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1 Samuel
Chapter Three
1 Samuel 3
Chapter Contents
The word of the Lord first revealed to Samuel. (1-10) God
tells Samuel the destruction of Eli's house. (11-18) Samuel established to be a
prophet. (19-21)
Commentary on 1 Samuel 3:1-10
(Read 1 Samuel 3:1-10)
The call which Divine grace designs shall be made
effectual; will be repeated till it is so, till we come to the call. Eli,
perceiving that it was the voice of God that Samuel heard, instructed him what
to say. Though it was a disgrace to Eli, for God's call to be directed to
Samuel, yet he told him how to meet it. Thus the elder should do their utmost
to assist and improve the younger that are rising up. Let us never fail to
teach those who are coming after us, even such as will soon be preferred before
us, John 1:30. Good words should be put into
children's mouths betimes, by which they may be prepared to learn Divine
things, and be trained up to regard them.
Commentary on 1 Samuel 3:11-18
(Read 1 Samuel 3:11-18)
What a great deal of guilt and corruption is there in us,
concerning which we may say, It is the iniquity which our own heart knoweth; we
are conscious to ourselves of it! Those who do not restrain the sins of others,
when it is in their power to do it, make themselves partakers of the guilt, and
will be charged as joining in it. In his remarkable answer to this awful
sentence, Eli acknowledged that the Lord had a right to do as he saw good, being
assured that he would do nothing wrong. The meekness, patience, and humility
contained in those words, show that he was truly repentant; he accepted the
punishment of his sin.
Commentary on 1 Samuel 3:19-21
(Read 1 Samuel 3:19-21)
All increase in wisdom and grace, is owing to the
presence of God with us. God will graciously repeat his visits to those who
receive them aright. Early piety will be the greatest honour of young people. Those
who honour God he will honour. Let young people consider the piety of Samuel,
and from him they will learn to remember their Creator in the days of their
youth. Young children are capable of religion. Samuel is a proof that their
waiting upon the Lord will be pleasing to him. He is a pattern of all those
amiable tempers, which are the brightest ornament of youth, and a sure source
of happiness.
── Matthew Henry《Concise Commentary on 1 Samuel》
1 Samuel 3
Verse 1
[1] And the child Samuel ministered unto the LORD before
Eli. And the word of the LORD was precious in those days; there was no open
vision.
Before Eli — That is, under his inspection and
direction.
Word — The word of prophecy, or the revelation of God's will
to and by the prophets.
Precious — Rare or scarce, such things being most precious in
mens' esteem, whereas common things are generally despised.
Open vision — God did not impart his Mind by
way of vision or revelation openly, or to any public person, to whom others
might resort for satisfaction, though he might privately reveal himself to some
pious persons for their particular direction. This is premised, as a reason why
Samuel understood not, when God called him once or twice.
Verse 2
[2] And it came to pass at that time, when Eli was laid down
in his place, and his eyes began to wax dim, that he could not see;
His place — In the court of the tabernacle.
Verse 3
[3] And ere the lamp of God went out in the temple of the
LORD, where the ark of God was, and Samuel was laid down to sleep;
Went out — Before the lights of the golden candlestick were put
out in the morning.
Verse 7
[7] Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, neither was the
word of the LORD yet revealed unto him.
Did not know — He was not acquainted with God in
that extraordinary or prophetical way. And this ignorance of Samuel's served
God's design, that his simplicity might give Eli the better assurance of the
truth of God's call, and message to Samuel.
Verse 10
[10] And the LORD came, and stood, and called as at other
times, Samuel, Samuel. Then Samuel answered, Speak; for thy servant heareth.
Came and stood — Before, he spake to him at a
distance, even from the holy oracle between the cherubim: but now, to prevent
all farther mistake, the voice came near to him, as if the person speaking had
been standing near him.
Verse 12
[12] In that day I will perform against Eli all things which
I have spoken concerning his house: when I begin, I will also make an end.
In that day — In that time which I have
appointed for this work, which was about twenty or thirty years after this
threatning. So long space of repentance God allows to this wicked generation.
When I begin, … — Tho' this vengeance shall be
delayed for a season, to manifest my patience, and incite them to repentance;
yet when once I begin to inflict, I shall not desist 'till I have made a full
end.
Verse 13
[13] For I have told him that I will judge his house for ever
for the iniquity which he knoweth; because his sons made themselves vile, and
he restrained them not.
Restrained them not — He contented himself
with a cold reproof, and did not punish, and effectually restrain them. They
who can, and do not restrain others from sin, make themselves partakers of the
guilt. Those in authority will have a great deal to answer for, if the sword
they bear be not a terror to evil-doers.
Verse 14
[14] And therefore I have sworn unto the house of Eli, that
the iniquity of Eli's house shall not be purged with sacrifice nor offering for
ever.
Have sworn — Or, I do swear: the past tense
being commonly put for the present in the Hebrew tongue.
Unto — Or, concerning it.
Purged — That is, the punishment threatened against Eli and his
family, shall not he prevented by all their sacrifices, but shall infallibly be
executed.
Verse 15
[15] And Samuel lay until the morning, and opened the doors
of the house of the LORD. And Samuel feared to shew Eli the vision.
Doors — Altho' the tabernacle, whilst it was to be removed
from place to place in the wilderness, had no doors, but consisted only of
curtains, and had hangings before the entrance, instead of doors; yet when it
was settled in one place, as now it was in Shiloh, it was enclosed within some
solid building, which had doors and posts, and other parts belonging to it.
Feared — The matter of the vision or revelation, partly from
the reverence he bore to his person, to whom he was loth to be a messenger of
such sad tidings; partly, lest if he had been hasty to utter it, Eli might
think him guilty of arrogancy or secret complacency in his calamity.
Verse 17
[17] And he said, What is the thing that the LORD hath said
unto thee? I pray thee hide it not from me: God do so to thee, and more also,
if thou hide any thing from me of all the things that he said unto thee.
God do so, … — God inflict the same evils upon
thee, which I suspect he hath pronounced against me, and greater evils too.
Verse 18
[18] And Samuel told him every whit, and hid nothing from
him. And he said, It is the LORD: let him do what seemeth him good.
It is the Lord — This severe sentence is from the
sovereign Lord of the world, who hath an absolute right to dispose of me and
all his creatures; who is in a special manner the ruler of the people of
Israel, to whom it properly belongs to punish all mine offences; whose
chastisement I therefore accept.
Verse 19
[19] And Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him, and did let
none of his words fall to the ground.
Fail, … — That is, want its effect: God made good all his
predictions. A metaphor from precious liquors, which when they are spilt upon
the ground, are altogether useless.
Verse 20
[20] And all Israel from Dan even to Beersheba knew that
Samuel was established to be a prophet of the LORD.
From Dan, … — Thro' the whole Land, from the
northern bound Dan, to the southern, Beersheba; which was the whole length of
the Land.
── John Wesley《Explanatory Notes on 1 Samuel》
03 Chapter 3
Verses 1-21
Verses 1-10
And the child Samuel ministered unto the Lord before Eli.
The child prophet
This white flower blossomed on a dunghill. The continuous growth
of a character, from a child serving God, and to old age walking in the same
path, is the great lesson which the story of Samuel teaches us. “The child is
father of the man,” and all his long days are “bound each to each by” true
religion. There are two types of experience among God’s greatest servants.
Paul, made an apostle from a persecutor, heads the one class. Timothy in the
New Testament and Samuel in the Old represent the other. An Augustine or a
Bunyan is made the more earnest, humble, and whole-hearted by the remembrance
of a wasted youth and of God’s arresting mercy. But there are a serenity and
continuity about a life which has grown up in the fear of God that have their
own charm and blessing. It is well to have “much transgression” forgiven, but
it may be better to have always been “innocent” and ignorant of it. Samuel’s
peaceful service is contrasted, in the second half of the first verse, with the
sad cessation of Divine revelation in that dreary time of national laxity. A
demoralised priesthood, an alienated people, a silent God,--these are the
outstanding features of the period, when this fair life of continuous worship
unfolded itself. This flower grew in a desert.
What Samuel’s call resembles in modern times
The call of Samuel was not a call to become a servant of
God,--that call Samuel had received when he was first brought to the
tabernacle, and there solemnly dedicated to God’s service,--but to be a prophet
of God, and a great reformer of the Church and nation. Moreover, in bad times
of the Church, and in evil days, whatever shape the evil takes, whether it
shows itself in the form of profligacy and a relaxation of wholesome
discipline, or in wide-spread superstition, or in doubt and unbelief, Almighty
God even now-a-days raises up men who are fitted to grapple with the evil, and
to set right (with His gracious assistance) the things that are wrong This is
the way in which all great changes for good have been made in the world--they
have been all brought about by one or two strong characters, suited by God’s
Providence to the times in which they lived, who have been vividly impressed
with the sad state of things around them, and have resolved, it may be very
early in life, to devote their whole time and energy to mending it. But now
observe what are the conditions of such a thing happening. Little Samuel, when
the call of God reached him at the age of twelve was found not doing anything
remarkable or extraordinary, but engaged in the ordinary commonplace duties of
his station. It is wonderful how many cases there are in the Bible of persons
called to be or to do something great, when they were engaged in doing the
common everyday duties of their station. Gideon, Moses, David, Elisha. What do
these and several other instances of the same sort teach, but that in order to
be called by God to something good and great, people need not travel out of the
high-road of their commonplace everyday occupations, but rather should be found
busied in these occupations? (Dean Goulburn.)
A reformation beginning in the soul of a child
In the days when the High Priest Eli was judge of Israel, there
appeared in the sanctuary of Shiloh a wonderful child: his name was Samuel. It
was a dark and stormy time; there were fears within and fightings without.
Israel was climbing a steep hill--arduously, painfully. Her progress was slow;
she was alternately worsted and victorious. And the struggle was more arduous
from the fact that there was no prophecy. It was an age of materialism. The
hands of Moses were no longer uplifted on the mountain; the eyes of Moses no
longer gazed on a promised glory. Religion had become a form; its spirit had
fled. There were few remains left of that heroic time when Joshua had fought for
God, and Deborah had sung for God. The nation had lost its poetry, and had lost
its faith, these had to be rekindled anew at the lamp of heaven. Where was the
new kindling to begin? Where was the Divine spirit to touch the world once
more? In the heart of the sage? No. In the breast of the old man? No. In the
leaders of the Jewish armies? No. It was to begin in the soul of a little
child. Out of the mouth of a babe in knowledge, God was to ordain strength. (George
Matheson, D. D.)
The child prophet no miracle
Was he a miracle--this little Samuel? No--in the view
characteristic of the Bible he is the real and normal aspect of humanity. So
normal is he that Christ says we must all return to his state before we can
become seers. What, think you, does Jesus mean when He declares that we can
only realise the beauty of the Kingdom through the eyes of a little child? Is
it not simply this, that to see the beauty of anything we require a first eye?
Take the Bible itself. To see the beauties of the Bible, one would require to
say to us what the prophet said to Hezekiah, “Let the shadow go back ten
degrees.” We should need to be transported back into life’s morning, to divest
ourselves of all preconceived opinions, to imagine that we were reading the
record for the first time. That is precisely the standpoint which Christianity
promises to create. It professes to make old things new, in other words, to let
us see the old things as they looked when they were new, and so to give us a
true sense of their power and beauty. What is this but to recreate in us the
life of Samuel l What is this but to say that the true seer must ever be a
child, that, however grownup he be, it is by the survival of his childhood that
he sees the Kingdom of God. Little Samuel is no miracle. He reveals the normal
law of faith. (George Matheson, D. D.)
And the Word of the Lord
was precious in those days.
The Word of the Lord precious
From Moses to Samuel, a period of several hundred years, there was
no prophet regularly appointed; particular revelations were made to
individuals; but there was no acknowledged prophet. The natural consequence
was, that such intimations of the Divine will, as were then given, made a
deeper impression: they were more highly valued and more eagerly sought for,
than when the gift of prophecy, in after ages, became more common. Such is the
perverseness of man; blessings of every description are estimated, not
according to their excellence, but their rarity; not according to the ease, but
the difficulty, with which they are to be obtained. And further, when in
possession of a blessing, we are often utterly insensible of its value; we
abuse it in thoughtless excess, and are ready to squander it away; but the
moment it is departed, we discover our blindness and folly. Meat and drink and
raiment, the air we breathe, the sun and the shower, excite no spirit of
gratitude, and by many are scarcely received and remembered as blessings; but
in the days of famine and pestilence, amidst the warfare and desolation of
raging element, these benefits and mercies are painfully acknowledged, and
ardently desired. And thus it is of domestic happiness and comfort: the value
of home is frequently not appreciated until it is forsaken and lost; the worth
of a friend is sometimes but lightly considered, till he “goes hence and is no
more sees.” These observations are also illustrative of the feeling and conduct
of men, in regard to their spiritual privileges and blessings. We are apt to
express a wonder at the obstinate indifference of the people of Israel to their
religious advantages and instructions; we are astonished, that they could
forget their miraculous deliverances by the hand of Moses, and the manifold
revelations vouchsafed through him for their knowledge and guidance: yet in
truth, the history of Israel is but too faithful a picture of the people of God
in other times and other countries; by no means excluding our own. Before the
age of printing, when the copies of the sacred word were comparatively few, the
Christian, who was so happy as to possess one, commonly regarded it as a
treasure. The value set upon the word of God, its preciousness in the heart of
man, is not proportioned to the frequency and the fulness of its communication.
It is in almost every dwelling, but not in every dwelling esteemed and loved.
The Bible is grievously neglected both by rich and poor. From this lamentable
neglect of the word of God, we may readily account for the want of religious
principle, for the decay of religious character, for the overspreading of corruption
and vice, so notorious in the Christian world. Let us suppose that it should
please God, for the heedlessness of this nation, to deprive us of the privilege
and blessing of the Bible; and to declare, that the neglected ministry of His
word should be continued no longer: we should undoubtedly regard this as the
direst calamity which could possibly befall us. Then let us be consistent; and
whilst we do enjoy this invaluable favour of heaven, let it be cherished and
improved. Let the Gospel, instead of being less precious to us, on account of
its universal publication, and its facility of attainment, be therefore prized
the more. (J. Slade, M. A.)
The preciousness of the word of the Lord in the day of evil
I. The Word of the
Lord--To this high honour the Bible professes to aspire: it claims to be
nothing less than the word of the Lord What does the Christian believe,
compared with the man who believes that the Scriptures are a cunningly-devised
fable? It is to him we plainly apply the exclamation, “O man, great is thy
faith.” We indeed believe difficulties; but he believes absurdities: we believe
mysteries; but he swallows absolute impossibilities. O Christian, your faith
does not stand in the wisdom of man but in the word of God: yet the wisdom of
man has always been on your side. Take up your Bible now, and examine it
internally--is it not worthy of God? Upon the same principle that when I survey
the works of creation I exclaim, “This is the finger of God;” so when I peruse
the Scriptures, I feel the impress of the Divine agency: I am perfectly sure,
that whoever was the author of the Book, he was a holy being, he was a wise
being he was a benevolent being; I am sure he knew me perfectly, and was
concerned for my welfare
II. Its
preciousness.--“Precious” means valuable; something of great worth and
importance. You will observe the preciousness of a thing is very
distinguishable from the truth of it, in the former argument. Nothing can
indeed be valuable and important that is not true; but a thing may be true
without being valuable and important. But here both these are conjoined--the
veracity and the excellency. This may be inferred, not only from the Author,
but the design. What is the design now of the word of God, but the restoration
of man from all the effects of moral evil, and placing him in a condition
superior to that in which he was originally created? The most precious book in
the world to me ought to be that which contains “the excellency of the
knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord:” and this volume does contain it. How
precious is it to have a standard of doctrine with regard to our belief; so
that if we feel perplexities we may call in the judgment of God the Father
Himself. How satisfactory is it to have a rule of duty with regard to conduct.
How wretched we must feel if we had been left to conjecture what God would have
us to do, and how he would have us to walk. As to matters of moment, here
everything is so legibly inscribed, that he may run that reads it. We must not,
before we dismiss this part of our subject, overlook its influence and
efficacy. We do not mean now with regard to the illumination of the mind, or
the relief of the pardoned conscience, or the setting of the man’s poor heart
at rest, so that he shall no longer run up and down this wide world, crying,
“Who will shew us any good?” but we refer now to his moral transformation. “If
any man be in Christ he is a new creature.” And we must also observe the value
of the Scriptures, as it appears not only when personally, but relatively considered.
You will observe that where it is not available to renew, it restrains: where
it does not sanctify it civilises. The Jews had the Oracles of God committed to
them; this it was which humanised them. How precious should the Scriptures be
that have closed so many avenues of wretchedness, and opened so many scenes of
comfort.
III. The season of
its preciousness. It would be precious in itself, if no one ever regarded it:
just as the jewel is equally valuable though the swine trample it under its
hoofs But it is with the word as it is with the Author of it; “to them that
believe He is precious,” and to them that believe it is precious. “The word of
the Lord was particularly precious in those days.”
1. The days of destitution. Such were the days of Samuel: this Was
the case also in after times with the church, when they said, “We see not any
signs; there is no more any prophet; neither is there among us, any that
knoweth how long.” How precious were the Scriptures before their translation;
how many were there to whom the sacred treasure was inaccessible. Suppose now
the word of God was remaining in the original Hebrew and Greek, what would it
then be to you? Why, it would be like a spring shut up, a fountain sealed; like
so many fine paintings hung up in a dark room. In the days of Queen Mary the
use of it was absolutely prohibited; we read of one farmer who gave a whole
load of hay for a single leaf of one of the epistles. “The word of the Lord was
precious in those days.” There may be something like these days of destitution
existing in some instances now: they may be produced by accidents, by diseases,
by deafnesses, and so on. One is deaf, so that he cannot hear the word; another
is blind, so that he cannot see. I remember, some years ago, a farmer in the
country, a very pious man, he was advancing in years, and his eyes were growing
dim: I often saw him reading the Scriptures at his window, and he seemed to be
musing as well as reading; he seemed to be committing it to memory: and when I
asked him, I found this was the case: “O,” said he, “I am making provision for
a dark day, that when I can no longer read, in the multitude of my thoughts I
shall have comfort left to my soul.” We all know best the value of a thing by
the want of it. “The word of the Lord was precious in those days.”
2. The days of conviction.
3. The days of affliction. Said Bolingbroke under his affliction, “my
philosophy forsakes me in my affliction.” But did Sir Philip Sidney’s
philosophy forsake him, when, after a battle, he having to undergo a dreadful
operation, said to the surgeon, “Sir, you are come to a poor timid creature in
himself; but to one who, by the grace of God, is raised above his own weakness:
and therefore, do not dishonour your art in sparing the patient.” “The word of the
Lord was precious in those days.” What days?
4. Dying days. I was one day called in to see a poor man on his dying
bed; and he began, the moment I entered the room, to address me in these words:
“Sir,” said he, “I have a long journey before me, and I don’t know one step of
the way.” Hobbes of Malmesbury, when he was dying, said, “I leave my body to
the grave, and my soul to the great Perhaps. I am taking,” says he, “a step in
the dark.” This was not the worst of it; he was not only taking a step in the
dark, but a step into the dark. (W. Jay.)
The precious word
Precious or rare--for the word may be translated so--precious
because it was translated so--precious because it was rare. Like the long dry
season, the heavens seemed to be sealed; and the coming of Samuel was the
beginning of a new era. The Word of the Lord was rare! We have got to speak of
the Bible as being the Word of the Lord, and, speaking broadly, the Bible is a
store of messages from God. I question sometimes whether the Bible has gained anything
by being no cheap. It was rare once, and it is sure that it was precious when
it was rare. When the City of London had but one Bible chained to the reading
desk of St. Paul’s Cathedral the citizens of London crowded to hear it read.
The Word of the Lord was precious in those days. Now this implies several
things.
1. First of all, that God does speak to men. Deism, the coldest
thing, perhaps, in the shape of a religion that man has ever believed--Deism
says it is beneath God to have any longing to come into personal intercourse
with men. A man may write a book and inspire you with his ideas, yet he may
resent it very much if you propose to bring yourself into personal intercourse
with him. Mr. Haweis speaks of the astonishment with which Mr. Tennyson received
him when, as a young fellow something like eighteen years of age, he ventured
to call upon the poet to thank him for what the poetry had been to him as a
young man; and perhaps, who knows! to ask the poet’s exposition of one or two
particular passages; but the poet seemed to think the youth was very eccentric,
if not very impudent. So the Deist might study the laws and phenomena of
Nature--the great book which carries upon it the signature of the Author, the
signature of God; but, he says, it would be irreverence for him to presume for
a moment that he could be of concern to the great Author, that the Almighty
should send special messages to him. God was to him what the Sphinx was to the
Egyptian worshipper--there was a light in its face which suggested that it
could tell the worshipper wonderful things if it cared to tell, but that it
would keep it all to itself. So to Deism God was a sphinx; He never spoke.
2. Finding by seeking. It is a matter of greatest importance that we
should believe that. Many men never see God, never hear His voice, because they
de not expect to do so. They never look for Him, they never hush themselves to
listen for Him. Darwin was always discovering some fresh fact in Nature, but
then he was always looking for them; he was always making experiments, always
giving Nature an opportunity to show how she did her work. He knew that Nature
was always speaking if he only gave her a chance. But he never expected God to
speak to him. He gave up praying because he had persuaded himself that God
never spoke to man.
3. The many voices of God. Let me add be that, God speaks in many
ways. The voices of God are many--the voice of reason, the voice of conscience,
the voice of material nature. Why, science is getting to protest that as emphatically
as anybody ever did. We often sing, “So God is here, let us adore,” and “How
awful is this place.” If there is any place where that might be sung with
propriety, it is the laboratory where the chemist and the physicist are at
work. This gives an entirely new meaning to nature. A barrel organ may give
correct music: the barrel organ does not make a mistake. The violin gives you
the same music, yet not the same. There is a man’s soul in the violin. Nature,
as the materialist talks about it, is a mere barrel organ. Nature is a violin
to the man who knows that every note of it is produced by the finger touch of
God, the mind of God, the heart of God, the delight of God in the world that He
has made, is in it. I heard a phonograph the other day sing a song of Adelina
Patti. It was not absolutely Adelina Patti, but it was correct. There was not
one missing note in it, every word, every intonation, the liquid clearness of
the beautiful voice; why it was absolutely human. I have heard of a General
taking a leaf out of his pocketbook on the field of battle, handing it over to
a messenger, and sending the message to someone somewhere in the rough battle.
It was a rough missive; the man to whom it was sent kept it, though, as a
memorial of the battle. It conveyed the commander’s message as effectively as
if it had been written an embossed paper. So people nowadays make a great to-do
about the numerical or the technical mistakes which are said to be found in the
Old Book. Do not be foolish; it is a message written on poor paper if you like,
here and there, but the message is none the worse for that. Do not demean
yourself to talk of the paper--what of the Message? Robert Browning speaks of a
musician who had music in him that no instrument that he had ever tried had been
able to reveal. It haunted him, it pained him, it was a burden to him; and he
must tell the music out. So he built his own instrument, and had the supreme
joy of uttering the music that was in him. God had told Himself in the words of
seer, and prophet, and psalmist, but He had never told Himself thoroughly yet.
But He will find a voice for Himself; the love of God, the law of
righteousness, which must not be insulted, even though the world be wrecked. He
told it by the cross. Glorious is the cross; God’s last voice, the Word of the
Lord.
