God of Wrath and God of Grace

Scripture: 1 Samuel 15

Sermon: God of Wrath and God of Grace

Topics: command, curse, wrath, violence, grace, crime, punishment

Preached: Woodlawn October 16, 2005

Rev. Mike Abma

Preamble: Marva Dawn has an essay called “Worship Ought to Kill Us.” The essay reminds us how dangerous worship is supposed to be. In another essay, Annie Dillard says something similar. She writes: “It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.”

Once we are done reading our passage for today, you may wish you had brought a crash helmet today.

1 Samuel 15

Samuel said to Saul, ‘The Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. ²Thus says the Lord of hosts, “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. ³Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” ’

4 So Saul summoned the people, and numbered them in Telaim, two hundred thousand foot-soldiers, and ten thousand soldiers of Judah.⁵Saul came to the city of the Amalekites and lay in wait in the valley.⁶Saul said to the Kenites, ‘Go! Leave! Withdraw from among the Amalekites, or I will destroy you with them; for you showed kindness to all the people of Israel when they came up out of Egypt.’ So the Kenites withdrew from the Amalekites. ⁷Saul defeated the Amalekites, from Havilah as far as Shur, which is east of Egypt. ⁸He took King Agag of the Amalekites alive, but utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. ⁹Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep and of the cattle and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was valuable, and would not utterly destroy them; all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed.

10 The word of the Lord came to Samuel: ¹¹‘I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me, and has not carried out my commands.’ Samuel was angry; and he cried out to the Lord all night.¹²Samuel rose early in the morning to meet Saul, and Samuel was told, ‘Saul went to Carmel, where he set up a monument for himself, and on returning he passed on down to Gilgal.’ ¹³When Samuel came to Saul, Saul said to him, ‘May you be blessed by the Lord; I have carried out the command of the Lord.’ ¹⁴But Samuel said, ‘What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears, and the lowing of cattle that I hear?’ ¹⁵Saul said, ‘They have brought them from the Amalekites; for the people spared the best of the sheep and the cattle, to sacrifice to the Lord your God; but the rest we have utterly destroyed.’ ¹⁶Then Samuel said to Saul, ‘Stop! I will tell you what the Lord said to me last night.’ He replied, ‘Speak.’

17 Samuel said, ‘Though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel.¹⁸And the Lord sent you on a mission, and said, “Go, utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed.”¹⁹Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you swoop down on the spoil, and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord?’ ²⁰Saul said to Samuel, ‘I have obeyed the voice of the Lord, I have gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me, I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I have utterly destroyed the Amalekites. ²¹But from the spoil the people took sheep and cattle, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal.’ ²²And Samuel said,

‘Has the Lord as great delight in burnt-offerings and sacrifices,

   as in obedience to the voice of the Lord?

Surely, to obey is better than sacrifice,

   and to heed than the fat of rams. 

²³ For rebellion is no less a sin than divination,

   and stubbornness is like iniquity and idolatry.

Because you have rejected the word of the Lord,

   he has also rejected you from being king.’

24 Saul said to Samuel, ‘I have sinned; for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice. ²⁵Now therefore, I pray, pardon my sin, and return with me, so that I may worship the Lord.’ ²⁶Samuel said to Saul, ‘I will not return with you; for you have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel.’ ²⁷As Samuel turned to go away, Saul caught hold of the hem of his robe, and it tore.²⁸And Samuel said to him, ‘The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this very day, and has given it to a neighbour of yours, who is better than you. ²⁹Moreover, the Glory of Israel will not recant or change his mind; for he is not a mortal, that he should change his mind.’ ³⁰Then Saul said, ‘I have sinned; yet honour me now before the elders of my people and before Israel, and return with me, so that I may worship the Lord your God.’ ³¹So Samuel turned back after Saul; and Saul worshipped the Lord.

32 Then Samuel said, ‘Bring Agag king of the Amalekites here to me.’ And Agag came to him haltingly. Agag said, ‘Surely this is the bitterness of death.’ ³³But Samuel said,

‘As your sword has made women childless,

   so your mother shall be childless among women.’

And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.

34 Then Samuel went to Ramah; and Saul went up to his house in Gibeah of Saul. ³⁵Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

This past Tuesday morning I was sitting in a room with a bunch of other Christian Reformed ministers from Grand Rapids. It was our monthly book club meeting. Somehow we got off the topic of our book and onto the topic of preaching. A number of my colleagues got on a roll that too many of our sermons are negative. They said too many are “downers.” Our preaching needs to be more positive, more encouraging, more uplifting. One colleague in particular said, “I challenge each of you to preach a truly positive sermon on Sunday.”

