When we were first married, my wife asked me how to study the Bible, but I showed her how to write a sermon. Then I flipped it around and said, “Instead of preaching that sermon to somebody else, just go ahead and preach it to yourself,” and that is basically Bible study. So today’s video is an interactive class on preaching. Now, I probably just lost a lot of people, but for those of you who are here, I am glad you have tuned in. I am using this as class number three in our Deeper in the Word Bible Institute. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and we have been going through Haddon Robinson’s book Biblical Preaching. This was the book I was trained under. I like the book, but if there is one ongoing complaint among the preaching students, it is that it is a bit unclear on the outlining part of things. So my alma mater started to use a different book, Invitation to Biblical Preaching by Don Sunukjian, right about the time I was leaving, so I only got one semester with it, and most of the students there now kind of swear by his method. I still like Robinson, but to supplement Robinson, I wanted to go through some of the chapters here, some of the outlining best practices that Sunukjian teaches.
Preaching the Bible, Not Just From the Bible
To catch you up on where we have been in our class, and if you are brand new to this, to give you an overview of where we are: we are talking about the idea. The ideas that come from Scripture are the ideas we should be preaching, not just a series of scattered ideas. When you are communicating, or when you are studying the Scripture and receiving something, it is like tossing somebody a rock instead of a handful of sand. It is easier to catch the rock. This is God’s holy Word. It is not just up to us to create our own sermons. I read of one famous Baptist preacher who started a sermon in Acts 26 and read the words of verse 19, “Whereupon, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.” and then jumped to Proverbs, where it says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” and then proceeded to preach his own thoughts from then on: we need a vision of God, we need a vision of lost souls, we need a vision of the judgment seat of Christ, we need a vision of hell, we need a vision of the church, we need a vision of Jesus Christ Himself. Now, those are all absolutely true statements. I believe every one of them. I am sure that if I had heard the sermon, I would have been super inspired and helped by it. So that is preaching from the Bible, and that is not a bad thing, but it is not necessarily Bible preaching. As my pastor in college used to say, “The Bible sure messes up a whole lot of good preaching.” I mean, I could preach some really creative sermons if I could just make up my own outline every week, but I am called to deal with this Book, in this context, originally written to some people for some reason. So it takes a great deal of work to just get into what the text says and convey what God is saying, not what I want to say. The flow of Sunukjian’s book starts with this idea of, “Man, look what God is saying,” and then that leads into, “Well, look what God is saying to us.” Before we jump into the “to us” part, we have to first find out what God was saying, and once we figure out what God was saying, then we can move to what He is still saying to us today. Chapter one in the book was about studying the passage: reading and rereading it, flagging words you do not understand, doing some word studies along the way. Chapter two is about outlining the flow of the text. It is like a river we are jumping into, and we have got to trace it out from start to finish to see what is actually happening in the text, to see where it started and where it is going.
Passage, Truth, and Sermon
I like his format, that it starts with the passage, then moves to the truth, what the truth of the passage is, and then to the sermon. It goes from passage to truth to sermon, and we will break down each of those. The passage outline is what happened. It is in past tense. It is the past, couched in terms of the original author and his culture. It is what the Holy Spirit inspired them to write. Now, they were not robots; they were people dealing with real situations. There is another book called Christ-Centered Preaching by Bryan Chapell. He teaches on the FCF, the fallen condition focus, meaning that there is some problem in every single biblical text. There is a sin issue, or some problem, something wrong in man that God wrote the Scriptures to fix in us. So the fallen condition focus that Chapell emphasizes asks, Why is this text in the Bible? Why are these words here? What is the point of this? What is it that God is addressing here? Are people believing something wrong, or acting wrong, or thinking wrong about something? What is wrong here? And then the passage outline literally goes through the text and talks about how God fixed it in their day. So the passage outline is in their terms first, and then you move from the passage outline to the truth outline. That is taking a step back, and it is a look at the eternal nature of the text. It is saying this is not just a history lesson; it is a truth lesson. If they were dealing with some kind of sin that God was trying to fix in them, the human nature of mankind is going to be the same throughout any context. I mean, we are dealing with the same issues they would have dealt with. The way God is dealing with it is different, because our context is not the same as ancient Israel’s, for example, but God’s answer to their problem of the human condition is the same. So when we are looking at the passage outline, we are trying not just to look at a history, but to see the truth outline: What is the truth God is trying to convey? If the passage outline is the historical, then the truth outline is the theological, the truth, the timeless part. A Chinese person, or an Indian person, or a South African person, or an American can take the truth home, because it is the same truth, and it transcends all cultures. Someone from 2025 or someone from A.D. 125 can take that truth home, because it transcends time as well. For example, he uses the time Jacob had the dream of the angels going up and down to heaven in Genesis 28. The passage outline is just the basic facts of what the text says. He says, “The time when Jacob had his dream of the staircase between heaven and earth was the last night in the promised land, when he was fleeing Esau’s anger and fearing that he had lost the promised blessing forever.” That is what is going on in the text. It is pretty straightforward, and it sums up the ideas of the passage by going through the details. But the sermon outline takes that passage outline, pulls out the truth from it, and conveys it to your audience, so the sermon outline is going to have many, many points and subpoints. It is going to take the story and break it down into various truth points along the way, while keeping in mind the bigger picture.