4. Deaf to the Word. Now let me add to that. The direst misfortune,
the direst calamity that can happen to man is that God’s Word should cease to
come to him. It is not that the Word ever ceases for the matter of that.
Science has been making the most wonderful progress during our day. Nature
seems to have taken the veil from off her face; but Nature has always been
doing this, Nature has always been willing to tell her secrets. But in these
days our ears are opened, and we are ready to hear. The misery of the world has
always been making an appeal; but philanthropy, in the sense in which we
understand philanthropy today, has only just been born. The world is only just
beginning to understand that it owes pity end help to the poor, to the
criminal, to the wicked one. We may bury our souls in frivolity and never take
the trouble to think: but literature is here, art and science are here, and the
bread which maketh the soul of man hale and strong--this is here. The Word of the
Lord is always here; it is only that we drown it in the din of frivolities and
material ambitions. Never read and never think, and no new ideas will ever come
to you. The spirit of truth and understanding never thrusts itself upon those
who never seek it.
5. Seasons of awakening. And lastly, there are seasons when the
Church awakes to a vivid sense of that. These seasons of awakening come to
every high region and touch into life every high matter you can think of. We
talk about the Dark Ages in England; for centuries the world was asleep; the
Word of God was rare in those days. The men to whom it came were few, a rare
soul now and then; a Wyckliffe heard the voice of God, but as a whole that
period was a long sleep. At last England awoke. There was the richness
literature; there came intellectual awakening. In the age of Shakespeare
England was born again. There was a spiritual awakening. Luther shook Europe.
The Reformers lit a fire which has never been put out. (J. Morlais Jones.)
Wanted: A prophet
“There was no open vision.” It was a time of stagnation and
stupor. It was a time in which all men had sunk into a dead level of dulness
and formality and mere routine. There was no enthusiasm, no earnestness. Men
went through their work and lived their lives in a humdrum languishing sort of
way, without heart and without spirit. There was a complete absence of that
intensity of feeling which is ever the evidence of a strenuous life. “There was
no open vision.” It was a time of deep religious depression. It was a “gelid,
torpid, tortoise-like existence” that man led. New, there are people who say
that we are passing through a similar period of spiritual depression now, and
have been passing through it for some long time, in the different countries of
Europe, and especially in our own country. Why had God ceased to speak to, and
commune with, His people as of yore?
1. Well, in the first place, there was no prophet; there was no man
to act as a go-between. There was no prophet who could communicate God’s
message to His people. It was a lack of men with the prophetic gift. God always
speaks to His people through chosen witnesses, and when these chosen witnesses
are not forthcoming, God’s voice is silent. Old Eli was, indeed, a man of God,
but his utter failure to rule his own house discredited him. The channel of
communication was choked up in that quarter, simply owing to the weakness and
imbecility of the man of God. Before God can communicate with the world there
must be a chosen vessel. The vessel itself must be filled first before the
world can receive the messages of God. What we need just now is a man who is
intellectually head and shoulders above his fellows, and who would act as a
great leader of men. We are in a kind of backwater as regards the possession of
men of commanding intellect and personality just now; but I cannot help
thinking, nevertheless, that our greatest need of all is a mighty prophet of
God, a man with a message from the Lord, a man able to stir up the nation to
its very depth in spiritual things. Musical services are all very well, and I
enjoy them; but they are not our chief need. It is not a great singer that we
want, but it is a great prophet, a man full of the Holy Ghost and of power, who
will rouse the indifferent and the careless, and stir up the lukewarm and the
half-hearted, and make the religion of Christ a power in the land once again.
2. Again, there was no open vision because the people were not in a
proper mood to receive the vision. The soil was not congenial, so to speak, for
the growth of prophets. It was a time of deep spiritual dearth, a time in which
men and women were almost wholly engrossed in the material and the present. The
supply of prophets was just exactly equal to the demand, and that was--nil!
Prophesying in the sense of forth-telling--preaching--is not much in favour
just now. There is this incessant clamour for extremely short sermons, which is
not at all a healthy sign. “Why do not men go to church?” Why, because your
immature, unsubstantial, perfunctory ten minutes’ discourse, which you falsely
call a sermon, has driven them out, for, wherever the sermon is a real thing,
manfully grappling with great life problems, there the men do congregate, and
there they will continue to congregate, for there they receive a message from
God. “And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open
vision.”
3. But, again, I am glad to be able to observe that this time of
depression and lassitude and spiritual famine was not continuous and permanent.
God never wholly deserts His people. Again He sends His prophets to speck to
them and to reveal precious truths to them. Ah, and it is ever so. It is always
when the fortune of the church is at its lowest that God sends His servants,
the prophets, to rouse it and to cleanse it. It was in the darkest days of the
Papacy, when Alexander Borgia sat on the throne of St. Peter, that Savonarola
made his appearance. It was when the sale of indulgences had become a scandal
and a menace to the very existence of religion and of the church that Luther
came, and with his mighty voice initiated the Reformation. And it was in the
dark and materialistic days of the eighteenth century, when our own beloved
church was dying of apathy and “respectability” that Wesley and Whitefield and
the leaders of the evangelical revival came, and set in motion that mighty wave
of spiritual fervour and enthusiasm which has not wholly spent its force yet.
And mark you! All these mighty revolutions, and revivals, and reformations have
been brought about by the power of prophesying--by the foolishness of
preaching. It is to preaching that even the Oxford Movement owes its origin and
vitality. It was Keble’s sermon on “National Apostasy,” according to all
reliable testimony, that gave that movement its birth. And it is by preaching
that the next great spiritual awakening is to be brought about. Meantime, our
duty is plain. We must pray God to speed the time of this awakening, to speed
the time when this terrible spiritual stagnation is at an end. (R. Jones.)
There was no open
vision.--
Times without vision
I. There are times
of open vision. This phrase has been a difficulty to interpreters, It has been
explained as referring to the times in earlier Jewish history when God appeared
in the pillars of cloud and fire, and by angelic ministry. It has also been
explained as referring to the opera and authoritative promulgation of Divine
truth. It has been noticed as a feature of human history that it divides into
alternate periods marked by the possession and the lack of spiritual insight.
There are times of open vision. Heaven, then, is near to men. They are
sensitive to spiritual impressions. They are inclined to attach spiritual
meanings to material things. The gift of vision is diffused. The things that
are unseen and eternal appear. These are periods of religious activity and
progress. The happy age following the conquest under Joshua was a time of open
vision. The nation had enjoyed the heavenly gift. The present century, in
contrast with the past, is a period of vision. It is a characteristic of this
age that the supernatural is looked for and readily believed. With all our vast
material progress, we have made a spiritual advance vet greater. It has been a
period of delusions, so ready have men been to listen to all voices. But it has
also been an age of faith. Would that we might be spared its dreary contrast.
II. There are times
without open vision--when heaven is far away, when men have faith only in what
they see and handle. The eighteenth was such a century. Science and philosophy
made marvellous advances; but they were atheistic. The light of the Puritan
century had faded out of the sky; or the eye of the new generation could not
receive its illumination. Men questioned, derided, triumphed over religion Then
was the deification of the worldly spirit. The church was invaded. The clergy
became unspiritual. With the loss of vision, truth is lost. This is especially
true of the stern truths--our accountability to God, the guilt and doom of sin,
the fixed and narrow limits of probation, the final judgment, and the eternity
of its awards. In such an age there is no fear of God before men’s eyes. The
picture of the times of Samuel, in the account of the wickedness of Eli’s sons,
is appalling.
III. There is no
time without the Word of the Lord. Though the vision is at times withholden,
God is always with us in his word. Why the vision is withdrawn we may not be
able to explain. God has a purpose, It is sufficient that he still speaks.
Samuel represented a renewed and more extensive dispensation of the word. The
spoken word, like the written, has never been lost. Visions might be
interrupted, but not the continuity of revelation. It has never ceased.
IV. The word
requires a human ear. Eli’s sons wanted the ear that hears God’s voice. The
hearing of Eli, like his sight, was dim; Samuel had a sensitive ear. “The Lord
revealed himself to Samuel.” “‘Literally,’ says Stanley, ‘the Lord uncovered
the ear’--a touching and significant figure taken from the manner in which the
possessor of a secret moves back the long hair of his friend and whispers into
the ear thus laid bare the word that no one else may hear.”
V. The Word of God
requires human lips to speak it. Samuel has received the message. He must
deliver it to Eli. (Monday Club Sermons.)
Verses 2-14
And it came to pass at that time, when Eli was laid down in his
place.
The character of Eli
Eli and Samuel.
1. They are contrasted in point of years: for the one is a boy, the
other a grey-headed old man; and if it were for only this, the chapter would be
one of deep interest. For it is interesting always to see a friendship between
the old and the young. It is striking to see the aged one retaining so much of
freshness and simplicity as not to repel the sympathies of boyhood. It is
surprising to see the younger one so advanced and thoughtful, as not to find
dull the society of one who has outlived excitability and passion.
2. They are contrasted again in point of office Both are judges of
Israel. But Eli is a judge rendering up his trust, and closing his public
career. Samuel is a judge entering upon his office. The venerable judge of
forty years is sentenced by the judge elect.
3. Still more striking is the contrast in point of character. Here
the difference of inferiority is on the wrong side. It is the young who is
counselling, supporting, admonishing the old
4. Once more, we have here the contrast between sludge by office and
a judge by Divine call. It is wise after an earthly sort to have an appointed
succession. Hereditary judges, hereditary nobles, hereditary sovereigns:
without them human life would run into inextricable confusion. Nevertheless,
such earthly arrangements only represent the heavenly order. The Divine order
of Government is the rule of the Wise and Good. From time to time, one who has
qualifications direct from God is made, in Scripture, to stand side by side
with one who has his qualifications only from office or earthly appointment;
and then the contrast is marvellous indeed. And thus by the side of Eli, the
judge by office, stands Samuel, the judge by Divine call: qualified by wisdom,
insight, will, resting on obedience, to guide and judge God’s people Israel.
Very instructive are the contrasts of this chapter.
I. Eli’s
character.
II. Eli’s doom.
Eli’s character has two sides; we will take the bright side first. The first
point remarkable in him is the absence of envy. Eli furthers Samuel’s
advancement, and assists it to his own detriment. God’s priest and God’s judge,
to whom so fitly as to him could God send a message? But, another is preferred:
the inspiration comes to Samuel, and Eli is superseded and disgraced. God’s
message for all Israel comes to a boy: to one who had been Eli’s pupil, to one
beneath him, who had performed for him servile offices. This was the bitter cup
put into his hand to drink. And yet Eli assists him to attain this dignity. He
perceives that God has called the child. He does not say in petulance--“Then,
let this favoured child find out for himself all he has to do, I will leave him
to himself.” Consider how difficult this conduct of Eli’s was. Remember how
difficult it is to be surpassed by a younger brother, and bear it with temper.
It is hard to give information which we have collected with pains, but which we
cannot use, to another who can make use of it Where is the professional man,
secular or clerical, who will so speak of another of the same profession, while
struggling with him in honourable rivalry, or so assist him, as to ensure that
the brightest lustre shall shine upon what he really is? Whoever will ponder
these things will feel that Eli’s was no common act. It was easy for Eli to
have instructed anyone else how to approach God. But the difficulty was how to
instruct Samuel. Samuel alone, in all Israel, crossed his path. And yet Eli
stood the test. He was unswervingly just. He threw no petty hindrances in his
way.
2. Remark the absence of all priestly pretensions. Eli might with
ease have assumed the priestly tone. When Samuel came with his strange story
that he bad beard a voice calling to him in the dark, Eli might bare fixed upon
him a clear, cold unsympathising eye, and said, “This is excitement--mere
enthusiasm. I am the appointed channel of God’s communications; I am the priest
Hear the Church. Unordained, unanointed with priestly oil, a boy, a child, it
is presumption from you to pretend to communications from Jehovah! A layman has
no right to bear Voices; it is fanaticism.” On the other hand, Eli might have
given his own authoritative interpretation to Samuel, of that word of God which
he had heard. But suppose that interpretation had been wrong? Eli did neither
of these things. He sent Samuel to God. He taught him to inquire for himself
There are two sorts of men who exercise influence. The first are those who
perpetuate their own opinions, bequeath their own names, form a sect, gather a
party round them who speak their words, believe their belief Such men were the
ancient Rabbis. And of such men, in and out of the Church, we have abundance
now. It is the influence most aimed at and most loved The second class is
composed of those who stir up faith, conscience, thought, to do their own work.
Such men propagate not many views; but they propagate Life itself in inquiring
minds and earnest hearts. Now this is God’s real best work. Men do not think so
They like to be guided. They ask, what am I to think? and what am I to believe?
and what am I to feel? Save me the trouble of reflecting and the anguish of
inquiring. And this is the Ministry and its work--not to drill hearts, and
minds, and consciences, into right forms of thought and mental postures, but to
guide to the Living God who speaks. To bring the soul face to face with God,
and supersede ourselves, that is the work of the Christian ministry.
3. There was in Eli a resolve to know the whole truth. “What is the
thing that the Lord hath said unto thee? I pray thee hide it not from me: God
do so to thee, end more also, if thou hide any thing from me of all the things
that He said unto thee.” Eli asked in earnest to know the worst. It would be a
blessed thing to know what God thinks of us. But next best to this would be to
sea ourselves in the light in which we appear to others: other men’s opinion is
a mirror in which we learn to see ourselves. Therefore it is a blessing to have
a friend like Samuel, who can dare to tell us truth, judicious, candid, wise.
True friendship will not retail tormenting trifles; but what we want is one
friend at least, who will extenuate nothing, but with discretion tell the
worst, using unflinchingly the sharp knife which is to cut away the fault.
4. There was pious acquiescence in the declared Will of God. When
Samuel had told him every whit, Eli replied, “It is the Lord.” The highest
religion could say no more. Free from envy, free from priestcraft, earnest,
humbly submissive--that is the bright side of Eli’s character, and the side
least known or thought of. There is another side to Eli’s character. He was a wavering,
feeble, powerless man, with excellent intentions, but an utter want of will;
and if we look at it deeply, it is will that makes the difference between man
sod man; not knowledge, not opinions, not devoutness, not feeling, but
will--the power to be. Let us look at the causes of this feebleness. There are
apparently two
1. A recluse life--he lived in the temple. And such are the really
fatal men in the work of life, those who look out on human life from e
cloister, or who know nothing of men except through hooks. Doubtless there is a
danger in knowing too much of the world. But, beyond all comparison, of the two
extremes the worst is knowing too little of life.
2. That feebleness arose out of original temperament, in sentiment
Eli might be always trusted: in action he was forever false, because he was a
weak, vacillating man. Therefore his virtues were all of a negative character.
Let us look at the result of such a character
1. It had no influence. Eli was despised by his own sons He was not
respected by the nation.
2. It manifested incorrigibility. Eli was twice warned; once by a
prophet, once by Samuel. Both times he was warned in vain. There are persons
who go through life sinning and sorrowing--sorrowing and sinning. No experience
teaches them, Torrents of tears flow from their eyes. They are full of eloquent
regrets. But tears, heart breaks, repentance, warnings, are ell in vain. Where
they did wrong once, they do wrong again.
3. It resulted in misery to others. (F. W. Robertson, M. A.)
Verses 4-10
Then the Lord called Samuel: and he answered, Here am I.
The child Samuel
“Child” is not a precise equivalent for the Hebrew word so
rendered, which is considerably wider in meaning, and includes adolescence.
Samuel was probably a youth when called. He had been growing quietly in ago and
goodness, while Eli’s sons were growing in licentiousness. The two growths are
strikingly contrasted in the previous chapter, where, after each statement as
to their wickedness, a clause comes in telling how Samuel advanced in his
ministry before the Lord. His word was “precious,” which does not mean highly
valued, but seldom heard, because ears were too much clogged with earth, and
there was no prophetic “vision” open--that is, widely spread--because there
were few eyes purged to see it. A prophet was needed to arrest the growing
evil, and the needed prophet was in training. The best place for a young life
to dwell is the temple of God. “They that are planted in the house of the Lord”
will grow fair and straight, and be sheltered from distorting influences, and
from many a gnawing enemy that works havoc among the young shoots. A youth that
keeps austerely remote from the vileness of Eli’s sons will be saved from their
fate, and will receive messages from the ark as authentic as that which woke
Samuel. “The Lord called Samuel.” No magnificent apocalypse of divine glory
shone on the youth’s opening eyes. Simply his name was spoken in the tone of
one bespeaking his attention and about to give him commands. Whoever spoke knew
him, claimed authority over him, and had something for him to do. In a word,
the speaker was his master, and needed him. God often assimilates His call to
the voices with which we are familiar. A stage comes in every young life when
the sense of responsibility is wakened, when the thought of a vocation to
battle for the truth starts up. Samuel’s mistake tells a great deal, both as to
the nature of the voice he heard and as to his relations to Eli. Evidently he
had been accustomed to be roused from sleep, to attend to the old man whose
blindness would make him need kindly ministrations. As evidently, he had been
accustomed cheerfully to answer the call. His loving readiness to spring from
sleep and do whatever was needed, are seen in his running to Eli. No holier
office can be entrusted to youth than to care for helpless age; and even if the
dependent old man or woman has failings, as Eli had, which the younger hates, the
duty of service is still plain, and its blessedness will be the greater, But
Samuel’s mistake has another lesson; for we, too, may think that it is only Eli
speaking, when it is really God. There is something very pathetic and beautiful
in Eli’s quick and ungrudging recognition of God’s call to his young attendant.
He had had no such communications himself, but he knew them when they came to
others. Poor Eli had a bitter pill to swallow when he knew that the boy whom he
had trained as his attendant was elevated to the position of a prophet; but he
was not offended nor jealous. There is dignity and peace for the old when they
heartily acquiesce in the Divine choice of the young to carry his work a stage
farther. Samuel had no thought of anything extraordinary, and the explanation
of his slowness of apprehension is given in the statement that he “did not yet
know the Lord,” which can only mean that he had not received any Divine
communications; for absolute ignorance cannot be supposed in one who had
ministered to the Lord all his life. Youth should be slow to believe that its
impressions are divine messages. They must be tested well before they are
trusted as such. One test, though an imperfect one, is their persistency. When
some conviction of duty keeps returning again and again, and forcing us to hear
it, we should at least not dismiss it without careful consideration; for it may
be the voice of the patient God, who does not let our carelessness silence him.
“Thy servant heareth”--an open ear for God’s commands and revelations will
never be left empty. “Speak, Lord,” is a prayer; and it is never offered in
vain when it is accompanied, as Samuel’s was, by “For thy servant hears.” Such
a disposition is a prevailing reason with God. If we are ready to listen and
obey, He is more than ready to speak. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
The call of Samuel
I. The
circumstances of Samuel’s call.
1. When the state of the Church was in a very low ebb: The word of
prophecy was very precious at that time (1 Samuel 3:1), a prophet was very
rare then, and few or none appeared with open vision by name, though mention be
made in general of a prophet ( 6:8). And of a man of God before (1 Samuel 2:27).
2. At that time (1 Samuel 3:2) when the Lord had sent
the day before that Man of God mentioned (1 Samuel 2:27), with heavy tidings
to Eli, then the very next day God calls and sends Samuel with the same sad
message.
3. In that time of the natural day (1 Samuel 3:3), when the lamps of the
golden candlestick were not yet extinguished, which had been lighted the
evening before (Exodus 27:21; Leviticus 24:8, 2 Chronicles 13:11). So that this
was betimes in the morning, and before day that God called Samuel. The place
where, in the temple or tabernacle.
II. The substance
of this word of prophecy revealed to Samuel.
III. The gracious
carriage of this young prophet, when so high and honourable a preferment is put
upon him by the Lord.
1. His humility.
2. His modesty, His modesty most appeared, both in his doing the
former office of a doorkeeper (opening the doors in the morning), though he
were now called of God to be a prophet. And likewise he was not forward, but fearful
to reveal the Divine oracle to Eli, which yet he might not conceal (1 Samuel 3:15).
3. His faithfulness also here is manifest in not hiding anything (of
that which God had spoke to him) from his master Eli: He told him every whirl (1 Samuel 3:18). Though there was not
one drachm of comfort in the whole oracle.
IV. Eli’s reception
of this rigid revelation from God by Samuel. Eli was conscious to himself of
great guilt, both in his villainous sons, and in himself for indulging their
villany, his conscience was a sore conscience, but theirs were seared
consciences, and therefore could he presage no good from God; hereupon he
advises his pupil to hide nothing from him, but to tell his tutor all that God
had told him (1 Samuel 1:16-17). When Eli had
heard God’s severe sentence he calmly crieth, “It is the Lord, let him do what
seemeth him good” (1 Samuel 3:18), as if he had said
the Lord Jehovah hath a sovereign absolute power over all the sons and
daughters of men, and may dispose of me and mine, and of all created beings
according to his good pleasure, unto which I freely submit, well knowing there
be better things in God’s will than in my own. (C. Ness.)
Verse 7
Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, neither was the word of the
Lord yet revealed unto him.
Early religious impressions
A study of this story will show parents and teachers much which
ought to be supremely helpful in their dealings with those young persons who
come under their care.
I. There is,
first, the period of conscientious routine. For a while every child born of
Christian parents, and trained as Samuel was, will follow the traditions his
father and mother have passed on down to him in course of education. What is it
possible for any child now to do, as a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, under
the family rule? Young people can be taught to pray, to take the care of some
practical schemes of usefulness, to study the Word of God diligently, to
contribute money to religious causes, to become interested in the poor, to
speak words of counsel and encouragement and warning to such as need direction
or assistance. The grand old moralities are always within their reach; fidelities
at school, courtesies to the aged consideration for the weak, keeping the
Sabbath, aiding in household cares, and full obedience to all God’s commands.
How far is this truly religious? Children differ extremely. Some of them become
spiritual Christians quite early; some never know the date of any experience
that might be considered regeneration; some are alert, imaginative, poetic,
sensitive; others are slow, heavy, and run to rigid moralities with supreme
delight and conscientious satisfaction. It is always right to do right, and God
loves a virtuous, correct life. Of this we can be comfortably certain. As to
the spiritual condition of Samuel at this period of his career, there is found
one verse in the record which has given some trouble: “Now Samuel did not yet
know the Lord, neither was the word of the Lord yet revealed unto him.”
Evidently there passed a vivid and permanent change over this boy’s heart and
history in that night’s experience: God called him.
II. Awakened
restlessness in children. There is a period in the history of almost every one
who, reared in a Christian land, has been more or less directly under the
pressure of the truth, in which he really faces the great question of his
relation to God. And the effort is often an earnest one and is directed towards
a positive decision concerning a religious life. This period you may recognise
in yourself, or detect in others, almost always by certain unmistakable signs.
There will be outward manifestations of solicitude which will show how seriously
the soul contemplates its own experience. Skill, however, and especially
patience, will be needed to understand these revelations of inward struggle.
They often partake of the nature of strategy, and press their advance in the
line of a precise contradiction. Then they will have to be read, like Hebrew
syllables, from right to left. Every individual of us, in these communities lit
with truth, comes one day to see that his path to heaven is unlike that of any
other person, and henceforth he must journey on alone. That thought is
revolutionary. But the thing to be remembered is this: “And Eli perceived that
the Lord had called the child.” Men and women may forget this, and grow as
sorrowfully “amazed” as was Mary when she rebuked Jesus for not paying more
attention to her feelings. They ought to recollect those calm words: “Wist ye
not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (C. S. Robinson, D. D.)
Verse 8
Eli perceived that the Lord had called the child.
