While they're looking for the PowerPoint, let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you that you have drawn us close to yourself in Christ. We rejoice in His person and we look to Him this morning. We pray that we might learn from the scriptures about your sovereignty, that we might be able to better trust in your wisdom, in your grace, and in your power.
We thank you for your word in Jesus' name, amen. The idea of sovereignty, I think, is appropriate for this time in our lives, in our society, in our, if you will, Canadian history and world history. We wonder, I think, sometimes about God's sovereignty. We shall I say hope that God is sovereign.
But of course, you know, as a believer, that is not something you should hope in. It is something you should know. It is something that is a rock foundation in your faith. That God is sovereign.
In an absolute sense, some historians I was reading, they cited a number of them, said that world history is a pile of confused facts. And the interpretation thereof defies all human efforts to understand or make sense of human history. But the, of course, the Christian writers do not view history that way. It is part of God's plan.
And you may have heard this one. It comes from a Dr. Pierce. History is his story.
God's plan is there. And we know it is there. We don't always understand the outworking of his plan in terms of national policies and so on. But God's sovereignty is there nonetheless.
And I submit to you this morning that what is actually, arguably more important, what is more important, is whether God is sovereign in your life. Don't you think? That's an important question. That you are living in obedience to God.
That as far as your energies and will and mind and heart and thinking are concerned, you want to be under and living in the sovereignty of God and being obedient to God insofar as you are able. That's the good question. That's the important question. I quoted here from, for Samuel 2, when I have a challenge this morning to try to somehow run you through the first three chapters of Samuel.
So if you have a Bible, it might be a good idea to open it and find the first three chapters of Samuel. David McDonald recently said the same thing that we were talking about. It's interesting. Samuel, the books of the kings, first Samuel, through second chronicles.
Very interesting. I went on a field trip, which was a repeat of a school field trip yesterday with my grandson. He let us down a path that had so much overgrowth. It was almost like a tunnel.
And he remembered the name of the pond where his teacher had taken the class, Peter's Pond, Heron Cove, and he brought us right up to a tree that had been cut down. And he brought us right down to the place where it had been cut down. And he pointed to the place there. He said, beaver teeth marks.
I'm learning a lot. And when we come to the scriptures, we should also be people who say, I want to learn something. I want to learn. This is interesting.
I love to learn. I hope that you do indeed love to learn. Sovereignty, sovereignty comes from two words, super and to rain. And this world is full of leaders, sometimes kings, historically, of course, many kings, not so many kings left today.
But these various leaders rain in their own way. Some of these leaders are very faulty. Some of these leaders are big disappointments. But over all of that, above that, super to that, is the reign of God, the superior reign of God.
It is good to keep that in mind. It is good to keep in mind that God is in control of history. He can rule and overrule what these small, what we might call petty potentates, sometimes decide. He can overrule those things.
He guides history. He is in control. He is the true sovereign. He is the true sovereign.
If you want to see mention of God in the context of a dictionary definition of sovereignty, you have to go back about 100 years because the modern definition of sovereignty and the dictionary you may not be surprised would not dare mention God in talking about sovereignty. I like this. I take my hat off to Daniel Webster. I stood in front of his grave in Connecticut by accident.
I say, oh, look who's there? Supreme or highest in power, superior to all others. Chief, independent of others, unlimited by others. Possessing an entitled to original authority and jurisdiction.
Predominant, greatest, utmost paramount. Efficatious in the highest degree. For example, someone named Hooker said, we acknowledge God, our sovereign good. God, our sovereign good.
Sovereign, our God is sovereign. We might, I don't know, try to make a diagram. Perhaps because I'm an engineer, I just can't help it. But shall we say levels?
We might think of in terms of levels of sovereignty. I think that is also a fiction. I think that God sees the high level as well as the details simultaneously. But it is good, I think, to sometimes remind ourselves that there is more to the universe, there is more to eternity than our small appreciation of it.
Time goes from eternity past at some point God created this earth. And then we have history, some of which is recorded. And at the end, God will make a new heaven and a new earth. There will be a recreation.
And we will enter into eternity future. So when we get upset about the small things and the blink of time in which we exist, maybe it's helpful to remember that it is only a blink of time from God's greater point of view. The part that we really should kind of keep uppermost is the fact that in all of this, God has a redemptive plan. That redemptive plan, as we know from scriptures, goes from before creation.
And what happens in that regard to you and I as redeemed people and how God and what God has for us after a new heaven that a new earth had been created? We don't know. This is a blink of time in which we exist. But I hope that you are glad as I am to be redeemed, to be inside of that redemptive plan.
