The Prayers of a Righteous Man

"Gather all Israel to Mizpeh, and I will pray for you unto the Lord"

1 Samuel 7:5

Following the confrontation between the god of the Philistines and the God of the Israelites, great fear came on the Philistines with the realisation that the God of Israel was not a heavy stony fishy god such as they worshipped; the God of Israel himself lifted up his people.

In spite of the proof the Philistines had both of their own impotence, and of the power of Jehovah, it was not long before they became hardened, and threatened Israel again, driving fear into the very hearts of the people of God. We are told at the beginning of chapter 7, the Ark of the Covenant remained at Kirjath-jearim for twenty long years. Only at this point does Samuel re-enter the narrative.

In this book of the Old Testament which bears his name, there is a large section from which Samuel is missing, with little record of his life and ministry. We have a record in chapter 4 of what happened when Eli died, and how the word of Samuel came to Israel. But it is very clear that Israel closed its ears and heart to the word that God had given Samuel to preach to them. They reaped the rewards of their refusal to listen to God. It may seem a very light thing for us to decide not to listen to God; it seems a light thing for our nation to refuse to listen to God. It seems a light thing to come to church and refuse to listen to the preacher; but if we believe in God at all, and if we believe in the primacy of preaching, we must believe that the man who preaches the Word of God is the very mouthpiece of God to our souls. And if we refuse to listen, and turn our ears away, and close our hearts and show to the world that we have no place for the man or the message, then we are saying that we have no place for God himself.

God sent Samuel to Israel, and Israel refused to listen. So what happened? God took Samuel out of the picture, and the privileges they once enjoyed, they enjoyed no more. Instead, they only knew defeat, hopelessness and despair. They saw their enemies growing, the Philistines getting stronger and bolder, and coming to threaten them time and time again.

There is a fundamental principle that runs through the whole of the Bible, and it is that we must make use of God's great mercies to us while we have them. We must make use of the Bible while we have it, and of the preaching while we have it, and of our preachers while we have them. While the light of hte truth shines among us, we must live and walk in the light of it, lest Jesus takes the light away.

It is very clear in the New Testament that that happened. There were places where the Gospel flourished. Here is the apostle Paul, writing to the church at Ephesus, where the Gospel came with power, and a place where the Word of God was accepted and feared and loved. The epistle to the Ephesians is one of the few in the New Testament that does not rebuke God's people for error, for going astray, for accepting heresy, for being divided, as many other New Testament churches had become. Yet it was to Ephesus that these words were sent in the Book of Revelation: repent or the candlestick will be removed. And just a few generations later, the gospel witness was sparse indeed.

And it is here too. In the book that bears the name of Samuel, God's message and God's messenger are rejected. They are refusing to hear. So what does God do? God says - I will leave them to their desire. They sink further into ignorance, fear and despair. We must always think twice before we miscall or mistreat the messengers of God, or turn our hearts away and refuse to listen, because God in his sovereign judgement may take not only the messenger, but the very message, away from us, and give ourselves over to our own devices.

But God had not cast off his people. Here he is once again sending Samuel to the house of Israel. What a glorious God is revealed to us in the Bible! The Bible highlights this attribute of God that we call his longsuffering - God suffers long. He is love, and it is the nature of love to suffer long and to be kind. And Peter goes so far as to say to us that the longsuffering of God is salvation. We would have no salvation, no gospel were it not for the patience, and longsuffering of God, which holds back the judgement that we deserve from his hand, and that lavishes upon us the opportunity to repent. God's longsuffering is our salvation, because judgement is delayed and mercy is offered. Peter almost says that the reason Jesus has not come back yet is because of the longsuffering of God - God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. He will judge the world at the end of human history, and he will divide the sheep from the goats, and his people from his enemies, but he is not willing that any should perish. Jesus has not come yet because God is longsuffering. But one day he will come; God will suffer the sins of men no more. Today there is Gospel for us to preach, and good news for the world to hear, and a Bible for us to read, and the voice of God is going right into our heart and soul and conscience because of the longsuffering of God.

That is what we have here. God sent Samuel to them once, and they refused to listen. So Samuel is then gone. But now, after twenty years, God sends Samuel to them again, so that now they will listen, and now they will repent, and now they will come to see that their hope and confidence must be in the grace of a glorious, merciful and loving God.

