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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
If you find yourself constantly arguing about the minutiae of your theology, and not becoming kinder and more generous as you do it, or if you find your theology constantly building more walls and excluding more people, rather than leading you to love more freely, then it's at least possible that you have begun to lose your way. Today though we wrap up the story of Samuel, at least for this year. Spoiler, next year in season 11, we are gonna come back and pick up with Samuel as we look at the story of David. But to recap this year so far, we have been looking at the era of the judges through to the rise of Samuel, who is the last judge in Israel, and now as he passes leadership on to the first king in Israel. And there have been some good, although challenging stories along the way.
Jeremy Duncan:We wrestled with the conquest of Canaan, some frankly disturbing tales that use outsized hyperbolic language that borders on sounding genocidal. But we've also seen how propagandistic la language was and how it's not necessarily objective. There are counternarratives woven throughout the text. Canaanites that live and mix with the Hebrew people, Israelites that fight alongside their Canaanite neighbors and make peace with them. It's important to understand that the Bible is not always monolithic.
Jeremy Duncan:And there are different threads, different stories, different narratives that are woven together. And we really only get the full picture when we engage all of those in dialogue with each other. We saw the stories of Deborah and Samson, some of the earlier judges that led us to Samuel. And eventually, we revived at our boy, Sam, who is born to a barren mother, born to a family outside the priestly line, and yet dedicated to the temple out of his mother Hannah's gratefulness. And by the way, we didn't really touch much on this in the story, but Hannah doesn't just drop off her son at the temple and never see him again, by the way.
Jeremy Duncan:In fact, the entire reason she dedicates Samuel is her thankfulness to God. And so we don't get a lot of details, but we do read in chapter 2 that Samuel is visited by his mother Hannah. She comes to the temple regularly. And every year, she knits a new coat for him as he grows. So there is still this thread of maternal, motherly connection in the background of Samuel's childhood.
Jeremy Duncan:But, again, we saw God sidestepping our expectations because we see Samuel functioning as a priest even though he's not a Levite. And because of that, he is in the right, the perfect place when his mentor Eli dies. If you remember, the Israelites engage a war of aggression against the Philistines. But God wants no part of this, and so the Israelites lose. In fact, they lose so bad that they lose the ark of the covenant that repentance.
Jeremy Duncan:And by the way here, what is Samuel calling the people to repent of? Well, certainly, the implication in the text is that they have turned to other gods. But the only expression of that that we see in the text is precisely the fact that they have sallied forth into a war that God has not asked them to engage. And I think at least part of the implication in the text is that treating their god as a war god just like any other god is precisely the idolatry that Samuel wants them to turn away from. Remember this.
Jeremy Duncan:You can worship the right God with the right name by going to the right church and singing all the right songs. But if you treat that god as if that god is on your side against those that you oppose, as if there is no separation between your opinion and divine judgment, then that is absolutely idolatry. Which is ironic, because from there, the story jumps forward a couple decades. Samuel has done a remarkably good job leading Israel. And yet in his last years, he begins to stumble.
Jeremy Duncan:He appoints his crooked sons in positions they are not ready for, And the people, because of that, lose faith in his leadership. I mean, frankly, Samuel starts to act like he's a king, getting to appoint his sons wherever he wants. And so the people say, well, why don't we just get a real 1? And last week, we saw God give in to the demands of the people as Saul is appointed the 1st king in Israel. Today, we are gonna watch this first monarchical reign unfold and ultimately fail.
Jeremy Duncan:And that will set us up for next year when we come back to look at his successor in David. First though, let's pray. God of grace and God of peace, for all the ways that you have challenged us in this series to reckon with violence, to wrestle with the complexity of your text, to work to ground ourselves always in the way of Jesus ahead of us. We are grateful. And we trust that in the working out of our salvation, we come to see you more clearly with each step.
Jeremy Duncan:May everything that we read, may all of our conversations, may the way that spirit works in and through us today lead us always back to the way that is Jesus, to the path that is peace, to the grace that floods the world and makes possible our movement toward and with 1 another. And then in all of this, might we come to know that we are loved and welcomed home, and then commissioned to bring that kindness into all of our encounters. For all that need your embrace this morning, Might we know that your heart is open and your arms wide and our place in you secure even as we wrestle with your scriptures. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.
