Maybe you wanted to be a pastor.
Well, no, you can't. It's a disqualifying feature. It's only, I think, near history that we have a Christianity that feels entitled to do anything it wants, and no prohibitions can be placed on it.
Well, they're wrong. And that's why God has given the church pastors to oversee and to manage the church, not to invade your life and come and tell you how to arrange your furniture at home. But we certainly have.
sovereignty in arranging the furniture in the church, for example. and we shouldn't be afraid of that. You're listening to Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher, Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel, Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of 1 Samuel.
Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about cross-reference radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in 1 Samuel chapter 1 with today's edition of Cross-Reference Radio. Samuel chapter 1. Birth of a prophet is what we're going to consider this evening, and the series. Prophets, kings, and heroes, because these are the dominant characters that.
We are exposed to. And we're exposed to them not solely for our entertainment, but for our edification in Christ. I mean, there are just certain things that you think of the Bible, where would we be without it? Could you imagine Christianity without the book of Genesis? Can you imagine the New Testament without Peter?
You know, how about David and the exploits in his life? How many lessons fly off the pages into our lives?
So we move from the nice people of Bethlehem And two.
some not so nice. the nice people of Ruth's day and some mean folks in the days of Hannah. And if maybe you are a Christian that you struggle with being kind to people. Maybe you'll learn something from the scripture about that to help you with that. Because I know, I don't think mean people.
Who comes to church, a Bible-teaching church? I don't think they want to be that way. I I don't believe that any Sin is welcomed in the life of a Christian. chronologically The story follows close behind Ruth, when we ended with the genealogy of David Obed, Boaz Obed, of course, lining us up for this book. And And In the days of Samuel, While the Philistines and the Canaanites were conquered, they were not purged from the land.
And that means that there was a shaky coexistence because of the influence. the spiritual influence of those people, plus the tendencies to go to war. With each other, which of course is much of the story in the life of Saul. And David. and so to keep the people from entangling themselves.
to the point of you know just uh being assimilated And no longer being God's chosen people to keep them from this entanglement, God would raise up. The prophets. The judges, of course. They delivered the people from Oppression and persecution, but they really did not bring spiritual enlightenment. And that is going to change with Samuel and David.
They are going to bring so much, as we would say, so much to the table. Just those two men. Brief outline of First Samuel, and of course, originally it was one book, Samuel. I don't want to get ahead of myself. I'll get to that a little bit further in the introduction, and then we'll get to the verses.
But a brief Outline In this story of Israel's last two judges, Eli and Samuel. and her first two kings. Which is, of course, Saul and David. Though David does not come to the throne in. The first Book of Samuel.
He is anointed to be king.
So we have Samuel the prophet and judge to Israel in the first seven chapters. And then in chapters 8 through 15, Saul the first king shows up. And then in chapters 16 through 31, David The king that is God's choice begins to dominate and eclipse Saul and becomes the hero in the story. As for the title, the theme, and the times, this man Samuel was an extraordinary servant. He's up there with Joseph and Daniel.
Uh that's how great of a man of God. He was And this book bears his name because he is raised to influence the nation in the direction of a theocratic monarchy. That is, Uh rule by king under God. And Samuel is the man in history chosen to do this. He is the kingmaker.
Paul, in one of his sermons, he brings this up. In Acts chapter thirteen, he says, after that he, that is God, gave them, the people of God, judges for about four hundred and fifty years until Samuel The Prophet. And even though Samuel is a Levite and he works with the priest, and we see him in so many, you know, just. positions of influence Essentially, he is a prophet. He is a man raised up to be the voice of God, God's voice coming through him.
He is not. the sole author Of the books of Samuel. And I'll I don't know how I'm going to ref refer to them as the book of Samuel, the books of Samuel. It's uh it's it's just you'll have to just keep up with me. Uh d th I'll let the mood strike me.
But uh Too many events are recorded. In This The book of Samuel. that happened after his his death.
So we know he's not, of course, the the author.
