It Looks Good From A Distance

Most of you are aware that Kim and I uh recently bought a home.

And as one does whenever you go into a new home, the very first thing that one person in your family does is decide what walls need to be knocked down.

And so this is what uh this is what our home looked like whenever we moved in.

Now, don't let the picture fool you that that living room is not 40 feet wide.

You know how they do.

This will this will make more sense later, but this is sort of what we do with our life is we'll take the images, the stories, we'll we'll stretch them and we'll toward them to make them look like they're incredible.

Well, this is this is our uh home here.

Uh and it is uh you can see right there uh on the uh left-hand side, there's a little hallway that goes down through there.

That hallway is not 40 inches wide, it wasn't 40 inches wide.

It was actually somewhere around like 32 inches wide.

Like my shoulders would almost bump from side to side.

I'm a pretty big dude, but they bumped side to side.

And so Kim thought it would be a good idea to knock out that wall, take out that closet, and to put in a rail.

And so that's the that's the end result.

Now, here's the thing I want you to know: two things.

Number one, uh, I did that.

So I took the crowbar, knocked all that out, put in the hardwood floor, reframed the sheetrock, put in the electric, all that stuff.

Right?

Yeah, thank you.

That's the response I'm looking for.

I've got a business card I will hand you at the end of the ser.

Now, here's the thing about this picture is it is it looks, I mean, like I look at that, like sometimes I'll walk down the hallway and remember remember what it used to be like, and I'll stop and be like, Yeah, pretty good, Dalton.

You did okay.

But here's the thing.

Some of you you might look at that and think, oh, the next time I have a home remodeling project, I'm going to call Pastor, and he's going to come help me.

And I'm going to tell you the truth.

That would be a very bad idea.

Because this image here from a distance looks great.

But if you zoom in a little bit, you start to notice the imperfections.

Right there.

Can you see that little crack in the floor?

And I don't mean the one between the boards, I mean the one where I cut into the old hardwood floor there.

That crack.

Yeah, let me see the next one.

Yeah, you can see the little disconnection there between the new hardwood and the and the old hardwood and how it kind of fits together.

Little little seam there.

And then finally the third one.

You don't want me doing sheetrock mud.

Uh yeah.

So when you zoom in a little bit, you begin to notice the blemishes.

Whenever you stop and really examine it, like they stand out to you.

And when the lighting has changed just a little bit, it well, the truth is told, isn't it?

By the way, let me just interject uh this moment here.

These photos were taken this morning whenever I got up and asked my daughter to go and take photos of the blemishes around the stairwell, and she did an excellent job at finding blemishes.

It's her spiritual gift.

She did a great job.

Say one give her a big hand for finding the blemishes.

You're gonna make somebody a great spouse someday, honey.

So, anyways, sorry.

So we all kind of do this, though, don't we?

Like from a distance, if we hold people at arm's length, if if we don't let them in close, and we don't them, we don't let them linger very long, then they they don't see the scars, the wrinkles, the imperfections, the misalignments, the cuts.

They only see the the big picture, the picture that we want them to see, the side that we want them to view.

Now, this is a a common human experience.

This is what we do.

We have a way of reframing reality in our mind, especially about ourselves, to fit with this self-image.

In the book of 1 Samuel, chapter 15, we find what I believe is the best example of this truth, this reframing, this hiding the flaws in life.

1 Samuel 15 · chapter mention

It's by a man named Saul, who you are probably familiar with.

He was the first king in Israel.

When Israel decided they wanted to be like the rest of the nations, they wanted a king who would go out and quote unquote fight for them.

How many of you know that your rulers are not fighting for you?

Saul, go out and fight for us, and they appointed Saul, and Samuel was upset about it.

But God said, Saul, Samuel, don't don't worry about it.

They're not rejecting you, they're rejecting me from being king.

So God allowed the appointment of Saul in his providence, and things went okay for a little while, but very soon began to unravel and until they reached this place here, just outside of a little town called Gilgal.

Samuel approaches Saul, and verse number 13 tells us the report that Saul gives, the photo that Saul shows to Samuel.

Saul says, Blessed be you to the Lord.

If it looks awkward to you, it is very awkward.

In Hebrew, it's allowed to lay there very awkwardly.

He doesn't say, Blessed be the Lord, or blessed be you by the Lord.

It's blessed be you to the Lord.

He's kind of detaching himself from the faith.

He says, I have performed the commandment of the Lord.

Here's the snapshot of what I've accomplished.