When we read the Bible, we get details. We find out about Adam and Noah, the Abraham, the patriarchs. We get through the Torah. We come to the book of Judges.
It could be translated deliverer. And then comes the little book of Ruth. And then we're into the period of the kings. Most of them, not very good.
Prophets and the person that one of the people that considered this morning is Samuel, the first in a line of prophets. And then the Old Testament closes and there's 400 years of silence and then Messiah comes. We were reading about the angels declaring it to the lowest rung in society. Shepherd's.
Shepherd's were kind of unclean. They were on the edge of society of God said, I'll tell you, my son is here. And then you have the church led by the apostles. And the church, the body of Christ, the redeemed, will extend into the future.
We will in our existence how? We don't know. And you see a little box with a question mark under there? That's like you or me maybe?
Oops. I tricked myself because I got to advance mine too. So the person we're going to think about first this morning is a barren woman, a barren woman, a woman who wanted desperately to have a child and suffered much over this problem, her apparent infertility. We'll think about Hannah.
Does she figure very large in this picture from patriarchs to apostles? I mean, the average Christian. Is there a Hannah that's of any importance in the Bible? Is it Hannah who?
Hannah what? I hope you know your Bible better than that. But this person, this barren woman was very important in God's sight. Maybe you might say, little person like you or me, wait, wait.
God uses the little people if there is such a thing. And we are in a period in our Bibles where there is a transition from theocracy to monarchy. How will God achieve that transition? Judges is noking.
The beginning of the book of 1 Samuel is it turns out, man's king. And 2 Samuel is God's king. So we are in a transition in the Bible. And it is most interesting to read.
It is most interesting to think about it. Every time I read it, it raises the thoughts and questions in my mind that cause me to say, you know, I need to think about this more. I need to study this more. These are things I need to think about.
I hope that is your experience with your Bible. So in these first three chapters, I need to somehow, in 15 minutes, run you through them. And I'm going to do it by personage, first Hannah, and then an old man, an old high priest named Eli. And then a boy, a boy named Samuel.
So when you're looking at your Bible and you see 1 Samuel 1, you see that there is a man, he has a Zufite. He lives at the border of Ephryum and Benjamin in a place called Rama. And he's an observant Jew. He goes with his family to Shiloh, where the tabernacle has been placed.
And there would be actually, it's not clear as to which one of the feasts or the convocations we are speaking of. But he brings his family to Shiloh for a holy convocation. And he does it with his two wives, Hannah and Pinaina. And he does it to worship and to sacrifice and to honor the Lord.
And one presenter. I read multiple commentaries. I watched two or three dramatizations on YouTube and a few sermons as well over the past month. And one rendition paints the picture of a man.
He's the leader of his family. And he is at the head of the 15 mile or so walk from Rama to Shiloh. And after him is pinaina with a bunch of kids. And they're sort of like bees around her feet.
And then at the end of the pack is poor Hannah, bringing up the rear by herself. I don't know if that's true. But it's quite credible. This poor woman had the situation of being barren.
Deuteronomy says that children are a blessing from the Lord. Isn't it just like human beings to say, oh, if children are a blessing from the Lord and you have none, you are cursed. How wicked. What a wicked thing to do.
But this pina, as some people pronounce her name, that's what she made a project out of. She made a project out of tormenting the other wife and reminding her every time. Every time. And torturing her.
Provoking her sore, as it says in the King James. What kind of a person does that? We see mention of pinaina there. And then after the first mention of pinaina, it's like her adversary and the one who's making trouble.
It's almost like the Bible says, I don't want to mention that person's name anymore. I've told you who it is. And this is the person who's making trouble in the family and torturing someone else with verbal abuse. And it grieved her.
It grieved her. What did the husband do? He said, well, when the part of the sacrifice that comes back to the sacrifice or comes back to them, I'm going to give my dear Hannah a double portion, my worthy portion. And tell her, you know, I really love you in so many words.
But it was still a hard thing, so hard, so hard. The Bible says that it caused in her bitterness of soul. It's the first time the word bitterness appears in the Bible. New Testament warns against bitterness.
She's on the edge. This experience is awful. And she has bitterness of soul. And she cried.
She wept sore, it says in verse 10 of chapter 1. And she prays. She won't eat. And she gets up.
And she prays. And this old guy, this old high priest Eli, he sees her praying. And he sees her lips moving. And he says, you woman over there, you shouldn't be drunk here.
This is why you're mumbling, isn't it? You've had too much to drink. That's why your mouth seems to be moving meaninglessly. She says, no, no, no.
I am bringing my complaint to the Lord. I am bringing my suffering to the Lord. Oh. He says, may God grant your request.
