CALL TO CONFESSION

Psalm 130:1-3

1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!

2 O Lord, hear my voice!

Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!

3 If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

All-seeing God, we confess our sinful response to the trials and discomfort of our lives. While in the depths of our trouble, we have resented our need for you and rarely lifted our eyes to you, the only one who can bring us true help. Instead we have consistently directed our gaze to earthly things that falsely promise escape and comfort. We have been charmed by vain things and in our willful blindness to the love and comfort you offer us, we are found completely guilty in your holy sight.

We ask you Lord, that you would look upon us in our helpless state and lead us to the cross. Thank you that Jesus looked perfectly to you in every single situation of his life, trusting you completely in all things. We are deeply grateful that Jesus never stopped trusting you, even when you did not allow the cup of condemnation that we deserve to pass from him. Yet Christ's life and death on our behalf is the very comfort to which we are habitually so unwilling to look. Forgive us, Father, for our rejection of this beautiful gospel story into which you have invited us.

Gracious Father, soften our hearts to delight in your love for us. Help us to trust you as you call us into journeys that we do not want to take, knowing that you will never leave us or forsake us. Give us strength to believe that from your own fullness you will repay all that you take from us. Lift our eyes afresh to the cross, from where our help comes, the place where our lives were saved by Jesus’ death. In his name we come, Amen.

“Take a few moments to personally confess your sins to the Lord.”

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

“Hear these words of comfort and assurance.” 

Psalm 130:4-6

4 But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.

5 I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;

6 my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning,

more than watchmen for the morning.

• The story we come to in 1 Samuel 15, confronts us with what happens when we treat the command of God as something we only sort of obey. 
• In chapter 15, Saul has a final opportunity to serve and obey the Lord. 
• It looks like Saul actually did most of what God told him. 
• It was, by any human accounting, a great victory. But by God’s standard, it was a catastrophe. 
• In the middle of the story sits one of the most familiar verses in the Old Testament: “To obey is better than sacrifice.” 
• And that shapes our central theme: The Lord delights in a heart that listens and obeys his Word more than in any sacrifice we could ever bring him. 
• This chapter is going to put a question to every one of us: Where in your life have you settled for the appearance of obedience when God has asked for the whole thing? 

1 Samuel 15:1-35

• Samuel came to Saul with the prophetic word of the Lord. 
• He reminded Saul that it was the Lord who had made him king. 
• And as king he had to listen to the words of the prophet of the Lord. 
• And he reminded him that the people over whom he reigned were not his, they were the Lord’s. 
• On account of that, Saul must listen to the words of the Lord. 
• The Hebrew word implies hearing with the intent of obeying. 

DEVOTED TO DESTRUCTION

• Now, vv2-3 are very troubling to modern minds. 
• Did God really command Saul to completely annihilate Amalek? 
• Let’s take some time to work through this, because of objections raised against passages like this, that what God is commanding here is genocide or ethnic cleansing. 
• That is not what is happening here. 

• We need to understand who Amalek is and why they are being singled out for destruction. 
• Amalek first comes on the scene in Exodus 17. They attacked the tired, hungry, and defenseless Israelites in the wilderness.
• And this is the account where Moses lifted up his hands and Israel prevailed but when he lowered his hands Amalek prevailed.
• At the end of the battle, the Lord said to Moses, “I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” (Exodus 17:14-16)
• God never forgot the Amalekite treachery. 
• What is happening in chapter 15 is that the Lord is commanding Saul, his anointed, to carry out a judicial act. 
• Amalek had been on death row for a long time and judgement time had come. 
• This was the holy and righteous judgement of God through divine warfare. 

• These are tough passages and hard for many to hear. 
• But it reminds us that God is holy. And his judgments are just and holy. 
• If we lose sight of who God is, how holy, perfect, and righteous he is, we will struggle to make sense of OT stories like this. 
• A few helpful things to understand:
• We have to keep the main storyline of the Bible in view. The biblical story is about God’s redemptive plan and the narrative of chapter 15 fits in the greater narrative of Scripture. 
• This type of judgment through divine warfare is limited and non-repeatable. 
• There will be judgment. God may delay it for a time, but it will come. 
• God is merciful. But there comes a point where God says, “Enough!” 
• There are consequences to sin and continued wicked behavior and God will not allow it to go unchecked forever. 
• God is long-suffering, extending grace upon grace, and when it is continually refused, then his justice will be revealed.
• Divine warfare is about the elimination of false worship. It is a focused attack on sinful and idolatrous religion more than it is about people. 