Now, of course, God is not fooled by our snapshots.

He's not taken by the angles that we want to show God show him or our community of our own personal life.

God sees everything.

That's what the author of Hebrews tells us.

Hebrews chapter 4, nothing is hid from him.

Hebrews 4 · chapter mention

He sees all.

Now, of course, God informed Samuel about Saul's shortcoming.

See, what's happened here is that Samuel, Saul, was instructed by God to lead the people out to make war against the Amalekites.

Let's go to Amalek and to conquer them.

And I don't want to I don't want to cower away from this.

I don't want you, those of you who know the passage, to think that, oh pastor is a coward.

So I'm going to tell you exactly what it says.

God instructed Saul to go out and to annihilate them, to kill the adults, the men, the women, uh apparently the children as well, they all must go.

I don't care much for that.

That bothers me.

I don't like passages like that.

I skip those whenever I'm talking to people about apologetics.

But whenever I sit down and I think about the situation, that Amalek, some centuries earlier, as Israel had left Egypt, they circled in behind Israel and the people who were straggling behind, the people with young babies, the people with elderly, the people who were sick, and the armies of Amalek would pick them off.

That's brutal.

And apparently they had not changed much.

They were still brutal and ruthless because whenever God refers to them, he refers to them not just as the Amalekites.

In another verse, he says, you go and you conquer the people at Amalek, all the sinners.

So they're still sinning.

They're still brutal.

They are a cancer on the Mediterranean basin.

And like any cancer, you don't let it linger, even if it means you have to amputate something at great cost, peril, and pain.

That's exactly what God is doing here.

So if you have concerns about some of the things that God orders people to do in the Old Testament, just be aware that what we know about God is He is loving, He is just, and He is wise, and we don't always have all the facts or features, but we know that there's a reason why God appoints people to death.

There's a reason why people why God appoints people to death, isn't there?

There's a reason why you are appointed to death.

And why I, why I am appointed to death.

It's appointed unto man once to die.

Why do we die?

Because of sin.

Why does sin kill us?

Sin kills us because God says the wages of sin is death.

Now, what I'm saying to you is ultimately God is responsible for the death of every human who has ever lived, or every human who is going to live.

Which means if you're going to indict God for one execution, for one killing, for one murder, you may as well attempt to go ahead and adopt him for the murder of everyone.

How do you think that's going to work out?

God is just.

We are sinners.

Saul was a sinner.

Whenever he went out and attacked under the direction of God, these ruthless, terroristic, cancerous individuals.

And unfortunately, he did not fully execute the job.

Now, let me just pause for a minute and say this is not a passage for us as Americans.

They were a theocracy, it was a different set of rules.

We do not have God ruling over us as they did.

It's a whole different context.

But for them, the rule was you go and you take care of this people who are going to cause great problems and they're not going to stop.

And Saul chooses not to.

Samuel had invested a great deal in Saul.

And as you invest yourself into people or things, you become passionate about them and their success because you take it personal.

If they don't succeed, you failed in some way.

As parents, we know, if we're sober, we know that's not true.

Sometimes you do your very best.

You make mistakes, sure.

There are cracks and corners that aren't right, but it's imperfection.

It's flaws.

And yet God covers the whole thing in grace.

Samuel is distraught.

We're told that Samuel was angry and cried out to the Lord all night.

And Samuel rose early in the morning and he went and looked for Saul in the morning, and it was told Saul as he approached the area where.

You know, by the way, let me just tell you, I knew whenever I was preparing the sermon, I was going to flip Samuel and Saul a thousand times as we worked our way through this.

Here we go again.

So Samuel woke up early, woke up early in the morning, and he went looking for the place where Saul was supposed to be, but Saul wasn't there.

And it was told Samuel that Saul came to Carmel, which was a high place.

And behold, there at that mountain place, he erected a monument to himself.

Saul is glorifying himself.

Everything is about him and his ego.

Saul was a man of incredible insecurities, and people who have incredible insecurities are given to tremendous arrogance and pride.

Let's let that soak for a minute.

Because sometimes we think we think that insecurity and arrogance are our opposites.

That an insecure person, all we really need to do is boost their ego up, and they'll be fine.

But the truth is, when you study this, you find out that the reality is it's all pride, that our insecurities are often just arrogance, believing that we're more than we've been able to make ourselves to be.

And that's Saul here.

He is, he's erected a monument to himself because he's prideful, he's arrogant.