What was her request? Her request is now that if the Lord will bless her with a son. That son will be a Nazarite. He will be dedicated to the Lord.
He'll never have his haircut. And part of the other part of that is there would be no fruit of the vine for him, no wine for him, no wine. She was just accused of being drunk. She's talking about giving over her firstborn son, her first child, over to be a Nazarite.
And this old man, this old man, he said, grant thee. May the God of Israel in 17 of chapter 1, may he grant thee thy petition. And we read that she went her way and she did eat. And she was comforted.
And I don't know whether she was comforted because of what Eli said or whether the Lord by his spirit had revealed to her that the matter was about to be resolved. She went home with her husband and she conceived a child in Rama. Hannah. Part of my message today is I guess the Bible deals with heavy stuff.
The Bible often deals with theological things that boggle the mind. But of course, the Bible is not a book of systematic theology like you might have to use at a seminary. The Bible is the Bible. And the Bible gives us help and instruction by way of example.
By way of example, I'm so thankful for that. If you've ever been a student in school, which you have, you can listen to a teacher go on about the theory. And when you come to what you're like, but this is what I'm like, OK, fine, fine, fine, fine. And now I will give you an example.
OK, this will help a lot. So the Bible is full of examples. We can think about Hannah, the negative example of Eli, and the example of Samuel. So let's see how we do this morning.
So I'll just give you bracketing verses around an image. And it says here, and she was in bitterness of soul. I wonder when you are in bitterness of soul, whether the sovereignty of God is uppermost in your mind, maybe not. I think at a kindergarten level, one of the things that is here is that when you are emotionally overwhelmed and when you are in a state of suffering, bring it to God.
Bring the very bitterness that you are experiencing to God. Have you been in a place where you don't feel like praying? That is exactly the time to bring the thing that is causing you not to feel like praying to God. That's a kindergarten outcome from this example.
A woman went from crying out in suffering in a situation in which her family situation was against her. Her culture, sort of a distorted culture, was against her. And she had to deal with a reminder of it with a regular religious festival. It's like unbearable.
And she just brings it to God. In chapter two, you can come and find that after Samuel is weaned, she brings him to the temple and says to Eli, remember me that you thought I was drunk, maybe. And I'm back. I promised the son and the son is here.
And his name is Samuel, asked of God. And he's here. And I'm turning him over to you. And it says he worshiped there.
This, as we'll see, rather be fuddled and faulty high priest worshiped when he found out that this child would be lent to him as it says in the King James. And we come to chapter two. And chapter two is a great chapter. You have, you know, in Judges the song of Deborah.
You have in the New Testament the Magnificat and of the arrival of the Savior, women who praised God, Elizabeth with John the Baptist as well, who praised God, Simeon praised God when he held that baby as we read last night. And this is one of those. This is one of those where the situation has gone 180 degrees and the woman is no longer in bitterness of soul, but is rejoicing in the sovereignty of God and that she has been lifted up. This is what it says.
The Lord makeeth, pour and makeeth rich. He bringeth law and lifteth up, lifteth up. He raiseeth up the pour out of the dust and lift it off the beggar from the dung hill to set them among princes and to make them inherit the throne of glory. For the pillars of the earth are the lords and he hath set the world upon them.
He will keep the feet of his saints. I love that. And the wicked shall be silent in darkness for thy strength, for by strength, sorry, for by strength shall no man prevail. That's a good thing to keep in mind too, thinking about the sovereignty of God.
The strength of man is nothing, nothing compared to the sovereignty and power of God. God sees the little people like Hannah. God notices the suffering of the soul that is brought to him. I showed you kind of layers of sovereignty.
Well, you should maybe wipe that away because this little person in the New Testament that occupies a couple of chapters, I'm sorry, in the Old Testament that occupies at not even two full chapters, this person is noticed by God and is helped by God. And as a result of that, her heart is full of praise for God. And she rejoices in the fact that God is sovereign and he lifts up whom he will lift up because he's sovereign. Good to keep in mind.
Good to keep in mind. Now we come to truth by negative example. Not everything in these three chapters is, you might say, encouraging from the point of view of how you would hope people that know better should behave better and actually behave worse. That is sad, that is very sad.
And what you see here is that God is going to judge that. God judges that very severely. We see that these boys who are working for their father, Phineas and Hovny, they are referred to as sons of Belial. These are like demon children, these are awful children, these are evil children.
This is a very terrible phrase to describe. The Lord was once called that. Here you have, and of course it was ridiculous, but here you have two real ones, evil sons, two evil sons. How are they evil?