An Exercise in Joshua 9
Now I want to try an actual exercise, and I would like you to try this exercise as well. The book goes through the passage of Mark chapter 4, and I was a little surprised that he used that as an example. To me it was like, “Well, I guess I can see it,” but I thought some of the arguments were slightly less than convincing. So I am going to go to a bit of a clearer passage than that. I want to go to a narrative, which is just a story, and in a story there are a lot of details when you read it. Be careful, because you can get sidetracked on all the little details of the text, but the point of this exercise today is to get into the flow of thought, to find that timeless truth in this passage, the thought of God that will transcend culture and time. So I would like us to go to Joshua chapter 9, and we are going to review particularly verses 1 through 21. There are a couple of key verses in there that really highlight what I believe is the main spiritual truth of this passage. We are not necessarily going to go into all the aftermath of Joshua chapter 9; you can get hung up on all of those details, and we are not going to go into much of what happened after that. But reading Joshua 9, I want you to look at what the passage is saying and then what the truth is saying. Find the truth of that passage. So we are going to put a timer on the screen. You will read the passage a couple of times, and flag words and look them up. There are online Bibles that let you tap a word and figure out what it means. There might be an app you can use for that as well. There are Strong’s concordances where you can look up words, or different apps with a Strong’s concordance built in. So right now, in Joshua chapter 9, do your own work for about 15 minutes. Write out what the passage is saying, the high points throughout this text, and then try to piece together the truth of this passage. Why did God record this story? What are we supposed to learn from this passage? Why is this in the Bible? So, on your mark, get set, go.
All right, welcome back. I am going to work through this passage too. In that space of time, I am sure we have all arrived at all kinds of different things, but I want us to start to think: What is the main thing we should be noticing? What is this passage about? What is a key spiritual point in this text? Sometimes it is explicitly stated, and I believe the main problem here is explicitly stated in this text. After reading about the Gibeonites a couple of times, you realize that part of the problem is that they were deceptive, and the other part of the problem is that Joshua did not seek God. So let’s start by looking at the broader picture. Maybe you go into the history of Israel. If you know Joshua chapter 9, you realize they are coming into the land under Joshua. They are past Moses, right? They are on their way to the promised land, but in order to take the promised land, they have to march their armies through the country, and God told them, “You have got to eliminate everybody. You cannot leave anyone. You have got to drive out the inhabitants.” So their command is to drive out the inhabitants. They have already done that in the previous chapters with Jericho, right? They saw a great victory with Jericho, and just by obeying God, they were able to conquer the land. They marched in there, and it was like, “Oh man, okay, we obeyed God, and it worked.” But then the very next battle was against Ai, and they had some issues there, did they not? Because of the sin that was in the camp, they just went charging on, and lives were lost because of that. So they got that squared away, and it feels like, “Okay, we are on the right path. We are doing the right things. We are following God. We are getting this thing figured out. We are marching through the land, and we are getting some victories along the way.” That is the context of Joshua chapter 9. They are supposed to be seeking the Lord every step of the way. And now the Gibeonites “They did work wilily, and went and made as if they had been ambassadors, and took old sacks upon their asses, and wine bottles, old, and rent, and bound up.” “Wilily.” I like that. So if I click the word wilily here, it is a feminine singular noun meaning craftiness, prudence. That word could be used in a wise kind of way, but here it means craftiness. They were going around trying to be subversive, and in this context it means they were being very, very tricky. Then I looked at verse 7: “And the men of Israel said unto the Hivites, Peradventure ye dwell among us; and how shall we make a league with you?” What if you are our neighbor? What would we do if you were our neighbor and we made a league with you? That would be going against God. Now, that is the right question to ask, but they are asking the wrong person. So I would write something like “right question,” and, let me get my eraser here, there we go, “wrong person.” They are asking the right question, but they are asking it of the wrong person. They are asking the deceivers: “Well, what if you are a deceiver? What are we going to do if you are one of our neighbors?” Oh, great. They are in it for the con, right? The Gibeonites are deceivers. They are literally there to trick the Israelites. And verse 9 is another thing I picked up on: “And they said unto him, From a very far country thy servants are come because