A Hard Pill to Swallow
1 Samuel 15:1-15
Turn in your Bibles to 1 Samuel 15. Much of the truth we will discover from our passage this morning is not digested easily. So, I have entitled this message, A Hard Pill to Swallow. Now I would not relate to that saying very well, as the few times I have taken a pill in my life, I really do not have a hard time swallowing a pill. So, I should have entitled this message, A Hard Medicine to Swallow, as I do take Buckley’s the odd time when I get coughing, as we know Buckley’s tastes awful, but it works. And I would endorse that statement. Now when we think of that term, a hard pill to swallow, it may refer to something that we should believe or something that we claim to believe. In other words, we ourselves may claim to hold to a truth that may appear hard to accept. And this is where we find ourselves this morning with our passage before us in 1 Samuel 15. A passage we believe. Of course, we believe it! For it is part of God’s Word. But not every truth is as easily accepted, as some are harder than others.
Now the last time we looked at Saul we were beginning to see glimpses of his shortcomings, as he was showing bad judgment and he was jealous of his son Jonathan. In other words, it was the beginning of the end for Saul as king. So, so let us look verse one.
1 Then Samuel said to Saul, “Yahweh sent me to anoint you as king over His people, over Israel; so now, obey the voice of the words of Yahweh.
2 Thus says Yahweh of hosts, ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt.
3 Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, infant and nursing baby, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
4 Then Saul summoned the people and numbered them in Telaim, 200,000 foot soldiers and 10,000 men of Judah.
7 So Saul struck the Amalekites, from Havilah as you go to Shur, which is east of Egypt.
8 And he seized Agag the king of the Amalekites alive and devoted to destruction all the people with the edge of the sword.
9 But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs, and all that was good, and they were not willing to devote them to destruction; but everything despised and worthless, that they utterly destroyed.
10 Then the word of Yahweh came to Samuel, saying,
11 “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following Me and has not established My words.”
Here we see the pinnacle of Saul’s disobedience that will disqualify him.
“But Samuel said to Saul, ‘I will not return with you; for you have rejected the word of Yahweh, and Yahweh has rejected you from being king over Israel.’”
1 Sam 15:26 (LSB)
Saul, likely knowing that he has not done everything the Lord had told him to do. But he is okay with that. Why? Because he has already justified his actions within himself. For this is what sinful human nature does. This is what we do when we are not really in line with God. We take wrong actions, something that we knowingly have done wrong, something that we would likely condemn in someone else for doing, if they did the same thing, and we justify these actions, so that our conscience is clear. Alistair Begg said:
“It is a reminder in passing, [how] sin blinds us to what is actually the case. Many times, we want to say, well, my conscience is clear and therefore I am innocent. Well, that may be the case, but sometimes our clear conscience is not an indication of our innocence, it is an indication of the fact that we have been disobedient and our sin has blinded us to the reality of [what is true].”
Alistair Begg
This is a human habit. This is human instinct. In fact, we may even ease the conscience of someone else by telling them that what they have done, though disobedient, was okay, because of the circumstances that they were in. The writer of Hebrews wrote, “so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Because sin is not only the act of doing something wrong, but sin also causes us to justify that wrong. The wrong we have done because of the deceitfulness of our human heart. So, we will begin to look at this action by Saul, Lord willing, next Sunday, and delve into all that Saul does here in 1 Samuel 15. But this morning, I wish to spend some time on three very difficult verses from this chapter. So, let us read them again:
1 Then Samuel said to Saul, “Yahweh sent me to anoint you as king over His people, over Israel; so now, obey the voice of the words of Yahweh.
2 Thus says Yahweh of hosts, ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt.
3 Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, infant and nursing baby, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
Notice here firstly (vs 1) that the effectiveness of Saul’s kingship was going to be directly related to his willingness to be submissive to God’s command, as Saul is commissioned here to completely destroy the Amalekites. So, the easy part of this chapter would be to go directly to the actions of Saul, and start to tear apart why he did what he did and address some warnings about disobedience, and we will do that next week. But there is another problem here in these verses that we must deal with first, and it is not the actions of Saul, it is the actions of God. When I read these verses, I thought of the Lord’s command to Abraham to take his son Isaac and sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering. And we struggle with that a little, but we are consoled by the fact that just before Abraham goes to slay his son, God intervenes and says, “no!” Whew! But the problem in this story is that the Lord tells Saul to kill the Amalekites. Okay, all those bad guys. But also the women, and children, the infants, and animals, yet God never stops him at the last minute!
