Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: “It’s About Time to Fight Effectively”
## 1 Samuel 7:1-15 | September 18, 2011
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Text for today is found in 1 Samuel 7, verses 1-15. 1 Samuel chapter 7, 1-15. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. 1 Samuel 7, beginning at verse 1.

And all the men of Kiriath Jearim came and took up the ark of the Lord and brought it to the house of Abinadab on the hill. And they consecrated his son Eleazar to have charge of the ark of the Lord. From the day that the ark was lodged at Kiriath Jearim, a long time passed, some twenty years, and all the house of Israel lamented after the Lord.

And Samuel said to all the house of Israel, “If you are returning to the Lord with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you, and direct your heart to the Lord, and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” So the people of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtaroth, and they serve the Lord only. Then Samuel said, “Gather all Israel at Mizpah, and I will pray to the Lord for you.” So they gathered at Mizpah and drew water and poured it out before the Lord and fasted on that day and said there, “We have sinned against the Lord.” And Samuel judged the people of Israel at Mizpah.

Now when the Philistines heard that the people of Israel had gathered at Mizpah, the lords of the Philistines went up against Israel. And when the people of Israel heard of it, they were afraid of the Philistines. And the people 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.” So Samuel took a nursing lamb and offered it as a whole burnt offering to the Lord.

And Samuel cried out to the Lord for Israel, and the Lord answered him. As Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the Philistines drew near to attack Israel. But the Lord thundered with a mighty sound that day against the Philistines and threw them into confusion, and they were routed before Israel. And the men of Israel went out from Mizpah and pursued the Philistines and struck them as far as below Beth Car.

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer. For he said, “Till now the Lord has helped us.” So the Philistines were subdued and did not again enter the territory of Israel. And the hand of the Lord was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel. The cities that the Philistines had taken from Israel were restored to Israel, from Ekron to Gath. And Israel delivered their territory from the hand of the Philistines.

There was peace also between Israel and the Amorites. Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. Help us to understand it and then to make application to our day and age and our times. We thank you that our Savior has called us to discern the times in which we live. And we pray that you would bless us with an understanding of your word that it might glorify you, that our understanding of it may fill our lives with satisfaction and joy and inform us how to live them. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

It’s unusual to return to 9/11 this Sunday for my sermon. But that’s what I decided to do. I decided to do that because first, I preached a sermon in Sacramento last week. As some of you know, I was down there for a week and a half, taught at their family camp, preached twice for them, and the eight messages were all on “It’s About Time”—the fourth commandment—and how the Old Testament Sabbath informs the Lord’s Day.

And so the theme was “It’s About Time to Take Back Sunday.” It’s about time to replace the commercial liturgy of our day and age with worship liturgies once a week so that we can reform what we do in commerce. It’s about time to let go of our lives once a week and trust God. It’s about time to take holiness seriously by setting aside the one day that God says we’re to hallow and sanctify. It’s about time for a lot of things.

And it’s about time that we learned and continue to relearn in this congregation how to wage war. God says he’ll train our hands for war. He says that in at least a couple of different places—actually in two places in the Psalms—in Psalm 144, verses 1 and 2: “Blessed is the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle. He is my steadfast love and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, and he is whom I take refuge in, who subdues peoples under me.”

I love, you know, whenever we look at these verses in context, it helps us. We’re going to talk today a little bit about Ebenezer, the stone that was set up. And I was at a wedding Friday evening and they sang Dan Prenis’s favorite hymn, which has a line in it, “Here I Raise My Ebenezer.” And really, you’d have a hard time—the song’s a great song, don’t get me wrong—but I doubt that we bring into the song an understanding of what this rock means.

Ebenezer means “stone of help,” because the Lord has helped us. Helped us what? Well, here the Lord is a rock and he trains our hands for war and my fingers for battle to fight off Philistines in the case of 1 Samuel 7. And yet there’s no problem with the psalmist immediately going on to verse two. He is my steadfast love. Love in combat. There’s no problem for God’s word helping us to put these things in connection.

And in fact, love is the ultimate attribute of God, and it’s love for God that causes us to want to see open, virulent enemies of his defeated. We’re talking in 1 Samuel 7 about Philistines. And it’s interesting because at the end of the text it says they have peace with the Amorites. So, you know, I think the text wants us to remember—it’s not talking about all unbelievers here. It’s talking about the particular, most grievous enemies of Israel’s God and, as a result, Israel who had occupied Canaan who had been doing horrible, terrific, horrific things. And these people are who God trains the hands of his people to war against in 1 Samuel 7. But it doesn’t mean all people that are outside of Israel. It ends up with peace with the Amorites.

So love for God means we’re going to also then move against his most virulent enemies in what we do. And so how do we go about doing that? Well, the Psalms tell us that God is to train our hands for war.

And it’s about time we learned what the Lord’s day was in terms of battle. Psalm 18:31, “For who is God but the Lord? And who is a rock except our God? The God who equipped me with strength and made my way blameless. He made my feet like the feet of a deer and set me secure on the heights. He trains my hands for war so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze. You have given me the shield of your salvation and your right hand supported me and your gentleness made me great.”