of the name of the LORD thy God: for we have heard the fame of him, and all that he did in Egypt.” So here is another theme, of being famous: “the fame of him,” a report, a reputation. They are saying, “Your God, and you as Israelites, the people of God, you are famous people. We have heard all the way from Egypt. We have heard from so far away. We are from a really far-away country, and you guys are famous.” So there is a little bit of, “Wow, oh, thank you. We are famous.” That really does something to you. They are playing on the emotions of the Israelites. They are crafty. They are wily. They are deceivers. They are like Wile E. Coyote. And the issue here, as you read through the text, is that the Israelites are getting blinded. Maybe it is the fame; they are being promoted. Maybe it is just their self-deception. Maybe it is an issue of self-reliance. They think, “Okay, we just took over Jericho. We learned our lesson from Ai, so we are doing fine, and we do not really need God on this. We have got this under control.” But that is not always the case. So what I am looking for in these Scriptures is the problem. What are the problems they are facing that are timeless problems? I am seeing things like self-reliance, self-deception, or just deception: you are deceived by the deceivers. Maybe it is not self-deception, but it is some kind of deception. There is some kind of Gibeonite in all of our lives. There are those who are coming in to deceive us, bringing some kind of deception to trick us into believing something that is not true. When we are reading about the Gibeonites, we know that they faked their position. We can see it from the author’s point of view, from the narrator’s point of view, so to speak. We know that Joshua is walking into a trap, and we are going, “Oh no, do not listen to them! They did not cook that bread a long time ago. They did not have new clothes. They are just from a couple of days down the road. Do not do it! Do not do it! It is a trap. It is a trick.” We have that particular insight as we are reading the story, but they did not have it. And that is the same idea: there are many people who will try to deceive you, or many circumstances the devil wants to use in your life to try to bring some kind of deception to you. Others can maybe see the deception happening, and they may be going, “Oh no, that is so deceptive. That is so wrong. We have seen it go wrong so many times before. Do not go down that path.” And maybe you are just blind to that, or you just think it is going to be okay: “We will be fine. We have relied on our experience before, and it has gotten us through.” You might be self-deceived. You might be deceived by the deceiver. Or you might just think, “Well, I have got this. This is no big deal. This should be fine. I am going to go with my gut here. I am going to trust my instincts. I am not deceived.” If you have ever said, “I am not deceived,” how do you know the answer to that question? How do you know? Because you will never know if you are deceived. If you knew you were deceived, then you would not be deceived. You just never know if you are being deceived or not. That is kind of a scary place to be. So again, I am looking at the passage and saying: here are the Gibeonites, here is the flow of the author’s thought, here is what is going on in Joshua. They have been deceived by these Gibeonites. So what is the truth outline here? What is the main reason for their deception? Why would they be facing these problems? Are they problems that every one of us faces in our own lives, or that we face corporately, as they faced them as a group? What is the truth here? Now, I believe the truth is explicitly stated in verse 14, and I will just scroll down here: “And the men took of their victuals, and asked not counsel at the mouth of the LORD.” That is one of the most outright statements about their main problem. They did have a problem of being deceived, yes, but if, instead of asking counsel of the mouths of the con men, they had asked counsel at the mouth of the LORD, then it seems from this verse that God would have spared them all the trouble of dealing with these Gibeonites. The truth outline points them away from self-reliance. You are prone to self-reliance, prone to self-deception, prone to deception, but verse 14 makes it clear that the counsel of the Lord is what is key here. The counsel of the Lord is what they should have been following, and that is the truth statement. The story goes on and shows how they paid for their sins. There were issues with the Gibeonites all along. They had to hold to their word, because they gave a vow that they would. So the story continues, but I think within these few verses we looked at, the main truth outline is that they did not seek the counsel of the Lord. So in a general sense, if you are stepping back, the main truth here, or the main lesson we are trying to learn from this, is to avoid deception. This is a passage about deception. This is how they could have avoided deception. You might say it is a passage about getting wise counsel, the counsel of the Lord. In future lessons we will talk about honing that down into a clearer statement and getting it into a workable statement, but I am just going for the passage outline leading to the truth outline, with the truth outline being a statement about where we are going with this.
