"Battle of Ebenezer," 1 Samuel 7:1-17, Andrew Evans

You may be seated well. Good morning.

Thank you so much. Who was that?

Good morning. Way back there.

Hey, it's good to see the rest of you, too.

I hope you're awake now. My name is Andrew Evans.

I'm one of the pastors here at Church of the Resurrection.

Let me invite you to open in your Bibles to First Samuel

1 Samuel 7 · chapter mention

Chapter 7 that's on page in the Pew Bible 200 and 15215.

We are continuing our series looking at First Samuel, which

is really just the first half of of the book of Samuel, which

tradition over the years is divided into two books, but it's

really just one book. And we're going to be looking

this fall at the story of Samuel, the story of David.

Before we get started, let me pray for us.

Father, you are a God who loves your people.

And you do not leave us alone, but you send us help, You send

us direction, You send us guidance, You send us

leadership. And I pray that you would meet

us in your word and meet us with your Spirit, and point us to our

Savior and our King Jesus. Amen.

The people of Israel, as our passage begins, are in a really

bad spot. They were defeated by the

Philistines in battle 20 years earlier, and the reverberations

from that have been continuing for two decades.

The Tabernacle was likely destroyed.

The Ark was brought back, but for two decades has sat in a

city that's largely inhabited by Canaanites.

The Philistines have continued to enslave and oppress the

Israelites. But one thing that I think is

most striking about the narrative is how for the last

two chapters and how for the last two decades, Israel has

lacked a leader. Last leader, Eli was weak,

conflicted, and when he learned that the Philistines had

captured the ark, he fell and his neck broke.

It's like he was decapitated. And when his head came off, it

was like the entire nation of Israel lost their head.

There was no leader in Israel. So as our passage begins and the

length of this time, the length of his leadership vacuum comes

into focus, we are forced to ask the question, will God provide

his people a leader to save them?

As it happens, this is, in a sense the question that has

animated God's people for hundreds of years at this point.

After the Hebrews grew into a large people in Egypt, the

Egyptians enslaved them. And So what did God do?

God sent a leader, Moses, who led God's people out of slavery.

Moses LED God's people all the way to the border of the

Promised Land. And then God provided another

leader, Joshua, whose name means God saves, to lead Israel the

rest of the way into the Promised Land.

God provided another leader to save his people and to lead them

in conquest of their enemies. Now, Moses and Joshua were great

leaders, there's no doubt about it.

There's a reason Moses is in the Supreme Court chambers on the

wall, some of the greatest leaders ever.

But even in them we start to see some faults.

Moses became angry and sinned. Joshua rashly made a pact with

the people who tricked him, people who happened to live in

the city that we've seen today of Kirioth Jirium.

And Israel failed to complete the conquest of the promised

land. They disobeyed.

And then for 300 years we have story after story of Israel

falling into sin and idolatry and then God sending a judge, a

leader to save them, to rescue them.

Now, these judges, they start out reasonably competent,

reasonably faithful. But the book of Judges is just

this spiraling downward spiral of Israel and its leaders

getting further and further away from God.

There's a reason one of the longest stories and judges is

the story of Samson, who was far from a faithful leader.

And by the end of the book, there's this refrain that keeps

getting repeated that shows us the problem.

There was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in

his own eyes. And so we come now to the book

of Samuel, which comes right after the book of Judges,

actually in some ways overlaps with the time period of the

judges. The people have been starved of

godly leadership for centuries. The time of the judges has been

a disaster. Will God, will God in his mercy,

send another leader to save his people?

And the answer seems to be, at least initially, no Eli, the

latest judge. He's feckless and lazy.

His sons are lecherous thieves. And the result is that the Ark

is taken into captivity. And it actually takes God.

As Dan showed us last week, it takes God re enacting the

plagues of Egypt to bring the Ark back to the Israelites.

The Ark has its own exodus, just like Israel did centuries

before. But the result of these two

exoduses in some ways couldn't be more different.

See, when Moses LED Israel out of Egypt, they come to Mount

Sinai. They received the law.

And then Moses, Aaron and 70 leaders, 70 elders go up the

mountain. They behold God, They eat and

drink. It's it's the climax.