Do you see - these chapters and narrative are the very stuff of the Gospel! This is not some kind of dry, arid Old Testament history, but the very stuff of the evangel - the grace of the God who gives space to men to repent, and the glory of the God who gives room for me, with all my sins and needs, to turn from my sins and seek the Lord.

So Samuel comes, and he summons all Israel to Mizpeh. Here they are, all gathered together. Let's note three things that this chapter tells us about Mizpeh:

(1) It was a place of REPENTANCE, a place where the children of Israel said "We have sinned".

(2) It was also a place of REVIVAL, a place where God came down in order to "discomfit the Philistines" as the AV puts it in verse 10. Isn't that a great word? There were the Philistines, feeling comfortable and God came down to make them uncomfortable and to set them in disarray and to show Israel that God was with them.

(3) It was also a place of REMEMBRANCE. After the great victory, Samuel set up the "Ebenezer", the stone of help, a commemoration of all that God had been and had done for his people up until that point.

Mizpeh Was a Place of Repentance

That was the message God gave Samuel to preach. It was the message that Jesus preached. Almost the first words on the lips of the greatest preacher of all are these: "Repent! - the kingdom of Heaven is at hand". I am amazed at the number of people who claim to belong to Christian churches, and yet repentance is like a foreign word. They want to show us the loveliness of Jesus, and the lovingness of Jesus, and to encourage us to follow the example of Jesus. Yet if we are to follow his example, that will mean laying emphasis on the primacy of this great gospel duty to repent. Jesus calls us to repentance.

In the Book of Acts we have the same thing. On the day of Pentecost the Spirit came down. The Gospel was preached. Peter stood and preached Jesus, told them what they had done to Jesus, and Luke tells us that they were pricked in their consciences and in their souls. What will we do, they said to Peter. His answer was: "Repent, and be baptized, every one of you for the remission of sins".

What will Samuel say to the people after twenty years of neglect and refusal? Does he encourage them with platitudes - "Let's try and get on better, and see if we can co-operate"? No - he gets to the nub of the issue: "If you will return to the Lord with all your heart, he will deliver you". Put away the strange gods. Put away Ashteroth. Prepare your hearts to the Lord and serve him only. It's the very Gospel itself. The Gospel is calling us to repentance. He is looking for the fruit of repentance where the Gospel is preached and where the seed of the Gospel is sown.

Is there a Mizpeh in our life? A place where we saw what our hearts were like, and where we saw what our condition really was in the presence of this holy God? Can we look over our lives and say that by the grace of God we reached a point where we could serve Ashteroth and the Baalim and the strange gods no more? Where there was for us only one place to which we could come - to the Christ against whom we had sinned, that he might cleanse us from our sins and wash them away? Do we know what it is to acknowledge our sins before God? That must be the first element in repentance: to confess that we have sins in the sight of a holy God. We cannot repent unless we know what sin is and what sin has done; unless we reckon with its gravity and seriousness. If we read through the Old Testament we see how graphically God illustrates the sins of men. And the Gospel calls us to acknowledge what we are before God as he is. Whatever course our lives have taken, God tells us that he is not willing that we should perish. There is a place where we can repent and a place where we can come, to confess our sins before the holy Lord God.

At the heart of true, biblical repentance is the realisation that what matters is not how I see myself, but how God sees me. The only thing worth troubling ourselves over is what God thinks of us; not what men think of us, or say of us, but what He says about us in His own word, and how He shows us to ourselves on the pages of the Scriptures. Have we seen ourselves this way, and come with our sins to the place of mercy where there is salvation and life and hope offered in the Gospel.

"Put away the strange gods" - why is the place of Jehovah occupied by strange gods in our lives? Why is the place that God ought to have in our lives given over so often to Ashteroth and all the other gods of this world? Why should there be strange gods there when the God of this Book, this Gospel, this Jesus, is able to fill a human heart with all the blessings of his salvation?

This is surely what our young people need to hear! The world has no shortage of strange gods. Time will come when our children will leave home to study, live and work elsewhere. There will be many new and interesting things to discover and experience; yet we must warn them against the idols that will run away with their time, their interests and their heart; strange gods that will try and put the true God out of their thinking altogether.