From Truth to Sermon
And then Sunukjian talks about the sermon outline being the points that answer the problem stated in man. So at a very high level, this is the broad overview of this whole book in a sense. It is saying: take the passage, find the truth God is trying to say from it, and then your sermon is going to describe what the rest of that truth looks like, how you can avoid the same problems they faced. So if it is a sermon, then we are saying, “Well, yeah, I want to avoid deception. I want to seek the counsel of the Lord. What would that look like in my life?” Now, we have the sight of Jesus Christ. We have the insight of Jesus Christ. We have the Holy Spirit in us. As Christians, we have something even more powerful than the ancient Jews had. So when we are reading the book of Joshua through a Christian lens, we are seeing this through the eyes of Jesus Christ. We are seeing that we have Christ on our side to help us avoid deception. We have the entire New Testament at our disposal. We have the Holy Spirit’s power at our disposal. We are not just Jews who had God on their side, who could have asked the counsel of the Lord, and whom Joshua could have led in a different spiritual direction. We are individuals who are our own priests. We have access directly to the throne of God, and so we have an even greater responsibility not to be deceived. So we look at the rest of Scripture and say: if this is a passage about avoiding deception, then we can see how they could have sought the counsel of the Lord, but what does the counsel of the Lord look like in our lives? For the counsel of the Lord, we could go to Joshua, no, we could go to Psalm 119, verse 24: “Thy testimonies also are my delight and my counsellors.” That is the Scriptures’ way of offering counsel. Now, yes, I said that was Jesus Christ, but before we get to the New Testament aspect of that, there are plenty of Scriptures we can go to and learn that the Scriptures themselves are good for our counsel. Another verse would be Proverbs 8:14. This was just from a simple word search on the word counsel, trying to find what the Bible has to say about counsel. Proverbs 8:14: “Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom: I am understanding; I have strength.” Wisdom says, “Look, come to Me for counsel.” Come to God for counsel. Proverbs 19:21, which is a little too far to scroll all the way, probably, so I will just tap it here, Proverbs 19, verse 21: “There are many devices in a man’s heart; nevertheless the counsel of the LORD, that shall stand.” So Proverbs 19:21 says counsel comes from the Lord, and Psalm 119 says counsel comes from the Scriptures. This is all about the Lord taking His Word to give us insight and to keep us away from the deception of our hearts. Now, I love James 1:22 as an answer to deception. You probably have it memorized: “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only,” and do you know the last part of that verse? I love this part. I am going to turn there so you can see it, James 1:22: “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” So James 1:22 is about being a doer of the word and not a hearer only, which seems to indicate that if you hear the Word repeatedly and do not actually do anything with it, you are deceived into thinking you are a spiritual person, but if it is not changing your life, then you are just adding to the self-deception. Now, I am getting a little off base here, because that is not necessarily what the Scriptures are saying they were dealing with in Joshua chapter 9. I am just saying that in a sermon outline, when you are bringing the application from the Old Testament Scriptures and you are learning about the counsel of the Lord, the counsel of the Scriptures to guide us in our paths, the Holy Spirit’s illumination of the Scriptures, we are expanding a little bit along the way. Yes, they were deceived, but the general truth is that we as humans are often deceived by our own hearts, or by the devil, and so what is the answer from the Bible on how I can avoid being self-deceived, or deceived by the deceiver? The Scriptures are one way: being a discerning Christian by the Scriptures. Another way is being a doer of the word, to avoid that self-deception. That is the idea of unpacking the sermon. If I do not want to be deceived by the Gibeonites of today, by the deceivers of today, then how can I really be careful with that? Well, the Scriptures will tell you: be a doer of the word, not a hearer only, deceiving your own selves. So I look at that, and a sermon would go to application, like, “Well, you need to attend church, and you need to do your devotions.” These are examples of using the Scriptures to apply to your life so that you can be a doer of the word. You are hearing the Word constantly at church. You are hearing the Word regularly in your personal devotions. But if those do not do anything to change your life, if they are not actually helping you be a doer of the word, then what are they doing? If