It is the ratification of the covenant, the ratification of

the leadership of God's people. But when the ark is rescued from

captivity, goes on its own exodus, almost the opposite

happens. At the end of chapter 6, the ark

is taken into a city of the Levites.

These people should know how to handle the ark, but they again

treat the art with contempt. They try to look inside it and

instead of 70 elders beholding God and eating and drinking in

his presence, 70 Levites die. This is why at the start of our

chapter, the ark is in the city of Kiryat Jarian.

If we weren't sure before, now we are absolutely clear.

God's people have no capable leadership.

Will God provide a leader for his people?

This is a massive problem for Israel, isn't it?

It's just a sociological reality that groups of any size need

leadership. A leader animates, guides,

points people to where they should go, where they should not

go. Leader looks out for dangers.

A leader fights off enemies. We as Christians need good and

godly leadership just like Israel did then.

And as the story of Israel shows, godly leadership leads to

flourishing, but unfaithful leadership leads to oppression

and slavery. Israel here is oppressed and

enslaved. Will God provide a leader to

save his people? Chapter 7 here is, you could

say, the end of the first part of the book of Samuel.

And here we see the prophet Samuel step firmly into the

center of Israel's civic life. And this passage shows us, as

we'll see that that Samuel is the new Moses who will lead his

people out of slavery. But more than that, Samuel

points forward to how God will continue to act to save his

people all the way up to today. He's establishing a pattern or

helping us to see a pattern. God saves his people by sending

a capable leader. God saves his people by sending

a faithful, capable leader. And this culminates in Christ,

the Son of God, the son of the great King David, who will lead

his people just as Samuel leads them here.

So let's walk through this passage together and see how

Samuel both leads God's people here and then points us to our

greater leader, the Lord Jesus. So we learned in verse 2 that

the people of Israel are lamenting after the Lord.

They're feeling the oppression of the Philistines, and so

they're lamenting and looking for salvation from God.

This has been Israel's pattern all through the book of the

Judges, right? Drift from God, become

oppressed, call on God again, and he sends the judge.

They hope. Rinse and repeat.

Will the cycle continue? And we have strong reason to

hope that the cycle could in fact be broken when Samuel steps

in. Samuel is the son of a barren

woman, just like the patriarchs. God has spoken directly to him,

which He hasn't done for anybody else in a very long time.

Samuel is different. Maybe this time will be

different. And what Samuel says in verse 3

here confirms that Israel is on the cusp of a renaissance.

Now look at with me at what he says in verse three.

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 then and only then will He save you.

Samuel is calling for true deep heart level repentance and

reformation of God's people. Samuel, the leader of God's

people, is directing their heart.

Now God cares about how we act. Certainly He cares about what's

visible on the outside, but he also cares about what's on the

inside, what other people can't see.

He cares about our hearts, our emotions, our desires, our

thoughts, our inclinations. And so as a result, does the

leader that God sends Samuel here isn't innovating, though.

This isn't a new teaching. He's following the example of

Moses over and over in the book of Deuteronomy, which is Moses

is sort of final sermon to Israel.

Moses calls on the people of Israel to follow God with their

hearts. One of the most famous verses,

perhaps the most famous in Deuteronomy verse in Deuteronomy

here, O Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is 1 You shall

love the Lord your God with all your heart.

He says that over and over and over.

The first great leader of God's people wants them to love God

from their heart, not just obey him.

Samuel here is showing himself to be a new Moses, ready to lead

God's people out of slavery by directing their hearts.

And Jesus follows exactly this pattern and does that when he

applies the law to the heart as well.

Perhaps most famous is in the Sermon on the Mount, where he

takes the law and then applies it to your heart, applies it to

our hearts. He is interested in the

condition of our heart. He is the true and final leader

of God's people. And as our leader, he wants our

hearts to be fully devoted to God.

In fact, this is the only way to root out idolatry.

Now, until now, we actually haven't heard about idolatry in

the book of Samuel. We've heard about theft.

We've heard about sexual immorality.

We've heard about presumptuousness.

