship showed us last week—falling off that ruling chair of authority by the tabernacle which was going to become the temple. And then Phinehas’s wife gave birth, she died, named the child, “the spirit has departed.” The battle of Aphek and the defeat of Israel was at the beginning of this narrative.

And now if we look at these last few chapters, this is the conclusion of this big narrative. The next chapter, Israel will again sin by asking for a king in chapter 8. But here we have victory bracketing the defeat by the Philistines. Now we’re going to have victory over the Philistines. In the midst of those two, the ark goes into exile. The ark is exalted in its exaltation by destroying the gods of the Philistines, knocking Dagon over, etc. And then the ark comes out as an exodus.

So the ark is exiled, exalted, and then comes out with an exodus. Instead of the people of God going into captivity, we have God himself going into captivity and delivering us from death and all of our enemies through that—picturing, of course, the work of Jesus Christ. That’s the context. And as a result of the ark’s exodus, it’s exile, exaltation, and exodus. Now we’re going to see victory over the Philistines. That’s kind of the big context here.

Now I want to look at particularly seven specific things that accompany or produce, that bring an end to this long period of defeat at the hand of the Philistines. I’m going to talk about seven specific things that seem to characterize the end of a long time of problems or difficulty and distress.

We’re in a country that’s increasingly showing the oppression of the Christian voice, mind, and thought. And at the same time, the rising sinfulness of abortion, homosexuality, adultery—just sort of the beginning of it all. And so we’re in a period similar to this Philistine oppression.

There are ungodly people in our country, and I don’t mean the women usually who turn their children over to abortionists. It’s the ruling authorities that convince them and delude them and deceive them into saying this is an okay thing to do. And these ruling authorities are the ones who are primarily culpable for this tremendous tragedy and outrage against the image of God in people that’s been conducted.

It’s no different. You know, Herod struck out at the image of God by killing the innocent—the massacre of the innocents—trying to kill Jesus. And behind abortion are these demonic forces that strike out at the children of God by striking out at all children. Demons hate children. And so we want to see an end to it. We want to see an end to the oppression of the Christian church by the Philistines. And I think this tale will tell us seven things that will accompany the end of our oppression as well.

Seven things. Now, really, they all build up into one thing: repentance. We know that—you know, repent. That’s what’ll change things. That’s ultimately the turning point for us. And it’s the turning point in terms of God—how God works with us. The problem we have today is that nobody knows what repentance means.

Leonard Cohen had a very interesting song called “The Future.” “I’ve seen the future baby, it’s murder.” And he talks about abortion, by the way, in that song negatively. “Kill another fetus now. We don’t like babies.” Anyhow, Leonard Cohen—a prophet of our age. In that song, he says, “When they said repent, I wonder what they meant.” “When they said, ‘Repent,’ I wonder what they meant.” His point is that we’re in a world now where people don’t have any idea what repentance means.

They don’t know what their sin is because the church hasn’t articulated it. They don’t know what repentance is. And the church has taught views of repentance that are very deficient. So while really the only thing that’s necessary is repentance, we can look at this narrative today as a story of the seven aspects of repentance. What does repentance look like? How does it manifest itself?

Let’s look at this. Let’s look quickly at seven points from the text. Have your scriptures open. 1 Samuel 7. And then right at the end of the sermon, we’ll look at the wonderful blessings that result from this sevenfold fullness of repentance demonstrated by God’s people. The wonderful things that happen as a result of that. And this will be preparation for us in our prayers to God that he would stop the awful slaughter, the murder of pre-born infants in our country.

All right. The first thing: How long will all this end? Well, first of all, when all the house of Israel laments her state—when all the house of Israel laments her wicked state.

So what we read in 1 Samuel 7, we get the kind of the background tying it to the previous narrative. The ark is away. It’s been there a long time. And then it says that after these 20 years, all the house of Israel lamented after the Lord. Well, there’s the beginning. There’s the beginning.

By the grace of God’s spirit—we can’t work it up within ourselves. By the grace of God’s spirit, the people of God—all of them, it says—all the house of Israel laments after the Lord.

Now, I’m going to be talking about things that in this text are characterized as applying to all the church. When we look for societal reformation and big change to the geopolitical structure and the benevolent structure of the world, we need all the Christians doing this stuff. Now, we don’t wait for them. We make it real in our own lives. And so these things have immediate application to us individually, to us as a church. But then really, it’s going to take the whole church reawakening and repenting in this way to affect this kind of change.

So first of all, there’s a lamentation over our state. They’ve been oppressed by the Philistines, and they lament over it. This word “lament” is only used here, but we know from cognates of it that it means to cry out with a loud voice. It doesn’t mean be a little sorry. It doesn’t mean hang our heads a little bit. It means to weep and to wail before the Lord God.

So repentance begins with mourning and lamenting our state. And you know, I don’t know exactly what it was like for them. I know what it’s like for us. We’ve got a lot of built-in comforts in our world. It’s easy to forget about the millions—literally millions—of children who have been murdered over the last 32 years. It’s easy to forget about what an offense that is to God and what a horrible effect it can have mentally on the women who are conned into—for the most part—doing this to their own children.

