XXIV. Endor and Gilboa

XIII. Forsaken? Never!

(1 Samuel 12:22)

For the glory and the passion of this midnight

I praise Thy name, I give Thee thanks, O Christ!

Thou that hast neither failed me nor forsaken

Through these hard hours with victory overpriced.

Now that I too of Thy passion have partaken,

For the world’s sake—called—elected—sacrificed!

—H. Hamilton King.

WHILST the whole land was ringing with the news of Saul’s exploit in the deliverance of Jabesh-gilead, it appeared to Samuel to be an auspicious moment for confirming the kingdom in his hand: and therefore he summoned a great convocation of the nation at Gilgal.

On that spot Israel had encamped for the first night after crossing the Jordan, and the twelve great stones commemorating that event were still visible. There the act of circumcision had been performed, cleansing the people of the neglect of the wilderness; and there, too, the first Passover in the Land of Promise had been celebrated. Amid these great memorials and memories of the past, with the swiftly flowing river sweeping constantly beside them to the Dead Sea, surrounded by all the associations of those glorious days, which had left an unfading splendour upon the history of their fathers, the people gathered from far and near to crown Saul king. He had been designated at Mizpeh; he was to be crowned at Gilgal; it was the inauguration of his reign, its ratification and confirmation by the entire people. After this great ceremony had taken place, Saul and his people rejoiced together with peace-offerings and thank-offerings before God; and this was the moment that Samuel chose to lay down his office as judge—the last of the judges, and the first of the prophets.

I. Samuel’s Resignation.—An end must come to the longest and most successful ministry, and the author of the Book of Ecclesiasticus, reverting to this event in Samuel’s life, says: “Before his long sleep Samuel made protestation of his innocence, before God and the people.” Yes, the long sleep will come to all, and happy are they who before they lay their heads down to the last sleep and their spirits enter to receive their final award, are able to extend their hands and bare their hearts before those who have known them best, and say, “These at least are clean.”

This is what Samuel by the grace of God was able to do. Standing bare-headed before the vast audience of the men of Israel, and pointing to his white locks, he said, “I am old and gray-headed, and I have walked before you [as in Eastern lands a shepherd precedes his flock] from my boyhood up.” His had been an unblemished career, and for his own sake and for the sake of God on whose behalf he stood, he was anxious to obtain from the people a vindication of the blamelessness of his career. He therefore protested: “I have not defrauded you, nor oppressed you. Whose ox have I taken? Whose ass? Can any man confront me as having taken from his hand even a sandal as a bribe that I should turn away mine eyes from his misdoing?” And all the people, like the leaves of the forest rustling before the wind, with one unanimous consent, cried: “Thou hast not defrauded, nor oppressed, nor taken anything from our hand.”

But the old man was not content; he wanted to bind the people by a solemn oath, as in the very sight of God and the king; and, therefore, he said, lifting his hand to heaven, “I call God to witness against you this day and his anointed king, that what you have said is true.” And again, from the lips of all the people, with one unanimous shout, there came the response, “God is witness.” The old man was comforted, and added: “Yes, God is witness, the very God who brought our people out of Egypt, and appointed Moses and Aaron.”

Oh, that all our public men to-day were as clean-handed and pure-hearted as Samuel was! that when the records of their actions are rehearsed before the judgment-seat of God it may be discovered that those who have been high in office have not prostituted their high position for their own emolument, or acted for private gain, but that they are clean-handed and pure-hearted. Happy is that nation whose public men are free from all complicity with bribery and from making profit out of the necessities or the sore distress of their fatherland!

II. He Designated his People’s Sin.—It was a great opportunity to show them where they had done wrong, and a man whose own hands are clean is permitted to be the sincere critic of others’ misdoing. See to it that your own eye is single, and that the beam is extracted from it before you essay to remove the mote from your brother’s eye. In several particulars he pleaded with that dense mass of people, and dared to hold up the crimes of his nation, that they might see them as they were.

First, he set himself to show the difference between their former and their latter method of procedure. He carried their thoughts back to Egypt, and, in effect, said: When your fathers were in bondage to the Egyptians, and under the oppression of Pharaoh, you cried unto Jehovah, and in gracious answer He raised up deliverance. And when in the days of the Judges you were oppressed first by Sisera, then by the Philistines, and then by the people of Moab, you cried to God for deliverance, and it came; but now, when the threatened invasion of Nahash, the king of the Ammonites, was filling the horizon with thunderclouds, instead of holding a great invocation for prayer, you insisted upon my appointing a king. Why have you deteriorated? Why was prayer your natural resort three hundred years ago, and now it is neglected? Is it not because you are prayerless that you have drifted from your ancient moorings? In this is a great sin.

Must not we always take care that, instead of saying impulsively and impetuously, “We will do this or that,” we should constantly wait before God that He would appoint a deliverer?

Secondly, in his dealing with the people, he put a new reading upon past history. On their side, they pointed out the successive catastrophes which had befallen their country; how the Ammonites, the Philistines, the Moabites, and Sisera, and other surrounding nations, had oppressed them, and brought them under their power, and therefore, as a way of deliverance from such troubles, they had argued the necessity of having a king. Samuel, of course, admitted the successive afflictions which had befallen his people, but he did not put the same reading upon them. He said: “You demand a king, who shall make such catastrophes no longer possible, but I tell you, on the other hand, that, whether you have a king or not, if you forget God, as you have forgotten Him, and if you turn to Baalim and Ashtaroth as you have turned to them, neither your king, nor any alternative mode of government you can invent, will deliver you from the consequences.” In other words, he made it clear that it was not the presence or absence of a monarchy, but the want of singleness of purpose, and devotion to Jehovah, which had been the cause and root of all their troubles.

Again, there is a lesson for ourselves. After all, it is not this man or that, who is necessary to a church, so long as the church itself is living before God in incorruption, and sincerity of truth, and is following the lead of the beacon fire by night and the cloudy pillar by day. When a church is right with God, God stands for the church.

Thirdly, he indicated to the people that God had never failed to send them a man when a man was wanted. He said: “Look back upon your past history. Even apart from an hereditary line of kings, with the prestige of royal descent, God has always raised up a man to help you in an emergency. Consider—did not He raise up Moses and Aaron? Did not He raise up Jephthah and Barak (see r. v. margin), Gideon and myself? See how perpetually, in the dark hour, in answer to prayer, God has sent you the man that was needed. Could you not have trusted Him; and instead of being so urgent for a king, could you not have waited for Him to do for you, as he had done aforetime?”

Lastly, he said: “My countrymen, you have greatly deteriorated; you have failed in your faith, you have demanded a visible king, but have forgotten the invisible Lord; you have magnified the arm of flesh, but have forgotten the mighty power of the Eternal. You have been sheltering under the idea of a new royalty, whereas God was your King, your true Head, the Leader and Patron of the nation. You should have rested only on Him.”

Are we not all liable to the same lapse of faith? We look to the visible and forget the invisible. The air is filled with anxiety, clamour, and controversy, whilst in the shadow, behind the thin veil of sense, stands the eternal crowned Christ, waiting ever to trim the lamps of the golden candlesticks and to hold the stars in his right hand. It was a brave thing, a noble thing, a right thing, for Samuel to show to his people how they had drifted from the old true standing ground of faith into practical atheism and unbelief.

III. Samuel’s Assurance.—Having handed over his office to Saul, who henceforth was to be the shepherd and leader of the chosen people, and having dealt with their failure and deterioration, he went on to say with inimitable sweetness, “The Lord will not forsake his people for his great name’s sake.” Oh, take these words to heart, and let them sink, like a refrain of music, into your soul. The Lord will not forsake his people! They may have lost their ideal; for a moment they may have drifted from their ancient moorings of childlike confidence, but the Lord cannot forsake his people, for his great name’s sake.

How perpetually this argument was used by the holy men of the old time. For instance, in Exod. 32:12, where God talks of casting away his people, when they had made the golden calf and worshipped it with garlands and dances, Moses dares to go into the Divine Presence, and say: “Lord, Thou canst not do it, for if Thou dost, thy character will be impugned, and the Egyptians will say, ‘He was not able to bring them in; he brought them out, but his power was not sufficient to accomplish that to which He had put his hand.’ Thou canst not do it. Thy credit is at stake!”

And in Josh. 7:9, when Israel had fled before the men of Ai, Joshua threw himself upon the ground before the Ark and cried, “O my God, if thy people fail like this, what will the Egyptians say? What will the Philistines say? What will the nations of Canaan say? And what wilt Thou do for thy great Name. Before Heaven and earth Thou wilt stand discredited if Thou failest to give us this land as Thou hast promised.”

Then in Isa. 48:9, 11, later on in the history of the chosen people, Isaiah, dealing with their sins, and speaking to them in God’s name, says: “For my name’s sake will I defer mine anger; and for my praise will I refrain for thee that I cut thee not off.” “For mine own sake, for mine own sake, will I do it; for how should my name be profaned? and my glory will I not give to another.”

In Ezek. 20, these remarkable words are repeated thrice: “I wrought for my name’s sake, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations, among whom they were.” God’s name is God’s character. He is bound by his self-respect not to forsake his people.

The old prophet went on to say: “It hath pleased the Lord to make you his people.” God hides his reasons. He loves because He will. The flame of his love requires no fuel. The bush is not consumed for its maintenance. We may put alongside with these, those words of the great apostle: “He gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a people for his own possession.” This assurance applies to men:

(1) As Individuals.—God will not forsake you. He did not choose you because of your goodness or beauty, and He will not forsake you because you have failed of your best. He has made you his child by adoption and grace, not that there was anything in you to specially attract Him, but because He would. Some day He may explain to you his reason, but just now there is no reason that any of us can guess at, why we have been chosen from the rest of men to be his. It has pleased Him to make us his sons and daughters. We may have sinned against Him and grieved his Holy Spirit, we may have mixed ourselves with the seed of the people amongst whom we dwell, but God will not forsake his people. If He did, there would be a charge against his love that it was not infinite, that it ceased after sin had reached to a certain height of outrage, that it could not abound over sin. His power also would be impugned, for the lost spirits in hell would boast that He had attempted more than he was able to perform—that He had not counted the cost.

There would also be an imputation upon his immutability. It would be spread through the universe that He took up a sinful soul, cleansed and clothed it, loved and blessed it, and then He changed. At the news that God could be fickle, the palace of eternity would rock, the throne of Heaven shake, and the mighty vault of space would reel to destruction. God dare not surrender the work which He has begun in the heart of man. That is why we may count on being saved. We have no positive claim on God; there is no native beauty nor attractiveness to Him who sees the inner life; there is nothing necessary in our service; but He has set his love upon us, and He must go through with it, and stand to his bargain before all worlds. O soul of man, God will not forsake thee.

(2) As a Church why could not God forsake Israel? Because the chosen people was the type of what He desired every nation to become; and therefore He must needs go on building up Israel, that his type might not be broken; and He had to work through Israel to bring other nations to its level. If God had abandoned Israel, how could He have hoped to regenerate the world?

What was true of Israel may be true of a church. There may be many failures and inconsistencies in her that ought to be altered. But God cannot cast her away in spite of all her sinful imperfection. He will refine and purify her till she realise his ideal and become his perfect Bride.

(3) As a Nation.—Our country cannot go drifting on into materialism and irreligion, as she is doing. God cannot afford to let her become immoral and debased; cannot permit her to follow in the way of Rome and Greece; cannot forsake the people whom He has blessed and used since the days of Alfred, who have been the pioneers of missionary and Christian civilisation through the entire world. For his Name’s sake He cannot do it. No, it is certain that, sooner or later, a great revival of religion will bring us back to our first love.

(4) As a World.—God cannot forsake this world, reeking though it be with blasphemy and impurity, with tyranny and sin. It has been saturated with the blood of his Son and of myriads of his saints. It has been bedewed with the tears of the noblest souls that have ever breathed, and it is yet destined to shine amidst its sister stars with an untarnished beauty; it is to be the specimen to all the universe of what God can do with a fallen world and a degraded race. God cannot forsake our earth, and some day we shall see her glistening in the light that shone over paradise, and enswathed with an unpolluted atmosphere. Purity shall breathe again over her landscapes and oceans. Yes, the children of men will come out from all the sin and evil by which they have been so long oppressed, and shall walk in the white robes of purity, love, and truth. “The Lord will not forsake his people for his great Name’s sake, because it hath pleased the Lord to make you a people unto Himself.”

XIV. Not Ceasing in Prayer

(1 Samuel 12:16–25)

O, who can tell how many hearts are altars to his praise,

From which the silent Prayer ascends through patient nights and days!

The sacrifice is offered still in secret and alone,

O world, ye do not know them, but He can help his own.

—A. Procter.

IN all Samuel’s career there is nothing finer than the closing scene of his public action as the judge and leader of the Hebrew nation. Had he died young, his place in the annals of his country, and indeed in history, would have been much lower; and our appreciation of his character much less. Naturally he found it difficult to step down from his premiership, and inaugurate a régime with which he had no sympathy, since it seemed to be a setting aside of Israel’s greatest glory in having God for King. But he suppressed his strong personal antipathies, and did his very best to start the nation on the new path it had chosen, selecting a king with the utmost care, and, regardless of personal suffering, bridging over the gulf between the old order and the new.

We cannot turn from the record of the great convocation, assembled before the Lord at Gilgal, to ratify Saul’s election, without noticing the repeated allusions to Samuel’s power in prayer. He appears to have been the John Knox of his age, as mighty in prayer as in statesmanship. His whole career seems to have been bathed in the spirit of supplication.

As a boy, with hands meekly clasped, as Sir Joshua Reynolds has depicted him, he asked God to speak, whilst his ear was quick and attent to catch his lowest whispers. In the Book of the Psalms he is mentioned as chief among those that call on God’s name, and as having been answered (99:6). The Prophet Jeremiah alludes to the wonderful power which he exercised in intercessory prayer, when he pleaded for his people (15:1). All Israel knew the long, piercing cry of the prophet of the Lord. In their perils his intercessions had been their deliverance, and in their battles his prayers had secured them victory (1 Sam. 7:8, 8:6). There was “an open road” between God and him, so that thoughts of God’s thinking were able to come into his heart; and he reflected them back again with intense and burning desire.

I. Samuel’s Prayer for Thunder and Rain.—The heart of man cries out for Divine authentication. In every age a crooked and perverse generation seeks a sign, and in seeking it proves how far it has wandered from the source of light, and become blinded in spiritual vision. If our nature realised its Divine ideal, it would discern God in the ordinary and common incidents of providence, in the morning light and the summer air, in dews that noiselessly alight and zephyrs that gently kiss the slumbering woods, in the garniture of spring and the carpeting of flowers (Acts 14:17). But the eyes of the soul are blinded, and men do not see the traces of the Divine footprints across the world day by day. “Lord,” said the prophet, “thy hand is lifted up, but they see not” (Isa. 26:11).

In default of the faculty of detecting God’s presence in the noiseless and ordinary providence of life, man asks for some startling phenomena to prove that God is speaking. “Bring,” he cries to the heaven-sent messenger, “credentials so startling and extraordinary that I may know without doubt that thou art properly accredited. The still, small voice is not enough. We must have the hurricane, the fire, and the bolt from the blue. Then we shall know that God speaks by thee, and that the word from thy lips is true.”

Samuel knew this, and he perhaps longed for some Divine corroboration of his words. God’s trusted servants are content to work through long years amid persistent resistance and apathy, if only they are assured that they are on the line of the Divine purpose. “And it came to pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice that Elijah the prophet came near, and said, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that Thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these things at thy word.” Thus, in a supreme moment, one of the noblest of his successors appealed to God, and his words expressed what was in Samuel’s heart at this great hour. He had surrendered his prerogatives, and introduced his successor; had confronted his people with their sins, and announced the heavy penalties that must follow on disobedience; and he yearned that they should hear another voice, asseverating his words, and pressing them home on conscience and on heart.

It was under the influence of these thoughts that he concluded his address and appeal, with the announcement, “Now, therefore, stand still, and see this great thing, which the Lord will do before your eyes. Is it not wheat-harvest to-day? I will call unto the Lord, and He shall send thunder and rain, that ye may perceive and see that your wickedness is great which ye have done in the sight of the Lord, in asking you a king.”

During the wheat-harvest, lasting from the middle of May to the middle of June, rain is almost unknown in Palestine, and the occurrence of a thunderstorm, coming as it did at the call of the aged prophet, was too startlingly unusual to be viewed as other than the Divine authentication of his claims.

It may be supposed that this incident is altogether without parallel, belonging to the realms of Old Testament story; but I cannot think it to be so. Nature is much more sympathetic with man than we sometimes suppose, because her beauty or terror is but the veil beneath which the Almighty hides Himself. How, save on the supposition that God answered the appeal of his servants, can we account for the fact of the terrific tempest that swept over our shores when the proud Armada of Spain menaced the liberties of Protestant England? And how, save on the supposition that Heaven itself protested against the blasphemous pretensions of the Papacy, can we account for the memorable fact that on the afternoon when the dogma of the Papal Infallibility was announced the Vatican at midday was suddenly invested with a pall of blackest midnight?

