Hacking Agag to Pieces

A few moments ago in the service we read the Psalm of the morning and it was the thirty-eighth Psalm. And that thirty- eighth Psalm is filled with the feelings of a guilty conscience. In verse 2 the psalmist says, "For Thine arrows have sunk deep into me. Thy hand has pressed down on me. There is no soundness in my flesh, there is ho health in my bones because of my sin for my iniquities are gone over my head. As a heavy burden they weigh too much for me. My wounds grow foul and fester. Because of my folly I am bent over and greatly bowed down. I go mourning all day long for my loins are filled with burning and there is no soundness in my flesh. I am benumbed and badly crushed. I groan because of the agitation of my heart."

The feelings of a guilty conscience, quite a contrast to what the Apostle Paul has said to us in 2 Corinthians chapter 1 and verse 12. Let's go back to that text this morning because I want to continue to look at this matter of the conscience and sin in the life of the believer. And in 2 Corinthians chapter 1 and verse 12 Paul very much at the other end of the spectrum from the psalmist says, "For our proud confidence is this, the testimony of our conscience that in holiness and godly sincerity, not in fleshly wisdom but in the grace of God we have conducted ourselves in the world and especially toward you." Paul was enjoying a clear conscience, a good conscience. The psalmist was feeling the agony of an accusing conscience.

We have been studying in 2 Corinthians chapter 1 this little section from verses 12 through 14 and we have focused on the soul's warning system which is the conscience. As we have learned, the conscience produces guilt, shame, anxiety, restlessness, fear, doubt, physical illness and pain and other depressing experiences when the highest known standard of moral conduct is violated. The conscience is given to us as a gift from God to warn us about what devastates the soul. And the Apostle Paul was living a holy life and thus he had a clear and non-accusing conscience.

He wasn't perfect but he was victorious over the sin in his life. No Christian can give testimony, honest testimony to the fact that when he became a Christian sin was erased. It's not so. The tendency to sin is still in our lives. Even though we're saved we still sin and worse, we still derive pleasure from our sin. We still struggle with sinful habits, not just sinful isolated acts. And sometimes we fall into shameful, scandalous sins. Our thoughts and our words are not always what they ought to be. Our time is often wasted on frivolous and worldly pursuits. Our minds and our affections are often set on things that will pass away. Our hearts often grow cold to things holy and evangelistic. And we might ask the question, why is this so?

If we go back to Romans chapter 6 we might conclude that everything should be different. Verse 14 of Romans 6 says, "For sin shall not be master over you for you are not under law but under grace." In verse 17 it says, "But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed and having been freed from sin you became slaves of righteousness." If indeed sin does not have dominion over us, if indeed we are no longer the slaves of sin, why can't we live a pure life and enjoy a clear conscience? Why does this battle go on? Well the answer is, there is yet remaining sin within us. We have been saved from the penalty of sin and that Christ took the penalty Himself in dying on the cross, we have been saved from the dominating power of sin in that sin's powerful mastery over us is broken and we do not have to obey it and we have even been saved, to some degree in the present, from the presence of sin for it no longer is with us at all times in all ways. And some day we will be saved from its presence all together. But though we have been saved and redeemed and forgiven, there is still remaining sin within us. Therein lies the problem. The problem is if you want to have a pure life and therefore a clear conscience you have to deal with remaining sin. The question is, how do you deal with it?

I want to borrow an illustration from the Old Testament. I think it may help to give us a vivid picture of how to deal with remaining sin in our lives so that we can have a clear conscience. And instead of having the experience of the psalmist, have the experience of Paul.

Turn to 1 Samuel chapter 15...1 Samuel chapter 15. This great Old Testament story is meant to teach us the seriousness of sin and the righteousness of God's holy wrath against it. I don't want to overlook those truths, nor the historic value of this, but I would like to borrow it as a rather graphic illustration of...or analogy of how believers have to deal with sin.

Let's look at verse 1 in 1 Samuel 15. "Then Samuel said to Saul, The Lord sent me to anoint you as king over His people Israel, now therefore listen to the words of the Lord." Now, you'll remember, that Saul was chosen because he was head and shoulders above other men, he was from the tribe of Benjamin, he was what the people wanted to be their king and so the Lord agreed to let them have the man they wanted. He was to be anointed but there was a caveat, there was a catch in this. If he was going to step into this role there was something he had to do and that was listen to the words of the Lord. He would bring himself into a position where he was going to be ruling the people of God and therefore needed to listen to God who was their true sovereign.