So likely Published in the reign of Solomon, Because Of the length of time that this book covers, no one person could be the sole author. And that goes for the Chronicles and the Kings. uh book of chronicles in the book of kings also. But guided by the Holy Spirit, we have these multiple contributors, and we have sort of a A verification of this process right out of the scripture. I'm reading from 1 Chronicles chapter 29 verse 29.
Now the Acts of King David. First and last, indeed, they are written in the book of Samuel the seer, in the book of Nathan the prophet, and in the book of Gad the seer. This seer was an ancient word for the prophet. And so we have Samuel. Probably did.
Right. and largely contribute to the first 24 chapters. He dies in chapter 24, at least that's when it's recorded. Gad the prophet, he shows up from chapter 24 through 2 Samuel 5, and then Nathan the prophet, of course. shows up in 2 Samuel into the book of Kings.
And so this is just kind of exciting to me as a student of the scripture to find how these things move around. From the lives of Samuel. And Saul And David God speaks to His people in their day. There's so many things going around in their lives.
So many other people contributing to the story. Hushai, you know, David's trusted advisor. God will speak through that whole event. And so we we're looking at this, the story unfold. of the historian.
though the historians, plural, have captured for us this Transition from a theocratic society. Tribal rule. to this Theocratic monarchy of the kings. And he begins this story with a godly family. El Khana.
and Hannah. They are the two stars in this first chapter. And of course, there will be a few villains in the first chapter. Uh as we move through it this this evening. Uh the story starts with them.
godly parents, And it ends in Second Samuel with the godly king erecting an altar to God There on the threshing floor Of Aruna or Ona and his alternate name.
So I just want to take a couple of verses from 1 and 2 Samuel, all three. To set the theme for us. In chapter 3, we read: Now the boy Samuel ministered to Yahweh before Eli. And the word of Yahweh was rare in those days, there was no widespread revelation. Thus, the need for a prophet.
Because Eli missed it. Eli had everything he needed to be that man of God, and he blew it. He was a prophetic underachiever. And every Every servant of God should be a little concerned about that. I ask myself: as a pastor, am I being an underachiever?
Led by the Spirit, but still driven, hopefully, by this. desire to to give the best you've got. For the king. 1 Samuel 16.1. This is God's instructions to Samuel about David.
Fill your horn with oil and go, I am sending you. And so there we see, you know, no prophet, no voice.
Well, Samuel is being raised up as a lad. He's being raised up. And then we see him as a man in the ministry as a prophet, and God is sending him to anoint David. And then in 2 Samuel 24, verse 25, and David built there. This is the last verse of the book of Samuel, the second book.
And David built there an altar to Yahweh and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.
So Yahweh healed the prayers, heated the prayers. for the land, and the plague was withdrawn from Israel. And so there's that just condensed into the three moments in these lives of two men. that radically brought light into Israel Israel that was on a collision course. And if God did not intervene in this way, So we would likely not have an Israel today.
So the conflicts with the Philistines and others in the book, the conflict between Saul and David, between Judah and some of the northern tribe captured in this book, as I mentioned, the judges, they delivered the people from physical threats. Physical enemies, but they did not, or they did very little spiritually for the people when you compare them with what Samuel and David. Would do in taking Israel to another level of worship. Where would we be without the Psalms of David? I mean, the book of Psalms would be just so much smaller.
You'd use 70 of them right away, it would be gone. And that would make it for easier reading. But we would miss The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. We would miss verses like, you know, I have been old, I have been young. And I have never seen the righteous forsaken, nor their offspring begging for bread.
We just would miss the 90s, so many Psalms that don't even have his name. I know David wrote that. Because no one's got that style, no one has that voice. except him. And if anyone else had that style and had that voice, they would have been held up as saying, hey, you know, as some of the other psalmists are, Ethan, you know, or other contributors to the Psalms.
As far as the date As I may have mentioned already, As I did mention already, it was composed Um over a period of time. Not by one man. First Samuel covers about ninety-five years, or maybe even a hundred years Of time, space and it's the events that take place of history. And together About 135 years, first and second. Um Samuel.