THE MISSION

• The word of the Lord was that Saul was the king the Lord had appointed to bring, at last, the promised judgment to the Amalekites. 
• The mission parameters were crystal clear: “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have.”
• “Do not spare them…” No one was to be spared. No man, woman, child, or animal will escape judgment. 
• And nothing was to be kept back. Nothing was to be taken for personal gain. 

• Saul prepares to carry out the words of the Lord. He musters up an army of considerable size and they march toward Amalek and lie in wait in the valley. 
• Saul warns the Kenites, who had been friendly to Israel in the wilderness, to evacuate so they don’t become collateral damage in the execution of divine warfare. 
• Vv 7-9 gives us the summary of Saul bringing the long-anticipated judgement on Amalek. 
• Saul defeated Amalek. He devoted to destruction all the people with the edge of the sword. 
• 9 But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fattened calves and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them. All that was despised and worthless they devoted to destruction.
• Saul devoted a lot of things to destruction but there was a lot he did not devote to destruction. 
• Whatever was considered worthless and despised was destroyed, but whatever was good, Saul and the people kept for themselves. 
• The original Hebrew suggests that it was Saul who spared the king and best of the livestock and the people joined him. 

• This is the heart of the chapter; this action of defiance of the words of the Lord. 
• And it’s the temptation we face every single day. To do the easy parts of obedience, the things that aren’t costly, the things that don’t require much of us, and quietly putting to the side the hard parts. 
• Spiritual compromise rarely looks like total rejection of God.  It looks like selective obedience or partial obedience. 
• We can outwardly present as pious, obedient believers doing the stuff everyone sees. Yet live with a divided heart that says 90% obedience is enough. 
• We might surrender to God our public behavior but we keep our private thoughts, our bitterness, or our secret internet habits to ourselves. 
• We might be generous with our time but we are harsh and impatient with our families behind closed doors. 
• We destroy the “worthless” sins that we don’t care about anyway, but we spare the “best” of our pride, our comfort, and our ambition. 
• That’s Saul. Everything he deemed despised and worthless he placed under judgment, and he saved the best for himself, and he called it obedience. 
• Partial obedience is still disobedience. 

THE LORDS REGRET

• V10, the Lord says to Samuel, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments.” 
• That idea that God can “regret” something trips up a lot of people. 
• There is even a seeming contradiction in this chapter. V10 says he regrets, v29 that he doesn’t, and v35 says he does again. 
• It’s not a contradiction. When we say “regret” we mean we wish we’d done something differently.
• But we can’t say that is true of God. 
• God is absolutely sovereign and omniscient. He doesn’t make mistakes. He doesn’t change his mind like we do. He is never caught by surprise. 
• So it cannot mean that Saul’s actions and behaviors here have caught him by surprise and he wishes he never had anointed him as king. 
• When we come across language in Scripture that describes the Lord as having what we would classify as human emotions, that is the infinite God using human language to convey something real about his heart. 
• What is it that the Lord is trying to convey by saying that he regrets making Saul king? It is that he was grieved by Saul’s rebellion and sin. 
• He is grieved by what his people do. His regret is his righteous sorrow over human sin. 
• This should sober us to know that sin is not just transgressing God’s law or breaking the rules, sin grieves the heart of God.

• The Lord’s word breaks Samuel’s heart. He spends the whole night crying out to the Lord.
• He knew the consequences of a disobedient king. He had warned the people at Gilgal, “If you will not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandments of the Lord, then the hand of the Lord will be against you and your king.” (1 Sam 12:15)
• The next morning he goes to confront the king. 
• On his way he is told that Saul built a monument for himself.  Instead of bringing glory to God, Saul is busy erecting monuments to his own name. 

SAUL’S DEFENSE

• When Saul sees him he greets Samuel like everything is wonderful. “Blessed be you to the Lord. I did everything the Lord commanded.” 
• Now the Lord had just told Samuel that he didn’t, but Saul thinks his partial obedience is doing everything the Lord commanded.
• Saul shows no signs of a troubled conscience. 
• This is an example of the deceitfulness of sin. 
• Sin deceives us. Hebrews 3:13 exhorts us to encourage one another so that we do not become hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 
• Saul had been deceived into thinking that almost enough was complete obedience to God. 
• The very sinfulness that leads to disobedience often blinds the sinner to the reality of his or her disobedience. 

• Samuel sees right through the nonsense. 
• “What is the sound of the bleating of sheep in my ears and the lowing of oxen that I hear?”
• The evidence of Saul’s failure and disobedience testifies against him. 