Inward convictions
I. We may define a
call, as usually understood, to be an inward conviction of the soul that such
and such is the will of God concerning it, accompanied with an irresistible
desire to obey the conviction. In such cases a test is required. There is
perhaps no extent of self-deception to which ah individual may not be led who
concentrates the whole of his thoughts and meditations upon the internal
emotions of which he is sensible. Hence the necessity of erecting a tribunal
without, to which may be referred the judgment of the inward conviction, and by
which we may see whether the voice which is abroad in our hearts, stirring and
moving, harmonises with the voice of parents and brethren and priest, that so
we may, with Eli, perceive of a surety whether the Lord hath called His child.
II. There is
another criterion by which men might go far to ascertain the nature of those
internal sensations of which they speak, namely, the criterion of outward
circumstances. In order to test feeling, we want something removed as far as
possible from what is exciting. In the majority of cases it may be fairly
assumed that what we are is what God would have us be; the station of life in
which we find ourselves is that which He would have us fill. When, therefore,
we seem to be Divinely led to an extraordinary course of conduct, it is no vain
prudence which bids us inquire whether outward circumstances tend to encourage
or dissuade us. (Bishop Woodford.)
God’s call to the child
We can recall a day of spring which began with a clear, bright
morning, bathed in sunshine and song, and giving every promise of fair and
steady weather. But ere noon the clouds gathered and grey shrouds covered all
the blue and gold of the sky. And then the rain came and drenched well-nigh to
drowning our last hope of a fair evening. But just as the sun was setting, the
veil of cloud lifted in the west, and a sudden gleam of glory shot across the
world before all was dark and drear again. So it was with the day of Eli’s
life. Fair promise of an early manhood was belied by the failure of later
years, and we welcome with joy, which yet has its pang of regret, this one
gleam of light that shows up in the sad eventide of an old man’s broken day.
Surely, without unduly spiritualising this simple little incident, we can see
in it a parable of history. First of all, Hannah’s loan of her boy to the Lord
was but the outcome of the instinct of Judaism. From the very first days of the
Mosaic dispensation, the children, and particularly the first-born, were
dedicated to the Lord. This recognition of the claim of God on the child is,
moreover, not one of the merely fugitive elements of Judaism. Much of that
great system of religion has passed away--it has been superseded by Christ’s
more perfect system. All through the ages the Lord has called the children with
a gentle voice that has sounded in the shrine of the child’s own heart--surely
the purest and sweetest tabernacle that God can inhabit. One thing is made very
clear to us as we study the Bible in its attitude to the child, and that is
that child life is of untold value in the sight of God. The position of the
child in Judaism was in striking contrast to that occupied by children in the
religions of the surrounding nations and of later ages. We can gauge pretty
accurately the value put upon child life in Egypt by Pharaoh’s edict, from the
results of which Moses was so strangely preserved. Centuries later, the King of
Edom sacrificed his son “for a burnt offering upon the wall.” Thus men sought
to propitiate their duties by offering “the fruit of their bodies for the sin
of their souls.” But, looking in the most favourable light at this sacrifice of
children--and perhaps Tennyson’s “Victim” gives us the most generous
interpretation, is it not a dreadful misinterpretation of the call of Jehovah
to the children? It is not their sacrifice at the hands of others that He
desires, but the offering of the living sacrifice of their own hearts and
service at their own hands. Children have too often been made the vicarious
sufferers for others in cases where the vicarious principle does not apply.
When we come to more recent times we find that even the value of a sacrifice is
denied to child life. The Roman father was allowed to refuse to accept as his
charge any child born to him, if he thought it physically defective or even
numerically superfluous. If on its being presented to him he refused to take it
in his arms, it was forthwith put out of the way. In Greece it was much the
same. The caves beneath Mount Taygetus were full of the bodies of infants that
had been exposed by parents, who were fully at liberty to repudiate the duties
of parentage. Think for a moment of the swarming crowds of children forever
playing in our streets. “The shout of happy children at their play” sounds
poetic until we see the class to whom the words refer most largely, and then we
wonder if they are happy. You who live in your comfortable homes, and snugly
tuck your own bairns up in their warm, cosy beds at seven or eight o’clock, and
would not think of allowing them out after dark, what think you of the little
ones who answer your call from your doorstep five minutes later for the “Latest
Edition?” And yet their souls and bodies are as important in God’s sight as the
souls and bodies of your own more favoured pets. Truly, the Eli of today still
fails to perceive that the Lord has called the child. Our Factory Acts have
vastly improved the whole matter of child labour. I remember a friend of mine
in a colliery district in the North of England telling me how he was carried at
the age of six (for he was too much afraid of the dark above ground to go
alone) to the mouth of the coal pit in the early morning, and then, in the
company of two or three other babies of the same age, he went down, clown to
the dark and noisome galleries below to act as putters--that is, to open and
shut the wooden doors for the trucks that passed so close to them that they
dared not breathe while they passed. That is done away. Recent Temperance
legislation has abolished much of the abuse connected with the serving of
children with drink. But much still remains to be done before Christian England
can shake off the reproach of Eli that he was so slow to perceive that the Lord
had called the child The modern problem of Hooliganism is largely the outcome
of dereliction of duty in this matter. We find in studying the Gospel that
Jesus gives a prominent place to the child. Christ has a message for the child.
Long centuries of the Christian era let that call and the child’s wistful
enquiry as to its meaning go alike almost unheeded. It is one of the chief
glories of the Evangelical Revival that its leaders “perceived that the Lord
had called the child.” And one of the earliest outcomes of the great Methodist
awakening of the religious life of England was the establishment of Sunday
Schools. The ideal of the Christian Church as set before her by her Master and
Lord will never be attained until she has thoroughly grasped as a principle,
and applied in practice, our Lord’s teaching regarding the child. This is
twofold--subjective and objective. The subjective aspect of His teaching is
that in which the child is made by Him a model in character building. “Except
ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of
Heaven.” The objective aspect of His teaching is given us in the words,
“Whosoever receiveth one of such little children in My name, receiveth Me; and
whosoever receiveth Me, receiveth not Me, but Him that sent Me.” (G. Waddy
Polkinghorne.)
Verse 10
Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.
The pupil of God
I. As the auditor
of God. “The Lord came and stood.” The Great Father speaks to man in nature, in
history, in moral reason, as well as in special revelations. This He does as in
the case of Samuel.
1. Frequently.
2. Personally. Samuel’s name was mentioned. God speaks to man, not in
the mass, but in the individual.
3. Earnestly. Samuel’s name is repeated, “Samuel, Samuel,” indicating
earnestness. God is earnest in His communications with men. “Doth not Wisdom
cry? and Understanding put forth her voice?” Alas! though all men are
“auditors,” all men are not “earnest” listeners. We have humanity presented
here--
II. As the pupil of
God. “Samuel answered, Speak; for Thy servant heareth.” Samuel’s conduct
suggests three things--
1. He became a pupil after having heard the Divine voice. The voice
had spoken to him thrice before, but it is only now he has heard it as the
voice of God. Before he thought it was the voice of Eli--the mere voice of a
man. No man will ever become a pupil of God until he hears His voice as His
voice. It is God’s voice that rouses men to spiritual study.
2. He heard the Divine voice after having put himself in a right
posture.
3. Having heard the Divine voice, he craved for further
communications. “Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.” The man who really
takes in one word from God, craves for another. God’s word, really taken into
the soul, does two things,
Here
are the relations which we all ought to sustain to God--auditors and
pupils--listeners and students. (Homilist.)
The reality of revelation and the preparation for receiving it
Why did the Lord call Samuel four times before He told him what He
had to tell him?
1. The plan which God adopted was well calculated to convince both
Eli and Samuel that the call was no delusion. When God makes any important
revelation, He always gives to the people concerned some means of assuring
themselves that it is indeed He who is speaking. He takes care there shall be
no reasonable ground for saying that the revelation is a mistake, a fancy, a
delusion.
2. The call of Samuel would have failed in one of its objects, if Eli
had not been convinced that it was from God. Eli was to be censured by it. The
call of Samuel was therefore the first step towards superseding Eli, and
putting another and more faithful person in his room. It was absolutely
necessary therefore that Eli should be assured that, Samuel’s call was from
God, and that it was the beginning of the fulfilment of God’s threatenings
against himself. And how could this be done more forcibly or more naturally
than by allowing Samuel to mistake God’s voice for Eli’s, end bringing him to
Eli’s bedside in unsuspicious simplicity three times in the course of the
night?
3. There was this great object in the delaying of the message
communicated to Samuel, until he had been three times called by name,--that he
was duly prepared to receive the message. If God had given him the message on
the first occasion of calling him, Samuel might not have known what to make of
a thing so utterly new and strange to him. (Dean Goulburn.)
Voices of God
Samuel was called to be a prophet of God in a great crisis of
Jewish history His appearance was quieter and less dramatic than those of Moses
and Elijah, but it was almost as momentous.
1. The commonwealth established by Moses came to an end with the weak
administration of Eli. The pure theocracy of the government was superseded.
2. The religious revolution was equally decisive and momentous. The
religious supremacy of the priest was superseded by that of the prophet. No
change could be more momentous in its religious influence. The function of the
prophet differs fundamentally from that of the priest, and appeals to entirely
different feelings. Samuel was the first of the order of the prophets. Hence
the call of Samuel was of exceptional significance and importance. Samuel was
clearly one of those great men of manifold gifts and functions whom God raises
up in great crises and for great services. He was not, like Moses, the founder
of the economy, nor, like Elijah, its restorer. But he was its preserver
through a revolution that had become inevitable.
I. Life is full of
voices of God, only we lack the spiritual faculty which discerns them--The
responsibility of life lies in listening for Divine voices, and in the response
to them that we give. We may cultivate the spiritual faculty that hears God’s
call, or we may make it obtuse. We may cherish God’s call, or we may silence
it; obey it, or rebel against it.
1. When we think of God’s voice, we English Protestants probably
think first and most spontaneously of God’s revelation of His will in the
Bible. Be the Bible whence it may, it is the highest spiritual authority we
possess. It reveals God as nothing else does. More distinctly, unequivocally,
and emphatically than through any other medium, God appeals to us by it. The
history of Christianity is mainly a history of the impressions and
transformations which the teachings of the Bible have produced upon men.
2. There are again voices of God’s providence, which, if we have
docile hearts, if we listen for the “voice behind us,” and watch for the
guidance of God’s eye, we shall not fail to recognise.
3. The instincts and yearnings of our own spiritual nature, again,
are an unmistakable voice of God. Every faculty has its function, every
yearning its satisfaction. What then is the satisfaction provided for my
religious soul? Christianity loudly and eagerly replies, God, and Christ, and
salvation, and heaven. This voice of God within tells us that we are more than
the brutes that perish, that we are more than mere intellectual machines. A man
has to do gross violence and outrage to his own nature, debauch it by sensual
excesses, reason it down by hard logic, before he can disable or overpower its
spiritual elements. Nay, when he has done his utmost, he has not destroyed, he
has only over-borne them. Out of the very constitution of our nature a still
small voice of God testifies to our spiritual and immortal being.
4. And to this religious nature God speaks by the motions and
monitions of His Holy Spirit; awakening solicitudes, exciting desires, touching
impulses. These we may either cherish or quench.
5. In moments of intellectual perplexity, for example, when
speculative reason has baffled herself in trying to think out the mysteries of
being and of God--amid this tempest and earthquake of intellectual strife the
still small voice of the religious soul is heard--God’s voice within us. So
that the spiritual soul itself disallows the reasonings that would deny it.
6. In quieter and more thoughtful moods of life we hear the voice of
God. In solitary ways, in quiet evening hours, in the sequestered chamber of
sickness.
7. God has voices that reach us in crowds; distinct, perhaps loud,
above every din of business, or Glamour of strife, or song of revelry.
8. In moments of temptation, even, God’s voice finds a tongue. In
some lingering power of conscience, in some sensitive remnants of virtue, in
some angel memories of a pious home and an innocent heart.
9. In times of sorrow God’s voice comes to us, summoning us to faith
in His rule, His purpose, His presence, and to patience and acquiescence in the
sacrifice demanded of us.
10. Most terrible of all is it when the first voice of God that we
seriously listen to is a sentence of doom. “I will judge thine house for the
iniquity which thou knowest.” Such voices of God have come to men. Our lives
are full of voices of God, if we would but listen to them. It is not God’s
silence, it is our deaf ear that hinders every place from being eloquent with
Divine meanings.
11. Again, at what unlikely times and in what unlikely places God may
speak to us. Not always in churches, or in formal acts of worship, or on
Sabbath days.
12. To what unlikely persons God’s call comes. The lesson is not an
easy one for the Church to learn. God will choose His own instruments.
II. How then do we
respond to God’s call?--Is not Samuel’s answer, “Speak, Lord, Thy servant
heareth,” in the childlike simplicity, faith, and submissiveness of it, a most
beautiful and perfect type of what our answer should be? He did not demur or
remonstrate, as even Moses did when sent to Pharaoh. Humility is seen as much
in the implicit acceptance of a great mission as in apologetic excuses for not
accepting it. True fidelity of service is simply to do whatever may seem to be
duty. The responsibility is with him who calls us. How variously men respond to
God’s call! Even in those who obey it, what, gradations of faith and
submissiveness there are! Men may deal with God’s call so insincerely that they
may destroy their very power of recognising it, and come to confound it with
mere human suggestion. Or else, recognising it to be such, they parley with it,
pervert its meaning, resist it, silence it. How God speaks to individual souls!
Our neighbours cannot hear His voice to us. Eli did not hear the call to
Samuel. It is addressed only to our personal consciousness, He who sits by my
side does not hear it. Sometimes we ourselves fail to recognise it at first.
Samuel thought it the voice of Eli, as we may think it the mere word of a
preacher. It may not be even a message, but only a call; “Samuel, Samuel;”
vague and inciting. Upon our response to it, our inquisitiveness and our
docility, it depends whether more shall be revealed to us. Oh, these voices of
God, how they fill our life and make it solemn and great! What forms they take!
What things they say! Upon our capability and willingness to hear Him our
spiritual life depends. So to dull and deaden our souls by evasions and evil
passions, so that it becomes incapable of discerning voices of God, is to
destroy its finer spiritual sense, to degrade and carnalise it. Of all the
voices of human life none are so great and inspiring as voices of God. Nay,
even grant them illusions,--the mere imaginations of spiritual feeling,--they
are dreams of noble and inspiring things. For practical uses of life it is
better to be led by imaginary voices to noble virtue, Divine sympathies, and
immortal aspirations, than to be led by real voices to carnal indulgences. It
was because Samuel so responded, that He who thus spake to the child, feeding
the morning lamp of his life with the oil of piety and gladness, continued to
speak to the man through all his after years, to be with him in every after
experience, to preserve him in every after temptation and peril; very largely,
no doubt, by the very memories and spiritual forces of his childhood.
III. The religious
importance of the passive or receptive side of our spiritual life.--There is an
active side of spiritual life which exerts power, and there is a passive side
that receives it; just as the body receives food for its nourishment, and puts
forth energy as the result of it. I kneel down to pray; I put my soul into a
receptive attitude: I open my heart to spiritual influences; I surrender myself
to quiet musings; I cherish thoughts about Divine things; I nurture spiritual
affections; I solicit into strength and fruitfulness the seeds of things that I
have received. This is the passive side of my spiritual life. These are the
vital processes that make me a spiritual man, holy, devout, loving. But I also
go forth to do things; to teach, to work, to serve, to speak to others the
thought that is in me, to proffer to others the help that love prompts, to
embody before others the holy principles and feelings that have been generated
within me. This is the active side of my spiritual life. The one is God working
within me, filling me with His presence and love; the other is my working for
God, filling the earth with the godliness that I have realised, ministering the
grace I have received. Every true life realises both. If either be wanting,
life is impossible; if either be in excess, life is maimed. The religious
history of the world is full of instances of mere zeal and self-will, working,
even in God’s service, extremest evil. The Church needs Christian workers,
consecrated lives, vigorous hands; “the harvest is plenteous, but the labourers
are few.” In a thousand forms evil has to be encountered and counteracted. It
is a great grace for a man to be willing to serve God in any way, for him to be
converted from the service of the devil to the service of Christ. It is an
eventful crisis in a man’s history when he first submits himself to Christ. But
it is not all at once that he subordinates to Christ all his feelings and
purposes. His excited zeal would fain be doing. He has no conception that is
not doing. He can scarcely be kept from abandoning business altogether. He does
not wait to hear God speak. He takes for granted that God has only one thing to
say to him--to bid him throw himself into the thickest of the fight. Young life
is characteristically energetic. Its strength is not to sit still. Different
states of society, different ages of the Church, have different characteristics
and perils. Our fathers developed the thoughtful, reflective side of the
Christian life. We fill the world with our Christian agencies, and our life
with strenuous endeavours. Nor may we say that too much is done: the world
needs it all. But perhaps we suffer in the completeness of our spiritual life.
The balance inclines unduly. Are we not too busy for thoughtfulness--almost for
quiet communion with God. There is therefore a sense in which we need to
preach, not so much activity as the lessening of it. Our life runs to leaf. How
much is said in Scripture about this devotional side of spiritual life, its
aspect towards God, its vital union with Christ, its dependence upon Him! “As I
live by the Father, so ye also shall live by Me.” This, then, is the conclusion
of the whole matter--that in the activities of our zeal we do not forget its
inspirations in God; that we keep open the heavenward gates of our souls; that
while with one hand we do battle with evil, or build the temple of God, with
the other we clasp the cross. The more entire our spirit of dependence, the
more effective the work we do. Our greatest sanctities, our greatest elevations
of thought and feeling, our greatest impulses, come from our communion with
God. The nearer to Him we live, the fuller we shall be of His light and
goodness and love. The men who have done the most for God are men who have
stood in Samuel’s attitude, and said with Samuel’s submissiveness, “Speak,
Lord, Thy servant heareth.” (H. Allen, D. D.)
Childhood a prophecy
I. As expressing
the cry of the human heart for a revelation of the Divine.--Sooner or later
that cry will be heard in us all. The thirst for happiness, the desire for
certainty, the craving for fuller life, the thinker’s search for uniting
general ideas, are all longings for God. This cry cannot be satisfied by nature
and its teaching, or by the voice of authority, or tradition, or reason, or the
church.
1. We are sinful beings. How shall we know that we are personally
forgiven and accepted, unless the voice of God speak in us?
2. We are solitary beings. We need a Divine Presence. How know that
Presence is with us unless God’s voice speak in us?
3. We are students of truth. How shall we be convinced that Christ is
Divine, and ever the Leader and King of men, unless the voice of His spirit in
us attest His claims?
4. We are undeveloped beings. The highest and best energies of the
soul only utter themselves as God’s voice calls them into consciousness, and
service, and cooperation.
5. We are responsible beings.
6. We are immortal. In life, in death, in duty, in joy, our hearts
cry, “Speak, Lord.” “Be not silent unto me.”
II. God answers
this cry, but in an unexpected manner.--We settle upon persons, places, times,
and modes for God to speak. He upsets the folly of our prejudgments.
1. Samuel’s cry is the result of the Divine voice to him first.
2. God calls the child, not Eli. He speaks to life, not years. The
child has a right to hear God. He speaks ever to the childlike.
3. He calls the child in the night. Samuel must go into the solemn
night, alone to hear the voice. How brave and fearless is the child-heart.
4. He calls him by a human voice. He cannot tell it from Eli’s. There
are tones of love, and sorrow, and tenderness in it. So with Christ, the form
of the voice is human, its substance is Divine.
5. He calls the child to receive the message of law and judgment. A
good discipline to begin with. Law, stern and inflexible, yet beneficent,
pervades love. Duty first, then privilege and comfort.
6. Eli has to complete the attitude of Samuel to God. The best part
of Eli appears here--his unselfishness, his sympathy with Samuel. This is the
use of all teachers, churches; not to demand our listening to them, but to send
us to solitary converse with God. Often the representative of an outgoing
school of thought has denied to the new voices the Divinity of which they are
full. Eli was better.
III. The Divine
voice is audible only to lowly obedience. (J. Matthews.)
God’s call to Samuel
I. The sleep.--You
may think of Samuel as now a boy about twelve years of age. The night was far
advanced. The golden candlestick with its seven lamps, in the Holy Place, had
not yet gone out, as it usually did about the time when the morning began to
dawn. Its light shone on all the sacred things. That night God was present in a
special manner. He was near to Samuel. But to Samuel it was as if none of these
things had been; he was all unconscious of them--for he was asleep. There is,
1. The Sleep of Carelessness.--Some mothers tell me about their boys,
that they are not bad-hearted, and that what they have to complain of, is not
so much want of heart, as want of thought. They never seem to think. And the
consequence is, everything goes wrong. I cannot tell how bad, how dangerous
that is, what damage it has done--want of thought. Though their eyes are open,
their minds are asleep. It is the sleep of carelessness. Some young people go
to church who never listen to what is said--who never hear what is said. I very
much fear there are many young people who never think about God, or the soul,
or their pressing danger, or the way of salvation.
2. There is what I might call the Sleep of Sin. This is in some
respects worse than the other. At first, conscience is uncomfortable, uneasy,
and they think they will never do the wrong thing again. But when the sin is
repeated time after time, conscience becomes quiet, the heart gets hard, and at
length there is sound sleep, so that nothing frightens, nothing alarms.
3. There is the Sleep of Security. Security does not mean safety. It
means the sense of supposed safety, and is sometimes the most dangerous state
of all.
II. God’s awakening
call.--There are various ways of awaking sleeping people. Sometimes a call will
do it; sometimes a gentle tap at the door; sometimes a loud knock.
1. There is God’s call in the Word. This is what most, and most
effectually, he uses. Strange and unlikely messages have proved words of
awakening to some, rousing the sleeper thoroughly out of his slumbers. Often it
is the simple story of Jesus’ love--His coming and dying for sinners.
2. There is God’s call in Providence.
III. The lying down
again.--In Samuel’s case, this was all right and good, he was an unusually
dutiful child. Whenever he was called, up he sprang, and that again and again.
In the case of most the lying down again is fatal. The second sleep is likely
to be sounder than the first, and to lie down again, when once awakened, is of
all things the most foolish. Sometimes, when God awakens, and there is much
anxiety and fear--a desire to be saved, and a willingness to do anything to get
salvation. We get quit of our anxiety and fear, and try to throw off our good
impressions, and are ashamed to have been so much concerned. Friends often say
to us, “Go, lie down again:” not that they would do us any harm, but, like Eli
at first, they do not know that the voice that is calling us is the voice of
God. Satan always says, “Go, lie down again;” for he does not wish us to be
saved. And many yield to the temptation.
IV. God’s call
recognised and answered.--All the three earlier times, “Samuel did not yet know
the Lord.” (J. H. Wilson.)
Vocation
The call to Samuel is an extreme and vivid instance of a truth of
which the Bible is full; the truth that we are all called of God to our several
places and occasions of action or of passion, of working or of waiting in the
world; in a word, that we all have a vocation. We hardly need the Bible to tell
us this, for it is one of the simplest truths of natural religion. The
evidences of providential purpose in the world have been criticised in every
age. But they have proved too strong to be upset by criticism, and still remain
as they have ever been, among our most necessary forms of thought. And as man
is the climax of the visible creation, we naturally expect the purpose which is
so abundantly visible elsewhere, to obtain also in the life of man. He too must
have a purpose, and to be created for a purpose is, in the case of a free
being, to be called to its fulfilment. The New Testament takes up and
intensifies this thought; addressing Christians as “the called of Jesus
Christ,” “called to be saints,” “called according to God’s purpose,” “called
unto the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord,” “called out of the
darkness,” “called to liberty.” Now it hardly needs saying that, for all its
naturalness and scriptural authority, we are too apt to forget this thought.