In fact, this first chapter Just the misery that Hannah is going to go through. It's going to take a few years. And that you have no less than about a five-year window here. The child is going to be about three by the time she turns him over to Eli. We are about eleven hundred years before the virgin birth.
and a lot of activity going on. All of 2 Samuel. covers the forty years of The life in in of David After Samuel and Saul.
Now originally The six monarchy or Yeah, history books of the Marn Art. Samuel, Chronicles, and Kings, Originally they were each one book, but what happened was, oh, almost 300 years before the coming of Christ, the Jews took their Jewish Bibles, their Hebrew Bibles, the script, the scrolls. And they translated them into Greek because after the Babylonian captivity the Jews dispersed throughout the civilized world and they picked up the languages of the peoples where they found themselves. And so the rabbis and scribes and the intelligentsia of their faith got together and said we need to translate our scripture into the Greek language so we can reach those Jews that aren't familiar with the Hebrew. This is a problem by the time we get to the book of Acts too.
Anyway. When they translated it, the Jewish language, the ancient Hebrew, did not. have symbols for the vowels. But the Greek does.
So when they put the vowels in, it literally doubled the volume of words. And now the scrolls were too big. You couldn't have one scroll of Samuel and one man carry it.
So they split it, 2 Samuel, 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles into two scrolls. If you've ever been to a bar mitzvah, You may recall that when the young lad who is Who the bar mister is celebrating when they're carrying the scroll? He's 14 years old and usually scrawny. And the scrolls are very heavy, so dad will walk with him, helping make sure he doesn't trip and drop this heavy scroll. That's just, you know, usually one collection of books, not the entire.
Hebrew Bible. And so that's how we get the first and second Samuel with this split some two hundred and eighty some years before the coming of Christ. That is the introduction.
Now we turn to the first chapter Sam uh first Samuel Chapter one Now there was a certain man of Ramathaim Zophim of the mountains of Ephraim. And his name was Elkanah the son of Jehoram, The son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, The son of Zuf. An Ephraimite. This word now links it with the story in Ruth, even though in the Hebrew Bible Ruth doesn't come, it doesn't precede Samuel. It does in, of course, the Christian arrangement of the scriptures, of the canon, of the order of books, but it fits.
It fits, it's just a fact. It fits, it's a perfect fit. And the the writer is linking. This, what he is about to say in the book of Samuel, with what has taken place somewhere. And where is that?
Well, the Book of Ruth is the book. The judges don't end, you can't link the last chapter of Judges, even though it's still in the judges' time period. You can't link those two together. Ruth is the fit. And uh Ramathium Zoophim, that is also known as Rama, today as Ramalia at the The Arabs dominate that area.
Interesting enough, by the time you get to the New Testament, it's Arimathea. You know, Joseph of Arimathea, the one that went to Pilate for the body of Christ. And one of the great lessons of Joseph of Arimathea, if you remember nothing else about this man, is that loving hands are the only hands that touched. the crucified body of Christ. And it's just a beautiful part of the story because loving hands are supposed to handle the body of Christ to this day.
And we struggle there. Elkanah was a Levite living in Ramah. Otherwise, Samuel could not enter into the office of a Levite assisting the priest. Samuel was not a priest, he was a Levite. And it's interesting because we're not told who replaces Eli as the high priest.
It's almost as though, well, you know, he did his priestly duties, but. Sam uh Samuel was the one that the Holy Spirit wants us to concentrate on. In that part of Ephraim, there was a colony of priests. Um in verse 2 now, and he had two wives. The name of one was Hannah and the name of the other Pinina.
And Penina had children. But Hannah had no children.
Well, Elkanah, incidentally, is financially well off. He can afford nice offerings when he goes to the temple. We'll see him offering perhaps three bulls at the end of this chapter. He can afford two wives. Just because you have money doesn't mean you're not a godly man.
He is a very godly man. And of course, we look at this and we say, well, he has two wives.