But there is another element in repentance. When we repent of our sins it is because we are aware of the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. Not only what we are but what he is. Are our hearts turning Christwards? Do we look to Calvary's great work and worth, to what Jesus did for us, dying in our place, taking our nature, our life and our death? The Gospel calls us to turn away from the many strange gods to the one true God, to the Lord Jesus, to serve him only.

And at last, it is to this that repentance leads: to the abandonment of our sins. He is able to drive a wedge between us and sin, able to break sin's dominion, lordship and government in the heart of a man. He is able to take the old away and make all things new. "If a man is in Christ he is a new man, and the dominion of sin is no longer there. Sin is not dominant; grace is dominant because of what he has done for us and because of what he has done in us. That is what repentance means: to turn away from sin knowing and fully persuaded that he is merciful, abandoning our sin in order that we will be holy, consecrated and dedicated to the Lord.

Repentance is not remorse. When we do something wrong, we often feel remorse. But the difference between repentance and remorse is this: when a man is remorseful it is nothing for him to go back to his sin. But when a man repents it is in order that he will leave his sin and cleave to Christ. Is there a Mizpeh in our lives? A place of genuine, evangelical repentance, where we have come as we are to Christ as he is, confessing our sin because the Bible says that if we confess our sin, he is faithful and just to forgive our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. This is our great warrant to repent before God because he is able to forgive and cleanse.

But let us never forget that there is a man of whom the Bible says that he found no place for repentance, although he sought it earnestly with tears. What a terrible description of a human being - aware of the fact that he was wrong, but God handed him over to himself and to the hardness and coldness of his own heart and God said "Mercy no more". There was no place for him to repent. But there is a place for us, in a day of gospel grace and opportunity, to confess the sin of our lips - everything that we said that was tainted with sin and self-interest, and everything unkind that was spoken against our brother and everything that was nothing short of murder - does Jesus not say that if we speak evil against our brothers we are murderers? Bring it to Jesus.

All the sins of our mind - things we allow to get into our mind through the gate of our eye and we let them lodge there, and they came in like a poison, to pollute. We live in a world whose atmosphere is polluted. If you are in a polluted atmosphere, you need to be protected. You need to have breathing apparatus and oxygen supplied to you because you cannot breathe it in naturally. Spiritually, we are taking in all the poison of the world. What a warning to all of us who are parents! We would not dream of placing a plate of poison in front of our children when they sit down for a meal. In fact, we will do everything we can to try and show them that poison can sometimes appear very innocent and harmless; they need to be taught that it can do immense harm, however it appears to us to be. Yet we can expose them to every programme, and soap, and film, and song on television irrespective of the poison going into their minds. That is what the devil does in this polluted air of a Godless, sin-sick world.

But God says that there is a place to which we can bring all these sinful thoughts and repent of them at the mercy-seat of Jesus.

What about our sinful actions? Things we have done that cannot be justified. Maybe we excused ourselves at the time, saying "This is right, I'm right, everyone else is wrong", and we did them and our conscience was clear. But your conscience got no rest, because these actions were indefensible. There was no excuse. There could be no justification for them. You did the thing, and it was wrong. But the Gospel says that there is a place to which we can come. where every sin can be dealt with.

Have we repented?

Mizpeh Was a Place of Revival

Samuel prayed to God for Israel, and God heard. We are told that the Philistines, who had already seen their god fall before the Ark of the Covenant, with a false boldness encamped against Israel. The children of Israel were afraid, we read. At one level they had every right to be afraid. Looking at things with the natural eye they had every reason to be afraid. All the Philistine armies , marshalled there ready to attack.

From every outward appearance the church has every reason to be afraid too. We bear witness to the Gospel - to the one great message of life and hope, and yet what do we see all around us? We see congregations dwindling, the cause receding, the boundaries of Christ's kingdom retracting instead of enlarging. We're seeing evil men in the ascendancy; our rulers and governments laying aside the claims of God's Word and of God's law - we have every reason to be afraid.

Maybe we have more personal reasons for being afraid. Maybe as we look on the horizon of our life, there is some threat looming there, poised to take away our peace, poised to destabilise, and remove every comfort and hope. Perhaps there are things that make us afraid too.