Let us consider the details of the call of Samuel to his life’s work.
Circumstances, as we say, but circumstances of which a mother’s prayer was
part, determine the sphere in which that work is to be done. “The child did
minister unto the Lord before Eli the priest.” Then comes the Divine voice
calling him by name; calling him out of the many possibilities of an office
which he shared with such men as Eli’s sons, to his own especial and high
prophetic destiny. We are not all called to be prophets, but we are called, in
our varying ways, to minister to the Lord; and we may learn from this typical
history how to recognise and answer our call. We are apt to lead aimless lives,
and shift the blame of them on to our circumstances; but circumstances, to a
believer in God, are providential, and meant to determine and not to divert our
aim. Parents’ wishes, constitutional temperament, intellect, rank, wealth,
poverty, obscurity, the books we read, the friends we form, family claims, or unexpected
opportunities in the opening days of life--these are the things that decide for
us the main outlines of our career. And it is very easy to imagine that they
are all happy or unhappy accidents, importing at the very outset a character of
chance into all that we do. But such a view is only born of the shallow
philosophy that sees nothing in the universe but a chaos of shifting sand. And
it is in the presence of such feeling that a belief in vocation comes to our
help. For that belief gives us a clue to the right interpretation of our
circumstances, and leads us to ponder over them with prayer. As we do so we are
no longer content to drift idly before them, or to turn and go away in a rage
because we are not bidden to do some great thing. But external circumstances
need for their interpretation the inner guidance of the voice of God; and to
hear that voice we must be listening with the obedient expectation in which
Samuel said, “Speak; for Thy servant heareth.” It is too readily assumed that
such interior calls come only to the favoured few who are predestined to
exceptional careers. They are ways in which God, the Holy Ghost, chooses the
weak things of the world to confound the wise; flashing on the mind in an
instant, through some chance thought, or eight, or sound, the conviction of His
nearness, and the message of His will. But real as these inner intimations of
the Divine purpose often are, they need to be received with care. And here
again the case of Samuel comes before us. The voice which called him was
interpreted by Eli. “Eli perceived that the Lord had called the child.” And all
our secret inspirations need a similar process of testing, in the light of our
own experience or that of others. What, then, is a divine vocation? It is a
call from the world, in its evil sense, to God. These are its two essential
characteristics. First, detachment,, or sacrifice. When the rich young man was
bidden to sell all that he had and give to the poor, the involved sacrifice was
obvious. But though less obvious, the sacrifice need not be less real in the
ease of those whose undoubted vocation is to accept the responsibility of a
great inheritance. Secondly, attachment. Vocation is a call to God, and not
merely a call to labour. It is a common mistake to regard our work as leading
us to God, rather than God as leading us to our work. But the latter is the
true order of vocation. God calls us to himself, and then sends us to labour in
His vineyard. If we sever our moral life from its spiritual root--its root is
the Father of Spirits--and confine our thoughts to any kind of merely moral
practice, however noble, we are liable by degrees to be too absorbed in our
work, to over-estimate its importance and our own importance as its agents, to
be unduly discouraged by failure or sudden avocation. Meanwhile, our work
itself will lack the note of perfectness which spirituality alone can give, and
be either outwardly ungracious or inwardly unreal. Whereas if we regard
morality as a function of the spiritual life, and conduct as the consequence
and not the cause of character, the natural and necessary outcome and
expression of the inner man, all things will fall into their proper place For
the work which flows instinctively from character is not only more perfect in
kind; but there is, in reality, more of it. It has a wider and more varied
scope. In fact, it is incessant; since a character is always working. And,
further, while action divorced from character contains no principle of growth,
and at; best can only increase in quantity, remaining monotonously same in
kind, a spiritual character is forever growing in refinement and intensity and
grace, and consequently issuing in a higher quality of conduct. “My son, give
Me thy heart;” is the universal form of all vocation. This is the essence of
vocation; and it naturally issues in a reality and earnestness of life which
nothing else can give. Without it men may be in earnest for a time, but; their
earnestness will rarely survive failure, much less such repeated failure as is
our common human lot. But the man with a sense of vocation is beyond all this.
For he neither depends upon success or failure, nor doubts the real value of
his work. Like the Pompeian sentinel, come what may, he will stay on duty till
his guard is relieved. He works not for achievement;, but for obedience, and
rests not when he is tired, but when he is told. Nor does this temper of mind,
as is sometimes thought, lead to dull and mechanical working. On the contrary,
the man with a vocation is the truest individual. For in his degree he reflects
God, and no two beings can reflect God in the same way. Indolence is always
commonplace. Imitation is its favourite method. And the more selfish men become
either in their personal or collective alms, the more drearily they resemble
one another No two saints were ever alike. And this the man with a true sense
of vocation feels. He gives himself up to God in confidence that the Maker of
the human soul alone knows the capabilities of His own instrument, and can
alone bring out its music. And be is justified by the result. Native
individuality alone will not do this. It may start with a flash and a lustre,
but succumbs in time to the deadening custom of the world, “the set gray life
and apathetic end”--one more instance of the epigram that “we are all born
originals and die copies.” But; vocation, while it emphasises our originality,
supports us under its loneliness with the sense of being upheld from above.
Again there are degrees and stages of vocations--vocations within vocations. Theology
is a matter of vocation. And then there is the missionary call, of which we
hear from all sides of the need. (J. R. Illingworth, M. A.)
Present day inspiration
Does God speak to our children today as He did to this lad Samuel?
I do not ask does God speak to us in an audible voice, and in dictionary
English. For you know well enough that the form is not, and never can be, of
the essence of a message. Methods are details. Spiritual impulse and
enlightenment, life and power, are all in all, the Alpha and Omega of
Inspiration. “There are,” says Goethe, “many echoes in the world, but few
voices.” Revelation is rare. Inspiration is common. Revelation is unique and
original. Inspiration may issue only in an echo to him who listens, but in what
is a living and new experience to him who speaks. So far as I can gather,
Samuel, though inspired as to become the first; in the regular succession of
the prophets of Israel, received no new truth, saw no facts going beyond the
first principles of religion taught by Moses; but; he grasped those truths with
a reality and clearness all his own, With deep solicitude, then, we enquire,
what are the facts? Is there, or is there not, a Present Day Inspiration? No
doubt the prophets of God were exceptional men. All are not apostles. All are
not prophets. All do not work miracles. All have not gifts of healing. Every
Greek is not a Plato in philosophical insight, an Aristotle in reasoning, or a
Pericles in eloquence and political capacity. Every Italian is not a Dante in
song. Every Englishman is not a Shakespeare in dramatic genius, a Macaulay in
historical portrait painting, or a Pitt in statesmanship. Every singer is not a
Beethoven or a Mozart. Every Christian is not a Luther. Even amongst the
prophets of the Old Testament there are greater and lesser lights. But in God’s
world, the exceptional is always the evangelistic. Divinely-anointed men preach
the Gospel to the poor, heal the broken hearted, deliver the captives, and
herald the arrival of the acceptable year of the Lord. God never makes any man
for himself, least of all a prophet. But supposing we had a lingering doubt as
to the teaching of the Older Testament, we cannot have any misgiving as to the
fact that Christ asserts over and over again the doctrine of the continuity of
Inspiration. It is His consolation among the irritations and disquiet of
opposition and defeat, that His Father reveals the truth of His Kingdom, to the
open, clinging, and trustful hearts of “babes” like young Samuel. A third line
of inquiry is open to us, taking us back in some sense upon our first and
second. It is this. Are the results of Samuel’s Inspiration possible to us, or
is there anything forbidding us to entertain the thought of entering into the
goodly fellowship of the prophets? We know we may walk with God as did Enoch,
preach righteousness with Noah, become the children of Abraham in heroic faith
and total surrender of will, fight against ourselves with Jacob, battle for
social purity with Joseph, assist in building God’s house with Moses, share the
strength of Samson, and drink the pure streams of domestic joy with Ruth and
Naomi; is it likely then we are shut out from the enjoyment of the sublimest
issues of the inspiration of the Spirit of God? Those issues, as seen in the
life and work of Samuel, are these four; an enlarged and purified conception of
God; a strong and governing sway for ethical ideas of God and of life; a
contagious impulsion of others towards God and righteousness; and a fine
susceptibility of advance in religious, social, and national activity. Samuel
knew the Lord through the word of the Lord revealed to him. God spake to him,
and the speech was a revelation of the Speaker. To know God--not so as to
define Him, but to enjoy Him; not so as to demonstrate His being, but to live
in and by His love and power; not so as to comprehend Him, but to trust and
follow Him; this is the gift of the Spirit. Next in gravity and in
fruitfulness, we see in this inspired here a moral illumination, an inflexible
fidelity to his vocation, and an uncompromising adherence to eternal ethical
principles, which infallibly assert his intimate fellowship with a righteous
God. He begins his youthful ministry by the delivery of a pain-filled message,
asserting the unrelaxed operation of the laws of God on the rapacity and
profligacy of the sons of Eli, a man of saintly devoutness and religious
fervour, but a father of foolish leniency and unpardonable weakness. Samuel,
young as he is--a mere lad--tells his story every whit, omits not a word from
fear for himself, or weak consideration for the feelings of Israel’s Judge. So
noble a courage has its fitting crown in the stern demand for absolute
obedience to God he makes on King Saul, and his intrepid refusal to accept any
shuffles and excuses for a self-willed defiance of the authority of the God of
Israel. “To obey,” says he, rising to the loftiest heights of the sun-filled
realm of truth, “to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat
of rams.” “The Lord let none of Samuel’s words fall to the ground,” for they
were a part of that truth which, however slowly it be revealed, when once here,
endureth to all generations. Samuel, like his successors, was a
prophet-politician. His chief care was the common weal. He saw a people weak
and disunited, foolish and fractious, licentious and profligate, idolatrous and
corrupt; and with glowing intensity of emotion and ringing eloquence he sent
out his manifesto against the reigning idolatry, reasserted the second great
commandment against the worship of images, urged repentance and searching of
heart, and confederated the tribes together on the basis of a true idea of God,
a spiritual worship, and a faithful keeping of the law of righteousness. Every
true and consecrated prophet is an earnest patriot, acutely alive to the real
perils of his country, sympathetic with all its struggles for a purer morality,
a higher culture, and a richer joy; and heartily cooperates in every effort
that illumines right, extends liberty, and brings men to God. Love of men,
evinced in practical service of their wide interests, is the sign and proof of
the anointing of God. Hence the inspired man is always in the van of progress.
He does not and cannot lag behind. Even though it be against his immediate
interests, and in the face of his cherished methods and associations, yet he
triumphs over himself and carries forward movements in which “the old order
changeth, yielding place to new.” No inspired man can be a frozen pendant, a
blind dry-as-dust, a galvanized corpse, frantically clutching at yesterday as
though it were better than today, and talking of God as though He bad revealed
Himself as the “I was,” instead of the “I am.” The breath of the Almighty lifts
him out of the darkness of a selfish stagnation and makes him the harbinger of
the coming day. Therefore, not even our depressing sense of mistake, our
mist-bound ideas, our feeling that God has cramped dwelling in our souls,
should hinder us from believing in, working for, and hastening to, a
present-day Inspiration. Each element of this four-fold result bears witness to
a universal need, and to a possible universal experience: prophesies that “when
He is come, He will convince the world of sin, and righteousness, and
judgment;” be “poured out on all flesh,” so that all flesh may see the full
salvation of God. Irresistible as this answer is, it only forces on us a
further question, scarcely less perplexing, viz., how may we be sure that the
voice that speaks within us is the voice of God, and not of self; that the impressions,
ideas, and convictions are the result of Divine inspiration, and not the subtle
temptations of evil, or the disguised promptings of a foolish and fevered
fancy? Ay, there’s the rub! That’s the insuperable difficulty! Fortunately for
us this is not a new problem. It is as old as the other. The Jews of Berea had
to face it with less light than we have, for they were invited to pass into a
new realm of thought and action, and required an unerring guide, Paul and Silas
preached the Word concerning Christ to them, and they received it with all
openness of mind, examining the Scriptures daily whether these things were so;
many of them, therefore, believed. They went at once to the best test they had;
used the supreme verifying process then in existence, looked into the Hebrew
accounts of the manifestation of God in the past; compared them with that which
was reported to them by the missionaries, and entered into rest and power. Now
we have this advantage over the Bereans, that the Scriptures are larger for us
than they were for them. We can take all the movements of the Spirit of God in
our hearts today to Christ, to see whether they are in accordance with His
Spirit and teaching, with His redeeming purpose and kingdom, with His sacrifice
and ethics; with His character and Ideal. He is our infallible test. Yet
another question If this gift of the Spirit be open So all souls, and this test
be so easy of application, why is it that Samuel, of all the lads in Israel,
hears the Divine Voice, and no one else; that Isaiah and Paul are inspired, and
so many of their contemporaries are not? Why? Well, why did mathematics and
colours speak with such captivating sweetness to the mind of Clerk Maxwell? Why
did music penetrate and sway the soul of young Mozart? Why could not Flaxman
rest in his father’s shop without modelling and sketching? Why did Augustine
hear the summons falling on his ear as he walked in the orchards at Tagaste;
“Take and read, Take and read”? Look into their minds, and you will find the
same law at work. Scientific things are scientifically discerned; musical
things are musically discerned; artistic things are artistically discerned; and
spiritual things are spiritually discerned. Their natures and training offered
the appropriate organs and conditions, and the inspiration followed. To the
fitting organ for hearing there comes the guiding Voice of God. Few “cases”
more vividly illustrate this law than Samuel’s. At least six signs of fitness
show themselves: his godly descent: his devout dedication for life to the
service of God; his early spiritual training; his preeminent prayerfulness; his
glowing love of God; and his unfaltering obedience to the Divine will. If,
then, any of us lack the strength of a daily inspiration, and who does not? let
him ask of God, with a fully dedicated spirit, an intense yearning to glorify
God, a total suppression of selfish desire, and a sustained doing of all the
Will of God, and He will do exceeding abundant above all we ask or think,
according to the power that worketh in us, even the power of the risen Christ,
Who hath already given us of His Spirit. (J. Clifford, M. A.)
Spiritual surrender for children
1. To begin with, there is indicated here, as a part of this boy’s
experience, the exercise of unquestioning obedience.
2. In the experience of Samuel we observe, in the second place, there
was the attitude of listening.
3. Then next in the experience of Samuel we observe there is a spirit
of reverence.
4. There is the apprehension of obligation. So whenever Christ comes
by His Spirit into contact with a young life there is the bending of the will
into desire for service.
5. There is the temper of submission. The entire surrender of the
soul is reached in that word “heareth.” This young child was offering himself
most unconsciously to a duty immediate and pressing, but indescribably hard. (C.
S. Robinson, D. D.)
God’s calling of Samuel
I. With respect to
the circumstances of this Divine call, there are, it is true, some differences,
whilst there are certainly also some resemblances, between his case and yours.
We may refer to,
1. Some of these differences.
2. Resemblances between the circumstances of the call of Samuel and
yours.
4. Have not all of you, like Samuel, been called repeatedly?
II. With respect to
the reality of the Divine call there is a perfect parity in both cases.--
1. The Bible you allow to be the Word of God.
Obedient to the voice of God
I. The Lord
speaking. “But does God speak to me?” you ask.
1. Yes, he does, in His Providence. In this land of Sabbaths, and
churches, and Bibles, and Christians, God is always speaking to you. Did He not
speak to you in the first human voice that reached your infant mind? And did
not God speak to you in that illness?
2. And God speaks to you by His word. For His word is not like the
word of a man in a book, a dull, dead thing: but in it you may hear God’s
living voice.
3. And God speaks to you by His Spirit.
II. The child
hearing. Your ear is one of the main gateways of the soul. A man of science
calls it “a harp of three hundred strings,” and it is made up of many wonders.
But far more wonderful is the inner ear of the heart, or the conscience, by
which you hear the noiseless voice of God. You have great power over the ear of
the body; you may spoil it, close it, or improve it. Oh, have you a good ear
for this music? It is astonishing how quick the ear grows to hear anything we
wish to hear. An Indian, by laying his ear to the ground, and hushing his
breath, can discover the approach of a horseman at the distance of miles. His
ear is as quick as the ear of the hare, or of the deer. A sleeping mother will
hear the gentlest movement of her suffering child, and awake to help it. Her
mother’s love calls her listening soul into her ear: her heart makes her all
ear. Thus the ear within the soul may be trained to know even the gentlest
whisperings of God’s voice.
III. The child
serving. “Thy servant,” he called himself.
1. His obedience was prompt. He might have said, “Oh, I’m frightened
in the dark: there must be soma mistake: I’ll keep my warm bed this cold
night.” He was prompt in obeying Eli’s voice (as he thought it) and God’s.
2. Samuel’s obedience was also hearty: he put his whole heart into
it. The trembling slave obeys promptly, but not heartily. He does his task at
once, but would gladly not do it, if he dared. We cannot obey God till we
really love Him.
3. Notice also that Samuel’s obedience was life long. There is the
closest connection between the heartiness and the continuance of our service. (J.
Wells, M. A.)
Answering God
In order to distinguish the voice and message of God there is
requisite--
I. A disengaged
mind. When the attention is absorbed by one object there is no room for
another.
II. An unbiassed
intelligence. Our own selfishness, conceit, and prejudice, both collectively
and individually combine to prevent our hearing and regarding the truth, in its
fulness and entirety. We want to speak and argue, as well as hear.
II. An earnest
expectation.
IV. A sense of
humility. “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.” This implies that we hear in
order to do. God will never give His counsel to the haughty and the proud.
V. A personal
individual communion. It is the want of the personal union to God that keeps us
in the dark and hides His light from our souls. (Homilist.)
Listening to God
Or, rather, “Thy servant is listening.” If, as we have read this
story, I wonder if we have thought of the strange feeling of awe that was
beating in that little heart that night? I wonder if there is any significance
in the fact that Samuel did not say just what Eli told him to? Eli said, “Say,
speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth;” but Samuel could not get quite courage
enough to say Lord; he was not quite sure that it was the Lord that was
speaking to him, and so all he says is, “Speak; for Thy servant heareth.” How
that heart must have beat, how that awe must have possessed him, as it came to
him that he was really face to face with Jehovah! And yet, familiar as we are
with this story, I do not think its lesson has sunk down very deep into most of
our hearts; for that lesson seems to me to be this: That there are times when
we are not to talk to God, and not to do anything for God, but just to listen
to God. A great proportion of you are doing some work for God; most of you, I
hope, more or less regularly pray to God; but how many of you have ever formed
the habit of listening to God? You see the difference. We know the full man,
the ready man, the overflowing man whom we meet in social intercourse, who is
so full of his message to us that he has no time to get our message back again;
who talks with such a stream of conversation that it is hardly possible for us
to get in a word in reply. There is no conversation with such a man, there is
only listening to him. You have met that man; perhaps you are that man
yourself. He is a very full man, but he does not know how to get the message of
the world. He does not know how to take in as well as to give out. The wise man
carries both minds with him, the giving mind and the receiving mind, and the wisest
man makes more of the receiving even than the giving. But at other times you do
not take up a theme for study, but you sit down in your easy chair and light
your evening lamp; the wind is howling and you are sure that you are going to
have that night no interruption; and you take your Browning, or your
Shakespeare, or your Carlyle, or your Tennyson, or your Whittier, and you do
not study, you simply let your favourite author talk to you, and after he has
spoken to you for ten or fifteen minutes the book drops into your lap and you
begin to think his thoughts. These hours in which we simply listen to what the
men of genius have to say to us, are they not the most fruitful hours of our
life? Have we not received more in those hours than we received when our
dictionary and our grammar and our treatise were before us and we were digging
for wisdom as for a hid treasure? Yes, these receptive hours are our best
hours. I know there are persons who think that God speaks no more to men: He
did speak once to Abraham, to Moses, to David, to Isaiah, to Paul, but there
came a time when the canon was closed, and inspiration was stopped, and God
became silent, and man lost his power of hearing. Strange, was it not, if it
were true, that God should have spoken to one little section of the race and no
other section, to one little epoch and to no other; strange, if He is the
Father and we are the children, that He should have talked to those children in
far-away times and have nothing to say to us children in this present time! I
do not believe it. I believe God speaks to His children new. I cannot see how
there can be a true, real religion without this faith. This faith underlies
obedience. How can I obey the will of God if God never shows His will to me?
How can I have faith in a present, living God, who never speaks to me?
Sometimes He comes to us as He came to Balaam. We have set our own purpose
before us; we have resolved what we will do; we have not been careful to take
counsel and consider whether this is the thing God wants us to do. A great
reward, a great honour, a great advantage, beckons, and we start out on our
path to do our will, resolved to reap our reward, and we come against some
obstacle, something that stops our way, and we are angry, vexed--we will sweep
it out of the way and all the time it is the Angel of the Lord standing before
us, barring our progress. And we cannot, do not, will not, see or listen.
Sometimes He comes to us as He came to Saul of Tarsus; conscientious, really
thinking he was doing God’s service, and yet so bent on his own notion of
what’s God’s service was. Sometimes He comes to us as He came to Elijah. We
have tried to do God’s will--tried, but have failed; all our work has come to
naught, and we are utterly discouraged. Sometimes it comes to us as it came to
Moses; comes in the voice and ministry of nature, in some wonderful phenomenon
in nature. Sometimes He comes to us as He came to Isaiah in the Temple.
Sometimes He comes to us as He came to Peter and James and John on the Mount of
Transfiguration. I wish I could carry you back to your childhood; I wish I
could make you remember the school desk and the teacher, or the mother
instructing you out of the primer or out of the Bible; and when I had made
those memories pass before you in a panoramic vision, I would bring, last of
all, the evening hour when the mother took you. (Lyman Abbott, D. D.)
Samuel, the young prophet
Samuel has just completed his twelfth year. Against this portrait
of young Samuel our lesson unveils the picture of the age in which he lived. It
was one of priestly corruption and spiritual dryness. To worshipping shepherds,
to praying Johns, to kneeling Stephens, to clinging Jacobs, to repentant
Davids, to obedient Samuels, God communicates his truths. Do not find fault with
God because He seems to withhold truth from you. Do not criticise the preacher
for commonplace utterances nor call your prayer meeting stupid. First look into
your own heart and life and know whether or not you are in condition to see the
truth when presented. The responsibility of the preacher of Christ and of
Christian bodies for a spiritual drought is very evident from the story before
us. We need heavenly living to receive heavenly visions. In this day of
withheld revelation, when the lips of prophecy were sealed and the people heard
no sounds from the heavens, God called Samuel. If it seems remarkable that he
should select one so young in years, we are to remember that God never gives
one a duty until he is fitted to perform it. He saw in this Hebrew youth the
qualities of mind and spirit which he desired in his prophet. Years do not
qualify men for great deeds. Holy living is the first condition of honour from
God. God wants men, holy men. He asks neither for youth nor age. He does ask
for holy manhood. Samuel met this condition, and therefore God called him. He
was glad to be a servant in the tabernacle. He had the spirit of service. He
chose God’s service, not a place in that service. That he left God to decide.
