Confusion

We are going to open our Bibles tonight to 1 Samuel chapter 4. I just want to confess to you all, I have been wrestling with this passage for quite some time.

Let me just set a little context and then I will read it. Where we find ourselves is just sort of a, not a very positive story, very honestly. But what comes before it is chapters that you know very well. What we see as we open the book of Samuel is that we are still really in the era of the judges. And you know the judges was not the best time in Israel's history.

In fact, everyone did what they saw fit in their own eyes. And so that sort of bleeds over into 1 Samuel. And so there is need for leadership and a king and all kinds of different things that we can look at in this book. But one of the things that we come across right away in chapters 1 and 2 is God is going to do something big. We know that usually when a couple is introduced and the wife cannot have children, God is about to act. We see that all over the beginning of the Old Testament. And God is ready to act again here. And so Hannah, who cannot have a baby, prays and asks God for a child.

And if God is good enough to give her a child, then she will dedicate the child to the Lord all the days of his life. And so what we have in the preceding chapter, before we get to the chapter we are going to look at today, is we have Samuel called by the Lord. What a great chapter. We see some really neat things in that chapter about God being the sovereign one, the one that initiates relationship, the one that calls and then doesn't just call for the sake of calling, but also anoints and gives jobs to those that he calls. And that's what he does for Samuel.

Now all of a sudden we are going to open up to chapter 4. We are going to realize that all of a sudden Samuel is not a part of the story anymore. God wants to show through Samuel here, through the story, some juxtaposition. And that is the idea of putting two things up against each other and showing how opposite they are.

Not how similar they are, but how different they are. Literature is full of that. And so that's just a very quick summary.

Let's look at this and just read it. And again, I warn you, this isn't a very positive few verses. The text really begins where it says, Now Israel went out to battle against the Philistines. They encamped at Ebenezer, and the Philistines encamped at Aphek.

Philistines drew up in the line against Israel, and when the battle spread, Israel was defeated before the Philistines, who killed about 4,000 men on the field of battle. And when the people came to the camp, the elders of Israel said, Why has the Lord defeated us today before the Israelites, I'm sorry, before the Philistines? Let us bring the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord here from Shiloh, that it may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies. So the people sent to Shiloh and brought from there the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord of Hosts. And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were there with the Ark of the Covenant of God. As soon as the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all Israel gave a mighty shout, so that the earth resounded. And when the Philistines heard the noise of the shouting, they said, What does this great shouting in the camp of the Hebrews mean? And when they learned that the Ark of the Lord had come to the camp, the Philistines were afraid, for they said, A God has come into the camp. And they said, Woe to us, for nothing like this has happened before.

Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods? These are the gods who struck the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness. Take courage and be men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews, as they have been to you.

Be men and fight. So the Philistines fought, and Israel was defeated. And they fled every man to his home. And there was a very great slaughter, for thirty thousand foot soldiers of Israel fell. And the Ark of God was captured.

And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, died. Let's go to the Lord in prayer and ask for his help. Loving Father, I ask that you would empower the preacher with your spirit, so that the Word of God may be clearly understood and believed by all of us in this room tonight. May the Spirit of God use the Scriptures this evening to help us see and believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It's in his name we pray.

Amen. Confusion comes in all shapes and all sizes. A misunderstanding, a mix-up, uncertainty, wrong inferences or conclusion. Harry Truman enjoyed telling a story and I thought it kind of humorous.

I would love to know if this were true. The story goes like this. It's about a man who was hit on the head at work. The blow was so severe, he was knocked unconscious for an extended period of time. His family, convinced he was dead, called the funeral home and asked the local undertaker to pick him up at the hospital, which he did. Early the following morning, this dear man suddenly awoke. Sat straight up in the casket, blinked a few times, looked around and, confused, tried to put the whole thing together. He thought, if I'm alive, what in the world am I doing in this soft, satin-filled box?

And if I'm dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom so bad? Confusion is not necessarily always a good thing. I don't know about you, but there is also this inability to understand. That was me in math class. Boy, I tried and tried and the harder I tried, the more confused I got. Especially, the harder the math. But think about it, even with good ideas and good thoughts as we kind of try to wrap our minds around the idea of the Trinity.

Right? Again, truth we can know about the Trinity. What about eternity or infinity? Boy, these things after a while, the more you start thinking about it, confusion. Truman also said, if you can't convince them, confuse them.