And then it gets very specific. Here's what the Lord has to say and here's what you're to listen to and obey, verse 2, "Thus says the Lord of hosts, I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel. How he set himself against him on the way while he was going up from Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has and do not spare him and put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey." That's what's called genocide, go wipe out a whole race...a whole tribe in this case, not really a race, but a whole tribe of people named for the man Amalek. God's command was very clear. Saul was to deal ruthlessly with these Amalekites. He was to kill not only the men but all the women and all the children and all the babies. And then he was to kill all their animals. The whole tribe was to be utterly and mercilessly taken out of existence. No hostages were to be taken and the implication here is no spoils either.

Now the question immediately arises...why would a God of infinite love and mercy and grace mete out such a severe judgment on a pagan tribe? Let me see if I can't answer that question for you. The Amalekites were an ancient tribe. They were nomadic, that is they traveled around. And they occupied southern Canaan. They were descendants of Esau and thus they were out of the line of promise, as Genesis 36:12 indicates. They were the perennial enemies of the Jews once the Jews came into the land of Canaan. In fact, you remember when the Jews approached the land of Canaan initially they were afraid to go into the land, you remember them at Kadesh-Barnea and they were very hesitant, they did not want to go in to the land, they were fearful because of the frightening ferocity of the Amalekites. In fact, it was there that they balked and disobeyed God because they were so intimidated by this fierce, evil, vicious tribe.

They were the same tribe who had, as is alluded to here, attacked Israel at Rephidim. In fact, this was shortly after the Exodus, as it notes, and this was the famous battle recorded in Exodus 17 when Aaron and Hur had to hold up, you remember, the arms of Moses so that victory could come. And they had engaged in the war against the Israelites in a very cowardly way. What they did, as we'll read about later, is that they attacked the rear of this mass of humanity that were moving out of Egypt from the Exodus into the promised land. They attacked them from the rear, that is the stragglers. And who would that be? Old people, little children, pregnant women, crippled people, the sick, anybody weak, weary, faint. It was a coward's way from the rear. And so they had ambushed Israel, massacring all of the stragglers and working their way up until finally the battle was engaged. And that is indicated to us, by the way, in Deuteronomy chapter 25 as I'll read in just a moment. It was an expression of their viciousness, their wickedness, their hatred of God, their hatred of those things which were holy, their savage attitude toward others. And God delivered Israel that day. You remember that story in the holding up of the arms of Moses, the Amalekites fled into hiding. And in the conclusion of the battle in Exodus 17 and verse 14, God swore to Moses this, "I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven." God says I'll wipe that entire people out. He was so committed to this that He made this vow a part of the Mosaic Law. It's in the Pentateuch in Deuteronomy 25, listen to three verses, the last three in chapter 25. "Remember what Amalek did to you along the way when you came out from Egypt and how he met you along the way and attacked among you all the stragglers at your rear when you were faint and weary?" And here's the real key, "And he did not fear God?" Well because of that, "Therefore it shall come about when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your surrounding enemies after you've settled into the land a while, in the land which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven." And then God added this, "You must not forget." This must come to pass. Treacherous, vicious, intimidating, deadly people, the Amalekites and God's anger burned against them because of their wickedness.

According to Numbers chapter 24 and verse 20 God even called on the corrupt prophet Balaam to prophesy their doom. Judges chapter 6 verses 3 to 5 says that these people like to maraud the Jews. And what they loved to do most of all was to come in and destroy their crops. And, of course, that would be to destroy their livelihood and their food supply. They hated God. They detested the Jews. They delighted in violence. They were vicious sinners. Because of all of this and because God had made a vow, God was going to destroy the Amalekites and when you come now to the text that I pointed out to you, 1 Samuel 15, it is here that it is time for this action to take place. And so God says now that Israel has a king it's time to act...go now and strike Amalek. Saul and his armies were to be the instrument through which God kept His vow and would carry out this holy execution of a sinister tribe. But Saul's obedience was only partial.

Let's pick it up in 1 Samuel 15 verse 7. "So Saul defeated the Amalekites." And the rest of the verse, "From Havilah as you go to Shur, which is east of Egypt," indicates that it was a crushing, wide-spread, far-reaching and devastating victory. He slaughtered them from pillar to post, from front to back, east to west, north to south, a crushing defeat. But, verse 8, "He captured Agag, the king of the Amalekites, alive and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword, but Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, the ox and the fatlings, the lambs and all that was good and were not willing to destroy them utterly. But everything despised and worthless, that they utterly destroyed."

Motivated by covetousness, motivated by the love of money, they kept all the best animals, they kept all the best possessions, collected the spoils of victory. They didn't even do a thorough job, by the way, of executing the Amalekites. A lot of them escaped. And then worst of all, they spared Agag. They spared the king.

Why? Why would Saul be so blatantly disobedient? Well it wasn't just materialism, in this case it was pride. Here was a marauding vicious terrorizing monarch of this tribe who was known to everybody as the greatest fighter and warrior and victor before whom others crumbled. Saul was going to show his great mighty power, his great force by holding up the trophy Agag and saying, "Look what I have, look who I defeated." It was pride and materialism. It was just an evil heart on Saul's part to flatly and blatantly disobey God.

