Thoughts on 1 Samuel 2

Today’s reading: 1 Samuel 2; Romans 6

I can’t get this statement from the Lord to Eli out of my head:

"Why then do you scorn my sacrifices and my offerings that I commanded for my dwelling, and honor your sons above me by fattening yourselves on the choicest parts of every offering of my people Israel?"

The fact of the matter is that God had set aside great things for the priests who served Him. If you remember a few months back in this plan as we were in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, a portion of the sacrifices and offerings went to the Lord, but much of it went to the priests and Levites who were ministering to the Lord. More than that, the Israelites were offering the best of what they had, which was then received by the priests. For example, when flour was used as part of an offering, it had to be finely ground. While that is normal for us today, the flour they used day in and day out would have been pretty coarse, and to further grind it into fine flour took a lot of extra effort which was not normally made unless you were extremely wealthy. However, because the Lord received fine flour in His offerings, the priests got to enjoy this delicacy that most others would not, at least not nearly so regularly.

So this isn’t God being stingy and the priests, barely able to make it by, are trying to skim a little off the top to survive. God has apportioned more than generously to the priests, such that they are likely eating much better than most Israelites, but Hophni and Phinehas weren’t satisfied with God’s incredibly generous provision for them and were even stealing the Lord’s portion.

The reason this sticks out to me so much is that we do this same thing all the time in so many different areas. Rather than giving to the Lord first and trusting that He will provide fully for us when we do, we take our own first and then pass along to the Lord whatever happens to be left (if anything at all).

When we consider our finances, we budget for our needs and our wants, and for what we want to set aside, and only then do we look at what’s left and ask how much of that (if any) we are willing to give to our church or to some other work of the Lord. When we consider our time, we fill it with all the things we need to do and all the things we want to do, then we look at what’s left and ask which shows we still need to binge or which social media accounts need to be mindlessly flipped through, and only then do we stop to wonder if we should try to squeeze in time for the Bible or for prayer. We invest our thoughtlife in our jobs, hobbies, or families, and can maybe squeeze in some time to consider the things of the Lord if there is a leftover gap we aren’t filling with our phones. When we consider our ambitions and goals in life, we think about our career, our salary, our lifestyle, our family, and a thousand other things, but God and His priorities for our life often don’t even get a seat at the table and we just kind of expect to keep going to church and such, but that is all secondary to the real drives and ambitions in our lives.

In talking about having our needs and wants met in a satisfying way, Jesus told his hearers that God knows we need these things, and then He said, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”

Just like with the priests, God is not stingy with us. He knows what we need and He is more than capable of providing abundantly for those needs to be met in the most satisfying ways. But when we fail to trust this, we stop seeking first God’s kingdom because we need to seek first our own. 

This is the real irony. God, as our creator, knows exactly what we need and what will ultimately be the most satisfying life we could live, and as creator of everything that exists, He has limitless resources at His disposal to provide us that life. And Jesus tells us that if we seek first His kingdom, He desires to provide those things for us. But we like to think we know ourselves better than our creator knows us. We think we know what we need, we think we know what will be satisfying, and we think we are better able to provide for those needs than the infinite God of the universe is. So rather than allowing Him to provide, we scrape and scramble to try to make life work on our own. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

God created us to live an abundant life in Him, and He will provide that life when we choose to make Him a priority and seek His kingdom before our own. We can be well assured that we will never regret prioritizing God’s kingdom over our own.

Maybe there is an area of your life that the Spirit has drawn your attention to already, but if not, I encourage you to spend a couple minutes before the Lord this morning, asking Him to show you where you are failing to give Him proper place and priority. And then I encourage you to do something about it. What would it look like for you to seek first His kingdom in that area today?

Lord, you are trustworthy and reliable. You created us and know what we need, and you have all resources to bring about your desires and purposes for our lives. Give us the faith to trust you enough, when you say you will meet our needs, to leave those in your hands and give our lives more fully over to you than we ever have before. We acknowledge with our heads, Father, that we will never regret giving more of ourselves and our lives over to you, but we need You, by your Spirit, to move that knowledge from our heads into our hearts, so that we more consistently live out of this reality. You are always worth keeping first Father. Thank you for your incredible generosity to us.