Boy, that sounds a little bit like the way things are run today. Confusion can also turn into manipulation. Confusion, though, sometimes harmless and comical, it can be very deadly at times. And I think what we see here in 1 Samuel 4 that I would like to go through very quickly is what we see is, in a nutshell, confusion. Confusion specifically from God's people.

That's what I want to focus in on. Not the Philistines, that's for another time, but the Israelites, God's people and their confusion. And this ultimately is what I would like to offer up that they are in confusion about. They're confusing the idea of worshipping God with using God. Confusing God with using God. We see this right off the bat in 1 Samuel 4, 9. And there's some inferences that have to be made here, but this is the verse.

It says, take courage. This is the Philistines speaking. Again, the leaders. Take courage and be men, O Philistines. Lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been to you.

Be men and fight. Here is the first idea of confusion, worshipping God with using God. The idea is that Israel is confusing their plans with God's plans. And so this is what their thoughts are.

Here's the inference. They have now been, for some time actually, sort of the toy of the Philistines. The Philistines come in and raid all the time and take slaves, take crops, take what they want really.

They're the big bully and they can do what they want. And so far we see up to this point at least that the Israelites have not been able to do a whole lot. And so what the Israelites are sick of is this, well, just not being able to beat these guys.

And letting them control in every way possible. And so what their desire is, is for, well, for them to get on the battlefield with these Philistines, to fight them and to win and to claim their freedom from them. The question is, is that what God wanted for them?

Was that simply their plans or was it God's plans? Well, in 1 Samuel 4, the very beginning, maybe not verse 1 but verse 2, as the story progresses, what we learn right off the bat is that the Israelites do what? They go to war against the Philistines.

Now, I don't want to give away what I'm going to say in just a couple minutes, but this is not the norm. This is not how Israel typically goes to war. They usually meet their leadership and they usually spend some time focusing first on what God has them to do. And God is the one that directs them and leads them to war.

You don't see that anywhere in this passage. And so what I see Israel doing in this moment is running out before God. It's kind of like this. I don't know if you have experienced this yet, parents. You happen to have a son that is finally taking an interest in girls and maybe is able to start dating, drives, doesn't have a car yet but is very interested, and finally kind of asks a young lady, maybe with a group of friends, to go out and spend some time together and while at school is able to make up all the plans and the movie they're going to go to and when he's going to pick her up and all of that sort of stuff. And everything works out so beautifully. And this boy is so excited to come home because all the plans are set. Everything is ready to go except there's one major problem in his planning. He has no car.

So what does he need to do? He goes home and he has a conversation with his father and the conversation goes like this. You'll never guess what, Dad? The girl that I've been talking to you about, she said yes. She finally said yes. We're going to go out on Friday night. I need the car.

I'm going to have the car. That's not the best way for kids to show respect, is it? There's no asking there. There's telling. There's a running out in front of the father, establishing plans, even accomplishing some of those plans, and then coming back a few steps and trying to gain the father's blessing. And we will see that I think that that is exactly what Israel is doing here. So not only are they confused with the idea that maybe their plans, they think might be God's plans or not. They don't even ask. They don't even worry about that. They just have their own plans and they go after their own plans. And then they take off and run out in front of God sort of without even asking Him what they should do. Let's just go to war and everything's going to work out okay.

And how do I know that I know that they think that everything's going to work out okay? Look at verses 3 to 5. Now this is after the initial first battle and they lose a whole bunch of guys and they're like, wait, okay, I know what we did wrong. I got it. I got it.

I know what we did wrong. Go get the ark. The ark will help us. The ark will help us.

So verse 3 starts, let us bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord here from Shiloh, that it may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies. What we have here is we have the people now assuming that God will help them simply because they are God's people. So do you see God's people, what they do is they have a desire in their heart. They run out ahead of God to accomplish what their desire of their heart is. And it might be good.

This sounds like a very good thing. Who wants to be slaves to the Philistines, right? They run out before God and then they expect God's blessing as they go. Well, we see initially right off the bat that God does not bless.

In fact, they lose and there are what, 4,000 people initially, 4,000 men that die? This brings me to the second problem that I think Israel is confused over and it's this. What they are doing is they're not only confusing maybe their purposes for God's purposes or their plans for God's plans, but there's something else that goes right along with this and one doesn't necessarily come before the other.

In fact, if anything, logically, maybe this second point comes before everything I just said. And it's this, that Israel is confusing God for an image. Israel is confusing God for an image and this is slippery. This is very sneaky because the ark is to be honored, respected in every way.

