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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 614. In Samaria
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In Samaria
1. The Evangelist bears a name which makes it probable that he was not a Palestinian Jew, but one of the many who, of Jewish descent, had lived in Gentile lands and contracted Gentile habits and associations. We first hear of him as one of the seven who were chosen by the Church, at the suggestion of the Apostles, in order to meet the grumbling of that section of the Church called Hellenists, who complained that their people were being neglected in the distribution of alms. He stands in that list next to Stephen, who was obviously the leader.
These seven were never called “deacons” in the New Testament, though it is supposed that they were the first holders of that office. It is instructive to note how their office came into existence. It was created by the Apostles, simply as the handiest way of getting over a difficulty. They were appointed to deal with a temporary difficulty and to distribute alms when necessary; and their office dropped when it was no longer required, as was probably the case when, very soon after, the Jerusalem Church was scattered.
2. Philip was the next after Stephen to give a decided impulse to an enlarged conception, among the early Christians, of the scope of the gospel. Stephen had made a brief but notable campaign, for the times, of progressive ideas, declaring boldly against the exclusive spirit of the Jews; repudiating their claim to a monopoly of the Divine favour; setting forth clearly the true relation of Judaism to Christianity-the former designed to be of but temporary duration, the latter intended to be permanent. In the advanced views which he advocated, he may properly be regarded as the precursor of the Apostle Paul, the great champion of an open-door Christianity for the whole world. But if the first martyr was the forerunner of the great Apostle in the realm of progressive ideas, Philip was his precursor in the application of the same, both in zealous missionary operations and, especially, in opening the door of the Church to non-Jewish believers.
From Wesley's death up to that time the impulse for foreign evangelization had come from one moving spirit, and the responsibility for supporting such enterprises rested on one man's shoulders. Dr. Coke was the Atlas upbearing the burden. Small in stature, but small in nothing else, warm-hearted, wide-minded, of indefatigable energy, he was the sole superintendent of missions, and the principal, if not the only, collector of subscriptions; for while the preachers made annual collections in the chapels he went his rounds from door to door. The shores washed by the Atlantic were well acquainted with him, for he had crossed the ocean eighteen times, but the Eastern Indies knew him not. Ceylon and Java were beckoning him. He resolved to visit them. The Conference at first withheld consent. He was sixty-seven; the voyage was perilous; the work at home would suffer by his absence. But, bursting into tears, and exclaiming, “You will break my heart,” his sorrow won his reluctant brethren over, and they allowed him to go, little thinking that they would see his face no more.1 [Note: E. J. Brailsford, Richard Watson, 62.]
3. The preaching of the liberal-minded Stephen not unnaturally stirred up the more narrow and conservative Jews. They were inflamed against him. To them he seemed to be the setter forth of dangerous, heretical views, views which threatened the very existence of the Jewish faith. The outcome of all was, first, the martyrdom of Stephen, then a persecution of all bearing the Christian name. In consequence, many of the Christians fled from Jerusalem. But so filled were they with the love of Christ, and with zeal for His cause, that they continued to bear witness for Him and to preach wherever they went. Among those who thus went forth was Philip. He went into Samaria, perhaps to the city of that name.
The Samaritans were a peculiar people. They were neither Jews nor Gentiles, though they were descendants from both-i.e. from colonists from the East whom the Assyrian king had placed in the land of Israel when the leading inhabitants of the country were carried into captivity at the time of the fall of Samaria in 721 b.c., and from the Jews whom the king permitted to remain.
At first these colonists continued, in their new home, the idolatrous practices in which they had been reared, but later they partially embraced the worship of Jehovah as the recognized God of the land. They accepted the law of Moses and practised the Jewish rite of circumcision. The Pentateuch constituted their only Scripture, and they had a temple of their own and temple services on Mount Gerizim. But although their religion and their worship were perverted by the admixture of foreign elements, and they were isolated from their distinctively Jewish neighbours by a feud which had continued for many generations, there was still not a little which they had in common with them in the matter of religious worship, and they looked for the same Messiah. Yet, notwithstanding their partial Hebrew descent and their partial acceptance of the tenets of Judaism, they were rigidly excluded from the Jewish Church, and were even denied the privileges accorded to the heathen of becoming proselytes to the Jewish faith.