You know, I’ve known people—we probably all know people—that have had abortions, women, and we know the devastating effect it can have.

Now, Samuel—once they repent here, he’s going to give them the assurance of forgiveness from God. He’s going to judge Israel and give them repentance. You know, if there are any women here who have participated in the sin of abortion, or men who have participated in that, you need to know you’re forgiven. And Samuel will affirm that to these people here as they lament their state. So there’s a lamenting, there’s a weeping over our sin that is an evidence of godly repentance at work.

You know, we sort of say, “Well, it’s a political problem. We got to take care of it.” Or, “You know, we kind of hide this thing off,” despite its being the 2,000-pound elephant in the middle of the room—the murder of these children. And it points to—we should lament the fact that, I don’t know, 90% or so of people turn their children over to a godless education system, funded by public funds that are not right. We can’t do nothing about that. We’re in a hopeless state before God.

Even the Republicans that we’ve elected here in Oregon seem more pro-school than the liberals. We should lament that. We should lament the fact that when we talk about bringing God’s judgment—killing people in the exercise of God’s judgment—we should lament the fact that people think that is horrific and abominable and a horrible thing. Now, there are some Christians who try to make a case for that, and that’s okay. We can have those conversations. But that’s not what’s going on in our country.

What’s going on in our country is that instead of our first purpose being to glorify God and enjoy him forever, our goal in this country has become to glorify man and make his life enjoyable forever. We’re humanists at our core. We should lament that. It’s an oppression and it stinks in the nostrils of God.

We should repent and lament our own personal involvement in these things. Not directly maybe in some of these grievous sins, but if we’re involved in sexual sin, we should understand the relationship of that in Romans to homosexuality. And of course, its relationship to abortion. If we don’t value our children, we should see how that’s connected to people that don’t value their children and actually kill them before they come out of the womb. See, we’re involved in this sin. We’re involved in this idolatry. We should lament over our pitiful state as a country, and we should lament over our culpability in that as well.

There was a man who wrote about this—this guy’s name is Lancelot Andrews from his private devotions. This is taken from a work on Bunyan’s characters. You know, Bunyan had a man, Mr. Wet Tears, who was one of the characters in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and his father was Mr. Repentance. So the idea is that biblical repentance brings forth fruit of wet tears before God. This man writing about it said this:

“I need more grief, oh God. I plainly need it. I can sin much, but I cannot correspondingly repent. Oh Lord, give me a molten heart. Give me tears. Give me a fountain of tears. Give me the grace of tears. Drop down ye heavens from the dryness of my heart. Give me, oh Lord, this saving grace. No grace of all the graces would be more welcome to me. If I may not water my couch with my tears, nor wash my feet with my tears, at least give me, Lord God, one or two little tears that thou mayest put into thy pot bottle and write in thy book.”

We should pray that the Lord God would give us tears—a lamentation, a crying out to him over our sins. That’s how it starts in this narrative.

Secondly, all this will end when all the house of Israel puts away our idols and recommits themselves to total service to Yahweh.

So the lamentation is followed up. You know, many pastors will say, “Repent. Repent. They cry in tears. Our children cry in tears. Great. You’re forgiven. That’s it.” But Samuel drives it home. You see, he takes the beginning of repentance and the strickenness of people over their state and over their own sinfulness and drives it home to make sure it ends up in a turning away from idols.

Verse 3: Samuel spoke to all the house of Israel. Notice the emphasis again. It’s a corporate deal going on. “Saying, ‘If you return to the Lord with all your hearts, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you. Prepare your hearts for the Lord and serve him only.’”

It’s kind of a doubling up thing. We’re supposed to return to the Lord with all our hearts, put away the idols, and in doing this, we’re preparing ourselves and serving God only. “He’ll deliver you from the hand of the Philistines.” How do we get out of this? How long till it ends? Well, when we turn from our idols and turn to serve God alone.

“So the children of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtaroth and served the Lord only.”

So we have: prepare—he says by putting away. He says return and put away. They prepare themselves by serving him alone, by putting away their idols. They do this. They prepare by putting away idols and then they turn to unitary service—with all their hearts, mind, soul, and strength—to serve Yahweh and him alone. There’s a commitment not just of a little portion of our lives. There’s a commitment of the entirety of our lives to God that is necessary to see this turn in our culture round about us.

So you know, “put away the Baals and the Ashtaroth.” Well, we’re not worshiping those totem poles and stuff. Well, neither were they for the most part. It’s interesting that the Philistines were descendants of Mizraim, which is Egypt essentially. So the Philistines are like new Egyptians. And the Egyptians—when God brings his people out of Egypt, he brings ten plagues against Egypt. But he’s bringing them against—and there are various texts in the Bible that tell us this explicitly—against the gods of Egypt.

If we look at those plagues, we can associate them with various gods of Egypt. The importance for us is that when Israel is described in the New Testament as being essentially Egypt, we’ve got Herod—a new Pharaoh—striking out at Jesus the way Pharaoh struck out at Moses. All these connections: “I brought my son out of Egypt.” Well, partly that’s Jesus going down to Egypt and coming out. But partly the point is that Egypt is being overturned.

