76. Real Repentance - 1 Samuel 7

G' day and welcome to Stories of a Faithful God for Kids.

Dave here.

What's the right way to treat God?

To come to him, to know Him?

How does he want us to treat Him?

So far in this series, we've seen lots of people treat God the wrong way.

The Israelites thought they could use him like a tool from the shed.

They'd lost a battle and so all they needed to do was bring out God's ark and it would be like a good luck charm.

It would force God to make them win.

God refused to be treated like that and they lost the battle.

The Philistines also thought about God as someone who can be controlled.

They put his Ark in the temple of their God Dagon.

And then when God punished them, they kept moving the ark from city to city, hoping they could somehow stop God from punishing them again.

God said, no, you can't treat me like that, like I'm a thing that can be moved around.

He's not a tool or a good luck charm.

He isn't a weapon that can be controlled.

He isn't a bomb that's about to go off.

So how should we treat Him?

What's the right way to treat him?

How should we come to Him?

Well, we're about to find out.

Get ready for our next episode of Stories of a Faithful God for Kids.

At the end of our last episode, God had defeated the Philistines.

He'd forced them to realize that they couldn't beat him and to send the Ark of the Covenant back to Israel.

Imagine the excitement of the Israelites in the town of Beth Shemesh as they see the Ark on the back of a cart coming down the road.

They're so happy, they quickly hold a huge party and make sacrifices to God.

As the ark comes back, it seems like God is with them again.

And yet they should know by now that having the Ark doesn't mean you have God under your control.

It doesn't mean you can just treat God however you want.

Unfortunately, that's how some of the men act.

They're not supposed to touch the ark.

Only priests are allowed to touch the poles that are carrying poles on the side of the ark.

But some of these men think, ooo, I wonder what's inside there.

And 70 of them lift up the lid and have a look.

Now remember, the Ark is not God.

But how people treat God's Ark shows how they think about God.

And these men are treating God like they can ignore his word, even though he said don't touch the Ark.

These Guys reckon it's totally fine.

They think they're in charge and it'll all be okay.

It's not.

And God is not to be messed around with.

Those 70 men all die.

The people of Beth Shemesh are all shocked.

They realize you shouldn't mess around with God.

But unfortunately, instead of asking God for forgiveness, they just try the same solution as the Philistines had done in 1 Samuel 6, 20.

They say, who can stand before the Lord this holy God?

Where can the Ark of the Covenant go from here?

They think by sending the Ark away, they're sending God away.

They decide to send it to another city.

But as they do that, they don't tell the people of that city why they're sending it away.

They make it sound like they're giving them a present.

They send some messengers to the people of Kiriath Jearim who say in verse 21, hey, the Philistines have brought back the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord.

Come down and take it to your city.

And the men of Kiriathjearim do come.

They do take the Ark.

But you know what we don't hear about in Kiriath Jearim?

We don't hear about anyone getting punished.

We don't hear about anyone dying.

Even though that had happened in all the Philistine cities that had the Ark.

And in the Israelite town of Beth Shemesh, it turns out the Ark is not just some kind of poisonous box or bad luck charm that hurts everyone.

It's around.

The difference is that the people of Kiriath Jearim treat God properly.

They treat God's Ark the way God told them to treat it.

In chapter seven, verse one, we're told the men of Kiriathjearim came and took the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord.

They took it to Abinadab's house on a hill.

There they made Abinadab's son Eleazar, holy for the Lord so he could guard the Ark of the Covenant.

This is the first time in 1 Samuel that anyone who's had the Ark has looked after it properly.

Maybe, just maybe, there's some hope for Israel.

And yet nothing happens.

Nothing happens for 20 long years.

Then finally, after all that time, after 20 years, the people of Israel finally realize how badly they've been treating God.

They finally become sad because they miss trusting God.

They finally want to come back to God and treat him properly.

Thankfully, God's prepared a leader to help them.

At this exact moment, not one of the dodgy priests like Hophni or Phinehas and Eli.

No God's prepared a man who actually listens to God and loves him and obeys him.

That man, of course, is Samuel.

He tells the Israelites how to come back to God.

The fancy word for it is repent.

Repent means to turn around.

You turn away from sin, back to God.

And here we get to see what sort of sin Israel's been doing.

They've been worshipping other gods, gods that aren't real gods that have statues called idols, but are really only idols.

That's all they are.

Gods like Dagon, who we met a couple of episodes ago.

God made his statue bow down before the Ark.

When you hear that that's what the Israelites have been doing, it makes total sense of how they've been treating the Ark.

They've been treating it like an idol.

In their thinking, if you have the idol, you have the God, and you can get him or her to do whatever you want.

That's how they have treated the ark.

And God said, no, I am not like that.

In fact, he is so much better than that.

He is powerful.

He speaks.

He saves.

They have tried to trick God into saving them from the Philistines, but actually all they needed to do was come back to him as their king, as their ruler, as their God.