Now if you are like me you can watch some old black and white cowboy movie and the native Americans can wipe out all the cowboys. And you sort of watch it like, okay, I am good with that, as I always sort of rooted for the native Americans anyway. But then the pet dog gets killed. No! That alone should teach me there is something wrong with me. Well, this whole story before us too is a hard pill to swallow, because the One who stands behind this entire mission of massacre is God.
“[A]nd Yahweh sent you on a mission and said, ‘Go and devote to destruction the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed.’”
1 Sam 15:18 (LSB)
In other words, reader, that this is not sinful Saul’s sadistic idea or Samuel’s wrong understanding, This is the heart of God speaking. So, we must ask the question why? Why is God doing what He is doing? Well, it tells us (vs 2) because the Amalekites treated Israel wrongly when they came out of Egypt. When Israel had first come out of Egypt, they encountered the Amalekites. The story of Hur and Aaron holding up the arms of Moses, as the Lord gave them victory over the Amalekites. So, when we read such a story and find out that the Amalekites opposed Israel, it helps us to feel better about what God is doing here. But why the women and children and animals and the Teds! And what we find ourselves trying to do in this story is to justify God’s actions, which is really hard, because we do not really understand all that God is doing.
I mentioned a few weeks ago about the value of expository preaching, as no one is going to preach on this passage unless they are moving through books of the Bible. And I said that to know God better, we must understand God throughout the entire Bible and not just in limited contexts. We must see God when He shows compassion, and we must see God when He judges. Without that, we only have a one-sided, a very narrow view of God, that does not help us answer much of life. As we need to know what the Bible says about all of God, because if we ignore anything the Bible tells us about God, then our understanding of God becomes just our own thoughts and ideas of what we think God should be, which are going to be entirely wrong without a complete view of the Bible. That God is just, and good, and righteous, and loving, and merciful, but He is also wrathful and He is also a God of judgment. For if we do not acknowledge that, we only have a one-dimensional view of God, and therefore, this passage is going to place within even us a great amount of doubt and questioning of God, as we would question the right He has in doing what He has done in 1 Samuel 15. Now we could also turn to a passage like Romans 9 which tells us something very interesting too about God, Paul writes:
13 “Just as it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
14 What shall we say then? Is there any unrighteousness with God? May it never be!
15 For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
16 So then it does not depend on the one who wills or the one who runs, but on God who has mercy.
17 For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised you up, in order to demonstrate My power in you, and in order that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.”
18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.
19 You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?”
20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? Will the thing molded say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this”?
21 Or does not the potter have authority over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?
22 And what if God, wanting to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath having been prepared for destruction,
23 and in order that He might make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory.”
Now understand that many theologians have stood on their heads trying to make this passage say what it does not. And we could read Romans 9 and 1 Samuel 15 and adjust our natural human thinking of what God should and should not do, and conclude that God has every right to do as He pleases. Or we could read Romans 9 and quickly move on to Romans 10 and read, he who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Whew! Now I feel better again, so, let’s just overstate Romans 10 and understate Romans 9. But here is the question, how are these Amalekite infants going to call upon the name of the Lord? How is this fair? Are these Amalekite children? Were they created as vessels of dishonour? What about even these Amalekite men who grew up with Dads who were unrighteous. Dads who never knew God, Dads who taught their sons to do evil. Were these sons, who are now adults, created as vessels of dishonour? I don’t know, but neither do I have the right to even say. But does God have that right?
Yet we may still struggle with such passages because we do not believe it to be fair. In other words, what right does God have to destroy these people and especially these women and children? And if I want to carry this even further, we need to understand that this is not something out-of-the-ordinary that only happens way back in Bible times. No, it is an earthly example of an eternal reality of all who do not know God. In other words, this is not an anomaly, this is the normal and certain fate of all those who reject God. Alistair Begg suggests two reasons why we tend to shrink back when reading such stories. One, he said simply that we do not know the Bible, so we are shocked when we read such a story; and two, we do not believe the entire Bible as we only believe the portions of the Bible that seem to fit us and make us feel comfortable. Yet, “The God who commanded the destruction of the Amalekites is the God who has determined that eventually on that day [judgment day] all those outside of Christ will be destroyed.” And this may be a hard pill for us to swallow.
Begg went on to say that we live in a culture that cringes at this kind of thinking, so we have learned to cringe too. And so, we tend to import human cultural teaching to real life. And when we are conditioned constantly to think this way as a culture, it will either, cause us to only accept certain truths from the Bible, or it will cause us that when we read our Bibles it changes that faulty thinking that has been saturated by the culture. When we read such a passage understand that we often do so with one foot planted in the culture and one foot planted in the Bible, and there is a battle going on in our hearts and minds of how are we going to interpret such a passage.
