SPEAKER_00: We study through books of the Bible here at the village chapel, and we are in 2 Samuel, as you can tell from uh the screen up there.
SPEAKER_00: If you need a copy, we've got extras.
SPEAKER_00: Uh just raise your hand up real high.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody will drop one off at your row, your aisle.
SPEAKER_00: You can also dial in by way of the internet, and uh rather than something simple like David, we've chosen Jabesh Gilead as our password for you, hoping to uh keep the bandwidth preserved from those who can't spell.
SPEAKER_00: And uh but uh do join us and look at the text with us.
SPEAKER_00: I think that's always helpful.
SPEAKER_00: Uh we're calling the study of 2 Samuel the story of unlikely redemption.
SPEAKER_00: Uh just reminding ourselves over and over again uh what unlikely choices we are, uh what unlikely choices people like uh Saul and David, Samuel, even all of them are.
SPEAKER_00: Who wrote the book?
SPEAKER_00: We do not know.
SPEAKER_00: Uh Samuel may have written part of it, but certainly he didn't write anything after chapter 25, because his death is recorded therein.
SPEAKER_00: So someone else must have written the chapter uh 1 Samuel chapter after chapter 25, so 26 through 31 there, and 2 Samuel itself.
SPEAKER_00: Now we have it as two books.
SPEAKER_00: The ancient Jews had it as one, uh, when it got translated into Greek, what's called the Septuagint, it became two scrolls, and on down there were some traditions that led us to a place where in our English Bibles, anyway, we separated as two different books.
SPEAKER_00: But what's interesting is when you finish reading 1 Samuel and you get to chapter 31, you have the death of Saul, recorded Saul and Jonathan, in a battle on Mount Gilboa.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna post the map up here, as I often do for you, just to let you know just a little bit about the geography.
SPEAKER_00: Now, uh, this is the Sea of Galilee up here.
SPEAKER_00: Uh this is Bethshan.
SPEAKER_00: Some of us have been there on our trip to Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Uh that is where um after Saul and Jonathan die, the Philistines carry their beheaded bodies and post them on a wall.
SPEAKER_00: And you're going, thank you for inviting me to church.
SPEAKER_00: Um but I'm I'm I'm just giving you the there's a 3,000-year gap between our reality and theirs.
SPEAKER_00: And that cultural gap and even the way they do warfare and things like this is completely different from what we're used to, but that's Betchan there.
SPEAKER_00: And uh um our place uh where that battle would have taken Maggie Boa, probably somewhere up in here.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna read about Ziglag as we did last week.
SPEAKER_00: We read one verse in our introduction to 2 Samuel, one verse, and I figured it out at if we kept up that rate of one verse per week, we will finish 2 Samuel in 2025.
SPEAKER_00: And and I'm hoping some of you will still be with us uh by that time.
SPEAKER_00: Um but but uh so what happened is a backstory, you've got to know this.
SPEAKER_00: Um, David's been hanging out right here in Ziklag for a while because Saul, who is the king of Israel, has been uh uh in pursuit of him, tries to kill him 11 times according to our Bibles and to the historical narrative, uh, roughly 11 times he's attempting to kill David.
SPEAKER_00: Um but so David is pretending to hang with the Philistines and pretending to be on their side, along with his 600 men that have followed him to Ziglag.
SPEAKER_00: It's one of the there are the these uh Philistine cities, cities right along in here, and this whole brown area is kind of ruled by them.
SPEAKER_00: They are marauders.
SPEAKER_00: They they they uh uh when they go up to Mount Gilboa and fight with uh Saul and the and Jonathan and the armies of Israel, uh David is sort of pretending to go along with them, and then some of the other guys, the other Philistines uh that didn't invite him to come get become nervous about him.
SPEAKER_00: They think, hey, wait a minute, he's he's actually from Israel.
SPEAKER_00: He's gonna turn and he's gonna turn against us in this battle.
SPEAKER_00: So they literally send him back.
SPEAKER_00: Well, little does he know, at the same time all that's going on up in the north, uh from the south and from the east, some people called the Amalekites have come to Ziglag, where David has been living and hiding out with his 600 men, with their wives, with their children, with their cattle, with their sheep.
SPEAKER_00: And these Amalekites, also a marauding group of people, have literally burned Ziglag to the ground.