Enough has been said to show that a strict Jew of the high orthodox school would have had a vast deal of prejudice to surmount in carrying to Samaria the tidings of the Kingdom of God and the gracious offers of the gospel. But Philip the Evangelist did not belong to this school. His circumstances, his position, and his office would all give him wider sympathies than were to be found among Pharisees and Hebrews of the Hebrews.
When Henry Ward Beecher came to Brooklyn there was no place for coloured men and women in the theatre except the negro pen; no place in the opera; no place in the church except the negro pew; no place in any lecture hall; no place in the first-class car on the railways. The white omnibus of Fulton Ferry would not allow coloured persons to ride in it. They were never allowed to sit even in the men's cabin on the boats. He invited Fred. Douglass, one day, in those times, to come to church here. “I should be glad to, sir,” said he; “but it would be so offensive to your congregation.” “Mr. Douglass, will you come? and if any man objects to it, come up and sit on my platform by me. You will always be welcome there.”1 [Note: N. D. Hillis, Lectures and Orations by Henry Ward Beecher, 221.]
4. Philip had been chosen for the office of a deacon because he was full of the Holy Ghost; and now the gift of the Holy Ghost seems to have been imparted to him in larger measure, for he was able to work miracles. This gift, added to the great earnestness of his preaching, drew multitudes to listen to his ministry. Thus the faith in Jesus Christ, instead of being stamped out, increased with wondrous power. Instead of being only a server of tables, a distributer of alms-money, Philip became an Evangelist, a teacher of the gospel to a whole city. They were astonished at the miracles he wrought, they were overpowered by his telling words; unclean spirits cried out with a loud voice and came out of many that were possessed of them; many that were afflicted with palsies and that were lame were healed. The word “gospel” means good news, and no wonder that there was a great joy in that city.
The Ways of the Lord are unsearchable, but He reveals them to those that fear Him, and whatever may be manifest to any other, this I am certainly persuaded of, that through all these things the Gospel of Truth shall go on to prosperity, and though the day be dark and gloomy and the wrath of the wicked be great, yet the bound is sure beyond which they cannot pass, and though we that remain alive to this day were all dissolved and were all rolled together in the dust, yet that Life and Power in which we have believed and that Everlasting Truth of which we have testified and for which we have suffered, shall never be extinguished or rooted out, but it shall find other persons to declare it from generation to generation while the sun and moon endure.1 [Note: Francis Howgill.]
5. Among those who professed to be converted to the faith, and received baptism at his hands, was Simon Magus or Simon the magician.
This Simon is never named again in the New Testament; but a multitude of legends, more or less improbable, have gathered round his name, and fancy seems to have run wild in the marvels it attributed to him. So powerful was his influence, it was said, that he was able to convert human beings into brute beasts; that he could make lifeless statues speak; that he claimed to be able to fly, and exhibited his power in the presence of Nero, but was arrested in his flight by the prayer of St. Peter; that he was buried alive at his own express desire in the firm assurance that he would burst the bands and rise from his grave. He has been designated “the hero of the romance of heresy”; and we may judge of the wildness of his heresy from a single sentence in one of the Early Fathers, who has summed up his extraordinary claims in the few words: “He was glorified by many as God, for he taught the people that it was he who appeared to the Jews as God the Son, who had come down to Samaria as the Father, and had come to other nations as the Holy Ghost.”
We find him in the sacred narrative at a city of Samaria, the inhabitants of which country were said to have been a most simple-minded and credulous folk, especially susceptible to impressions from anything of a supernatural character. It was an age, we must remember, when thaumaturgy was a role of the time. Our Lord Himself had prepared men for a great development of deception and imposture; false Christs and false prophets were to arise and, if it were possible, deceive even the very elect. Simon was the foremost among them; he had been trained in the art of magic or sorcery in its degenerate form, and had no difficulty in gaining a complete mastery over the Samaritans by the charms and spells which he practised.