Why? Because the ark is where the invisible God said that he would reside and rule over his people. And we learned back in the law that no one was even supposed to look at the ark. That's how much respect and awe was supposed to be given to the ark. We know that the ark of the covenant was constructed on God's command. It was truly supposed to be the place where God dwelt. He would rule over. He would protect and he would dispense grace for his people from the ark.

So you could see some of the confusion. Let's just bring the ark. This has happened in the past. When the ark leads us, we win. Well, notice the ark didn't lead them into battle this time, did it?

This was a second thought. This was something like, oh yeah, maybe we should get the ark. The ark will help. The issue is that the ark was not magic. The ark was not God. The people could not use the ark to manipulate God. The ark was not to be worshipped in and of itself.

It was an image pointing to the living God, the invisible God, who was to be worshipped. In fact, you know what this story reminds me of just a little bit? Again, I want to be respectful here, but it reminds me of the golden calf incident. They, in a sense, are using the ark the way the people did when they worshipped the golden calf.

You know this to be true, don't you? That man will make gods out of everything. We know from Romans 1, 22 through 25, it says, claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

Amen. Man will make gods out of everything. They will worship the son instead of the one who made the son. Pastors who become self-focused, and we see this, it seems to be all over the place, can worship their ministries. Pastors actually can get, if they become self-focused enough, they can actually worship this and the study of this more than the God that it reveals. We worship our callings instead of the one who called us.

Church, we can worship the under-shepherd. We can worship the pastor instead of the true shepherd, instead of Christ. How often do we worship God's blessings instead of the God who blesses? Not only do we make gods out of everything, but I feel like I need to cover this as well, because brothers and sisters, I think this is maybe where we struggle with making images all the time and worshipping them.

I think maybe we struggle with this one even a little more, and it's this fact. It's the idea that what we do is we take God himself and we turn him into an idol. How on earth do we do that? Any time you choose to worship God by adding or subtracting anything to him that is not revealed from scripture, we turn him into an idol.

This day and age, we are very good at doing that. The world says a loving God will not send anyone to hell. A loving God, no matter what kind of decisions you make, he will love you just the way you think you are. You can come out and be anybody you want, live the life however you choose, find your own truth, and God will love you. That is not biblical. That is not what the Bible teaches. We must have the entire, the whole counsel of God, the whole revelation when we put the love of God and that attribute up there, we must put it up there with every other attribute that the Bible speaks of God.

His holiness and his righteousness and everything else that the Bible speaks of. And so if you choose to worship a God that is okay with your sin, then you are not worshiping the God of the Bible and you are exchanging, you are confusing the God of the Bible for a God of your own making. We must be so careful because it is so easy, it's so slippery to fall into that. And so very easily, you know, these things organically just move into some questions then before we move on.

And the questions go something like this. Are you busy chasing after your own goals, your own wants, your own desires, and then expecting God to bless? This one's kind of tricky. Is your time with the Lord, is your prayer life, your church attendance, the time you spend in the Word, is it growing because of your love for the Lord or because you need him, the things he does for you? And then regarding images, whose image are you confusing for God? How is it that you as an individual or you as your family, how is it that you are changing, confusing the image of God to fit what you need?

I do not want to be a wet blanket all night tonight. That's not the point. My point is not to be guilty or make you feel guilty. My point is simply to bring up some things that make us trip in our Christian walk. And we see here with the Israelites, they trip. And it just doesn't happen in this chapter.

It goes on for quite some time. If you want to go home and study the next few chapters. In fact, until we get to chapter 7, where finally Samuel comes back on the scene and you know what he says? If you want God's blessing, if you want him to fight for you, if you want the God of the Scriptures, the God that has done all of his faithfulness, all of his covenant faithfulness, all of his promises that you've seen worked out through the generations. If that's the God you want, then get on your knees and repent.

Turn away from idols. And guess what? God is faithful. What we see here, if we kind of bring it into New Testament teaching, New Testament story, one of my favorites is found in all of the gospels and in John chapter 6 is a really neat passage.

It's the feeding of the 5,000 and I'm sure you know it pretty well. Jesus is teaching and he's pretty popular about this point. He's getting more and more popular.

He's been doing some miracles and we're going to see a massive one here. So he's kind of in an area where there's not a whole lot of fast food restaurants and there's not a lot of places for the people to go quick and get a bite and then come back and listen to Jesus continue speaking. And the people are getting hungry and this is a lot of people.

We know that there's 5,000 men, let alone families. And so you know the story so I won't go through the whole thing. Jesus turns to his disciples and says, feed them. They go, what?