Well, you're looking at it from today's standards. That's not fair. Because that's not how they looked at it then. In fact, many times it was a blessing. That we talked about the story in Ruth, you know, if a Woman became a widow, she needed a husband.
And There are many times just nobody else was available. and someone w could legally marry her and take care of her.
Well, a likely scenario here is that Hannah It was the first wife. But she couldn't bear children. And so Elkhanah Under the law, even though God does not did not and does not promote Polygamy. He sends flags out on it through the stories in Deuteronomy, but in the New Testament shuts it down completely. But She likely could not have children, so he marries Panina, brings her into the family.
Have the children. And in the ancient world, failure to have children was regarded as a family tragedy. You had to have them to run the farm. To help eke out a life for yourself. And if he had a lot of land and worked it, which is why he may have been wealthy.
Children would have been very much an asset in that agrarian culture. It's not until we get to The city culture, where children become, in the eyes of some, a liability. This was one of the things that they were accusing the yuppies about not wanting to have kids, just wanting to live in the cities and enjoy nightlife and their careers. And I'm just pointing out a recent event that is connected to this uh understanding of having uh children. Anyway, without Uh a s a son The family name was in jeopardy.
Again, we just got through this in the book of Ruth. And as a woman, she uh well The allotments of the territory and the idea: if you were in Judah, if you belonged to Judah and you knew Messiah was coming from out of Judah, you were automatically not in the running. And that was something that a mean person could turn against you. And that is what is going to happen in This chapter.
Now the Jewish rabbis, they did, many of them, note that God produced one wife for Adam. Genesis chapter 2, verse 24. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother, and he shall be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the two shall become one flesh, is how it is said. Not the three or the four, etc.
And so some of the rabbis picked up on that. And good for them. Of course, Paul being one, he enjoyed 1 Timothy chapter 3: that if you're going to be a pastor, just one wife, can't have multiple wives. Because in that time, at that time in the culture that Paul pastored, polygamy was legal. And you have a guy, you know, you could have three wives.
And maybe you wanted to be a pastor. And you well, no, you can't. It's a disqualifying feature. It's only, I think, the near History, that we have a Christianity that feels entitled to do anything it wants, and no prohibitions can be placed on it.
Well, they're wrong. And that's why God has given the church pastors to oversee and to manage the church, not to invade your life and come and tell you how to arrange your furniture at home. But we certainly have.
sovereignty in arranging the furniture in the church, for example. And we shouldn't be afraid of that. There are certain words that we, as Americans, I think, we're afraid of.
Sovereignty somehow is connected with tyranny.
Well, God is sovereign, He's not a tyrant. And his kings were sovereign, and they were not all tyrants.
So we should be very careful and not throw our brains away. We have a tendency of becoming uh too narrow-minded.
Sometimes it's good to be narrow-minded with in the face of sin. Straight is the way, narrow is the way, straight is the way that leads to eternal life. The name of one was Hannah.
Well, her name means grace. The name of the other, I'm in verse 2 now. Panina It means pearl. Etion. Uh Panina had children, but Hannah had no children.
Now again, the blame for not having children rested on the women. And in that time in history and often led to divorce. The women didn't come out well with that in that scenario. This is not going to be the case. Elkanah loves Hannah, and he loves her more.
And so verse 3 This man went up from his city yearly to worship and sacrifice to Yahweh. of host in Shiloh. Also the two sons of Eli, Hophnai, and Phineas, the priest of Yahweh, were there. Elkanah is careful to honor the word of God. He's not going to the high places to worship.
He's not doing things his way. He is conforming to the Scripture. At which Deuteronomy just 12, for example, makes it very clear. And the men were mandated three times a year to go to the tabernacle to worship. The women did not have to go.
They did, and they often did. Very often. Yeah. Uh but uh it was mandated for the men. And here we're getting insight into the type of man that Samuel's father was.
Okay. Yeah. Thanks for joining us for today's edition of Cross Reference Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel, Mechanicsville, in Virginia. Currently, Pastor Rick is in the book of 1 Samuel.
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