Jeremy Duncan:A lot of ground to cover today. And in that, we are gonna talk about how old is Saul anyway, assassination attempts, propaganda programs, and when religion is co opted. But first, a story. This past week the Edmonton Oilers came very close to winning a hockey game. You may have heard about this.
Jeremy Duncan:It was kind of a big deal. Had they won, I think you could absolutely arguably make the case that that would have been the most important, most significant game in the history of the NHL. Coming back from 3.0 was a big deal. Alas, they did not win. And Canada remains on a 3 decade long Stanley Cup drought.
Jeremy Duncan:To be fair, I grew up in Toronto. 3 decades is nothing. But last weekend, my wife and I were comparing notes in our calendars, making sure that we had a plan for who was doing what on each night that week. Both of us have multiple board meetings in a month, and soccer for both kids. And in the winter, I play hockey.
Jeremy Duncan:In the summer, my wife plays field hockey. And so coordinating around everyone's schedule is an ongoing challenge. I'm sure you have exactly the same issue in your home. But on Saturday, she was telling me that her board wanted to move their meetings so that they could watch the hockey game. Priorities.
Jeremy Duncan:And she was excited, because that would mean she could make her field hockey game, which was originally going to be a conflict with her board meeting. Priorities. However, on Sunday morning last week, I was talking to a friend here at church, and I said, hey, are you ready for the game tonight? And he said, no, the game is Monday night. And I said, oh.
Jeremy Duncan:So when I got home, I said to Rachel, Hey, your board meeting is actually tomorrow night. That means you're free tonight. What do you want to do? And she said, Yeah. My board meeting was always tomorrow night.
Jeremy Duncan:You just don't listen to me. To which I said, That's a fair criticism, and I need to work on that. But in this case, I just wasn't paying attention to the NHL schedule properly. And to be fair, I'm not sure the Oilers were for the first half of that series anyway. But that's another story.
Jeremy Duncan:Anyway, I say all of this because there's always 2 narratives in every story. And today we find ourselves in a section of 1st Samuel that is uniquely impacted by those 2 stories. I'm going to get a little technical here. But in our Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, they are primarily translated from something called the Masoretic texts. And these are Hebrew texts of the entire Old Testament that date to the 11th century CE, so right about 1000 years ago.
Jeremy Duncan:And for a very long time, those were the oldest Hebrew manuscripts that we had available to us. What we also have are much older Greek manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures called the Septuagint. And that's not surprising, because that Greek translation, that was the primary version of the Hebrew Bible that was in circulation at the time of Jesus. And so 1 of the complications in translating Bibles into English has always been deciding whether we should prefer the older Greek manuscripts that are already a translation, or whether we should look to the newer Hebrew manuscripts that are almost a millennia younger than what we have in Greek. Now, a lot of that debate was settled in the 20th century after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered and examined, because those were actually very ancient Hebrew manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew.
Jeremy Duncan:And for the most part, what they showed is that the Masoretic texts were incredibly consistent with what the Hebrew people were reading in Hebrew at the time of Jesus. It's actually pretty fascinating if you're a Bible nerd to think that it was only in the 1940s that we discovered some of the most important biblical texts in history. And it was literally a shepherd boy throwing rocks into caves that discovered them when he heard some pottery break. By the way, that's why I tell my kids not to throw rocks. You never know.
Jeremy Duncan:But let's take a look at our text today, and I'll show you why I'm bringing all this up. This is 1st Samuel chapter 13 verse 1. Saul was 30 years old when he became king, and he reigned over Israel for 42 years. Now you may notice here that the words 3040 are italicized on the screen. They probably will be in your English Bible as well.
Jeremy Duncan:That's because those words don't exist anywhere in Hebrew. What the Hebrew actually says here is that Saul was a year old when he became king, and he reigned over Israel for 2 years. Now, that's obviously nonsense. So let's go to what the Greek says. And well, this entire sentence, verse 1, does not exist anywhere in the Septuagint.
Jeremy Duncan:And it's very obvious this was a mistake. Saul was not a year old when he became king. And so it's very likely that the Septuagint translators came across this passage, realized, well, that doesn't make any sense. And rather than filling in the gaps, they just decided to leave it out of the Bible. Our English Bibles, though, take a different approach.
