Wise reasons must have prevailed with God for the appearance of Samuel. Dr. Hales has suggested the three following:
1. To make Saul’s crime the instrument of his punishment, in the dreadful denunciation of his approaching doom.
2. To show to the heathen world the infinite superiority of the Oracle of the Lord inspiring his prophets over the powers of darkness, and the delusive prognostics of their wretched votaries in their false oracles.
3. To confirm the belief in a future state, by “one who rose from the dead,” even under the Mosaical dispensation.
Taking the view now represented, we may draw some practical conclusions from it.
1. The soul lives after death. Samuel’s appearance showed that his soul still lived, though his body had died at Ramah and had been buried.
2. It is vain to pray to the dead. Scripture gives no encouragement to this practice. This passage, and one in the New Testament, show the utter hopelessness of finding comfort by this means. The word of God reveals the mercy seat; and a prayer hearing God invites the sinner to ask mercy in the name of Jesus. “If any man sin, he has an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” “He is able be save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them” (Heb_7:25).
3. There is no oracle of the future but God’s. No evil spirit can reveal the destiny of a soul, nor could he be trusted. No light that led astray was ever light from heaven. The father of lies could not he entitled to credit in his disclosures of our future. Departed saints are incapable of doing this. They have not such a function assigned to them in the economy of the spiritual world. (R. Steel.)
Saul in the cave at Endor
I.This is the cry of a soul consciously deserted of God. “The Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets.”
1. God does sometimes desert the sinner even in this world. “My Spirit shall not always strive with man.” “Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone.”
2. The consciousness of this desertion is the greatest misery. There is no orphanage so bad as the orphanage of a soul--a soul that has lost its God. It lives to sink deeper and deeper forever into ruin.
II. This is the cry of a soul profoundly convinced of the value of a once neglected ministry. “See that ye refuse not him that speaketh, for if they escaped not,” etc.
III. This is the cry of a soul that had become the victim of delusions. The man’s mind under a sense of guilt and Divine desertion had lost its balance; his intellect had been hurled from the throne, and his imagination, under the despotism of a guilty conscience, filled his soul with ghastly phantoms. Men talk of a sound mind in a sound body, but there is no sound mind without a sound conscience--a conscience freed from the sense of guilt, and attuned to the everlasting harmonies of right. Reason in the atmosphere of a guilty conscience is like the eye amidst the shower of pyrotechnic lights, dazzled with false visions. As we build up our houses and our cities out of the rough materials taken from the earth, so the imagination of a mind consciously deserted by God will build up its world of woe out of the corrupt materials of its own heart.
IV. This is the cry of a soul plunging into the depths of despair. When despair comes, a hopeless darkness settles over the soul. The course of sin leads to despair. Every sin a man commits he quenches a star in the firmament of hope. The moral of the whole is this--the well-being of humanity consists in loving fellowship with the Eternal Father. (Homilist.)
Without God, without hope
This was a cry wrung from the heart of a man who believed himself forsaken by God. “His soul was orphaned,” without God in the world.”
1. Have you never felt that orphanage--when God seems to have gone out from your heavens, and the universe appears a vast, sunless, godless infinite, black as night? The world without a sun! The flower stems bend over filled with icy tears shed for the loss of the sun that gave them all their colours, the bleached leaves hang without a flutter in the still, cold air, or fall rotting in the dark, the cattle of the field, perish for lack of sweet food and soft warmth, and the shivering hearts of men freeze within them--for the sun died last night. A soul without God, in awful solitude, starless, sunless. If you have felt that orphanage, and lived through doubt and despair to believe in God, happy are you. If you have never known it, happy are you also.
1. Saul was without God in his soul--he was alone; what should he do? Do! What could he do? Why could he not be quiet, and stop still? The sun would not forever be on the under size of the world, the night would not last foreverse One of the most fruitful errors of mankind is that irrepressible desire to do something; men cannot wait. Pascal said that most of life’s evils sprang from “man’s being unable to sit still in a room.” This restless unquiet is the cause of business depression; men must speculate, “do something;” there was a mania for excessive action.
2. Saul would do something, no matter what! He would seek a witch, and she would raise up Samuel to him. Ill omens crowd his mind, and his heart fell when he heard the mysterious seer from the afterworld add his ghostly word to his own too sad prevision of disaster and ruin on the morrow. He needs no ghost to tell him that, ‘tis already too surely known. Oh, power of conscience! A guilty conscience fills the soul with phantoms that are tongued with evil. The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a soul. Conscience speaks in whispers; but, if unheeded, its whispers echo quickly back and back from the close walls of the dark prison house of the soul, until, gathering strength, they reverberate like sounds of volleying thunder. Small as an earthworm, conscience may swell, until at last it becomes a great stinging serpent.
3. Hope is belief in God; hope is the anchor of the soul, which, tossed on the rolling ocean that is full to bursting, and driven helpless by the wind that is wet with storms, is steady, for deep buried in God’s bosom is the anchor, trust in our Father in heaven. The wise ancients said that Hope was the only gift left in Pandora’s box; it is the last thing that dies in a man. To lose hope is to lose oneself. By hope are we saved. Be not ashamed to hope; hope the highest things. Such is our Christian duty. A soul losing hope in God is like a traveller going down some mountainside as the broadening sun sets behind him; at his every step his shadow widens, lengthens, blackens, till at last he is shrouded in midnight darkness, and with way lost, tumbles over the crag into ruin. Hope then in God; doubt but hastens peril. Look up, out, of thyself; and learn that the darkness is thine own, that the heavens glow with light. Thou despairest of good, saying that there is no sun? Open thy closed eyes, the darkness is in thine own soul only. Despair is the only atheism; hopelessness is unbelief in God; Hope thou; that is, believe in God; he that believeth not is damned. But hope, which is the presence of God, never dies--neverse (B. J. Snell, M. A.)
