Amalekites Revisited

I love looking at Old Testament stories and tracing history through its books. Sometimes I try to draw practical lessons from the things that happened in times past. Other times I leave that process mostly to the reader. Some lessons are more obvious than others, and we don’t always need to be beaten with a 2×4 to register what the Holy Spirit is trying to tell us.

Early last year we published a post I entitled “The Prototypical Enemy”. It concerned the Amalekites and their relationship with the nation of Israel over a 900-year period. In that post, I tried to link together a bunch of different scriptures to present a history of the Amalekite people. It was a lengthy one, so I left most of the practical applications to the reader.

First Among the Nations

I have since come up with enough thoughts about what the Amalekites teach us to fill a post of their own, so here we go. If you have not read the earlier post, you may find it useful to do that first.

Balaam once called Amalek “the first among the nations”, a statement which initially seems perplexing. Even at the height of its powers, Amalek was nowhere near first in size, prominence or antiquity among the nations of its day. That said, Amalek was the first nation to attack Israel on the way out of Egypt, and the only nation in that part of the world characterized by a complete absence of the fear of God.

God had exterminated large groups of evil people before, in the Flood and at Sodom and Gomorrah. In the one case, God targeted the entire human race (with the exception of Noah and his family). In the other case, it was two especially wicked cities (with the exception of Lot and his family). But Amalek was the first nation God ever proposed to exterminate from under heaven (see Exodus 17). I doubt it was the first genocide in human history, but it was certainly the first one God ever initiated.

What Can We Learn from the Story of the Amalekites?

So then, let’s get to those practical lessons. Here are a few things the story of the Amalekites can teach us:

1. There are people who simply hate God. They don’t need a reason. The Amalekites didn’t have one. They were nomads, not Canaanites. They had no cities to defend, and they were not among the tribes Israel was destined to replace. When David wrote in the Psalms, “More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause”, he may have had Amalekites in mind. But those words apply to the Lord Jesus too, don’t they. They hated him without cause, and he reminded his disciples that they too would be hated even though they were doing good. We like to think that we can please everyone if we just figure out how to say or do the right things. Sometimes we fear there is something wrong with us if the world doesn’t like us. But so long as we are not provoking the people around us with our own misbehavior, Peter tells us we shouldn’t be overly concerned if they react to our devotion to God by hating us. That has been going on since the Exodus. The Amalekites are a symbol of the world’s unthinking, unreasoning hatred for the people of God.
2. Certain types of sin must be dealt with ruthlessly. “These things happened to them as an example,” Paul writes to the Corinthians, “but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.” Christians don’t fight physical battles or conquer nations. We fight spiritual battles and conquer sin in our own hearts. Those battles must be fought ruthlessly, with no quarter given to the enemy, just as God commanded Israel to leave no evidence of the Amalekite civilization behind. Jesus said, for example, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.” I don’t think he meant that literally, but he also didn’t mean that we are to fool around with sin the way Saul fooled around with the Amalekites and rebelled against God’s command to completely destroy them to the last man, woman and child, including all their animals and goods. Saul couldn’t understand the rationale behind God’s command, so he decided not to keep it. But when God commands something, there is always a good reason, even if we can’t understand it.
3. When God says something is going to happen, it is going to happen. It took 900 years for all vestiges of the Amalekite civilization to vanish from scripture and from history. But God had promised it, and it happened exactly as predicted. You can’t find a trace of the Amalekites today outside of the Bible. So it doesn’t matter if it happens tomorrow, or 700 years later, or 900 years later … the fact that God promises it is an iron clad guarantee it will. God is not concerned with the passage of time. With him, a day is as 1,000 years and 1,000 years as one day. So if the Lord Jesus says he’s coming back, he’s coming back, even if two millennia have passed since he said it. If he’s promised to descend from heaven with a shout and call the dead in Christ to rise first and his people home, he will keep that promise. The passage of time has no meaning to him. It’s simply evidence of his amazing grace. But he will do everything he says he will do.
4. God works in different ways, and we need to let him work through us. Sometimes God works directly and obviously. More often he works through people. With respect to the Amalekites (at least as far as the record of scripture is concerned), Esther finished the job that Saul wouldn’t and David couldn’t. God can work through a woman asking her husband for a favor as easily as through an army. He doesn’t need numbers or power to accomplish his purposes. He can do it with a series of suspicious coincidences (as in the entire book of Esther) or even through a polite request.
5. Every failure of obedience to God’s commands makes it harder for the people who come after us. We do not live or die to ourselves. Our choices affect others. Sin that doesn’t get dealt with in our generation has bigger and bigger consequences with every generation that goes by. Every Israelite who ever shirked from killing an Amalekite and came up with some good reason to justify not obeying God’s command made Haman the Agagite’s attempted genocide of the Jews possible centuries later. When we fail to obey the direct commands of the Lord in our own lives, we will inevitably make life more difficult for our children and our children’s children. That’s true in our families, in our churches and in the broader society. Declining to fight the battles God has given us to fight in our own generation is simply passing the job of doing God’s will on to another generation, along with both the potential cost of obedience and the reward that goes with it.

That reward is something we should want for ourselves, and it’s not greedy to seek it. Our children will have plenty of commands to obey and plenty of reward available to them in their day without us making their situation worse through disobedience.