• It's true that our sin testifies against us. We can do our best to cover it up, say the right things, post the right things on social media, show up to church with a smile. 
• But sin leaves evidence. There are sheep bleating somewhere! 
• Hebrews 4:13 reminds us that, “No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account.” 

• Saul does what most of us do, he shifts the blame. “They…the people, they spared the best of the sheep and the oxen. It was them, not me.” 
• And he wraps it in religious clothing, they spared the best “to sacrifice to the Lord your God.”  
• That blame shifting reminds us of the garden: the man blames the woman, the woman blames the serpent. 
• The heart in rebellion will always find someone else to blame. 
• It's a symptom of a heart that hasn’t yet learned to say, “It was me. I sinned. I own it before God.” 

• Notice this small detail. Saul calls him, “YOUR God,” not “MY God.” 
• His words betrayed his separation from the God whose voice he was meant to be hearing. 
• “Saul’s one sentence defense provides a brilliant study in the deceitfulness of sin.” John Woodhouse

SAMUEL’S ACCUSATION

• Samuel stops Saul.
• He reminds Saul of his position. He is the Lord’s anointed king over Israel, even if he thinks he is less responsible than the people in his own eyes.
• He reminds him that the Lord sent him on a mission to completely devote to destruction the Amalekites, the sinners.
• Those two reminders laid the foundation for the seriousness of the question Samuel asks of Saul: “Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord?” 
• “Why did you do it?” This echoes Samuel’s statement to Saul back in ch13, “You have done foolishly!”
• Disobedience to God’s Word is always foolish, so why do we do it? 
• Every time we sin we demonstrate that we do not believe that God is good, wise, righteous, and powerful. How foolish that is! 
• Saul wanted to blame the people but Samuel put all of the responsibility on Saul. 
• He wanted to claim the people spared the animals to sacrifice to the Lord, but Saul refutes that claim, “Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord?”
• Saul doubles down, “I did obey. I completed the mission. I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, I have devoted the Amalekites to destruction. But the people took of the best of the spoil to sacrifice to the Lord your God at Gilgal.” 

SAMUEL’S VERDICT 

• Samuel delivers one of the most famous indictments in all of Scripture. 
• V22-23 “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. 23 For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king.”
• There is the heart of true religion. The Lord is not impressed by religious activities that are built on top of a disobedient life. 
• God does not want our outward religious rituals if they are a substitute for a surrendered heart. 
• Nothing wrong with sacrifices, God commanded them.
• But sacrifice without obedience, what is that? That is empty religion. False devotion. It’s costume jewelry. 
• It’s an attempt to bribe God, “I’ll give you this sacrifice so that I can live my life the way I want to.” 
• God doesn’t just want your sacrifices, he wants your heart. 

• Our sacrifices today are church attendance, bible reading, and serving. Those are good things. 
• But if we think those activities are going to make up for an area of our life we have not surrendered to God, we are mistaken. 
• The 'you' that you keep hidden, that nobody knows about, that’s who the Lord wants. 
• He wants you to come into the light, receive cleansing and forgiveness by the blood of His Son, so that you can walk in obedience by the power of His Spirit. 
• Samuel goes even further. Rebellion, he says, is like witchcraft and divination. And presumption is like idolatry. 
• Samuel says, “Your partial, selective obedience is just as offensive to God as if you practiced divination.” 
• At the root, it’s the same thing. When we don’t obey God we are setting ourselves up as the ultimate authority.
• In essence, we have adopted another religion; which is idolatry. 

• Saul’s disobedience was a rejection of the word of the Lord, which was a rejection of the Lord himself. The consequence was God’s rejection of Saul as king over his people. 

• V24, Saul offers a confession, “I have sinned.”
• But it’s a hollow confession.  Because even in his confession he is still making excuses and blaming the people. 
• He is not grieved about transgressing God’s word. There is no brokenness over his sin. 
• We’re not hearing language like David’s confession in Ps 51, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.”
• Saul is more concerned about losing his grip on power than he is about his broken relationship with God. 

• Here’s what Saul really wants. To keep up appearances. “Return with me that I may bow before the Lord.” 
• He wants the prophet to stand by his side so that his standing before the people will not be ruined and his reputation remains intact. 
• That’s not godly sorrow that produces repentance. That’s worldly sorrow. 
• The difference is that godly sorrow says, “I’m sorry, I have sinned.”  Worldly sorrow says, “I’m sorry I got caught.”
• Godly sorrow says, “I’m sorry I grieved you Lord.” Worldly sorrow says, “I’m sorry for the consequences.” 
• If we’re honest, that’s what a lot of our repentance looks like. 