SPEAKER_00: They've stolen all of the wives and children.
SPEAKER_00: They've stolen, they've they've stolen the sheep and the cattle and dragged them off.
SPEAKER_00: So David, when he comes back down with his my his men, he sees the smoke in the distance.
SPEAKER_00: When he finally gets there, he sees that Ziglag, his own his own temporary town, is literally just burned to a cinder, and all of the people are missing, people he loves so dearly, people that his men love so dearly, their wives, their children.
SPEAKER_00: He inquires of God, shall I go?
SPEAKER_00: Will you be with him?
SPEAKER_00: I want to go rescue them, God.
SPEAKER_00: God says yes.
SPEAKER_00: We read this in 1 Samuel.
SPEAKER_00: And so he goes and he rescues them and routes the Amalekites and comes back, and that's where we pick up in verse 1 of 2 Samuel.
SPEAKER_00: You ready?
SPEAKER_00: So it's one of those kind of action-packed deals.
SPEAKER_00: I remind you, it's in the Iron Age, uh, early Iron Age, actually.
SPEAKER_00: And um uh the monarchy is the time period of Israel's history that we're calling.
SPEAKER_00: That's the blue stripe that goes up in the middle there.
SPEAKER_00: And uh it begins with Saul being the king of all of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Uh when he dies, which we're gonna read about here, there'll be a little period of about seven years where there's two kings.
SPEAKER_00: Ishbesheth is one of them, sort of up in the north, and David in the south.
SPEAKER_00: And after about seven years, the kingdom unites under David and then Solomon, and then the kingdom will split again a little bit later.
SPEAKER_00: But this follows on the heels of the period of the judges.
SPEAKER_00: The period of the judges, which we've also studied as a book of the Bible together in the history of Israel, is a time period when everyone, there was no king in Israel, and everyone did that which was right in their own eyes.
SPEAKER_00: And that's not a positive statement.
SPEAKER_00: That means there's basically anarchy of all kinds.
SPEAKER_00: And the place was chaotic, and and a lot of acrimony, a lot of people fighting against each other, a lot of just tribalism and all that stuff, and that's a period of the judges, and so they come into the period of the kings, and Saul becomes king, and at first it looks okay, but then it goes south, and we see that Saul's just become this person who's literally walked away from Yahweh.
SPEAKER_00: And uh, so to the point that Samuel, God's prophet, has anointed David to be the next king.
SPEAKER_00: But there's a period of time where it takes for that transition to happen, and we're gonna be reading about that transition after we kind of finish here with the death of uh of Saul.
SPEAKER_00: Let me just read the 16 verses, and I'll show you some pictures from an archaeological dig in a second.
SPEAKER_00: Um, it came about after the death of Saul that David had returned from the slaughter of the Amalekites, that David remained two days in Ziklag, and it happened on the third day that behold a man came out of the camp of Saul, that would have been from up north, with his clothes torn and dust on his head.
SPEAKER_00: Don't miss that.
SPEAKER_00: That's very much the way they would mourn, very publicly, very physically.
SPEAKER_00: Uh like us, we go to a funeral, we put on a suit, we put on the, you know, we look nice, we go to the funeral, we get we don't have dust in our hair, we don't we don't tear our clothes.
SPEAKER_00: These guys are very effusive and visible with their grieving and their mourning.
SPEAKER_00: And so he's got that on him, and that that visible thing, and it must be bad news.
SPEAKER_00: As he approached, as he came to David, he fell to the ground and prostrated himself.
SPEAKER_00: He must know something about David, to have chosen David to be the one to fall before.
SPEAKER_00: What did he know?
SPEAKER_00: I I can't say with a hundred percent confidence, but he isn't falling before everyone else.
SPEAKER_00: He's falling before David.
SPEAKER_00: So he must know something about who David is.
SPEAKER_00: David said to him, and by the way, David speaks in this 16 verses five different times, and all five times he's asking questions.
SPEAKER_00: I like that.
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting.
SPEAKER_00: He's trying to find the facts of what happened.
SPEAKER_00: And so here's the first question.
SPEAKER_00: From where do you come?
SPEAKER_00: The man said, I've escaped from the camp of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: David said to him, second question, How did things go?
SPEAKER_00: Please tell me.