When John the Baptist is going to have Israel repent and be baptized, they’ve got to leave the land on the other side of the Jordan, be baptized, and come back in. It’s a new exodus. Leave Egypt, come back to Canaan. You see? So we always become Egypt. But you know, it doesn’t seem like we’ve got raw images that we were worshiping. Well, neither were the Israelites 2,000 years ago.

But what they were doing was worshiping the natural forces of nature. Baalism is force worship. It’s worshiping the natural forces of nature. Ashtaroth is the female side of that whole thing. So the sun and the moon are sort of what they worship, and all these other forces in nature.

I saw a beautiful movie last night called The New World. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Christians were generally depicted as horrible, of course, and the Indians were wonderful. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But it’s typical of our day when there seems to be a resurgence of Indian worship. What did the Indians worship? They worship spirits and forces of nature. They were baalists and worshipers of Ashtaroth. They worshiped the forces of nature—the sun, the river, the wind, the spirit—all this stuff.

And so you know, all of these are forces of God. It’s easy for us to get confused and think they’re actually worshiping God. But that’s just because we’re all messed up in our own thinking. We become, in many ways, practical baalists. We don’t look to God personally for assistance, power, and ability to live our lives, etc. We look to the forces of nature. You know, we look to silicon one way or the other. One could say the natural forces of sand and silicon to give us our delights and pleasures.

Now, there’s technology that’s good—based upon service to Yahweh. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re worshiping nature and the forces of nature. We’re humanists, as I said earlier.

You know, I like to call this day “anti-abortion day of the Lord.” And many churches call it “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” And I like to call it “anti-abortion day of the Lord” because I think that we’re being deceived by this terminology. I don’t think it was like, “Gee, this is a better theological term.” When we started using this term 15 years ago—whatever it was—the anti-abortion movement began as an anti-abortion movement. Now people in this church young enough don’t remember that. They’ve only ever heard “pro-life.”

Well, that’s a new political rhetoric that was developed 15 years ago because we wanted to be politically savvy and cool and not offend people. So we wanted to be “pro-life” and not anti-anything, you see. And now there’s some important truth to that. We’re going to talk a little bit here about the importance of affirming life and not just asking for God’s judgments, but then reaching out in benevolence as part of what we do in relationship to this stuff.

But you see, “sanctity of human life” just reinforces the incipient humanism of our age. Everybody’s into the sanctity of human life. They’re just not going to admit that’s life before it gets born. And then they’re going to kind of fudge about that, too. Our problem is not that people don’t value human life. Our problem is that people don’t value God first and foremost.

Now, you know, when you don’t do that, God turns you over to various kinds of insanity, and you do start to become anti-life. “All them that hate me love death,” Proverbs say. So there is a culture of death that ensues. But our primary problem is we’re humanists. We’re not worshiping transcendent things so much, but mankind himself. And “sanctity of human life” seems to feed the sinfulness of being good humanists that our culture has developed. That’s why I think it’s important not to use that term, or at least meld it with anti-abortion.

The law is negative. The law says what you can’t do and gives you freedom then of the things you can do. When we try to make everything positive, all we’re doing is setting ourselves up for a law that has to tell us everything that we can do.

So in any event, we’re anti-abortion. We believe in capital punishment—not ultimately only as a punishment against people that strike out at the image of God in other people. That’s certainly part of the death penalty laws of the Old Testament, but there are a lot of other ones as well: for blasphemy, violation of the Sabbath, adultery, rape, etc.

See, the death penalty is the reason it’s going away—why it’s almost completely gone. It’s gone completely in Europe. You can’t be a member of the European Union affirming the death penalty. It’s gone. Won’t come back for a good long time unless God does something really different. And it’s almost totally gone in this country. Yeah, we’ve had a few done in California recently, but it’s almost gone. Why? Because the country has affirmed the sanctity of human life—not in relationship to God’s law, but human life is the ultimate value. And whenever we do that, the Lord God is going to curse us because we’re not putting his honor and glory first.

The reaffirmation of the death penalty is so important because it affirms the holiness and the glory of God ultimately, not the ultimate value being human life.

So here we’ve got to repent of the specific idols. There are these general idols of our culture—humanism. And there are specific idols as well that each of us gather in our hearts. Matthew Henry in commenting on this verse said, you know, we’ve got to strike out at the darling sins that we engage ourselves in. Those are the tough ones. It’s easy to repent of a general humanism or, you know, homosexuality or something that we’re not prone to. But you need to know the specific sins that you’re prone to.

You see, and a condition of changing the culture round about us, a predecessor to these prayers of maledictions—to have each one here today affirm that they are intending to turn from the idols that they struggle with, that we each struggle with, and turn to God to serve him only.