Now many will teach that when Jesus came to the earth, He set straight the heart of God by showing grace and mercy to those whom He encountered, as Jesus starts to hang around with the sinners and those who we would never believe that God could love. And there is much truth in that, as God showed us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Yet this is still not the complete picture of God, as Jesus’ first coming was not a full revelation of the purposes of God, for Jesus had a very specific purpose in His first coming.
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”
John 3:16-17 (LSB)
This is why He came. And this is the love message that is proclaimed to the world, but His second coming will also have a very specific purpose. For Peter reminds us in 2 Peter 3 that the heavens and earth are being preserved for a day of judgment and fire. Not man’s global warming or not this year’s global cooling, but God’s global fire.
“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be found out.”
2 Pet 3:10 (LSB)
So, let me leave you with some observations this morning from this difficult passage. And if you have notes this morning, this might be a good table discussion at lunch today. I will give you some thoughts with each observation, but it would be good to try to reconcile some of these things in your own minds as well. And I have written these as one flowing thought.
- God is perfect; therefore, God has every right and is free to do all He wishes with His creation.
Now we may struggle with this principle as we might say that there are some things that God cannot do, such as Titus 1:2, God cannot lie, that is true. Yet the principle is that God has every right to do all that He wishes. Because there is no wish or desire in the heart of God to do wrong. This is why God is the only truly free Being in the universe, as there is nothing in God that would limit His desires. Because He is perfect. He is therefore, totally free to do what He wishes to do. This is not true of us, as sin at times will keep us from doing what is good, and sin at times will tempt us to do what is wrong. But there are no such limits with God. And though this is a statement that God has every right, we will never completely understand the ramifications of it. But we know this to be true. The Apostle Paul said it, does not the Potter have the right to do what He wants with the clay? And I know we may struggle with God commanding the killing of children, yet we know He is free to do as He wishes, and His command cannot be sinful or wrong.
I want you to consider for a moment all that will likely happen today. I suppose if we looked at all the deaths that will occur in our world today, Mar 9th 2025, there will be those who die of old age, which is always because of some medical reason. There would be those who will die at many ages through some kind of medical condition. Some will be through the fault of their own—alcohol, obesity—and others because of no fault of their own. Some may die in the current wars going on this morning. Some will die through some kind of car accident, a fire, a drowning, or a work accident. Some mothers will experience a miscarriage. Some will be murdered today. Are these not all in the hand of God? Does not the Bible, in Job 14:5, say that our days are determined by God? James says that we do not know what tomorrow will bring. Psalm 139 says that all our days are written in His book.
And we might say that it is different to live 89 years as opposed to 18 years. And that is true as the Lord knows the sorrow we experience when someone younger is taken. In fact, the Lord hurts with us as we mourn such loss. But how would the patriarchs in the Old Testament respond to much of this? Did not their ancestors live 900-950 years? Methuselah 969? And then later on people lived for only 400-500 years. Until when? It was determined that man would live for approximately 70 years. Psalm 90, the length of our days is 70 or 80, if we have the strength. Who determined that? God did. God determines all these things. This is why it is sin for us to murder or to abort a baby or to participate in MAID—medical assistance in dying—why?
Because this is God’s domain. 1 Samuel 2:6, the Lord puts to death and the Lord gives life. And we have no idea of God’s judgment of such children in the end. We have no idea of what He may have spared them from in life or in eternity. All we know is that whatever God chooses to do is right. That God has prepared an eternal hell and man’s punishment will be determined by God, determined by the One who knows all things. And therefore, we must live in that security. That God is perfect and therefore, God has every right and is free to do all He wishes with His creation.
- Therefore, our perspective of God must be biblical and not based upon mere human feeling.
This keeps us from eisegesis, which is a word that means that the reader of the Bible enforces his or her own thinking upon the Bible. As opposed to exegesis, which is discovering the meaning from the Bible. And this is what we may be struggling with this morning, as our human tendency is to disregard something that we may disagree with, or to overstate some truths about the Bible and understate others. But we cannot do this for the Bible teaches that though God is unchanging, He will act differently at different times and at different events, all at the same time. Right now in our world, God is rejoicing with some who may be praising Him this morning. To some, He is greatly blessing; to others, He is bringing trouble. To some He is showing His love and compassion, while to others God is judging and displaying His anger. Some will be praying this morning and God will answer “yes” to their prayer; yet to some godly soul, God will answer “no.” For these are all truths that we know about God and that the Bible must be our perspective.
- Therefore, though we will grow in our love for God and our understanding of God, we will never completely know the mind of God.