In the midst of his wonder-working he was suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Philip the Evangelist, whose signs and miracles completely eclipsed all that he had done. Indeed, he was so impressed by their superiority that, in the hope of becoming initiated into the secret, he was baptized, and joined himself to Philip's company.
6. That Simon's adherence to Philip implied no real change of heart is made clear by what followed. The church at Jerusalem, on hearing of Philip's success, sent down Peter and John to report upon this latest extension of the Christian Kingdom, and to confirm the new believers. When Simon Magus saw that by the laying on of the Apostles' hands the Holy Ghost was given-the gift being probably accompanied by outward signs-he attempted to bargain for that gift for himself, that by the imposition of his hands these powers might be conferred.
The proposal was in the highest degree dishonouring to God. It put the operations of the Holy Ghost on a level with the deceptions of men; it proposed to make merchandise of that which was the richest gift of the Divine goodness; it wanted to turn to individual aggrandisement that special blessing which God has bestowed upon the Church to assist its progress in the world. Therefore Peter was utterly shocked by the blasphemy of the man, and exclaimed, with holy indignation, “Thy silver perish with thee, because thou hast thought to obtain the gift of God with money.”
We are surprised, perhaps, that Philip should have baptized Simon. It may have been that in his eagerness to gain over such an influential convert, he was less circumspect than he should have been; or that, if he had doubts of his sincerity, in that spirit of charity which has inspired the Church from the beginning, which permits us to bury a sinful man with words of hope and blessing, Philip accepted Simon on his own profession, and refused himself to sit in judgment upon him.
But where Philip was gentle, because he had no proof of his insincerity, Peter was severe, because there was no longer any doubt: “Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray the Lord, if perhaps the thought of thy heart shall be forgiven thee. For I see that thou art in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.” But there was no true response to the appeal; no manly confession of his sin; no compunction for the deception with which he had bewitched the people; no publican's prayer and broken-hearted cry for forgiveness; nothing but a slavish fear of threatened punishment; not a hint that a word of supplication to the God of mercy crossed the threshold of his own lips; and he passes out from the sacred story like the ghost in Hamlet, “unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled.”
7. Like John the Baptist before our Lord, Philip withdraws behind the scenes when the two Apostles come upon the stage. There is something very touching in this willingness to be eclipsed, which it were an injustice to the character of the Evangelist to pass over. Philip might have naturally felt that he had borne the burden and heat of the day in Samaria, and that the success which the Apostles met with there was owing to their finding all things made ready to their hand. He had dug the soil, and thrown in the seed, and watered it, until the field was white to the harvest; and now it remained for St. Peter and St. John only to put in the sickle, and mow down the corn. Their doing so seems to have been watched by him without any of that grudging jealousy which mere nature in such circumstances must have prompted. Philip's aim in his ministry was just the reverse of Simon's aim in his sorcery. The latter sought popularity and influence for himself; the former sought to attract men to the Saviour. And, accordingly, any increase in the knowledge, any confirmation in the faith of the Saviour, was to Philip a matter of pure joy, because he sought the people's souls, and not their suffrages.
Down the furrow strides the sower-
From his hand the live seeds leap-
In his heart the hope of harvest
Little knowing who will reap!
Harvest comes in, teeming-teeming-
Golden stalk and laden ear,
But the sower's sleeping-sleeping
In the earth he held so dear!
So through life, if I am sowing,
What to me the toil or gain?
If my brothers reap the harvest
I shall not have lived in vain!1 [Note: P. J. O'Reilly, Harvest.]
“Great poets,” says the author of Thalaba, “have no envy; little ones are full of it!”2 [Note: J. G. Lockhart, Life of Scott, iii. 45.]