Samuel was usable of God. His spirit of obedience is evident. When the voice
called, he cried: “Here am I.” There is something unusual in this spirit. He
was ready to try, with God’s help, to do what God wished. He was trustfully
obedient, like Abraham and Joshua and Paul. His was the obedience that ran. The
obedience that lingers with leaden feet never receives the prophet’s rod and
mantle. It is interesting to note that “Samuel did not yet know the Lord,
neither was the word of the Lord yet revealed unto him.” He certainly knew God
as every trustful, loving heart knows Him, and God’s word was his law. He did
not, however, know him through the medium of a special revelation. Before he
could enter upon his special work as a prophet or even know it was to be his, a
special communication from God to him was necessary. No man ever yet succeeded
who took up a special work for God on general principles. We are called to the
work He desires us to do. In some way God draws near us in special revelation,
communicating His will. In this special revelation God “came.” The word means
“presented Himself.” The calling was not a mere impression or dream of
Samuel’s. He heard a voice and then beheld the vision He recognised his God.
“Speak; for thy servant heareth.” There was no doubt, no confusion in his mind
regarding the nature of the occurrence. In God’s service we are not left to act
upon impressions nor to the guidance of dreams. We meet a living presence. God
came, and God comes to men. He meets us at every turn on life’s road. He gives
us such special revelations of Himself as we may require. We talk not into a
mysterious darkness, but in the ear of our God. We are left not to the mercy of
fancies, but are guided by an all-wise and loving Father. In sharp contrast
with the exaltation of Samuel to this prophetic life and his vision of Jehovah
is the picture of Eli’s house. His sons are dissolute. They have degraded their
important office and brought reproach in some way upon the name and worship of
God. For Samuel to disclose to Eli the sad future of himself and his family was
no easy task. It was the beginning of his cross-bearing as the prophet of God.
It is worthy to be noticed, as an illustration of the frankness of God’s
dealings with us, that he never deceives us as to the nature of our duties. On the
very threshold of his new life Samuel met this delicate and trying task. (Monday
Club Sermons.)
Samuel; or, God’s wrath upon His Church
We may look upon this Divine call of Samuel as the beginning of a
new order of things in Israel. The high priest had, from the occupation of
Canaan, been the medium of communication from God to the people. He wore the
Urim and Thummim in the breastplate, and from these was able to receive answers
from God to questions concerning duty. But the degeneracy of Israel, in which
the high priests seem to have participated to a degree, rendered a change
necessary. The high priest is made secondary, and the prophet is raised up as
the primary authority in Israel. The prophet will now be the mouth of God to
the people. If the Church makes a god of its forms, he breaks those forms to
pieces. When the ritual priesthood failed in their duty, he punished them, and
set up an order of prophets above them to be the interpreters of his will.
Samuel is thus a witness to God’s demand for a spiritual religion in contrast
to mere form. God is a holy God, and He will have His people holy; and if they
substitute a ceremonial for holiness, His holy wrath will certainly fall upon
them; and in this blow not only those will fall who, like Eli’s sons, commit
gross wrongs, but those also who, like Eli, through indulgence or apathy, fail
to rebuke and resist the evil. The Church of God is today courting the world.
Its members are trying to bring it down to the level of the ungodly. The ball,
the theatre, nude and lewd art, social luxuries with all their loose
moralities, are making inroads into the sacred enclosure of the Church. God
will not bless a Church that drags down His heavenly things into the dust--that
gilds vice, calls it Christian, and then indulges in it. But His holy vengeance
will assuredly come and strip such a Church of its pride and make it eat the
bread of affliction. (H. Crosby, D. D.)
Youth the repository of Divine judgment,
I. Night visions.
We might suggest several reasons why night was selected as the season of this
vision:--
1. It was calm and silent.
2. It would lend impressiveness to the call. It being unusual to hear
a voice at midnight, earnest attention would be secured, and reverent awe
inspired.
3. It was also consistent, with the event announced. What time more
appropriate for the utterance of tidings so terrible as darkness, whose gloom
would also be prophetic of the future?
4. To show that God works at the moss unlikely times, independent of
external and natural aid.
In fact, when we look upon the dead horses and unblown trumpets of
Sennacherib’s defeat, on the desolation caused in Egypt by the withering breath
of the destroying angel, we feel in the presence of this principle that when
nature and mortals slumber, God is most active.
1. In what the vision consisted. “And the Lord called” (verse 4).
What a deep impression would this night’s transaction make upon Samuel’s mind!
Hence, by this vision, he was conducted to advanced experiences, of which the
two most prominent thoughts would be the woeful destiny of evil, and the
judicial majesty of God. These communications were
(a) By Divine oath (verse 14)
(b) By a strict refusal of compromise (verse 14).
2. To whom entrusted. The Lord called Samuel (verse 4). Childhood
vocal on the lips of God. Devoted childhood honoured by God. Compare. “In those
days there was no open vision” (verse 1). “And the Lord called yet again,
Samuel.”
3. Honestly mistaken. “And he ran unto Eli” (verse 5). Have we not in
the cheerful obedience of this young servant a pattern for all stations of
service?
Samuel mistook the Divine call for the human; this is the greatest
tendency of the present day, to expunge the miraculous, not only from the
records of inspiration, but also from the events of general life. Mistaken
childhood instructed (verse 7). It is the duty of old persons, and especially
old priests, to instruct the young.
4. Obediently received (verse 10). “Speak, for thy servant heareth.”
Samuel omits the word “Lord,” which Eli had instructed him to use. His youthful
nature had not yet grasped its meaning; the doctrine of the Divine Lordship was
too deep a mystery, he stood before it in silence, daring not to vocalize such
an attribute of majesty. Every impulse of his heart cried out, “Speak,” and Samuel
signified himself attentive to the message; “thy servant heareth.”
II. Morning
disclosures. Samuel enters upon the duties of the day with a heavier heart than
usual, trying as much as possible to avoid contact with Eli, lest he should be
questioned respecting the call of the previous night. What contrasts do the
Christian life present! He “opened the doors of the house of the Lord” (verse
15). The revelation of woe had not caused him to forget his duty, or filled him
with pride to disdain it. Here we catch a glimpse of the greatness of his young
nature, that it could walk amidst this splendour with such unconscious
simplicity. The vision was:--
1. Timidly retained (verse 16, 17). “And Samuel feared to show Eli
the vision.” Probably he had received no command from God to disclose it, and
feared lest he should intrude upon the threshold of the Divine prerogative.
Perhaps he discreetly considered that the tidings would be too astounding, that
Eli’s feeble energies, like the drooping plant, would succumb to the fury of
the storm; feeling also a respect for and a sympathy with the unfortunate
Priest, knowing that God had irrevocably signed his death warrant, Samuel did
not wish to embitter the final hours by heedless, useless sorrow. However Eli
suspects that the call of the night had reference to himself, and importunately
asks for its message:
2. Faithfully disclosed (verse 18). “Samuel told him every whit.”
Faithful to God, and respectful to Eli, he unfolds the solemn secret of the
future, in language not softened by omission or nullified by misrepresentation.
3. Reverently acknowledged (verse 18). “And he said, It is the Lord.”
lessons:
1. Childhood taken to the tabernacle as likely to be called by God.
2. The tabernacle is the place for the instruction of youth.
3. The punishment of parental indulgence is both certain and fearful.
4. The secrets of Divine Providence are ever entrusted to faithful
souls.
5. Moral rectitude honoured by God and respected by man (verse
19-21). (Joseph S. Exell, M. A.)
Samuel, the model of early piety
I. In the first
place, Samuel’s early piety made him--a model of usefulness. Samuel became a
prophet of the Lord, and was very useful in this way He made known to the
people of Israel what God wanted them to do, and taught them how they were to
serve and please Him. And then he was a judge, as well as a prophet. He went
out at stated times among the people, and settled their disputes and quarrels,
and so he was the means of promoting peace and happiness among them. He did a
great deal of good to the people of Israel in this way.
II. Samuel’s early
piety made him--a model of happiness. Religion is intended to make us happy.
Loving and serving God is the secret of true happiness.
III. Samuel’s early
piety made him--a model of perseverance. To persevere means to keep on doing
whatever we begin to do without giving up. One reason why some people never
succeed in what they begin to do, is that they do not persevere. They soon get
tired and give it up. But this was not the way with Samuel. When he began to
serve God he persevered in it. He kept on trying without getting tired.
IV. Samuel’s early
piety made him--a model of honour. (R. Newton, D. D.)
The still small voice in the night
I. The Divine
call, or, the revelation by a human voice.
II. Now
consider--Samuel’s perception of only the human voice.
1. That when young hearts do not recognise God’s voice calling them,
or His purpose with them, it is not a proof or a sign that God is not with
them, or that they are not under religious influence.
2. Again, when repeated special calls are not intelligently responded
to by the young we are not justified in thinking that the Lord is not leading
them.
3. But let me say to the young, What may seem to you only a human
voice may be God’s, is God’s, if it asks you to love Him. (G. B. Ryley.)
Divine calls verified
The call of Samuel is very different in its circumstances from the
call of St. Paul; yet it resembles it in this particular, that the circumstance
of his obedience to it is brought out prominently even in the words put into
his mouth by Eli in the text. The characteristic of all Divine calls in
Scripture is:
I. Those who are
living religiously have from time to time truths they did not know before, or
had no need to consider, brought before them forcibly, truths which involve
duties, which are in fact precepts and claim obedience. In this and similar
ways Christ calls us now He works through cur natural faculties and
circumstances in life.
II. These Divine
calls are commonly sudden and as indefinite and obscure in their consequences
as in former times. The call may come to us:
III. Nothing is more
certain than that some men do feel themselves called to high duties and works
to which others are not called. No one has any leave to take another’s lower standard
of holiness for his own. We need not fear spiritual pride if we follow Christ’s
call as men in earnest. Earnestness has no time to compare itself with the
state of other men; earnestness has too vivid a feeling of its own infirmities
to be elated at itself. It simply says, “Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.”
“Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?” (J. H. Newman.)
The child Samuel’s prayer
I. First of all we
shall take our text as the prayer of a little child. When we see any trace of
good in our youth, then, like Eli, we should be the more earnest to have them
trained up in the faith. Let the child learn the Catechism, even though he does
not understand all that is in it; and as soon as the young heart can comprehend
the things of Jesus, labour in power of the Holy Spirit to bring it to a simple
dependence upon the great sacrifice. It is said of the Rev. John Angell James,
“Like most men who have been eminent and honoured in the Church of Christ, he
had a godly mother, who was wont to take her children to her chamber, and with
each separately to pray for the salvation of their souls. This exercise, which
fulfilled her own responsibility, was moulding the character of her children,
and most, if not all of them, rose up to call her blessed. When did such moans
ever fail?”
II. Let us now
consider the words as the cry of an anxious soul.
III. We will turn to
the third view of the text as the prayer of an earnest relieverse I was led to
select this text, by finding it in the letter of one who has just been taken
away from our classes, and from our Church. She was about to change her
position in life in some degree, and the one prayer that seemed to be ever upon
her mind, was a prayer for guidance, and she prayed, “Speak, Lord; for thy
servant heareth.” She said she felt that God was about to do something for her,
but she did not know what it was; she little dreamed that she was so near the
kingdom and the glory, but yet that was the prayer, “Speak, Lord; for thy
servant heareth.” This is a very appropriate prayer for the Christian when he
is in providential difficulty. Take thy matters before the God of Abraham, and
the Urim and Thummim shall yet speak to thee. Domine Dirige nos, “Lord direct
us,” is a good motto, not only for the City of London, but for the citizens of
heaven. In points of doctrine this de, ire humbly uttered may bring us much
light. The same course should be adopted by every Christian in matters of
practice. As melted wax is fitted to receive the impress of the seal, so let us
be ready to accept the Master’s teaching. Let His faintest word bind us as with
bonds of steel; and let His minutest precept be precious as the gold of Ophir.
As for the matters of duty again, be ye ever ready to follow the Master and Him
alone. Not Luther, nor Calvin, neither Wesley, nor Whitfield, is to be your
Rabbi; Jesus alone is Master in the kingdom of heaven. Whatsoever He saith unto
you, do it, but where you have not His warrant, let no traditions or ancient
customs make you stir so much as a single inch.
IV. We will close
by observing that our text seems to us rightly to express the spirit of a
departing Christian. He sits patiently upon the river’s brink, expecting that
his Master shall open the passage for him to pass over dryshod. He is praying,
“Speak, Lord,” and the sooner Thou wilt speak the more shall I rejoice. Say
unto me, “Come up hither.” “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.” (C. H.
Spurgeon.)
Voices of God
1.God speaks in the experiences of life. We are but children, and
know so little. We can scarcely distinguish the voices which comes to us
through the gloom like the murmuring of distant bells, speaking strangely and
bewilderingly. There are sad hearts as well as bright ones, and we cannot make
out the message of sadness always. I grope my way along the dark corridors, and
I plead, “Speak, Lord, speak, for thy servant heareth.” And above the tumult I
hear a voice which bids me forget the things that are behind and reach forward
to those that are before. Onward, and into the future we venture, hoping,
believing, knowing that though sorrow may endure for the night, joy cometh in
the morning.
2. God speaks to us in the inner life--to the souls of His trusting
people. St. John says: “His voice was as the sound of many waters”--helpful,
encouraging, loving; the life itself. (J. S. Stone, D. D.)
The listening servant
These were the words of Samuel.
I. They reveal the
attitude of attention. The man who never leaves his counting room, the student
who never lifts his eyes or his attention from his books, will never know the
glories of Mendelssohn or Beethoven. The housewife in whose ears is always the
clatter of pots and pans will have no time or attention for a sweeter
orchestra. So the man or the woman who never listens to God’s voice will never
hear it. The marginal reference makes a verse in the thirty-seventh Psalm read:
“Be silent to the Lord, and wait patiently for Him.” It is a soul silent unto
God that is in the best attitude for knowing Him, for hearing Him, and for
holding fast the blessings which He bestows. This marks as indispensable the
quiet hour, the moments of silent communion, until our senses have become so
refined and our spiritual ears so attentive that, like Nicholas Herman, of
Lorraine, the devout monk, better known as “Brother Lawrence,” we too can hear
God’s voice above the din of the market place and the buzz of the schoolroom
and the clatter of the kitchen. As someone has welt said: “The very familiarity
of the voice of God in Nature or His Word may dull our accustomed ears to its
sound, just as the roar of Niagara is never beard by those who live upon the
banks of the Horseshoe Falls, and the whirr of the loom in the factory falls
upon calloused ears. Because we are familiar with God’s message in His house,
with His written Word, with His songs of praise, we need all the more to stop
said listen that we may catch His individual message for our souls.” It is said
that so great is the hum of business that the people in the streets of London
scarcely ever hear the tolling of the bell in the spire of St. Paul’s
Cathedral. But they could hear if they would stop a moment in the mad rush of
trade, and listen.
II. Those words
reveal the attitude of obedience. “Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth.” The
hearing was in order to heeding. Some people seem to think that contemplative
people must, of necessity, be very unpractical and useless people. They point
to the almost barren lives lived by many monks and nuns and others, who, as
they say, retired from the world to live lives of spiritual meditation and
exclusion from evil. But it was in their retirement from the world, in their
seclusion from life’s active duties, that they made their mistake. They
listened to God’s voice, but it was not in the attitude of readiness for
self-denying, active obedience. Hearing should always be for heeding. The
seasons of contemplation should lead to other and longer seasons of service. In
Christian contemplation the ideals of the Christian should glow luminous and
living. Hearing in order to heeding; contemplation in order to service; this
should be the attitude and method of the true Christian. (G. B. F. Hallock,
D. D.)
“Speak, Lord”
The child Samuel was favoured above all the family in which he
dwelt. The Lord did not speak by night to Eli, or to any of Eli’s sons. In all
that house, in all the rows of rooms that were round about the Tabernacle where
the ark of the Lord was kept, there was no one except Samuel to whom Jehovah
spoke. The fact that the Lord should choose a child out of all that household,
and that He should speak to him, ought to be very encouraging to you who think
yourself to be the least likely to be recognised by God. Notice also that,
while God had a very special regard for young Samuel, he had, in that regard,
designs concerning the rest of the family. God’s elect are chosen, not merely
for their own sake; they are chosen for God’s name’s sake, and they are also
chosen for the sake of mankind in general. The Jews were chosen that they might
preserve the oracles of God for all the ages, and that they might keep alight
the spark of Divine truth that we Gentiles might afterwards see its brightness;
and when God’s Special love is fixed upon one member of a family, I take it
that that one ought to say to himself or herself, “Am I not called that I may be
a blessing in this family?”
1. And, first, I will speak to you upon the soul desiring--desiring
to be spoken to by God: “Speak, Lord.” We cannot endure a dumb God. It is a
very dreadful thing to have a dumb friend, a very painful thing to have a wife
who never spoke with you, or a father or mother from whom you could never hear
a single word of love; and the heart cannot bear to have a dumb God, it wants
Him to speak. For what reason does the soul desire God to speak to it? Well,
first, it desires thus to be recognised by God. It seems to say, “Speak, Lord,
lust to give me a token of recognition, that I may know that I am not
overlooked, that I am not flung away like a useless thing upon the world’s dust
heap, that I am not left to wander like a waif and stray.”
2. More than that, this desire of the soul is a longing to be called
by God. When the Lord said to the child, “Samuel, Samuel,” it was a distinct,
personal call, like that which came to Mary: “The Master is come, and calleth
for thee,” or that which came to another Mary when the Lord said to her,
“Mary,” and she turned herself, and said, “Rabboni,” that is to say, “my dear
Master.” “Speak, Lord, speak to me; call me.”
3. “Speak, Lord, moreover, that I may be instructed.”
4. We sometimes mean by this expression, “Speak, Lord, for our
guidance.” We have got into a great difficulty, we really do not know which way
the road leads--to the right or to the left--and we may go blundering on, and
have to come all the way back again; so we specially need the Lord to speak to
us for our guidance.
5. At times, also, we want the Lord’s voice for our comfort.
II. Now, secondly,
let us think of the Lord speaking. Suppose that the Lord does speak to us; just
think for a minute what it is.
1. It is a high honour. The peers of the realm are not so honoured
when they see their Queen as you are when you see your God, and he speaks with
you. To be permitted to speak with Him is a delight; but to hear Him speak with
us is heaven begun below.
2. It is a very solemn responsibility. Jesus Christ spoke to Saul of
Tarsus out of heaven, and from that hour Paul felt himself to be the Lord’s, a
consecrated man, to live and die for Him who had spoken to him.
3. To hear God speak to us will bring us many a happy memory.
4. I think I must also say that it is a probable mercy that God will
speak to you.
5. “But how does the Lord speak?” someone asks.
1. God often speaks to His children through His works.
2. God also speaks to His children very loudly by His Providence.
3. But the Lord speaks to us chiefly through His Word.
4. But the Lord has a way of sometimes speaking to the heart by His
Spirit
I think not usually apart from His Word--but yet there are certain
feelings and emotions, tendernesses and tremblings, joys and delights, which we
cannot quite link with any special portion of Scripture laid home to the heart,
but which seem to steal upon us unawares by the direct operation of the Spirit
of God upon the heart. Christians are not alike favoured. One may be a child of
God, like Eli, and yet so live that God will not speak with him; and, on the
other hand, one may be a child like Samuel, obedient, beautiful in character,
and watchful to know God’s will, praying, “Speak, Lord; for thy servant
heareth;” and then God will speak to you. It is not to all that He speaks, but
He would speak to all if they were ready to learn what He had to say.
III. The soul
hearing. We have had the soul desiring, and the Lord speaking; now for the soul
hearing: “Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.”
1. I think we have here an argument: “Lord, do speak, for I do hear.”
“There are none so deaf as those that will not hear.”
2. Yet it appears to be an inference, as well as an argument, for it
seems to run like this, “Lord, if thou speakest, of course thy servant heareth.”
3. “Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth,” seems also to contain a
promise within it, namely, that if the Lord will but speak, we will hear. I
remember being asked to see a person, and I thought that he wanted to learn
something from me; but when I saw him for three-quarters of an hour, he spoke
the whole time, and afterwards he told a friend that I was a most delightful
person to converse with! When I was told that I said, “Oh, yes, that was
because I did not interrupt the man! He was wound up, and I let him run down.”
But conversation means two people talking, does it not? It cannot be a
conversation if I do all the talking, or if my friend does it all; so, in
conversing with God, there must be, as we say, turn and turn about, You speak
with God, and then sit still, and let God speak with you; and, if He does not
at once speak to your heart, open His Book, and read a few verses, and let Him
speak to you that way. Some people cannot pray when they wish to do so. I
remember George Muller sweetly saying, “When you come to your time for
devotion, if you cannot pray, do not try. If you cannot speak with God, do not
try. Let God speak with you. Open your Bible, and read a passage.” Sometimes,
when you meet a friend, you cannot begin a conversation. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The listening soul
The story of Samuel begins before he was born, as the story of a
river begins up on the mountain side, where the spring bursts forth from its
rocky reservoir The great snowdrifts on the mountain summit, and the deep
caverns in the depths of the hills, are interesting chapters in the story of a
riverse So back of Samuel with his open ear and his open heart toward heaven
are a good father and a pious mother; people who were faithful to God and who
sought to do their duty. They did not lay up great wealth for Samuel, but they
gave him the heritage of a good name, and above all things they gave him the
heritage of faith in God, and of love for things good and pure. Let every man
who had a praying mother thank God. A home that is fragrant with the reading of
the Bible and musical with the sound of family worship is something to be
grateful for as long as one lives. Better than gold, better than all the
world’s luxuries, is the inheritance given by a Christian mother to her
children.
1. In the first place, it is a very interesting fact to note what; is
directly stated here, that up to this time Samuel did not know the Lord. Of
course there was a sense in which Samuel did know the Lord. He knew what one
can know about God in seeing others worship; but his own heart did not go out
to God in prayer and love; and in that deep, inner, personal sense he was
without God. Is that not exactly your case? You have heard about Christ since
you were a little child, and you feel that; you know e great deal about Him,
and yet in the truest sense you do not know Him.
2. I want you to notice again that God called Samuel three times
before he answered. Has not God called you again and again? You heard the call
and you understood it, but you did not answer. Perhaps God came to you at a
time of some disgrace because of your sin. Your conscience spoke as it had
never spoken before. God called you then with clanging notes of alarm; and your
heart said, “I ought to kneel to God; I ought to seek the forgiveness of my
sins.” You knew it was God’s call to you, but you did not answer. Perhaps it
was a great joy that came, and the goodness and gentleness of God filled your
heart with up springing praise. With warm heart and tearful eyes you exclaimed,
“God is so good to me, I ought to yield Him my heart, I ought to give Him my
open thanks, I ought to let the whole world know how good He is to me.” It was
God’s call to you, but you did not answer.
3. I call your attention to the fact that God called Samuel by name.
“Samuel, Samuel,” is the way the Lord talks to the boy. God spoke to Abraham in
the same way. When the Lord Jesus met Saul on the way to Damascus it was a
personal message he brought him, and he cried out to him, “Saul, Saul, why
persecutest thou Me?” God knows us all by name; you are not lost in the crowd
to Him. No one can tell how much it will mean if you will only listen to God
and answer His call tonight. It is quite possible that if some who hear me now,
who are called of God through this word, would yield their hearts in response
to God’s call, it would be the beginning of a life equally as useful. (L. A.
Banks, D. D.)