So again, the only other occurrence of God training our hands for war is in the context of God being a rock. And so the coloring sheet today for the young people has an image, a picture, a drawing of Samuel who set up this rock at Mizpah—the stone of help, not mitzvah. The rock is called Ebenezer, stone of help, because God has helped us. And we’re going to talk about this incident today as we move into an analysis of our text.

I’m also going to talk, however, about what’s on the front of your order of worship—this picture, although I get the color when you don’t. Sorry. This picture, which is the tower of Siloam found in Luke 13 that fell and crushed eighteen people. And so as we think about what happened ten years ago and the great effect it had, at least on us who were adults at the time—I know a minority of you young people have grown up with no knowledge of it—it was, you know, a very troubling day for those of us who experienced it in our adult lives, having kids, etc. And so it’s a tremendous event that happened in the context of our country’s history, and it bears a second meditation for this church also. And that’s why I wanted to come back to this today, even though I know you heard a sermon on this last week, which I haven’t listened to. But in any event, that’s why we’re back to it.

And the Tower of Siloam—this incident of it in Luke 13—is significant for us. Let me just talk about that for a couple of minutes by way of introduction. And then we’ll just go through the text in 1 Samuel and try to understand what applicable truths there are in that for us today, in terms of a proper response and evaluating our response individually and our response as a country to the events of ten years ago.

Now, right now, one thing we learn from these texts and the Psalms as well is there are real enemies who need to be warred against. And so, you know, one of the proper responses to 9/11 was a desire for vindication—that God would deliver us from real enemies, real people who were like the worst of the Philistines and needed to be put to death. And so, you know, that’s a perfectly proper response, and in fact, it’s an important biblical response.

For the last few years, we’ve tried more and more in our prayer of confession to put into it elements of a cry for vindication as well, because that is one of the repeated themes in Scripture: that God would vindicate us from his enemies and ours. And a proper response to 9/11 includes that.

Now our Savior talks about this collapse of a tower, the tower of Siloam, in Luke 13, and leading to this at the end of Luke 12, he chides those of his day for not being able to discern the times. They were supposed to discern the times and understand things. And as he’s teaching them about this discerning of the times, at that very moment, someone comes up and tells them that there were some Galileans—we don’t know how many—who had come down to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices and they were killed by Roman soldiers. So their blood was mixed with sacrifices, is the way the account is given. But the idea is they were murdered or killed by Roman soldiers.

And then Jesus goes on also to mention them, and he talks about that. He helps us to interpret that event, and he interprets at the same time the collapse of the tower of Siloam. What Jesus says is interesting and important for us in evaluating the collapse of our towers ten years ago and the murder of innocents by a different type of soldier—not soldiers, but al-Qaeda, Islamic soldiers, militant Islamic soldiers.

And so what does our Savior say? Well, the first thing our Savior says in response to these accounts is it’s what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “Well, these things just happen. You know, towers will collapse, disasters occur, just don’t worry about it.” He doesn’t say that. That’s the first thing to note.

Secondly, what he does say is he chides them for thinking that the people that died—either by the hand of the Roman soldiers or in the collapse of the tower—are worse sinners than they are. So he chides them for blaming the event on the sin of the people who ended up dead. He says, “What? You know, are you think you’re better? That they were worse sinners than you? These Galileans that you were—that they were worse sinners than you? These people that died at the collapse of the Tower of Siloam.” He really goes right after that kind of thinking, and he helps us to be careful not to think that same way ourselves.

And that’s really good, because once you start down that path, then anytime you see somebody get cancer, have a climbing accident, or like Jay Paul Stus’s brother-in-law fall through a skylight—you know, whenever we see bad things happen to people, if we start thinking in terms of them getting judged by God for that thing—you know, that’s a dangerous path to go down. Because now we start blaming all kinds of things on people’s personal sin, and our Savior just says don’t do it.

Why do we do that? Well, we like to think that we’re better than them. The tower didn’t collapse on us. And so if we can put it on their sin, then that makes us better people. There’s a self-righteousness to the whole thing that really is quite wrong. And Jesus speaks very strongly against it as he helps us to discern the times of the collapse of his tower and what not to say. And what not to say is that this particular collapse or these Roman soldiers murdering Galileans is tied to a specific event in the life of those people, a specific sin.

He says don’t do that.

The other reason we like to blame it on their sins and their actions is that kind of builds our ability to think, well, we can kind of manipulate God. We can prevent him from having bad things happen to us if we’re just good enough. If we just clean up our own acts enough, then bad things won’t happen to us. But really, that’s kind of, you know, it’s really a denial of the sovereignty of God.

And it really is sort of—I mean, I know this is a bit of a stretch—but it’s sort of like what was going on in 1 Samuel 7. Baal worship is force worship. And it’s the idea that we can manipulate the forces of God through manipulating his forces of nature. And so the idea is that power ends up in human hands. And so one reason we like to blame other people’s sin for bad things happening to them is because it puts us off the hook. Plus, it means that we reinforce our idea that we can somehow prevent bad things from happening to us. Well, you can’t. Jesus warns us against that kind of approach to interpreting events like 9/11 here in our time as well.

The third thing to notice about what Jesus says in this account—and I know I haven’t read the account, and I’m talking about something that is not fresh in your memory, so you’ve just got to take my word for this—but the next thing he says is, you know, you should be careful. You should be warned by this event to repent yourself, even though it didn’t happen to you. And if you don’t repent, like things will happen to you. You’ll die in like ways.