Isaiah 55:8, “‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,’ declares Yahweh.” Job 26:14, “Behold, these are the fringes of His ways; And how only with a whisper of a word do we hear of Him! But His mighty thunder, who [of us] can understand?” Romans 11:33, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!” Ecclesiastes 8:16-17, “[A]nd I saw every work of God, I concluded that man cannot find out the work which has been done under the sun … he will not find it out; and though the wise man should say, ‘I know,’ he cannot find it out.” Even righteous Job said to “[K]now that [God] can do all things, And that no purpose of [God’s] can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand, Things too marvelous for me, which I did not know.”
- Therefore, our response to God can be nothing less than an overwhelming awareness of His greatness, as our intellectual distance from God should remind us always of His awesomeness.
None of us would argue the fact that God is intellectually way beyond us, and therefore, if He is far superior to us in knowledge, it would only make sense He will make decisions that we cannot understand. In other words, if we could understand all that God is doing, it would mean that we would have to know all that God knows. In our Sunday evening series on the attributes of God, we spoke about God being omniscient, that God knows everything. God knows every single action and event throughout the universe outside of time and space. God even knows what would have happened if things went in a different direction. Wayne Grudem wrote:
“If God fully knows himself, he knows everything he is able to do, which includes all things that are possible. This fact is indeed amazing. God has made an incredibly complex and varied universe. But there are thousands upon thousands of other variations or kinds of things that God could have created but did not. God’s infinite knowledge includes detailed knowledge of what each of those other possible creations would have been like and what would have happened in each of them!”
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology 191
God knows how many grains of sand there are in the universe without counting them. He knows how many stars are in the sky without counting. In fact, God is present with the farthest star we have yet to discover, for He is everywhere. So, this means that God does not have to weigh things out or reason, for the Bible says that He already knows the end from the beginning. He never learns anything and He never forgets anything. It is good to be reminded that our lifetime of learning is a billionth of a fraction of things that God already knows. And if God never learns anything and God never forgets anything, this means what? God’s level of knowledge never changes or grows. For if God learned something new, it would mean that He would not have been all-knowing prior to His learning. Therefore, His intellect is far beyond our intellect, and therefore, like Job, we must stand before Him silent. Finally:
- Yet, God’s intellectual distance from us does not mean that His heart is not moved by both our sinfulness against Him or our sincere worship of Him.
“I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following Me and has not established My words.”
1 Sam 15:11a (LSB)
We also know from the Scriptures that just prior to the flood (Gen 6) God was sorry that He had made man. These examples teach us that God is not immune to both our suffering and gladness, but that He hurts with us and He rejoices with us. Yet some would teach that because God is so far above us intellectually, and because God knows all things, that God does not feel emotions or passions. But He does. Obviously, the Lord does not have sinful passions or emotions, but we have many references to the Lord rejoicing, grieving, showing pity, times of wrath, times of loving. And though God is infinite, He chose to relate with mankind. Though He is far above His creation, He allows His attributes, not to change, but to interact with us.
I trust that each of these statements are truths that we know, though we may not always understand. My title “A Hard Pill to Swallow” is such a negative way in which to present this sermon, because the emphasis is on the difficulty and almost unwillingness to take this in and embrace it and love everything about God. And the term almost makes it seem that we have to embrace everything anyway, though we do not want to. In Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, there is the scene of Scrooge standing before the Ghost of Christmas Present. And Scrooge is saying to the phantom, I’m too old to change. And the Ghost of Christmas Present says to Scrooge, “Mortal! We Spirits of Christmas do not live only one day of our year. We live the whole three-hundred and sixty-five. So is it true of the Child born in Bethlehem. He does not live in men’s hearts one day of the year, but in all days of the year. You have chosen not to seek Him in your heart.”
And what I learn from this fictional statement is the need in our lives to embrace all of God and not just part of God, and even times when we do not understand all that God is doing, that we would trust Him completely. And we still embrace Him, for He is good. So, maybe a better title than “a hard pill to swallow” should be “a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down.” As medicine is good, but it is not always tasteful at the time. And the sugar here is God’s Word. Assuring us that God is all good always, it’s He? The psalmist wrote:
“I have not turned aside from Your judgments,
For You Yourself have taught me.
How sweet is Your word to my taste!
Sweeter than honey to my mouth!
Your word is a lamp to my feet
And a light to my path.”
Ps 119:102-103; 105 (LSB)
When we read something so encouraging in God’s Word, we can rejoice in that, because God is good and God is always right. And when we read something challenging to our human minds in God’s Word as in 1 Samuel 15, we can rejoice in that, because God is good and God is always right. Lord, for what we know not, teach us. For what we have not, give us. And for what we are not, make us. And all God’s people said, amen.