Jeremy Duncan:And they just, well, bluntly fill in their best guess that seems reasonable to them here. The NIV says that Saul was 30 years old, and he reigned for 42 years. The New American Standard Bible figures that Saul was 40 years old, and he reigned for 32 years. The ESV says that Saul lived for 1 year and reigned for 2 more. And probably my favorite translation right now, the NRSVUE, terrible name, good translation.
Jeremy Duncan:It says that Saul was x years old and reigned for 2 years with a big old asterisk beside it. And part of the reason I like that is because if you are just reading through, they don't try to pull any sleight of hand here. They just let you know, hey, look. There's a problem in the text here, and we had to figure out something. No.
Jeremy Duncan:Does any of that matter for our story today? Absolutely not. But that is precisely why I want to talk about it, because it highlights how complex and nuanced our relationship with the text is. And I think it helps to focus us on what the scriptures are for. You see, the very fact that Jewish translators came across this passage some 2000 years ago and saw what was an obvious mistake and just decided to leave it and move on, I think that tells us that the power of scripture was never in the details to begin with.
Jeremy Duncan:It was never about the perfect alignment of text or even an objective reading of historical data. No, the power was always about the story in understanding the lesson and metabolizing the points. See, what Jewish translators knew was deciphering Saul's age didn't really matter all that much, but learning from his story did. So we might as well get on with that. And far too often what I see is people arguing about the details while completely missing the point, missing the forest for the trees, as it were.
Jeremy Duncan:Right? And if I were gonna scale that lesson up, I might say, I might even go, this goes far beyond just what we read in the text into every aspect of our lives. If you find yourself constantly arguing about the minutiae of your theology and not becoming kinder and more generous as you do it, or if you find your theology constantly building more walls and excluding more people rather than leading you to love more freely, then it's at least possible that you have begun to lose your way by staring a little too closely at the path that's beneath your feet. When the psalmist says that the scriptures are a lamp unto my feet, he doesn't mean stare at the ground. He means let scripture keep you moving forward.
Jeremy Duncan:And today, that lesson is going to come back to haunt us when we read the text. So hold on to it, because Saul is some amount of years old, and he reigns for some amount of years plus 2. And now verse 2. Saul chose 3, 000 men from Israel. 2, 000 were with him at Michmash in the hill country of Bethel.
Jeremy Duncan:And a 1, 000 were there with Jonathan at Gibeah in Benjamin. Surprise. Saul has a son. He's named Jonathan, and he's now in charge of thousands of men. But the rest of the men, he sent back to their homes.
Jeremy Duncan:Jonathan attacked the Philistine outpost at Geba, and the Philistines heard about it. Then Saul had the trumpet blown throughout the land and said, let the Hebrews hear. So all Israel heard the news. Saul has attacked the Philistine outpost. And now Israel has become obnoxious to the Philistines.
Jeremy Duncan:And the people were summoned to join Saul at Gilgal. All right. We've seen a lot of the Philistines since we first opened First Samuel. 1st Israel attacks, and it doesn't go well. Then Israel attacks, and it doesn't go well again.
Jeremy Duncan:Then the Philistines attack, and that doesn't go well for them either. You might think at this point they'd just stop attacking each other. But now Israel decides to attack again. And before we get into the war here, a few things I want to pick up. First, we have Jonathan who is going to be a very big character throughout Saul's story and through most of his successor David's life as well.
Jeremy Duncan:But Jonathan kind of pops up here completely out of nowhere. Last week, in Saul's introduction, there's really no indication that he has a family or a son, certainly not a son who has risen up through the military ranks to command thousands of men. And for the most part, commentators are really not sure what to do with this. It's certainly quite odd that such a major character is introduced in such an offhand way. So it's possible, at least, that this introduction is here to reinforce just how random Saul's coronation was.
Jeremy Duncan:I mean, last week, we saw everyone basically say, hey, that guy's tall, and he's handsome. We might as well make him king. And maybe the fact that we're just now getting some biographical data about him serves to reinforce just how rash that decision was. If that's the case, it's actually kind of a neat way to roll out the story. Either way, meet Jonathan.
Jeremy Duncan:And we read that Jonathan attacks the outpost at Geba. That's probably not a great translation. Better would be, Jonathan struck down the prefect or the senior commander at Geba, and the distinction being that he doesn't gather his men and attack an outpost. He strikes down a person. This is an assassination.
