"BILL E. SUNDAY SPECIAL

First Samuel One

“Heard of God”   yet subject to Eli.

We live of course in a strange, unnatural, violent and profane world; one full of “leaders” like Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phineas.  In such a world, it is hard to make Godly requests, like Hannah’s, without advanced travail and many tears.  After the events of Judges, it would be easy to give up, and think that Israel, the whole nation, was doomed to failure, throttling itself in its own cradle, as Hercules was said to have strangled a large snake in his bower of infancy.  The Lord’s gift of strength, like all His good gifts, is more often misused than used in any form of holiness and obedience.

 

“So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.”

 

It is interesting to note in the commentary that before God gave Israel its first king, He prepared the nation in one striking way: He instituted the office of the prophet first; and the kings and the priests, who had been and would be corrupt most of the time, would have some pre-provided “informants for God,”  who, like Elisha who would be informed by God of what the Syrian king was saying in his bedroom; hence would be God’s voice and charge to all kings;  And Samuel would know, like Jesus would see  Nathanael by the fig tree, what Saul was not only doing, but thinking.  He could see, by God’s Spirit, into the heart of the king and act like Nathan would act towards David a few years later:  “ ‘Thou art the man.’”—with the heart of darkness.

It says in the NT that those who follow Christ and believe His Words have become temples and priests and kings.  But not all are prophets, as Paul wisely pointed out.  In fact, for 400 years before Christ, there were no significant prophets recorded.  The Temple itself had been overrun by Greeks and Romans, and what remained, except for a few men like Simeon and a few women like Anna, was largely functioning without prophets and without the Holy Spirit, since the time of Malachi. (Herod was given John the Baptist as a prophet, and  the outcome presaged Jesus’.) The last prophet, Zechariah, was murdered by the descendants of “Hophni and Phineas” on the very steps of Herod’s (Herod’s Indeed!) Temple.

Many in our day have been “nominated” for the office of prophet:  Alexander  Solzhenitsyn,  Charles Colson, David Wilkerson, and many other great pastors or even Christian philosophers and intellectuals and scientists.  Yet if one would ask them if they were prophets, they would all deny it.  Yet Paul declared that some have that gift.  Is that, um, “for today?”

Then again:  is there any substitute now, for The Holy Spirit?  Do we need a priest to mediate our relationship to Christ? (No, but a mentor and good Biblically based teaching are good, mostly) Are we cast back, like Hannah and Anna, on our knees, needing to hear from the Lord as the Lord intended by sending Christ, and then the Comforter.  And how many tears have we shed along our ways?—not so many as Hannah, I am sure!

It is all too human to want an intermediary; and God has for 4000 plus years, accommodated our profound core weaknesses, and our desires for the directorship of a human dictatorship.  But those millennia are drawing to a rapid close, and God wants us to start to “know Him as we are known,” for soon “all will know Him, from the least to the greatest,” and God is pouring “His Spirit out on all flesh.”

 If so, do we not, also by The Spirit, have to be our own prophets? To rebuke, annoy, and deny the worldishness and  the would- be dictators of our flesh within us, our “wicked kings a-many?”

 

I don’t know. I’m just asking.  Maybe the answer is obvious. But I do know that we are responsible to The Spirit, not just to the Letter of the Law.

Much less to anything I might say here, or elsewhere.

He was, John the Baptist, “a voice of one calling in the wilderness, make straight the path for the Lord.” (Isaiah, the real prophet of Christ.)  Are we called—genuinely called—to do the same?