So what Jesus tells us: first, things like this aren’t just circumstance. God is in control. Secondly, don’t blame it on the people who died, or that bad things happen to them—that it’s their sin. But third, think about sin. When things happen, when death occurs, untimely death occurs, we are supposed to think about sin, but we’re supposed to think about our own sin and use it to help correct us in terms of acknowledging that our sin is indeed a problem to us.

So Jesus says the proper response to these things involves an evaluation of our lives as well. You know, you don’t want to blame everything on your own sin. You don’t want to get in that ditch, you know, of thinking that everything that happens to you is because you’ve got to figure out what sin it is that made it happen. No, that’s a ditch. But most of us are way over in the other ditch, right? When we get sick, it’s just germs. It’s little tiny things. Or bad things happen to us, it’s some other guy’s fault. We’re way in that secular ditch, I think.

So to avoid those two ditches at a personal level—when you get sick, for instance—and at a grand level, when 9/11 happens, God wants us to think about sin. He wants us to not think that there is a specific sin tied to these events necessarily, but he does want us thinking about his actions and what he’s doing. And he wants us to come to repentance.

You know, in Deuteronomy 28 there are all these curses listed, and you can have one of those curses and think it must be because of sin, maybe not. So Jesus says that’s a mistake to think it’s always a result of your sin, but do take that into account. You know, don’t stand there for weeks or years figuring out what it is that made God do this, but do take a short view of your life or maybe even a long view if it’s a significant effect, and think, well, am I living right? Is my way of life really something that’s honoring and glorifying to God?

So those are some of the kind of parameters that Jesus gives us in terms of how to successfully navigate the waters when we go through personal calamities or natural calamities as well.

So one other thing before we get into this text. So by way of caveat: this is Philistines. It’s not all unbelievers. And then secondly, by way of caveat: our normal way of waging war is not physical.

Right? So Paul talks about this in 2 Corinthians 10. “Though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.”

So, generally speaking, you know, ninety-nine percent of the time, we don’t engage in physical warfare. Now there’s a time for it. And when you know David went off to Iraq many years ago, people at the church contributed, bought him a pistol, and I think we had on it one of these verses from the Psalms about God trains my hands for war. Perfectly legitimate to do that when we’re fighting, you know, ungodly enemies who hate God and who we’re at war with.

But that’s not normally how we war. And so we look at this—how to learn how to wage war in 1 Samuel 7—and we want to remember those caveats. It’s Philistines. It’s an unusual time when they’re actually at war with another occupying nation. But we can draw from it principles and truths about our life.

Okay. So let’s try to do that. Let’s just work our way through the text. Eight points. What happens? This is so a model text about when really bad things happen. What do you do? How do you reverse the situation, turn it around? And then secondly, this can sort of serve as an evaluation and test for America. We’re ten years into this thing now. How well have we done?

Okay, so the first thing that we are told: okay, they’re under Philistine oppression. They got the ark back from the Philistines because they had, you know, defeated Dagon at the doorway and all that stuff. And the Philistines got rid of it, but they couldn’t bring it up yet to dwell amongst the people. It’s out of town. It’s at a gentile’s house. And so we still have Philistine oppression of the Israelites going on. And so that’s what they’re dealing with here. And the question is what to do about it.

And in 1 Samuel 7, verse 2, at the end of the verse, we read that all of the house of Israel lamented after the Lord.

So the first thing we’re told in a series of events that will lead to the reversal that they sought—in which we see when we’re at warfare or when we have, you know, bad things going on in our country—the when we have, for instance, you know, millions of pre-born babies murdered in the last thirty-seven, thirty-eight years, whatever it is—when we look at these things, the first step in this particular account, and we don’t want to ultimatize it too much, but it is an example to us. It’s a story God wants us to look at and learn what the first step was for them at least, and maybe this should be our first step.

And the first step is a lamentation. And to lament means to weep. It means, you know, literally—this is not a common word. It’s used a number of times in the Old Testament. And what it means is to be able to weep, to weep over their state.

Okay? So what they’re weeping over first is what position they find themselves in. And you know, I fear that sometimes we don’t have even this first step going on. Did we weep on 9/11 over the state of our country being attacked so apparently easily by box cutters? Have we wept over the results of 9/11 with the reduction of liberties, the horrific economic costs we’ve endured? You know, Bin Laden’s strategy was “the death of a thousand cuts.” His entire strategy was economic. This is what he wrote over and over again. And so if you look at the cost of our country and the immediate recession that followed it, the disruptions to our system that have gone on, the incredible loss of productivity because of the security measures we take, etc.—his strategy seems to be succeeding. And have we lamented that? Have we wept over our state? And specifically, have we wept over anything in our lives that may be related to that?

Another point that it’s easy to rush by here is that it says “all the house of Israel lamented.” One of the things that we should weep at, at least figuratively weep at, if not literally weep at, is that there is no “all the house of Israel” anymore. The disunity of the church. I guess we could say the first step before you get to lamenting is the unity of the body of Christ. Not a unity at the cost of truth, but a unity of people who are committed to follow Yahweh and to let his Scriptures be their infallible guide for what they do.