Speak, Lord.--
Use of the Divine name in prayer
You observe that He did not say, “Lord;” perhaps he hardly dared
to take that sacred name upon his lips. He was impressed with such solemn awe
at the name of God that he said, “Speak; for Thy servant heareth.” I wish that
some Christian men of my acquaintance would leave out the Lord’s name a little
in their prayers, for we may take the name of the Lord in vain even in our
supplications. When the heathen are addressing their gods, they are accustomed
to repeat their names over and over again. “O Baal, hear us! O Baal, hear us!”
or, as the Hindoos do when they cry, “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!” repeating the name
of their god; but as for us, when we think of the infinitely-glorious One, we
dare not needlessly repeat His name. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Responsive souls
In a court of justice a number of violins were lying on the table.
The ownership of one of them was in question. It did not differ in appearance
from the others, but one witness said he would know it among a thousand. “I
would know it,” he said, “even if I were blind.” “How?” asked the astonished
judge. “By its voice,” replied the old man. “It would speak to me as no other
violin can speak. It is speaking to me now.” And, listening, he bent low until
his ear almost touched the instrument. Then he grasped another that lay beside
it, and with his right hand swung the bow across the strings. A low, deep,
throbbing, pulsing note broke the stillness of the courtroom. When it ceased,
with hand uplifted and with bow pointing to the table where the other
instruments still lay, the old player waited expectantly. Across the room,
faint, yet clearly audible, came the same sweet, low, throbbing note, yet far
richer, sweeter, and purer, as though some celestial master player had swept
the strings. “That,” said the old man, “was the voice of the violin. It has a
soul, and it has speech. But a false note, rude sounds, or mere discords will
not open its lips. So whenever I strike a true note, if the old violin be in
the room or near at hand, it will always answer.” Thus should it be with the
human soul when God, its true proprietor, speaks, answering with a glad and ready
response, “Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth.”
Heavenly voices
Lady Henry Somerset, becoming restless and unsatisfied in early
life with worldly honour and gaiety, began to question in good earnest the
meaning and end of life. The more she studied the Word, the more she felt that
there was a reality in the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that her
great need was personal consecration and an active share in the Divine effort
to save the world. Still, the light was not given until one day in her garden,
alone with Jehovah, questioning the existence of such a thing as Providence,
she heard a voice say distinctly, “Act as if I were, and you shall know that I
am.” The voice was not addressed to the material ear, but the words were
distinct to the ear of Lady Henry’s soul. They made a deep impression, and the
more she thought upon the mysterious matter the more she was convinced that it
was really a voice from heaven, sent in answer to her pleadings for light and
guidance. She resolved to follow the counsel so strangely sent, and when she
put the resolve into action a flood of light dispelled all the darkness, solved
every doubt, so that she exclaimed, in a rapture of conviction, “Thou art
Christ, the Son of the living God.” (Christian Herald.)
Guides to religious experiences
Although God spoke to Samuel he needed Eli’s instruction to enable
him to recognise the voice. He heard someone knocking at the door of his heart,
but when he looked out all seemed dark until Eli told him in what direction to
look for the unseen visitor. We need the direction of those who have become
more accustomed to obey such voices, and have thus learned by experience the
meaning of such intuitions, (R. C. Ford, M. A.)
Verses 11-16
I will do a thing in Israel, at which both the ears of every one
that heareth it shall tingle.
Causes of Eli’s overthrow
There are several impressive lessons urged by God’s treatment of
Eli.
I. First of all it
is clear--and it ought to be made most distinct, because of a great practical
delusion which exists upon this point--that it is not enough that there be many
good points in a character. Character ought not to be a mere question of points
at all. Character ought not to be viewed in sections and departments, in
aspects and occasional moods. Character should have about it the distinctness
of wholeness, entirety. Our goodness is not to be an occasional impulse or a
transitory appearance of moral conscience and moral concern for others. Out of
our character there is to stream continuous and beneficent influence. When our
moral training is perfected we shall not have points of excellence; our whole
character will be massive, indivisible, and out of it will go an influence that
will constrain men to believe that we have been with God, and that we have
imbibed the very spirit of his righteousness. Eli was amiable. A great many
mistakes are made about amiability. A man may be amiable simply through mere
want of interest or force; he may be so constituted that really he does not
much care who is who, or what is what. Eli had religious impulses. What then?
There is a sense in which religious impulse may be but constitutional. We must
not overlook the constitutional condition. Let us clearly understand,
therefore, that mere religious sensibility, religious impulse and religious
susceptibility, must not be understood as proclaiming and certifying sound
religiousness of character. Eli treated Samuel without official envy or
jealousy. So far so good. But absence of envy may come of mere easy good
nature. There are men in the world who do not care one pinpoint who is at the
head of affairs. That is not magnanimity; that is not nobleness.
2. The second lesson that is urged upon us by this view of Eli’s
position is--that divine discipline is keen--intensely spiritual. The inquiry
is, Can you point out any vulgar sin in Eli? Sin is not measurable by
vulgarity. Some men seem incapable of seeing sin until it clothes itself in the
most hideous forms. Forms have nothing to do with sin. Herein we see the
keenness, the spirituality of Divine discipline.
3. See further, in this case, the terribleness of God’s displeasure.
But the way of the transgressor is hard; he is making a hard pillow for his
head. Be he high priest or doorkeeper; be he mighty in gift or obscure in
talent--God will not spare him. If judgment begin at the house of God, where
shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? (J. Parker, D. D.)
The causes of Eli’s overthrow
Can you find one vulgar sin in the venerable high priest? We
cannot see, looking at the page in the light of merely literary critics, where
the great lapse was. We know not but that if Eli, as portrayed in the inspired
book, were set up as the standard of determination, a great many would fall
short of his lofty altitude. These considerations justify the interest of the
question how Eli came to be dispossessed of the priesthood. Look at his noble
treatment of the child Samuel. When did he chide the young prophet? When did he
superciliously snub the child? Look at the unpriestliness of his tone when he
talks to the child. Looking at some aspect of Eli’s character, what reverence
we feel for the old man! We see that he was a fine interpreter of the
supernatural section of life. He was not self-obtrusive; he was no mere priest;
he introduced men immediately to God; he did not claim any power of exclusive
or tyrannic mediation. Look, again, at the submissiveness of his tone when his
doom was pronounced. Then look at the man’s interest in the ark of the Lord.
Down to the very last, we see that Eli was an intensely religious man, from
whom God withdrew His covenant, and on whom He pronounced such severe
judgments. We would, therefore, repeat with fervour and with emphasis, that the
conscience of universal man asks: “Lord of heaven and earth, is this right?” In
looking at the failure of Eli as involving a moral question between the Creator
and the creature, we are prepared to teach that the obligations of character
must always control the obligations of covenants. All God’s covenants are
founded upon a moral basis. A covenant is but a form; a covenant is merely an
arrangement, if it be not established upon moral conditions. There are
circumstances in which God’s faithfulness and God’s unchangeableness are seen,
not in fulfilling, but actually in the annulling, of covenants. God will never
maintain the letter at the expense of the spirit. There is a pedantic morality
amongst men which says, “The bond must be kept to the letter,” and which cares
nothing for the spirit of the engagement. God’s morality is not a morality of
ink and seals and witnesses. It involves life, spirit, motive, purpose. Were
God to keep to the letter at the expense of the spirit, He would be no longer
God. His unchangeableness is in His righteousness, not in His formality. Our
confidence in Him is this:--That He will set aside His oldest servants, His
first-chosen men, His most princely vice-regents and interpreters--he will
utterly destroy them from the face of the earth, and hurl after them the
written covenants He has made with them--if they trifle with eternal truth,
with infinite purity! To cover a corrupt life with the blessing of His
approbation, simply because there is a literal covenant to be carried out,
would be to deny every element which makes Him God. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Verse 13
For I have told him that I will judge his house forever for the
iniquity which he knoweth.
The punishment of parental sins
Experience is like the stern light of a ship; it illumines only
the path that is already passed overse This familiar adage is true as to our
own experience; but if we study carefully the Word of God we can follow, as it
were, in the wake of many other voyagers, and get the benefit of the light they
cast upon the waves. By a striking concurrence we have two domestic histories
unfolded side by side. One is the story of wise parental training, as
illustrated in the case of Elkanah and Hannah, the father and mother of Samuel.
The other is the tragic story of Eli, the father of those two “scapegraces,”
Hophni and Phinehas. This latter story is a beacon of warning against parental
indulgence of sins committed by those who are entrusted to us as the trustees
of their spiritual welfare. The attractions of the bright side only deepen the
darkness of the dark side. The clay in Eli’s composition was exceedingly frail
and friable. Excellent as were his convictions of duty, he seems to have been
pitiably weak in working them into practice. There was a lamentable lack of
will power. There are too many such people now-a-days--men and women of good
impulses, but of weak performance. They lack spiritual force and fibre; when
the strain comes they snap. You cannot build a safe suspension bridge from New
York to Brooklyn if the cables are half iron and half twisted tow. The one
vital point in which high priest Eli broke down most disgracefully was in the
management of his own household. This has given him his unhappy celebrity. By
leaving the iniquities of his graceless sons to grow apace he came at last to
be strangled by the serpent monster which sprang into frightful dimensions
within the bosom of his own family. Devotion was prostituted to the foulest
indecencies; the road to the altar became a road to hell! Heavily indeed must
the tidings of these crimes of the sons have fallen upon the ears of their
unhappy father. The extent of their villainies he had not fully known until
now. With a broken heart the poor old man summons before him the profligate
sons whom he had begotten and whom he had never attempted to govern. It is a
harrowing interview. After listening to this solemn and pathetic rebuke from
the aged high priest we are ready to wonder how such a man should have been
such an unfaithful father. We wonder that one who talked so well should have
acted so wrongly. It surprises us that this just abhorrence of what his sons
had been doing did not make its appearance in time to restrain them from
beginning their abominable practices. At the eleventh hour he rubs open his
sleepy eyes to see what he ought to have seen ten hours before. The verdict
against the suffering old man was that he did nothing effectual in the way of
hindrance to his sons’ iniquities; there was no wholesome and powerful
restraint. It is not by main force that the wayward son is to be kept back from
sin--not by hurling terrific threats in his lace or by bombarding him with
irritating censure and taunts. Restraint is the application of truth in love.
It reasons as well as rebukes. It appeals to conscience, and sets God before
the tempted youth. It employs authority, but authority unmixed with passion and
resentment. Eli’s misgovernment of his children bad two cardinal faults. One
error was that he rebuked his sons too late. This was the fatal blunder of the
father who should begin to dissuade his son from the wine bottle when the young
man had already become an inebriate. Eli’s reproofs and admonitions did not
commence soon enough. He did not attempt, we may be assured, to “bend the twig;
“but he laid vain hold with palsied hands of the deep-rooted and full-grown
tree. The other error of the weak-backed Eli was that, having postponed his
correction of his dissolute sons until they became hardened in vice, his words
of rebuke were as weak as water. As quaint old Matthew Henry remarks, “There
was no edge to his reproofs.” He was not only too late; he was too lenient. His
culpable indulgence had left no respect even for his gray hairs or his tears;
they had come to despise the parent who had never secured their respect nor
made them feel his authority. Eli’s wretched failure was the failure of
millions of fathers since his day: when his children were young he would not
restrain them, and when they grew older he could not. Before we reach the
catastrophe of this most; instructive story let me emphasise a few truths in
regard to paternal influence. If Hannah is a model for mothers, Eli is a beacon
for fathers. Many things have been spoken or written--yet not one syllable too
many--about the happy and holy influence of a godly mother, But there yet
remains a solid philosophy in the ancient adage, “Like father, like family.”
The law of heredity decides the denominational and the political status very
generally. “He is a chip of the old block,” said someone when he heard the
younger Pitt’s first speech. “Nay,” replied Burke; “he is the old block
himself.” But if in your houses the “old block” is worm eaten, what shall
become of the chips? The grace of God is not transmitted by inheritance, yet a
father’s conscientious piety is often reproduced in his children. If his
footsteps are deeply indented toward God and heaven, he may reasonably hope
that his children may tread in them. “He sought to the Lord God of his father
and walked in His commandments,” is the Bible description of the good King
Jehoshaphat. If there is a law of Christian nurture by which, with God’s help,
the godly family becomes a nursery of religion, so there is a law of
unchristian nurture, and by this law bad opinions and bad habits are
transmitted to the next generation. Whatever “fires the father kindles, the
children gather the wood.” Show me one who fences his home around with God’s
commandments, and lights it up with domestic comforts and pleasures, and
anchors himself to his home, and I will show you the best kind of restraint
from dangerous evening resorts. A happy Christian home is the surest antidote
for evil amusements. But if a father hears the clock strike eleven in the
theatre or in his clubhouse, he need not be surprised if his sons hear it
strike twelve in the drinking saloon or in the gaming room or the haunts of the
profligate. But Eli, you may say, was a servant of God. So he was, in his way,
but there are two different types of paternal religion. It is a terrible truth
to declare, but I honestly believe that some professed Christians are an
absolute hindrance to the conversion of their children. For the warning of such
the Divine Spirit has spread out at full length the calamitous history of Eli’s
awful mistake. (T. L. Cuyler, D. D.)
Eli’s family government
1.In disorderly families it is likely that both parents and children
will have to divide the blame.
2. When children grow up into vicious courses, it is wise for parents
to try to change the temptations which injured them.
3. When God sends a warning, it will not do just to settle down into
a discouraged apathy and consider it resignation.
4. In considering the matter of home government, we must remember
that the children have some rights. No one principle is lodged in a boy’s mind
by nature more deeply than that of a strict and irrevocable justice.
5. Ideas are yet influential in the training of even the stubbornest
of children and even the vainest. There is a power in family instruction, and
parents are to teach their children what is right and honest and decent and of
good report. It is folly to think that young people are without reflection.
Perhaps the time will come in which people will cease foolishly to object that
the hearts and habits of children ought to be allowed, especially in religious
matters, to grow up unbiassed.
6. A proper measure of permissions should be mingled with the
restrictions which the family sovereignty imposes. Those who are familiar with
the autobiography of Goethe will perhaps recollect with what energy he
exclaims, after recounting some painful frettings of parental discipline he
himself endured, “If elderly persons wish to play the pedagogue properly, they
should neither prohibit nor render disagreeable to a young man anything which
gives him an innocent pleasure, of whatever kind it may be, unless at the same
time they have something else to put in its place or can contrive a
substitute.”
7. The time for making impressions upon the minds and the hearts of
the children comes much earlier than many parents seem to suppose.
8. When a direct conflict of authority is reached there can be no
compromise. The story that Gambetta poked out one of his own eyes when a child,
because his father would not permit him to do as he pleased, is perfectly true.
What is not so generally known is that the elder Gambetta remained inflexible
even after this appalling display of wilfulness. The boy was being educated at
the Lycee of Cahors; and conceiving a dislike to the institution, asked to be
removed from it. His father refused again and again. At last Leon said, “I will
put out one of my eyes if you send me back to the Lycee.” It was holiday time.
“As you please,” said the father, to whom it seems never to have occurred that
his boy might have inherited his own strength of purpose. The same day Leon
took, not a penknife, as the popular tradition has it, but an inkstand, which
he dashed such violence against his eye as to destroy it. Shocked as was the
elder Gambetta, he would not give in; and Leon returned to the Lycee. There
could have been no other decision with such a lad. Better the loss of an eye
than the victorious defiance of law.
9. Prayer for help every instant is the one necessity for all success
in family government. The devil of misrule is one of those evil spirits which
cannot be cast out otherwise. (C. S. Robinson, D. D.)
Eli and his seas
The chief lessons to be drawn from our subject are--
1. That to spoil children is not only a weakness on the part of the
parents, but a positive sin, which may bring great mischief and sorrow not to
the children only, but to the parents themselves; and further, that children
will be spoiled, if parents, to save trouble or spare their own feelings, only
remonstrate without actually punishing them.
2. That God does not leave a man unpunished for his sins and
weaknesses, because he is in the main a good man and a true servant of God.
3. That people may be naturally amiable; and yet that their very
amiabilities may be a snare to them, and plunge them into all sorts of
spiritual mischief. (Dean Goulburn.)
The punishment of evil doing
1. It is plain in the first place, that God requires holiness in all
who serve him. Why were Hophni and Phinehas dismissed with Divine reproaches?
Because they were wanting in original thought? We now dismiss our ministers
because they are not very original. We do not learn that Hophni and Phinehas
were dismissed from the priest’s office because they were wanting in vitality and
freshness of brain power. Why were they dismissed? Because they were behind the
age? The age! Oh, what a ghost that age is to some people. We do not read that
Hophni and Phinehas were dismissed because they were behind the age--but
because they were corrupt men. Corruptness cannot be atoned for by genius.
Gifts are no substitute for grace. Holiness, then, is the fundamental
requirement in all persons who would interpret God and serve Him in any
department of the great mystery of His kingdom. Holiness is genius. Holiness
hath keen, piercing eyes that see every filament of Divine truth and holy
communication to men.
2. It is evident that all the covenants of God are founded upon a
moral basis. “I said indeed that thy house, and the house of thy father, shall
walk before me forever.” There is the bond, there is the covenant of God
repeated by a servant. Hath he promised thee, O man, and art thou living upon
that promise? Know thou, that the promise is always secondary; the character is
primary--righteousness first. Go to the first line--the great line on which all
true things are built, all lasting empires and monarchies are founded--and you
will find that along the line of righteousness God never moves to the right
band or to the left--on from eternity to eternity, never a break or a
deflection in the line of infinite righteousness 3 It is evident that some of
the communications of God are at first very startling and terrible. (J.
Parker, D. D.)
The guilt and consequence of parental unfaithfulness
Could we trace the public and private evils, which infect our
otherwise happy country, to their true source. I doubt not we should find that
most of them proceed from a general neglect of the moral and religious
education of children.
I. We are to
consider the sin here mentioned. Eli’s sons made themselves vile, and he
restrained them not. It is not said that he set them a bad example. It is
evident, on the contrary, that his example was good. Nor is he accused of
neglecting to admonish them. In this respect he was much less culpable than
many parents at the present day. But though Eli admonished he did not restrain
his children of the same sin those parents are now guilty, who suffer their
children to indulge, without restraint, those sinful propensities to which childhood
and youth are but too subject; and which, when indulged, render them vile in
the sight of God. Among the practices which thus render children vile are a
quarrelsome, malicious disposition, disregard to truth, excessive indulgence of
their appetites, neglect of the Bible and religious institutions, profanation
of the Sabbath, profane, scurrilous, or indecent language, wilful disobedience,
associating with openly vicious company, taking the property of their
neighbours, and idleness which naturally leads to everything bad. From all
these practices it is in the power of parents to restrain their children in a
very considerable degree. Nor will a few occasional reproofs and admonitions,
given to children, free parents from the guilt of partaking in their sins. No,
they must be restrained; restrained with a mild and prudent, but firm and
steady hand: restrained early, while they may be formed to habits of
submission, obedience, and diligence; and the reins of government must never
for a moment be slackened, much less given up into their hands, as is too often
the case. If we neglect our duty to our heavenly Father, we surely cannot
wonder or complain, if He suffers our children to neglect their duty to us.
II. The punishments
denounced against those who are guilty of it. It will soon appear, that these
punishments, like most of those with which God threatens mankind, are the
natural consequences of the sin against which they are denounced.
1. That most of his posterity should die early, and that none of them
should live to see old age. Now it is too evident to require proof, that the
sin of which Eli was guilty, naturally tends to produce the consequence which
is here threatened as a punishment. When youth are permitted to make themselves
vile, without restraint, they almost inevitably fail into courses which tend to
undermine their constitutions, and shorten their days.
2. In the second place, God declares to Eli, that such of his
children as were spared should prove a grief and vexation, rather than a
comfort to him. The man of thine, whom I shall not cut off, shall be to consume
thine eyes, and to grieve thine heart. How terribly this threatening was
fulfilled in the case of Eli, you need not be told. If parents indulge their
children in infancy and childhood, and do not restrain them when they make
themselves vile, it is almost impossible that they should not pursue courses
and contract habits, which will render them as bitterness to their fathers, and
a sorrow of heart to those that bore them. If such parents are pious, their
hearts will probably be grieved, and their eyes consumed with tears, to see
their children rebelling against God, and plunging into eternal ruin. They that
sow the seeds of vice in the minds of their children, or who suffer them to be
sown by others, and to grow without restraint, will almost invariably be
compelled to reap, and to eat with many tears the bitter harvest which those
seeds tend to produce.
3. In the third place, God forewarns Eli, that his posterity should
be poor and contemptible. Here again we see the natural consequences of Eli’s
sin in its punishment. Children, who are not well instructed and restrained by
their parents, will almost inevitably in such a place as this, contract habits
of idleness, instability, and extravagance, which naturally lead to poverty and
contempt.
4. Lastly; God declares that none of the methods thus appointed to
obtain the pardon of sin, should avail to procure pardon for the iniquity of
his house; I have sworn unto Eli, that the iniquity of his house shall not be
purged away by sacrifice nor offering foreverse This too was the natural
consequence of his conduct. He had suffered them to follow without restraint
those courses which rendered them unfit for heaven, until their day of grace
was past, and the door of mercy forever closed against them. They were now
given up to a hard heart and reprobate mind. The terrible punishments denounced
against this sin sufficiently show that it is exceedingly displeasing in the
sight of God. Let us then inquire as was proposed.
III. Why it is so?
1. Because it proceeds from very wicked and hateful principles. There
is scarcely any sin which proceeds from worse principles and more hateful
dispositions than this. For instance, sometimes it proceeds from the love and the
practice of vice. Openly vicious and profligate parents, who do not restrain
themselves, cannot, of course, but be ashamed to restrain their children. In
other instances, this sin is occasioned by secret impiety and infidelity. Even
if such parents sometimes restrain the grosser vices of their children, they
will give them no religious instruction; they will never pray for them, for
they never pray for themselves; and without religious instruction and prayer,
little or nothing effectual can be done. But in religious parents, this sin
almost invariably proceeds from indolence and selfishness. They love their own
ease too well to employ that constant care and exertion, which are necessary to
restrain their children, and educate them as they ought. They cannot bear to
correct them, or put them to pain There is also much unbelief, much contempt of
God, and much positive disobedience in this sin Parents are as expressly and as
frequently commanded to restrain, to correct, and instruct their children, as
to perform any other duty whatever Now these are some of the worst principles
of our depraved nature; and therefore we need not wonder that a sin, which
proceeds from such sources, is exceedingly displeasing to God.
2. This sin is exceedingly displeasing to God, because, so far as it
prevails, it entirely frustrates His design in establishing the family state.
3. God is greatly displeased with this sin on account of the good
which it prevents, and the infinite evil which it produces. He has taught us,
that children properly educated will be good and happy, both here and
hereafter.
4. Lastly; this sin is exceedingly displeasing to Him, because those
who are guilty of it, break over the most powerful restraints, and act a most
unnatural part. He knew that it would not be safe to entrust such creatures as
we are with the education of immortal souls, unless we had powerful inducements
to be faithful to the trust. He, therefore, implanted in the hearts of parents
a strong and tender affection for their offspring, and a moss ardent desire for
their happiness, that they might thus be induced to educate them as they ought.
But then who neglect to restrain their children, do violence to this powerful
operative principle.
And now let us improve the subject,
1. By inquiring whether the sin does not greatly prevail among
ourselves.
2. If there are any children or youth now present, whose parents do
not restrain them, and who make themselves vile, by indulging in vicious or
sinful practices, they may learn from this subject, what will be their fate,
unless repentance prevent. (E. Payson, D. D.)