But there are other methods of Divine authentication on which every true servant of God may rely. When Paul and Barnabas abode for a long time in Iconium, speaking boldly in the Lord, “He gave testimony unto the word of his grace”; and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews generalises the experience of the early heralds of the Gospel when he says that the message of God’s great salvation was confirmed by them that heard the word, “God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according unto his own will” (Acts 14:3; Heb. 2:3, 4).

We cannot be too thankful for the witness of the Holy Spirit, whose voice is to the faithful servant of God all, and more, that the thunder was to Samuel. It was this that armed the primitive saints with irresistible power. “We are his witnesses,” cried the apostles, “and so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey Him.” “Our Gospel,” wrote the greatest apostle of all, “came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance” (1 Thess. 1:5).

May I ask if my fellow-servants realise this—that the Holy Spirit is in the Church to-day, that He is prepared to bear witness to every true word which is spoken in the name of Jesus, and that He will convict of sin, righteousness, and judgment; so that the faith of our hearers should not stand in the wisdom of man, but in the power of God, God bearing them witness and giving them the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2:1–4; Acts 15:8).

This is the fatal lack of our preaching. We speak earnestly and faithfully, but we do not sufficiently look for nor rely on the divine co-witness; we do not understand the communion and fellowship of the Comforter, and our hearers do not hear his voice thrilling their souls, as thunder in the natural world, with the conviction that the things which we speak are the truths of God. Only let the passionate longing of our heart be, “Father, glorify thy name,” and voices will come as from heaven, saying, “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.” Whilst some that stand by may say that “It thundered,” others will say “An angel spake” (John 12:28, 29).

Oh, our God, give us such power in prayer that when we pray Thou shalt answer “in the secret place of thunder,” and send thunder and rain.

II. Samuel’s Unceasing Intercessions.—Terrified by the loud thunder-peals and the torrents of rain, the people were urgent to secure Samuel’s intercession on their behalf. They feared for their lives and their property, and entreated him to pray for them. “Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God,” they said, “that we die not”; and the emphasis they laid on the word thy seemed to indicate that they felt no longer worthy of their ancient prerogative, as the chosen people. Touched with their appeal, and confident that Jehovah only desired to corroborate his word, the aged seer calmed their fears, urged them never to turn aside to vain idols, which could neither profit nor deliver, assured them that the Lord would not forsake them, and ended with the striking words: “Moreover, as for me, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you.”

Samuel realised that prayer was action in the spiritual plane. The energy which we exert in action in the physical sphere becomes prayer in the spiritual. It has often been said, Laborare est orare (“to labour is to pray”); but the converse is much truer, Orare est laborare (“to pray is to labour”). “The fervent prayer of a righteous man,” says James, “availeth much in its working.” Therefore it was, that when the good Epaphras could no longer help his brethren at Colosse by his words and deeds, he betook himself to prayer, and laboured fervently for them all in prayer (Col. 4:12).

“Work shall be prayer, if all be wrought

As Thou wouldst have it done:

And prayer, by Thee inspired and taught,

Itself with work be one.”

Samuel could no longer exert his energies for his people, as he had done. The limitations imposed by his advancing years, and by the substitution of the kingdom for his judgeship, made it impossible that he should make his yearly rounds as aforetime, but he was able to translate all that energy into another method of helpfulness. The light became heat, the water became steam. The prayers of God’s saints were equivalent, henceforward, to battalions of soldiers.

What the telescope is to the eye, the bicycle to the foot, the telephone to the voice, and the steam-driven machine to the hand, in enlarging and increasing human power, that is prayer to the soul, because it links us with the mighty power of God, it touches springs that unloose spiritual forces which are eternal in their duration and universal in their scope. “Mighty is he who is mighty in prayer; he has learned how to labour with the energies of God.” Why, O soul of man, wilt thou not lay thy fingers on the keyboard of the eternal powers, which would respond instantly to the touch! How great a mistake and loss it is for thee to be satisfied with the lower keyboards of the natural and intellect, when the spiritual, the highest and furthest-reaching, awaits thee!

Samuel viewed prayer as a Divine instinct. For him to thwart the promptings towards prayer which arose within his soul would be nothing short of sin. “God forbid,” he said, “that I should sin against Him in ceasing to pray.”

Let us recognise, we may say with another, that, logic or no logic, men pray, and they want to pray. The instinct to do so seems to be part of ourselves. Probably it is not constant, and it is only the saint who remains in the spirit of prayer; but some time or other, and always when the spiritual nature stirs within us, we begin to pray. Prayer is therefore more than petition, it is the movement of the spirit Godward. We recognise our own limitations and attempt to reach beyond them into the infinite. Therefore, in every true prayer, there is much that cannot be put in words. “The spirit maketh intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered.”

To thwart this instinct, whether it prompts us to pray for ourselves or for others, is to do violence to our noblest nature, to grieve the Holy Spirit of God, and to sin against the Divine order. Prayerlessness is not only an indication of a besotted and demoralised nature, but is in itself a sin, that requires confession and cleansing in the blood of the Cross. And when, in answer to our lowly supplications, we are again brought nigh by the blood of Christ, we shall find that prayer will rise as naturally and freely in our hearts as a fountain from unseen depths fed from the everlasting hills. Prayer is the response of the soul to God, the return tide from us to Him, the sending back in vapour what we receive in showers of heavenly rain.

Samuel viewed prayer as a trusteeship. He could no longer act as judge, but he felt that the interests of the nation had been entrusted to his hands for the highest ends, and it would be treachery to fail in conserving and extending them at least by his intercessions. Often must he have gone aside, as Moses on the Mount, and as our Lord on the hills that engirdled the blue waters of Galilee, to pour out his soul in strong cryings and tears for his brethren, his kinsmen according to the flesh, who were Israelites, to whom pertained the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises. Often, like the apostle Paul, he had great heaviness and continual sorrow in his heart. Often, when the Philistines overran the land, and oppressed the people with their tyranny, it must have seemed as though his heart would break. The failure of Saul to realise his ideal only elicited the more strenuous appeals to God to save both king and people, and the victory which we must record in our next chapter must have been due to his eager entreaties.

This is a model which we may all copy. The one question for the Church in the present day is whether she may reckon on a new manifestation of the power of the Holy Spirit, and this is entirely contingent on another question, “Is it possible to bring the whole Church to her knees?” If these words are of weight with any, let me ask them to join in one persevering and heaven-moving appeal to God that He would awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old, and do great things like those of which our fathers have told us.

XV. The Causes of Saul’s Downfall

(1 Samuel 13:13, 14)

Bide thou thy time!

Watch with meek eyes the race of pride and crime,

Sit in the gate, and be the heathen’s jest.

Smiling and self-possest,

O thou, to whom is pledged a victor’s sway,

Bide thou the victor’s day.

—N. H. J.

THIS chapter is the story of a great tragedy, since it contains the history of the incident which revealed Saul’s unfitness to be the founder of a line of kings. Had he stood this test, there is no doubt that he would have been, not only the first monarch of Israel, but the father of a royal race, and the whole after-history of the chosen people might have been different. But, as we shall see—though, at first, his kingdom augured prosperity to his fatherland—it evidently lacked the elements of permanence and continuity and of becoming Israel’s permanent bulwark against the invasions of the enemy from without and the cancer of disintegration or corruption within.

Let us gather around this story, not only because it has so much to do with the history of God’s people, but because it is full of instruction for ourselves. Turning from Saul to David, Samuel said, “The Lord hath sought Him a man after his own heart.” It is, therefore, clear that, in some way, Saul had ceased to be “a man after God’s own heart,” and it becomes us carefully to inquire the reason, that we may avoid the rocks on which this good ship split and foundered.

You will remark that the chapter which tells the history of this tragedy, the overcasting of a bright morning, the spoiling of a fair and beautiful promise, also contains the story of the unutterable distress to which the chosen people had been reduced by another invasion of the Philistines. We are told, for instance, in ver. 6, that the people of Israel were in a strait, that they were distressed, that they hid themselves in caves and thickets, in rocks and in pits; indeed, some of them even crossed the Jordan, and forsook their fatherland in the hour of its extremity; while those who were yet associated with Saul and Jonathan, as the nucleus of the royal army, followed him, trembling (ver. 7). A spirit of fearfulness had settled down upon the whole people; the old national spirit had decayed; it seemed as though they could never again be induced to stand against the Philistines, any more than a flock of sheep against a pack of wolves.

We are also informed of the numbers of the vast host of Philistines which had been gathered from all parts in order to crush out the movement towards a national existence, of which the coronation of Saul and the exploits of Jonathan were symptoms (ver. 3). We can overhear the tidings brought to Saul (ver. 5) by some panic-stricken messenger, who, with the exaggeration of abject fear, described the Philistines as the sand which is on the seashore in multitude.

A further proof of the hapless misery of the people is adduced in verse 19: there was no smith found throughout the whole land of Israel, and the Hebrews had to take their implements of agriculture down to the smithies of the Philistines, in order that they might be sharpened for their use. Never in the history of the chosen people were there more dire calamity, more absolute hopelessness and despair, than reigned around Saul and throughout the entire country at this hour.

At this juncture Saul seems to have withdrawn his troops, such as they were, from Michmash, and to have taken up his position on the ancient site of Gilgal, where the act of circumcision was performed after Israel had crossed the Jordan under Joshua. There upon the level land, and therefore exposed to the assault of the Philistine hosts at any moment, Saul seems to have pitched his camps, whilst his heroic son, Jonathan, kept up a post of observation in the vicinity of the Philistine hosts.

Whilst Saul with his soldiers remained at Gilgal, every day marked the diminution of his host. This man and that stole away, either across the Jordan as a fugitive, or to hide in some hole and corner of the hills.

It may be asked why, at such a time, Saul did not make one desperate effort against the Philistines. Why did he wait there day after day, whilst his army evaporated before his eyes? Ah! thereby hangs a story—to understand which we must turn back a page or two in the inspired record. In 1 Sam. 10:8, in that early morning interview, when Samuel designated Saul for the crown, he told him that the crisis of his life would overtake him at Gilgal, a prophecy the fulfilment of which had now arrived. “Thou shalt go down before me to Gilgal; and, behold, I will come down unto thee, to offer burnt-offerings, and to sacrifice sacrifices of peace-offerings; seven days shalt thou tarry, till I come unto thee, and show thee what thou shalt do.”

I. Saul’s Mistake.—This command, uttered three years before to Saul, as he stood on the threshold of his vast opportunities, involved two things, and each of them constituted a supreme test.

First, whether he was prepared to act as God’s vicegerent, not as absolute monarch determining his own policy, and acting on his own initiative, but as God’s servant, receiving the marching orders of his life through the prophet’s lips; not acting as an autocrat, but as one to whom there had been a delegation of Divine authority.

Second, whether he could control his impetuous nature, put the curb upon his impulse, and hold himself well in hand.

It was this embargo which Samuel had laid upon him that made him wait, day after day. Can you not imagine how his chosen advisers and warriors would come around him and urge him to do something? Might they not have pointed to the Philistine hosts encamped at Michmash, gathering like a cloud of storm? Might they not have told him how, unless he acted quickly, his paternal estate would be wiped out before the invasion? Might they not have pointed to the dwindling hosts, and said, Rise up and do something; it were better to die beneath the Philistines’ hand than allow them to pounce down on you as the bird of prey on the trembling dove!

But he waited, day after day. “He tarried seven days, according to the set time that Samuel had appointed; but Samuel came not to Gilgal, and the people were scattered from him.” Then it would seem that within a brief space of the expiry of the allotted time he could wait no more. He thought that Samuel must have forgotten the appointment, or had been intercepted in making his way from Ramah through the Philistine lines. He had waited till within half an hour (because to offer a burnt-offering and a peace-offering could not take much longer), and then spoiled the whole, by his inability to delay further; and he said to the priest, who still lingered by the ancient site where God had been worshipped and the Tabernacle posted, “Bring hither the ephod, and let us offer the sacrifice.” “And it came to pass that as soon as he had made an end of offering the burnt-offering, behold, Samuel came.”

Ah! if only some sentry standing on a pinnacle of rock could have looked over into the adjacent valley and seen the form of the old man drawing nearer to the camp he might have warned the King, crying, “Samuel is coming.” But there was no one to arrest him, nothing but the monition and remonstrance of his own heart. It was shown that he could not wait for God, in absolute faith that He could not fail nor deceive. He was careful to maintain an outward rite, but the spirit of devotion and faith was altogether wanting. As he was, his successors would become, to the undoing of Israel; therefore his kingdom could not continue.

The one lesson that comes back to us with almost overwhelming force is that the man who is after God’s heart is the man who will obey God to the letter, who will wait for God to the last moment, who will dare to stand amid a diminishing and dwindling army, and even see disaster imminent, but, because he has not received the marching orders of God, will stand still, until presently God sets him free.

How many religious people there are, who, as they review their past life, can recall moments when they did not know what to do. An inner voice, still, sweet, but commanding, bade them wait and trust; but many other voices, loud and strident, summoned them to act; so that the still small voice of faith, of resignation, of absolute obedience was silenced, the one rash word spoken, the one irrevocable act performed, betraying the weakness of the heart, the ineffectiveness of the resolve. When all was over, Samuel has come, and we have reproached ourselves, saying, “Oh, if I had only thought that God was so near, I would not have acted as I did; woe is me, why could not I wait?” Samuel always comes just at the last moment, but it is so hard to wait till he does come. “Master, Master, we perish; and He arose, and rebuked the storm, and said, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but the spirit of power, of love, and of self-discipline and self-restraint.

Man becomes so weary of waiting, and it seems as though God were so slow. God’s mighty processes sweep around a wide orbit. One day is as a thousand years, but He is coming as the morning, as the spring, as the millennium. “His going forth is sure as the morning, and He shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter rain that watereth the earth.”

II. Saul’s Disingenuous Plea.—Notice Saul’s explanation to Samuel. He said: “I said to myself, The Philistines will come down upon me to Gilgal, and I have not intreated the favour of the Lord. I forced myself therefore, and offered the burnt-offering.” That surely was insincere. He laid the blame on circumstances; he said practically: “The circumstances of my lot forced my hand; I did not want to do it, I was most reluctant, but I could not help myself; the Philistines were coming; I tell you the sceptre was wrested from my grasp, and I had to obey the imperious voice of the misfortunes that fell thick and fast upon me.” His speech reminds us of Aaron’s, who stripped the people naked before God and their enemies, and sought to excuse himself by saying, “They gave me their earrings; I cast them into the fire, and there came out this calf.”

We are all prone to speak in the same tone. When the rash word has been uttered, and the proud act done; when we have refused to obey, and have seen the house of our life toppling down upon us, or consuming in the flames of our folly, then we have said, “Circumstances compelled me, I had to do it, and I did it; I forced myself, my hand was forced.”

O soul of man, thou art greater than circumstances; greater than things; greater than the mob of evil counsellors. Thou art meant to be God’s crowned and enthroned king; to rule and not to be ruled; to obey God only, and to resist all other attempts to bring thee under the yoke. Rouse thee, lest it should be said of thee also, that thy kingdom shall not continue.

III. Mark the Alternative to This.—In answer to all this, Samuel, speaking in the name of God, said, “I have chosen a man after my own heart, who shall perform all my will.” In Jesse’s home the lad was being prepared who could believe and not make haste. Listen to the manner in which this man after God’s own heart spake in after-years, “I waited patiently for the Lord, and He inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and He set my feet upon a rock and established my goings. And He hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God; many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord. Blessed is the man that maketh the Lord his trust, and respecteth not the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies” (Psa. 40:1–4).

Wait, wait thou thy Lord’s leisure. Let thine heart stop its feverish beating, and thy pulse register no more its tumultuous waves of emotion! To act now would only disappoint the highest hopes, mar the Divine purposes, and set stones rolling that shall never be stopped. Wait for God, stand still and see his salvation. His servant is coming up the pass; his steps may not be quite so speedy as we would have them, but He will arrive to the moment; not a moment too soon, but not a moment too late. God’s messenger is timed to come when the heart has almost failed, the steps almost gone, and hope almost vanished. “The Lord is at hand!” Oh, wait, my soul! wait, wait upon God, for God cannot be behind, as He will not be before, the allotted and appointed moment.

And when He comes there will be laughter for tears, harvest for sowing, blue skies for clouds, and long days of rapturous bliss that shall make thee forget the shame and reproach of the past!

XVI. “Two Putting Ten Thousand to Flight”

(1 Samuel 14)

Oh! I have seen the day,

When with a single word,—

God helping me to say

‘My trust is in the Lord!’

My soul hath quelled a thousand foes,

Fearless of all that could oppose.

—Cowper.

JUST two young men, with the glow of patriotism in their hearts, and trust in God as their guiding-star—what may they not effect?

Jonathan was a true knight of God, who anticipated some of the noblest traits of Christian chivalry. We may almost say of him that he was the Hebrew Bayard, a soldier without fear and without reproach. He lived pure, spoke true, righted wrong, was faithful to the high claims of human love, and followed the Christ, though as yet he knew Him not. His character serves as a bright background on which that of his father is but a sorry contrast.

From the Jordan bank a noble valley, twelve miles in length, leads up into the hill country of Central Palestine, and so to the seaboard of the Mediterranean. Two miles from the head of this defile, and about eight miles due north of Jerusalem, the cliffs on either side become very precipitous, and approach each other almost to touching.