We don’t have that. Now, this is why your pastor and your associate pastors spend time working in Oregon City with the other churches—some of whom are different and unusual, some of whom, you know, are not necessarily they’re not homosexual pastors, but they believe that LGBT is not really sin anymore. And they end up reinterpreting the scriptures in particular ways. Why do we work with these people? Because they’re trinitarian churches. They’re part of the body of Christ. And we have to figure out what we’re doing. We’re trying to produce more and more unity of the church of Jesus Christ in Oregon City. That takes a lot of time. We’ve been here twelve years. I mean, I must have attended at least a hundred or more of these pastoral meetings. Why do I spend that kind of time and effort? Because of verses like this. We’re supposed to be reaching toward an “all of Israel” sort of perspective. That’s why.

You know, myself and Flynn and Chris W. are flying back to Minneapolis in a couple of weeks and spending a week and a lot of your tithe money to meet together with our every-three-year council or general assembly of our denomination—we’re in—because again there we work at the local level, we work at the denominational level to try to achieve, you know, the first step, which is having all the house of Israel being able to do something jointly. And that’s why we’re doing it.

By the way, I have today—in fact, they’re right here. There’s a congregational meeting this Friday to discuss some of the matters that we’ll be voting on at presbyter and at council, and I’m a council delegate. And we want to get any input you want to give us. So we’re having a meeting Friday night here at RCC to discuss that. And maybe somebody could come up, take these and put them on the—or the orders of worship. Or if some young man could offer to do that. Run somebody up. There you go. Hot dog. Just put them back there on that table.

And that’s why that kind of stuff’s important. That’s why you should be praying about it, because the first step is a degree of institutional catholicity and unity and organic unity that we don’t really have anymore. And so that’s important to us. And as I said, following the unity is then we have a working together in lamentation, in tears. And these tears would lament not just our state—as we’ll see, they move to a confession of their sin. And it’s important to recognize this: the great painter Albrecht Dürer—who was with Cranach, you know, one of Dürer painted a lot of Luther stuff—he in his painting of the prodigal son, in an act of penitence, he put his own head and his own face on the body of the prodigal son returning. So he tried to personalize it for himself, put himself in the story, and recognize the things that he needed to be penitent for as well. And that’s what begins here.

In Bunyan’s The Holy War, he has a character Mr. Wet Eyes, whose father was Mr. Repent. Repentance. And so again, the idea is that the true penitent becomes one whose eyes are wet with tears. Even if we don’t have many tears, we ought to have some tears.

I’m going to read a quote here from the private devotions of Lancelot Andrews. And here’s what he said:

“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, and bedew the dryness of my heart. Give me, oh Lord, this saving grace. No grace of all the graces were 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 one or two little tears, that thou mayest put into thy bottle and write in thy book—tears, penitence.”

The thing begins with a lamentation. Has our country lamented? Well, no doubt some have. I’m sure some of us did. But I don’t think generally we can say our response was a lamentation.

And particularly, you’ll notice the verse says that they lamented “after the Lord,” toward the Lord. The services that followed 9/11, the national services representing the country were interfaith services. Now, I’m fine having a Jewish service, a Muslim service at some point during the week—Christians as well—but to put them together is an affront to the truth claims of the God of the Scriptures, who says that we’re to be lamenting not toward these other gods, the God of Islam or the unitarian God of Judaism, but rather the God who came in the incarnation as Jesus Christ. That’s God. And that’s a truth claim that’s exclusive.

And our country rather than lamenting toward God lamented or tried to process it through worship that denied the basic aspect of what the New Testament teaches—denied it completely. And so I think we probably had not a very good grade on whether we lamented it and the results of what’s happened in our day and age.

I know we’ve become slaves. I guess you should know that too, right? You do know that. It’s interesting because right after the account in 1 Samuel 7, we have chapter 8. And in chapter 8, after the great deliverance—we’re going to get to hopefully here in a few minutes, you don’t know, it’s been some time later—Samuel is now old in chapter 8. But God wanted to put in the scriptures the very next thing that the people of Israel do is they all demand a king like the nations around them. So the reformation doesn’t last more than several decades, and it’s followed by—and we know the text, right?

Oh, Samuel says, if you have a king—and wanting a king isn’t bad—but wanting a king like the other kings who doesn’t submit to Yahweh, in other words, having that kind of king means slavery. That’s what Samuel is telling him. He said he’ll take a tenth of what you produce—your cows, your sheep. He’ll take you young men and make him part of his army. The part for the whole, in other words, any king who isn’t submissive to King Jesus inevitably moves—in terms of slavery—with making total claims on the people through claims to the tenth, the children, whatever it might be.

Now, that’s where we’re at. There’s only two options in history. You can either worship King Jesus, or you can replace him with somebody else. And whenever you replace him with somebody else, what happens is an inevitable movement towards slavery. And in our country, the master that owns us now tells us what sort of light bulbs to put in. And I know you young people probably get tired of hearing about it. It’s just one illustration of a whole bunch. They tell us what kind of light bulbs we can use. Okay, that’s what it’s reached. They tell us all kinds of things. They tell us so many things the businesses can’t keep up with them anymore, and the economy starts to tank. So that’s what’s happened, right?