you know so much about the Bible but you do not act on it, the Scriptures teach that you are being deceived by yourself. You are allowing a Gibeonite into your life. Now, I am not preaching this; I am just explaining to you how to preach a Gibeonite sermon. But that is a good lesson for us. I mean, it is good for all of us to avoid the Gibeonites in our lives and be really, really careful about making sure we are doers of the word, not hearers only. Sometimes the most self-deceived people are the ones who hear the most of the Word of God. Maybe that is Bible college students. Maybe it is people who have been in church all their lives, who have heard so many sermons and done so few of them that they think they are good with God, but God may be looking at them and saying, “It has been years since you have done anything with all the knowledge I have been giving you.” So being an active Christian is one aspect of not being deceived. Now, it could be prayer. You could lean into how not to be deceived through prayer. Joshua could have sought the Lord, sought the counsel of the Lord, as we saw in verse 14 of Joshua 9. Those are all aspects of this, and they are all true, but I am boiling it down here. What was the flow of the passage in Joshua 9? What was the truth? What were the issues they were facing, and what was the answer the Scripture gave to those issues? Well, it was to seek the counsel of the Lord. So if you are writing a sermon, you are taking that truth and bridging the gap between Joshua and the Gibeonites and today. You are using the authority of the Bible to show that these are not our thoughts, these are God’s thoughts, but we want to bring the Bible home and make sure it makes sense for us today. What do Gibeonites look like in our context? What does being deceived look like in our context? We are taking the sermon and explaining what Gibeonites look like today. So that is a general overview of the passage outline, the truth outline, and the sermon outline. Over the rest of our Bible Institute class, if you are watching this live in our Bible Institute, we will keep unpacking this. If you are watching our video series only, we have done an entire 20-part YouTube series on Bible study, and that would be one way you could gain further insight into how to study the Scriptures and apply them to your own personal life.
The Interrogative Keyword Approach
One last thing that Sunukjian says, after laying out those outlines. He says that a generation ago, preachers would create outlines with what is called the interrogative keyword approach. They would figure out a theme, say salvation, or prayer, or ministry, and then come up with a keyword to organize the thoughts around. It was usually some plural noun: the benefits of salvation, or the reasons we should pray, or five principles for ministry. Then questions would fill in the title: When do we get the benefits of salvation? Why should we pray? And the points of the sermon were the answers to those questions: We get the benefits of salvation the moment we believe. We get other benefits of salvation when we walk in obedience. We get the final benefits of salvation when we get to heaven. Or, if it is on prayer: We should pray because of the faith it shows God. We should pray because of the testimony it shows to others. We should pray because of the results it brings. Again, those are all true statements. That is right, and that is fine. But what I am saying is that when you are reading, for example, the story of the feeding of the five thousand, it is not about five principles for ministry. You can pull five principles for ministry from it, things like: occasionally seek solitude, because Jesus sought solitude; allow others to change your plans; have compassion; involve others; seek closure with a wrap-up. Those are good principles. That is fine. Those all did come from the story of the feeding of the five thousand, but were those leadership principles the main reason God included that text in the Bible? I would say no, they were not. It is fine to use the Scriptures for our admonition, for learning, even for getting biblical examples, but Sunukjian says that finding the author’s central truth can be done only after you have anchored yourself in the unfolding progression of the passage outline, the author’s outline. The author’s outline then stays inviolate as you turn it into a truth outline reflecting its timeless theology. Only then do you ask what larger question the author is addressing with this flow of thought, and what answer he is giving to that question. You put those together, question and answer, topic and assertion, and those give you the dominant take-home truth of the text. So that is the general idea of saying, “I do not want to preach from the Bible. I want to preach the Bible.” Not just leadership principles, not just things I gleaned from it, but what God was trying to convey when He wrote this letter, when He wrote this narrative, when He gave this story in the Scriptures.
