The Word of the Lord (Part 1 of 2)

Anytime we fail to hear God's voice, chaos ensues. Today on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg, we'll hear about a time of deep spiritual famine among God's people.

Alistair Begg explains to us how it happened and how we can prevent the same thing from happening today. 1 Samuel 3 verse 1, Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli. And the word of the LORD was rare in those days.

There was no frequent vision. At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his own place. The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the LORD, where the ark of God was. Then the LORD called Samuel, and he said, Here I am, and ran to Eli, and said, Here I am, for you called me. But he said, I did not call. Lie down again.

So he went and lay down. And the LORD called again Samuel. And Samuel arose and went to Eli and said, Here I am, for you called me. But he said, I did not call, my son.

Lie down again. Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. And the LORD called Samuel again the third time, and he arose and went to Eli and said, Here I am, for you called me. Then Eli perceived that the LORD was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, Go, lie down, and if he calls you, you shall say, Speak, LORD, for your servant hears.

So Samuel went and lay down in his place. And the LORD came and stood, calling us at other times, Samuel, Samuel. And Samuel said, Speak, for your servant hears. Then the LORD said to Samuel, Behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel, at which the two ears of everyone who hears it will tingle. On that day I will fulfill against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house from beginning to end. And I declare to him that I am about to punish his house forever, for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them. Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli s house shall not be atoned for by sacrifice or offering forever.

Samuel lay until morning. Then he opened the doors of the house of the LORD. And Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli. But Eli called Samuel and said, Samuel, my son. And he said, Here I am. And Eli said, What was it that he told you?

Do not hide it from me. May God do so to you and more also if you hide anything from me of all that he told you. So Samuel told him everything and hid nothing from him. And he said, It is the LORD.

Let him do what seems good to him. And Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him, and let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel from Den to Beersheba knew that Samuel was established as a prophet of the LORD. And the LORD appeared again at Shiloh, for the LORD revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the LORD.

Amen. This is one of the more familiar chapters in 1 Samuel. Everybody, if they know the book at all, know the chapter that involves David and Goliath. And if we only know perhaps one other chapter, then it probably is this third chapter, which recounts for us the calling of Samuel.

Certainly for myself, growing up as I did within the framework of the church, I remember us singing what I think was a children's hymn that began, Hushed was the evening hymn, the temple courts were dark. And that was the intro into a hymn that recounted the events which are before us here in 1 Samuel 3. Now, in short order, what we have in this chapter is the prophetic ministry of the Word of God being restored to Israel at this time through the life and, in turn, through the lips of this man Samuel, whose progress we have been now following since birth. When you come to a chapter like this and you are studying it, perhaps on your own, and you are looking to find your way through it, one of the things to do is to see if it is framed in any way.

And this particular chapter allows us to say, yes, it is, because you will notice that in verse 1 the emphasis is on the word of the Lord, and when you get to verse 21, it finishes with the emphasis in the exact same place on the word of the Lord. And so what we're going to discover today, what that really means, why it mattered at the time, and why the restoration and the hearing of the Word of God always matters. Now, it is a while since Hannah has dropped Samuel off and left him.

She's been coming back and forth on an annual basis, as we saw last time. We also acknowledge last time that it is quite difficult—it is virtually impossible for us—to say with any accuracy or authority just where we are in the age of Samuel at each point in this story. What we do know is that he has been growing, that he's grown quite a bit, and that as he has grown, we have seen the evidence of it. So, for example, in verse 21 of chapter 2, he was growing in the presence of the Lord. Down in verse 26, he is in 26 continuing to grow. Now, what we don't know is how much time has elapsed between verse 21 and verse 26.

It's not a matter of great import, except it's good for us just to acknowledge the fact that progress is being made. The really significant thing that we're told in light of all his ministrations and his progress and his stature and his favor is what we will come to in a bit, and that is in verse 7, where quite amazingly we're told that Samuel did not yet know the Lord. Now, we will come to that, but only in a moment or two. First of all, let us consider verses 1–3 under the heading of one word, simply Silence.

Silence. The boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli, and the word of the Lord was rare in those days. What had just happened, as we looked at it last time, in the second half of chapter 2, was an unusual occurrence. Those of you who were present in the evening as we studied that were struck by the fact that God raised up a certain man who spoke the word of the Lord. That's verse 27 and following. And chapter 3 begins by reminding us that that kind of event, certainly when it was accompanied by a vision of God that would give rise often to the Word of God, that that is actually unusual. Reminding us of what we've seen from the beginning, and that is that the chaos at the end of Judges, where everybody did what was right in their own eyes, where there was an absence of effective leadership, was in itself an expression of the spiritual darkness at that time among the people of God.