Mr. Presumption—another character in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—he repented and brought his sin to the cross with his past. Then he left the cross to commit the same sin at the first opportunity. Dante has a portrayal of the reprobate. The reprobate is the man who is repenting in Dante’s imagery, but he has one eye as he repents on the next opportunity to do that same sin. So the picture is a guy repenting, but he’s got one eye looking at the cross, one eye looking over at the sin that he’s repenting of, and he’s going to do it again.

God says habitual sin like that is the very particular thing that we have to address today before you enter into these prayers of malediction against others. You clean that sin out of your life. You commit to God afresh to strike out at that habitual sin. You plead to him to deliver you. You turn from that particular Baal or Ashtaroth—whatever it is in your heart—whatever you’re prone to. And may the Lord God grant you to see the importance of not having an eye on the next opportunity to do it, but rather you turn from the cross to serve God wholeheartedly.

2 Corinthians 7 says—and remember what Leonard Cohen said: “When they said repent, I wonder what they meant.”

2 Corinthians 7 says, “Godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted, but the sorrow of the world produces death.” Everybody’s sorry about things. But is it a godly sorrow toward life? Well, how do we know? Well, observe this very thing. He says that you sorrowed in a godly manner. What diligence it produced in you! What clearing of yourselves! See, not for the moment so you could go do the same sin. You wanted to clear that sin out of your life. What indignation against yourself and your own sinfulness! See? What fear, knowing our sin brings the oppression, the things that cause us to lament. What vehement desire to serve God wholeheartedly! See, turning away from our veils and our idols. What zeal! What vindication in all things! You proved yourself to be clear in this matter.

This repentance is to be a repentance that strikes—as Matthew Henry said—at the darling of our sin. So we’re not going to see things change until all the house of Israel turns from her Baals and her Ashtaroth and recommits to serve God wholeheartedly.

Third: When will all this stop? When all Israel publicly acknowledges our sins and renews covenant with God.

Verse 5: Samuel said, “Gather all Israel to Mizpah. I will pray to the Lord for you.” So they gathered together at Mizpah, drew water, poured it out before the Lord, and they fasted that day and said, “We have sinned against the Lord. And Samuel judged the children of Israel.”

So see, they begin with a lamentation over their state. Samuel drives home the repentance by saying, “Turn from the specific sins you’re engaged in and serve God wholeheartedly.” The people then say, “Yeah, we’re leaving this and we’re turning to this.” And then Samuel says, “Come together in convocation. Bring everybody together to Mizpah. We’re going to renew the covenant. And as part of that covenant renewal, there’s a specific confession: We have sinned against the Lord.”

That’s what we do every Lord’s day. And that’s what we’re to do as well in our lives as we sin against him. We’re to say, “We have sinned against Yahweh. My fault, my own fault, my own most grievous fault.”

We were studying the life of Saul and David in Bible class this last week, continuing on in Samuel. The only difference between Saul and David—they’re a lot alike, you know. They’re both big and tall. Saul’s a little bigger. David was big and handsome. Saul took care of his father’s flocks. David took care of his flocks. Saul cared about the emotional distress that looking for the flocks might produce in his dad. So you’ve got this whole father-son thing, Saul trying to honor Dad. At the beginning of the story, Saul’s given a new heart. The text says he’s a meek man. He doesn’t try to assert his authority over rebels, etc. He’s like David. But he was unlike David in one very specific way.

And it wasn’t that he sinned. David sinned. David committed murder. David committed adultery. The difference is not that they sinned or didn’t sin. The difference is Saul didn’t repent and David did. Saul blamed the people. Saul blamed Samuel. “What I did—you—I waited the seven days. You took too long. Someone hadn’t sacrificed. Well, the people were leaving me. So I had to hold them together and worship God.” See? Well, you know, it’s always had an excuse. Always had an excuse.

And at the end of the day, the only way this thing is going to turn around in our country, and the only way we’re going to be relieved from the oppression of our Philistines today—our Ted Kennedys and other politicians who have horrible moral character and yet refuse to see the importance of affirming a godly man like the man that’s been nominated to our Supreme Court. It’s just astonishing to me the sort of wickedness we now have in the halls of Washington DC, and in Salem too, I’m sure. We’ve seen some of that too over the last few months and years—wickedness, oppressing God’s people.

But the only way it’s going to turn around is if we begin with ourselves lamenting to God, turning away from our idols, committing to serve him, and making a good confession of our sins: “We have sinned against the Lord.”

David didn’t say, “I’ve sinned against Bathsheba.” He had. David didn’t say he sinned against Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite. Though he had. But David says in Psalm 51, “Against thee, against thee only have I sinned and done this great evil in thy sight.” David was not a humanist. He wasn’t primarily concerned about the effect on other people. It’s important. It’s always important. And I’m not denying that. But the most important thing is the glory and honor of God. And that’s what we sin against. And ultimately, that has to be at the heart and core of our repentance before God. Not just being sorry for circumstances, not being sorry how it’s affected other people, but being sorry in terms of how we disobeyed and brought shame to the name of God.