An Exercise in 1 Samuel 2
One of my recent sermons was from 1 Samuel chapter 2, and I want to take some time on this passage as well. Observe the history of the text, the background of what is going on before and after the text. Look at the context of the passage in 1 Samuel chapter 2, just the first 11 verses, and then note some of the words in the text and see if you can spot some of the main themes throughout. So again we will take about 10 or 15 minutes. Read through the passage, 1 Samuel 2:1–11, and then try to get the passage outline, a truth outline, the flow of the truth, and then a big question-and-answer statement, a take-home truth from this passage. We will start the countdown timer again, and then I will pick up and we will go through this passage as well.
Okay, welcome back. You have been reading 1 Samuel 2:1–11, particularly the prayer of Hannah in verses 1 through 10. Backing up again to the overall picture, you look at the context, and the context is that in chapter 1 she was praying for a son. She wanted so badly for God to give her a son. She promised that she would give her son to the Lord, that her son would serve the Lord all his days. She was constantly berated by her husband’s second wife, who is called her adversary. She was the one constantly nagging her, almost making fun of her for not having any children, and that was the thing that drove Hannah to pray for a son. Eli the priest saw her and accused her of being drunk, and she said, “No, it is in great anguish of soul that I am praying,” and she received an answer from the Lord right there that she would receive a son, and then she gave him over to the Lord as promised. That is chapter one. That is the context of chapter 2. Now, chapter 2 starts with this prayer of praise to the Lord. So the context, we would say, is a prayer of praise. This is a prayer of thanksgiving. It is praising the Lord for the answer to prayer in giving her a son. But as I am reading through it, I am looking at things like verse 1: “And Hannah prayed, and said, My heart rejoiceth in the LORD, mine horn is exalted in the LORD: my mouth is enlarged over mine enemies; because I rejoice in thy salvation.” Right off, those kinds of words, and I will just use salvation as an example here: the word salvation shows us that there is a bigger picture going on than just the answer to prayer. The narrow focus of this passage is that God answered the prayer and gave her a son, but it is not necessarily the son that she is thanking the Lord for. It is not the answer to prayer that she is praising God over. It is the Lord, as in verse 2: “There is none holy as the LORD: for there is none beside thee: neither is there any rock like our God.” So there is this holiness of God, this holy nature of God, that He is completely separate, completely unique from all the gods of the region. When I was preaching this, I went into the background of Baal and Molech and the different mythologies from the Canaan regions surrounding them, and it is like Hannah is saying all of those false gods are completely and utterly foolish. There is none holy as our God. She is saying, “Look, this is all about the God of Israel, the God that we know.” So she highlights His holiness. She highlights how much of a rock He is for her, how much He came through for her in tough times. The first three verses are about her situation, but then verses 4 through 8 or so go into this whole explanation, this whole beautiful picture of the kind of God He is. So even though He did that in her situation, she backs up, and it is like she is saying, “But it is not just my situation. This is what God does.” The bows of the mighty are broken. Anybody who tries to stand against God is utterly consumed. He is the sovereign God. He is the One who holds life and death in His hand. Nothing happens that is outside of His control. He is the One who knows the beginning from the end, and He is the Giver of life, and even the Taker of life. Verses 7 and 8: “The LORD maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up. He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them.” So this is the absolute authority and sovereignty of God on this earth. That is the beautiful nature and the beautiful picture of God. We saw that He is holy, but she is also talking about vindication against those who are the enemies of His people. He is completely holy. He is completely just. He is fully sovereign. He is absolutely in control of what is going on in this life. But not only that, He is completely good. Verse 8 especially talks about raising the poor out of the dunghill, out of the dust, and what a good God that is, to look down on us and give us salvation. Now, again going to the New Testament, we realize that salvation is through Jesus Christ. She had an extreme faith in God. We are given the opportunity as Christians to have faith in God through Jesus Christ. We have faith in Jesus Christ, that He came to die for our sins, and so through Jesus Christ we are given access to God, and through Jesus Christ He has done the same for us, reaching down and bringing us out of the miry clay, setting our feet on a rock, and making us royalty. That is the beautiful nature of God. So it is like Hannah is looking at her specific situation, and then she is stepping back in verses 4 through 8 and looking at God and saying, “Wow, this is what God does. This is the incredible God we serve.” When I was preaching this, I brought a Lego model. It is a small-scale version of a French café, and inside there are all these little miniature versions of an espresso machine, and a bookshelf, and a little sitting and reading area, and sleeping quarters on the third story, and