How are we going to do that? And so you know Jesus goes through the whole process of finding a little bit of food and just creating this amazing miracle. And there's so many neat things we can pull out of that story that just show us Jesus and all of his glory. But can I take you to a point that brings us back to what the Israelites are doing here in 1 Samuel chapter 4?

Is that when we get near the end of that chapter or at least the end of that story, this is the way it goes down. Everybody is sitting there full. Everybody's full.

Everybody's feeling great. You know what they decide to do as a group? Is they look at Jesus and they say, we want to make Jesus our king. You know what the story says is that they went out and they tried to force Jesus to become their king. And the text is very quick, the story is very quick when we just have a small little verse that says, Jesus simply, or it simply is not there, but Jesus simply departed.

He left. What's pretty wild about the story and the way it comes into 1 Samuel here is that Jesus presents himself in John chapter 6 as the savior of the world. He really does. In fact, he says some really hard things. You must eat of my flesh and you must drink of my blood.

And you know the story well enough that there were people there going, whoa, what are you talking about? We don't know anything about that. We don't know that we want that.

We don't know if we want you the way you are presenting yourself. So then what they do is they devise a picture of Jesus, what they do want. We'll take this Jesus and that Jesus is we want your power, we want you to be king, and then we want you to help us to take care of the situation we have found ourselves in. What Jesus says is no. You see the problem is they confused Jesus with this statement. Thou art worthy.

With thou art useful. So he withdrew. We find later in chapter 4 that it says that the glory of God departed Israel. The Philistines actually capture the ark and take it away.

The story ends really fun. I'll let you read on, but that's for another day. Jesus offers himself on his own terms. He comes and he says that I alone am the way, the truth, and the life.

I am the only gate. There is no other name under heaven given to men by which you must be saved. His redeeming work, you can picture Jesus walking and saying, my redeeming work is the only work that will reconcile you with the Father.

There is none other. So Jesus is not a smart or good prophet. He's not a good example. He's not all of these little boxes that we want to put him in. We must not confuse Jesus for who he said he was. He is the Son of God that came and took on flesh.

He died in our place. He took on our sin. He has given us his righteousness, those who believe. We must take Jesus on his terms.

Brothers and sisters, I think that's really good news. I think it's pretty amazing when it says in multiple places throughout Scripture that we cannot add to his work. There is nothing that you or me that we can add to the work of Christ.

There's also nothing we can take away from it. Not only is he the Savior of the world, not only has he taken away sin for eternity, but he is also the judge who will return, the holy God who will wipe away sin and judge the earth one day. So I encourage you tonight to not be confused over who God is, who he claims to be from Scripture, revealed in Jesus Christ. So brothers and sisters, do not be confused over who Christ says he is.

But we can't just take part of him. He saves you just like he chose, he initiated and chose Samuel for a work. He has chosen you for a work. And if we just boil it down, and I don't even want to get into what all that looks like here on this earth and good works and all of that stuff, it can be all boiled down for all of us in one little thing, and that is just the idea that you and I are to be like Christ, holy. We are to change from glory to glory. We are to become the church, mature and complete, lacking nothing in him, in his power, in his strength.

He wants to make us like him. That is a beautiful, beautiful thing. That is a God worth worshiping, and not worth confusing to simply, well, what is he good for today as far as my needs are concerned?

Oh, it is so much bigger than that. So even as we wrap up and as we sing our closing song, let's gaze upon our Lord and Savior as he reveals himself to us completely and fully. And let's remember that he is worth worshiping.

Let's pray. Father God, I know that even in my own life, I wrestle with the same things that the Israelites wrestle with, and that is running before you, that is getting confused my plans and your plans, even to the point where I will try to manipulate you or I will even try to create you in my own image, or there are even times where we slide and we just worship other things, all for the sake of going after our own desires. Lord God, I pray that in this room tonight, God, that you would allow us to see Christ, who is the revelation of the invisible God, and we would see him as he is offered in scripture, as our Savior, yes, the one who can save us from our sin, and as our Lord, the one who saves us and then wants all of us, every bit of us, all of our passion, all of our love, all of our hatred, all of our sin, everything, all that we are, you want it. God, help us through the power of your spirit to worship you as you are revealed in scripture.

Help us not to add, help us not to take away. God, may we just see you as worthy, as weighty, as worth so, so much. God, continue to grow us in the likeness of Christ. It can only come from you, so we ask that you would help us to lean on you. God, may you be glorified in all of it. We ask this in your name. Amen.