It was a darkness that was almost a palpable darkness. And that darkness was directly related to the fact that the Word of God was increasingly silent. Throughout the history of God's people—and sometimes in an expression of judgment, for example, in the book of Amos—you have the description of the people of God roaming, as it were, back and forth, east to west and north to south, on account of not a physical famine in search of physical food but on account of a spiritual famine and in search of spiritual food, so that they realize, We have not been hearing from God. The Word of God is becoming increasingly rare. Now, I don't want to camp on this, but there is a sense in which, almost in every generation, the people of God will be forced to identify this as a recurring feature. I don't say this in any spirit of judgment, but as I travel around the country and beyond the country, I'm often struck in going to places of worship at the absence of the public reading of Scripture—of the Bible actually being present, being physically present, being visibly present, and being audibly proclaimed.

I'm not saying that there isn't a service. I'm not saying that there aren't talks about God. I'm just making a comment regarding the actual sense of the Word of God.

Often the way it is read, if it is read, is fairly casual. Often it's just shot up on screens, whereby people are increasingly divorced from the sense of having their own Bible. Because, loved ones, it is a peculiar privilege to have a Bible. It is not so long since, at the height of the Soviet Empire, Bibles were removed and burned and had to be smuggled into places and where to get a portion of the Scriptures meant a tremendous amount to many of our brothers and our sisters.

It is an honor and a privilege. It's only really in the last four hundred years or so that a minister has ever been able to say to the congregation, Please take your Bible and turn to. Because prior to the printing press, nobody had a Bible to turn to. In the eighteenth century, when Newton was addressing his congregation one morning, I think this just must have struck him. And he said to him, I count it my honor and happiness that I preach to a free people who have the Bible in their hands.

Alec Matea, whom I love to quote, on one occasion writing in a commentary not on 1 Samuel, asks these questions. He says, Have we got a Bible in our hands? Let us prize it, read it, and commit the precious truths to heart and mind.

It is not an inalienable possession. It may not be ours forever. And then he says, Is the Bible still preached in our church? Let us love to hear the word of God. Let us be urgent to bring others in earshot of it.

It is not our guaranteed privilege. The voice of the preacher could be silenced. And the truth of God is our only defense against error. One of my good friends, my big brother, Sinclair Ferguson, and I are from time to time involved in a kind of panel Q&A. And on a number of occasions when that has occurred, the question has been raised, you know, So tell me about your church, how many people come to your church, what is the strength of your church? And almost inevitably, Sinclair says, The test of the church in terms of its hunger for the word of God is in the evening service. It is in the evening service. Which of course nobody likes to hear, because many people have disbanded any thought of an evening service, starting with the minister—and often because the minister's ego is unable to handle the fact that he doesn't like to preach to smaller crowds. How many of such men would be preaching today in places around our world where the only crowds to which we might ever preach are inevitably small crowds?

But it is a test, isn't it? One of the indications of the hunger of North America for the word of God is to be conveyed in the darkness of church buildings after four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon—the emptiness of the car parks. The same people who are prepared to say, Speak, O Lord, and plant your truth deep in my heart apparently don't want to get too serious about it. One of the challenges that all of us face living in the twenty-first century is the challenge of believing that because we've been privileged to live at this point in history, we must really know how it goes. We must really understand how things should be, and the way we've now buttoned them down is presumably the way everybody who lived a hundred or two hundred years before us would also have buttoned them down if they'd only had us, the bright people, around to be able to tell them how the thing really works. It's a dreadful arrogance, isn't it?

It's terrible. And so that's the great benefit of history. And that's why history is so important. So, for example, you read of the church in Geneva in the sixteenth century. And the Genevan church extended its reach and gave its guidelines for the clergy of the day.

And those guidelines went in part like this. Each Sunday there is to be a sermon at Saint-Pierre and then at Saint-Gervais, at the break of day and at the usual hour at 9 a.m. At midday there is to be catechism—that is, instruction of little children in all of the churches. At three o'clock there is the second sermon. Besides, on working days there will be a sermon at Saint-Pierre three times a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So you wonder at the impact of the Reformation church. What they were doing was on the count of six sermons a week. What some of us are trying to do was on the count of one sermon a week.

There might be just a direct correlation between the impact, separated by four hundred years. You say, Well, this is not very nice of you to say. Why not?

Why not? Where are the young people on a Sunday morning scattered throughout North America? Forget about Sunday evening. Having never been raised within the framework of the instruction of God's Word, it is no surprise that as soon as freedom abounds, there is nothing within them that would draw them to that place. Now, if you think about this, and you think about a famine of the Word of God, and you project yourself a few years forward—just a couple of decades—and you go back and you visit Western Europe, and you say to yourself, Why are all those places so empty in Western Europe? I think the answer is just this.