So our tears—back at ten years ago, yes, but maybe continuing tears—for the loss of freedom, for our being under bondage of a king like the other kings of the nations who doesn’t submit to Yahweh ultimately, but rather reigns autonomously, or at least seeks to do it. Now, we’ve got some checks and balances in all that stuff, but they’re quickly being eroded away. We’ll see what happens. But a lamentation—that’s the proper response. It’s not your fault necessarily, but that’s what you should do. You should weep over the loss of Christian liberty and the loss of Christian identity as a nation, as a people. We should weep.

Calvin said this. He said, “It sometimes happens that God smites a nation with war, pestilence, or some kind of calamity. In this common chastisement, it behooves the whole people to plead guilty and confess their guilt.” So Calvin said, you know, you should at least look at it as the chastening hand of God, and not necessarily think one-for-one action for this thing, but then think about what is it that we’re doing wrong that might be behind what God is doing here—might be. And so that’s the beginning of it: this lamentation.

Secondly, the lamentation produces a fruit of putting away idols and recommitting ourselves to total service to Yahweh. Verse 3: “Then Samuel spoke to all the house of Israel. Notice the emphasis on unity again. Saying, ‘If you return to the Lord with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods of the Ashtaroth which are among you and prepare your hearts for the Lord. Serve him only.’”

So the idea is the next step: if you got unity, you’ve got lamentation. And then you’ve got not just being sorry for our state and not even just being sorry for our sin. There’s a grief, you know, that there’s a sorrow that doesn’t lead to repentance, but Samuel asked them to move beyond sorrow to repentance—to turning away from whatever idolatry they may have been engaged in that might have something to do with their state.

And these idols that he specifically mentions here are Baals and Ashtaroth. And those were two of the three gods of the Philistines. And the third was Dagon. So he says to repent of that idolatry.

Now, again, to repent of idolatry means idolatry is putting anything above Yahweh. You know, uh, forces of nature, Baalism, sexuality, Ashtaroth, Aphrodite in the Greek name for this goddess—these are good gifts of God. Forces are good, you know? Water—you want it to run downhill. It’s a force of nature. It’s personally overseen by God, but it’s a force of nature. Sexuality in the context of Christian marriage is a wonderful thing, and without it we’d have no more history or future, right? So these are good things.

But putting any of these things above submission to Yahweh is what makes them idolatrous. And so whatever we put above God, above Yahweh, the God who’s revealed himself in the sixty-six books of the Bible, that’s an idol.

And as I said, what did we do as a nation? As a nation, we returned to our idolatry with the worship service in response to 9/11 that was multifaith. Now again, I’m not saying you don’t have freedom for other religions. In fact, Christianity is one of the few religions that have ever had freedom for other religions to exist in the context of their culture. It’s not a—Christianity is not a religion of coercion. Ultimately, it’s persuasion. And so, you know, we don’t have the same liberty in the nation that a lot of conservative Christians like. Israel in Judaism, you’re prevented there from evangelizing Jewish citizens. It’s a crime. And in Islam, same thing. So, you know, I’m not saying we want to do that. We don’t want to do that. If our sons and daughters convert to Judaism or Islam, that’s, you know, that’s their choice. They’ll suffer with that choice, but we’re not going to compel them that they can’t do it. We’re not going to pass some law. But that’s what these other religions do.

So I’m not saying that we would want to clamp down or get rid of the other religions. But to have as the national response to this a worship that doesn’t affirm any one of these particular religions, but instead says they’re all together—what it effectively does is it sublimates religion to the national desire for unity and peace and Americanism. And that’s wrong. That’s idolatry. To put Americanism above fidelity to Yahweh is idolatry.

It’s idolatry—not, you know, there are other forms of idolatry as well, and the forms that are listed here, for instance, sexuality—this has become an idol, I think, in American culture since the sixties on. I was at our pastor’s day at the cap this year, and Desh Duza spoke, and he said, you know, “If you see a deer, you know, you see a bush—you’re out there hunting, you see a bush move—you don’t know if it’s a deer or a person—you don’t shoot. And so we don’t know—some people say they don’t know if it’s life in the womb or not. And the obvious, the obvious thing you should do is don’t shoot if you’re not sure. You may be ending a life. You may be committing murder.” But people go blindly past that argument. Why? Because abortion is, among other things, a sacrificial act that allows people to engage in promiscuous sexuality outside of marriage regularly. You cannot have that kind of free, open sexuality that the sixties called for, and that we now live in the context of—you know, with most people living together and not engaging in marriage, even a lot of Christians. You can’t have that with resultant unwanted pregnancies, and then those pregnancies are sacrificed to the idolatry of sexual freedom. So sexual freedom is placed on a higher scale in terms of values than human life itself, and that’s where we’re at.

Another thing to lament. But it shows we haven’t really, I don’t think, as a nation, repented of our idolatries in terms of lamenting.

I went to a rally shortly after 9/11, and I was just shocked and appalled. President Bush spoke here in Oregon, and I was shocked and appalled at all the bravado: “This country will never be defeated. We can defeat all of our enemies.” You know, this country—you know, ridiculous. There was no crying out to God, ultimately, at least in the public shows of some of these things.

So I don’t think our nation did particularly well in lamenting or turning from sins.