So, after being duly chided, I spent the rest of the week scratching my head trying to figure out how to preach a positive sermon on this passage. How do you preach on 1 Samuel 15 with a Joel Osteen smile?

Well, I decided to phone the colleague who issued the challenged. Once I got him on the phone, I said, “Hey, help me out here. I’m trying to be more positive but I’m preaching on 1 Samuel 15 this morning. You know, the passage where Saul doesn’t totally destroy everything belonging to the Amalekites and gets rejected as king?”

My colleague asked, “Well, how’d you get stuck with that passage?”

“O, Peter, my colleague, he gave it to me,” I answered.

THE THREE MAIN STUMBLING BLOCKS

This passage is tough.

Each of the 3 movements in this chapter trips us up and causes us to stumble:

1. First there is God’s command to utterly destroy the Amalekites. I am someone who gets queasy watching CSI, so it is easy for me to get literally ill thinking about the carnage God commanded.

2. Then there is Saul’s crime – he spared the Amalekite king, and some sheep and some cattle. Is that so bad?

3. Lastly there is Saul’s punishment. He is rejected as king. What makes this hard to swallow is that Saul seems to try to repent, and he is still rejected.

STUMBLING BLOCK No. ONE: GOD’s COMMAND and the CURSE

We’ll start with the first stumbling block – God’s command to utterly destroy the Amalekites. This isn’t the first time God commands his people to utterly destroy another nation. When the Israelites under Joshua took Jericho, it had to be utterly destroyed. The technical word is the Hebrew word “herem” – sometimes referred to as being put “under the ban.” It meant that everything, and everyone under this ban was to be totally devoted to or given over to God.

But why destroy the Amalekites? It was the Philistines who were the big threat to Israel at this time? Well, we have to go all the way back to Exodus 17 when the Amalekites attacked the Israelites just as they were coming out of Egypt. At that time God’s anger burned brightly and fiercely against the evil of the Amalekites. God said, “I will completely blot out the memory of the Amalekites.” At that time a curse was put on the Amalekites that God would be at war against them from generation to generation.

For many of us, this is a disturbing picture of God.

God full of anger and wrath?

God as a warrior using violence?

We prefer a different picture.

We don’t want to see any wrath, any anger.

Love, yes, but wrath, no.

But a God of only love and no wrath is a dangerous lie.

It is a lie that fails to see God’s anger as a dimension of his deep love.

It is a lie that fails to see His wrath as a dimension of his deep passion for justice.

What we need to see and acknowledge is that the reality of evil is so deeply-rooted in this world, that it takes hard and sharp and at times violent tools to get it out.

For God to get his people out of Egypt,

it took a series of hard and sharp plagues.

Even then, it still took violently wiping out Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea.

Do you know that God is first called a “warrior” in Exodus 15?

That is because it took a “mighty arm,” a “warrior’s arm” to deliver his people.

God is a holy warrior.

He is passionate for his people.

He is passionate for justice and shalom.

And that very passion causes him to turn and fight against evil.

Here the sword of God’s wrath is turned against the Amalekites.

But anyone familiar with the Bible knows that God’s wrath also turns to uproot

the evil within his own people;

And in time, the sword of Assyria would pierce disobedient Israel.

In time, the sword of Babylon would pierce disobedient Judah.

The point is, if our picture of God is one of deep passionate love,

then that picture has to include a deep passionate zeal

for holiness, for truth, for goodness, for beauty –

a passion that will burn against

all that is perverted, all that is lies, all that twists and distorts

and pollutes his good creation.

The theologian Karl Barth went so far as to say, “If God does not meet us in his jealous zeal and wrath … then he does not meet us at all.”^[1]

STUMBLING BLOCK No.TWO – THE CRIME

The second big stumbling block in this passage is Saul’s crime. On the face of it, it doesn’t look that serious. So he spared the life of a king and some sheep, cattle, and livestock. Is that really such a big deal?

Of course, we might ask the same thing about Achen after the battle of Jericho. So he took a Babylonian tailored suit, and a few pieces of silver and gold – was that such a big deal?” (Joshua 2)

Of course, we might ask the same thing about Ananias and Sapphira, in the young church in Jerusalem. So that took some of the profits from their land sale. They got some but God got most. Is that so bad? (Acts 5)

The big deal in each of these cases is that what is devoted to the Lord, belongs to the Lord – period.

Also, in all these cases, big risky ventures were just under way.

God always seems to look for obedience when big risky ventures are under way:

at Jericho, it was the risky venture of Israel just entering the Promised

Land;

with Ananias and Sapphira, the fledgling church was just getting

started.