If so, the Bible, and the God of the Bible is for us. What did the Israelites say to Samuel? The Samuel whom they had neglected to listen to for twenty years? "Cease not to pray to the Lord for us". I tell you, if we are afraid, cease not to cry to the Lord. There is a place where fear can be dealt with, as sin can be dealt with; there is a place where anxiety and worry can be dealt with , whatever looms on our horizon is not too large for the Lord - "Cease not to cry". If in our personal life, we are facing something that makes us shudder, we must cry to the Lord, and carry our burdens to Calvary and leave them there, and the Lord will sustain and guide and carry us through. Far too often we take our burdens to Calvary and back again! It is as if they are on an elastic rope, which will bring them back to us again. Far too often we say with Elijah, "I, only I am left"; we sit under the juniper tree and we say "The cause is lost". And we have the juniper tree strapped to our back sometimes, and we carry it around with us, so that wherever we go, and whatever we do, we have this juniper tree of depression hanging over, and these burdens of anxiety looming greater and greater, and we become afraid. The remedy is here "Cease not to cry to the Lord".

There is a place in Heaven where prayers are heard, and received, and where even tears are bottled up; in God's great Heaven, there are bottles filled with the tears of His people who ceased not to cry to Him. What are we to do when the prospects for the church are not good? "Cease not to cry to the Lord". We are not called to put our trust in men, or organisations or associations, we are to cry to the Lord; not in church politics or church courts, but in the Lord of the church, the great King and Head of the Church.

What will he do? He will "discomfit the Philistines". He'll come right down and scatter his enemies and send showers of hail that will scatter the enemies of his cause and will cause his people to triumph. I can do all things, said Paul, through Christ who strengthens me. The Bible supplies the one answer to every single church problem and to every Christian problem: "Cease not to cry to the Lord". He'll send down the blessing, HE'll scatter the enemy, HE'll revive the church, HE'll cause his own cause to triumph, sending out the Gospel, bringing enemies to be the footstool of the King, turning sinners towards him, building up his army - He is the one who will revive his cause in the midst of the years, and in wrath he will remember mercy. It is his prerogative to bless.

The lesson is great: cease from man, whose breath is in his nostrils, and cease not to cry to the Lord, the great King and Head of the Church. That is the place to which we must come with whatever is on our horizon, and whatever causes us anxiety - to turn away from men and to look to Christ. The future of the church is dependent not on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God. And as he did it before, he will do it again - he will bless his own cause and his own church, and will be glorified in the conversion of sinners. In these great ages of revival in the history of the church, you will find the people of God crying to Jehovah for the blessing; and the blessing came down, in spite of all that was happening on earth, the people of God cried to Heaven, and Heaven heard, and Heaven's wind blew; the cause of God was strengthened and renewed and revived. That's what the church needs now, more than anything else in the world - the Spirit of God to breathe upon us, to give us a place of repentance and a place of revival.

Mizpeh Was Also a Place of Remembrance

How could it not be? When Israel's God came down and discomfited Israel's enemies, how could Samuel not raise the stone and call it "Ebenezer - hitherto God has helped us"? Is there a Mizpeh in our lives? A milestone upon which we can look and say "God helped me then, and he has helped me right up to this very moment. Times of difficulty - but God took us through them. Times of trial - but God held us up. Times when we were weak - but God made us strong. Times when we had no resources left - but he was all things to us. Times when everything was dark - but he came in with his light. Times when others forsook us - but he drew alongside us. Times when we felt that we couldn't take another step - but he carried us, and helped us to progress. Times when we felt there was nothing left - but God came and did for us more than we could ask or even think.

For the people of God, their pathway is littered with stones of remembrance, and every one is saying "Up to that point, God helped". There is something I really like about the translation of 7:12 - it has no sign at all of coming to an end. It's not saying "That's the last time God will help". It is saying that he has helped up until now, and whatever lies ahead, he will help then too. Can we say this? Can we give God the glory for helping us to this point, believing that more help will come in every time of need? Let's remember that however good the help of God has been in the past, the best is yet to be; and all who came to experience the blessing of the God of Samuel will one day be gathered into his mansions to be with him for ever and ever! He who gave his people repentance, renewal and revival, gives them reason to shout and sing for joy, because he who has been with his people here, will take his people to be with him in Heaven at last.

© Iain D. Campbell 2001