SPEAKER_00: He said, The people have fled from the battle.
SPEAKER_00: Also, many of the people have fallen and are dead.
SPEAKER_00: And Saul and Jonathan, his son, are dead also.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, Jonathan was David's very best friend.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: David said to the young man who told him, this is the third question, how do you know that Saul and his son, Jonathan, are dead?
SPEAKER_00: Remember, the battlefield would have been vast.
SPEAKER_00: The hillside of Gilboa would have been pretty big, or pictures of it and bringing it, but I mean it's pretty big.
SPEAKER_00: And Saul and Jonathan could have died way over there, and you might not have even seen it if you were still a part of the battle.
SPEAKER_00: You know?
SPEAKER_00: How do you know that they died?
SPEAKER_00: The young man told him this.
SPEAKER_00: He said, by chance, and this is a pretty strong word right here.
SPEAKER_00: It just so happened, you know, it'd be another way to interpret that.
SPEAKER_00: Uh I happened to be on Mount Gilboa.
SPEAKER_00: Behold, Saul was leaning on his spear, not like a golf guy leaning on his golf club, but we read from 1 Samuel 31 that Saul leaned on his spear to kill himself.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: So he wanted to die.
SPEAKER_00: He wanted to impale himself and die.
SPEAKER_00: And behold, the chariots and the horsemen pursued him closely.
SPEAKER_00: When he looked behind him, he saw me, and he called to me, and he said, and I said, Here I am.
SPEAKER_00: And he said to me, Who are you?
SPEAKER_00: And I said to him, I am an Amalekite.
SPEAKER_00: You know, this guy may or may not know how that name, Amalachiite, that name of a people group, would have sounded in David's ear at that particular moment, given the fact that the Amalekites had just destroyed Ziklag.
SPEAKER_00: And David had just given everything to go rescue his wives and his kids and his property.
SPEAKER_00: And so this guy says that, telling the story of his conversation with Saul, and then Saul says to him, Please stand beside me and kill me, for agony has seized me because my life still lingers in me.
SPEAKER_00: And the man then tells David, I stood beside him, meaning Saul, and killed him, because I knew he had could not live after he had fallen.
SPEAKER_00: And then the man says this, and I took the crown which was on his head, and the bracelet which was on his arm, and I've brought them here to my Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Now why would he do that?
SPEAKER_00: What does he know about David?
SPEAKER_00: What does he think about the crown and the arm band?
SPEAKER_00: David took hold of his clothes, his own clothes.
SPEAKER_00: This is the implication.
SPEAKER_00: He tore them.
SPEAKER_00: And so also did all the men who were with him, and they mourned and they wept and they fasted until evening for Saul and his son Jonathan, and for the people of the Lord and the house of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword, and so they're grieving, mourning.
SPEAKER_00: And remember, heretofore they've been tending to be Philistine, pro-Philistine.
SPEAKER_00: And here they are in burned down Ziklag, physically exhausted, emotionally, stretched so thin.
SPEAKER_00: But yet coming back somewhat victorious with their wives and their children and their cattle and their sheep.
SPEAKER_00: But to a city that's reduced to cinders.
SPEAKER_00: Still their whole life is turned up upside down.
SPEAKER_00: And now comes the news of his best friend's death.
SPEAKER_00: And of King Saul's death.
SPEAKER_00: Now remember, King Saul has been after David to kill him.
SPEAKER_00: But David has resisted responding in kind multiple times.
SPEAKER_00: 1 Samuel 24, 1 Samuel 26, two occasions.
SPEAKER_00: He could clearly and easily have killed Saul, who was in pursuit of David, to kill David.
SPEAKER_00: And David said, No, I won't lay a hand on the Lord's anointed.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: And David said to the young man, fourth question, Where are you from?
SPEAKER_00: Not where did you just come from, but where are where are you from?
SPEAKER_00: The man answered, I'm a son of an alien, an Amalekite.
SPEAKER_00: David said to him, fifth question, how is it that you were not afraid to stretch out your hand to destroy the Lord's anointed?
SPEAKER_00: Not just Saul.
SPEAKER_00: But how is it that you were not afraid to stretch out your hand to go against what God has set up, what God has done?
SPEAKER_00: Why weren't you afraid of that?
SPEAKER_00: You should have known that, especially if you're a resident alien living in Israel, which is what he's claiming to be.