Conceive of a very narrow pass protected on either side by steep walls of chalky formation on which only the wild goats could find a footing, and almost unscalable by man. The ridge on the north, which rises above an almost perpendicular crag into three knolls, was called Bozez, or “shining,” because it reflects all day the full light of the Eastern sun, whilst that on the south, a few yards distant, was known as Seneh, “the acacia,” being as constantly in the shade. Michmash crowned the former, and there the Philistines were encamped, whilst the little village of Geba lay above the latter, and thither Saul had removed his army, such as it was, withdrawing from the plains of the Jordan to watch the movements of the hostile force.

How long the armies watched each other we have no means of knowing, nor can we guess what the result might have been had it not been for the heroic episode which we are to recount; but it is certain that Israel was absolutely spiritless. At the most the men of war who gathered around the pomegranate tree where Saul had pitched his tent numbered only 600, and these had only such rude weapons as clubs and goads.

Jonathan chafed at the inaction and the disgrace which the whole situation attached to his countrymen. He was animated also by a profound faith in God, and was prompted by the Divine Spirit to an act which issued in a glorious victory and deliverance.

I. Jonathan Entered into the Divine Purpose.—It seemed to him impossible to suppose that God had forsaken the people of his choice or withdrawn from his ancient covenant. Had He promised, and could He not perform? Were not the people of Israel his chosen heritage? Had He not chosen them out of all the world, that they might be the custodians and purveyors of Divine truth to the nations? Was not the land of Canaan made over to them by an irrevocable deed of gift? Did not all the miraculous leadings and interpositions of the past confirm such an interpretation of the Divine purpose? Surely, then, the present state of things could not be according to the Divine will! Surely the purpose of the Almighty was in conflict with the invasion of the land by these Philistine hordes, and only waited for some believing soul to enter into full communion with its mighty current, and deliverance would be secured!

Saul, on the other hand, had no perception of these things. The great past failed to speak to him. Discouraged by what met his eye and ear from morning to night, he had no power to rouse himself to lay hold on the Divine promise of deliverance. The sentence of deposition, which Samuel had so recently pronounced, like a stone on the mouth of a tomb, seemed to shut him up to despair.

It is of the utmost importance in this mortal life, when heart and flesh fail before the giant wrongs that assert themselves against the well-being of mankind—such as the drink-traffic, the mania for betting and gambling, impurity, and the insensate absorption in pleasure, which are the Philistines of our time—to look away to the Divine purpose, as disclosed in the redemption achieved on the Cross by the blood of the world’s Redeemer. Surely that cannot have been shed in vain. The power and potency of the Divine might are pledged to realise and accomplish that full deliverance of which the Cross was prophecy. The Son of Man has been manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil; and He will not fail nor be discouraged until that purpose has been realised. Happy are they who, like Jonathan, raise themselves above the depression of the moment in living fellowship with these eternal facts, and ally their weakness and helplessness with the march of God, as He is ever going forth to establish righteousness and judgment in the earth, which has been redeemed by precious blood.

II. He Yielded Himself as an Instrument.—God always works through human means. He calls us into fellowship with Himself, so that the Divine tides shall flow through human channels. He will multiply the bread, but He requires human hands to distribute it. He raises the dead, but man must roll away the stone and unwrap the cerements of the grave. He arrests Saul of Tarsus, but the words and patience of suffering saints must be the goad, which surely urge the pricks of the recreant soul to repent. God is ever on the outlook for believing souls, who will receive his power and grace on the one hand, and transmit them on the other. He chooses them, that by them He should make his mighty power known. Happy are they who are not insensible to the Divine impulse, nor disobedient to the heavenly vision.

Jonathan was one of those blessed souls who are as sensitive to God as the retina of the eye to light, or the healthy muscle to the nerve; and “it fell upon a day that he said unto the young man that bore his armour, Come, let us go over to the Philistines’ garrison, that is on the other side.” With a beautiful modesty “he told not his father”; and in all probability the two slipped away silently in the gray dawn, whilst their comrades were still wrapped in slumber. The intimation of a Divine purpose thrilled the ardent spirit of the young prince, to which he gave some clue in the words, “It may be that the Lord will work for us, for there is no restraint to the Lord to save by many or by few.”

Notice where Jonathan laid the emphasis. He had the smallest possible faith in himself, and the greatest faith in God. His soul waited for the Lord; in Him was centred all his hope, and from his gracious help he expected great things. All that he aspired to was to be the humble vehicle through which the delivering grace of God might work. This is what God wants—not our strength, but our weakness, which in absolute despair turns to Him; not our armies, but two or three elect souls, who expect great things and dare them. It is false to say that the Almighty is on the side of great battalions. All history goes to show that the movements which have transformed the face of the world have been achieved by the going forth of God through individuals, who have not been specially distinguished by outstanding talents, but have been led to surrender themselves absolutely to the Divine impulse. What shall I more say?—for time would fail to tell of Carey, and Wilberforce, and Livingstone, and George Müller, and hundreds more.

Yield yourselves to God—and I especially appeal to the young men who may read these words. There are wrongs that God wants to right, tyrannies He is about to break, foes of human peace and happiness that He wants to quell; but He must have agents and instruments, clean and pure, true and faithful, delivered from the domination of the flesh, and absolutely resigned to his disposal. It matters not if they be high-born as Jonathan, or obscure as his armor-bearer; through them He will achieve a great deliverance.

Saul, the chosen king, had no such vision, and no such faith. He was not sensible to the Divine voice speaking in his soul, but had to depend on the interposition of the priest (ver. 19 and 36); he spoke and acted as though the victory depended wholly on the efforts that he and his men might put forth, and in forbidding the use of such simple refreshment as the wild honey of the woods might yield, he forfeited the full results of God’s interposition. Could it be supposed that God’s deliverance of his people would fall short because they put forth the ends of the rods that might be in their hands to convey the wild honey to their lips? Throughout the whole day, and especially in this senseless adjuration, which was meant to save time, but really hindered the full result, Saul showed himself oblivious of the one thought that animated the heart of his noble son—that God was working through human instruments to inflict his own judgment on the invading hosts.

III. Jonathan Reckoned on God, and God did not Fail Him.—Faith is the indomitable power by which we call unto our help a whole range of laws and forces which are outside the lives of ordinary men. As we have said, they have two keyboards to their organ, we have three. They employ the physical and intellectual, whilst we, in addition, may call in the aid of the spiritual and eternal. Thus we are able to accomplish the same results, and better, by the assistance of energies which are as much greater than those ordinarily employed as electricity is greater than horse-power, or steam than hand. This was the secret of Jonathan’s success.

As they ascended the steep cliff-side, the young men agreed on the sign which should indicate that they were indeed in the line of the Divine will, and that God would not fail them. The heart of man, in its first venture on the way of faith, eagerly longs for some sign that it is not following a will-o’-the-wisp, or being misled by wreckers’ lights. This was graciously granted in the mocking voices of the advanced outposts, which ridiculed the idea that the Hebrews were to be feared (14:11) even though they should succeed in scaling the crags. “Behold,” they said, “the Hebrews come forth out of the holes where they have hid themselves; and the men of the garrison answered Jonathan and his armour-bearer, and said, Come up to us, and we will show you a thing [or, we should like to make your acquaintance].”

This was the heaven-given sign, and conveyed the assurance that the Lord had already delivered them into the hand of Israel (10). By faith the soul appropriates the Divine answer. “Whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him.” But it is only as we fulfil the one all-important condition of successful prayer, which is so often overlooked, “All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have them” (Mark 11:24).

The soul that reckons on God cannot be ashamed. When they reached the top, the two young Benjamites used their slings with such precision that twenty men measured their length on the ground, and a trembling from God, a heaven-sent panic, spread from them back on the main army behind, and to the bands of spoilers returning from their night raids. The Philistines could not know that the two who faced them were absolutely alone. It seemed as though they were precursors of a host of resolute and desperate men, and, suddenly, in the panic, each man suspected his neighbour of being in league against him. The foreign mercenaries and strangers, of whom there was a large admixture, became the objects of special terror; “and every man’s sword was against his fellow, so that there was a very great discomfiture.” Meanwhile the Hebrews that had been allied to the Philistines, or silently acquiescent in their rule, even they also turned against them; and all who had hid themselves in the hill country of Ephraim, when they heard that the Philistines fled, even they also followed hard after them in battle.

From his outlook at Gibeah, Saul beheld the wild confusion, and how the multitude swayed to and fro, and melted away. Without delay, he hurled himself with his soldiers on the flying foe, who fled, in headlong precipitancy, down the long valley, past Bethaven, past the Upper and then the Lower Beth-horon, in order to gain the Philistine frontier by the valley of Aijalon. Every town through which the fugitives passed rose in their rear, and joined the pursuit, so that the flying host was greatly reduced, and thousands of warriors dyed the highways of the land which they had so grievously oppressed, with their heart’s blood. Thus did God work on behalf of his chosen people in answer to Jonathan’s faith.

The unwise prohibition of the king against food had a terrible sequel, first, in the exhaustion of the troops, and, secondly, in the famished eating of the spoils of the day, without the proper separation of the blood. Still worse, when the day closed in, and Saul asked counsel of God, the Divine Oracle was dumb. Some sin had silenced it, and the monarch, already touched with the dark suspicions and fears in which his soul became afterward so densely enveloped, realised that some sin was crying for discovery and expiation. He did not look for that sin, where he would have assuredly found it, in his own heart, but in the people that stood around him. Finally, he and Jonathan stood before the people as the objects of the Divine displeasure, and Saul was prepared even to sacrifice his son in his moody wrath.

But the people saved him. They cried indignantly, “Shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great salvation in Israel? God forbid! As the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground, for he hath wrought with God this day.” Ah! the cause of discomfiture most surely lay between those two men; but it was not due to aught in Jonathan. Saul was alone to blame. He had not only missed the greatest opportunity of his life, but he was already enwrapping himself in the unbelief, the jealousy, and moroseness of temper in which his sun was to be enshrouded while it was yet day.

XVII. Failure under the Supreme Test

(1 Samuel 15:26)

Mortal! if life smile on thee, and thou find

All to thy mind,

Think, Who did once from Heaven to Hell descend

Thee to befriend!

So shalt thou dare forego at his dear call

Thy Best—thine All.

—Keble.

ON the shores of the Dead Sea, encrusted with salt, lie the trunks of many noble trees which have been torn from their roots, and carried by the rapid Jordan in its flow from the uplands of Galilee toward the depression of that remarkable gorge; and as they line those desolate shores they remind us of lives which God planted to bear fruit and give shade, which have not fulfilled his original purpose in their creation, and which have been torn up by the roots and borne down to the sea of death. Conspicuous among such failures is that of Saul, the first king of Israel.

It is impossible to turn to these pages without lamenting that the bright promise of his early life was so soon overcast; and that he, who stood forth in the morning of his life amid the acclaim of his people as likely to do marvellous work for his fatherland, became one of those whom the sacred writers describe as having failed of the high purpose of their life, been rejected in their mission, and cast away as tools from the hands of the great Artificer.

This chapter gives the story of the final rejection of Saul, which had indeed been threatened aforetime, but which now befell.

I. The Test of the Divine Summons and Command.—“Go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (ver. 3).

This command was given after several years had intervened from the incident narrated in the previous chapter; and during those years Saul had met with marvellous encouragement. The handful of men who had followed him, trembling, had increased to a great army, properly disciplined and armed, and led by Abner, his uncle. He had also waged very successful wars against Moab and the children of Ammon on the East, against Edom on the South, and against the kings of Zobah on the North. In whatever direction he had directed his arms, he had been victorious beyond his highest hopes. It is also evident that he had gathered around him considerable state, for we find the royal table was reserved for himself, Abner, and Jonathan; that he was surrounded by a bodyguard of runners; and that his will was law. The kingdom that had been inaugurated amid such adverse circumstances was beginning to enforce respect, and Saul was able to vie, both in the magnificence of his state and in the army that followed him, with the kings of the lands that bordered on Canaan.

It was at this time that the supreme test entered his life, as it so often comes to us in days of prosperity. In the warm summer days we are most in dread of corruption and contagion, and it is in the days of prosperity that the soul is oftenest subjected, not realizing the significance of the ordeal, to its supreme test. If of late you have had immunity from special adversity, if your circumstances have been easy and comfortable, if paths that were once difficult have become smooth and easy—be on your guard; for, at such a time as ye think not, the Son of Man comes to call you to his bar.

You will notice, also, that this supreme test gave him a final chance of retrieving the past. At Gilgal, years before, God had told him by the lips of Samuel that his kingdom should not continue; but there had been no sentence of his own deposition or rejection, and it seemed as though this last command was put into his life to give him an opportunity of wiping out his former failure and mistake, and of retrieving the fortunes that had seemed to be absolutely sacrificed.

God often comes to us, when we have made some sad and apparently irretrievable mistake. He gives us yet another opportunity of reversing the past, as when our Lord said to his disciples in the Garden of the Olive-press: “Sleep on now, and take your rest”; a moment afterward adding, “Arise, let us be going,” as though a fresh opportunity would be afforded of fellowship in his sufferings.

The Divine command involved the absolute extermination of the Amalekites; for the word translated “utterly destroy,” would be better rendered devote. It is the word so often used in the Book of Joshua for placing under the ban the sin-infected cities of the Canaanites. It was understood that, in the case of the “devoted” city, man, woman, and child, and the very beasts, must be destroyed, and only the precious metals kept, after being passed through the fires of purification (Num. 31:21, etc.). With such absolute devastation and destruction was the name of Amalek to be wiped out from under heaven.

There had been feud between Amalek and Israel from the earliest days. “Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I have marked that which Amalek did to Israel, how he set himself against him in the way, when he came up out of Egypt” (ver. 2). You will remember that Moses reared an altar, and called it Jehovah-nissi—“the Lord my banner”; because he said that the Lord would have war with Amalek, until He had wiped out the reproach of his people (Ex. 17:16). Centuries had passed, and this ancient threat had remained unfulfilled until this hour, and now the command was given, “Go and smite Amalek.”

At first it seems very terrible that God demanded this act of obedience from Saul; but on the other hand the Amalekites, as we are told in ver. 18, were sinners of a very black and aggravated type, “Utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they be consumed.” We learn also from ver. 33 that Agag with his sword had often made women childless. A very cruel and rapacious tribe of robbers were these Amalekites, who were constantly making raids upon the southern frontier of Judah. It was absolutely necessary, therefore, for the safety of the chosen people, that their power to injure should be permanently arrested, and their claws drawn.

Even in this world God sets up his judgment seat; and as our Saviour tells us in his last wonderful discourse, the Son of Man sits upon the throne of his glory, while the nations are gathered before Him, and He separates them as the sheep from the goats. These words, without doubt, portend some imposing event, which we are to witness in that great day, when the King of the Ages will call to his bar every nation and kindred, people and tongue, and will announce his awards. But we cannot suppose, for a single moment, that the judgment of the nations is to be altogether relegated to that final day. Throughout the history of the world the nations have been standing before Christ’s bar. Nineveh stood there, Babylon stood there, Greece and Rome stood there, Spain and France stood there, and Great Britain is standing there to-day. One after another has had the solemn award—depart, and they have passed into a destruction which has been absolute and irretrievable.

The Amalekites had stood before the bar of God, had been weighed in his balances, and found wanting. Their sentence had been pronounced, and Saul was called upon to inflict it. But remember that Saul was only doing summarily and suddenly that which otherwise would follow in the natural process of decay, for God has so constituted us that when we sin against the laws of truth, purity, and righteousness, decay immediately sets in by an inevitable law. If Amalek had never been attacked by Saul and his hosts, the vices that were already at work in the heart of the people must have led to the utter undoing and consumption of the nation. It is said of families in our great cities, infected with the evils that are rife among us, that in five generations they die out, having lost the power of self-propagation; and what is true of a family is equally so of a nation. We may infer that there was therefore mercy in this Divine ordinance. It was infinitely better for Amalek, and for the surrounding peoples which would have become infected by her slow deterioration, that by one stroke of the executioner’s axe the existence of the nation should be brought to an end.

II. Obedience with Reserve.—The story is told us in ver. 9: “But Saul and the people spared Agag.” When he raised his standard, 200,000 footmen from Israel, and 10,000 men of Judah, Benjamin, and Simeon gathered around it at Telaim, on the southern frontier; and they came to the chief city of Amalek, which lay, probably, a little to the south of Hebron.

After lying in ambush in some dry water-course, or wady, and having given notice to the Kenites—a peaceful, friendly people—to depart, the attacking army carried the city by assault, put to the sword men, women, and children; pursued the fleeing remnants of the Amalekites from Havilah even to Shur, the great wall of Egypt; and with the exception of Agag, and a few that may have escaped, and the choice of the flocks and herds, the whole country was rid of its inhabitants, and reduced to the deathlike silence of an awful solitude.

Saul returned, flushed with triumph, reared a monument of victory in the oasis of Carmel, near to Hebron; and then came down to the sacred site of Gilgal, that he might sacrifice to the Lord, and perhaps divide the vast plunder of sheep and goats, of oxen and camels, which had fallen into his hands, and which he and the people had been loath to destroy. “Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; but everything that was vile and refuse, they destroyed utterly.”