• Saul begs Samuel to stay with him but as Samuel turns to leave, Saul reaches out and grabs the hem of Samuel’s robe, and it tears. 
• And Samuel uses it as a vivid object lesson, telling Saul that the Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel away from him and given it to a neighbor that is better than he is.
• Saul’s kingdom is done, it is torn away from him. 
• And the neighbor who is better is David, a man after God’s own heart. 

• Samuel says to him words that were condemning to Saul but comforting to us. “The Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret.” 
• People will lie to us, promise us things they don’t intend to keep, and people we trusted will fail us. 
• But the Lord is not like that. He is not fickle, moody, doesn’t change his mind. 
• We can trust his promises. He means it. The Glory of Israel will not lie.
• Saul says, “Honor me now before the elders of my people…” Even after the rebuke and prophetic pronouncement all he cares about is his honor. 
• And Samuel does go with him. But not to validate him. 
• Samuel turns back to finish the job Saul refused to do.
• Agag appears before him cheerfully thinking the danger has passed. 
• Samuel declares that because Agag’s sword has made women childless, his mother will now be childless. 
• And the aging prophet takes a sword and executes the judgment of God himself, hacking Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal. 
• Notice, it was before the Lord. This was God’s holy judgment.
• That is a striking and vivid image that shows us that sin must be dealt with completely. 
• Sin cannot be managed. It cannot be kept like a pet. It must be put to death. 
• Every sin we cherish and hold onto, every little compromise we tell ourselves doesn’t matter, gives us a false expectation of safety. That the danger has passed. 
• But Scripture tells us plainly, the wages of sin is death. 

• The chapter ends on a somber note. Samuel returns to his home at Ramah, never to see Saul again. He grieved over Saul. Their relationship was forever severed. 
• Saul’s reign has ended in shipwreck.  

CONCLUSION

• This is a heavy narrative that leaves us feeling the weight of human failure. 
• We are more like Saul than we care to acknowledge. 
• We have all partially obeyed. 
• We have all been tempted to rationalize our sin by blaming others. 
• We have all feared the opinions of others more than we have feared the Lord. 
• We all have a lengthy record of failed obedience. 
• And if our acceptance before God depended on our perfect obedience, then every single one of us would be rejected, like Saul. 

• The good news of the Gospel is that God did not leave his people without a king. 
• The whole chapter has been driving us to consider: where is the king who will fully obey the Lord? 
• Saul couldn’t be that king. David will do better, but he has his failures. 
• The OT keeps asking, and never finds an answer. 

• Until one night in Bethlehem. 
• Centuries after Saul’s failure, another King arose, a descendant of David, the very neighbor the prophet Samuel spoke about. His name is Jesus. 
• Saul failed the test of obedience, but Jesus triumphed in perfect obedience. 
• Paul writes that Jesus, “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:8)
• And in Romans he wrote, “By the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” (Romans 5:19)
• Saul made excuses, Jesus made none. 
• Saul shifted the blame, Jesus bore it. 
• Saul spared himself the cost. Jesus spared us the judgment. 
• He took the judgment that our disobedience deserved. 
• He was rejected so that we could be accepted. 
• And on the cross, he offered the sacrifice that finally and fully pleased the Father because it came from a perfectly obedient heart. 

• Because of Christ, our standing before God is not based on our performance. 
• It is based on Christ’s perfect righteousness imputed to us by faith alone. 
• This truth changes how we think about obedience. 
• We don’t obey God to earn his favor. We obey him because we already have his favor in Christ. 
• True obedience is the joyful fruit of a heart that has been transformed by grace. 

• As we leave here today, let’s stop playing the game of partial obedience. 
• What is the Agag you’ve been sparing? The sinful habit you’re protecting? 
• Whatever it is, bring it out today. Don’t manage it. Don’t negotiate with it. 
• Put it to death at the feet of the King who was put to death for you. 
• Ask the Holy Spirit to search your heart, expose the areas of compromise, and bring them into the light.
• Confess them and lean on the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
• Then rest in him whose perfect obedience is counted as yours through faith. 
• To obey is better than sacrifice.

APPLICATION AND REFLECTION

In light of today's message....

• What did I learn about the gospel?
• How can I apply what I learned about the gospel to my life?
• With whom can I share the gospel this week?