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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 263. The Prophet of the Lord
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The Prophet of the Lord
And Samuel answered Saul, and said, I am the seer.- 1Sa_9:19.
The distinguishing title for Samuel most commonly on our lips is, “Samuel the Prophet.” He may be fairly regarded, indeed, as, in one important respect, “the first of the prophets.” There were, no doubt, prophets before his time. Moses, great on almost every side, was a prophet mighty in words and in deeds, in some respects a unique type of the Greater One like unto him, who was to come. And to various men of God, and women too-such as Deborah-particular messages had been entrusted at different times by Jehovah. But Samuel, to Israel as a second Moses, was the first of that long, unbroken line of heaven-sent teachers, men of Divinely inspired insight and foresight, who from his time to the time of Malachi had so important a part to play alongside of the kingship-to guide, to restrain, and sometimes to oppose the throne, and to touch at many points the national life-rousing the listless from their apathy, denouncing the profane, ministering comfort to the depressed, awakening hope, and especially Messianic hope, among the faithful in Israel.
1. As we have seen, Samuel's youth was a time of preparation for his after-life. When he was yet a child, Samuel was made a seer before he knew. He saw enough of God and man that terrible night to make him an old man and a seer before the morning. As he lay awake till the morning he saw what was the wages of all that wickedness that had so horrified him to see and to hear in Eli's sons. He saw, while yet a child, that the wages of such sin is death. And he saw what would be the end of all that to Eli also, his father in the Lord. It was indeed no wonder that he hesitated to tell Eli what he had seen and heard that terrible night. And all that must have worked powerfully together to make young Samuel the pure, prayerful, holy child before God and man that he early was and continued to be. His purity of heart and his love for holy things prepared Samuel early to be a seer; and the sights he saw both in heaven and in earth, both in God and in man, only perfected all his days what had been so early and so well begun.
What is a Seer? One who Sees, whose eye pierces beyond this life into the infinite and even attempts to penetrate the very purposes of God.
That to the height of his great argument
He may assert Eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to man.
He is the eagle who can face the sun, unblinded. He is above and beyond philosophy through excess of insight, not of mere ecstasy. He has been “caught up into the third heaven, where he has heard things unspeakable,” but he has come back to earth with the glow of the third heaven about him and can lift us towards it, though not to it. Wordsworth well describes the Seer when he writes of
that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.1 [Note: H. B. Garrod, Dante, Goethe's Faust and other Lectures, 19.]
2. There are two types of experience among God's greatest servants. St. 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 is a serenity and a 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. Pardon cleanses sin, and even turns the memory of it into an ally of holiness; but traces are left on character, and, at the best, years have been squandered which do not return. Samuel is the pattern of child religion and service, to which teachers should aim that their children may be conformed.
As regards what is of consequence in the personal life, Dean Stanley, in a passage of profound insight and rare beauty, has availed himself of the example of Samuel to contrast the religion created by convulsion with the religion developed by growth. Of this last, Samuel is the standing type. There is many an abrupt transition from a life of self-indulgence to a life of self-consecration, in which a great chasm breaks in between the years before and after the sudden conversion. Well for those who, in looking back on wasted years, can see such a chasm in the ever-memorable crisis of repentance separating the sinful past from the regenerated life. But better for those who can look back, like Samuel, on an unbroken growth from childhood up in the way of God, in a life which carries no consciousness of stains and weakness and doubts inherited from years misguided and misspent.1 [Note: J. M. Whiton, What of Samuel? 65.]
3. It is remarkable that in so active and varied a life as that of Samuel we find only two well-defined points, and these separated by the long interval between the child and the old man. The history is quite minute in its detail, both of the young child's introduction into the service of Jehovah and of the old man's agency in the inauguration of the monarchy. The period between has the briefest record: “Samuel judged Israel forty years.” The reason of this silence is doubtless in the character of the time-a time of calamity under ferocious oppression, a time of fighting rather than writing. We next come upon Samuel at a time of almost unbounded importance in the history of Israel, and here again we find in him the “prophet of the Lord.”