Jeremy Duncan:Now, either Jonathan is sent in by his dad, a little spy craft, or he self authorizes a hit on the guy who's in charge of the Philistine outpost. But that's important, because what we read next is that all Israel heard the news. Saul has attacked the Philistines. That's normal. King gets the credit, just how it works.
Jeremy Duncan:But then we read this. They heard that Israel had become obnoxious to her enemies. Now obnoxious is an interesting choice here. The Hebrew word literally means smelly. So ironically, noxious would have been a much better translation here.
Jeremy Duncan:You guys were so close. But what I'm interested in here is the social dynamic, because obnoxious is not the right translation. Israel is not an annoyance. The implication here is that they have become somehow subhuman in the eyes of their enemy. The people heard that we have become like garbage to the Philistines.
Jeremy Duncan:My question is, who are they hearing this from? Where is that narrative originating? I mean, it's Israel that orders a largely unprovoked hit on the Philistine leader. I tend to doubt that this narrative is coming from Israelites having gentle conversations with their Philistine neighbors. It's far more likely this narrative is coming from the leadership of Israel, from Saul.
Jeremy Duncan:This is what he's telling them. We attacked because this is what they think of you. Now is it true? Maybe. I mean, we have seen there's a lot of hostility between these 2 people groups.
Jeremy Duncan:We've been following it for weeks now. Maybe it's not an unreasonable assumption, but what I want you to see here is that the first story of Sallal's era as king is about an assassination and an attempt to build a narrative to support it. They despise us. They think we're garbage. They hate us for our freedom.
Jeremy Duncan:Okay. Maybe that last 1 was a bit on the nose. But you get where I'm going with this. Right? Saul has decided that as a new king and a new leader in charge, he needs to consolidate his power.
Jeremy Duncan:And for that he needs a war, and for that he needs an enemy. And any time anyone tries you to convince you that they are the problem, because they hate you, because they think they're better than you, without allowing you to actually talk to them, or get to know them, or ask them what they really feel about things, that's the kind of leadership you should be very skeptical of. Do you remember that story in Luke 9 when Jesus and his disciples are traveling through a Samaritan village, and the people there who have a very legitimate beef with the Jewish people, are not particularly kind to the disciples. And the disciples fill in a story about how much they hate them, and they turn to Jesus. And they say, hey, man.
Jeremy Duncan:Do you want us to call down fire from heaven and wipe out these clowns? And Jesus says, do it. No, you don't remember that story, because the disciples do ask Jesus about this. And he immediately turns around dumbfounded that they could even think that was acceptable to ask, and he rebukes them. And I think maybe this story, at least part of it, is about the fact that someone should have been there to do that for Saul.
Jeremy Duncan:No. Maybe the Philistines don't think we're subhuman. Maybe they're just upset that we assassinated their leader. And so what happens? Well, the Israelites rally behind this narrative, and they gather for a war.
Jeremy Duncan:Except when they look out across the valley, what they see is the Philistines massing with a much, much larger army than they expected. And now they are terrified. So some start hiding in the caves and in the bushes. Others desert, and they head back home. Saul, though, doubles down.
Jeremy Duncan:He decides what he's gonna do is a special burnt offering. He's gonna do this fellowship sacrifice to God to convince God to support his war. And so he calls on Samuel, who's no longer a judge or a leader, but he's still a priest in Israel. And he wants him to do this sacrifice, except for some reason, Samuel doesn't make it by the appointed day. We don't get an explanation for that.
Jeremy Duncan:Maybe you just had camel troubles along the way. Who knows? But either way, Saul decides he's gonna take things into his own hands. And so in verse 9, we read that he said, bring me the burnt offering and the fellowship offerings. And Saul offered up the burnt offering himself.
Jeremy Duncan:Just as he had finished making the offerings, Samuel arrived, and Saul went out to greet him. What have you done? Asked Samuel. Now, we talked about this earlier in the series, how there are quite clear, strict rules about who can offer these types of sacrifices, how it's reserved only for the priestly order, only for those who descend from Aaron. We also talked at length about how God is, well, more comfortable than we are at times in setting those rules aside when God wants to.
Jeremy Duncan:Remember, Samuel himself is not a Levite, and yet he is accepted by God as a priest. And yet, here, this time, the circumstances are very different. Now, I do think that sometimes the rules are less important to God than they are to us. I mean, God has demonstrated in this very book that God is willing to bend, even break the rules for Samuel. But here, I think what we're starting to see is that those rules were never meant to put God in a corner.