SPEAKER_00: That word is the way that would describe him.
SPEAKER_00: As a person who would be living in Israel would know that Saul is the king, and that God had set him up as the king initially.
SPEAKER_00: David called one of the unmen and said, Go cut him down.
SPEAKER_00: So he struck a and he died.
SPEAKER_00: And David said to him, Your blood is on your head.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, it's on you, for your mouth has testified against you, saying, I have killed the Lord's anointed.
SPEAKER_00: And we'll fade to black and stop there.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are going, Okay, we should have gone to the Methodist Church, or maybe we should have gone to the Baptist church, or maybe we should have gone to the Presbyterian church, and somewhere.
SPEAKER_00: This is weird, okay.
SPEAKER_00: Look, 3,000-year gap, historical, religious, cultural, all kinds of hurdles.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have to jump to understand some of this stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Um, but at the same time, this is God's word.
SPEAKER_00: And it's preserved for us for a purpose and for a reason, and I think there's much that we can learn.
SPEAKER_00: Well, sidebar number one before we get into the meaning, what I think the meaning of the text is, is man, just this month and last month, they uncovered the ruins of Ziklag.
SPEAKER_00: It's awesome.
SPEAKER_00: They weren't really sure where it was before.
SPEAKER_00: And uh you can go online yourself if you want to see some of these photos, but I mean, here it is.
SPEAKER_00: Man, they have uncovered it.
SPEAKER_00: It's got a layer that dates back to um uh, you know, the very beginnings of the Iron Age, more like 1200 B.C.
SPEAKER_00: See, the time of David is more like right at we're right at about a thousand BC right now.
SPEAKER_00: And um, and so this is this is pretty amazing.
SPEAKER_00: And they found on top of it a layer of artifacts that were clearly Jewish.
SPEAKER_00: And so it's an ancient city that has Philistine artifacts, and on top of that a layer that seems to be Jewish in some in some of its markings and some of its the way it the way the pottery is, the way things are.
SPEAKER_00: They're deducing that this is a Jewish layer, and there seems to have been a fire.
SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
SPEAKER_00: Well, might, I mean, there's fires probably uh in a lot of places, but I just find it fascinating.
SPEAKER_00: I find it interesting to see that over and over and over again, it seems to me that history, science, and that sort of thing eventually catches up to what the Bible tells us is true and what the Bible records as history.
SPEAKER_00: And so at least I think some of the evidence can't be denied.
SPEAKER_00: You gotta look at it, and this is just current, it just happened, and I thought I'd share it with you because of that.
SPEAKER_00: Now, our um one other thing I I we need to acknowledge is that this does re this passage raises a lot of questions.
SPEAKER_00: I started asking them early on this week.
SPEAKER_00: Trust me, I'm going, what do you want me to say?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, really, Lord, this is uh a weird sort of thing for us in our modern times as we look at a passage like this.
SPEAKER_00: And given the fact that 1 Samuel 31 and 2 Samuel 1 seem to differ on a couple of the details.
SPEAKER_00: In 1 Samuel 31, it seems to imply that the Philistine archers were the ones that came and surrounded Saul.
SPEAKER_00: And yet in chapter 1, this Samalachite says it was charioteers.
SPEAKER_00: Uh it seems to say in 1 Samuel 31 that Saul committed suicide and he was dead, it says in 1 Samuel 31.
SPEAKER_00: And yet in 2 Samuel chapter 1, this Amalekite says that he finished Saul off.
SPEAKER_00: In 1 Samuel 31, it says the Philistines took Saul's armor, which why would you leave the crown if you're gonna take the armor?
SPEAKER_00: It's a shiny thing with jewels in it.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you're just gonna take the iron plate thing, whatever, you know.
SPEAKER_00: And yet here in 2 Samuel 1, we have this Amalekite who has in his possession the crown and the arm bracelet.
SPEAKER_00: What are what are we gonna do with all of that?
SPEAKER_00: It sounds a little is the Bible contradicting itself?
SPEAKER_00: What do we got here?
SPEAKER_00: You know, and this is these are all natural questions to ask.
SPEAKER_00: Which account is true if they're contradicting each other?
SPEAKER_00: Which one is true?