Now, I think a lot of us did. I know that a lot of us did. I had conversations with you, and there was a lamentation, and there was an examination, and there was a renewed seriousness about, for instance, family worship, personal prayer times, reading our Bibles. I would challenge you today. Ask yourself what was your response? It probably was one of these godly responses. You probably did look at whatever you were doing wrong—not just the nation, in terms of what was happening. You wanted to have vindication against the enemies who attacked those innocent civilians. Properly so. And we did it good at that. But I know that many of you got much more serious about your commitment. You did repent the way Samuel describes here, and you turned with your heart to God to serve him only, and to have a renewed sense of what you’re doing at your vocation as well—in terms of you being a Christian, a disciple of Jesus, in everything that you do.

And I would ask you right now: Ask yourself what’s happened in the last ten years. Have you maintained that level of commitment? Now, I know things happen, life gets busy. I understand all that. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. But I am trying to give you an opportunity today, in nearly the tenth anniversary—probably the tenth anniversary—of your personal commitments to follow Christ more wholeheartedly. I do want to give you an opportunity today, you know, to do that same kind of commitment of your heart in service to Yahweh and to try to clean up whatever sins you may have idolatrously left in the context of your own life.

How do we make war? We make war by lamentation, by going to God, by acknowledging our own personal sins to God, whether anything to do with the particular action or not, and by a recommitting of ourselves in service to Yahweh. So these are some of the proper responses that train us for the victory that will come.

Number three: we publicly acknowledge our sins. So this isn’t just a private thing. This happens publicly here in this event at Mizpah, at least. There are times for a public acknowledgement, a listing of sins of an individual or a church or a people, or in this case the nation of Israel. There’s a publicly acknowledging that we have sinned against the Lord.

And then it says that Samuel judged the children of Israel at Mizpah. And it’s interesting because this public acknowledgement has something to do with prayer, right? Samuel said, “Gather all Israel to Mizpah, and I will pray for the Lord to the Lord for you.” So they gathered together and they poured out their hearts, and then Samuel prays for them.

Jesus, the greater Samuel ever, lives to make intercession for us. And when we confess our sins and when we acknowledge them, we ask for Christ to make intercession. And he ever lives, Hebrews says, to do just that very thing. It’s like it’s his only job in that text from Hebrews, at least—is the intercession that Jesus pours out before the Father.

We’re changing our liturgy a bit today. We’re adding another song between the offertory and the pastoral prayer. Those songs will emphasize prayer, because one of the responses noted here is prayer to God. And that would be a desire of mine in my own life and in the life of our church—to pray more. And so we want to encourage your participation in the pastoral prayer. And we want to do that by having an extra song, going to allow you plenty of time to get back from the bathroom break or whatever it is you need to do during offertory time to get back in here to prepare yourself for prayer with a song that’s specifically targeted at that. And hopefully that’ll lead us to pray more as a congregation.

Number four: turning to God for deliverance in our fear. What happens is when you start to get things right, bad things happen. So they start to gather at Mizpah. They start to recommit their lives to God and everything. And the Philistines then hear about this, and they’re going to go attack Israel. So sometimes bad things happen as a result of good actions. Bad things happen as a result of doing what’s right. Or we could say commitment is frequently followed by testing.

And so part of what we do to move toward victory is acknowledging that and committing ourselves to continue to do what’s right—not pragmatically, not for what works in the culture or what works best for me or my family or the church, but to do what God’s word directs us to do in spite of bad things happening as a direct result of you trying to do what’s right.

Let me tell you something: to govern in a church, to shepherd a church, our elders know full well that frequently when we do things right is when we can end up with the most opposition, with things really going bad for a while. And you have to be able to understand that. You know, in order to successfully manage your family, you have to do the same thing. You have to recognize that when you begin to really train children in a particular thing, you may well get more rebellion than you ever thought you’d get before. Bad things can happen as a result of doing good things and proper things. And that’s what happens here.

And we have to be committed to when we step up and serve Yahweh in the kind of self-conscious way the text instructs us to do, to not worry about bad things happening, to not get fearful—or at least in that fear—to continue to cry out to God to make intercession for us and to deliver us from our enemies.

One of the ways God trains our hands for war is to remind us over and over again that deliverance only comes from him. It can’t happen as a result of our own efforts. So we have to cry out to him.

Number five: engaging in liturgical warfare. So Samuel, and you’ve heard me talk about this text before, he offers an ascension offering. It says “whole burnt,” but it’s really an ascension. It means to ascend up. So Samuel offers an ascension offering. They worship God in the context of this gathering at Mizpah. It’s like our Lord’s Day worship, right? The ascension offering from Leviticus is part of what Christian worship is all about. It’s one of the aspects of what Jesus has accomplished—that drawing near to God through transformation, not through death ultimately.

And so as they worship, the text tells us that as they worshiped, God thundered with a loud thunder, with a loud voice. He thundered at the Philistines while they were worshiping.

Liturgical warfare means that part of the way we train our hands for war—it’s about time to learn how to war successfully. And warfare really begins with these self-conscious devotion to God and then engaging in Lord’s Day worship. And God begins to answer. At least he does in this case, and I think there are many cases of this throughout the scriptures. God begins to answer in ways that we cannot understand. They’re not pragmatically discernible. But God brings psychological distress to the enemies of his church as they worship.