Hugh Latimer, you know, was probably the greatest preacher of the English Reformation. Catholic and converted to the Reformation. Before Latimer came to faith in Christ, an acquaintance of his, Thomas Bilney, tried hard to speak to him about the gospel. Bilney was a reformer, preached the gospel to Latimer. But Bilney had no luck. He kept talking to him, talking to him, and Latimer refused to listen. He was stubborn. And Bilney realized he would get nowhere with the direct approach.

So here’s what Bilney did. Latimer was a priest, a Roman Catholic priest, and he heard confessions. So Bilney went to Latimer and asked if he would hear his confession. He did. Bilney there in the confessional confessed his sins. Latimer listened to this confession, this repentance of humility. And here’s what he wrote later on: “I learned more by this confession than in many years before. From that time forward, I began to smell the word of God, and I forsook the doctors of the school.”

What turned Latimer from an idolatrous, unsaved Roman Catholic to one of the greatest Protestant Reformation preachers in England was hearing a godly confession by this man who was trying to witness to him.

May the Lord God grant us a lamentation, a turning from idols and turning to God. But may he grant us more than anything else a sincerity of confession before God that we would say indeed, that we would weep before God and say that we have sinned against him and against him only.

They pour out water. We don’t know what that means, but it seems to be related to the idea—and the fasting—of death. You know, we’ve come to the end of ourselves. We repent before God. And then in the context of that, it says that Samuel judged Israel. What does it mean? It means that it’s a judgment of absolution. The preacher absolves God’s people and assures them of their forgiveness, as we have here as well.

Fourth: When will all this stop? When we don’t turn from God in our fear of the resultant stepped-up opposition, but rather seek his salvation.

The point is that in the narrative here, this renewed commitment to God and true repentance brings forth opposition, and the people get fearful of that. Right? We read in verse 7: “When the Philistines heard that the children of Israel had gathered together at Mizpah, the lords of the Philistines went up against Israel. That’s what’s going to happen, and does happen, in our country too. And people see the church of Jesus Christ getting serious relative to their service to God. They understand the implications of it, even if we don’t. And it’s going to energize the opposition to God’s people—the Philistines, the ones who want to oppress God and his people.

So our very actions of public repentance before God will produce opposition. “When the children of Israel heard of it, they were afraid of the Philistines. So the children of Israel said to Samuel, ‘Do not cease to cry out to the Lord our God for us that he may save us from the hand of the Philistines.’”

You see, fear is not spoken against here. They do the right thing with fear. Fear is supposed to drive us to cry out to God and to have our pastors and preachers cry out to God for us.

So our repentance, our getting serious about the faith and turning from our idols, will energize opposition to the church. And it has the last 20 years. And then the question is, are we going to get fearful? Well, that isn’t the question. You know, you’re going to get fearful when tough times happen. And if you know the government starts coming against us, or if people start oppressing you, or as they did to Pastor—Mehenny in San Francisco and the homosexuals try to torture your house, etc. You know, fear is not a bad thing. Everybody gets fearful.

The question is, are you going to be brave in the midst of that fear? Are you going to do the right thing? And specifically, the right way to handle our fear of the circumstances round about us is to turn to God. You know, David Spears will become a member hopefully next week. He’ll tell you everybody’s afraid of battle. But you know, you’ve got to do the right thing. He’ll also tell you that the way to get courage in battle is to be surrounded by other men who are also trying to get courage in battle. It’s the corporate emphasis. It’s the camaraderie. It’s the church. It’s the team. It’s the group together that bolsters each other up to have confidence.

So here all of Israel is united and asking their preacher to cry out to God for them. They know where to turn. They know what the purpose of the fear is—to cause them to cry out to God. So you know, the fear is going to come. The question is, are we going to turn from it or are we going to process it correctly? Are we going to, in our fear, turn away from God, that which has produced the difficulty?

Matthew Henry said this: “We may be in God’s way and yet meet with distress. Nay, when sinners begin to repent and reform, they must expect that Satan will muster all his force against them and set his instruments on work to the utmost to oppose and discourage them.”

Commitment to serve God will be followed by testing—and usually a right severe testing. And the question is, will we, in spite of fear, continue to serve God and look to him in continual prayer. Samuel’s a good preacher. He preaches the word to them, tells them what they’ve got to do, and then he prays to God for them. The sermon and the prayer, you see, go together in this narrative.

So they do that, and Samuel answers, and he does this thing.

Fifth: The characteristic of when these events turn around. How long will all this go on in our country? Well, it’ll turn around when all Israel engages in liturgical warfare.

That’s what happens next in the narrative. Verse 9: “Samuel took a suckling lamb, offered it as a whole burnt offering.” That’s an ascension offering to the Lord. Transformation, right? So it’s not so much a covering for sin. He’s already assured them of that. It’s the transformation of the people of God into holy warriors for him.

“Samuel cried out to the Lord for Israel. So he does this, and the Lord answers him. As Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, as he’s worshiping, as he’s leading the people of God in worship, the Philistines drew near to battle against Israel. But the Lord thundered with a loud thunder upon the Philistines that day and so confused them, that they were overcome before Israel.”

