1 Samuel 7:15-17

And Samuel judged Israel all the darts of his life.

The prophet judge

In the hopeful emergency of Israel’s lamenting after Jehovah, “Samuel spake unto all the house of Israel;” and the clear, bright word, and the wise act of that and subsequent days, show him to us as worthy to be a prophet of the Lord, and a judge or ruler of a great people. Great soldiers have been admired for the way in which they have seized the black and bloody opportunity of a crisis in a battle in order to plunge into more successful carnage; but what better is that than the shark’s swift and well-timed whirl and dash at its almost escaping prey? How much loftier and demanding what higher gifts and power is the act of him who sees and grasps the opportunity of raising a nation from its almost ruin, and even before the delivering time has come sees the flower of hope blooming among the ruins? Such was Samuel’s act in this passage; and such in our own day the hope and deed of Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, who foresaw and made possible the growth of united Italy, at a time when the priests and soldiers had brought the Italy of history to a degradation that only soldiers and priests know the way unto. It is of the greatest importance that we should understand Samuel’s arrangements for the national recovery, and apply the principles involved as piously and intelligently as we can

1. Notice, then, that Samuel’s first great act in his character of prophet-judge was to call the people to a thorough religious and moral cleansing: religious in that they were required to disown the idolatry that was in their lives and opposed to the worship of Jehovah; and moral in that the worship of Baal and Astarte was licentious, degrading; vicious in society as well as profane before their God. Samuel required this of them as well as “lamenting after the Lord.” Israel needed the true worship of the pure God. Purity of heart, temperance of spirit, chastity of body, righteousness to one another; these things, aimed at for the love of God, are His true worship; these were the true ways of putting from them the false and foul idols that God abhorred. So we have to learn. Mourn after God; be penitent and contrite; but aim after Godlikeness as well. Mourn over your sins, but show the true contrition that seeks to be like God; that says, “I will arise and go to my father.” Remember that the invader was in the land; the polluters of the sanctuary still in the sacred places. A soldier “patriot” might have earned renown by military expeditions and dashing raids into the conquered territory; but the dark day of soldier-judges was gone. There was now a man leading who preferred his country’s purity to her prosperity, and would have rather seen his nation die than have her prosper with the work and wages of iniquity. Therefore he called them to a national purifying. But the call of Samuel is intended to be to us. For it is not the only duty of a nation to summon its armed bands and squadrons in times of national peril, or international anxiety. Nor is it less than profanity to send armies forth invoking the “God of battles,” forgetting that before the barbarity of man shed human blood in war, God was a God of purity, and is to be remembered in war and strife, and before conflict and carnage, as the God of righteousness, who will require unjustly or heedlessly shed blood at the hands of those who have poured it out to cry unto Him from the ground.

2. Samuel’s next great act as a prophet-judge was to summon the people to a great prayer assembly. So distinctly did he put the duty of consecration to God before all things that, instead of military deliberations, instead of holding a great council of war, he said to them, “Gather all Israel to Mizpeh, and I will pray for you unto the Lord.” But this mighty act of penitence and prayer was rudely disturbed. Like the royal and prelatic dragoons, that rushed down the mountain side against the meetings of the Scottish Covenanters, to stain the heather with their blood, the Philistines marched swiftly to Mizpeh against their defenceless tributaries. Evidently the Israelites had made no military preparation; and all seemed to threaten that the meeting for prayer and purification would end in a horrible massacre, like many similar meetings in Christian times. The only brave heart there was Samuel’s. The best man was the most courageous. Penitence led to prayer, prayer to victory, and victory to praise. Such is our soul’s sure way. The prominent feature of the day in connection with Samuel is one that repeatedly shows itself in his life, and that is his character of intercessor. He prayed hopefully when all was gloomy and foreboding, and he did so not because or when he could do nothing else. He did not act as we so often do; he did not make prayer a last resource, but first and foremost he cried unto the Lord. It was for prayer that he assembled the people, and it was while he was uttering his peculiar cry of earnest intercession that the voice of the Lord’s thunder was heard. Nor, in thinking of Samuel’s prayers and the people’s penitence and their efficacy, must we forget the instructive contrast there is between this day of unexpected triumph and the day of battle at the same place; when, notwithstanding the presence of the ark and all the Divinely ordained accompaniments of its mystery when it led the armies of Israel, there was nothing but disaster, disgrace, and death. Under Samuel, without the ark, or priest, or any symbol of the presence of God, Israel’s enemies were destroyed and the penitent people delivered. The difference was in the penitence; in the setting of their hearts towards the Lord in contrition and prayer. Ichabod was the word that ended the day of trusting in the ark; but Ebenezer crowned the day of penitence and prayer.