You can read in chapter two, about 12 to 17 and then there's an inset. And we go back to the boys, Phineas and Hovny. How are they evil? They profane to their religion.
I don't use the word religion, but we don't like, as born again Christians all the time to use that word religion, but the Jewish religion is a real religion and it has a lot of details and a lot of demands and a lot of requirements. It has a high priest and a sacrificial system. It is a religion. It was instituted by God in that time and in that age, in that dispensation I like to say, as does my Scofield Bible.
But we read of two sons who actually make a point of turning something that is holy into something disgusting and they make a point of it. They profane a religion, a religion is supposed to be about everything that's not profane, it's supposed to be about everything that is set apart in holy. And these two boys are turning it into a profane thing. They are profanely abusing what is taking place in that sacrificial system.
And God will have their lives shortly before too many pages are passed in your Bible. They will be dead. They will be judged. They actually use religion to further their own sin.
They're involved in theft. They're involved in immorality. They're involved in what it says in 29 of chapter two, kicking at the sacrifice. The sacrifice was supposed to point toward Christ.
You kick at that. You'd use this as an opportunity to show that level of disrespect for what is supposed to be holy. Oh yes, God does not let that go by. In verse 22, we read about how Eli thinks about these things.
We read this. Now Eli was very old and he heard all that his sons did unto Israel and how they lay with the women of the assembly of the door of the tabernacle of the congregation and he said to them, why do ye such things for I hear of your evil dealings by all this people? And he goes on to say that if you sin against God, who will speak for you if you sin this way? But they were deaf to that.
They were deaf to that and the way that the writer of the chapter says it's because the Lord had purposed to slay them. They had shown what they were. The judgment was in place. They way that they turned away from this rebuke from their father was merely an indication of what they were, what they were in their being.
You have choices in life and those choices, if you keep making the evil ones, change you, they change you. And these two young men who are supposed to be honoring God at Shiloh are systematically dishonoring God and systematically turning themselves into sons of Belial to the point that there's no more hope for them and they're going to be gone within about another chapter. It's interesting that in this context, we have Eli saying to Hannah a little earlier on in the context of the book, go in peace. God of Israel grant thee thy petition that thou hast of him and he's the high priest.
Isn't that interesting? This big man, this big man. And when he actually gets news of the death of his sons, he falls off of that chair and his neck is broken. He's so heavy.
That's what's going to happen. So we have a contrast around this man that yes, he has an office and yes, he not only blessed Hannah once, he actually blessed her twice and she had even more children. It's almost as though God is recognizing the office, not so much the person, because God pronounces judgment against this man that from now on, his lineage would be characterized by short lives. And indeed, his two sons were going to have short lives.
The Lord would slay them. So as I say, this is perhaps what you might call truth by negative example. What is characteristic of Eli? Only, only, softly rebuking his sons, being passive.
We sometimes think that, and rightly so, what is obedience about? Obedience is about being active. It's obeying, isn't it? Well, what about doing nothing?
What about standing silent or being a softy when it comes to evil? I'm guilty of that sometimes I have been. It takes a lot of courage to properly speak out against great evil. God was very displeased with a man of his office who failed to do that.
Take note of that. Take note of that. And we see here the bracketing verse on this man. If a man sin against another, the judge shall judge him.
But if a man sin against the Lord, who shall entreat for him? Indeed, indeed. And the curse comes, behold, the days come that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm of thy father's house, and there shall not be an old man in thine house. Very sobering.
I hope you find it very sobering. That such a man would be dealt with, though it seems that he had been in that office and used in a measure and recognized in a measure. Yet he was judged. And his line was judged.
The disgrace that his family had brought to God, there would be judgment against the family. Now we come to Samuel. And it's a lovely picture. The word effid and the linen.
It's a lovely picture of a miniature priest. And we have this boy, who ministers before the Lord in 218, being a child girded with a linen effid. And it says that every year that his mother visited him, she brought him a coat that was a little bit bigger. I wonder when he was 13, how she can guess?
Well, how much is he going to grow between 13 and 14? I better be generous, because you never know. But she would bring him a larger coat every year. And the child grew on.
And the testimony was that he was in favor with both the Lord and also with men. That is almost repeated in Luke 2.52 of how Jesus grew up. He was an amazing man this Samuel. He had an amazing life.
He lived for God. And he was a blameless man. Unfortunately, his own sons did not follow in his footsteps. But other than that, he was a truly outstanding man.
And he had a beginning. He had a beginning as a boy in a temple with an old befuddled priest who had bad eyesight. Samuel would be a prophet that could see into the future. That old man, he had dim eyes.