Liturgical warfare. They don’t begin with physical warfare. They begin with liturgical warfare. The text tells us that as they’re worshiping, it energizes the Philistine attack against them, but it also energizes God to strike out at them.

When we come together in worship of God, as we plead the blood of the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world, and as we see ourselves transformed through God’s sacrifice and his word, as we cry out to him in worship, God changes the world—not just because he changes you to send you out into the world, but as we’re worshiping, the world changes. As they’re worshiping, the enemies get more enemy-like, but as they’re worshiping, the power of God goes out. In this case, with thunders and lightnings—a storm, as we read about in Psalm 83. God struck at them.

You see, this is why they sang songs like Psalm 83. They knew their history. They knew this is how it works. We worship, we sing, and God brings temporal judgments against those round about us. He brings psychological judgments. He causes them to become fearful, to strike out. He brings confusion to them, and he brings temporal judgments.

When all the church—every sanctity of human life Sunday, or anti-abortion day of the Lord—comes together and laments her sorrowful state and commits to turn from her idols and turn toward God and confesses her sin before God, and doesn’t become fearful of what the enemy will do, but instead engages in the liturgical warfare, then things change dramatically. Then the victory is won.

This is the turning point right here. It happens in worship. That’s when God strikes the Philistines. Okay? And this is why in our day and age, covenant renewal worship and its resurgence is a wonderful thing. We have a denomination that we’re part of, Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, that understands liturgical warfare, understands that the battle is won definitively by God’s hand alone, by his grace toward us as we worship him and cry out for deliverance.

That’s why our anti-abortion efforts begin with prayers of malediction against his enemies and the enemies of children and the enemies of his people, as well as the confession of our own sin. This is where it all starts. This is where it not just starts—this is where it definitively happens. The Lord God discomfits them. So they were overcome before Israel. God defeats them in the context of worship.

And as our liturgy we’ll talk about today in the book of Revelation—it’s the same thing. That’s why that picture on the front of your orders of worship. Worshiping is going on, and God sends forth his ministers, his angels, to strike at the demonic forces and the Philistines amongst us.

And as we come together and worship God, and they know we’re worshiping God and we’re praying that God destroy them and deliver us and relieve us of our sins and make us wholehearted servants of his again, then God says in the context of that liturgical warfare, he goes out with his spirit and he brings judgment against those that would oppose him.

But it doesn’t end there. Israel is to engage in liturgical worship. You know, Samuel and his—Saul, Solomon, and his prayer of dedication for the temple in 2 Chronicles 6 says, you know, when God’s people are defeated in battle and they cry to you, to your holy place, to your temple, hear from heaven and deliver them. You see, this is the normal way it works. When the temple is initiated—we’re the temple of God. The New Testament tells us. This is the way it’s supposed to work. We find ourselves oppressed by Philistines. We cry out to him. We confess our sins. We ask for deliverance. And he’ll hear from that temple, from his holy temple in heaven, and he’ll bring judgments against his enemies and he’ll bring deliverance to his people.

That’s what we do today. So we do it every Lord’s day—engage in liturgical warfare. But it ain’t enough.

The next verse tells us in verse 11: “The men of Israel went out of Mizpah.” This is a problem we can fall into. Having seen the wonderful beauties of liturgical worship, some of us—that’s all we want to do. We just want to do it on Sunday. You know, we want to bang that gong, as Wilson talked about when he was here in October, and strike out that tone from God’s worship against the gates of hell. We bang against those gates and destroy them. But that isn’t the end of it. That’s how the gates get definitively fractured and defeated. But there’s a mopping-up operation that we must enter into.

They don’t stay at Mizpah. “Get out of here. Now depart from here. There’s demonic, overcome people down there that you’ve got to help—not just by worship, but by work.”

And this text shows us the transition from worship to work. Worship starts it. Worship doesn’t end it.

“The men of Israel went out of Mizpah, pursued the Philistines, drove them back as far as below Bethcar. And then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer. ‘Thus far the Lord has helped us.’”

Sixth: When will it stop? Well, when not just stopping at worship, Israel—all the church—puts her worship into action, engaging in non-liturgical warfare. Warfare that is determined definitively by liturgical actions, but then it’s non-liturgical in the rest of the week. We’ve got to go out there and do things. We’ve got to engage in political action if we want an end to abortion, right?

We’ve got to try to, you know, elect people that will promote judges—as the current president is doing—to try to chip away at this horrific sin. We have to try to elect members of Congress, members of the Oregon legislature, who will roll back abortion. And not just abortion, but we’ll try to implement more and more the death penalty, eventually eliminate funding for public schools—all this stuff.

We have to engage in non-liturgical warfare in the week. And part of that is political action.

Please pray about a new thing we’re doing. We’re going to try to—we’ve seen the devastation that judges produce in our state. And we’ve got a meeting a week from this Friday with an ex-administrative pastor of East Hill Foursquare Church who also happens to be a judge and an attorney. We’re going to talk to him more about putting out a judicial candidates voters guide in May. You know, in Oregon, almost all the judges are voted on in the primary election, and there’s a bunch of them, and nobody knows anything about them. I don’t. I never know who I’m voting for.