SPEAKER_00: The Amalekite in chapter 1 of 2 Samuel or the narrator in chapter 31 of 1 Samuel?
SPEAKER_00: Choices are you could go with 1 Samuel 31 has it wrong, the narrator there.
SPEAKER_00: You could go with Amalekite in 2 Samuel 1, was an opportunistic schemer, or perhaps an intelligence officer for the Philistines trying to figure out whether or not David would, how he would respond to the news of Saul's death.
SPEAKER_00: Because remember, they were suspicious of David.
SPEAKER_00: And they sent him back.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't allow him to go to Gilboa to battle Saul.
SPEAKER_00: And if he hears about Saul's death and he jumps for glee, it would seem like he would be on the Philistine's side.
SPEAKER_00: If he cries and weeps and mourns, perhaps he really was never with the Philistines.
SPEAKER_00: And so maybe this guy, this Amalekite, is a spy.
SPEAKER_00: And he's been sent to scope out the way David reacts.
SPEAKER_00: You could also come to the conclusion that both accounts have some of the details wrong, or that both accounts are right and that they can be harmonized.
SPEAKER_00: Look up on the screen.
SPEAKER_00: The Philistine archers could have been riding in the chariots.
SPEAKER_00: Saul could have attempted to commit suicide, but the Amalekite have to finish him off.
SPEAKER_00: That's possible.
SPEAKER_00: Even though we know he asked his armor-bearer to finish him off in 1 Samuel 31, but his armor-bearer refused to do that.
SPEAKER_00: He would not lay a hand on the Lord's anointed.
SPEAKER_00: And yet this Amalekite would.
SPEAKER_00: And says that he did.
SPEAKER_00: You could harmonize it that way.
SPEAKER_00: You could say the Philistines took Saul's armor because they came late to the game, and the Amalekite was hiding behind a rock right near where Saul died, and when Saul fell, he immediately snuck out from behind that rock, grabbed the crown, grabbed the armlet, and then ran for the hills.
SPEAKER_00: But I got other questions.
SPEAKER_00: Man, if I'm that Amalekite, and I did do that, and I got the gold crown, and I got the armlet, I'm putting it on eBay.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna sell it.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna make some money and buy a house by the sea.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna walk 80 miles to go find David.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna continue to put myself in the sort of fray and risk my very life and be a part of all of that stuff.
SPEAKER_00: I'd find a way to do something else with this landslide of good luck that I've had because I just stumbled upon, as it says right here, just happened to be on Mount Gilboa.
SPEAKER_00: You gotta ask why the Amalekite even made the 60 to 80 mile journey from Gilboa to Ziklag in the first place.
SPEAKER_00: What possible motive could he have?
SPEAKER_00: Why not head away in some other direction?
SPEAKER_00: Let me answer it this way.
SPEAKER_00: It isn't always necessary for us to, or even prudent, for us to try to find an either or when a both and is okay.
SPEAKER_00: I think when you read this story, I think some of the harmonizing, that's okay.
SPEAKER_00: That's fine.
SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't change the meaning of this text.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't change the fact that this Amalekite seems to have some motives that are other than, I just want to honor David and Yahweh.
SPEAKER_00: No, if he really wanted to honor Yahweh, and if he really wanted to honor David, he wouldn't have even killed the Lord's anointed to begin with.
SPEAKER_00: He would have known, because he lived inside of Israel, as he claimed, that you don't do that to God's anointed.
SPEAKER_00: Just as David didn't do that.
SPEAKER_00: What's clear, I think, in the overarching story is that God had determined it was time for King Saul to be replaced by King David.
SPEAKER_00: And we believe, in a big story of history, that God is in charge of human history and the flow of human history, and that each and every one of these kinds of events that we might not be able to understand because of the 3,000-year gap and the cultural gap and the religious gap and all of the even even the war practices that we're used to and that they are practicing.
SPEAKER_00: We're not used to any of this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: It sounds so strange to us.
SPEAKER_00: But in in with all of that taken into consideration, there is yet something God is trying to say to us as this is preserved for us.
SPEAKER_00: And this is God's word to us.
SPEAKER_00: And he writes says what historical investigation can do, and in this case I believe must do, is to clear away the overgrown thickets of misunderstanding, misreading, sheer bad history, sometimes willful obfuscation, in order that the main texts can be allowed to say what they are saying.
