1 Samuel 3:1-10
John 5:31-47
This remarkable story of the child, Samuel, who was to become the last judge and the first and most famous prophet of
Elkanah had two wives – Hannah and Peninnah. Hannah was barren; Peninnah was not. When the family went up to worship and sacrifice to the Lord at Shiloh, Elkanah would give portions of the meat to Peninnah and her children and a double portion to Hannah because, we are told in 1 Samuel 1, “…he loved her, and because the Lord had closed her womb.” We are told that Peninnah ridiculed Hannah. So, “In bitterness of soul, Hannah wept and prayed to the Lord.”
Eli, the priest, saw Hannah moving her mouth in prayer and thought she was drunk. Hannah corrected him by saying, “Not so, my lord. I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I have not been drinking wine or beer; I was pouring out my soul to the Lord.” Eli then said, “Go in peace, and may the Lord grant you what you have asked of him.”
Shortly thereafter, Hannah became pregnant with Samuel.
Hannah did not go up to the annual sacrifice the next year. She told her husband, “After the boy is weaned, I will take him and present him before the Lord, and he will live there always.” Imagine, if you will, bearing a child of promise and giving him up to God. Only a mother could know the depth of such a sacrifice.
When she brought the boy to Eli, she said to him, “As surely as you live, my lord, I am the woman who stood here beside you praying to the Lord. I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.” “Elkanah and his family went back to Ramah, but Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli the priest.”
There is a touching story of how Hannah, every year, brought a little robe to Samuel. Eli would pray over her, and Hannah would get pregnant again. She gave birth to three more sons and two daughters. As for Samuel, we are told that “…the boy Samuel continued to grow in stature and in favor with the Lord and with men.”
This story reminds us of the stories of both John the Baptist and Jesus. Elizabeth and Hannah were both barren, and God intervened. Samuel and John were both called by God to a very important mission in redemptive history. What was said about Samuel was also said about Jesus: “He grew in stature and in favor with the Lord and with men.”
We come to the story of one particular night in the life of Samuel.
We get the sense that Samuel was very faithful: “The boy Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli.” Samuel is lying down in the temple of the Lord where the Ark of the Covenant was located. He hears, “Samuel; Samuel” and runs to Eli, thinking that Eli needs help.
That happens 3 times before Eli catches on. He instructs the boy to respond when he hears the voice again, with “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
God is about to punish Eli for raising two wayward and rebellious sons who had prostituted the office of priest. They had rebelled against Eli and against God. Here was Samuel, shaming them by his obedience and faithfulness to their father.
Samuel took as Eli’s call what was the call of the Almighty. These are perhaps the kinds of mistakes that you and I make when we hear the still, small voice of God. It either gets drowned out by the noise around us, or we are quick to interpret God’s voice in the way that our minister, or our favorite televangelist interprets it. We often are so hungry for a new twist on the “Old, Old Story of Jesus and His love,” that we will purchase books like Left Behind for our doctrines – rather than dig into the Word of God.
God calls us by His word, and we leave it to the minister, rather than the Spirit, to interpret the call. The still small voice of the Spirit calls out to us, and there are few of us who can understand that God is calling. The witness of the Spirit on our hearts is often mistaken for foolishness, and we look to others to tell us what to do and where to go. This gets particularly dangerous when we follow the advice of those who do not believe in the Lordship of Christ.
The Psalmist says, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly or sits in the way of sinners, for His delight is in the law of the Lord, and in that law does he meditate day and night.”
The point is well taken. Those of us who would call ourselves God’s servants must carry inside a deep and longing desire to know the mind of God: “Speak, Lord, for your servant hears.”
God’s word, we are told, is a “lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path.” God’s word is intended as a guide for the path to our lives. Paul tells Timothy, “Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman who needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” A lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path suggests that we are otherwise walking into the unknowns of life in the dark.
Because the Word of God has been abused and misused, it is often feared by Christians. Instead of being a lamp and a light, it has become a stumblingblock to faith. It has become a legal document instead of the revelation of God. We pick and choose verses that declare things to be sins that are not in our particular bag of sins.
Meanwhile, the Bible lays there with the indictment, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” or “All men are liars, and the truth is not in them,” or, “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
We focus on the words of God rather than the Word of God. The Word of God is the revelation of God in Christ Jesus. It is not a list of sins that are more evil than any of the sins that you and I commit with impunity. You can condemn abortionists and homosexuals if you wish, but how about pride, or lust, or hate, or anger or love of money? The list goes on and on, hitting us much closer than do the sins of abortion and homosexuality.
The answer to all this is to be guided, not by the words of God but by the Word of God: “Speak, Lord, for your servant hears.” To focus on the words is to focus on the writer. To focus on the Word is to focus on God. God did not dictate the Scriptures. He breathed to the writers the objective truth, and they put that truth in their own words.
Fast-forward a thousand years from Samuel to the time of Jesus, and you have a condition where the rules of religion had again become far more important than the spirit of religion.
You will recall the Sadducees coming to Jesus with a theological question, “Whose wife would a woman be in Heaven who had been married to seven husbands who had died?” What is especially relevant about this is that the Sadducees did not believe in the Resurrection of the dead, so for them there was no Heaven. They pose this question to trap Jesus about a technicality.