Whether this reserve was due, so far as Saul was concerned, to greed, as appears most likely, or because, as he says in ver. 24, he feared to thwart the people, obeying their voice rather than the voice of God, we cannot decide; but considerable light is thrown on the incident by the startling expression used by Samuel in ver. 19, when he says, “Why didst thou fly upon the spoil?” employing the same expression as in chapter 14:32, where we are told that the people, in their ravenous hunger, flew upon the spoil, and ate even with the blood. The same passionate vehemence seems to have characterised Saul and the men of Israel. Surely rapacity and greed were at work, and before their boiling currents all the bulwarks of principle and conscience were swept away.

There is great significance in this for us all. We are prepared to obey the Divine commands up to a certain point, and there we stay. Just as soon as “the best and choicest” begin to be touched, we draw the line and refuse further compliance. We listen to soft voices that bid us stay our hand, when our Isaac is on the altar. We are quite prepared to give up that which costs us nothing—our money, but not our children—to the missionary cause; the things which are clearly and disgracefully wrong, but not the self-indulgences which are peculiarly fascinating to our temperament. Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath, will he give for his life—only spare him that, and he will cheerfully renounce his claim to all else. There is always a tendency with the best of us to make a bargain with God, and sacrifice all to his will, if only He will permit us to spare Agag and the best of the spoil.

But an even deeper reading of this story is permissible. Throughout the Bible Amalek stands for the flesh, having sprung from the stock of Esau, who, for a morsel of meat, steaming fragrantly in the air, sold his birthright. To spare the best of Amalek is surely equivalent to sparing some root of evil, some plausible indulgence, some favourite sin. For us, Agag must stand for that evil propensity, which exists in all of us, for self-gratification; and to spare Agag is to be merciful to ourselves, to exonerate and palliate our failures, and to condone our besetting sin.

Is this your case? You are willing to give Christ the key of every cupboard in your heart, save one; but that contains your most cherished sin, for which you find manifold excuses, and to retain which you are prepared to sacrifice everything else. Thus Ananias and Sapphira kept back part of the price, and were cut off from the ranks of the Church.

It is startling to learn that Saul perished, on the field of Gilboa, by the hand of an Amalekite (2 Sam. 1:1–10). What a remarkable fact! The least instructed can decipher the lesson. He who runs may read. If we spare ourselves, forbearing to cut off the right hand or foot, which may be causing us to offend, we shall certainly perish by the hand of that which we refused to part with. Our cherished indulgences will bring about our undoing. The love of God, foreseeing the risk we are incurring, pleads with us to destroy without mercy the enemies of our own peace; but Agag comes to us delicately, we forbear to inflict the Divine sentence, and presently we are stricken down by the hand of the assassin, dye the greensward with our life-blood, and are despoiled of our crown, which is transferred to another.

Moreover, presently, Samuel arrives to speak the Divine sentence of deposition: “Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, the Lord hath rejected thee from being king.”

XVIII. A Remarkable Colloquy

(1 Samuel 15:12–35)

Thy choice was earth! Thou didst attest

Twas fitter spirit should subserve

The flesh, than flesh refuse to nerve

Beneath the spirit’s play! Thou art shut

Out of the heaven of spirit! Glut

Thy sense upon the world! ’tis thine

For ever!—take it!

—R. B.

AN intimation of Saul’s lapsed obedience was made in the secret ear of Samuel in the dead of night, when God came near to him and said, “It repenteth Me that I have set up Saul to be king, for he hath turned back from following Me, and hath not performed my commandments.”

God requires literal obedience, and when that fails the results are as though He had changed his purpose or repented, but this is in appearance only. As a matter of fact, God cannot repent or change his purpose. Man may frustrate the working out of his plan, but the Almighty Workman will achieve it by some other method.

The wind may be blowing steadily in the same direction, and as long as we yield to it, it will waft us to the desired haven; but it is always possible for us to reverse our course and go against it, and then our life is so powerfully affected that it would seem as though God had changed his purpose—the change being due to ourselves, because, whereas formerly we moved with his purpose, now by disobedience or unbelief we are steadily resisting it.

Does God ever come to you at night, or when the world is quiet, and tell you his secrets? Happy are they whom God can trust with his own profound sorrow over the failure of his chosen servants, honouring them with his confidence, and appealing to them to watch with Him. “Shall I hide from Abraham that which I do?”

The faithful soul of Samuel was deeply moved. We are told he was “angry”—a righteous indignation that one who had been appointed with such solemn sanctions, and had bidden fair to achieve such glorious deliverances for his people, had so seriously missed his mark. Those who are true to God cannot but feel indignant when his purposes are frustrated, and his grace outraged, and the door of usefulness which He had set wide in front of a chosen servant is shut and barred by some act of careless or wilful disobedience. Samuel’s soul was not only deeply moved, but “he cried unto the Lord all night.” Ah! how much we owe to the Divine Friend, and to human friends, who when they see deterioration at work within us, take no rest, and give God no rest. This is the most priceless service that one soul can afford another. There is hope so long as lover and friend bear up our case before God, and plead that rather they should be accursed than that we should perish. How many a son now leading a reckless and profligate life, in his still hours, or when his evil courses have cast him on a bed of sickness, and debarred him from the active pursuits of life, comforts himself with the thought that, in some lone cottage, his mother does not cease to pray for him, and he secretly hopes that her prayers may avail against the vehemence of the fiery passions by which his soul is driven.

Samuel travelled some fifteen miles to find Saul, following him from Carmel, where, as we have seen, he seems to have set up a monument which was either shaped in the form of a hand, or on which the figure of a hand was graved (r. v. margin) to Gilgal, the site of the ancient shrine, where, as one of the versions informs us, the King was engaged in offering sacrifices to Jehovah; and there this most remarkable colloquy took place.

Saul.—It was commenced by the King, who, seeing the Prophet coming towards him, advanced to meet him with an unctuous phrase upon his lips, “Blessed be thou of the Lord,” and, with great complacency in his demeanour, added, “I have performed the commandment of the Lord.” Whether Saul was blinded and did not really know how far he had deteriorated, for it is certain that disobedience puts out our eyes, as Hubert did young Arthur’s, blinding us to the enormity of our sin, or whether he desired to gloss over his failure, and to appear as a truly obedient son, so as to deceive the prophet, we cannot tell, but that “Blessed be thou of the Lord,” from his lips, and at such a moment, has an ugly sound. It reminds one of certain persons who interlard their business talk with references to religion, so that they may put the unwary off their guard, and enable their user to take a mean advantage, under the appearance of a high code of morals. It is the sin of Judas who betrayed his Master with a kiss. Better the open foe than the secret assassin. Better a dozen times the arrow that flieth by day than the pestilence that walketh in darkness.

Samuel.—At that moment the sheep began to bleat, and the oxen to low. A breath of wind, laden with the unmistakable indication of the near presence of a great multitude of flocks and herds, was wafted to the Prophet’s ear. It is an unfortunate occurrence when, just as a man is becoming loud in his protestations of goodness, some such untoward incident suddenly takes place, so that the lowing of the oxen and the bleating of the sheep belie his words. I remember once a professor of religion who desired to impress me with his entire sanctification, and deliverance from every kind of idol, giving unmistakable evidence, by the taint of tobacco on his breath, whilst he spoke, that he had been smoking a rather rank kind of tobacco. I had not said a single word about smoking. I have never felt it my business to denounce indulgences concerning which God may not convict men universally. It is our business, on matters not clearly forbidden, and concerning which Christian people are not agreed, to lay down general principles, and to leave our hearers to apply them for themselves. But when this man went out of his way to assert his entire deliverance, I naturally was more on the alert, and in the taint on his breath I detected the presence of the choice oxen and sheep which had been reserved. With sad irony the prophet said, “What meaneth then this bleating of sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of oxen which I hear?”

Saul.—The King excused himself by laying emphasis on the word they—“They have brought them from the Amalekites; for the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen, to sacrifice unto the Lord thy God.” Notice the subtle effort to conciliate the prophet by the emphasis laid upon the word thy—“thy God; and the rest we have utterly destroyed.” It was unroyal and contemptible to lay the blame upon the people, and it was an excuse which could not be allowed.

Samuel.—The royal backslider would probably have gone on speaking, but Samuel interrupted him, saying, “Stay, and I will tell thee what the Lord hath said to me this night.” Then the faithful old prophet went back to the past. He reminded Saul how insignificant had been his origin, and how he had shrunk from undertaking the great responsibility of the station to which God had summoned him. He reminded him how he had been raised up to the throne, and how the Almighty King of Israel had delegated to him his authority, requiring that he should act as his designated vicegerent. He reminded him also that a distinct charge had been given him, and that the responsibility of determining his line of action had been transferred from himself, as the agent, to the Divine Being who had issued his mandate of destruction. In spite of all, Saul had allowed his greed to hurry him into an act of disobedience. He had flown upon the spoil as a hungry lion upon his prey, and had done evil in the sight of the Lord.

Saul.—The King reiterated his poor excuse: “Yea, I have obeyed the voice of the Lord, and have gone the way that the Lord sent me, and have brought Agag, the king of Amalek, and have utterly destroyed the Amalekites. But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the chief of the devoted things, to sacrifice unto the Lord thy God in Gilgal.” It was as though he had said, “You have judged me wrongfully. If you would wait for a little while, you would see the issue of my act of apparent disobedience.” He may even have cajoled himself into thinking that he meant to sacrifice these spoils now that he had reached Gilgal; or he might have mentally resolved there and then that he would sacrifice them, and so relieve himself of the complicated position into which he found himself drifting.

Samuel.—In answer to this last remark, God’s messenger uttered one of the greatest sentences in the earlier books of the Bible, a sentence which is the seed-germ of much to the same purpose in the Prophets, which in subsequent centuries was repeated in different forms, and to which our blessed Lord gave his assent—“Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt-offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” Whatever Saul might be leading him to infer, as to his intention to offer the sacrifice, there could be no doubt that up to that moment, at least, he had disobeyed God’s positive command; and, in point of fact, the whole attitude of his soul was towards disobedience and rebellion, which, in fact, were the assertion of his own will and way against God’s.

Then, tearing the veil aside, the old man showed the enormity of the sin which had been committed, by saying: “Rebellion is equally vile as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry and the teraphim.” These sins were universally reprobated and held up to the contempt of good men, but in God’s sight there was nothing to choose between them and the sin of which the King had been guilty. Then, facing the monarch, and looking at him with his searching eyes, the Prophet, in the majesty of his authority as God’s representative, pronounced the final sentence of deposition, saying, “Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, He hath also rejected thee from being King.”

Saul.—In a moment the King realised the brink of the precipice on which he stood; and with the cry not of a penitent, but of a fugitive from justice; not hating his sin, but dreading its result; eager at any cost to keep the crown on his brow and the empire in his hand; afraid of the consequences which might ensue if his leading men detected any break or coolness between himself and the Prophet—he cringed before Samuel, saying, “I have sinned; for I have transgressed the commandment of Jehovah, and thy words: because I feared the people, and obeyed their voice. Now therefore, I pray thee, pardon my sin, and turn again with me, that I may worship the Lord.”

There is a great difference in the accent with which men utter those words, “I have sinned.” The prodigal said them with a faltering voice, not because he feared the consequences of sin, but that he saw its heinousness in the expression of his father’s face, and the tears that stood in the beloved eyes. Saul, however, feared the consequences rather than the sin, and that he might avert the sentence he said, as though Samuel had the power of the keys to open and unloose, to pardon or to refuse forgiveness, “Pardon my sin.”

Samuel.—The Prophet saw through the subterfuge. He knew that his penitence was not genuine, but that the King was deceiving him with his words, and he turned about to go away. Then Saul, in the extremity of his anguish, in fear that in losing him he might lose at once his best friend and the respect of the nation, seems to have sprung forward and seized the collar of Samuel’s cloak, and as he did so with a strong, masterful grasp, as if to restrain and draw back to himself the retreating figure of the Prophet, it rent. When Samuel felt and heard the tear, he said, “The Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from thee this day, and hath given it to a neighbour of thine, that is better than thou.” And then, referring to Saul’s effort to turn him back, as though he would reverse the sentence which he had pronounced, he said, “Remember that the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent; his sentence is irrevocable. The word is gone out of his lips and cannot be called back. There is no opportunity of changing his mind though thou shalt seek it bitterly and with tears.”

Even at that moment, had Saul thrown himself at God’s feet and asked for pardon, he would have been accepted and forgiven. Even though as a monarch his kingdom might have passed from him, as a man he would have received pardon. But there are moments in our lives, irrevocable moments, when we take steps that cannot be retraced, when we assume positions from which we cannot retreat, when results are settled never to be reversed.

Saul.—Again the King repeated the sentence, “I have sinned,” but his real meaning was disclosed in the following words: “Yet honour me now before the elders of my people, and before Israel, and turn again with me, that I may worship Jehovah thy God.” His inner thought was still to stand well with the people, and he was prepared to make any confession of wrong-doing as a price of Samuel’s apparent friendship.

Finally, Samuel stayed with him, that the elders might not become disaffected, and that the people generally might have no idea of the deposition of the King, lest the kingdom itself might totter to its fall before his successor was prepared to take his place. He stayed therefore. The two knelt side by side before God, but what a contrast! Here was darkest night; there, the brightness of the day. Here was the rejected; there, the chosen faithful servant. Here was one whose course from that moment was to be enwrapped in the dark clouds of moody tyranny and jealousy, until he died upon the field of Gilboa; there was one, the unsullied beauty of whose character was to remain untarnished until his removal to that world where he would shine as the sun, in his heavenly Father’s kingdom.

Lastly, the old man summoned Agag, the King of the Amalekites, to his presence, and Agag came to him “cheerfully,” hoping without doubt that he would be spared; and saying, as he advanced, “Surely the bitterness of death is past—there is no reason for me to fear it.” Then Samuel, strengthened with some paroxysm of righteous indignation, seized a sword that lay within his reach, and hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord—emblem, this, of the holy zeal that will give no quarter to the flesh; and we are reminded of the words of the Apostle, “Make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.” To Amalek we must give no quarter.

May God help us to read deeply into this tragic story. Whensoever God our Father puts a supreme test into our lives, let us at any cost obey Him. Everything hinges upon absolute obedience. If you cannot obey, you cannot command. If you do not obey, you are not fit to be an instrument in God’s hand. If the chisel is not true, the sculptor dare not hold it still in hand. Let us walk circumspectly and wisely, redeeming each opportunity, that God may make the most possible of us, and that, above all, we may not become castaways.

XIX. “An Evil Spirit from the Lord.”

(1 Samuel 16:13–14)

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased;

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet, oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

—Shakspere.

ALL great painters and poets whose works are of the first order have availed themselves of the force of contrast—that there should be a dark background to set forth some beautiful and radiant object. The Bible excels in its use of this striking method of laying emphasis. In the very first chapter the world is described as without form and void, whilst darkness broods over the face of the deep, and against that, as the background, is the creation of light, leaping across the void, and upon the background of chaos arises the cosmos of order and beauty. Also at the end of this great Book, great even as a literary production, we have again the force of contrast, as from all the storm and tumult of the world we are borne upwards to those heavenly spaces where a white-robed multitude with crowns on their brows, and palms of victory in their hands, in perfect peace, chant the everlasting song. In contrast with the apostate Church of Babylon, there is the Bride of the Lamb, Jerusalem from above, prepared as for her marriage. All through the Bible you are constantly brought face to face with the greatest possible contrasts, and much of its interest may be attributed to this source.

The same feature is stamped on this division of the Book. In the opening chapters, against the wild licence and unbridled indulgence of the Book of the Judges, and especially against the dissolute and abominable behaviour of Eli’s sons, as the background, is the kneeling figure of the young Samuel, with clasped hands, engaged in prayer beneath the open sky. The beauty of the child’s piety is the more exquisite because of the dark wildness, licence, and passion amid which it unfolds. And here, at the end of the Book, where it is evident that Saul is drifting as a wreck to the rocks, whilst from the lurid sky the thunderbolts fall and the lightning flashes on the earth, the curtain is uplifted from God’s own king, the man after his own heart, the young and beautiful boy called from following the sheep to be the shepherd of Israel. Against the contrast of Eli’s sons you have Samuel, and against the contrast of Saul’s rejection you have David’s anointing. This law of contrast pervades this great Book—great from the artistic and human standpoint, altogether apart from its lofty, its transcendent, its Divine, origin.

We will notice the dawn of fair promise; the darkened afternoon; and, finally, the lurid gleams of a false zeal.

I. The Dawn of a Fair Promise.—“Samuel cried unto the Lord.” His intercessions rose day and night for Saul, if haply he might arrest the terrible consequences of his sin, which seemed so imminent. But he was made aware that prayer would not avail. It seemed as though Saul had already made the fatal choice, and had committed the sin which is unto death, and concerning which we have no encouragement to pray. The summons of the hour was, therefore, not to prayer, but action. The Spirit of God bade Samuel go to Bethlehem, and among the sons of Jesse discover and anoint the new king. Samuel was stunned by the request, and suggested that if Saul heard a whisper of such a proceeding, he would at once take measures to avenge himself, by inflicting the death penalty. But the Spirit of God bade him go, taking his long horn of oil in one hand, and leading a heifer with the other. Thus he made his way across the broken hill-country of Judea, until he came to the village of Bethlehem, lying along the slope of the hill at the foot of which, not long before, Boaz had courted Ruth. The halo of the immortal story of their love was still fresh as dew.