Now, that’s what it says here. God begins the battle against the advancing Philistines as they worship. The center of the book of Isaiah—same thing, right? All those Assyrians out there, you know, all those Roman soldiers, all those Philistines gathered again against God’s people in the middle of the book of Isaiah. And the middle is not some kind of renewed commitment to political action or military action. Deliverance happens when Hezekiah spreads out the letters from Sennacherib and says, “This guy hates you. He’s blaspheming you. Attack him.” He prays an imprecatory prayer, but he worships in the temple. And as a direct result, his prayers are heard, and God then moves supernaturally to destroy the enemies that are camped around Jerusalem. He gives him the victory.

So God trains our hands to war. And before we talk about political action or this or that or the other thing, it begins with liturgical warfare. Now, it doesn’t end there. That’s not the end of the thing, but it certainly is important.

You know, I would venture to say that in terms of a nation, we’re not doing much better at that. We’re singing songs about Ebenezer that still have to do with our own personal lives. I was watching a couple of videos by Francis Schaeffer—the “How Should We Then Live?” series—and he talks over and over again that America became, you know, completely taken with two idols: personal peace and affluence. Personal peace means just leave me alone, leave me in my little space. Don’t care that you’re being hauled off to the gulag or whatever it is. Personal peace and affluence. Things that give us lots of buzz. And so that’s a lot of times what we want as well.

And these scriptures teach us that is not what we’re supposed to do by way of response. But our hymns set us up for that very thing. The Ebenezer citation—great hymn, Dan, I’m not putting it down, but it’s a hymn, you know, about personal coming to personal salvation as an adult and then coming back to God. Now, that’s what’s corporately going on here as well. It works as an analogy, but Ebenezer brings in the idea of God’s vindication of his people and the destruction of his enemies at the same time. It brings in victory. It brings in a victory that begins in liturgical warfare and then doesn’t stop at liturgical warfare.

That’s number six: we learn to war when we don’t stop at worship, but we put our worship into action, engaging in non-liturgical warfare. Verse 11: “The men of Israel went out of Mizpah. So now they leave worship and they pursued the Philistines and drove them back as far as Beth Car. 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.’”

Okay? So it isn’t enough just to worship. It starts there. But if all you do is worship and then leave it up to God, you’re being the lazy, undiligent person who doesn’t take up your responsibilities. God starts the battle, but you’re supposed to finish it, by and large. And you’re supposed to do things during the week.

We did these very steps, by the way, in Oregon City when we had the pornography shop, right? First pornography shop in Portland, right across from the Dairy Queen, right across from the place where our kids were taking piano lessons, right there. And what did we do? We worked to develop unity in the churches in Oregon City. We set up a Sunday where many pastors preached about the dangers of sexual sin and pornography. Prayers ascended up before God. And then we followed up those prayers with picketing of the place whenever it was open for a number of weeks.

And what was the result? Victory. He delivered us from the Philistines, so to speak, from the pornography shop. The guy finally gave up, went home, because we didn’t start with political action. We started with worship. But we didn’t end with worship. We moved toward direct action—not political action really, but direct action in terms of that particular place.

I met a fellow down in Sacramento this week named Steve Masia. And he is one of—he’s the director for California, Nevada, and Arizona for a group called Students for Life. And I’m interested in seeing if there’s interest here to bring him up to Oregon. I think he’d be willing to do it, even though it’s out of his territory. There’s no one up here for the organization.

Here’s what he does. He goes around to college campuses, sets up four signs about abortion with different pictures and quotes from abortionists, etc. And then he tries to—he gets involved in conversations with students about abortion. And then he signs up kids to start pro-life clubs. In the last three months, he started thirty pro-life clubs at thirty different universities or colleges in California.

Another thing he does is he trains people, and he himself engages in high school action. He’ll go to a high school before classes start, hand out anti-abortion material to the students. And the day we saw him, the day before, he had been accosted by a policeman for doing this. And it’s an interesting tale, and you can watch the YouTube video of it if you want. But in any event, he does this sort of thing.

And I think that’s an example of following up. If the concern is abortion, then we need to pray against abortion. Anti-abortion day of the Lord and every Lord’s Day. It’s one of the enemies we’re seeking to drive back or bring to repentance—are people that kill little babies in the womb. But it’s not enough to just do that on Sunday. And PCCs are a good step, but another step is direct action to try to change the minds of the support culture that are making these girls consider abortion. And hopefully they get to a PRC. But most of them won’t.

So to go to direct action in terms of that in Oregon City—you know, he was intrigued by—we got one college, Clackamas Community College. We got one Oregon City High School directed effort, and we could have an impact. And we could do it again with the other churches in Oregon City.

So God trains our hands for war through these steps that lead up to liturgical warfare and then moves out of liturgical warfare into our culture.

Number seven: remaining diligent to maintain the victory. “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.”

Well, who’s the hand of the Lord? That’s the church. Arm of the Lord in Isaiah is the church. How is the hand of the Lord perpetuating the victory against the Philistines all the days of Samuel? Through the church. So the church has to remain diligent once it’s engaged in these actions and gotten victory.