But underlying all of this sin is idolatry, worshipping other

gods. What was true then is true now

as well. Idolatry drives us away from God

and into sin. And the only way to stop

sinning, the only way to defeat these idols, is not some sort of

outward conformity to rules. It'll work for a little bit of

time, but that will never last. The only way is an inner turning

back to the Lord with our hearts.

Our hearts must be gods. This is what Samuel is calling

Israel to. It's what Jesus calls us to as

well. So the leader of God's people

first directs our hearts, but he does more than that.

Let's keep looking. The people put away their idols

and then Samuel calls them to Mizpah for a worship service and

a covenant renewal ceremony. Now Samuel here doesn't pretend

that Israel can just go there alone and you know, talk to God

on their own. You know, like they somehow have

this this direct access to the big man upstairs.

Sometimes that's your help here here.

It put that way. Look at verse 5.

Then Samuel said, Gather all Israel to Mizpah, and I will

pray to the Lord for you. Samuel, as their leader, will

stand between them and God, and he will pray for them.

Samuel is the faithful leader, and he as the leader will

represent Israel before God. He will intercede for them.

Now the people confess their sins, and in the Philistines

they sense an opportunity here to strike another blow against

them. And so they start to attack.

Israelites, naturally enough, are afraid.

And so in verse 8 they say 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 that's exactly what Samuel

does. He intercedes for the people.

He prays to God on their behalf. And again here, Samuel isn't

innovating. This is just what the leaders of

God's people do. Abraham did this.

Moses did this repeatedly. Daniel does this later in the

Old Testament. And all of these examples of the

leaders of God's people point us ultimately to Jesus, who is

always interceding for us before God.

Maybe you have fallen into sin. You know that you're not right

with God. You're feeling distant from him.

And you know deep down that this is because of your sin.

You struggle to pray. You don't really want to read

your Bible. Coming to church makes you

anxious. You're afraid of being called

out, and you wonder in your most honest moments, who will bring

me back into God's presence? Who can restore me to him and to

God's people? My friends, this is what the

leader of God's people does. Samuel here is representing

God's people before God in order to restore them to him.

And as he does this, he is pointing us to Jesus.

Jesus represents you to the Father.

Jesus asks God to forgive you. Who will restore you to God?

Jesus, look to Jesus, call on him.

He will not leave you. He will come with you and stand

before you with the Father. And even now he's interceding

for you. So as Samuel is interceding, the

pressure continues to rise on the Israelites.

Samuel prays and then he offers a sacrifice of an innocent lamb

to atone for the sins of the Israelites.

And just as he's offering the sacrifice, verse 10, the

Philistines drew near to attack Israel.

Well, text is pretty clear that the Israelites knew that the

Philistines were coming. Samuel almost certainly, it's

not almost certainly, certainly knew that they were coming as

well. But what does Samuel not do?

He doesn't draw them up into battle lines, does he?

He doesn't become an army commanders.

Maybe some other judges have done that, but that's not what's

going on right here. He leads them.

Samuel here leads God's people by setting their priorities and

the highest priority, even with the Philistines right there, the

highest priority is becoming reconciled to God.

I think it's so important that we're always asking ourselves if

we are letting Jesus set our priorities.

Just like Samuel here is setting the priorities for Israel.

Now we as a church are setting out on a strategic planning

process. Looking forward to that, I

think. Please pray for us, pray for

your for the pastors, pray for the PC as we work on that

together. Pray specifically that we would

follow the priorities of our leader, Jesus.

We want Jesus, our leader through the Holy Spirit to lead

us, to guide us, to set our priorities, and what is true of

us as a church corporately is true of us as individuals and

families as well. In just a few minutes, we will

be baptizing Rowan Murphy. What a joy, what a privilege to

have you guys here. And we will, we will charge him

and pray for him that he will fight boldly under Christ's

banner, that he will follow the Lord Jesus in his life, that the

Lord Jesus would be his leader. And what's true for him is is

true for all of us. Are we willing to follow Jesus

even when it's inconvenient and even dangerous?

Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to give generously, to

forgive readily, to be hospitable even to strangers.

We must do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with our God.

The world will tell us different things will.

The world will tell us that we are being naive.

But we must let our leader, our Lord Jesus, set our priorities.

We must follow Jesus in our lives.

Our passage here pushes us even deeper, though.