Now here, the big risky venture is the new monarchy.

The Lord comes looking for obedience from Saul.

Remember that the whole chapter starts with Saul being reminded that he was anointed.

He was anointed to listen. He was anointed to obey.

That is the basic meaning of being anointed.

But Saul doesn’t obey and to make matters worse, he lies about it.

And his lies are as old as time itself.

Follow the pronouns in this passage:

Saul says, “I obeyed. I went. I destroyed.”

Samuel says, “Don’t I hear sheep bleating and cattle lowing?”

Saul, “O, that ….that’s the soldiers’ doing. They took the sheep and cattle.”

Sound familiar.

“O, it was that woman you gave me….she gave me the fruit.”

Being God’s people, being God’s chosen, being God’s anointed is a big deal, a big privilege, and a big responsibility. It means fighting against evil as God fights against evil. It means being holy as God is holy.

God may be a mighty warrior, a holy warrior,

but God is not so large that he cannot be hurt.

In so much of this chapter, God is grieving and his prophet is crying.

Evil, in all its forms, makes God weep.

STUMBLING BLOCK No. THREE — THE PUNISHMENT

The third stumbling block in this passage is Saul’s punishment.

Does Saul’s punishment fit his crime?

Doesn’t total rejection seem too harsh?

And why won’t Samuel accept Saul’s repentance?

And also, why do we have to hear about how Samuel finishes King Agag off – more bloody business in a bloody chapter.

These are good questions and tough questions.

I will not pretend to give satisfying answers.

What I will say is that this is not Saul’s first offense, nor will it be his last.

Already in chapter 13, Saul disappoints God by not waiting for Samuel to arrive.

His feels pressured by his people to do something he knows he shouldn’t do.

And that is Saul’s problem throughout 1 Samuel. He is a person more concerned about what other people think than about what God thinks. So here, at the end of this chapter, his repentance seems more about saving face, saving honor, before the elders and before the people, than genuine sorrow for sin.

And so Saul is rejected.

Samuel leaves him, never to see him again.

The truth is, by the end of this chapter, everyone is feeling lousy.

Saul goes home, only to spend the rest of his life as a tormented soul.

Samuel goes home, only to spend the rest of his life mourning for Saul and what could have been.

And God, too, is grieving, and in pain – sin, evil, death have that effect on Him.

He grieves that he gave Israel a king – something he didn’t want.

He grieves that this king was so much like the rest of his people – fickle, easily swayed, and disappointingly disobedient.

CONCLUSION — GOD OF GRACE

The title of this sermon is God of wrath and God of grace.

Wrath yes, but where’s the grace?

Where’s the grace?

Where’s the grace, indeed?

We have to look ahead to another who was anointed to be our king.

The one anointed to be a holy warrior,

to fight against evil in all its forms — demons, and diseases, and death.

We have to look to the holy warrior who the Catechism (Q&A 37) describes

as spending his whole time on earth

bearing in his body and in his soul,

the wrath of God against the sin of the whole human race.

We have to look to the holy warrior,

who was commanded to carry our curse to the cross.

the holy warrior

who became a criminal and was punished for our sake

the holy warrior

who was rejected and abandoned by all,

even his heavenly Father.

Notice that all the things we stumbled over in our passage this morning –

the curse, the violence, the punishment, the rejection —

these are the same things we stumble over in the scandal of the cross.

The scandal of the cross is this:

in the past, the sword pierced the Amalekites and king Agag;

in the past, the sword of Assyria pierced Israel;

in the past, the sword of Babylon pierced Judah.

Then the holy warrior came and was anointed

to uproot the power of evil,

to disarm the power of death once and for all.

And so, with a passion more terrible than we can imagine,

and a love more fierce than a raging fire,

this holy warrior gave a hard and sharp sword to his enemies,

and his enemies violently drove that sword right through him.

Where is the grace, we ask?

While we were yet sinners,

While we were yet enemies of God,

While we were yet the Amalekites,

we were saved from the wrath of God,

by the gracious death of the holy warrior, Jesus the Son (Romans 5:6-11).

God is a God of wrath and God is a God of grace

Thanks be for the victory of our holy warrior, Jesus Christ!

Prayer:

God of wrath and God of grace,

Thank you for anointing us in the water of baptism,

for plunging us into Christ’s death and rescuing us in his resurrection.

Now as a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,

Take all that we are,

Take all that we have,

Take all that we will,

In the service of your holy kingdom. Amen

1. Quoted in Miroslav Volf, “Divine Violence?” Christian Century October 13, 1999. Also see the article “When God Declares War” in Christianity Today October 26, 1996. ↑