3. Samuel’s next great act as a prophet-judge was to consolidate the reformation and prosperity by systematic righteous judgment. “He went from year to year in circuit to Bethel and Gilgal and Mizpeh, and judged Israel in all those places.” He was too wise not to know, and too devout not to remember, that a land left with only a military success, and rejoicing chiefly over the damage done to its political rivals, would ever be a temptation to itself, and would expose itself more and more to the perils of raillery ambition and adventure. History is full of instances of this. Ambition will govern the military nation, and avarice the commercial, with little regard to the God of justice in either. But by judging for God, witnessing regularly to the presence of God’s law as he went through the various districts, Samuel prevented the people’s penitence being only fugitive, “as the morning cloud and as early dew,” and guarded against the perils of their enormous deliverance from foreign oppression. Concentrate the truth of this on the smaller range of your own private lives and personal development. For it is possible that penitence, if only fleeting, and the great kindnesses of God may be made the occasions of greater condemnation. And this grace of knowing the Lord and the revelations of Himself to His earnest souls are not spasmodic, interjectional, and unreliable; for “His going forth is prepared as the morning; and He shall came unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.” Consolidate your penitence into piety, your thankfulness for deliverance into earnest devotion and regular good doing. Go, round your nature, and set everything and every power to the acquirement of “holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” (G. B. Ryley.)

Samuel the Judge

Samuel is a splendid model of sanctified authority. Even as Mount Gideon towers in rugged, regal grandeur above that broad tableland on which the fortunes of the Jewish monarchy were afterwards unrolled, so his strong pure character towers in magnificent sublimity above the fickle, selfish age in which he lived. He was the highest type of a ruler. There are two kinds of authority, that which is sustained by force of arms, and that which is held by force of character. Samuel had the latter; the former is hard to get and hard to keep. It is the possession of tyrants. We have had in these later days a striking illustration of these two kinds of power in the Czar of Russia and the late ex-Emperor of Brazil. A certain writer in commenting on the life of the former says: “No one in the world is so grand a monarch, and yet no one in the world today is more wretched. He knows that the spirit of Nihilism is abroad throughout his vast domains, he fears to see in every face the look of an assassin. Turn now to the other picture, Dom Pedro, for many years the loved and trusted emperor of the Brazilian people, the friend of the oppressed, the emancipator of the slave, the patron of the arts and sciences, who was willing when his people had become, through his own generous influence and training, ripe for a republican form of government, to abdicate his throne and to go uncomplainingly into exile. His was an authority resulting from character. He held a throne within a throne which could not be touched or overthrown by the vicissitudes of a progressing civilisation. The influence of the last of the Brazilian emperors, like the influence of the last of Israel’s judges, will be felt throughout successive, generations. The authoritative power of a strong, continuous character is a fact familiar to us all. Samuel ruled by virtue of what he was in himself, and he was what he was because of his early training and continuous growth in character. I would like to say a few words about this continuity of righteousness. As a rule the men and women who have the strongest influence in the world today are those whose moral characters have been built up from their youth time. I do not wish to say anything that shall discourage those who have emerged from the wild excessses of youth into a manhood comparatively strong and influential. I think of men like Augustine, and John Bunyan, and John Newton, and John Gough, who, having emerged from the fiery furnace of dissipation, went about among their fellow men and, despite the awful scars upon their characters and the smell of fire upon their garments, wielded a mighty influence for good and exercised a moral authority in the world which might have been impossible had they, like Timothy and St. Anthony and Edward the Sixth of England, led lives of unbroken righteousness. And yet these men may be regarded as exceptions to the general law of influence. The wild oats theory is all wrong, the assertion that you must be a profligate and a prodigal before you can be a prince among men is devil’s gospel. I have no doubt that the devil over-reaches himself and cheats himself, but in any transaction between you and him he is longer-headed than you are. If you give him a mortgage on your life in the early days, he will be pretty sure to get out of you double the face of your note before he gets through with you. Many a reformed man, many a converted man, is obliged to lament today, as Job did, because “the iniquities of his youth” possess him. The sin is forgiven, but the disabled body, the weakened will, the impaired influence, the thought of those who have been led astray by his example, must abide with him. Chaucer, “the bright herald of English song,” a man of surpassing abilities, failed to be the power that he might have been because of his early sins. He cried out repeatedly On his deathbed: “Woe is me that I cannot recall and annul these things; but, alas! they are continued from man to man and I cannot do what I desire.” I had a letter from one of these unfortunates only a few days ago. He has for many years been yielding to temptation. Again and again he has striven to break away from the thraldom of his past life, but as yet in vain. He says: “I have been on a disastrous downhill slide for the past few weeks; nothing wrong other than dissipation, which ought to be a criminal offence, particularly for me. Sinning and trying to repent seems to be my lot. Why cannot I be saved?” The difference between a character that has grown up into a matured strength from early goodness and purity and that which results from some sudden and violent conversion after years of weakening excesses is like the difference between the stalactite and the icicle: they look much alike, they are formed by the same forces of nature; but the one is many years forming, and the other grows in a night-time. Keep the icicle under right conditions of temperature and it remains, like the stalactite, solid and beautiful; but change those conditions, put the two together under the burning heat of the sun, and the creation of a night time will molt away, while the deposit of many years will be strong and solid still. The prince among men who is the greatest moral power in the world today, the man who can do the most in moderating and guiding the passions of his fellow men, who is best able to help the weak and encourage the faint, and who impresses his character upon the age in which he lives, is the man who, like Samuel, can look back through middle age and youth and childhood upon a life which has been clean and true. (C. A. Dickinson.)