And he had dim vision. And he had dim appreciation of what was going on around him, not Samuel, not Samuel. And as you know, probably the account yourselves in chapter 3, that Samuel was sleeping in the temple. And the Lord called him.
And he got up and he went to Eli and said, what? What do you want? He says, not me. Not me.
This is 3, 3, down, through 10. Another time. And another time. It's Eli.
Oh, it's not. It's the Lord. It's the Lord. This is what you should say.
Speak, Lord, for thy servant hereth. That receptivity to learn the receptivity when you're a boy. What a wonderful thing. What a wonderful thing to learn that kind of receptivity when you're a boy.
And what happened then? God reiterated to that boy what was going to happen to the high priest and his house. That was a hard thing for that boy to hear, to the point that he hardly knew how to repeat it. But Eli demanded it.
And Eli got it. Both barrels and found out that yes indeed, yes indeed, the judgment was coming. And we read at the end of chapter 3, and I'm out of time, that Samuel was confirmed. And we have the phrase in for Samuel that none of his words fell to the ground.
That's a hebraism. And you know what? I don't even need to explain that, right? A prophet who speaks things.
And none of his words fall to the ground. You already know what that means. I didn't even explain it to you. It's a self-explanatory metaphor.
Samuel was a man confirmed over and over and over by God. And he developed that receptivity to God while he was a boy in the temple in spite of the fact that the person over him was very faulty. Was very faulty. What lessons can we draw as I close?
Well, the Lord himself taught us that if we're going to pray, we need to be a bit persistent. I don't know what you're like, but sometimes I say to myself, you know, I've prayed about that three times. Why hasn't something happened? Well, how many years did it go on that Hannah went up and prayed bitterly?
And she kept praying. And I don't think she only prayed when she went on the trip to Shiloh. She was persistent. And you know that yourself, the Lord said that a woman who keeps knocking out the judge's door to get justice, even if he's a judge that doesn't care about what justice is, he's going to answer her because he's tired of the door being knocked on.
Is God like that? Is God like a person who doesn't care about justice? Is exactly the opposite. So the Lord says, well, what's the logical conclusion?
If the Lord is God and cares about justice and he's sovereign, he won't give her a stone for a fish, right? He won't do that. And this in the context of asking you to seek and you shall find, asking that she'll be giving you. Persistence, let's be a little bit persistent.
Let's bring to the Lord any suffering that we may be experiencing in our unusual circumstances. What's the watchword for this old man with dim eyes and out of control, evil sons neglect? He got a very heavy judgment, not actually for what he did, but for what he didn't do. That's a very sobering thought.
Samuel, well, he actually had to be told that it was the Lord talking to him, but it was the beginning. And the Lord would never let his words fall to the ground. He would be used of God to not only give the people what they wanted, which was Saul, almost as a lesson to them, but the last word in the book of Ruth is David. Samuel would anoint David.
And David was God's king. And this transition from Judges to 2 Samuel, that's all about Samuel. And this man was receptive. He was God's man.
And as you know, and as I submit to you now, if you are receptive and you want to be God's man or woman, you need to be a person who is receptive to God and one way of being receptive to God is to be in prayer, to be in the Word, to be in fellowship. So there's more than one way. So you have at your disposal the means of grace to enable you to empower you, to be used of God, to be used of God. So as it says in the New Testament, let's not neglect these things, don't neglect them.
I'm going to close by reading that verse. I need it on my screen. It's a bit like, interestingly, Hannah's rejoicing, because it talks about, you know, what's going on? How do we make sense of all these things?
Some people are lifted up, some people are humbled. There might be a period of humbling followed by a period of lifting up. But whatever it is, David says, it's of God, and God knows it, and God's in control of it. First Chronicles 29, wherefore David blessed the Lord before all the congregation.
And David said, blessed be thou, Lord God of Israel, our Father forever and ever. Thy know Lord is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty. For all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine. Thine is the kingdom.
O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above all, both riches and honor come of thee, and thou rainest overall. And in thine hand is power and might, and in thine hand is to make great, and to give strength unto all. Now therefore our God, we thank thee and praise, thy glorious name. A wonderful statement of the sovereignty of God.
Let us live in the sovereignty of God. Let us know the sovereignty of God. Let us take instruction from the lives of these three people that we have considered this morning. And may the Lord Jesus give us strength in our Christian lives to serve him, shall we pray.
Father, we thank you for this time and for the instruction that is there in your word, for us to read, for us to think about. We pray that Lord, you would strengthen us in these difficult times, and help us to know and to have that rock bottom knowledge that you are sovereign. In your name, we pray, amen. Thank you for your attention.