And finally, number eight: thanking God for the results. Look at verses 14 and 15 on your sheet. “The cities that the Philistines had taken from Israel were restored to Israel.” So they have defeat of enemies. We’re to give God thanks when God defeats their enemies. Secondly, they regain territory. They retake the major cities from the Philistines. And third, they have peace with other people that are not part of the body of Christ, or Israel. In the Old Testament, there was peace. It says in verse 14, “also between Israel and the Amorites. And Samuel will judge them all the days of his life.”

So peace—peace is the result. That’s our goal. That kind of freedom, that kind of ability to defeat all of our enemies and have a safe country that isn’t always being attacked. That’s our goal. How do we get there? We get there through liturgical action. Some of which we did ten years ago personally and corporately, and which we need to refocus on, I think, a lot of us at least in our particular time as well.

Now let me go back to Luke 13 briefly. Jesus said, “Unless you repent of your sins, you’ll die in like fashion.” He didn’t say, “You’re also going to die. You’re going to die in like fashion.” And immediately after this text in Luke 13 is the parable of the fig tree, representing Israel. And essentially the parable says, “Israel will be cursed. Jerusalem will be destroyed.”

And what will happen when Jerusalem is destroyed—because they don’t repent of their sins—is Roman soldiers will kill more than a few Galileans. The Roman soldiers and the Idumeans will come in and slaughter massive numbers of those who rebelled against the Lord Jesus Christ, even as he taught them. And instead of that little tower of Siloam falling and crushing eighteen people, there will be a lot of masonry crushing a lot of people in AD 70, and the temple itself will be torn down.

Jesus said these lessons: don’t use them improperly to blame particular people for particular sins, but understand that they are indeed symbols. They’re important to interpret them according to the stories that God gives us. We’re ten years into what I think has essentially been mostly an improper response to the chastisements that we felt ten years ago, at least on the part of the government. And we’re ten years further down the road to doing just what the people in 1 Samuel 8 did.

We’ve now got a king like the kings of Europe. We’ve now got an economic system, European socialism, that is more and more taking away the liberty and freedom of people. And as a result of that, leaving us less and less able to truly help the poor, which we have a desire to help, right? So we’re ten years down the road from failing to turn back to Jesus, King Jesus, you know, as a people. And we’re ten years down the road closer to having a king rule over us who isn’t submissive to Yahweh ultimately, but a king like all the other nations—all those European countries—who thinks that the state is sovereign. And we’re ten years more enslaved as a result of what’s happened.

Jesus says, “These are signs of the times.” Jesus says, “You don’t like that? Learn to learn to make war. Learn how to do what’s right. Turn the thing around and do it through the steps that are articulated for us here in 1 Samuel 7. Lament your state. Repent before God. Clean up your own act. Make yourself a wholehearted disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ again. And then go to him in liturgical warfare. Ask for Jesus to cry out to God the Father to send judgments upon those who hate him and hate his people and are attacking them, whether in the womb or in the Twin Towers or wherever it might be.”

My brother Mike sent out an email this last week, and I’ve never quoted him before, but I’m going to today, and this will be the concluding comments. He always has a quote at the beginning, and John E. will like this.

“God created Arrakis to train the faithful.” So Muad’Dib says in Dune. He created Arrakis to train the faithful.

There’s what my brother Mike went on to say:

“Since God moves all things after the counsel of his will (Ephesians 1:11), we can be quite certain that the current crisis in our world has been ordained by God to train his people for war and mature them thereby. We must not waver or be distraught in our fight with the great evil that pervades our planet. For everything that comes our way is designed for our good and the expansion of the kingdom of Christ.

“My two favorite words in the Bible,” my brother Mike writes, “are these: ‘But God.’ But God. There is nothing that he can’t turn around if we, his people, will confess our negligence in the stewardship of the world that belongs to us in Christ and then focus on the fields of harvest that God is preparing for us by dashing the hopes of the reprobate. Let us find true joy in knowing that the battle belongs to the Lord, no matter how grim it may look to our weary eyes.”

God has given Arrakis to train the faithful. And he’s given us the particular chastisements that we might feel now to train his faithful people in looking to him first and then moving in the power of the Holy Spirit into our weak to do things that effectively combat the kind of disasters that our nation now falls under and continues to drift toward.

There’s only one choice. You either serve Jesus or you serve those who will enslave you. And the choices are that obvious. They’re not frequently that obvious in our day and age. They’re becoming more obvious. And that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing because God wants to train us to war and to bring the love of the Lord Jesus Christ in a way that will feed all the people of the world, that will bring about a wonderful, blessed reality.

This country in its earliest days—its business people, its economics—fed much of the world and continues to do so. This country has given tremendous amounts of benevolence to nations all over the world. We have trained people in how to do things in a way that allows them to feed their own people in ways they couldn’t have before. That’s our heritage. That’s what we’re losing is the ability to do that as our economy slips further and further away from freedom and further and further into European socialism. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing for anybody. It just creates warfare, violence, oppression.

May the Lord God deliver us as he trains our hands to make proper warfare for him.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your Scriptures. We thank you that you do indeed teach us how to go about pressing the claims of Jesus Christ. We do wish, Father, to take thoughts captive and to bring down philosophies that…