When he entered the little town the elders were filled with consternation; it was so unusual to see the great prophet visiting them without previous announcement. They asked if he had come peaceably. “Peaceably!” was the laconic reply. A sacrificial feast was at once prepared, the victim offered; but as some time must elapse between the offering of the sacrifice and the preparation of the food, Samuel adjourned to spend the interim in the house of the village chieftain, Jesse the Bethlehemite, a mighty man of valour and of wealth; and thus, in the privacy of the home, in a manner unlikely to attract the notice of the Court, David’s career as king began.

One after another the stalwart sons of Jesse passed before the prophet, and as he looked upon them in their towering stature and manly frame, he supposed that any one of them might be God’s designated monarch. But his Almighty Counsellor told him that outward appearance was not this time to weigh in the scales of choice; but that the royal qualities of the heart were alone to determine his selection. And so son after son passed; all had come but one, and he was with the sheep. Samuel felt that probably, because he was the youngest and the least, he might be God’s accepted king. He could not proceed with the holy exercises until the boy was summoned; and, anon, coming quickly from the hills, the colour mounting to his ruddy cheeks, his hair waving in the wind, his beautiful blue eyes flashing with purity and truth, David stood before the old man, the dawn of a new age, the inauguration of a better time, the keystone of the great fabric of Hebrew monarchy; above all, the man whom God loved. As his brethren stood around, the old man took the horn of oil, broke the capsule, poured it on the bright young locks, drenching them with the holy unction, as the boy bent beneath. As he anointed him, it seemed as though God Almighty accompanied the outward sign and seal by the inward grace, for we are told that the Spirit of God came upon that young life from that day forward, bathing it, permeating and filling it, so that he went in the power of the Holy Spirit to meet his great life-work, to be the sweet singer of Israel, the shepherd of God’s people, and the inaugurator of Solomon’s temple.

You may have nothing in the outward semblance, nothing in your surroundings or circumstances, to indicate the true royalty within; but if you bare your heart to God, you shall stand revealed as his son, as a priest and king unto Himself. Oh, that at this moment the Holy Ghost might descend upon you! Would that you might seek and receive an unction from the Holy One Himself! Oh, that the Holy Spirit of God, who is the true anointing oil of the soul, might be shed upon you, so that you might go forth, saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, He hath anointed me”!

II. An Overcast Afternoon.—We have morning with David; we have afternoon with Saul. Here youth; there manhood which has passed into prime. Here the promise; and there the overcast meridian of a wrecked life.

You will notice that, whereas it is said that the Spirit of God descended upon David, we are told that “The Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul.” That does not necessarily mean that all the religious life of Saul had become extinct, but that the special faculty and power by which he had been prepared for his kingly work were withdrawn from him. It is abundantly sure that the work which a man does in this world is not wrought only by the force of his genius, the brilliance of his intellect, or by those natural gifts with which God may have endowed him, but by a something beyond and behind all these—a spiritual endowment which is communicated by the Spirit of God for special office, and which is retained so long as the character is maintained; but when the character begins to deteriorate and decline, when there is a divorce between religion and morality, when a soul turns definitely from the will and way of God to the paths of disobedience—then that mystic power, which our forefathers called unction, and which the Bible calls the Spirit of God, seems to be dissipated, and to pass away as the aroma when scent has been long exposed to common air. So Saul lost the special endowment of power, which had enabled him to subdue his enemies and to order his kingdom.

Secondly, we have the mysterious power of opening our nature to the Holy Spirit of God, who is the medium of communicating all the virtue, the energy, and the life of God, infilling spirit, soul, and body, quickening the mind, warming the heart, elevating and purifying the whole moral life. We have also the awful alternative power of yielding ourselves to the evil spirit, or demon spirits, of which the spiritual sphere is full. When we are first born into the world, the inner shrine of our being is not, as yet, occupied; it is a holy of holies not yet tenanted; but as years go on it is left for each to choose by which spirit he will be inhabited. Some, by the grace of God, are led to open their natures to receive the most blessed gift that God can bestow, since it is Himself; whilst others resemble Judas, of whom it is said that “Then Satan entered into him”; or Saul, of whom it is said: “Then the Spirit of God departed from him, and an evil spirit troubled him.” In many cases men appear to be tenanted, occupied, and infilled by the spirit of evil; and possibly even some of the worst forms of drunkenness, of lustful passion, and of jealous temper, are simply to be attributed to possession by some demon spirit. In the treatment of the insane, it would perhaps be wise to bear this theory in mind, and to deal with the tormented nature as our Lord did, who dealt with such as palaces occupied by legions of unclean tenants, whom He commanded to go forth.

It is affirmed that “an evil spirit from the Lord” troubled Saul. To interpret this aright, we must remember that, in the strong terse Hebrew speech, the Almighty is sometimes said to do what He permits to be done. And surely such is the interpretation here. God cannot be tempted of evil, neither tempteth He any man, but He allows us to be tempted of Satan (Job 1:6–12; Luke 22:31). Our Lord was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted of the devil, and He taught us to ask that we should not be led along that dreaded path; but that the necessary discipline of life should come in some other way.

When therefore we read that an evil spirit “from the Lord” troubled Saul, we must believe that, as Saul had refused the good and gracious influences of the Holy Spirit and definitely chosen the path of disobedience, there was nothing for it but to leave him to the working of his own evil heart. The guard of spiritual help was removed, and there was nothing to prevent Satan entering him, as in after-days he entered Judas. In the solemn words, thrice repeated in Rom. 1, God “gave him up” to a reprobate mind (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28).

III. The Lurid Gleams that Break through this Overcast Sky.—In 2 Sam. 21:2 you have this:—“The king”—that is David—“called the Gibeonites, and said unto them (now the Gibeonites were not of the children of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites; and the children of Israel had sworn unto them: and Saul sought to slay them in his zeal to the children of Israel and Judah).” Saul was smarting under Samuel’s words, writhing under the sentence of deposition, and his soul was stirred to neutralise, if possible, the Divine verdict so as to still keep the favour of God. It was true, and Saul knew it well, that he had failed in one distinct act of obedience; he had kept the choice of the spoil for himself, but why should he not, by excessive zeal in other directions, win back his lost inheritance? Granting that he has failed, he will more than compensate. Allowing that he has failed in what God told him to do, why should he not succeed in something that God had not told him to do? Why should he not resuscitate some old command, and give it unexpected obedience?

Now there were two such commandments which seem to have occurred to him. The one enacted that when the children of Israel entered the Land of Promise, they should destroy all the people of the land. The Gibeonites, however, succeeded in securing that they should be excepted because they had made a covenant with Joshua, and Joshua had sworn to them (Josh. 9). The Gibeonites, therefore, had lived amongst the children of Israel for many centuries, and had become almost an integral part of the nation. But in his false zeal for God Saul seems to have laid ruthless hands upon these peaceable people; and, in spite of the old covenant which bound Israel to respect their liberty and life, he exterminated them—an act that brought righteous retribution in after-days on his house, for you remember how, as a setoff to this ruthless attack, Rizpah’s sons, and his own five grandsons, were hanged upon a tree, and left there until the rain rotted them (2 Sam. 21:8). Secondly, there was on the statute-book a very drastic law against necromancers and witches, and it was commanded that these should be exterminated from the land (Exod. 22:18). Therefore Saul turned his hand against them. In his heart he still believed in them—for at the end of his life, when a man always casts aside his pretences and appears as he is, Saul sought out one of these very women and availed himself of her help. In order, however, to show his religious zeal for God, and to extort the reversal of his sentence, Saul began to exterminate them.

But as his edicts went forth, there was rottenness in his heart. His royal state was greatly increased; he wore from this time a gorgeous turban, like other kings, which was brought from the field of Gilboa to David. There was a great increase of luxury in his Court, for he arrayed the daughters of Israel in scarlet and gold (2 Sam. 1:24). A subtle admixture of Baal worship with the recognition of Jehovah appears from his naming his sons, partly from the name of Jehovah and partly by the name of Baal. He took to himself concubines in imitation of his neighbours. While on the one hand, therefore, there was this outburst of lurid zeal for God, his own heart was becoming more and more enervated and evil.

Saul’s is not an isolated case. Take, for instance, two examples from the New Testament, which are almost parallel. The one in which the apostle says, of Israel, that “they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.” And the other, the case of that still more famous Benjamite, Saul’s namesake, who tells us that, while he was kicking against the pricks, he had a zeal for God in the persecution of the Church (Rom. 10:2; Acts 22:3, 4).

Do not we know this in our own experience? When one has fallen under the condemnation of conscience, the heart has endeavoured to whisper comfort to itself by saying, “I will endeavour to redeem my cause by an extravagance of zeal.” We have plunged into some compensating work to neutralise the result of failure. It is zeal, but it is false; it is zeal, but it is strange fire; it is zeal, but it is self-originated; it is zeal, but it is only for self, and not for God; it is zeal, but it is zeal for the letter, for the tradition, for the external form; it is not the zeal of the man who is eaten up and devoured by a passionate love for the Son of God, and for the souls He has made.

This is the story of ourselves. No man can get away from it. Here is the mirror in which we behold our own faces. The Bible is the Book of God, because it is the Book of man; it is the timeless Book; it is the Book that is the mirror of the soul, because man is always seeing himself in the experience of those that have preceded him.

Let us turn from Saul for a moment to that dear face that bends over us to-day; to that heart that yearns over us; to the Christ of God that loves us. We, too, have disobeyed, have come short, have failed to fulfil his commands, but there is forgiveness in those flowing wounds; there is pardon in that loving heart. Ask Him to blot out the past. And may the Holy Ghost kindle upon our heart-altars a fire of zeal which shall never be put out, which shall always burn for his glory, purifying our nature, making us living sacrifices unto Him.

XX. “Sin Bringing Forth Death.”

(1 Samuel 18:12)

We scatter seeds with careless hand.

And dream we ne’er shall see them more;

But for a thousand years

Their fruit appears

In weeds that mar the land, or healthful store.

—Keble.

NEVER has there been a truer illustration of the words in which the Apostle James describes the genealogy of sin and her fateful family than that furnished by the life-history of Saul. No sooner are we told that he had begun to yield to the spirit of evil than the historian hastens to tell us of the successive steps by which the early suggestions grew into a headlong passion, hurrying the monarch to one breach after another of the Divine law. How true it is that they who offend in one point are finally guilty in all. The first sin is like the letting in of water, which gradually eats away the embankment, so that presently the entire flood of waters inundates the land.

It befell thus. About this time, while Saul was smarting under Samuel’s sentence of deposition, David for the first time crossed his path. Two accounts of the introduction of the young shepherd to the God-forsaken and moody monarch are given, but are not inconsistent. The one tells of his entering the royal palace as a minstrel, the other of his prowess in war, which rendered his presence an indispensable adjunct to the court.

The attacks of Saul’s depression and despondency became more frequent and severe; and at last it was suggested by his servants—tradition says by Doeg the Edomite—that the effect of music should be tried on the poor diseased brain. “Behold now,” they said, “an evil spirit from God troubleth thee; let our lord now command thy servants, which are before thee, to seek out a man who is a cunning player on the harp, and it shall come to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon thee, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shalt be well.”

Instantly the king fell in with the suggestion; and presently David’s name was mentioned by one of the young men, who had, perhaps, come from the same part of the country, and had often met the son of Jesse in their native village, may even have sat with him at the feet of the same Rabbi. The young shepherd was possessed of the very qualities which were most captivating for the king. He was skilful in playing. Already he had come to be known as a man of valour, in the border-skirmishes which he maintained with them for the integrity of his father’s flock. He was skilful in judgment, and eloquent in speech. Manly beauty characterised his countenance and port. It seems as though that had happened to David which happens in measure to all God’s servants—the unction and abiding of the Holy Spirit had brought out into fair and living prominence his natural traits, as when a spark is taken from common air and plunged into a jar of oxygen gas, or as though an island which had long lain under the spell of Arctic winter could be loosed from its moorings and drifted down to southern seas, and beneath the genial touch of the tropic summer all the buried seeds should burst forth into a rich and luxuriant growth.

The description given to him greatly pleased the king, who was always on the outlook for promising youths, and in the exercise of that unquestioned autocracy which marked his reign, like that of other Eastern monarchs, he despatched a summons to Jesse to send him David, his son, who was with the sheep. Such a summons could not be disregarded, and making up a present of the produce of his farm, the old man despatched his Benjamin to begin to tread the difficult and intricate paths of royal favour. “And David came to Saul, and stood before him, and he loved him greatly.” And whenever Saul was overtaken by one of his fits of melancholy, when the sky was overcast with the heavy clouds of God-forsakenness and despair, “when the evil spirit from God was upon him,” David, then probably about eighteen years of age, took the harp and played with his hand, so that Saul was refreshed, and the evil spirit departed from him, and he was well.

Robert Browning has depicted for us, with a wonderful luxuriance of imagination, the scene when the minstrel strove with all the spell of his art to tame and exercise the depression that mantled the royal brow: how he sang of the scenes in the valleys where the sheep were being gathered beside the brimming waters of the wells; and again of the pasture lands over which they were scattered, browsing on the tender grass. At one moment there was a strain of martial music, summoning the clans to repel a border foray; at another it seemed as though the voices of maidens were welcoming back from the fight their lovers, crowned with victory. Again, the music told of the rising storm, the rattle of the thunder, the pelt of the hail, until you became aware that the fury of the elements had spent itself, and was dying down into the cadences of a summer landscape, bathed in peace. Now you could have heard the sough of the wind through the trees, or sweeping over the meadows, and anon the music of the spheres, as the heavens declared the glory of God and the firmament told of his handiwork. Sometimes the young poet would rehearse the joy of drinking the pure nectar of young life:

“Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock;

The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree; the cool silver shock

Of the plunge in a pool’s living water—the hunt of the bear,

And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.

And the meal—the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust diviue,

And the locusts’ flesh steeped in the pitcher! the full draught of wine,

And the sheep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell

That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.

How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ

All the heart, and the soul, and the senses for ever in joy.”

It is probable that the spell of music with which David sought to relieve the king’s dark moods was greatly successful, as afterward in the case of Philip V. of Spain, who was cured of a fixed melancholy by the music of a famous player. His fits of insanity became less and less frequent, the need for David’s attendance at court was greatly relaxed, and the king may almost have ceased to think of him, amid the many suitors for his royal favour. Perhaps this very fickleness was part of the disease. It was due probably to the disordered condition of the king’s brain that he well-nigh forgot the stripling whom he had greatly loved, and who had become alike his armour-bearer and his physician (16:22).

How long a period elapsed in this way we cannot tell, but another series of events brought Saul and David into closer and more tragical contact. The Philistines had never forgiven the Hebrews for having discarded the yoke which for so long they had meekly borne, and at last, after a series of forays and raids on the southern borders of Canaan, the tide of invasion could no longer be restrained. It rolled across the frontiers and poured through the valleys, till the Philistine hosts were gathered together in the valley of the Terebinth, which belonged to Judah, and pitched their camp at Ephes-dammim, “the Boundary of Blood,” so called probably, from the dark and bloody encounters which had taken place there. The valley, or wady, is broad and open, and about three miles long. It is divided in the centre by a remarkable ravine, or trench, formed by a mountain torrent, which is full of foaming water in the winter, though dry in summer. It was the presence of this gorge or channel, some twenty feet wide, with steep vertical sides, and with a depth of ten or twelve feet, that protracted the issue for so long, so that the two hosts lay watching each other for forty days, neither of them daring to face the hazard involved in crossing the valley and its ravine, in the face of the other.

The full story of the combat with Goliath belongs to the Life of David; we only touch on it here as it concerns the ill-fated and hapless Saul.

When the gigantic Philistine champion, whose name was suggested by his “shining armour,” strode forth, and even dared to come near the lines of the Hebrew troops, clothed in helmet, jerkin, and greaves of bright copper mail, handling a mighty spear, and with a sword girt at his side; and when he boldly challenged the armies of Israel to produce a man worthy to take up the gage of battle, Saul was as dismayed and panic-stricken as any of his soldiers. It is said that he was “greatly afraid” (ver. 11). Though he was God’s chosen king, and in his earlier life had stood in the might of a simple faith, his disobedience had severed the sinews of his power, and he had become as weak as any other. Obedience and faith are two aspects of the same posture of the soul; as you obey, you are able to believe; as you believe, you can obey. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the fourth chapter, the words are perpetually interchanged. Let a man but have faith in God he waxes valiant in the fight, and turns to flight armies of aliens. One can chase a thousand, and two put thousands to flight. Oh! beware of disobedience which introduces trembling and faintness into the heart, so that the sound of a driven leaf chases the fugitive! All that Saul could do, in the face of the braggart blasphemy of Goliath, was to hold out the most lavish promises of what he would do for the hero who would take up the challenge, and make the proud Gittite bite the dust.

When, finally, David was brought into his presence, his soul glowing with an heroic faith, and avowing his determination to go alone to fight the Philistine, Saul endeavoured to dissuade him. “Thou art not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him.” He had no idea of power other than that which came of long usage (ver. 33), or of helmets and coats of mail (ver. 38, 39). The point of David’s narrative of his successful conflicts with the lion and bear was entirely lost on him. Saul looked on them as the result of superior agility and sinewy strength; he did not fathom David’s meaning as he spoke of the great deliverances which Jehovah had wrought (ver. 37). Already the young Psalmist was saying to himself:

“The Lord is my light and my salvation,

Whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the strength of my life,

Of whom shall I be afraid?”