Part of this non-liturgical warfare is letting people know who these judges are so they can engage in the warfare of political action and try to remove improper judges—judges who won’t rule for justice and goodness—and insert good ones. And part of our action is to do that. I don’t know why you know, groups that have a million dollars or more every year in funds don’t do it. But we have almost no money, Peaceful Education Association, but it’s worth doing, and we’re going to do it. I’m tired of waiting for somebody else to do it. We’re going to do it. It’s how we engage in non-liturgical warfare based on what we worship.

But, you know, it isn’t just stopping things. I mean, you know, it’s not just anti-abortion. It is an affirmation of the wondrous beauty of God’s image bearer, of life. And so we have the benevolent phase of the non-liturgical warfare. It is non-liturgical warfare to go down to the PRC, volunteer, and help some poor woman who’s being deluded by every authority figure she’s got in her life—typically, telling her that this is not really a baby—to keep her from making an error that could haunt her the rest of her life.

You see, I mean, the child will be okay. The Lord God will take care of that baby, right? We believe that God is gracious, and we think those kids probably end up in heaven, all of them. But the woman—you see—we think—we forget about—she will suffer as long as she lives guilt. And she’ll have to process that guilt somehow. There are all kinds of women walking around our country now who have just gone nuts because of their sin against God.

Now, Christian women receive forgiveness of those sins, and they can put it behind them. All of us do these horrible things—have done them in our past. God says you can—you can be assured that as God judges you today, it’s a judgment of absolution. But we want to stop this stuff. And one of the ways we engage in this non-liturgical warfare is through benevolent actions—to go and help, talk to women, give them things to affirm their pregnancies and their birth of their children, carry them to term, adoption.

We’ve had that wonderful illustration here in the Evans family to adopt kids. You see, this is non-liturgical warfare, but it’s warfare nonetheless—affirming the need to care for the children that God has brought into this world.

Samuel is a picture of adoption, of course, right? That’s what he is. He’s adopted by Eli, so to speak. So adoption is another thing we’re going to encourage. Praise God that, you know, Sarah Apprentice is engaged as staff now at the PRC. We’re going to have a volunteer from the PRC today after dinner during the announcement time downstairs to talk a little bit about the impact of the PRC work in her life—helping her and how we can help other women.

You know, don’t leave today by just praying a prayer, asking for God to do something. Commit yourselves to some step of non-liturgical warfare in your life—political action, benevolent action, whatever it may be. Hence, what these people do. Don’t just stay at Mizpah, and don’t leave Mizpah without an idea to engage the enemy. They left Mizpah specifically to pursue the Philistines and to engage in the mopping-up exercise that they had to do. Real and significant.

So that’s when it’s going to turn around—when we engage in liturgical warfare. But then when we take that liturgical warfare and engage in non-liturgical warfare.

And then seventh, this will stop when we remain diligent to maintain the victory.

Verse 13: “The Philistines were subdued. They did not come anymore into the territory of Israel. And the hand of the Lord was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel.”

So it isn’t just enough to win today’s battle. We want to be diligent to continue to restrain evil in the world by striking out at those people that are evil. We want to get the death penalty going and keep it going. Hopefully, fewer people have to be executed over the years, but you know, to affirm the glory and honor of God and to keep at our diligent action—to keep at the political action, not letting, you know, wolves creep into the political halls—keep at the benevolent action of assisting women with their pregnancies.

If it wasn’t for in some degree the failures of the Christian church to minister to women who were having back-alley abortions—they really did occur, folks. You see, that’s what spawned our modern abortion movement. And how can we combat that? We can keep at our work. Once we make abortion illegal again, by helping women—not disdaining them because of their sexual sin. Sure, we sin. But to help them carry, not to commit a more worse sin on top of that, you see.

So our benevolent actions have to continue. We’ve got to continue to press in terms of these things. That’s when all this will stop. When we cry out to God, when we lament our situation, when we turn from our idols and turn back and commit ourselves to God—that’s what we’re going to do here when you come forward with your offerings, right? When we reaffirm that it is indeed our sin that has brought this stuff to pass.

When we engage in liturgical warfare, asking for God to change the world and believing that he’ll do it. And then when we take what we’ve learned at Mizpah as we go about pursuing the Philistines as part of our necessary work. And as we keep going in that action—this is what. When all the church does these things, that’s what turned the situation here. And by way of illustration for us, that’s when all this will end.

And I don’t think it’ll end until then. Why should it? It’s a judgment of God against the house of Israel. That’s what they had to understand. The problem wasn’t the Philistines. They were the problem. The problem in Canaan was not the Philistines. The problem were the people of God, who were idolatrous, who were living too fat and easy with the Philistines in charge, who didn’t want to affirm the glory of God and didn’t want to engage in battle. They were the problem.

That’s why judgment begins at the house of the Lord and then moves out to the Philistines, as it does here.

Now, let’s look at the wonderful blessings of such a state when we do these things, very quickly.