Hold on, because you're about to find out. Because the same decline, the same disinterest, the same superficial sense of going through the motions absent the reality of laying hold upon the great and precious promises of God's Word accompanied those in that context. Now, all of that is simply to say that the silence is a virtually deafening silence. And the Word of God was rare in those days, and there was no frequent vision.

It's a dreadful time when that's the case. That's why the cry of the Reformation, or the description of the Reformation, is what post tenebras lux is after darkness light—that the darkness of the Middle Ages was a darkness that was directly related to the absence of the Word of God. Incidentally, you will notice in that Genevan expression, it doesn't say that services are to be heard. It says that sermons are to be preached.

There's no absence of services. People going through motions of religious ritual. It is the rarity of the Word of God, the prophetic Word of God, that says, This is what God says, and because it's what God says, it's vital that people hear it. Now, it is in that context of silence that we read verse 2. You say, goodness, verse 2, after all that time, verse 2. Yes, we will not get very far, so relax.

Don't get upset. At that time—at what time? Well, at the big time of the rarity of the Word and the absence of frequent vision, but at the specific time of this evening hour, Eli, whose eyesight is failing—we're going to discover in chapter 4 that he's also increasingly heavy, and his eyes have begun to grow dim so that he could not see, and he was lying down in his own place. So, again, this picture of the aging man, and there's something of a metaphor there, isn't there, that his eyesight had begun to grow dim? This is a physical statement. We've also become aware of the fact that his spiritual eyesight is increasingly dim.

I mean, he thought that Hannah was a drunk, he can't see what's going on with his own boys, and we're about to discover more evidences of his lack of perception. The lamp of God had not yet gone out. The lamp of God you can read about in the earlier parts of your Bible, in Exodus, I think, around chapter 27 or so, the very express and specific instructions are given about the lighting of the lamp, where it is to be, how it is to be tended, and the privileges of being there to make sure it is burning and then realizing when it is to be extinguished. And so this lamp had not yet gone out. That gives us, then, a time reference, because it burned until the morning hours, it burned virtually until dawn, and so we know, then, that what is taking place here is in, if you like, the watches of the night. And the physical picture that you have is of Eli, who's in his own bed, lying in his own place. You would expect that to be the case. And yet Samuel, now, we're told, is lying down in the temple of the Lord. I think it's striking, isn't it? Because we would be tempted to say that Eli, since he is the priest of God, would be lying down in the temple of the Lord at the tent of meeting in the context of the ark of God, which contained the tablets of the commands and an expression of God's covenant, that you would expect that would be the priest, and he would say, Now, Eli, you go and go over there.

You've got a little place for yourself over there. But it's actually reversed. Eli is now somewhat distanced, at least visibly, from this, and Samuel is lying down where the ark of God was. I think there's a metaphor in that lamp as well, isn't there? You'd be very, very careful about suggesting that this is why it says what it says. When it says, The lamp of God had not yet gone out, it's talking about the physical lamp that had not yet gone out, okay? That's what it means.

It doesn't mean something other than that. But given what we know, we recognize that it is virtually a metaphor for the fact that in the darkness, in the spiritual darkness, in the absence of the Word, it is actually true as well that the lamp has not yet gone out. And that's the significance of little Samuel. Here is the light in the darkness, a failing, distanced Eli in sharp contrast to the emerging Samuel. So the lamp is still burning, the tent is still standing, and, as the poets tell us, the darkest hour is just before dawn.

For me, that's the mamas and the papas, if you're interested, each night before you go to bed, my baby, because the darkest hour is just before dawn. Well, that's exactly what we find here. You're listening to Truth for Life. That's Alistair Begg reminding us that even in the bleakest times, God is kindling a spark. In our current series, we're learning just how essential it is to heed God's Word. That's why we teach the Bible every day here at Truth for Life. In fact, our singular mission is to open the Scriptures each day to help all who come better understand what God's Word says and how it relates to our daily life.

We do this, of course, with God's help, trusting that His Spirit will convert unbelievers, deeply establish those who already believe in their faith, and encourage pastors to remain committed to teaching the Scriptures. And to supplement the daily teaching you hear on Truth for Life, we carefully select books to help you grow in your relationship with Jesus. Today we want to recommend a book titled Name Above All Names. Alistair, along with his good friend Sinclair Ferguson, collaborated on this exploration of Jesus' identity and His character.

When you read the book Name Above All Names, you'll discover how the whole Bible is a book about Jesus, how He is predicted, revealed, preached, explained, and expected. You can request your copy today. Simply tap the image on the app or visit our website at truthforlife.org slash donate. Or if you'd prefer, you can call us at 888-588-7884. I'm Bob Lapine. When God breaks through His apparent silence, we expect relief, don't we? But that's not always the case. Be sure to listen tomorrow as we'll hear Samuel's response to his first assignment as God's new prophet. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.