Some of this also probably extends from the fact that Saul knew that he had not done what was right.

Sometimes in our life, as we make our way from year to year and month to month, we know that we're not doing what is right.

Not only that we've we failed, but that we continue to pursue paths that are unrighteous.

And we cover that up so frequently with gigantic monuments in our life, with our portfolio, with our house, with our network, with our brags, with our Facebook posts.

We're building monuments to ourselves, hoping that the largeness of it will eclipse the whole in our heart.

It would never work.

This is what Saul is doing here.

He's building this monument to himself, and he's gone all the way down to Gilgal.

And so Samuel pursues him down there because Samuel's got to have this hard conversation with the king.

It's never easy to have hard conversations with people who perceive themselves to be sovereign.

Samuel's got to do this.

So he goes down and Samuel approaches Saul, and then we get to the verse that we read a few minutes ago.

He shows up and Saul's like, Welcome! Blessed be you to the Lord, whatever that means.

I want you to know that I have, here's the snapshot, fulfilled the command of the Lord.

We're all good here.

Now, of course, Samuel knows better, so he asks that question.

It's very familiar if you know the story because it's very poignant.

Samuel says, Okay, you've done the command of the Lord, then what is this, what is this bleeding of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear?

See, the command from the Lord was that Samuel or Saul and the people should go out and dedicate everything to destruction.

The Hebrew word is a particular word.

It's the same word that's used in Leviticus when talking about the first fruits, that they belong to the Lord.

It's dedicated wholly to the Lord.

It should be sacrificed completely to the Lord.

And Saul had not done that.

You know what he had done is he had sacrificed the broken, the lame, the meager to the Lord, but he had kept the finest for himself.

Now, of course, you see that for what it is.

Like you know, this guy is completely off the mark.

But Saul apparently doesn't see that.

It's more difficult to know where we are off the mark, where our heart is not in the right place.

It's more difficult to know that than it is to know that about other people.

Let me set it other way.

It's easier to flaw to spot the flaws of someone else than to look in the mirror and realize where your own personal flaws are.

This is this is Saul.

Saul doesn't see his flaws.

We all have a certain way of responding to our flaws.

Uh and what I want to do over the next very few minutes is to talk about how we typically respond to our flaws, because that's what Saul is doing here, his mistakes, his flaws.

We we do the same thing.

We take our photos, we make sure the lighting is right, the distance is right, we don't want God to see, we certainly don't want our family to see.

We we try to well, we try to justify ourselves.

That's how we respond to our flaw, our flaws.

Our response is typically justification.

Now, justification typically appears in two different forms.

Typically, um for me, one of the most common ways that justification appears is through blame.

It was the first sin in the garden, right?

Where we see blame first come up whenever whenever God approaches Adam and says, So, so who exactly told you you were naked?

Have you eaten of that tree in the garden that I told you not to eat?

Of course, God already knew because He doesn't need He doesn't need for us to take the right photo, the right angle, to zoom in real close.

He doesn't he doesn't need a daughter who specializes in spotting the flaws to point out where the problem is.

God, God knows.

So he knew exactly where the problem was, and so he he knew when Adam began to respond that Adam was deflecting.

He was blaming.

Yeah, okay, so God, you remember that woman that you made her, right?

I didn't make it.

Yeah, right, you made her the woman you made, okay, she gave me the fruit, and so I ate it.

What's he doing there?

He's blaming.

Saul does this in verse number 15.

He says, When Saul, Samuel says, What is the bleeding of the sheep?

And and I hear I hear these goats over here too.

What's that about?

And Saul says, Okay, so here's the deal, Samuel.

They, the people, have brought them from the Amalekites.

For the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God, and the rest we have devoted to destruction.

What's he saying?

He's blaming them.

Look, this isn't me.

I mean, it's not like I'm King Samuel, you know.

This is what the people did.

They took the sheep, the oxen, the best of it, set it to the side, and said, Hey, you will get around to that later.

And and and the other stuff they devoted to destruction.

He is blaming.

I mean, I I do this.

I see it in my life, I see it in the life of my family and and and those in the community.

And when I turn on the news, people who say, It's not me, it's my job.

It's not my fault, it's my neighbor.

It, you know, I wouldn't act that way, but you know, I mean, the the the government, the state, the city, look at what they do, what they've done.

Or here's some more common.

Um, you know, it's it's my childhood.

It's the way I was brought up, it's the stuff I've faced as a as a child, or it's my biology, it's my chemistry.