little stairs that go up. It was this incredibly detailed little thing, with lights and everything. It was phenomenal. But that was not an actual French café. It was just a scaled-down version of the bigger thing. Now, God did that with Hannah. “For this child I prayed,” she said in chapter 1, “For this child I prayed; and the LORD hath given me my petition which I asked of him.” but that was like a small, scaled-down version of the bigger thing. It was like God says, “Well, I do that all the time. I am the Giver of life. You received a son, but that son was not the only miracle I have ever given. I do that all the time. I am a good God. I am a holy God, a just God, a sovereign God, and a good God.” So the flow of the passage shows us about God, and we will just finish by looking at verses 9 and 10: “He will keep the feet of his saints, and the wicked shall be silent in darkness; for by strength shall no man prevail. The adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces; out of heaven shall he thunder upon them: the LORD shall judge the ends of the earth; and he shall give strength unto his king, and exalt the horn of his anointed.” It is like she is recognizing that this goes so much bigger than her situation. He is the Judge of the whole universe. And then she even references, “he shall give strength unto his king.” There are different views on that, and you can do your own research on it. I did, and I have come to the conclusion that I believe this is a prophetic passage about the Messiah, Jesus Christ. I believe she was pointing forward, even in a day when the monarchy had not yet been established. She is talking about a king. Kings were called rulers of the lands, and Abraham fought kings, and they were just tribal leaders. I realize all of that, but I believe she was pointing ahead not just to the Davidic kingdom but to the kingdom of Jesus Christ, the rule of Jesus on this earth, an incredible prophecy through her words, even if she did not fully understand what she was saying. Again, we can look at it from our perspective as Christians, see the full, bigger picture, and realize there is a kingdom where Jesus is the King. He is the Ruler of the universe, and He will one day judge the entire world. So you pick up on words like king in passages like that, and you see, “Okay, there is a whole lot more here than just a prayer of thanksgiving for a baby.” There is a bigger picture here: this is who God is, and this is what God does. Her being blessed with a child named Samuel is a small-scale version of the greatness of God, the justice of God, the goodness of God, the holiness of God. That is all what this passage is saying.
The Sermon From 1 Samuel 2
Now, the sermon outline, when I did preach it as a sermon, was just going through the text, trying to highlight the character, the nature of God, and then trying to call people to trust the God who can see the bigger picture, as Hannah trusted God to see the bigger picture of her life. When you move into an application of that bigger picture, you may not always realize why God is doing something. You may not even realize, “Why is this happening? Why is this seemingly bad thing happening? How come this woman is allowed to berate me for not having any kids?” But then she realizes later, “You know what? God saw it all from His perspective. He knew the beginning from the end. He decided to give this to me in His timing, and He is a good God who does the right thing every single time.” I looked at that and thought, You know what? There are so many bad things that happen in this life, and from God’s perspective, He is going to be able to use those evil things of this world and turn them around for something good. The only thing missing is God’s perspective. In the meantime, though, we are called to have the same trust in God and belief that He has got the bigger picture in mind. It can work out for good in His hands, not in our hands. There are so many situations where we try to manipulate and twist and all that, or situations where we think, “Man, this is so bad. This is so bad.” But it was the bad circumstance in Hannah’s life, this constant nagging, that caused her to be driven to her knees to beg the Lord, and it was this terrible circumstance that God turned into something good, not only for Hannah, in giving her a son, but for the entire nation of Israel, in bringing the prophet Samuel, who would usher in the monarchy and bring about King David and this incredible movement in the history of Israel, in part because of this bad thing that happened to Hannah. She was driven to prayer, and God answered those prayers and gave us Samuel, and gave us these books of the Bible, where we have this incredible picture of God. All of that is connected to the flow of thought in this passage of 1 Samuel chapter 2. That is what we want to get at when we are getting into the Scriptures: not just the micro view, but also the macro view. As Sunukjian says, What is the biggest question God is trying to answer in this text? It is not just five principles for parents who cannot have kids. There are helpful things in this passage for parents who cannot have kids, and there is great comfort in that, but Bible preaching is stepping back from those specific questions and asking why this passage is actually in the Bible. So we want to look first at that and then pull application from it. That is the passage flow, the truth flow, and the sermon flow, which asks what the truth means for my life, and you can look at that whole big picture. Well, I encourage you to continue your own Bible study in a similar format, seeking what God is trying to say. God bless you as you continue your Bible study.