He told them that they were in error because they did not know the Scriptures. There is no marriage in the next life, so the question is irrelevant. When we think about this, we have to admit that all theological errors that have been adopted by the Church of Jesus Christ have flowed from the same fountain – ignorance of the word of God.
A lawyer approached Jesus and asked, “Master, what is the greatest commandment?” Jesus referred him to the Bible for the answer. When Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert, He answered every temptation with the words, “It is written.” What we get from this is that Jesus made the Scriptures His constant rule and guide. Can any of us do less?
There are some who insist that the Spirit is their guide. If that be so, Jesus, who had the fullness of the Spirit, did not need to refer to the written word. But He always did.
It is the duty of every believer who consciously follows Christ to search the Scriptures. John 5:39 says in the King James, “Search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life, and they are they that testify of me.” The NIV says it this way: “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
Jesus is talking here to the unbelieving Jews who had condemned Him for healing a man on the Sabbath. They had become so engrossed in the prohibition against work on the Sabbath that they missed the point of the healing. They scoured the Scriptures to find a formula for eternal life, but the path to eternal life was in the subject of the Scriptures – Jesus the Christ. They missed it altogether.
Today, we have those who scour the Scriptures for moral precepts and laws and miss the point of the Scripture – regeneration by the HS of those who are in Christ Jesus. The fountain of God’s revelation of Himself to mankind was our fall in Adam and our new birth in Christ. If we search the Scriptures as we ought to do, we will not see them as a list of sins, but we will see in them the fall of Adam and our redemption in Christ.
All the threats, promises, laws and doctrines contained in the Scriptures, and all the rites, ceremonies and sacrifices under the Jewish law, assume our fallen nature in Adam and point us to a Mediator.
Had mankind continued in the state of innocence in which we were created, there would have been no need for any physical revelation of God because the law of God was so deeply written on our hearts. But having eaten the forbidden fruit, Adam incurred the displeasure of God and lost his divine image.
We have been eating the forbidden fruit every since – the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And because of this inherited trait, it was necessary that God physically declare Himself in the person and work of Jesus.
One of the great fallacies of human thinking, even among Christians, is the inherent goodness of man. If we are good, from where do those corruptions come that rise daily in our hearts? We could not have been created as corrupt beings because goodness could make nothing but what is like Himself – holy, just and good. We simply rebelled against God.
Despite the fact that we are trying desperately to escape these disorders of our nature, we find ourselves unwilling to admit that we are depraved and in need of grace. That is why we strive so to appear to others quite different than we really are.
Searching the Scriptures is not a pastime. It is a necessity because the Bible is the grand charter of our salvation – the revelation of the covenant made by God with mankind in Christ Jesus and a light to guide us into the way of peace. We are obliged to read and study them.
There are those in our day who look to the Bible for signs and wonders and the timetables of God – outward evidences to prove divine revelation. Has not God revealed Himself to us already and enough? Yet they require a sign, and there shall be no more signs given except the person and work of Jesus the Christ.
There are those in our day who are so busy pulling apart the Bible as a roadmap to the future that they lose sight of the Word. The religious right wants to replace the Constitution of the
Jesus tells these unbelievers who are fully versed in the Scriptures that they have missed the message. It is the forest and the trees analogy. They know the Scriptures, but they do not have the love of God.
Jesus has come as the fulfillment of the Scriptures, but they do not accept Him. “Yet,” he tells them, “if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe if you accept praise from one another yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God?”
That’s a good question, isn’t it? Politics is about false praise on both the right and the left. Those on the right are praising each other because they are sinless – they don’t have abortions or are not homosexuals, supposedly. Those on the left are praising each other because they believe in humanity rather than God. And both use the Scriptures in vain.
There are a few ways that we can rise above the words of God to the Word of God.
First, we need to read Scripture with the end in view for which it was written – to show the way of salvation by Jesus. All Scripture points to Jesus. If it points to a moral code or a lesson in history, it is being read but not understood.
Secondly, Scripture should be read with a child-like humility. Remember that God hides the things of the Kingdom from the wise and the prudent in their own eyes and reveals them only to those who are as little children – who think they know nothing, who hunger and thirst after righteousness and who humbly desire to be fed by the Word.
Compare that with the Christian Right who are so confident in their interpretation of Scripture that they are willing to risk your life and liberty on that interpretation.
Third, the Scriptures should be read with a desire to put into practice what you learn about God. Jesus spoke in parables to confuse those who had no desire to learn and less to put what they read into practice.
Fourth, whatever was written in the Word of God was written in a cultural context. Put yourself, as best you can, into the culture of the writer, understanding that the Word is timeless in that it was written for our learning as well. What Jesus said about fallen man being restored belongs to those to whom he was speaking and to those who would follow until the last of the elect are safely home.
Read the Scriptures by praying first that God the HS would reveal Jesus to you through the reading. Understand that what you read was written by inspiration but that you, as a believer, may also become an inspired reader. The HS is the connection between writer and reader.
Fifth, read the Scriptures, not as words, but as life itself. Just as the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night went before the Israelites, so does the Word of God go before the believer.
Finally, as you read, learn to pray that God’s Spirit will guide you into all truth
A few weeks ago, we considered a passage from 1 Peter that said that we are to be ready, when asked, to give account for the hope that is within us, and we are to do that with respect and humility.
The hope that is within us is fed by the inspired Word of God that points to salvation in Jesus Christ. How can we give account if we have no grasp of Scripture?
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