But here's the problem with looking at life that way, because the truth is, yeah, all of those are factors, and your neighbor may be a jerk, and your children may be difficult, and your job may be tough, and and like all of these things weigh in.

But the truth is if we are going to blame everything on a factor or person in our life, we're no longer sinners standing at the foot of the cross, we're victims standing at the foot of the cross.

Does that feel okay to you?

I mean, when you look at it that way and we say, hey, you know, God, you're sovereign.

I mean, I'm not in control of this world, but but someone is, it's you.

And this isn't my fault, it's my job, it's not my fault, it's my family, it's not my fault, it's my chemistry, it's not my fault, it's my past, it's not my fault, it's look at what they're doing.

Then ultimately, whenever that domino begins to fall, it ultimately ultimately lands back on the lap of the God who died on a cross for us.

We are not victims standing at the foot of the cross.

The victim is nailed to the cross.

Blame.

The other one is excuse.

We blame, we blame others, and the other one is we excuse, we minimize, we act like it's really not that big of a deal.

Maybe given enough time, we would sort this thing out.

You know, God, we're kind of like the character and the story that Jesus told, the parable that Jesus told with a man who owed like a bazillion dollars, and the master comes and says, Hey, listen, you're gonna have to pay this back now.

And the guy's like, No, no, no, you need to give me more time.

If you just give me more time, then I will figure this whole thing out.

But you you gotta be just, you gotta be fair, give me more time.

What's he doing?

He's excusing, he's just saying, Hey, look, the problem is not me, the problem is the circumstance that you're setting up.

Give me more time.

Here's that's what Saul does in verse number 20.

Saul he's giving his first blame excuse, and Samuel stops him.

He literally in the text, he says, Stop.

Just I can see Samuel.

Putting his hand out.

Talk to the hand.

Stop.

Don't say anything else.

And then he confronts Saul.

And then Saul doesn't yield.

He doesn't repent.

Instead, he offers this excuse.

He says, He says, I have obeyed the voice of the Lord.

I've gone on this mission on which the Lord has sent me.

I have brought Agag and the Amalekites from Amalek and have devoted the Amalekites to destruction.

But the people, again the blame, but the people took of the spoils, sheep and the oxen and the best, and all these things devoted to destruction to sacrifice to the Lord your God at Gilgal.

What's he doing?

Hey man, we're going to get around to it, but you're just going to have to give me more time.

Because, like we were on our way, we're down here at Gilgal right now.

So, I mean, we're going to do it.

I'm going to get there someday.

I'm going to make it all work.

I'm going to figure it out.

I'm going to stop doing this.

I'm going to start doing that.

But you just got to give me more time.

As a pastor, as a father, as a as a teaching assistant for five years, I can tell you one undeniable truth about human nature.

We are excuse-making machines.

I mean, I the very last human cognition to go, I believe, is the ability to excuse oneself.

It's the first one that shows up.

We are excellent excuse makers.

This is what this sounds like today.

I only had just one.

Not a big deal.

Just a little bit.

I just need to blow off some steam.

You know, we're really in love.

I mean, I know what the Bible says, but we're really in love.

I'm just telling it the way it is.

This is how we justify doing things that we know in scripture are strictly prohibited.

You know, I worship better at the lake, anyways.

I know I shouldn't have put that in there, but I've got my own.

I've got the excuses that I make for the problems that I create for me in my home.

You know, it's been a rough day.

You know, I just need some space.

I mean, we're we're great at making excuses.

That's what we do with our flaws.

That's what's in our nature, our instinct is to hide our flaws, to take the picture from a distance, from an angle that no one's going to see, pretend like maybe God's not going to be aware of it as well, or at least he's going to appreciate what all was so good about our work that he's not going to notice the mess we made on the wall.

That's not God.

God is, he's not just a person with perfectionist tendency, perfectionist tendencies.

We all dealt with people who have perfectionist tendencies.

God is the embodiment of perfection.

So God's response is different.

God's response to our flaws is summed up in a single word.

It appears four times in this text.

It's the word regret.

Look with me at how they appear in this text.

Roll back with verse number 11 to verse number 11.

God says to Samuel, I have regret that I have made Saul king.

When Samuel is talking to Saul, he tells Saul, he says, and also the glory of Israel, when he's telling Saul that, hey, the kingdom's going to be taken from you, given to your neighbor who is better than you.

He's talking about David, of course.

And he says concerning this, he says, also the glory of the Lord, the glory of Israel, will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man that he should have regret.