But the sin was so serious that God immediately deposed Saul and all of his descendants forever from the throne. Look at verse 23, actually we could start in verse 22, "Samuel said, Has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord?" You remember that Saul had claimed that he kept some of the animals to offer as sacrifices and God speaking to him through Samuel says, "Do you think...do you think I'm interested in burnt offerings? What I want is obedience." "Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice and to heed than the fat of rams, for rebellion is as the sin of divination and insubordination is as iniquity and idolatry." And then the deposition of the king, "Because you have rejected the Word of the Lord, He has also rejected you from being king." And so, he was dethroned, serious issue.

Now go down to verse 32. "Then Samuel said, Bring me Agag the king of the Amalekites." Now you've got to know that of the people of Amalek who had survived, they were probably somehow in contact with their king and as long as their king was alive they felt their people still had a reason to exist. Their king was still alive, they were still intact and what was happening behind the scenes was the surviving members were beginning to reinvigorate and revive around the reality of their king. Samuel said, "Bring me Agag the king of the Amalekites." And Agag thinking all is going to well, Saul is off the throne, everything is forgiven, comes in cheerfully. And Agag said, "Surely the bitterness of death is passed." Well that's all over. "And Samuel said...in very prosaic...As your sword has made women childless so shall your mother be childless among women." Which is another way of saying, "I'm going to kill you" in a very prosaic way of saying it actually. "And Samuel hued, or hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal."

It's a rather sickening scene, isn't it? It was God who commanded it to be done. And Samuel did it before the Lord and Samuel was no soldier. Samuel was a priest. But here was God sending out divine judgment from holy wrath against sin. Unlike Saul and the rest of the Israelites, Samuel carried out the Lord's commands. This is a tremendous picture of God's attitude toward sin.

Sadly, however, the battle that was supposed to exterminate the Amalekites, supposed to wipe them out, ended before the goal was accomplished.

Apparently the soldiers were so busy collecting the spoils and making sure they were sorting out the good animals from the bad that they never really did the job. And Scripture records that a few years later the invigorated tribe raided the southern territory and took all the women and children captive. Turn over to chapter 30 of 1 Samuel. Verse 1, "And it happened when David and his men came to Ziklag on the third day, that the Amalekites had made a raid on the Negeb and on Ziklag," that's in the southern area where they were still ruminating around. "They had overthrown Ziklag, burned it with fire, they took captive the women and all who were in it both small and great without killing anyone and carried them off and went their way. And when David and his men came to the city, behold it was burned with fire and their wives and their sons and their daughters had been taken captive and David and the people who were with him lifted their voices and wept until there was no strength in them to weep. Now David's two wives had been taken, Ahino-am the Jezreelitess and Abigail the widow of Nabal the Carmelite."

So they come back and this terrible, terrible marauding bunch of Amalekites has done it to them again. Over in verse 16 of 1 Samuel 30 we read, "And when he had brought him down, behold they were spread over all the land, eating and drinking and dancing because of all the great spoil that they had taken from the land of the Philistines and from the land of Judah," this is the Amalekites. "And David slaughtered them from the twilight until the evening of the next day." Just about a 24-hour slaughter. "And not a man of them escaped except 400 young men who rode on camels and fled."

Now some young boys got away, the rest were massacred. "David recovered all that they Amalekites had taken and rescued his two wives and nothing of theirs was missing, whether small or great, sons or daughters, spoil or anything that they had taken for themselves, David brought it all back. So David had captured all the sheep and the cattle of which the people drove ahead of the other livestock and they said, This is David's spoil."

David, by God's mercy, rescued those captive women and children and all that spoil from these people. And they disappeared forever after that. Gone from human history as God vowed they would be.

As I said, this is a tremendous insight into God's attitude toward sinners and His holiness and wrath against sin. But I want to use it just as an analogy, if I might, this morning. It is an excellent illustration analogically of the sin that remains in the believer's life. When you were saved and I was saved there was at that moment a crushing defeat of sin...a crushing defeat. From one end to the other, east to west, north to south our sin was crushed. But we still have remaining sins.

There are some Amalekites running around loose in everybody's life. We all have our Agags. And the problem in our Christian lives is not that sin has not been defeated with a crushing defeat, it has but there is still remaining sin. There are some loose iniquitous Amalekites in all of us. And though there was a great and glorious and triumphant defeat at the time of our salvation, there is the necessity that the remaining sins be hacked to pieces or they will revive, they will plunder our hearts and sap our spiritual strength. We cannot be merciful with the Agags of our life. We cannot be merciful with the remaining sins in our life or they will turn and create an insurrection and a rebellion to attempt to destroy us.

