Put Them To Death. Every Last One.

We have a good number of trees in our yard. Now that they are in season, I often find the driveway and lawn littered with black walnut, maple seed helicopters and tulip poplar seedlings sprouting up all over the place. Most of the little saplings are small enough that they come out easily, but there is one tulip seedling that took root near the garage what must have been a couple years ago, hidden in a tall patch of grass, that I never noticed. It is now over six feet high, and I cannot pull it out from the ground no matter how hard I try. I will have to, at some point, cut it down, and work hard to dig out the roots that have so stubbornly worked their way deep into the ground. Neglect has a way of catching up to us, and little things have a tendency to accumulate into big problems later on.

In 1 Samuel 15 the Lord gives the command to Saul "Go, now, attack the Amelekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them." (1 Sam 15:3) The Amelekites were a pernicious enemy of Israel. Saul carries out the command, but not in its entirety. He keeps king Agag alive, along with the best of the sheep and cattle..."everything that was good," reasoning that they could be sacrificed to the Lord as a holocaust.

What is the problem here? As Samuel confronts Saul later when he hears "the bleating of sheep and the lowing of oxen" that Saul had spared, he makes clear "The Lord anointed you king of Israel and sent you on a mission, saying, "Go and put the sinful Amalekites under a ban of destruction. Fight against them until you have exterminated them. Why then have you disobeyed the Lord?" (v18-19). Saul, in turn, maintains that he has obeyed the Lord, but Samuel calls him out:

"Obedience is better than sacrifice, and submission better than the fat of rams." (v22)

The Lord, in turn, rejects Saul as ruler of Israel, the kingdom stripped from him, and Samuel is forced to finish what Saul failed to do by killing Agag himself before the Lord in Gilgal.

What is the takeaway here? I think this is a lesson for how God wants us to deal with things in our life that oppose His plans, i.e., sin. "Good enough" is not, in fact, good enough. Partial obedience is, in fact, no obedience at all. God doesn't want 99% of our hearts--he wants our hearts in their entirety. He is not satisfied with someone who puts a hand the plow and looks back, for such a person is not fit for the kingdom of God (Lk 9:62).

Saul was using worldly reasoning in his dealings with the Amelekites, keeping what he thought seemed good with the even more erroneous belief that it can be sacrificed to the Lord. A "better way" than what the Lord had proposed.

There is a danger here too--when sin is viewed as the cancer that it is, leaving 1% of cancerous cells is an invitation for them to multiply anew. The Old Testament is replete with commands against intermingling with pagans, "lest they make you sin against me by ensnaring you into worshipping their gods." (Ex 23:33).

This is a lesson for me, for there is more than "one thing that I lack," in my obedience to the Lord of Hosts. We should not 'consider' what the Lord commands, and then make our own judgements. We should obey! Like the bleating of the sheep that Saul left behind, so too do my sins bleat in the crevices I have hid them. When you surround yourself with godly people, they know the sound, so we have a tendency in sin to surround ourselves with people who can't hear, or don't make a big deal of it. We hide in the darkness, because darkness blankets and muffles the sound.

Light is not "99% light" or "sort-of" light, but LIGHT. That which is not light is darkness, and there is no in between. There is Heaven, and there is Hell. So too with the commands of the Lord, and so too with sin. It takes discernment and prayer to be attentive to what the Holy Spirit is calling us to, and it is so easy to turn a deaf ear or simply by filling our ears with the sound of the world. When we are given clear commands to do what is right and avoid what is evil, we would do well to listen lest we find ourselves stripped of the kingdom inheritance.