He's not like me.

God doesn't have to retract statements.

God doesn't have to rewind.

God doesn't have to regret.

Some of you are already spotting the tension here, aren't you?

God's not a man that he regrets.

But look at the very uh the very next uh slide here, verse number 35, at the very end.

Samuel did not see Saul again until this is the narrator, by the way, speaking.

Samuel did not see Saul until the day of his death.

But Samuel was grieved over Saul, and the Lord regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel.

Kind of weird, isn't it?

The opening verse that uses the word regret says that God regretted.

The very last verse tells us, the narrator tells us again that God had regretted that he had made Saul king.

But right in the middle of this section, Samuel says twice, God doesn't regret anything.

That's not what God does.

God's not like a man who regrets.

So what's happening here?

Because for us to understand what is going on with how God is handling Saul's sin, I think it tells us a lot about God's nature and how he's going to handle our sin.

I'm interested in that.

How many of you are interested in how God's going to handle your sin?

Very interested in that.

Like I want to know, God, God, God regretted his sin.

What's this about?

Well, all right.

Here's your word for the day that you some of you will remember this from your English class.

It's the the the word, the phrase is semantic range.

Semantic range.

A semantic range is uh something that uh English teachers will use to describe the meaning of a word.

And it's like, okay, it has this range of meanings.

So, like to, you know, something as simple as the word live has a range of meanings, L-I-V-E, a range of meanings.

The Hebrew word here has a range of meanings as well.

Sometimes the word means um to be sorrowful, to be upset about.

God regrets.

Sometimes it has that emotional aspect to it, but other times it has a more cognitive, a more mental, a more, a more thoughtful um range of meanings.

And there the word regret means to make a decision.

I regret that I've done this, I'm going to undo it.

So you got these range of meanings, and by the way, both translations occur many times in the Old Testament, where you see God or other people who are regretful, they're sorrowful, or where you see God or other people who are regretful, they're changing their mind.

Now, so what I think is happening in the text here is this is almost like a wordplay where the narrator is leaning on one meaning, and the words of Samuel are leaning on the other meaning.

Now, I know for some of you like you get lost in all that, but let me give you an example of what this looks like.

Uh Benjamin Franklin famously said after, like directly after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Uh, this is not on the slides, by the way, so you can just write this down in your mind.

Um, he Benjamin Franklin famously said after directly after the signing of the decorate declaration of independence, we must all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

Good phrase.

Two different meanings of the word hang.

Uh Vince Lombardi said, and I, and I I love this, like I'm I'm never going to get a chance to use this as a pastor, but if I ever was a manager, like this is this would be like day one phrase.

This is Vince Lombardi.

He says, If you aren't fired up with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.

It's pretty good, isn't it?

Right.

So there you got the two meanings of the word fired.

You know, one is fired, like emotional bubbling up, and then the other one is fired as in like you no longer have a job here, you know, what our president used to say before he became president, but that's a whole nother sermon.

So, anyways, and here's the third one.

Uh, this is actually an unnamed individual.

Um, you have to own your mistakes before you can own your future.

And there the word own, own or accept your mistakes before you can own or have any kind of control or direction for your future.

It's not great theology, I understand, but the principle is pretty clear there, multiple principles.

Number one, how this works, how regret can have this range of meanings and at the same time this truth that we have to own our mistakes.

I've thought many times.

I want to get to heaven.

I want to see if, first off, if multi-worlds is true.

I want to see if like there are other alternatives that were taken throughout history and the mind of God.

Like I want to know, but what I because what I really what I'm really curious about is this.

I want to know.

I want to know if Adam and Eve in the garden, when God came down and God said, Have you eaten of that tree that I told you not to eat?

If Adam and Eve, weeping and genuinely sorrowful, fell on their face before God and said, We we're so sorry.

I know I shouldn't have done that.

I'm not going to blame, I'm not going to excuse.

Like it was us, we we did it, we're sorry.

What do you think God would have done?

I you know, I can't say for sure, but knowing the nature of God as I do, I wonder if this whole thing would have played out entirely differently.

Whenever they didn't try to hide their mistakes, they tried to confess them.

Because look, it's true.

God, God regrets concerning our flaws, God regrets.

He is sorrowful over our flaws.

God was sorrowful over the situation that Saul had put himself in.

It broke God's heart.

God's heart is broken over our sinfulness.

But there are also choices that are made concerning our sin.

Romans 8 gives us some glimpse of what that is.