SPEAKER_00: And that the main questions may stand out in their stark simplicity.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we'll try to get to in all of this.
SPEAKER_00: What are the main texts?
SPEAKER_00: What is it really saying to us ultimately?
SPEAKER_00: And I think at the very beginning, at the at the least, it's saying that every page of biblical historical narrative is ultimately designed to tell us the story of God's promise of redemption.
SPEAKER_00: I think that ultimately that's the goal.
SPEAKER_00: That God is showing us as He shepherds human history along with great specificity in the lives of individuals like Hannah and Samuel and Saul and Eli even and David here in 2 Samuel, like he's going to do.
SPEAKER_00: As God shepherds that, God is ultimately in charge.
SPEAKER_00: And he's moving pieces into place so that his ultimate purposes and plans for redemption on offer by grace through faith in Christ Jesus, who said that the Old Testament finds its fulfillment in him.
SPEAKER_00: All of this is God at work in some of the details.
SPEAKER_00: The entire story of the Bible, Keller says, can be seen as a struggle between true faith and idolatry.
SPEAKER_00: That is, if I worship the crown or the arm bracelet, if I worship King Saul, or even if I worship David, who's about to be the next king, I'm going to be disappointed at some point.
SPEAKER_00: Because I will have created idols, and we just have modern day versions of idols in our own day and time.
SPEAKER_00: For us, the things we put at the center, the things we look to as kings.
SPEAKER_00: If you will, in our lives, could be many and varied.
SPEAKER_00: It could be an opportunity, a vocational opportunity, could be a pleasurable experience of some kind.
SPEAKER_00: It could be some way in which we've wrapped our entire identity around our job or around some next hope of some opportunity happening for us or whatever.
SPEAKER_00: What are we so ambitious about?
SPEAKER_00: You know?
SPEAKER_00: This Amalekite seems to me to be ambitious for himself.
SPEAKER_00: Whereas David is pretty ambitious for the glory of God because his main concern is God's anointed.
SPEAKER_00: That is God's plan.
SPEAKER_00: It's not just the person Saul, but it's that God, Yahweh, would be honored in his planning.
SPEAKER_00: And that David himself withdrew from opportunities to kill Saul himself.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because if God was going to take Saul out, God would have to take Saul out himself.
SPEAKER_00: And he's not going to try and help God do this.
SPEAKER_00: So he doesn't kill God's anointed.
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, I think we see here this Amalekite, especially that deception, rarely yields desirable dividends.
SPEAKER_00: I think that's true.
SPEAKER_00: I think, I mean, Eugene Peterson, when he writes about this particular chapter, he says it this way: the Amalekite is a liar.
SPEAKER_00: He just says it right out.
SPEAKER_00: And most of the commentators summarize the Amalekite that way, that he has some real selfish motive involved, that he thinks he can be a grifter, move into this space, and take advantage of the death of Saul and take advantage of David's, what he thinks is David's passionate desire to be the human king of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: And yet David is the one that isn't really motivated by all that.
SPEAKER_00: David seems to be the one who's motivated by God's time and God's will, God's ways in all of this.
SPEAKER_00: And while he could have hurried things along by killing Saul himself, he doesn't.
SPEAKER_00: He's interested in what God wants to do.
SPEAKER_00: Deception really yields desirable dividends.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you know that personally.
SPEAKER_00: How many of you are bad secret keepers?
SPEAKER_00: I am a bad secret keeper.
SPEAKER_00: I'm the worst secret keeper in the world.
SPEAKER_00: Anybody else that way?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm serious.
SPEAKER_00: If I buy a gift for Kim, I bring it home, and I'm pretend I'm supposed to give it to her a week later or something like that.
SPEAKER_00: It's like an hour and boom, she's got it.
SPEAKER_00: Because I'm like, honey, I got you something, you know.
SPEAKER_00: And look, see, it shakes.
SPEAKER_00: It's got that noise.
SPEAKER_00: You know what that noise is, don't you?
SPEAKER_00: And I'm just I'm just so excited.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm a horrible, terrible uh I can't deceive on this thing.
SPEAKER_00: I can't keep a secret.
SPEAKER_00: I just can't.
SPEAKER_00: Um, to me, seems to be professional at all of that.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what Jesus said about deception.