But such boasts of the believer in God were an enigma to the king. The eyes of his heart were blinded, and he could not see. He had no idea that faith opens altogether new sources of power, touches stops in the great organ of nature which elude other hands, and avails itself of those Divine prerogatives which, like legions of angels, wait in harnessed squadrons around the beset believer.

As David went forth to meet the Philistine, Saul said to Abner, his uncle, and the trusted captain of his army, “Whose son is the youth? Inquire whose son the stripling is”; and when presently the young champion returned with the head of the Philistine in his hand, the one question the king put to him was, “Whose son art thou, thou young man?” It was as though Saul thought to account for his success on the ground of heredity. “Surely,” thought he, “this youth comes of a great line of ancestry; the blood of Caleb or Joshua must be in his veins; the best of Hebrew stock must have yielded this scion.” It is thus that the man of this world tries to compute and reckon up the child of faith. He is always analysing the elements of his success, and trying to account for him. He has no conception of what God can be or do for the soul that wholly trusts Him.

On the ground of expediency, after his return to Gibeah, Saul set David over the men of war. The harp was exchanged, for the most part, for the sword; and as he went forth on his expeditions against the hereditary foes of Israel, he became more and more necessary to the stability of the throne, as he became increasingly the darling of the nation. “Whithersoever Saul sent him, he behaved himself wisely.” Out of this popularity originated the great sin of Saul’s life.

On one occasion, as Saul and David were returning from some final and decisive victory over the Philistines (ver. 6, see margin), the people crowded to meet them and the troops; and the women, dressed in gay attire, danced around and before the advancing columns, singing to the music of their tambourines and three-stringed instruments. As they performed the usual sacred dance they sang responsively, “answering one to another,” an ode of victory, of which this was the refrain:

“Saul hath slain his thousands,

And David his ten thousands.”

Instantly the king was smitten with the dart of jealousy. All his soul was set on fire with the thought that not improbably David was the neighbour of whom Samuel had spoken, as being the divinely designated successor to the kingdom, which was even now passing from his hand. What if this bright young soldier, with the light of God on his life, and the love of the people already gathered to his person, was to dispossess him! “And Saul was very wroth, and the saying displeased him; and he said: What can he have more than the kingdom.”

“And Saul eyed David from that day and forward.” All the love and admiration that he had entertained towards him turned to gall and bitterness. The milk of human kindness turned sour. His old malady, which had been charmed away from him, came back with more than its wonted force; and on the day after the incident, brooding over his fancied wrongs, it seemed as though his whole nature were suddenly thrown open to an evil spirit, who possessed him, and swept him on to do a deed of murderous hatred. Raving in a mad fit of frenzy, he caught up the spear that stood beside him as the emblem of his royal state, and hurled it at David, who was sitting before him, endeavouring to charm away his malady. Not once, but twice the murderous weapon quivered through the air, but David avoided out of his presence twice, no doubt imputing the attempt on his life to the king’s illness, and having no idea of the jealousy that was burning in his soul like fire.

Let us take care of the first beginnings of sin, when the least suggestion begins to float in the air around us, like a microbe or germ of malignant and deadly disease. Then is the time to turn to Christ with it for deliverance, securing his gracious interposition, as you exercise faith in the grace of his salvation. “Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me; then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression.”

XXI. The sin of Jealousy

(1 Samuel 18)

All selfish souls, whate’er they feign,

Have still a slavish lot;

They boast of Liberty—in vain—

Of Love—and feel it not!

He whose bosom glows with Thee—

He, and he alone, is free.

—Cowper.

AMONG the most terrible of human sins is jealousy—the parent of the darkest and blackest crimes that have disgraced the annals of our race. And of all the delineations of it, which are frescoed on the walls of history, none is more absolutely true to life, and terrible in its graphic colouring, than this portraiture of the first king of Israel.

I. Jealousy Opens the Door to the Devil.—In Saul’s case the interval was the briefest possible. On the morrow after the song of the women, which first aroused in his heart the feeling of jealousy towards David, we learn that “an evil spirit” came mightily upon the ill-fated monarch.

There is an impenetrable wall, as we believe, built by the providence of God between human souls and the evil spirits which tenant the atmosphere around us, and are therefore called “the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenlies” (Eph. 6:12,), whilst their leader is known as the Prince of the Power of the Air (Eph. 2:2). No spirit of evil, however malignant, can break through that barrier from his side; but it is possible for man to break it down on his. Every time we yield in thought or act to the temptations which are perpetually accosting us, we disintegrate and impair that barrier, and expose ourselves to the entrance of demon influence, which adapts itself to the outward mould of our sinful desires, only investing and filling it with an intensity of passion which would otherwise be impossible to us.

This evil spirit, in Saul’s case, is said to have been “from God”—a phrase which can only be interpreted on the hypothesis that God permitted it to come, and that this tragic result transpired in direct pursuance of the immutable fixtures of the universe. If a man tampers with his soul, God cannot save him from the inevitable results. Obey the law of fire, and it will obey you like a dutiful slave—this is God’s will and appointment; but it is also his will and appointment that, if you disobey it, it will devour your towers, palaces, treasures, and homes, with merciless fury. When men rebel and vex the Holy Spirit, He turns to be their enemy and fights against them. “God,” says one, “must be something to us; what He shall be depends on what we are to Him.” Go with the wind, and it beneficently wafts you forward; go against it, and your progress becomes ruinous in its deadly cost.

“With the merciful, Thou wilt show Thyself merciful;

With the perfect man, Thou wilt show Thyself perfect;

With the pure, Thou wilt show Thyself pure;

And with the froward, Thou wilt show Thyself froward.

II. Jealousy Defeats its Own Good.—David had suddenly become the darling of the people. With almost a single bound, he had leapt into the throne of universal homage and affection. “All Israel and Judah loved David” (16). In this common affection for one who was so accessible to them all, the people forgot their ancient feuds. Not only they, but the Court, was enamoured of him. He was set over the men of war, and went out with them whithersoever Saul sent him, and his promotion was good, not only “in the sight of all the people,” but also “in the sight of Saul’s servants,” while Jonathan loved him with a love passing the love of women; and Michal, Saul’s daughter, was tenderly attached to him. There must have been something of a spell in the influence of that pure, bright soul over all who came into contact with it.

Besides this, the Lord was evidently with him. Note how constantly the sacred chronicle touches that note: “Saul was afraid of David, because the Lord was with him” (12); “David behaved himself wisely in all his ways, and the Lord was with him” (14); “And Saul saw and knew that the Lord was with David” (28).

Moreover, he behaved himself wisely, or prospered (5); wisely in all his ways (14); very wisely, so much so that Saul stood in awe of him (15); more wisely than all the servants of Saul, so that his name was much set by (30).

Under these circumstances, how judicious it would have been for Saul to bind the son of Jesse to himself! Admitting frankly that he was his designated successor, and that he was enjoying the special favour of Jehovah, Saul might have used David for the rehabilitation of his waning fortunes. It was evidently impossible to reverse the Divine choice, but he might have postponed the infliction of the inevitable sentence. Nothing could have made the king himself more popular than to have identified his fortunes and those of his family with one who could have rendered conspicuous and inestimable service to court and kingdom. Nothing could have been easier, nothing more politic. But instead of this, Saul allowed his mad passion to smoulder always, and sometimes burst into a flame, until it broke out in irresistible fury and consumed the house of his life.

In the case of the higher passions of the soul, it is often easy to curb and restrain them by the introduction of considerations of self-interest and personal prestige; but it is not so with jealousy. At the shrine of this passion, which differs from the lust of the libertine and the drink-crave of the inebriate, in being wholly a passion of the mind, the jealous soul is prepared to repeat the act of Palissy the potter, who tore up the very boards of his home, after having destroyed every atom of furniture, in order to prosecute the design by which he was consumed. The peace of the home; the success of some great enterprise; the happiness and prosperity of some loved one who has been the unwitting cause of jealousy; the service of God; the prospect of long, happy years of high respect if only the passion is resisted and extinguished—I have seen these, and more than these, sacrificed because jealousy has demanded its revenge.

III. Jealousy is very Inventive of Methods of Executing its Fell Purpose.—Its shape is protean. Sometimes it uses the stiletto, whose edge is so fine that you do not know you have been struck till afterwards; and sometimes the bludgeon, that fells to the ground with one murderous blow. The poison cup, or the fine meshes of a subtle stratagem, which leads the victim to inflict his own doom—such are the methods which jealousy employs.

Trace this in the history before us. First Saul, under the excuse of his malady, attempts to take David’s life with his own hand. He knew that the murderous deed would be imputed to the deranged condition of his mind, and therefore, with impunity, twice launched the javelin at the minstrel who sought to charm away his malady.

Then he sought to throw him into positions of extreme peril, by inciting him to valiant deeds on the field of battle, and in border warfare. For a bribe he promised him his elder daughter, Merab, whose hand should be given him in marriage, as the reward of heroic deeds; and to this was added the appeal of religion, than which no motive could be more potent with this devout and chivalrous soul. “And Saul said to David, Behold, my elder daughter, Merab; her will I give thee to wife: only be thou valiant for me, and fight the Lord’s battles.” And then, with unsparing hand, the sacred writer draws aside the veil, and recites to us the secret thoughts that were passing in that dark and evil-haunted nature—“for Saul said, Let not mine hand be upon him, but let the hand of the Philistines be upon him.” We do not know the heroic deeds to which these allurements led, but it was not for want of them that the royal promise was unfulfilled, and Merab given to Adriel the Meholathite.

The stratagem had failed, but it seemed too insidious and too likely to realise the royal purpose, to be abandoned without being put to one further proof and Michal, Saul’s younger daughter, who really loved David, at this time, at least, was made the guerdon or prize to allure the young, unsuspecting warrior to fresh encounters with the Philistines. The sure evidence that a hundred of these doughty foes had fallen by David’s hand was the only stipulated dowry which was required, and the honour of becoming the king’s son-in-law was the theme of many a hint, suggestion, and open conversation, between the courtiers and the young soul on whose career so much attention was being concentrated. To his servants, Saul must have seemed to be sincerely attached to David, and to desire, with genuine earnestness, to enrol him in his family; clearly he was playing a game of unusual adroitness. On the one hand, his servants really believed that the king delighted in David, and wanted the alliance; on the other, “Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines.”

It was only after the plot had failed, and it seemed as though through the providence of God David was possessed of a charmed life, that Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and to all his servants, that they should slay David; again hurled his javelin at him with such force that it stood quivering in the palace wall; and finally pursued him, first to his own home, and finally to Samuel’s home in Naioth (see chap. xix.).

Not otherwise is it with jealousy. When a wife is jealous of another woman, who may be absolutely guiltless of any attempt to influence the husband’s affections; when an elder minister becomes jealous of his assistant, or of a neighbour; when a person becomes jealous of the influence which another is obtaining over his friend—it becomes almost impossible to enumerate all the unkind suggestions, all the insinuations, all the wrong constructions on conduct, all the perversion of words, actions, and looks, through which the soul will vent its spleen.

IV. Jealousy of the Innocent is Unable to Avail against God.—Everything that it does has a reverse effect from that which was intended, and so far from overwhelming the rival, extends his influence, and more thoroughly establishes his throne.

It was remarkably so with David. Saul was bent on alluring him to his ruin. Through God’s interposition, however, each murderous intent was foiled, and became the cause of the still greater popularity of his rival. If he is set over the men of war, he prospers wherever he is sent; if he is separated from the immediate proximity of the king, and permitted to go in and out before the people, the whole nation loves him (18:13, 15). If he is sent to fight the Philistines, he slays not one hundred but two, so that his name is much set by (30). If Saul urges Jonathan to slay him, he drives his own son to a closer friendship, and forces him to plead the cause of the twin soul, with which his own was knit. Everything that is meant for ill turns out for good. The weapons that are hurled on the young life are boomerangs which return on the hand that launched them. The curses came home to roost. Saul digs privily a pit, into which he falls himself.

If only jealous people would ponder such a story as this, surely they would see the uselessness of their malignant attempts to injure those who may seem destined to take their place. It is not thus that the peril can be met. The stars in their courses fight against Sisera. Balak may bribe Balaam with his wealthiest rewards to come to curse Israel, but how shall he curse whom God hath not cursed, and how shall he defy whom the Lord hath not defied?

There is a Nemesis in life which will certainly return on the evil-doer. The Lord will not leave his Davids to the cruel mercies of a Saul. He will raise up Jonathans to warn them of their peril, will cause Michal to ward off the molesting blow, will overpower with the mysterious spell of spiritual influences the murderous bands, and will still the enemy and avenger.

“God is a righteous judge,

If a man turn not, he will whet his sword,

He hath bent his bow and made it ready,

He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death.

His mischief shall return upon his own head,

And his violence shall come down upon his pate.”

XXII. “Cruel as the Brave.”

(1 Samuel 20–27)

’Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours;

And ask them what report they bore to heaven;

And how they might have borne more welcome news.

Their answers form what men Experience call,

The Spirit walks of every day deceased,

And smiles an Angel, or a fury frowns.

—Young.

JEALOUSY has no scruples, and will not hesitate to violate the most revered sanctities. Her foot is ruthless; it will trample upon the relationship of home, the bonds of friendship and kinship, and the reverence which attaches itself to the house and worship of God. When once this passion has kindled, there is nothing on which it will forbear to feed, nothing is too sacred to be fuel for its flame. Not that it often, under the restraint of Christian civilisation at least, proceeds to murder; rather, by whispered suspicions, by the shrug of the shoulders, the movement of the finger, the furtive look, the suggestive question, it may destroy the peace which one has in husband, wife, child, or friend.

The home-life is one of the most sacred institutions of our human life. It originates in the knitting of spirit with spirit, so that the twain become one; and from that union springs the dower of blessed children, sowing the world with flowers, and making the race perennially young. Such a home, in David’s case, was largely due to Saul’s own arrangement. When Michal, his daughter, loved David, and they told him, and it pleased him, and he gave her to David to wife, it was the burst as of a new spring-tide to those two young lives—happy in each other’s affection, though afterwards to be sadly alienated. Yet when David had evaded his javelin, and fled to the security of his home, saying to himself, “At least my father-in-law will respect the sanctity of his daughter’s love,” the madly jealous monarch sent messengers thither to watch him, and slay him in the morning, eliciting from the imprisoned singer the plaintive strains preserved in one of his Psalms (59).

“Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God;

Set me on high from them that rise up against me.

Deliver me from the workers of iniquity,

And save me from bloodthirsty men.

For, lo, they lie in wait for my soul;

The mighty gather themselves together against me;

Not for my transgression, nor for any sin, O Lord.”

Michal knew her father too well to trust his clemency, warned her husband of the imminence of death, with woman-wit (and what will not women do for those they love!) aided him to escape, with her own hands letting him down from the window. It was to his daughter that it was due that the newly formed home was not rendered desolate, and the light of its hearth quenched.

The sanctuary of religious worship is next in importance to the home, if not superior. They stand or fall together. The one is generally the guarantee of the stability of the other. From the home as its forecourt, we pass into the house of God as our abiding-place. “In my Father’s house,” said our Lord, “are many mansions”; and may we not suppose that human homes are included amongst them?

But the case of Saul shows that jealousy will break down the precincts of the sanctuary as ruthlessly as of the home. David hastened to tell Samuel of the turn that things were taking, and of the grave suspicion which was forcing itself on his soul, that Saul’s attempts on his life were not the result of a disordered brain, but of a wicked and murderous will. For greater security Samuel led him to a cluster of booths, perhaps woven of osiers (called Naioth), where a number of young men were being trained for the prophetic office, and were living in the fullest manifestation of spiritual power. The very atmosphere where they dwelt seemed charged with spiritual electricity.

Into this sacred assembly Saul forced three successive bands of messengers to arrest David, and finally, in hot wrath at their failure to return, came himself. In after-days it was distinctly remembered how he came to the great well, or cistern, in Sechu, and asked with peremptory vehemence for Samuel and David. When one told him, he went off to Naioth; but was stricken down or ever he reached the place; and, divested of his royal robes, for a second time in his life lay on the ground in a kind of trance, which lasted for all that day and all that night.

We cannot read of this singular incident without being reminded of scenes in the life of John Wesley, of whom it is said, “While preaching on the common at Bristol a young woman sank down in violent agony, as did five or six persons at another meeting in the evening. One was a young lady, whose mother was irritated at the scandal, as she called it, of her daughter’s conduct; but the mother was the next who dropped down and lost her senses in a moment, yet went home with her daughter, full of joy. Bold blasphemers were instantly seized with agony, and cried aloud for the Divine mercy, and scores were sometimes strewed on the ground at once, insensible as dead men. A Quaker who was admonishing the bystanders against these strange scenes as affectation and hypocrisy was himself struck down, as by an unseen hand, while the words of reproach were yet upon his lips.” The difference, of course, between these two phenomena lay in the result. In the case of the sunken down under Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, the outcome was a change of heart and life, together with a very blessed and exalted religious experience. In the case of Saul, the experience was as the early cloud and the morning dew, which goeth away. Whatever the nature of the experience, whether physical, mental, or spiritual, and probably it was the latter, it was transient and evanescent, and left him really worse than it found him, for his jealousy next threatened the life of his noble son Jonathan.