Samuel the Ruler

Other books--the works of great men and possessed of great merit--have been written for the use of princes in training for a throne; but in preference to all such, were we a prince’s tutor, we should select the Bible; and for a pattern for rulers him whose name stands at the head of this chapter. America boasts her Washington; England her Hampden; Scotland her Wallace; Greece and Rome their patriots or patriot-kings; but among the few illustrious men whose deeds shine in the annals and whose names are embalmed in the heart of nations, where, in all history, sacred or profane, is there one so eminently fitted to rule as Samuel--who presents such a remarkable combination of mental power, the purest patriotism, and the highest piety?

1. He was a patriotic ruler.

(1) His object was not the possession of power--that for which so many kings and statesmen have had recourse to the meanest devices. How basely did Henry IV desert the sacred cause for which, his white plume dancing in the thick of the fight, he had often led his followers to battle! And from him who embraced Popery to win Paris, and, with its gay capital, the kingdom and crown of France, to such as by bribery have purchased meaner offices, what sacrifices of conscience, and virtue, and truth, have been offered at the shrine of power! The crimes which some have committed to gain it have been without a parallel, unless those which others have committed to retain it. Unlike that grand old Roman who threw up the helm of the state and retired to plough his paternal acres, how many has the world seen clinging to power as a drowning man to a plank; and to retain possession of it, resorting to the most dishonourable and vilest means! For this purpose, once and again the sword of Joab was plunged into the heart of a rival; to prop up his throne, Charles I, in Stratford, gave the neck of a devoted friend to the headsman’s axe; to secure their places and appease an angry crowd, a British ministry cast an admiral of the fleet to the mob, and hanged him up before the sun; and Richelieu, a cardinal of the Church, and chief minister of France, arranged that her armies should suffer an ignominious defeat--scrupling not, rather than that he should lose his place, that thousands of his gallant countrymen should lose their lives, and cement with their blood the tottering fabric of his power. In the crooked policy they have pursued to gain or to retain place and power, what base things have great men done, and what bad things good men! A finer contrast to the general character of the princes and statesmen, and, whether they occupied a high or a low place, of the rulers of this world, we cannot imagine than that which Samuel presents. Place, honour, and power sought him, not he them. He became the judge of Israel, or its ruler, at the call of God; and when, without respect to his grey hairs and long years of honourable, successful service, an ungrateful country called him to resign his office, like the sun which looks largest at its setting, he never seems so great, so grand, as in the last scenes of his public life.