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing concealed that will not be disclosed.
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing hidden that will not be made known.
SPEAKER_00: What you've said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, what you've whispered in the ear, in the inner rooms, will be proclaimed from the roofs.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you, but it makes me a little uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00: If Jesus is right, and I kind of think he is, um this is a little unsettling for me.
SPEAKER_00: Um of my motives, all of my thoughts, all of my questions, all of my weird, crazy stuff that goes in my brain, that goes on in my brain, all of that.
SPEAKER_00: It's all gonna be made.
SPEAKER_00: No, that's that's smoo boy, oh boy.
SPEAKER_00: But the great news of the gospel is that I'm fully known already, and I'm fully loved already.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why we come together and remind ourselves of the gospel all the time.
SPEAKER_00: He already knows your deepest, darkest thought.
SPEAKER_00: He already knows the things that make you so afraid and tremble and despair.
SPEAKER_00: And he already also knows the things that make you get mad and angry.
SPEAKER_00: He also knows the things that you're obsessed with that have become idols for you.
SPEAKER_00: He already knows this.
SPEAKER_00: He you are fully known.
SPEAKER_00: And the gospel is you are fully loved as well.
SPEAKER_00: So why wouldn't you turn to him?
SPEAKER_00: Why wouldn't he become your king?
SPEAKER_00: He's the one that, he's the only thing that can bear that weight of glory in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: We must never think that even if we may have duped man's discerning eye, that we've also eluded the scrutiny of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Um God is watching.
SPEAKER_00: He's watching, he sees everything, he's not misplaced one square inch of his creation.
SPEAKER_00: Uh he knows where every molecule is.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is what infinite infinite means.
SPEAKER_00: And we we finite creatures have difficulty understanding what it means for him to be an infinite being, but it means that he has numbered the hairs on your head, Jesus said.
SPEAKER_00: And and and he knows exactly where every part of his creation is and where it's going.
SPEAKER_00: And he is sovereignly in charge of all that.
SPEAKER_00: So rest in his love.
SPEAKER_00: You're fully known and you're fully loved.
SPEAKER_00: He sees it all.
SPEAKER_00: I've told this story too many times, but I enjoy telling the story, so I'm gonna tell it again.
SPEAKER_00: I love the little story of the kids in the cafeteria at the Catholic school.
SPEAKER_00: At the head of the table was a large pile of apples.
SPEAKER_00: The nun made a note, posted the apple trick right by the apple tray and said, Take only one.
SPEAKER_00: God is watching.
SPEAKER_00: And right down from the table, a little girl had brought in a little plate of chocolate chip cookies and put that there.
SPEAKER_00: And she saw that note, and she went around another night, and she wrote that note and put it there, and says, Take all you want.
SPEAKER_00: God is watching the apples.
SPEAKER_00: So, so this is awesome.
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
SPEAKER_00: That I can tell you, does God know you completely and fully?
SPEAKER_00: Is he watching you?
SPEAKER_00: Yes, he knows everything that's going on in your heart.
SPEAKER_00: He knows everything that's going on in your mind, your imagination.
SPEAKER_00: He knows what you invest your time and resources in.
SPEAKER_00: And he knows everything you're afraid of.
SPEAKER_00: All that stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And yet he loves you fully.
SPEAKER_00: That's great news.
SPEAKER_00: Why wouldn't we why wouldn't we turn to him?
SPEAKER_00: Uh why wouldn't we want him to be our king?
SPEAKER_00: We must nurture, thirdly, a faith that honors God, God's time and God's ways and God's wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: We take that from this passage, yes, because of what we see in David and how it's contrasted with what we see in the Amalekite.
SPEAKER_00: The self-ambitious Amalekite reminds us that we must never think that even if we've do man's discerning eye, we could evade heaven's stare.
SPEAKER_00: We've got to find ourselves more controlled, not by selfish ambition, but by holy ambition.
SPEAKER_00: If you want to know what your ambitions are all about, ask yourself what you do when there's nothing else for you to do and you, what do you do with your spare time?
SPEAKER_00: Where does your mind go?
SPEAKER_00: How do you spend your resources?
SPEAKER_00: If you have extra resources, or even if you choose to go in horrible debt, what is it you're so obsessed with that you've got to have that you think will make you happy in some way?