The very fountains of a father’s love and pride dry up before the volcanic fires of jealousy, and become the cause of even deeper and wider contortions. Jonathan was one of the noblest types of manhood. A truly princely soul was his. In any age, even of the most romantic age of chivalry, he would have stood easily, and by a universally acknowledged right, in the foremost rank. Whether in the court or on the battlefield, he shone as a star of the first magnitude. Grace and beauty must have adorned his person, whilst intrepid daring and courage characterised his behaviour on the battlefield. The darling of the people, who once saved his life from his father, the chosen ideal of the maidens and youth of his time, wise in statesmanship, true in friendship, strong in resolution, there was everything to bind his father to him, for reasons of policy as well as of paternal pride. But these considerations had no weight with Saul, whilst jealousy of David lay heavy in the other scale. He might be, as his friend eloquently expressed it in his funeral elegy, “lovely and pleasant,” swifter than an eagle, stronger than a lion, but Saul was prepared to sacrifice it all to the spirit of revenge.

It was on the monthly festival that this new vent of the volcano which raged within Saul’s heart revealed itself. It was the second day, and as on the previous one, David’s seat was empty. Speaking of him derisively as “the son of Jesse,” thus accentuating his lowly birth, and ignoring the relationship that bound him to the royal family, the king asked Jonathan the reason of his absence; and when he received the answer on which the two friends had previously agreed, he fell into a grievous rage, abused Jonathan with the vilest epithets that an Eastern can use, who to-day vents his scorn on the mother of the object of his hate, insisted on David’s immediate arrest and execution, and ended by hurling his javelin at his noble son, who had interfered to mollify his wrath. “So Jonathan arose from the table in fierce” (and righteous) “anger, and did eat no meat the second day of the month: for he was grieved for David, because his father had done him shame.”

But jealousy is also responsive to the worst possible suggestions. Of this there is an illustration in the following chapter (21). The fugitive fled this time to Nob, where Ahimelech, the high priest, presided over the relics of the ancient sanctuary. The suspicions excited in Ahimelech’s mind by his unescorted and hasty advent were removed by an evasive reply, and the king’s son-in-law was received with all deference, supplied with bread, with the mighty sword of Goliath, and such spiritual counsel as the ephod could afford.

The incident was reported to Saul, some months afterwards, as he was encamped “on the height” (r. v. margin) above Gibeah, waiting for tidings of his hated rival, that he might at once march with his household troops, composed of trusted Benjamites, men of his own tribe, to capture and slay him. It seemed as though all the demands of the public service were set aside and accounted as the small dust of the balance so long as the vengeance of his soul was unappeased. The promulgation and execution of law, the hearing of suits, the defences of the kingdom—all were of no account in his estimation until this one purpose was fulfilled.

In the heat of his spirit he gave vent to the complaint (and jealousy so often takes on the tone of injured innocence) that all his servants were in conspiracy against him, that no one cared for him, that Jonathan was at the bottom of David’s conspiracy, and that each was cherishing the hope of his speedy downfall in order to receive possessions and promotions as the price of treachery from the hand of the son of Jesse. It was an unjust and injurious taunt. Well might the apostle James affirm that the tongue is often “set on fire of hell.” It was so here. Mad jealousy runs amuck, striking here and there, with absolute disregard of all that is most precious and true in human loyalty and love. Amid the silence that followed these undeserved reproaches, Doeg narrated what he had seen on that fateful day when he had happened to be detained at the Tabernacle, for some ceremonial ablution or other rite, and had witnessed Ahimelech’s attentions to the king’s son-in-law (1 Sam. 21:7).

Doeg’s malicious statement at once diverted the king’s suspicions from his courtiers to the priests. Nob was not far distant from Gibeah; and a peremptory summons, after a brief interval, brought Ahimelech and all his father’s house, i. e., all the males of the high priest’s family of the house of Eli, into the presence of the king. In unmeasured terms Saul accused the whole of them of connivance with David for the overthrow of his throne and dynasty, and would give no heed to Ahimelech’s mild expostulations. The high priest pleaded that, though he had done what the king accused him of, he had done it quite innocently. He had always accounted David as one of the most faithful of Saul’s servants, had looked on him as being constantly entrusted with secret commissions, and had frequently made similar inquiries of God on his behalf, believing that in this he was serving the royal will. But he might as well have tried to stem the swelling of Jordan. The king’s mind was made up before he began his defence. Yielding to some unholy impulse which surely must have come to him from some malign and evil spirit, and to which his disordered nature was as susceptible as it had been to the spiritual afflatus of Naioth, he said, “Thou shalt surely die, Ahimelech, thou and all thy father’s house.”

The royal bodyguard shrank from executing the awful sentence; but Doeg the Edomite, a foreigner, with his herdsmen, had no such compunctions, but forthwith fell on the unresisting priests, who were butchered one after another, until their mangled corpses were piled in heaps, and their white robes were saturated with their hearts’ blood.

It was a cowardly and dastardly deed, the tidings of which must have staggered the whole nation with dumfoundering horror. All good men must have felt that the foundations of society were loosed, and that neither life nor liberty was safe, while such frenzy was enthroned in their monarch’s breast. The black current which had caught him was bearing him ever more swiftly to his doom: a depraved heart wrought on a maddened brain, and this reacted back again to his destruction.

What a warning is here that we should not yield to the first intrusion of evil, lest the thought should lead to the act, and repeated acts to the habit, and habits congeal to character, and character become set in destiny!

Jealousy is, however, subject to strong remorse. These scourges are the remonstrances of that blessed Spirit who allows no soul to drift unwarned to the bottomless pit. Saul was very subject to these powerful eddies in the hurrying current.

When, in an earlier stage, Jonathan reminded his father of the priceless services that David had rendered, he hearkened attentively, relented, and pledged his royal oath that he should not be put to death (19:1–7).

When David spared his life in the cave, near the Fountain of the Wild Goat, amid the wild ravines that border on the western shores of the Dead Sea, refusing to put forth his hand against the Lord’s anointed, and restraining his surprised and eager followers—touched by a generosity which was wholly unexampled in those rude days, Saul lifted up his voice and wept, and poured out the pent-up generosity which had been natural to him in earlier days, but had for long been restrained. “If a man find his enemy,” he said, “will he let him go well away? Wherefore the Lord reward thee good for that thou hast done for me this day” (24:16–22).

And, when again he came in search of David and pitched his camp on the ridge of Hachilah, on the southern hills, and again, though David’s clemency, his life was spared from the fatal plunge of the spear, which would not have needed a second thrust, Saul went so far as to say before all his camp: “I have played the fool, and have erred exceedingly. I have sinned; return, my son David, for I will no more do thee harm” (26).

But, alas! in every case, his remorse was of brief duration, and failed to produce any permanent change in heart or purpose. The fire still smouldered in his soul, awaiting the least breath of air to rekindle its flames. He might exclaim, “Blessed be thou, my son David, thou shalt both do mightily, and shalt surely prevail.” But David dare not trust him, and said in his heart, “There is nothing better for me than that I should escape into the land of the Philistines” (1 Sam. 26:25; 27:1).

But the cure of jealousy is clearly set forth in these terrible chapters. Without doubt Saul’s surmises were well known to all the members of his family, and especially to Jonathan. Before ever Saul had blurted out his threat that Jonathan’s kingdom would not be established, so long as the son of Jesse lived upon the ground, the heir-apparent had assured his friend that he knew the time would come when the Lord would cut off the enemies of David, every one from the earth (20:14, 15, 30, 31). And later, while Saul was seeking David’s life amid the ravines of Ziph, urged on in his madness by the treacherous Ziphites, Jonathan came to him, and strengthened his hand in God, and said: “Fear not, for the hand of Saul, my father, shall not find thee, and thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee; and that also Saul my father knoweth.”

Jonathan, then, was even more affected by the choice of David than his father was. It was certain that he would never succeed to the throne. Respected and loved he might be, but enthroned never. But not a cloud of jealousy ever darkened the pure heaven of his love, or cast its shadow on the crystal lake of his peace. Perfect love had cast out hate; we are told that “he loved David as his own soul.”

If you are tempted to jealousy, do not brood over the fell passion, or allow it to grow from less to more, but arise to deal with it at once, and with all the energy of your soul. Insist on loving the one to whom you have felt the unholy passion. You reply that that is the very emotion of love. It may be impossible for you to command the latter, but quite possible to practice the former, since love consists primarily, not in the feeling, but in the doing; not in emotions, but in strong acts of self-denial and service.

Find out the individual concerning whom you were beginning to feel jealous. Be on the alert to do kind acts and speak kind words. Whenever you are tempted to utter a depreciating remark, arrest the words before they cross your lips, and utter some kindly ones instead. Whenever you find yourself on the point of speaking contemptuously or judging harshly, go out of your way to do some generous deed. Overcome evil with good, hatred with love. Do not wait to feel kindly, but act promptly and heartily. Go out of your way to confer a kindness. Above all, avoid aloofness. Throw yourself in that other’s company; try to enter into the anxieties, trials, and temptations by which his life is torn and rent; cultivate a near and close fellowship, and always offer and present yourself to God as a living sacrifice. Believe also that God does hear you, that his Holy Spirit takes part with you against the enemy of your peace, and that He who has led you to desire perfect deliverance is prepared to work in you to will and do of his good pleasure.

XXIII. A Great Sunset

(1 Samuel 25:1)

Life is only bright when it proceedeth

Toward a truer, deeper Life above;

Human Love is sweetest when it leadeth

To a more divine and perfect Love.

—A. A. Procter.

AT length Samuel came to his end, so far as this world, at least, was concerned; and was borne to his grave, as a shock of corn fully ripe. Though he had spent the last years in retirement, partly because of his great age, and partly because of the breach between the king and himself, he had never lost the love and respect of his people; and when finally the tidings sped through the country that he had fallen upon that blessed sleep which God giveth to his beloved, the event was felt to be a national calamity, so that from Dan in the far north to Beer-sheba on the southern frontier, “all Israel gathered themselves together, and lamented him, and buried him.”

Josephus adds this significant paragraph to the record of Scripture: “His moral excellence, and the esteem with which he was regarded, were proved by the continued mourning that was made for him, and the concern that was universally shown to conduct the funeral rites with becoming splendour and solemnity. He was buried in his own native place, and they wept for him many days; not regarding it as the death of another man or a stranger, but as that in which each individual was concerned. He was a righteous man, and of a kindly nature, and on that account very dear to God.”

The impression made on his contemporaries lingered, as an afterglow, long after his sundown. Again and again he is referred to in the sacred record.

1 Chron. 9:22 suggests that he laid the foundations of that elaborate organisation of Levites for the service of the sanctuary which was perfected by David and Solomon.

1 Chron. 26:27, 28, asserts that he began to accumulate the treasures by which the House of the Lord was ultimately erected in the reign of David’s mighty son.

2 Chron. 35:18, contains a passing reference to some memorable Passover Feast, which he instituted and carried through.

Psa. 99:6, and Jer. 15:1, commemorate the fragrance of his perpetual intercessions.

Acts 3:24, and 13:20, indicate what a conspicuous landmark was furnished by his life and work in the history of his people.

Heb. 11:33 places him in the long gallery of time, the niches in the walls of which have been filled one by one by the statues of those who have lived and wrought in the power of a living faith. “The time would fail me to tell … of Samuel … who through faith … wrought righteousness …”

I. The Blessedness of his Life.—Though Samuel’s career was an arduous one, it must have been fraught with the elements of true blessedness.

He was pre-eminently a man of prayer. This was his perpetual resort. Whether for his people or his king, for the overthrow of the Philistines or the recovery of Saul from his evil courses, he never ceased to pray—he would have counted it a sin if he had. “God forbid,” he exclaimed on one memorable occasion, “that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you.” Many a sleepless night did he spend in tears and prayers for the king whom he had set up, and to whose hands he had committed the national interests as a precious charge (1 Sam. 15:11, 35; 16:1).

It has yet to be seen, and probably we shall never know until the veil of eternity is lifted, whether the world has benefited most by our prayers or labours. It is more than likely that the men and women who have poured out perpetual supplications and intercessions have, like Epaphras, wrought most effectively. These have resembled mighty mountains, commencing with the skies, down whose slopes the perennial streams have poured, wreathed in rainbow vapour, and carrying the quality of the mountain soil into the plains.

All books, says an eloquent writer, are dry and tame compared with the great unwritten book prayed in the closet. The prayers of exiles! The prayers of martyrs! The prayers of missionaries! The prayers of the Waldenses! The prayers of the Covenanters! The sighs, the groans, the inarticulate cries of suffering men, whom tyrants have buried alive in dungeons, whom the world may forget, but God never! If some angel, catching them as they were uttered, should drop them down from heaven, what a liturgy they would make! Can any epic equal those unwritten words which pour into the ear of God out of the heart’s fulness? But these prayers have been deeds. In the words of James (5:16, r.v.), they have availed much in their working. An energy passes from the holy soul, striving mightily in prayer, which becomes a working force in the universe, an indestructible unit of power, not apart from God, but in union with his own mighty energies, of whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things.

Let us pray more, especially as life advances. Let us seek to be enrolled among those who call upon his Name. Let us so live that men may shelter themselves in the thought of our intercessions, as Saul in those of Samuel.

“More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.”

Samuel was also characterised by great singleness of purpose. He could court without flinching the most searching scrutiny (1 Sam. 12:3). From those early days when, as a child, the vision of his childlike purity, contrasted with the evil of Eli’s house, struck on the imagination of Israel, his had been a career of stainless and irreproachable honour. The interests of his people had been his all-absorbing concern. For these he had spent himself with ungrudging devotion, and to find that he must withdraw from them in favour of another was the sorest grief of his life. The troubles which had befallen his land had only led him nearer God, and bound him more tightly to his fellow-countrymen; but when he discovered that they desired him to give up his position, it required all the gifts of God’s grace, and all the qualities of a naturally noble nature, to sustain the shock with equanimity. But again his unselfishness, which had become the inner law of his life, conquered; he set himself to secure the best successor which the age could afford, and humbly stepped down from the supreme place of power.

It was this beautiful humility and singleness of purpose that arrested the reverence of his people and attracted their veneration. And it was to this trait of his character that we must attribute his perception of the Divine purpose. The eye must be single in its intention, if the whole body is to be full of light. Sir Percivale missed, but Sir Galahad beheld, the vision of the Holy Grail, because the one missed what the other possessed.

“O son, thou hast not true humility,

The highest virtue, mother of them all.

Thou thoughtest of thy prowess and thy sins;

Thou hast not lost thyself to save thyself,

As Galahad.”

Oh, to be so absorbed in a consuming passion for the glory of God in the salvation of others, that we may be oblivious of ourselves, willing to take the second place, to be reckoned as no account, to retire from the blaze of light that falls on the stage to the retirement and twilight of the cloister, where the progress of the days is marked by the clock-chimes, and the incidence of the shadows indicates the progress of the sun from solstice to solstice!

Samuel was also careful to construct. When the whole land was disorganised, he began to lay the foundations of a new state. Deep down in the weltering waves his careful hands laid course upon course. The time and care he expended on the schools of the prophets, his careful administration of justice in his itineraries, his appeals to the people in their great convocations, were part of a great policy which resulted in a consolidated and united people.

Do something in your life. Don’t waste the precious time in criticising others, but put a piece of solid work into the great fabric which is rising around us, and on which the new Jerusalem will one day be established. To criticise others is a less efficient way of setting them right than to do the same thing as they are doing, so much more quickly and deftly that they are led to follow our example. I like the example of the man who, instead of criticising the garden plots of his neighbours, made his own so beautiful that those on his right and left, to the extreme ends on either side, were led, one by one, to do the same.

“We will not cease from mental strife,

Nor shall our sword sleep in our hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In this our green and pleasant land.”

As first of the prophets, as the connecting-link between the first days of the settlement in Palestine and the splendour of Solomon’s reign, by his unblemished character, by his sympathy and strength, by his evident fellowship with the God of Israel from his boyish days to his old age, Samuel won from his people the most profound veneration; and it is not to be wondered at that one of them—who owed everything to him, though he was unable to appreciate the majesty of his personality—in the supreme hour of his desperate need, when all beside had deserted him, turned for help to the great prophet, though he had been withdrawn for a considerable time from earthly scenes, and cried, “Bring me up Samuel.”

II. His Blessed Death.—Death is not a state, but a step; not a chamber, but a passage; not an abiding-place, but a bridge over a gulf. None are dead. We should speak of the departed as those who, for a moment, passed through the shadow of the tunnel, but are living in the intensity of a vivid existence on the other side. “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live unto Him.” None are dead, in the sense of remaining in a condition of deadness. Those whom we call dead are those who died, and passed through death into the other life. They put off their earthly tabernacle, but the tenanting-spirit has passed into other scenes and activities for weal or woe, from which it would be an effort to tear itself, if summoned to return to the cares and responsibilities of this mortal existence: “Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?”