In fact, it may well be that like the Amalekites, the remaining sin in us often becomes more fierce, more formidable than even before because we don't expect it. Certainly the children of Israel had felt that the Amalekites were a defeated foe. Their king had been hacked to pieces and here they came. Scripture calls on us to deal with our sin like Samuel dealt with Agag, to kill it. There is remaining sin residing in our unredeemed humanness, our flesh, and it has to be killed. It has to be followed up, found and destroyed. And until we do that, we're never going to enjoy what Paul experienced in his bold confidence about a holy and godly sincere conscience.

Look for a moment now at Colossians chapter 3. In Colossians chapter 3 verse 5 you will notice a marginal reading for if you have any note in your margin in the New American Standard the text actually reads, verse 5, "Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead." But the marginal reading says, "Put to death the members which are upon the earth." Things like immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire and greed which amounts to idolatry. Kill them. Put them to death. You can't do it partially, you can't do it half- heartedly, you can't just have a remaining Agag and just sort of leave him in your life somewhere, he'll lead an insurrection. You've got to keep going until the task is complete. Sins like Amalekites have a way of escaping the slaughter, breeding reviving and launching new and unexpected assaults on our most vulnerable areas.

Go back to Romans chapter 8 and verse 12 and 13. Verse 12 Paul says, "So then, brethren, we are under obligation not to the flesh to live according to the flesh," then in verse 13, "For if you are living according to the flesh you must die but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live." "Putting to death the deeds of the body" is characteristic of somebody who is living. In other words, it is characteristic of a believer to be killing the deeds of the body, to be executing the Amalekites in his or her life and doing it by the power of the Spirit. That's what he's saying there. After declaring victory over sin in Romans 6, he then describes the ongoing battle with sin in Romans 7 and now he describes the triumphant and experience that wins the battle and silences the conscience and he says it is here, it is putting to death the deeds of the body. Killing sin, hacking it to death. The distinctive behavior of those who are saved and those who are victorious over sin is they are continually putting their evil deeds to death, killing them. As the King James says, "Mortifying sin." Paul is saying that is a characteristic of a true believer, they put to death the deeds of the flesh, they kill sin. A true believer will not act like Saul who wanted to pamper and preserve Agag, but he will act like Samuel who hacked him without mercy into pieces.

Beloved, you can't tame the flesh, you can't make it house pet. You can't co-exist with it. You can't say, "Well there's only a few of them out there, let them run around, they're not going to harm anybody." Paul says you better get after all of them and kill them just as God instructed His people to do with these marauding Amalekites. Dramatic action.

Our Lord spoke of such dramatic action on several occasions, one of them is in Matthew 5:29 and 30 when He said, "If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you for it is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish than for your whole body to be thrown into hell, and if your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you, it is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish than for your whole body to go into hell." He's not calling for self-mutilation, He's calling for mortification. It's a very similar thing. You've got some things in your life you need to kill. And Paul is saying essentially the same thing back in Romans when he's talking about killing sin.

Paul never promises a believer immediate freedom from sin's harassment. He doesn't say that in the great triumphant all the Amalekites will die. He says you're going to have to keep putting them to death all through your life. And Paul doesn't say you can solve this problem with a...with a crisis moment, second- blessing, second-work of grace, instant-sanctification experience. Doesn't say that. He doesn't say you can solve it with a passive approach by saying, "Let go and let God, I can't do anything, I won't do anything, I'll just flop, I'll just sit back, I'm not going to get involved in this, I'm going to let God do it all." Paul doesn't say that. And he doesn't suggest some turning point decision of rededication or reconsecration at the end of an invitation after a sermon. He says what you've got to do is continually, unendingly through all your life as noted by the tense of the verb be putting to death the deeds of the body. You're moving around killing sins all the time. It's a continuous struggle, persistently putting to death the deeds of the flesh. He's not calling for some kind of life of physical pain. That's not the idea. I remember meeting a man who wore a belt next to his flesh that was filled with little needles because he wanted to rip and tear his flesh all the time so that he could somehow deal with his sins. He's not talking about that. I know of people in the history of the Catholic Church who put things like tacks and nails and rocks in their shoes in order to inflict pain on themselves thinking somehow they could mortify sin. Paul is not calling for a life of self-inflicted pain. He is not asking for monastic deprivation. He is not asking for self-mutilation, he wants nothing to do with external self- punishment. He is describing rather a way of life that seeks to kill sin, crush it, sap it of its strength, deprive it of its influence and thus yield a clear and a good conscience that brings peace and joy and rest, security, assurance and hope.

Basically, mortification of sin or the killing of sin involves the cultivation of new habits of godliness combined with the elimination of old habits of sin. On the positive side you begin to do godly things. On the negative side you stop doing sinful things. And that is a constant warfare to which we must remain perpetually committed.

Now