The children of religious parents
1. The life and history of Eli is full of instruction, of painful
warning and sad reflection. The prominent feature of his history is the
ill-success of his children. Eli failed in his children, but more than this, he
culpably failed. It was no matter of commiseration; it was one of blame and
severe censure.
2. The leading circumstance which I will dwell upon in Eli’s life is
his conduct to his children and his treatment of them. It is a circumstance
which must have struck many that the sons of eminently good persons often turn
out ill; or that in many cases, they fall far short of the character and
reputation of their parents.
3. But, singularly enough, another fault seems to have mixed itself
up In the character of Eli--a yearning for and a love of family aggrandisement.
There seems to have been a winking, if not more, at the mode in which his sons
made a traffic of their religious position. Religion, especially family
religion, has always a market value in the world. The recognition of this, and
the practical use of it for a man’s own ends will rank among a man’s most
perilous faults. It is a fearful thing to” deal with out position with regard
to God as a medium of exchange and barter. (E. Monro.)
Eli
In Eli we have one in whom great and varied excellence is fatally
marred by a single fault. And yet, even that fault was at least amiable, akin
to a form of goodness, and capable of a specious apology and extenuation. It
was but an excess and misdirection of parental love. “Eli,” we are told, “was
very old;” and in that decay of firmness and energy which attends the decline
of life, are to be found the solution and apology of this miserable weakness.
Yet this did not avail with God. And why? Eli had not grown weakly indulgent
first when the powers of nature were failing; nor had Eli’s sons jumped by a
sudden spring from a life of virtue to such depths of profligacy and vileness.
Eli had all along been educating his sons to be what they had become. He had
taught and counselled and reproved them well; but he had been too fond of them
to restrain and punish them. And now they were vile, and set at defiance an
authority they had never been taught to honour; and he must bear the bitter
penalty.
1. Let me remind you that a parent is a ruler by appointment of God,
and is held at God’s bar accountable for the office and work of a ruler. A
parent then is more than an example and an instructor. He is one of these
“powers that be, that are ordained of God,” and, in his sphere, is appointed to
be a terror to evil-doers, and for a praise to them that do well. The family is
a Divine polity of which he is the head; and as such, in it he is the
representative of God, with a portion of whose power he is correspondently
clothed. And what is a polity without laws? and what are laws without
penalties? and what are penalties without punishments? Too many are wont in
this day to regard the whole subject of punishment, whether in the family or
the state, under the misleading influence of a weak sensibility and a
counterfeit benevolence. But He, whose love is far purer and truer than any
known to man, has appointed it to man as a needful restraint and a salutary
remedy; and we shall never find our wisdom or our welfare in any vain attempt
to criticise or amend the ordinance of God.
2. Lastly, let me remind you that a child is a being that needs
restraint and coercion. False theories of education are mainly built on the
basis of a false estimate of the moral condition of human nature. Starting with
the false position that the child has nothing in it but elements of good, which
only need to be developed in order to the production of a pure and lovely
character, and protected during their growth from corrupting influences from
without, it overlooks the solemn truth, that, mingled with these elements, are
prolific seeds of evil, which need to be eradicated with a firm and steady
hand, and resolutely repressed upon their first shooting forth and growth. The
true work of moral training is, like all other true works of men, a warfare
also, undertaken and prosecuted against contrary influences and opposite
tendencies, which nature does not aid, but opposes. Parents have the world, the
flesh, and the devil to hinder their success. True, it is not in man’s power to
change the heart. That is the prerogative of God only. But he that works by
Divine rules, with faith in Divine promises and Divine methods, will not be apt
to lack a Divine blessing. (R. A. Hallam, D. D.)
Eli: A warning to parents
We are sometimes tempted to imagine, that God will in mercy
overlook the defects in a devoted servant on account of his distinguished
position. The case of Eli is adapted to correct such a mistaken notion. Over
domestic, as well as out of door sins, the judgment of God is seen to hang
alike.
I. Let us consider
Eli’s sin. We can be too kind and indulgent to our children is the simple, yet
important lesson taught by the history of Eli. There are, then two things
equally to be avoided in the graining of children--over kindness and over
severity. Eli’s sin was over kindness. Now, this paternal over kindness in Eli
was a sin for which he was held responsible. It is a sin, too, which, on
account of the tender susceptibility of the parental instinct, requires the
nicest degree of watchfulness over the treacherous emotions of our deceitful
heart. There are many parents who are scrupulous to maintain a character for
moral decorum, and spare no pains to instruct their children how to walk in the
paths of worldly wisdom, but they have not that anxiety for their eternal
welfare which the Word of God requires. They seem to imagine, that, if they
take their children regularly to church every Sunday, they have fulfilled their
parental duty in a religious point of view.
II. Such was Eli’s
sin: Let us now consider the manner in which he is reproved for it by the most
high. He who had judged Israel for nearly forty years, was now condemned at the
bar of conscience by a stern reproof from the lips of a stripling. It is not
usual for venerable old age to be obliged to sit to hear the voice of
inexperienced youth raised in reprimanding accents. Nothing could have been
more humiliating to Eli’s sense of righteousness than to have had the sin of neglecting
to discharge his duty towards his children brought to his remembrance by a
child. If it were wisely ordained that a child endued with such a disposition
as that of Samuel should be sent to rebuke an elder, the reception given by Eli
to Samuel is worthy the imitation of old age. It is worthy of remark that the
same humble instrument has been employed by God on other occasions. The voice,
manner, and conduct of a good child oftentimes exercise a mysterious power in
not only checking the faults of old age, but in bridling the restless pride in
the bosom of manhood at its prime. In the gradual training of the mind to the
attainment of the perfection of its original knowledge and happiness, it
forfeited through the first act of disobedience to the commands of God, our
most valuable instruction in gaining our lost inheritance is not to be derived
in the heated crowds of a busy and ever-vying world, but from the simple ways
and unadorned sentiments of childhood. The silvery voice of childhood has ere
this touched a chord in man’s complicated system that has aroused his supine
nature from its prevailing tendency to apathy, and set in motion the million
wheels of duty.
III. Let us consider
some of the practical consequences attending Eli’s sin. Having been too fondly
indulged in the days of youth, they gradually lost that filial respect for
parental authority which is of the last importance to the welfare of children.
The sequel of the unfortunate career of Hophni and Phinehas is soon told. In
consequence of the transgressions of the Israelites, they were given up by God
to the vengeance of their enemies. Finally, let those parents, whose besetting
sin, like that of Eli, tempts them to make a practice of spoiling their
children, of excusing their faults, and allowing them to have too much of their
own way, remember that they are certainly exposing themselves to the wrath of
God. If indulged children do not turn out immoral, they are likely to turn out
proud, selfish, ungrateful, disrespectful, cold, distant, inattentive,
disobliging, self-willed, headstrong, grasping, extravagant, unnatural. Be sure
such a sin will find the incautious parent out. God says so, and who shall
contradict it? (R. Jones, B. A.)
The fatal consequences of a bad education
I. Observe the crimes
of the sons of Eli.
II. The indulgence
of the parent.
III. Observe what
terrible punishments this criminal indulgence drew down upon the guilty father,
the profligate sons, and even the whole people under their direction. These
threatenings were accomplished in all their rigour.
1. To neglect the education of our children is to be ungrateful to
God, whose wonderful power created and preserved them.
2. To neglect the education of our children is to refuse to retrench
that depravity, which we communicated to them.
3. To neglect the education of our children is to be wanting in that
tenderness, which is so much their due. What inheritance can we transmit to
them? Titles? They are often nothing but empty sounds without meaning and
reality. Riches? (Proverbs 23:5.) Honours? They are often
mixed with disagreeable circumstances, which poison all the pleasure. It is a
religious education, piety, and the fear of God, that makes the fairest inheritance,
the nobles succession, that we can leave our families. To neglect the education
of our children is to let loose madmen against the state, instead of furnishing
it with good rulers or good subjects. The least indulgence of the bad
inclinations of children sometimes produces the most fatal effects in society.
This is exemplified in the life of David, whose memory may truly be reproached
on this article, for he was one of the most weak of all parents. Observe his
indulgence of Amnon. It produced incest. Remark his indulgence of Absalom. This
produced a civil war. Remark how he indulged Adonijah, who made himself
chariots, and set up a retinue of sixty men (1 Kings 1:6.). This produced an
usurpation of the throne and the crown. To neglect the education of your
children is to furnish them with arms against yourselves. To neglect the
education of children is to prepare torments for a future state, the bare
apprehension of which must give extreme pain to every heart capable of feeling.
A reformation of the false ideas, which you form on the education of children,
is, so to speak, the first step, which you ought to take in the road set before
you this day. First maxim: Delays, always dangerous in cases of practical
religion, are peculiarly fatal in the case of education. As soon as children
see the light, and begin to think and reason, we should endeavour to form them
to piety. Second maxim: Although the end of the divers methods of educating
children ought to be the same, yet it should be varied according to their
different characters. Let us study our children with as much application as we
have studied ourselves. Third maxim: A procedure, wise in itself, and proper to
inspire children with virtue, may sometimes be rendered useless by symptoms of
passions, with which it is accompanied. We cannot educate them well without a
prudent mixture of severity and gentleness. Fourth maxim: The best means of
procuring a good education lose all their force, unless they be supported by
the examples of such as employ them. Example is always a great motive, and it
is especially such to youth. Children know how to imitate before they can
speak, before they can reason. Fifth maxim: A liberty, innocent when it is
taken before men, becomes criminal when it is taken before tender minds, not
yet formed. What circumspection, what niceties does this maxim engage us to
observe. Sixth maxim: The indefatigable pains, which we ought always to take in
educating our children, ought to be redoubled on these decisive events, which
influence both the present life, and the future state. For example, the kind of
life, to which we devote them, is one of these decisive events. Companions,
too, are to be considered as deciding on the future condition of a child. Above
all, marriage is one of these decisive steps in life. A good father of a
family, unites his children to others by the two bonds of virtue and religion.
Seventh maxim: The best means for the education of children must be accompanied
with fervent prayer. (J. Saurin.)
Eli and his sons
I. Eli, let us
observe, was otherwise and personally a good man. His character underwent
searching tests at the most critical period of his life, and it is clear that
he was resigned, humble, and in a true sense devout. If Eli had been the
successor of a long line of rulers of the religion of Israel, submission would
have been easier. “You can fall with dignity,” it has been said, “when you have
behind you a great history.” It was easier for Louis XVI to mount the scaffold,
than for Napoleon to embark for St. Helena. Eli had succeeded to a position to
which his family could never have expected to succeed in the ordinary course of
things. He hoped, no doubt, that his sons would secure to his family the
dignity of the priesthood for all coming time; he hoped he was to be the first
of a long line of priests of the house of Ithamar. The disappointment of a hope
like this is much more than any but a good man can experience without repining.
His fault, after all was not positive but negative; he had only done less than
he ought to have done; he had sinned out of good nature, out of an easy temper,
but could he have been chastised more severely had he himself sinned viciously
and out of malice prepense? This is what many a man would have
said in Eli’s position; but Eli is too certain that he is in the hands of One
who is all just, as well as all powerful, to attempt or to think of complaint
or remonstrance. And Eli’s personal goodness is also seen in his humility; he
submits to be rebuked and sentenced by his inferior without a word of
remonstrance. The nameless member of a prophetic order tells a man who is at
the head of the religious as well as the civil state of Israel, that his
conduct has been marked by ingratitude to God, and that the doom of degradation
awaits his house. We know how rulers like Ahab and Manasseh treated prophets,
however eminent, who told them unwelcome truths. Eli listens, he is silent; no
violent word, much less any act of violence, escapes him. He has no petty sense
of offended dignity that must vent its spleen on the messenger, when his
conscience tells him that the message is only what he might expect to hear.
This, I say, is true humility, the desire, the determination to see ourselves
as we really are, to bear ourselves towards God and towards our fellow men
accordingly. And, thirdly, Eli’s personal piety is especially noticeable at the
moment of his death. He had to hear that the ark of God was taken. It was too
much. It came to pass that when the messenger “made mention of the ark of God,
Eli fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck
brake, and he died.” This, I say, was an unpremeditated revelation of
character. He might have survived the national disgrace; he might have survived
the death of his children; but that the ark of the sacred presence, of which he
was the appointed guardian, should be taken, this he could not survive. It
touched the Divine honour, and Eli’s devotion is to be measured by the fact,
that the shock of such a disaster killed him on the spot.
II. There is, then,
no question as to Eli’s personal excellence, but it was accompanied by a want
of moral resolution and enterprise which explains the ruin of his house. He and
it were ruined “because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them
not.” The original word might perhaps be better rendered. “They brought curses
on themselves.” They are described as sons of Belial, or in modern language as
thoroughly bad men. Eli only talked to his sons, and we can understand how he
may have persuaded himself that talking was enough; that instead of taking a
very painful resolution it was better to leave matters alone. If he were to do
more, was there not a risk that he might forfeit the little influence over the
young men that still remained to him? Would not harsh treatment defeat its
object by making them desperate? Might they not attribute the most judicial
severity to mere personal annoyance? If, after speaking to them, he left them
alone they would think over his words. Anyhow, they would soon be older, and as
they grew older they would, he may have hoped, grow more sensible; they would
see the imprudence, the impropriety, as well as the graver aspects of their
conduct; they would anticipate the need of action on their father’s part by
such a reformation of their manners as would hush the murmurs and allay the
discontent of Israel. And even if this could not be calculated on very
seriously, something might occur to give a new turn to their occupations. In
any case, it might be better to wait and see whether matters would not in some
way right themselves. This is what weak people do. They escape, as they think,
from the call of unwelcome duty, from the duty of unwelcome action, by stretching
out the eyes of their mind towards some very vague future, charged with all
sorts of airy improbabilities. If Eli had not been blinded by his misplaced
affection for his children, he would have known that outward circumstances do
not improve those whose wills are already on a wrong moral tack, and that there
is no truth whatever in the assumption that because we are getting older, we
are therefore, somehow, necessarily getting better. Years may only bring with
them a harder heart, and a more blunted conscience. Nothing but an inward
change, a change of will, and character, and purpose, could possibly have saved
Hophni and Phinehas, and this change was, to say the least, more probable if
they could have ceased to hold the offices which meant for them only every day
they held them deepening guilt and ever accumulating profanation. Downright
wickedness rouses opposition; something, others feel, must be done, if anything
can be done, to put it down; but weakness saunters through the world arm in arm
with some form of goodness, and men put up with its failures out of
consideration to the good company that it keeps. Had it not been for the
excellence of Eli’s personal character, Israel would have risen in indignation
to chase the young profaners of the sacred priesthood from the precincts of the
sanctuary; but Eli’s sons could not be treated as common criminals, and Eli
failed to do for his God, for his religion, for his country, that which he only
could do, if the law of God’s just judgments was not to take effect. Eli’s sin
consisted precisely in this: he did not restrain his sons.
III. Let us make two
observations in conclusion.
1. It is said that a refined civilisation brings with it increased
softness of manners and a corresponding weakening of human character, and this,
it is urged, is to be seen in public as well as in private life; but it is
especially observable in the modern relations that exist between parents and
children. Fifty years ago the English father was king in his household. He was
approached with a kind of distant respect; he was loved, but he was feared as
much as he was loved; his will was law, and he did not scruple to enforce it.
Now, many a family is virtually a little republic, which assigns to the parents
a sort of decorative leadership, but in which the young people, in virtue
sometimes of their numbers, sometimes of their boisterous spirits, really rule.
Those who know most of the change can tell us whether it works well, and
especially whether fathers who have failed to assert their true authority are
rewarded by the priceless gift of dutiful and high-minded sons. It may be that
two generations back the relations between parents and children erred on the
side of stiffness and severity. Is it certain that we in our day do not err on
the side of good-natured indifference to plain moral obligations? No
relationship can be more charged with responsibility: than that between a
parent and the immortal being to whom he has been the means of giving life. It
may be that two generations ago the relations between fathers and sons were
wanting in geniality, that they were stiff, that they were formal; but let us
ask ourselves this question: Is it better, when a father has gone to his
account, that his son should say of him: “My father kept me in strict order,
but he never knowingly let me do any wrong that he could prevent,” or that he
should say, as sons have said: “My father was the most kindly and easy-going of
men; but he never helped me to keep out of troubles which, alas! will not be
buried in my grave?”
2. And, lastly, let us note that no outward circumstances can of
themselves protect us against the insidious assaults of evil or against the
enfeeblement of mind. If Hophni and Phinehas could have led honest and pure
lives anywhere, it surely would have been on the: steps of the sanctuary at
Shiloh; if anywhere Eli could have felt that family affections may be so
displaced as to dishonour God, and that weakness in a ruler may be criminal, he
would have felt it at a spot which was so charged with the memories of the
heroes and saints of Israel; but, in truth, external advantages of this kind
only help us when the will and the conscience are in a condition to be helped.
(Canon Liddon.)
Verse 15
The doors of the House of the Lord.
The doors of the Tabernacle
Some think, that whereas yet the Tabernacle consisted of curtains
and coverings, and so had veils instead of doors: that the House of God and the
Tabernacle were not the same, as the Ark was in one place and the Tabernacle in
another in the time of David and Solomon, before the temple was built; and
hereunto this giveth some probability, because it is called here not the
Tabernacle but the Temple of the Lord (1 Samuel 3:3), and the House of the
Lord (1 Samuel 3:15). But this is not
like: for the Tabernacle was set up in Shiloh in Joshua’s time (Joshua 18:1-28; Joshua 1:1-18), and so it had continued
in the time of the Judges ( 21:19), and there it was now in Eli’s
time (1 Samuel 1:9).
2. Therefore it is more like, that though the Tabernacle, while it
was in the desert, for the better transporting and carrying from place to
place, had veils only hanging in the entrance instead of doors; yet now, being
settled in a certain place, it might also be made sure with doors.
3. These were the doors only of the outward court, whither the people
might come in to worship, and the charge whereof belonged to the Levites (1 Chronicles 26:1-32). (A.
Willett.)
Humble service
I heard the Rev. F.B. Meyer say that he would consider it as great
ah act of consecration for a young woman to stay at home and play her brother’s
accompaniment in learning a song if thereby she could keep him at home that
evening, although the doing so prevented her attending some religious meeting.
I like what is told us of the young Samuel on the most eventful night in his
life’s history when God spoke to him and revealed Himself to the lad; what do
we read at the close? “And Samuel lay until the morning and opened the doors of
the house of the Lord.” There he is, after such a night, opening the doors,
sweeping the floor as usual. The Beatific Vision must not keep us from our
common duties; we must pass from the seeing to the serving. (Christian Endeavour
Times.)
Verse 17
What is the thing that the Lord hath said unto thee?
A private enquiry
I. Let us view the
question as addressed to Samuel.
1. The first remark which we shall make upon it is that God does
speak to men. In ways suitable to their feeble nature the Lord has spoken to
men.
2. God regards not age in His speaking, but He condescends to speak
with young children.
3. When we do hear the voice of God we should be deeply impressed by
it.
4. We should store up in our memories whatever God says to us.
5. Looking at the text in its light toward Samuel, we learn that we
should be able to tell what we hear from God.
II. Let us now view
the question as it comes from Eli.
1. I understand from Eli’s question, first, that we should willingly
learn, even from a child.
2. Next, learn from Eli, that we should be willing to know the very
worst of the ease.
3. Next, we should desire to hear the whole of God’s word. Men aspire
to be clever, and to that end they must appear to be bold thinkers, highly
cultured, and far removed from the old worn out notions of orthodoxy. Many are
the floral displays in sermons! Sheaves of corn are too plain and rustic. This
is the age of bouquets and wreaths of rare flowers. Paul must give way to
Browning, and David to Tennyson. Brethren, there are enough in the novelty
business without us; and we have something better to do. Keep us right by
saying to us, “What is the thing the Lord hath said to thee? I pray thee, hide
it not from me!”
III. And now
consider the question, to and from ourselves. I want to put a series of
questions.
1. Have we ever asked the Lord to speak to us?
2. Next, have we all regarded what God has spoken?
3. A further question is this: Have we shaped our lives by what God
has said?
4. Next, have we told what we know?
5. Do our children ever rebuke us? This Samuel was to Eli like a
grandchild. His sons were grown up, and had left him; but here was this little
one brought into the temple to minister there, and the old man came to be
rebuked by this little child. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Verse 18
And Samuel told him every whit.
Speaking the truth in love
Samuel, so adjured, “told him every whit, and hid nothing from
him.” How interesting it is to trace, at every stage of the history, the
development of this holy child’s character. He had been called to be a prophet,
that is, an announcer of God’s word and will to His people. And what are the
leading qualifications for the office of a prophet?
1. That he should speak the whole truth fully and without reserve.
2. He must speak the truth in love. He is not to speak harshly or
bitterly, as if glorying in the prospect of sentence being executed, but
tenderly, and in sympathy. What a good augury of his right discharge of the
prophetical office--this fidelity combined with this sympathy! (Dean
Goulburn.)
Samuel’s youthful virtues
1. His submission to Eli deserves particular notice. Early grace made
him anxious to do well, and to obey those over him in the Lord.
2. Samuel showed great respect to Eli’s feelings. He had a regard for
the feelings of the amiable old man, and had no desire to glory over him by being
preferred as the channel of Divine communication, or to embitter his gray hairs
by such mournful tidings. His conduct evinced great self-command and
consideration for others--features of character of great worth and usefulness,
and very beautiful in one so young. It is wrong even to tamper with the
feelings of anyone, or to distress a heart unreasonably. There is a cruelty in
annoying the aged by wantonly abusing them for the faults of other years, or
reproaching them for the vices of their sons, or bearing to them the tales
which irritate their souls, and make their lives unhappy, He was not forward to
utter bad news, as young persons often are, but acted with becoming caution.
3. Samuel’s candour was remarkable. Samuel’s frank and candid
statement is a model to every youth. (R. Steel.)
It is the Lord: let Him do
what seemeth Him good.
I. A judicious
discovery from whence all evils come. “It is the Lord.” He is omnipotent, and
who hath withstood His power. He is just, and will bring no evil without good cause,
He is wise, and whatsoever evil He bringeth He can draw it to a good end . . .
He remaineth the same God in the fire and in the earthquake which He was in the
still voice; the same when He slew the Israelites as when His light shone upon
their tabernacle. His glorious attributes cross not one another. His justice
taketh not from His mercy, nor His mercy from the equity of His justice; but He
is just when He bindeth up, and merciful when He woundeth us . . . The same God
that overthrew Pharaoh in the Red Sea, that “slew great and mighty kings” (Psalms 136:15; Psalms 136:17-18) did deliver up His own
people, did deliver up the ark to Dagon: for His justice, His wisdom, and His
mercy “did endure forever.”
II. A well-grounded
resolution. Let us learn with Eli to “kiss the Son, lest He be angry” (Psalms 2:12), nay, to kiss Him, and bow
before Him when He is angry; to offer Him up a peace offering, our wills, of
more power than a hecatomb, than all our numerous fasts and sermons, to appease
His wrath . . . This is the truest surrendry we can make . . . ”I do not only
obey God, and do what He would have me, but I am of His mind,” saith the
heathen Seneca. . . . The stubbornest knee may be made to bow, and obedience
may be constrained. But the true Israelite doeth it with joy and readiness, and
though he receive a blow he counteth it as a favour, for He that gave it hath
taught him an art to make it so. (Anthony Faringdon.)
Peaceable fruit of righteousness
So long as things went well with Eli he had given no evidence of
being one of God’s true children. But the sore pressure of God’s judgment upon
him brings out the good in his character, which lay beneath the surface. The
fragrant leaf must be crushed, before it will give out the perfume that is in
it. The pebble must be cut and filed and rubbed by the jeweller, before the
beautiful veining which runs through the heart of it can be brought to light. (Dean
Goulburn.)