This is a, some of this is a very familiar passage of scripture, just like Paul's pointing this out.

He says in verse number 27, he says, and he who searches the hearts knows what is in the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

God knows.

He doesn't just know what's in your hand, he knows what's in your heart.

How terrifying a statement is that!

Frightful.

Frightful.

But fortunately, Paul doesn't stop writing there.

And we know that for those who love the Lord, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

For, listen, for those whom he did foreknow, he did predestine to be conformed to the image of his son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

And those whom he did predestine, he also called, and those whom he called, he also justified, and those who he justified, he also glorified.

Anybody here feel glorified today?

I mean, like, I don't always feel it, but there it is in God's sacred, eternal, undeniable word in past tense form, those who he predestined, he also glorified.

See, here's the truth.

Here's the truth that is so important for when we start taking snapshots of our life and sharing them with one another, or taking snapshots of our life and presenting them to God, here's the thing that you want to remember.

Regrets, God not having regrets is actually a very good thing.

Because for me, when I think about this passage, when I read this passage that God doesn't have regrets, I think to myself, if God judges me, like that judgment is locked in, if God punishes me, that punishment is locked in.

And there is some truth that we should converse at another time about that whole thing.

But but what I hear today, when I read this verse and I realize that God doesn't have regrets, when I hear Samuel's declaration that God is not like a man, that he changes his mind, I hear it in context of Romans 8, where from the foundation of the world, according to the book of Revelation, our names have been written in the Lamb's book of life from the foundation of the world.

And God keeps no white out in his office, no eraser, his keyboard does not have a delete key.

There's no Command Z, no undo button.

He he does not have regrets, he does not change his mind.

And in Christ, he made up his mind about you and me many, many years ago.

Eons ago.

See, God's true response is not just regret, but it's a special kind of regret.

God's response is not just, he doesn't change his mind.

It's this sorrowful kind of passionate and love, this rescue regret.

We might would call it justification.

In the same way, well, using the same term, you and I, our response to our flaws is justification that doesn't work.

God's response to our flaws is justification that does.

God justifies us.

That's what Paul says in the book of Romans, that those who he predestined, he called, those who he called, he justified in Jesus Christ.

He justified.

And those who he justified, he also ultimately glorified.

God wants to cover your sin so that you don't have to hide your sin.

That makes confession very important, recognition of who we really are very important.

By the way, that also makes you a better human, a better father, a better mother, a better brother, a brother, a better sister, a better neighbor, a better worker, a better boss.

Whenever you and I realize that we are flawed individuals, working with other flawed individuals, and our flaws may not perfectly align with their flaws, but boy, howdy, we have our own, don't we?

That makes me think through.

Whenever I encounter people who are complicated or difficult, I have to remember that I at times, though very, very rarely, am also complicated and difficult.

God wants to justify our sins.

I wonder what would have happened if whenever Samuel showed up, if Saul had been brokenhearted and repentant, knelt down and said, I just, I don't, I don't know what's wrong with me.

I should have done better.

Yeah, you're exactly right, Samuel.

I didn't do what the Lord commanded me to do.

And that was a very important task.

That's that's something, long story, that's something God had promised to do way back in the book of Exodus, and he assigned it to me, and I didn't do it, and I'm so sorry.

I just kind of wonder with this God who is so loving and so gracious and regrets, but that regret is bathed in rescue, something we would call justification.

He wants to rescue humanity.

What would that story have looked like for Saul?

I think it would have been entirely different.

I want to close with just simply reading over us Hebrews chapter 4, verse number 12 through 14.

Hebrews 4 · chapter mention

I almost selected this as our text, but we've just gone through the book of Hebrews, and so I didn't want to go back and rewind and because some of you would have thought that I was just being lazy and not preparing.

So, but I want to close with this reading for us this morning.

The author says, For the word of the Lord is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing through the to the division of soul and spirit, of joint and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intents of the heart, the very deep pieces.

Like I may know my thoughts at time to time, but I rarely know my true intentions.

So do you.

Rarely know those.

But the word of the God knows it very deeply.

And in addition to that, no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

That's heavy.

It would be unbearable were it not for the next sentence.

It would cause me to want to justify my flaws, to blame, to excuse if that's all God said about it.

But he continues in the very next verse, he says, Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens.

Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession.

What confession?

That He is Savior and that we are lost, that He is righteous, we are sinners.

That our life is filled full of attempts to justify our actions, and God's desire for our life is that our souls be justified by Him.