2. His object was not his own personal aggrandisement. “L’etat, c’est moi” (“The State, it is I”), said Louis XIV to one who happened to speak in his presence of the interests of the State. A striking picture that of one who, though called “the great,” was an incarnation of the worst passions of human nature--of selfishness, pride, heartless cruelty, insatiable ambition, and abominable lust!--a truer picture, though drawn by his own hand, than any left by Bossuet, or Massillon, or the other flatterers of a bloody tyrant and ruthless persecutor of God’s heritage. We meet with no such scenes under the rule of Samuel. Unlike those that had preceded, or were to follow, the sword slept in its scabbard all the days of Samuel--that great battle excepted which inaugurated his reign, and was won by his prayers. Under his government--Samuel himself the highest example of it--piety flourished; the stream of justice ran pure; the rights of all classes were respected; private property was safe; and the public burdens, pressing lightly, were easily borne by a prosperous people. I can fancy, when old men described the happy and quiet life they led in the good days of Samuel, how many felt that when their fathers clamoured for a king, on that occasion, as old Bishop Latimer said of another, the vox populi was rather the vox diaboli than the vox Dei--the voice of the devil than the voice of God.

2. Samuel was a pious, as well as patriotic, ruler. It would appear that in the rudest times of old an altar always rose near the throne; and that an indispensable part of every palace was the chapel, where he to whom others knelt, knelt to God; and learned to remember that there was One above him whose throne overshadowed his; at whose mercy seat kings had to seek for mercy; whose laws were to form the rule, and his glory the chief end of their government. Simply the vicegerent of God, and no king, Samuel had no place in Israel; the palace, if such it could be called, was the tabernacle, where God dwelt within the curtains of the holy place, No armed guards protected the person, nor gorgeous retinue attended the steps of Samuel. No pomp of royalty disturbed the simple manner of his life, or distinguished him from other men; yet there rose by his house in Ramah that which proclaimed to all the land the personal character of its ruler, and the principles on which he was to conduct his government In a way not to be mistaken, Samuel associated the throne with the altar; earthly power with piety; the good of the country with the glory of God. “He judged Israel,” it is said, “all the days of his life, and went from year to year in circuit to Bethel, and Gilgah, and Mizpeh, and judged Israel in all these places; and his return was to Ramah, for there was his house, and there he judged Israel, and there,” it is added, “he built an altar unto the Lord.” That altar had a voice no man could mistake. In a manner more expressive than proclamation made by the voice of royal heralds with painted tabards and sounding trumpets, it proclaimed to the tribes of Israel that piety was to be the character, and the will of God the rule, of his government. What an example Samuel presents to our magistrates, our judges, our members of parliament--to all entrusted with authority, and how should all who love their God and country pray that every post of honour and of public trust may be filled with a man of the type of Samuel! Religion is the root of honour; piety the only true foundation of patriotism; and the best defence of a country, a people nursed up in godliness--of such virtue, energy, and high morale, that, animated with a courage which raises them above the fear of death, they may be exterminated, but cannot be subdued. It, is not, as some allege, our blood, with its happy mixture of Celtic, Saxon, and Scandinavian elements, but the religion of our island--our Bibles, our schools, our Sabbaths, our churches, and our Christian homes--which, more than any and than all things else, has formed the character of its inhabitants; and to that more than to the genius of its statesmen, or to its fleets and armies, Britain owes her unexampled prosperity, and the peace that has brooded for a hundred years unbroken on her sea-girt shores. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)