First of all, we have the defeat of the enemies. Of course, we’ve talked about that. The enemies are defeated. That’s one of the wonderful blessings of this movement of the spirit of God.

Secondly, there’s a restoration of territory. Verse 14: “Then the cities which the Philistines had taken from Israel were restored to Israel from Ekron to Gath, and Israel recovered its territory from the hands of the Philistines.”

So there’s a restoration of proper authority in the land, given back to God’s people as they do this stuff. There’s defeat of the enemies, but there’s an influence that’s extended. We are restored back territory that we’ve lost. I hear it’s geographic territory. We could think in terms of political territory, other kinds of territory as well—intellectual territory—but territory is restored back when these things happen. The worship of God increases. Gath, you know, there’s a Gittite who will become part of the worship of God because Gath has been restored to Israel. It’s now a worshiping city again. You see? So there’s a restoration of lost territory that occurs.

And then finally, there’s peace with our neighbors. Also, there was peace between Israel and the Amorites. Well, that’s an odd thing, isn’t it? It’s important for us. Let me touch briefly on it here. The Amorites were the original inhabitants of Canaan. The Philistines were a particular group of bad folks, like Egyptians, who were oppressing not just the Israelites, but the Amorites, too.

Now, the Amorites didn’t believe in Yahweh yet, but they were peaceable people. They were middle ground. Well, we don’t like middle ground. You know, “you’ve got to be against.” Well, that’s true in one sense. But God says we’re to pray for the peace of the city. In that peace, we can pray for the salvation of people. We can live out our lives in normal ways, not having to worry about the slaughter that goes on at abortion clinics. You know, we can work, live out our lives peacefully, but in such a way as to bring salvation to everyone. That’s what it says in 1 Timothy, right? “God desires the salvation of all men.”

So there are wicked people, and then there are Amorites. And I would say that most of the women, for instance, who end up committing abortion are in the category of Amorites. They’re oppressed by Philistine rulers, Philistine teachers, Philistine National Education Association rulers who control the teachers to push a pro-abortion mentality. They’re oppressed by Philistine parents in some cases, Philistine pastors, Hophni and Phinehas, who tell these women it isn’t really a baby. You see, they’re oppressed by all those things.

We want to throw off the oppressor so that we may be at peace with the Amorites, and in that peace, evangelize the Amorites. So: defeat of the enemy, restoration of territory, peace with our neighbors. Christianity believes in a peacefulness—not conquering through—or not evangelizing through conquering ultimately, but evangelizing through the proclamation of the word. And that’s the idea here. Peace with the Amorites so that they may hear the word of God and may stream up to the city of God in praise and giving him the glory.

We have to differentiate between Amorites and Philistines and what we do and what we say and what we pray.

I said Leonard Cohen said, “When I said repent, I wonder what they meant.” Well, this is what God means by repent. He means all these things—serving him wholeheartedly, saying with sincerity, “It’s my sin, my sin alone, my most grievous sin. See, nobody else’s fault. This is our fault. And the situation of the world we’re in is our fault. God says we’re the controllers of the rulers of the world now.”

And we repent before God and ask him to strike out at his enemies. And we pursue those enemies as we leave this place through political action and benevolent work. And then we become at peace with our neighbors so that we can evangelize them with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

These are all pictures of one thing. Now, there’s just one thing necessary: Repent. But what does it mean? It means all these aspects that today’s story shows. And one thing it means is getting ready to pray this prayer of malediction against God’s enemies. And to do that, you know, through a confession of our own sin and seeing that we’re culpable.

Let’s do that before God now.

Father, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you for this day. We thank you for your great victory. We thank you for Ebenezer—that stone, that memorial to your work. Lord God, we know that we are here because of your help in this country. You’ve established us, Lord God, as a city on a hill, a light shining forth. But we know that light has become diminished, and that we now have oppressors over us. And as a result of that, we see wickedness, Lord God, round about in our land. We see adultery, homosexuality, abortion.

We do pray, Lord God, you’d prepare our own hearts. Help us to see our culpability as a people individually and corporately. And then in terms of the whole church in America, for what’s happened here. Help us to see that the power to change this does not lie in the Philistines. They’re going to act according to their nature, Lord God. But it lies in you moving in the context of your people repenting.

Bring us to repentance, Father. Help us to lament the sinful situation that we find ourselves in. Help us to lament our own sins. Help us to confess before you, Lord God, that we are practical idolaters in so many ways. And help us as we come forward to commit ourselves afresh to totally serve you, to wipe out those darling sins that we harbor in our hearts and in our homes.

Help us, Lord God, to pray in such a way then—as a forgiven people—that you would bring your judgments upon the Philistines of our day, bringing them to repentance or removing them from off the face of the world.

We pray, Lord God, for the deliverance of the Amorites—the people that are tricked, fooled, deceived, pressured into horrific sin. They still have their culpability, Lord God. But we know that those who are over them in terms of the church, state, and family are more culpable. Help us, Father, to prepare our hearts before you, not seeking our own vengeance, Lord God, but we’re asking that you might indeed avenge this horrible sin that goes on in our country.

In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.