SPEAKER_00: These are the things we are ambitious about.
SPEAKER_00: What if it doesn't go the way you planned?
SPEAKER_00: What if you had this idea and it was supposed to be so grand and so awesome and it doesn't go that way?
SPEAKER_00: Is that gonna destroy you in some way?
SPEAKER_00: Because if it is, maybe that's what you're ambitious about.
SPEAKER_00: As opposed to the holy ambition of God's anointed, God's chosen, God's plan, God's purposes, if you will.
SPEAKER_00: Stott used to talk about holy ambition, uh, and he reminded us that ambitions for the self must be modest.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna put it on the screen, it's too long, but I'll read it to you.
SPEAKER_00: Ambitions for God, if they are to be worthy, can never be modest.
SPEAKER_00: Ambitious for God.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what David was.
SPEAKER_00: Ambitious for the good name of his God.
SPEAKER_00: Um, whether you think he was harsh or not in meeting out that that death at Malachi, at least what I can say, is I take from it his ambition was not just about Saul, it was about the Lord's anointed.
SPEAKER_00: It was about God's will, God's ways.
SPEAKER_00: There's something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God, Stott said.
SPEAKER_00: How can we ever be content that he should acquire just a little more honor in the world?
SPEAKER_00: No, Stott says.
SPEAKER_00: Once we are clear that God is king, then we long to see him crowned with glory and honor and accorded his true place, which is the supreme place.
SPEAKER_00: That's beautiful.
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean, Buchanan says, to know God so well that we trust God no matter what?
SPEAKER_00: Man, I want to get there.
SPEAKER_00: I think that's where real freedom is, is trusting God so much that whatever comes my way, whether I'm Paul and Silas sitting in the prison cell late at night, wondering why in the world I'm having to suffer this.
SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden they start singing, they start praising, they start worshiping God.
SPEAKER_00: And that is indeed the kind of response that we need to have.
SPEAKER_00: No matter what, we trust God, we're here for his glory.
SPEAKER_00: So the last point I would make is this in Yahweh's kingdom, we bow before a king who sees and exposes our sin and then rescues and redeems us from it.
SPEAKER_00: You see, David saw and exposed the Amalekites, and then he lopped his head off.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm so glad Jesus is the greater king than David.
SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad Jesus is the greater king than Saul.
SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad that when Jesus sees my sin and exposes it, he goes to the cross for it himself.
SPEAKER_00: And see, that's why I can stand up here and say, He's the king you've always needed, he's the king you really want if you get honest about it.
SPEAKER_00: Aren't you glad that Jesus is greater than King David, greater than Saul, greater than any king that ever lived in Christ, fully known, fully loved, and the personal work of Christ, fully reconciled to God.
SPEAKER_00: Because the finished work of Christ on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: So close with this red path quote.
SPEAKER_00: Bible never flatters its heroes.
SPEAKER_00: So when you think about David in this book, you're going to see him in all of his guts and glory, uh, glory and shame.
SPEAKER_00: Bible never flatters its heroes.
SPEAKER_00: It tells us the truth about each one of them in order that against the backdrop of human breakdown and failure, we may magnify the grace of God and recognize that it is the delight of the Spirit of God to work upon the platform of human impossibilities.
SPEAKER_00: This is why Jesus is the one that we can trust for grace, for mercy, for forgiveness for all our sin.
SPEAKER_00: That's why his life and his name are the name above, he's a name above all names and the one that we can really trust.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, thank you for this.
SPEAKER_00: Uh keep using even these dark passages, Lord, to point us not only to our see our own sin, but to see our need for the Savior, Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Um thank you, uh, Lord, for the way you've worked very hard down through history to in great detail to set things up so that we would see your hand on human history.
SPEAKER_00: Uh and that I know is being done in many lives here, represented in this room and those watching on the internet.
SPEAKER_00: I know you're busy, Lord, in all of our lives.
SPEAKER_00: So help us, Lord, to see ourselves as belonging completely to you.
SPEAKER_00: And may our lives bring you glory as we delight in your presence in our life, your will for our life, your ways in guiding and leading us in the path that you have for us.
SPEAKER_00: And may you be glorified in our lives, we pray in the name of Jesus, our Savior and Redeemer.
SPEAKER_00: Amen and amen.