Samuel says in verse three, if you're turning back to the Lord with all your hearts, you must remove your foreign gods.

You must remove your idols of Ashtoreth.

That's the name of one of the gods.

You must give yourselves fully to the Lord and serve only Him.

Then he will save you from the Philistines.

And that is what the Israelites do.

They stop serving other fake gods and they start serving the one true God.

They repent.

Samuel gets all of Israel together at a place called Mizpah.

At Mizpah, they confess their sin to God.

They say what they've done wrong.

They say to God that they recognize their evil of serving other gods instead of him.

They show their sadness at their sin by not eating all day.

And they listen to Samuel, God's servant.

They don't try and trick God or use him as a tool.

They actually treat him as God.

And kindly, gently, wonderfully, God forgives them.

Down in the cities of Philistia, the Philistine kings hear that all of Israel has gathered together.

To them, it seems like Israel is getting ready for war.

And so they get their armies together and they march out to fight them.

They're probably pretty confident.

Last time they fought the Israelites, they thrashed them.

They even got to steal the Ark of the Covenant.

Of course, if you ask them why they don't have the Ark anymore, they might get a little bit embarrassed.

They seem to have forgotten that they won the last battle because God fought against Israel.

And then they had to give back the Ark because God fought against them in their own cities.

So who will God fight for?

Now?

When the Israelites hear that the Philistine army is on its way, they become afraid.

They don't want to lose the battle.

They don't want to die.

They don't want to be slaves to the Philistines.

So what should they do?

Well, here's what they don't do.

They don't try and trick God into fighting for them.

They don't send for the Ark to come to the battle.

In fact, we don't hear anything about the Ark.

Instead, the people put their trust fully in God instead of trying to control him, instead of trying to be in charge of Him.

They recognize that he's in charge of them and that he's very, very good.

And so they ask him for help.

We're told in verse eight, they said to Samuel, don't stop praying to the Lord our God for us.

Ask the Lord to save us from the Philistines.

Then Samuel took a baby lamb.

He offered the lamb to the Lord as a whole burnt offering.

He called to the Lord for Israel's sake, and the Lord answered him.

While Samuel's making the offering, the Philistines form up their battle line and march towards the Israelites.

The sun is glinting off all their spears.

Their shields and swords are ready.

Their feet are thudding together as they march forward.

But all their power is nothing because God is going to save his people.

Verse 10 says, but the Lord thundered against the Philistines with loud thunder.

They were so frightened, they became confused.

So the Israelites defeated the Philistines in battle.

The men of Israel ran out of Mizpah and chased the Philistines.

They went almost to Bethkah, killing the Philistines along the way.

When the battle is over, Samuel gets a stone and stands it upright.

It's a memorial, a bit like a war memorial.

He gives the stone a name, Ebenezer.

It means stone of help.

And he says, the Lord has helped us to this point.

He's reminding everyone they haven't won because they're great warriors.

They haven't won because they somehow tricked God.

They won because God helped them.

He saved them.

You know, people do all sorts of things to try and get God to do what they want.

In our sin, we want to be in charge.

We want to tell God what to do.

We want to decide what's good and right.

But actually God's in charge.

And it's always so much better when we stop trying to be in charge of our own lives, turn away from sin and trust God to be God to be in charge of us if we do.

It's so good because God is so good.

When Jesus came into the world, he told some good news.

He said that the kingdom of God had come.

Anyone can be in God's kingdom.

Anyone can have God as their good saving king.

Have Jesus as their good saving king.

And how does Jesus say we get into that kingdom?

By becoming perfect?

No, that'd be impossible.

By praying ten times a day and only eating sausages on Tuesdays?

No, it's by repenting and believing, turning away from sin and trusting Jesus.

It doesn't mean you'll never sin again.

But you are saying, I don't want to sin anymore.

I want to serve Jesus.

I want to trust Jesus to be in charge.

And for everyone who does repent and believe, just like with the Israelites, Jesus saves them even more than the Israelites.

He doesn't just save us from a battle.

He saves us from sin and death and from being locked out, away from God forever.

He saves us into God's family, into happiness forever, into his love back in Israel.

God keeps saving Israel throughout Samuel's life.

We're told in verse 13.

So the Philistines were defeated.

They did not enter the Israelites land again.

The Lord was against the Philistines all Samuel's life.

Earlier the Philistines had taken towns from the Israelites.

But the Israelites won them back from Ekron to Gath.

They also took back from the Philistines the neighbouring lands of these towns.

There was peace also between Israel and the Amorites.

Samuel continued as judge of Israel all his life.

Every year he went from Bethel to Gilgal to Mizpah.

He judged the Israelites in all these towns.

But Samuel always went back to Ramah where his home was.

He also judged Israel there.

And there he built an altar to the Lord.

As long as Samuel's alive, the people keep trusting God.

But what's going to happen when he gets older?

What'll happen when he dies?

Will the people stick with God?

Well, that's a story for next time.

Keep trusting Jesus.

Bye for now.