Text: 1 Samuel 15
Topic: Understanding the justice and mercy of God

• There comes a time in most everyone's life when they realize that they just are not as good as they thought they were.
  • Illustration: Woodruff recounts being humbled at his first tennis tournament.
• In order to understand how much God loves us and how amazing his grace is, we have to understand how fallen and rebellious we are.

• In 1 Samuel 15, God orders Saul to totally destroy the Amalekites.
• This is one of the passages that critics turn to when they want to dismiss the Christian God as nothing more than a tribal war deity or argue that religion causes violence.
• By entering this discussion, we are asking God to justify his actions.
• It says something about us that we are more concerned with God's behavior than with our own—that we are judging him rather than worrying about him judging us.
  • 1 Samuel 15
• In this troubling passage, God is not allowing bad things to happen; God is causing them.
• God seems vindictive; we feel as though we have higher moral standards than he does or did; or God's standards have evolved.

• The call to wipe out the Amalekites was issued by God before Christ, during a time when God was protecting and preserving the Jewish people.
• There are six other passages like this one that embrace what is referred to as "the ban," where everyone is to be killed and everything is to be destroyed.
• Remember: God chose Abraham and promised that through his descendants he would bless the world.  
• It is through the Jewish bloodline that Christ will be born; therefore, in the Old Testament we find God going to great lengths to preserve the bloodline
• The Amalekites were to be punished, because they were wicked.
• The Amalekites did not fear God; instead, they attacked the weakest of God's people.
  • Illustration: William F. Albright, a famous archeologist, once described their religion as "perhaps the most depraved religion known to man."
• God did not act in haste.
• It is popular in some circles to suggest that the God of the Old Testament has a hair-trigger temper, and idea codified by a second century heretic named Marcion, who taught that the God of the Old Testament was a God of wrath who needed to be banished to the ash heaps of history.
• It is true that Christ's message is not going to be promoted with a sword but by a suffering servant; and while he is ready to die for this cause, he is not ready to kill for it.
• If you read through the Old Testament, you do not come away feeling like God has a hair-trigger temper; rather, you come away feeling like he is being taken advantage of. 
• It is not unfair to say that God is like a woman in an abusive relationship who keeps going back to her abusive partner.
• God's decision to judge the Amalekites came over 400 years after they had been warned.

• Option Number One is to suggest that God lost his temper.
• This option ignores the centuries the Amalekites are given after their warning to correct their behavior.
• Option Number Two is to suggest that the Bible is not really God's Word, but only a record of what the Jewish people thought about God.
• This option takes God off the hook by suggesting that the Bible is not his Word--that there is nothing particularly divine about it.
• I believe the Bible is divinely inspired and true, and I am persuaded that it is the view of Christ.
• Option Number Three suggests that we are interpreting this passage incorrectly; the text is accurate but our interpretation is not.
• Much is made of discussions about whether or not the Bible is to be read literally, but a literal interpretation of literal factors in the literally genre—that is not the common understanding.
• It is possible that what is meant here, when God says to wipe them all out, is that they are to have a crushing defeat. 
• Option Number Four is simply that the passage means what it says, and we just do not get it, because we look at things quite differently than God does.
• Our human view is that this life is more valuable than anything else—and that God somehow owes it to us.
• God's view is that all we are owed is punishment for our rebellion and selfishness—that life is a gift he can give or take; that he has authority over all things, including us; that he owns all things by virtue of the fact that he created them.
• Please understand: the issue of infants and children being killed in the battle is not the "take your breath away" issue here in the end, because I believe they go to be with God.
• In the case of the Amalekites—a culture that sacrificed their own children—I suspect that ending the life of those born there and ushering them into eternity was probably one of the most merciful things he could do.

• The difficulty of this text is not the challenge of reconciling the order to destroy the Amalekites with the character of God; it is the reminder that we all face judgment.
• We have little appreciation for God's ultimate authority and holiness.
• Jesus says, "Do not fear him who is able to destroy your body but unable to destroy your soul. Instead, fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell."
• I believe in a God of love and grace who gives me what I don't deserve, but I am under no illusions that this was a small rescue.
• God's holiness demands that sin be punished—and one day it will be.
• The reality of our judgment is what makes his grace in Christ so amazing.

• The distance between how we tend to think about God and who God has revealed himself to be is not small.
• Christ died so that we would no longer be accountable for our sin, nor live in dread of meeting God.