Jeremy Duncan:They were always meant to restrain the worst in us. You see, the reason that the priestly order was separated from the leadership in Israel, in particular this new category of king, is because God has always known that once religion and politics are commingled, it's always going to be religion that is co opted. Do you remember when Israel trotted out the Ark of the Covenant and tried to strong-arm God into supporting their war? And God said, I'm out. Saul is doing it all over again here just a couple chapters later.
Jeremy Duncan:These sacrifices are not meant to please God. They are meant to buy God. And I want you to see that the first thing the first king of Israel does is try to use religion to support his agenda, his assassination plot, his propaganda. And that itself is the problem in the story. The problem isn't just breaking the rule about who gets to offer sacrifices.
Jeremy Duncan:Samuel himself is a break in the protocol. The problem is that the rule is there to protect the Hebrew people from the kind of manipulation we're seeing here in Saul's first steps as king. Faith is not about checking boxes. It never was. Faith is about slowly coming to understand what the rules teach us, how they guide us and shape us, how they disciple us and form us even to the point when the rules themselves will show us when to break them and when to hold absolutely fast to them.
Jeremy Duncan:And what's fascinating here in this book, in the life of Samuel, is that we've seen when to break the rules, and now we're seeing when to protect them, and the consequences of not knowing the difference. Near the end of His life, there's this moment where Jesus is with His friends. He turns to His disciples, and He says, look, at some point after I'm gone, you are gonna come face to face with how hard life and faith can really be. And you will have to bind yourself to new rules. You'll have to loose yourself from old ones.
Jeremy Duncan:You will have to make choices for yourself. And the only way that you will do that well is if you can metabolize My teaching so deeply that they will flow out of you instinctively, because that's what it actually means to follow My way. And guys, the stakes will only get higher the more influence you have. Peter, this is as important as the keys to the kingdom of heaven, Jesus says. But what happens when the king, who is at the very top of that pyramid, doesn't understand the consequence of his choices?
Jeremy Duncan:Well, do you remember the very first thing that God said when the people asked for a king? It's in chapter 8, verse 11. He will take your sons and make them serve with his horses. He will run them in front of his chariots. And not only does Saul do that.
Jeremy Duncan:It's the first thing he does, and he does it in the name of God. And so we read just 13 verses into Saul's reign. What you have done is a foolish thing. You have not kept the command the Lord your God gave you. If you had, He would have established your kingdom over Israel for all time.
Jeremy Duncan:But now your kingdom will not endure. For the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him ruler over the people, All because you have not kept the Lord's command. All because you have not understood why the rule was there in the first place. All because it was there to protect the people from the kind of manipulation that you have fallen prey to in your heart, thinking you could use me to support your agenda. Look, life is not about the letter.
Jeremy Duncan:Life is about slowly coming to understand the letter so well that it becomes the narrative through which you live, the story from which you make your choices. And Saul has found himself unable to grasp the difference. He thinks because Samuel got to offer sacrifices, he gets to as well. He thinks that he can use the religion of the people to support where he wants them to go. And with that, ends the reign of the first king of Israel.
Jeremy Duncan:And it's also where we'll end our series, the last of them, as we set the stage for next year to come back to pick up with his successor. Let's pray. God, for all the ways that we fall prey to this same agenda, ways that we try to use you to prop up our opinions, our perspectives, the directions that we want to go. And perhaps we don't have the power of a king, but we use our prayers in ways that are coercive or manipulative, and we think we can force you, drive you, push you to what we want. We use our religion and our theology in ways to prop ourselves up and push others down.
Jeremy Duncan:For all of this, we're sorry. And instead, we ask that your spirit would be near to us to guide us, not to be a tool that we use, but instead to be the force that shapes and models and conforms us to the likeness of your son who walked the path of grace and peace and demonstrates for us what it looks like to follow the way back to you. God, may every day we get up led by your spirit to understand the words of scripture so that they would flow out of us instinctively in the choices that we make, not just in checking boxes and following rules, but in decisions that honor the heart and the love at the foundation of the universe. May this be our path with Christ ahead of us. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Jeremy Duncan:Amen. Hey. Jeremy here. And thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at commons, you can head to our website commons.church for more information.
Jeremy Duncan:You can find us on all of the socials at commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our discord server. Head to commons.church/discord for the invite and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus, we would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in.
Jeremy Duncan:Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.