When Samuel focuses on reconciliation with God here,

he's revealing what should be our highest priority as well.

My friends, there is nothing more important for you and for

everybody else in this world than to be reconciled to God.

It may feel like the Philistines are breathing down your neck.

Maybe work is overwhelming your marriage on the rocks.

Health crisis has left you spinning.

Maybe current events have left you angry and anxious, and the

saving work of Jesus to reconcile us to God through his

death and resurrection feels like a distant and frankly

irrelevant abstraction from the needs of the day.

But think about the situation of Israel when Jesus actually came.

Jesus came to a people who were oppressed by outside forces led

by corrupt leaders. Sounds an awful lot like the

Israelites here, doesn't it? His disciples and so many other

people expected him to be a great political leader.

But instead of raising up an army, Jesus became an innocent

lamb. It was slaughtered to atone for

our sins. All seemed lost.

What a waste. But it is precisely here, in the

atoning death and resurrection of Jesus that the greatest

victory over the powers of the world took place.

Jesus conquered your greatest enemies.

You were no longer enslaved to the world, the flesh, and the

devil. You are a new person because of

Christ and what He did for you on the cross and in the empty

tomb. If you were looking to Him in

faith, He is working now to set all things right, and He will

finish that work and He calls you to rest in that promise.

The greatest need that we have is to be reconciled to God.

The greatest need that the world has is to be reconciled to God.

My friends look to Christ in faith, receive that

reconciliation from him, bring other people to the Lord so that

they might look to him and receive that reconciliation.

Christ's atoning sacrifice is the wellspring of all that this

world needs, just like it was the wellspring for what Israel

needed as well. The Philistines.

They're closing in on the worshipping Israelites.

Just as the Paschal lamb dies, God thunders against the

Philistines and throws them into confusion.

They are defeated before Israel. All Israel then has to do is to

chase them away. The result is that the land is

free from oppression and slavery.

God won the victory. God saved his people who were

trusting in him. And as if to drive this point

home, look with me at what's highlighted in verse 14.

The victory is so great that Israel actually reclaims several

cities that they had lost. Cities from Ekron to Gath.

Now, we've already seen these cities in this narrative.

They're the same cities that had passed the ark between them,

cities owned by the Philistines. But when they pass the ark

through them, God demonstrated his power and defeated them by

sending plagues and reclaiming these cities for Israel.

Here is only finalizing the victory that God alone won many

years earlier. God won the victory.

He fought here for his people, and he'd been fighting for years

actually for them. And as a result, Samuel sets up

a monument near the place of Israel's covenant renewal, and

he calls it Ebenezer Stone of help.

Thus far, the Lord has helped us.

He marks a place. He wants Israel to remember

where their salvation comes from.

It's not from him that salvation comes from the Lord.

Now, of course, though, there is a sense in which it did come

through him, right? Samuel is the leader whom God

used, just like God used Moses, just like you would use kings

later. The problem though is that all

of these leaders will fail. None of them are God.

For them to exalt themselves would be blasphemy until Jesus.

Jesus is the perfect leader, He never fails and he is God by

drawing people to himself while saying look to me, put your

faith in me. He's pointing them to the very

one who saves them. Jesus wants all people to be

reconciled to God, and that means for him, unlike for

Samuel, pointing people to himself, the cross in the empty

tomb, the places of of Christ's passion and victory are the

greatest Ebenezer friends right now, so many of us are anxious

and angry. We're worried about our jobs,

worried about our friends, worried about our city, worried

about our country. It can feel like the Philistines

are attacking us right when we are most vulnerable.

We so desperately need a leader, one who will guide us and guard

us and gather us together. Many people offer themselves as

that leader. Pretenders to the throne have

always existed, and they always will.

But we have a leader, the greater Samuel, the greater

Moses, Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the son of King David.

We have a leader who took the attack of the Philistines, who

absorbed its blow, and who now stands victorious, ready to lead

us. He directs our hearts, He

intercedes for us, He sets our priorities.

And then he calls us to himself, for he is the one who saves us.

There is no leader who is better to follow.

There is no leader who is more faithful.

He will never fail you. He will never be defeated, so

let's follow Him and follow him always, in the name of the

Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.