Archbishop Whitgift, when he was paralysed and his speech
affected, could be heard to say nothing distinctly but this: “Pro Ecclesia
Dei,” “Pro Ecclesia Dei,” (“For the Church of God.”) The Church of God was
nearer to his heart than his own troubles and approaching death. (Dean
Goulburn.)
Resignation in suffering
You are aware that in the Christian character there are what are
called the active and the passive graces. It is not enough for us to ask what
we do, but we must also ask how we suffer.
I. Let us attend
to the nature of that submission to God of which we have an example in the
memorable Eli.
1. Submission to God does not suppose insensibility to the
afflictions under which we are called to cultivate it. We are allowed to mourn,
though we are not allowed to murmur. Religion does not exact stoicism of its
subjects.
2. This submission, in the second place, does not suppose that we are
not to employ the means which are within our power, with a view to the
prevention of evil. Our employment of means, with a view to prevent evil from
falling upon us, is not at all inconsistent with a feeling of submission to the
will of God.
3. Nor, in the third place, is prayer to God against evil,
inconsistent with submission to Him under it, if He should see fit to visit us
with it. We must not, indeed, open our mouth against God, but we may open our
mouth to God.
But then, let us inquire what this submission actually implies.
1. Why, in the first place, it implies that we justify God in every
thing that He does--that however much we may blame ourselves, we attach no
blame to God. Now, this is something; and I am afraid it is more than all of us
at all times experience.
2. But submission involves more than this: it involves in it, that we
approve of all that God does.
3. Then, lastly, this submission supposes that we cleave to God in
the midst of all.
II. Let us notice
the grounds on which this submission to God rests. First, then, it rests on the
sovereignty of God.
2. Then, secondly, on the ground of the righteousness and justice of
God, we ought to submit to Him.
2. Then, again, the unchangeableness of God should also inspire us
with a feeling of resignation and submission.
III. Some practical
effects or fruits of this submission to God. Now, there are some evils which it
will prevent, and there are some direct and absolute benefits which it will
ensure. First, there are evils which it will prevent. It will prevent rash
conclusions. Again, this submission to God will prevent immoderate sorrow. In
the next place, this will prevent sinful staggerings. This is a scriptural
phrase. It is said of Abraham that “he staggered not.” Sometimes a sudden
affliction comes upon us; and, like a flash of lightning across our path, it
surprises us. Then, as to the positive benefits which this feeling--this
habit--this virtue of submission will insure to us, it will give us, in the
first place, inward peace. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is
stayed on Thee.” Therefore, this will also bring along with it enduring
patience--a noble virtual Patience is one of the finest moral virtues! Lastly,
another positive advantage is that it will excite praise and thanksgiving. The
language, the spirit of the text, is not to be attained, perhaps, all at once.
(J. E. Beaumont.)
Resignation to the Divine Will
Let us see what virtue Eli manifests in the text; then, how he
displayed it; and, what lessons may be drawn from the subject.
I. The virtue.
1. It was conformity to the Will of God viewed in relation to God,
this virtue is based upon the realisation of His goodness, and that therefore
His will is always just and good and wise.
2. Further, that nothing happens unless it is designed or permitted
by Him. Eli’s instinctive expression, “It is the Lord,” reveals the habit of
his soul to discern God’s hand in all things.
3. But the words express the entire resignation of his own will to
the will of God. In this lies the virtue. It was not a mere emotion, but an act
of that within him must have been a habit. Difficult occasions do not create
virtues, but call them into operation.
4. Holy Scripture supplies us with many instances of conformity of
will to God, which is a law which holds good throughout the spiritual sphere,
as that of gravitation does in the natural sphere: e.g. the answer of
the Shunamite, when her child had died, “It is well,” or “Peace” (2 Kings 4:26). Again, Job’s
wonderful resignation, expressed by the words, “The Lord gave, and the Lord
hath taken away; blessed be the Name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).
II. How displayed.
1. Promptly. There was no hesitation or delay. We know how, when some
great loss is broken to us, for a time we are apt to be overwhelmed, dazed, and
bewildered with grief, and want a little pause before we can gather ourselves
together again and attempt to cry, “Not my will, but Thine, be done.” But with
the aged Eli, the accents of resignation followed immediately upon the
announcement of the evils which would befall him and his house. He apparently
sustained the shock without perturbation, though evidently a man of deep
affections.
2. Humbly. Men often disdain to be corrected by their juniors, but
Eli displayed no such sensitiveness. Though judge and priest, he heard with
humbleness of mind the tale of woes and denunciation from the lips of the
innocent child, and expressed the justice of what God was about to bring upon
him. Most painful and humiliating, and, as far as this life was concerned,
irretrievable; yet no word of murmuring or self-defence escaped from his mouth.
3. Absolutely. “Let Him do what seemeth Him good.” Not “what seemeth
good to me.” This is true liberty of spirit. So the greatness of Eli’s prompt,
humble, and absolute resignation is accentuated by the consideration of the
time when he lived and the circumstances of the period.
III. Lessons.
1. We are warned, by the judgments upon Eli and his family, of the
momentousness of the duty of rebuking sin, and especially on the part of
parents, rulers, and priests.
2. The practice of conforming the will to God in all the events of
life, and that with the same features of promptness, lowliness, and entirety as
Eli manifested, is the chief lesson from the text.
3. Further, to remember that we can learn conformity from the
self-surrender of Christ to His Father’s will, especially in His Passion and
death, and that we are aided in the production of this grace by the presence of
the Holy Ghost; so that to say, “Not my will, but Thine, be done,” is easier
for us than it was for Eli.
4. The root of his conformity of will comes to view at the moment of
his death. He bore up when he heard the tidings of the great slaughter of the
people, and that his two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were dead; but when he was
told that the ark of God was taken he fell backward and died. Evidently God,
and the things of God--notwithstanding his past great and culpable
negligence--held the first place in his heart; hence this submission to His
Will. (Canon Hutchings, M. A.)
Faith surviving sorrow
“A few weeks ago, in a city of Nebraska, I was holding meetings.
There came to that city my dear friend, Commander Booth-Tucker. It was the city
of Omaha. I shall never forget my talk with him there. I said to him,
‘Commander, the passing of your beloved wife was one of the things that I
freely confess I cannot understand.’ He looked at me across the breakfast
table, his eyes wet with tears, and yet his face radiant with that light which
never shone on sea or land, and he said to me, ‘Dear man, do you not know that
the Cross can only be preached by tragedy?’ Then he told me this incident:
‘When I and my wife were last in Chicago, I was trying to lead a sceptic to
Christ in a meeting. At last the sceptic said, with a cold, glittering eye and
a sarcastic voice, ‘It is all very well. You mean well; but I lost my faith in
God when my wife was taken out of my horns. It is all very well; but if that
beautiful woman at your side lay dead and cold by you, how would you believe in
God?’ Within one month she had been taken through the awful tragedy of a
railway accident, and the Commander went back to Chicago, and, in the hearing
of a vast multitude, said, ‘Here in the midst of the crowd, standing by the
side of my dead wife as I take her to burial, I want to say that I still
believe in God, and love Him, and know Him.’” (Campbell Morgan, D. D.)
Verse 19
And Samuel grew, and the Lord was with him.
Samuel
It is the design of the present discourse to show what was implied
in God’s being with Samuel.
I. This implied that
God preserved his life and health. While other children died, Samuel lived, and
grew in stature and strength. He could gratefully say, “I am old and
grey-headed.” Long life is often represented as the natural effect and temporal
reward of early piety.
II. God’s being
with him implied that he preserved him from moral as well as natural evil. He
lived in an evil day. All orders and ages of men had grown corrupt, and every
kind of error, delusion, and vice prevailed. Samuel, therefore, was greatly
exposed to be carried away by the torrent of moral corruption, and nothing but
the presence of God could preserve him from being overwhelmed and destroyed.
But God was with him and he with God; for he lived as seeing Him who is
invisible. A love to God, and a sense of His constant presence, made him hate
and avoid every sinful course. This was certainly owing to God’s being with
him, and restraining the native depravity of his heart. It is easy for God to
keep the heart of those who constantly lean upon Him.
III. God’s being
with Samuel implied his constant guidance in the path of duty. Accordingly we
find that God did from time to time, direct him in duty. He directed him to
bear His solemn messages to Eli and his house. He directed him to comply with
the voice of the people, and anoint Saul to be king over Israel. And He
directed him, at the hazard of his life, to anoint David, the son of Jesse, to
succeed Saul on the throne which be then claimed and possessed. Besides
directing him in extraordinary cases, whither to go, what to do, and what to
say, He directed him in all his common and daily conduct.
IV. God’s being
with Samuel implied that he afforded him assistance in the discharge of duty.
Samuel was constantly dependent on God to enable him to do his duty, after he
was led to the knowledge of it. He was called to many arduous and self-denying
duties, which he would have neglected to perform if God had not inspired him
with courage, resolution, and zeal. He was at first afraid to deliver the
Divine messages to Eli. It was a dangerous duty to anoint David king over
Israel, while Saul his enemy was on the throne.
V. God’s with
Samuel implied that he succeeded, as well as guided and assisted, him in duty.
Men may form wise and good designs, and pursue them with activity and
diligence, but without success. In all their undertakings, it depends upon God
whether they shall obtain the object of their wishes.
VI. That God’s
being with Samuel implied that he made him eminently useful in his day and
generation. God made Samuel uncommonly useful in various ways.
1. By his predictions. He early called him and ordained him a
prophet, to reveal His will to His chosen people.
2. God made Samuel useful by his instructions. Though he was not a
priest, yet he was an eminent instructor. He was the first that taught the
school of the prophets; which was a most excellent institution, and continued
in the nation until after the Babylonish captivity, when synagogues were first
established and multiplied in the land. But, beside this, he taught the people
at large, and restrained them from the gross practices and errors to which they
were exposed, while there was no king nor faithful priests in the nation.
3. God made Samuel very useful, by clothing him with civil authority,
and giving him opportunity to administer justice through the land. We read,
“Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life.”
4. God gave Samuel the spirit of grace and supplication, by which He
enabled him to draw down national blessings, and avert national salamities. David
mentions the efficacy of Samuel’s prayers, as an example to the people of God
in the days of darkness and distress. “Exalt ye the Lord our God, and worship
at His footstool: for He is holy Moses and Aaron among His priests, and Samuel
among them that call upon His name: they called upon the Lord, and He answered
them.”
5. His example crowned and established his character in the view of
the nation. He was called to visit all parts of Judea, which gave the people a
peculiar opportunity of seeing his holy and exemplary conduct. This constrained
them to believe that God was with him, for he carried the visible appearance of
living near to God, and of enjoying His gracious presence.
Improvement.
1. It appears from the character and conduct of Samuel that pious and
faithful parents may do much to promote the piety and usefulness of their
children.
2. We learn from the character and life of Samuel the importance of
parents being pious.
3. The character and conduct of Samuel show the peculiar obligations
of those who have been the subjects of parental dedication and instruction, to
make a personal dedication of themselves to the Lord.
4. In the view of the character and conduct of Samuel we may see the
great importance of early piety.
5. We learn from what has been said that it is very criminal to
obstruct early piety. (N. Emmons.)
Here to grow
We are not in this world merely to do the pieces of work, large or
small, that are set over against our hand. We are here to grow in strength and
beauty of character. And it is not hard to see how this growth may go on
continually amid life’s daily toil and cares. If we are diligent, careful,
faithful, prompt, accurate, energetic in the doing of a thousand little things
of common life, we are building these qualities meanwhile into our soul’s
fabric. Thus we are ever learning by doing and growing by doing. There is art
unseen spiritual building arising within us continually as we plod on in our
unending tasks. Negligence in common duties mars our character. Faithfulness in
work builds beauty into the soul. (J. R. Miller, D. D.)
The character of Samuel
I. Consider Samuel
in his early advantages. He was in a special and peculiar sense a child of
prayer.
II. But let us come
to contemplate the results of this early training, as they soon developed
themselves in the person and character of Samuel.
1. Observe his attention to all appointed duties. This is seen in the
promptness with which he rises to obey the fancied summons of Eli even at
midnight.
2. Let us consider next the deportment of Samuel towards others. Thus
we find it was always modest, and courteous, and respectful. We never find him
elated by the honourable position to which he had been advanced.
3. But once more, notice among the personal qualities of Samuel his
steady, uncompromising faithfulness. Removed at so early a period from the
pious overse sight of his parents; left only to the instruct, ions of the
feeble, and as it would seem now careless Eli; compelled to be a witness of the
fruits of his master’s sinful negligence, and even to be the daily associate of
that master’s profligate and abandoned sons--we could hardly have wondered if,
infected by the surrounding contagion, this plant of early and holy promise had
withered and faded sway. “But the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of
temptation.”
III. But let us
consider Samuel, in the last place, as he stood high in the favour of God. This
is especially observable in the circumstances of his prophetic calling. The
latter times of the Judges were times of great spiritual decline. Good men were
scattered like two or three berries on the top of a bough. (D. Moors, M. A.)
The ministry of Samuel
These passages (1 Samuel 12:23) bring out some of
the most characteristic points in the life of Samuel the prophet. The child
devoutly surrendered bee sins the first and greatest of the prophets, the man
chosen to close the order of judges and inaugurate the government of kings. It
is as the first of the prophets that he appears before us in our text: “And
Samuel grew, and the Lord was with him, and did let none of his words fall to
the ground. And all Israel knew that Samuel was established to be a prophet of
the Lord.”
1. First, our text tells us, he grew. What a child will become
depends very much on its capacity of growth. There are some who never grow, or,
if they grow at all, grow feebly or imperfectly. Their body is stunted, their
mind is undeveloped, their character makes no progress. But where there is full
power of growth there is hardly any degree of eminence which may not be
attained. Growth mainly results from two things, vigour of life, and suitable
culture. Samuel enjoyed both these. But this growth was aided by culture. That
culture began in infancy. He was brought to the house of the Lord; he was
placed under the care of Eli--the devout, the true, though too indulgent Eli.
Nor were there other influences wanting. His mother never ceased to pray for
him. His mother came up every year, we are told, to offer the early sacrifice,
and brought with her a little mantle, or coat, woven by her own hands. Oh! the
anticipation of that yearly visit. Oh! the joy with which she folded him in her
arms, and clothed him in his new dress. Oh! the love which she poured into the
susceptible heart from hers, with fondest kisses and tenderest prayers. The
impression of these visits lived on from year to year, and more than any other
influence served to keep his heart pure, and loving, and devout. Above all, God
Himself took Samuel in hand, and completed his education by His own Spirit.
2. The second thing our text tells us is that the Lord was with him.
The Lord was with him, a blessing of the most comprehensive and sufficing kind,
a blessing which seems to include all other blessings in itself. Only thus is
the man blessed who fears the Lord, and whom the Lord delighteth to honour. The
Lord was with Jacob to keep him safely in all the places whither he went. The
Lord was with Joseph, and all that he did prospered. The Lord was with Moses,
“certainly I shall be with thee,” and with confidence before which even Pharaoh
quailed, he wrought deliverance for Israel. The Lord was with Joshua as He was
with Moses, and he became strong and very courageous, and with the people took
possession of the land. Paul at his first examination before Caesar was left
alone, all men forsook him, nevertheless the Lord stood with him, and his
preaching was so fully known that all the Gentiles heard, and he was delivered
out of the mouth of the lion. And so “the Lord was with Samuel, and did let
none of his words fall to the ground.”
3. Thirdly, “the Lord did let none of his words fall to the ground.”
Because he had the capacity which was revealed in growth, and because the Lord
was with him, therefore his words were words of power and took lasting effect.
His predictions came to pass because they were really the utterances of the
Spirit. Perhaps we have never grown as Samuel did, never grown up to such an
apprehension of Divine truth that it has become a living power in our souls,
and therefore we cannot skilfully unfold it to others, Perhaps we have never
felt that the Lord was with us when we spake, and so the one influence which
alone could open the heart was wanting. And the other passages I have read as
part of my text show us how this was. First, because he adhered to his purpose:
“I will teach you the good and right way.” What Samuel taught he felt to be of
the first importance, and he could not be sure that what he taught would, in the
highest sense, be good and right, unless it were Divine. Like all the ancient
prophets he kept his ear open to catch the words of the heavenly oracle, his
heart open to receive the celestial fire. If his teaching were of God, it would
be true in its substance, decisive in its affirmations, and, however severely
tested, would firmly stand. When men speak of “advanced thought” in the present
day, and mean by it thought which is simply human, wrought out by man’s unaided
reason, and freed from the assumption of being Divine, they might be indulging
in the severest irony. Thought that springs up in a feeble human mind in
advance of that which flows from the Divine! Thought originating in perceptions
which are dim, limited, liable to be distorted, in advance of thought
originating in perceptions which are clear, illimitable, and unperturbed! Save
us from such progress as this. To a noble soul there is something stimulating
in the persuasion that God has spoken to man, and that we have His words. Then,
secondly, our text tells that he tolerated nothing that was unreal. When Samuel
saw the miserable dissimulation which Saul was practising in covering his
self-will with the cloak of sacrifice, he scornfully said, “Behold, to obey is
better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the blood of rams.” The deep
sincerity of the man, his determination to unmask all that was hollow and
unreal, his demand for substance, not show, was another element of power in
virtue of which none of his words fell to the ground. And finally he continued
instant in prayer. (J. Harrison.)
The growth of character
1. Let us reflect, first, upon this description as applying to the
ancient seer of Israel. “And Samuel grew.” It was a saying of the poet Southey
that, live as long as we may, the first twenty years are the longest half of
our life. Why is this? There is a physiological and there is a moral reason for
it. The physiological cause lies in the more vivid sensibility of youth--the
soft wax is not yet set, the tender branch is not yet hardened. The moral cause
lies in the greater variety of influences to which we are subject before life’s
choice is made, and ere we have definitely cast in oar lot either with the good
or the bad. And both these are gathered into one statement if we say that the
first twenty years are the longest half of life because they are the period of
vigorous and determining growth; that being the analysis of the growing
process--vigour of life and determination of life. Hence the significance of
the clause, “And Samuel grew.” There was the vigour of the lad’s life;
wherefore the young limbs lengthened and the supple frame waxed strong, and he
developed into a magnificent man. And there was the determination of the lad’s
life towards wise and pure conduct; wherefore he eschewed the evil example of
Eli’s sons, and set himself to walk in the good and right way. This persistent
emphasis upon the growth of the prophet is intended to teach that the secret of
his even and consistent life is to be found in his early piety. The visitations
of God’s grace were upon him like the dews of the morning; he grew, and when he
was old and grey-headed, he remained like a tree rooted in its place.
Occasionally a wild, ungodly youth is followed by a consecrated manhood, for
the grace of God can work miracles; and this ham been seen in such lives as
Augustine’s, Ignatius Loyola’s, John Bunyan’s, and John Newton’s. But the law
is that “whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap; be that soweth to the
flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; he that soweth to the spirit shall of
the spirit reap life everlasting.” And even those apparent exceptions to which
I refer do really confirm the rule, since, as the greatest of ecclesiastical
historians has pointed out, the men who are converted after a lawless and
reckless youth usually become Christians of an ill-wrought and inharmonious
type. Always the Christliest saints are those of whom it can be said, as of the
first prophet, “And Samuel grew.”
2. The text goes on to speak of a second characteristic. “And the
Lord was with him.” Alone, he would have fallen. Alone, his spiritual nature
would have sickened in the atmosphere of unclearness; he would have learned to
tolerate the crimes of his neighbours--it may have been to outdo them.
3. Once more the text tells us that “the Lord did let none of his
words fall to the ground.” This was the natural and appropriate result. (W.
J. Woods, B. A.)
Verse 20-21
And all Israel, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, knew that Samuel was
established to be a prophet of the Lord.
From Dan to Beer-sheba
That is to say, from Plymouth to Aberdeen--all the people in the
towns and villages of Israel knew that there was come a new thing on the earth,
that God was now speaking by the mouth of a little child. One of the first
lessons which comes from the study of this story is, that bad men and bad
things are doomed. Nothing can keep alive that which God has condemned. I look
upon Hophni and Phinehas as representatives of that which was bad. “All Israel
from Dan to Beer-sheba knew that Samuel was established to be a prophet of the
Lord,” and at the same time, that Hophni and Phinehas were to be removed from
the face of the earth. We are surrounded by evil; bad men and bad things are
all around us. But I want those of us who believe in God to cheer ourselves
with the thought that nothing will live forever but that which is good. No
wrong thing can live foreverse Slavery was a giant. It is a giant yet in
Africa; but its brother, American slavery, came down never to rise. Tyranny is
a doomed thing. “Samuel is established to be a prophet of the Lord;” and I do
not care who Hophni and Phinehas are if you will only do your duty. Be brave,
and God will see you through.
2. The second lesson I want to teach today is this: Mothers, get your
children ready, “that Samuel may be established to be a prophet of the Lord.”
Oh! what honour came to Hannah through Samuel. We should encourage our children
to have right ideas, and encourage them to propagate their ideas. Never was
there a time when there was so much room for individual goodness.
3. I should say, further, that early consecration is the pathway to
honour and greatness. What a great man Samuel became. (T. Champness.)
The call and prophetic work of Samuel
I. In the first
place, we will consider the call of Samuel.
II. But in the
second place let us consider the prophetic work or Samuel.
1. First, his work Was to announce the Divine mind by predicting
future events.
2. In the second place, another pare of the prophetic work of Samuel
was to revive religion and restore the worship of God among the nation. For at
the time that Samuel was introduced to the prophetic office, religion was
exceedingly low, indescribably low.
3. But, in the next place, another part of his work was to decide all
doubtful cases, according to the will and the law of God. The most difficult of
all those cases that came before him was the introduction of monarchy into the
theocracy.
4. Another part of the work of Samuel was to introduce and to
perpetuate a race of prophets, a series of prophets, in the Jewish church.
5. But again: another part of his work was to write a portion of the
inspired volume--to communicate a part of the mind of God by inspiration.
1. Let us learn from this, in the first place, that early piety is of
great influence in the Christian church.
2. And, in the second place, let us learn how a youth, in very
disadvantageous circumstances, may be of great use in reviving religion in his
day and generation (T. W. Jenkyn, D. D.)
Communications from God
1. What a dreary, hopeless state it is to live without any
communications from God! Man did never in fact live entirely without such
communications. God did reveal Himself “at sundry times and in divers manners,”
sometimes dropping His communications for a long tract of time, but always
renewing them again. It has indeed been said by doubters and unbelievers that
God has given man a conscience and a moral sense, which speak to him in God’s
name, and teach him what is right and wrong, and that this is quite sufficient
communication from God to make us good and happy, and that we need nothing
further. But what is it that our conscience, which is indeed the voice of God
within us, teaches us first and before all things else? It is that we have gone
astray from the rule of right. No man, without some better help than conscience
lent him, ever lived fully up to the requirements of his conscience.
2. But again: “God revealed Himself to Samuel by the word of the
Lord.” We may justly reflect that He has done this more completely to ourselves
than He did to Samuel. Now, do we each one of us practically act as if we fully
believed that constant revelations from God were necessary to make us holy and
happy? Do we make daily devout use of the Holy Scripture, which is our great
means of receiving revelations, or, in other words, communications from God? (Dean
Goulburn.)
──《The Biblical Illustrator》