Remember how the Apostle Paul describes death. He speaks of his departure (2 Tim. 4:6). His word is a nautical term, and signifies the loosing of a ship from its moorings, not that it may reach harbour, but that it may go out from the harbour on to the broad bosom of the ocean.

This is the exact thought caught by Tennyson, when he sings:

“Sunset and evening star.

And one clear call for me;

And may there be no moaning of the bar

When I put out to sea.

“For though from out our bourne of time and place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crossed the bar.”

To recall this sonnet is to be irresistibly reminded of another of the noble conceptions of death given by this great Christian poet, which is so exactly in keeping with the apostle’s thought, when he describes the passing of Arthur thus:

“So said he, and the barge with oar and sail,

Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan.

That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,

Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood,

With swarthy webs.”

This is death. It is a moving out of the soul from the stagnant waters and containing walls of the harbour, on to the great bosom of the ocean of eternity, where there are width and space, opportunity to explore to the furthest coast-lines of thought, and to attain to the golden shores of the blessed isles.

Speaking of the deaths of two men, whom we both knew and loved, a beloved friend of mine has quoted a poem of Bret Harte, which is exceedingly beautiful and apposite, because it so exactly expresses the desire of the man who is in a strait betwixt two, knowing that the blessedness of this mortal life is far less than that of departing to be with Christ:

“But lo, in the distance the clouds break away!

The gates’ glowing portals I see;

And I hear from the outgoing ship in the bay

The song of the sailors in glee.

So I think of the luminous footprints that bore

His comfort o’er dark Galilee,

And wait for the signal to go to the shore,

To the ship that is waiting for me!”

Remember how the apostle Peter describes death. Speaking of his death, he uses the very word which had been employed in that memorable conversation on the Mount of Transfiguration, when Moses and Elijah spake with the Master of the decease which He was to accomplish at Jerusalem. “After my decease” (Luke 9:31; 2 Peter 1:15). The Greek word is exodos. There is only one other place in which that word occurs, in the whole New Testament, when the reference is to the going out of the people from Egypt (Heb. 11:22).

Death, under this conception, is a going out, not a coming in. It begins. If it ends, it ends the life of slavery and pain, and opens the way into a world where the development of the soul will be unrestrained.

Let us not dread to die. With most the soul is probably as unconscious of the act of death as of that of birth. It needs but the cracking of the frail shell, the withdrawing of the thin curtain, the slackening of the golden cord of life. In all probability we shall be surprised to find that heaven has been lying all around us, throughout the days of our mortal pilgrimage, and that we had come (long before we died) into the midst of Mount Sion, had been walking the streets of the new Jerusalem, had been mingling with the innumerable hosts of angels, and the spirits of just men made perfect.

The Lord justly claims the title, “the Resurrection and the Life.” He has abolished death, and brought Life and Immortality to light through his Gospel. We are not now left to the dim light of a surmise, of supposition, or of hesitating guess work. We know that there is a life beyond death, because men saw Him after He was risen. “We are witnesses,” says one of them, “of all things which He did in the country of the Jews, and in Jerusalem, whom also they slew, hanging Him on a tree. Him God raised up the third day, and gave Him to be made manifest, not to all the people, but unto witnesses that were chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with Him after He rose from the dead.”

Yes, He lives, and because He lives we shall live also. He has gone to prepare mansions for us in the Father’s house, and He will come again to receive us to Himself, that where He is we may be also. And in that world we shall see his face, and his Name shall be on our foreheads, and, in company with kindred spirits, we shall do his commandments, hearkening to the voice of his Word. “His servants shall serve Him.” Even now I suppose Moses and Aaron are among his priests, and Samuel among them that call upon his Name, “in the solemn troops, and sweet societies” of eternity.

XXIV. Endor and Gilboa

(Samuel 28; 1 Chronicles 10:13)

Earth fades! Heaven breaks on me; I shall stand next

Before God’s throne; the moment’s close at hand

When man the first, last time, has leave to lay

His whole heart bare before His Maker.…

—R. B.

YEARS had passed since David’s sling had brought Goliath to the ground, and the Philistines had fled headlong at Ephesdammim before the onset of the men of Israel. A new invasion was now planned to revenge that disgrace, and re-establish the Philistine supremacy over the plain of Esdraelon, which was the necessary link between the wealthy cities of the Euphrates Valley and the vast market for their wares and produce furnished by the cities of the Nile Valley. To hold that great trade-route involved the right to impose very valuable taxation on the merchandise transported to and fro—hence the desire to hold its keys. The tides of Philistine invasion, therefore, poured up by the seacoast route, which was favourable for the evolutions of the Philistine chariots and cavalry, and a strongly fortiesfied camp was formed at Shunem, about three and a half miles north of Jezreel, and celebrated in aftertime as the abode of the rich woman who so hospitably entertained the prophet Elisha.

Hastily gathering what forces he could collect, Saul marched northwards, and pitched his camp on the slopes of Mount Gilboa, four miles distant from the invading army, and on the south of the Great Plain. “Green plains rising from the level of the Kishon lead to the slopes of Gilboa, swelling after a time into low heights, which rise bare and stony. Behind these the many summits of the hills shoot up abruptly some five or six hundred feet, bleak, white, and barren, their only growths spots of scrub oak and mountain thorns and flowers, which in spring at least are never wanting in Palestine.”

The sight of the great force which was arrayed against him seems to have completely paralysed Saul’s courage. He contrasted the complete accoutrements of the Philistines with the spears and slings of Israel, and “his heart trembled greatly.” The heroic courage which faith might have brought him was not now possible, since the sense of God’s presence was withdrawn. There was no rift in the black canopy of despair that overshadowed his terror-stricken soul. He could say with another, “Behold I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him; on the left hand, where He doth work, but I cannot behold Him; He hideth Himself on the right hand that I cannot see Him” (Job 23:8). It was to this that the terrible series of tragedies, which we are now about to narrate, must be attributed. The restraining grace of God, which he had so long despised and resisted, no longer strove with him, and he was left to follow the promptings of those evil spirits—“the rulers of the darkness of this world”—who, for mysterious purposes, are permitted to assail the sons of men.

True, he inquired of the Lord, for probably the first time after the lapse of many years; but there was no repentance or confession of sin, only abject terror and frantic despair. Therefore “the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets.” “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.”

I. Endor.—At some previous period, as we have seen, “Saul had put away those that had familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land.” He may have done this in one of those strange lucid moments when he became conscious of the strivings of God’s good Spirit, or as a set-off to the wild strivings of passion of which he was guiltily conscious—so often men seek to atone for the sins into which they have been betrayed, by some strong outward act, intended as a make-weight in the other scale, or a sop to an uneasy conscience. It became clear, however, that he had no heartfelt abhorrence of the crimes he thus punished, seeing that in his own dire extremity he had recourse to the very arts he had striven to abolish, and sought from the mouth of hell the help for which he had appealed to heaven in vain!

About two miles north from Shunem, in the rear, therefore, of the Philistine army, lay the little village of Endor. It was one of those spots from which Manasseh had failed to expel the old population; and amongst these, the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, was an old woman who professed to be able to bring up the souls of the dead. It is likely enough that her claims were baseless. By ventriloquism and sleight of hand she no doubt simulated the voice and appearance of those who seemed to come from the other world at her bidding. If there was more than that, we do not hesitate to affirm our belief that in all ages demons have been in collusion with necromancers and spiritualists, and have answered to their call. This is at the root and heart of the phenomena of modern spiritualism.

Heavily cloaked and disguised, accompanied by two trusty companions whom tradition has identified as Abner and Amasa, Saul set forth in the early hours of the night, crossed the plain, made a detour round the eastern shoulder of Little Hermon, and arrived safely at the witch’s dwelling. The door opened to admit them to the house, and amid the dark weirdness of the interior, revealed by the glimmering light of a brazier, choked with smoke, the woman was quite unable to recognise the features of the haggard man who accosted her with the request that she should bring up whomsoever he should name.

At first she hesitated, reminding him how perilous her profession was, and suggesting that to give him satisfaction might cost her life. “Behold, thou knowest what Saul hath done, how he hath cut off those that have familiar spirits and wizards out of the land; wherefore then layest thou a snare for my life, to cause me to die?”

With an oath which strangely implicated the God whom he was at that moment denying, and with a touch of his kingly prerogative the king assured her that no punishment should befall her for doing what he requested. “As the Lord liveth, there shall no punishment happen to thee for this thing.”

Thus reassured, the woman asked whom she should bring up; but she must have been not a little startled, when in a hoarse whisper, as of one paralysed and awestruck by his weird surroundings, the King said, “Bring me up Samuel.”

Retiring from him to a distance, the wretched woman began her incantations, perhaps dropping a powder on the coals of the brazier, muttering incantations in a low voice, making passes and adjurations. But before she had completed her preparations the Almighty seems to have interfered, sending back his faithful servant from the world beyond the article of death, so that the witch might not even appear to have the credit of securing so wonderful a visitation. “The woman saw Samuel.”

At the same moment that she recognised Samuel, she seems to have recognised Saul also. Startled and frightened for her life she called with a loud voice, and spake unto Saul, saying, “Why hast thou deceived me?” Perhaps in her excited condition of soul, she was endowed with that supernatural insight which we call clairvoyance; or perhaps there was something in Samuel’s appearance so startlingly vivid and real that she was led in that dread hour to connect prophet and king as in years gone by; or perhaps the king in his eagerness had drawn near, and had dropped the mantle which veiled his face and figure. But however it befell, she saw through his disguise, and in horror-stricken tones, cried, “Thou art Saul!”

Again he reassured her, and asked her what she had seen.

“A majestic being, worthy to be God,” she replied, “arising as if from out of the earth.”

Pressed by Saul to describe his appearance more minutely, for she was beholding a mysterious form, which, though present in the same chamber as himself, was veiled from him, she said, “He resembles an old man covered with a robe.” “And Saul perceived that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground, and made obeisance.”

Very touching and thrilling was the conversation that followed. I am disposed to think that it was held without the medium of the witch, and that God permitted the prophet to speak with Saul, as afterwards Moses and Elijah to speak with our Lord of the decease to be presently accomplished at Jerusalem. It is likely that these sentences were actually interchanged between the king and his former friend and confidant, to whom he turned remorsefully in his awful agony. Do you not think that if, even then, Saul had turned to Jehovah with tears of confession and the simplicity of faith, he would have been answered according to the multitude of the Divine compassions? Assuredly he would; but there was no sign of such a change of temper.

Samuel did not wait to be questioned, but sadly told the awestruck king that, even in the other life, his misdoings had filled his spirit with unrest, so much so that he could not forbear returning to speak to him once more. “Why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up?”

Saul’s answer was that of despair. “I am sore distressed; for the Philistines make war against me, and God is departed from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets, nor by dreams; therefore I have called thee, that thou mayest make known unto me what I shall do.”

But from the lips of the prophet came no words of comfort or hope. It was useless to ask of the servant the help which was denied by the Master. There was no gain in evading the fact that God Himself was on the side of David, and against the king, whose reign had begun with such fair promise. The multiplied misfortunes which had befallen him and his realm were due to his disobedience to the direct instructions issued with respect to Amalek. The sin which he had now perpetrated had put the last touch on all his transgressions. Nothing, at this hour, could stay or avert the descending avalanche. As he had sown, he must reap; as he had fallen, so he must lie. It was, therefore, revealed that the Lord would deliver Israel also with him into the hand of the Philistines, and on the morrow Saul and his sons should have also passed into the world of spirits; the Hebrew host would be annihilated, the camp sacked, and the land left to the fate which the conquered of those days knew well how to expect.

Little wonder was it that the king fell straightway his full length upon the earth, and was sore afraid. He was already weak with watching and fasting through the previous day; the events of the night had completely unnerved him; and his nervous system collapsed under the terrible strain. Even the callous nature of the witch was smitten with compunction and pity. Her woman’s nature was thoroughly aroused by the awful horror that lay on the King’s soul. She besought him to eat. By the trust she had reposed in him she pleaded that she had some claim on his mercy, to be expended not for her, but for him. “Let me set a morsel of bread,” she pleaded, “before thee; and eat, that thou mayest have strength when thou goest on thy way.”

At first he refused. It seemed as though he would never rise again from the mud-floor on which all the glory of his manhood lay prone. “But his servants, together with the woman, constrained him; and he hearkened unto their voice. So he arose from the earth, and sat upon the bed.” What memories must have passed before his mind, as he sat on that divan, whilst the woman hasted to prepare the meal! Did he not remember the first happy days of his reign; Jabesh-gilead; the overthrow of the Philistines, not once or twice; and the love of his people? But, step by step, he saw how he had gone down from the sunlit summits to the dark valley, where the black torrent ran, and the overhanging rocks met overhead. As with a drowning man, the whole of his previous career passes before him in a moment of time, so the whole panorama of his past must have stood in clear outline before the mental vision of the king. Then, after hastily partaking of the calf and the unleavened cakes, the three figures stole through the darkness, back to the camp.

II. Gilboa.—On the morrow there was some slight alteration in the disposition of the respective hosts. The Philistines moved towards Aphek, a little to the west of their camp; while the Israelites descended from the heights of Gilboa, and took up a position near the spring or fountain of Jezreel (29:1).

Presently the battle was joined. In spite of the most desperate efforts to withstand the onset of the heavily mailed troops that were opposed to them, the Hebrews were routed, and fled from before the Philistines. It is expressly noted by the historian that the lower slopes of Gilboa were covered by the wounded, whose hearts’ blood bedewed the mountain pastures (31:1, r. v. margin).

Saul and Jonathan made the most desperate efforts to retrieve the day:

“From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty,

The bow of Jonathan turned not back

And the sword of Saul returned not empty.”

But it was in vain. “The battle went sore against Saul.” “The Philistines slew Jonathan and Abinadab and Melchi-shua, the sons of Saul.” The flower of his army lay strewn around him; the chivalry of Israel was quenched in rivers of blood. Then, leaving all others, the Philistines concentrated their attack on that lordly figure which towered amid the fugitives, the royal crown on his helmet, the royal bracelet flashing on his arm. “The Philistines followed hard upon Saul … and the archers overtook him, and he was greatly distressed because of the archers.” He knew what fate awaited him if he was captured whilst his life was yet in him. Exposed to ignominy, tortured to death, it seemed to him that immediate death were far preferable to such a fate. “Then said Saul to his armour-bearer, Draw thy sword and thrust me through therewith; lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me through, and make a mock of me.”

The armour-bearer dared not lift up his hand against the sacred person of his king, so Saul, placing his sword-hilt firmly in the earth, fell upon the point, which pierced his heart.

The narrative which the Amalekite gave afterwards to David suggests that the effort to take his life was not at once successful; and he seems to have asked this child of a race which he was once bidden utterly to destroy, to give him the last finishing stroke. “He said unto me, Stand, I pray thee, over me, and slay me; for anguish hath taken hold of me; because my life is yet whole in me.” It may be, however, that all this was a fabrication, intended to win David’s favour; for we are told that when the armour-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he likewise fell upon his sword, and died with him.

The day of Gilboa was a veritable Chevy Chase. “Saul died, and his three sons, and his armour-bearer, and all his men, that same day together.” The next day the Philistines set to work to strip the dead, and finding the bodies of Saul and his sons, they despatched their heads, armour, and decapitated corpses to be carried in triumph through the streets of their principal cities, and finally to be affixed to the walls of Beth-shan. As the tidings spread, the people left the towns and villages in the neighbourhood, and fled across the Jordan. Roving bands followed up the victory, and carried fire and sword into all parts of the land. It was the tidings of their approach to Gibeah that caused the accident to Mephibosheth. “He was five years old when the tidings came of Saul and Jonathan out of Jezreel, and his nurse took him up and fled; and it came to pass, as she made haste to flee, that he fell, and he became lame” (2 Sam. 4:4).

One brave deed relieved the sombre hues of that terrible catastrophe. The men of Jabesh-gilead could not forget how nobly Saul had come to their aid in the early days of his reign; and they resolved, at least, to retrieve the royal body from the ignominy to which Philistine malice had exposed it. The valiant men therefore arose, and went all night, took down the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the temple walls, bore them reverently back to Jabesh, burnt them to conceal the hideous mutilation to which they had been subjected, buried them under “the tamarisk tree in Jabesh,” and lamented with unfeigned grief this tragic close to a reign which had been once as a morning without clouds.

It is an awful thing when a man persists, as Saul and as Judas, to the end striving against God. We feel that it was a dreadful thing to do as he did; we are horrified at his temerity; we marvel at his infatuation; yet we may fall into his wicked ways, and be overcome of evil as he was. We, too, may have resort to things, habits, and people which we had once religiously tabooed. We, too, are liable to step back to our undoing. If a man, having felt the evil of covetousness, and set himself against the love of money, after a while allows it again to invade his soul; if a man has been a slave of his appetites, and having realised their degrading tendencies, has acted, for a while, on a vow of temperance, but has gradually allowed them to resume their former sway; if after years of irreligion he has begun to be in earnest about his soul, but has again relapsed into moral apathy—is not this like Saul seeking help in the cave of the enchantress, whose class he had proscribed? Such men are wells without water, clouds carried before the blast of the tempest, for whom, in the words of the apostle, is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever: “For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour, they are again entangled therein and overcome, the latter end is worse than the beginning; for it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they had known it, to turn back from the holy commandment delivered unto them.”

↑ Back to top