(1) Samuel is called emphatically “The Prophet.” To a certain extent this was in consequence of the gift which he shared in common with others of his time. He was specially known in his own age as “Samuel the Seer.” “I am the seer,” was his answer to Saul when he said, “Tell me, I pray thee, where the seer's house is?” “Seer,” the ancient name, was not yet superseded by “prophet.” “The Lord uncovered his ear” to whisper into it in the stillness of the night the messages that were to be delivered. It is the first distinct intimation of the idea of “revelation” to a human being. Samuel was consulted far and near on the small affairs of life; loaves of bread, or the fourth part of a shekel of silver, were paid for the answers. From this faculty, combined with his office of ruler, an awful reverence grew up round him. No sacrificial feast was thought complete without his blessing. When he appeared suddenly elsewhere for the same purpose, the villagers “trembled” at his approach. A peculiar virtue was believed to reside in his intercession. He was conspicuous in later times among those that “call upon the name of the Lord,” and was placed with Moses as standing for prayer, in a special sense, before the Lord (Jer_15:1).
(2) But there is another point which more especially placed him at the head of the prophetic order as it afterwards appeared. This is brought out in his relation to Saul. He represents the independence of the Moral Law, of the Divine will as distinct from regal or sacerdotal enactments, which is so remarkable a characteristic of all the later prophets. He certainly was not a priest; and all attempts to identify his opposition to Saul with a hierarchical interest are founded on a complete misconception of the facts of the case. From the time of the overthrow of Shiloh, he never appears in the remotest connexion with the priestly order. Among all the places included in his personal or administrative visits, neither Shiloh, nor Nob, nor Gibeon, the seats of the sacerdotal caste, is ever mentioned. When he counsels Saul, it is not as the priest but as the prophet; when he sacrifices or blesses the sacrifices, it is not as the priest but either as an individual Israelite of eminence, or as a ruler, like Saul himself. Saul's sin, in both instances when he came into collision with Samuel, was not of intruding into sacerdotal functions, but of disobedience to the prophetic voice. The first was that of not waiting for Samuel's arrival, according to the sign given by Samuel at his original meeting at Ramah; the second was that of not carrying out the stern prophetical injunction for the destruction of the Amalekites. When, on that occasion, the aged prophet called the captive prince before him, and with his own hands hacked him limb from limb, in retribution for the desolation he had brought into the homes of Israel, and thus offered up his mangled remains almost as a human sacrifice, we see the representative of the older part of the Jewish history. But it is the true prophetic utterance, such as breathes through the psalmists and prophets, when he says to Saul in words which, from their poetical form, must have become fixed in the national memory, “To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.”
(3) The next point is that he is the first of a regular succession of prophets. Samuel planned and set up an institution, so to call it, that has made far more mark on the world than anything else that survives to us out of Israel or Greece or Rome. In his ripe and far-seeing years Samuel devised and founded and presided over a great prophetical school. That school of the prophets, to which we owe so much of Samuel himself, to which we owe David and Gad and Nathan and all their still greater successors-that great school was the creation and the care of Samuel's leisure from office. True, Divine prophecy does not come by the will of man in prophetical schools, or anywhere else. School or no school, holy men of God will always speak as they are moved by the Holy Ghost. No man knew that better than Samuel; but at the same time, no man ever struck out a more fruitful line of action in the things of God than Samuel when he laid the foundation of the sacred school of Ramah. Israel had already a Divine deposit of religion and worship and morality and civilization, all of which they had but to accept and assimilate in order to be the strongest, the safest, and the happiest nation on the face of the earth. But the Divine law was too high and too good for the Israelites. Their hearts were hard, and they were not upright in God's covenant. And the new monarchy was already threatening to become a very stronghold of that hard, worldly, rebellious spirit. Saul, in spite of all that Samuel could do, was soon to become a complete shipwreck. But the throne was destined to stand long after Saul was cast out of it; and Samuel is determined to do his very best to secure that Saul's successors shall have around them and over their people a class of men who, if not indeed prophets, yet shall watch over the religion and the morals of the people, in the prophetical spirit and in the prophetical name. And thus it came about that at Naioth in Ramah the first school of the prophets was set up.