The judge in circuit; or, religion in business

In every State much depends on the proper administration of justice, and it is of the first consequence to sustain it incorrupt. It is with the body politic as with the individual. Regard must be had to those secondary laws which influence health and contribute to our fitness for discharging ordinary duties. If we pay no respect to the laws of diet, exercise, and ventilation, by which health is conserved, we become unable to perform our business, the internal economy is deranged, and all the members of the body suffer. In society there are principles that regulate order and prosperity, which cannot with impunity be set aside. If the administration of justice be neglected or perverted, liberty and religion must seriously suffer. But when religion is revived, it is of vast moment to bring all civil affairs under its purifying influence. Without this, religious ceremonies would serve as cloaks for sin, and liberty excuse licentiousness. It was, therefore, the great business of Samuel, when by God’s blessing he had godliness recovered and national order re-established, to free the judgment seat from corruption, and to make it a respect and a dread through all the land. The civil government of Israel was peculiar. It had its origin from God, and was as much a Divine institution as the Church itself. Jehovah was their lawgiver and king, both in Church and State. Church and State being co-extensive in Israel, the Levites acquired a large share in the administration of justice. In the days of David, we read that six thousand of the Levites were officers and judges (1 Chronicles 23:4), in addition to the number employed in the tabernacle service. Members of the State were subject to the law of the Church, and the members of the Church were citizens. Religious error was criminal in civil law. Idolatry was treason, for God was their king. Offences against society were subject to ecclesiastical censure, and cut off the guilty from the congregation of the Lord. The two forms of government were mutually helpful and interdependent. The revival of piety purified the State, and spiritual officers led rulers to reform. Samuel was a Levite, and was devoted to the sanctuary by the circumstances of his birth. But he also discharged high civil offices on account of the position into which he was providentially raised. He officiated as a priest, and he ruled as a judge. Samuel was an upright and godly judge. There is a danger of separating the official from the personal character, and whenever this is done the individual is seriously injured. There have been good men who have been bad judges, and bad men who have made respectable judges. There is another danger to which a judge is exposed, when he is tempted to indulge personal feelings while seated where impartial judgment should be given. It is recorded of Aristides, one of the brightest names in ancient Greece, and a man to whom his contemporaries awarded the title of “the Just,” that when he was a judge between two private persons, “one of them declared that his adversary had greatly injured Aristides.” He thus hoped to awaken the personal feelings of the judge against his opponent and secure a verdict favourable to himself. But the just judge replied, “Relate rather what wrong he hath done to thee, for it is thy cause, not mine, that I now sit judge of.” Private feelings may, however, sometimes be tried severely. When Brutus had to occupy the seat of justice and his two sons were placed at the bar charged with treason against the State, it was trying for the patriot to set aside the parent, and for duty to act against affection. But the majesty of law prevailed over the emotions of kindred, and the spectators are said to have gazed more at the judge than on the culprits on that august occasion, and to have regarded the scene as a most illustrious exhibition of moral heroism. Party feeling is another danger to which judges are exposed. When Richard Baxter had to bear the coarse ribaldry and unjust judgment of Jeffreys, it was evident that party feeling ruled the decision of that wicked man. A judge should be upright, and Samuel brought to the judicial seat a character fitted for the high office he had to discharge. The altar was beside his bench and his home. The profession of his faith was beside his robe of office. The believer was in the judge. He connected the official with the personal so intimately that he could not be a godly man without also being at the same time an upright judge. Nor has he stood alone in the lives of judges. Sir Matthew Hale was a man after Samuel’s pattern. Under the power of godliness and familiar with the word of God, he sought to evidence the principles of religion in the practice of his profession. When he was an advocate, he would not plead a cause, if he were convinced of its injustice; and when he rose to the bench and was Chief Baron of the Exchequer he was noted for the impartiality of his decisions. A peer of the realm who had a case in court once called upon him to give him private information, that he might have fuller understanding of it when it was brought up for judgment. Sir Matthew is reported to have said that “he did not deal fairly to come to his chamber about such affairs, for he never received any information of causes but in open court, where both parties were to be heard alike.” The duke complained to the king; but his majesty observed, that “he believed he would have used himself no better, if he had gone to solicit him in any of his causes.” Sir Matthew feared God and regarded man, but his integrity of righteous action was not to be sacrificed. Samuel did not forget whose law it was which he dispensed, whose worship he observed, whose altar was at his house. After the fatigue of official duty, the exercise of devotion at the family altar was sweet refreshment. Before entering upon the anxieties of judgment or the vexation of litigation, domestic worship was his best preparation. Amidst the difficulties of the conflicting cases before him he would remember the altar, and seek wisdom requisite for the occasion from the Lord most high. Secular engagements did not pervert his godliness, or lead him to neglect family worship. He could come from the strife of tongues to the peace-speaking blood, and approach with humble faith the altar of his God. That is not a complete house which is without an altar. It may have a hearth to warm, and accommodation to suit the body, but it has not that which likens it, as it links it to heaven. You may have a respectable business, and conduct it well, and yet want what blesses it--a domestic altar. A house without an altar lacks its brightest ornament, its clearest light, its best principle, and its sure consecration. But where the altar is in the house it has a safety lamp. Numerous have been the testimonies to the value of the domestic altar. (B. Steel.).