Hallmarks of Greatness

"As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you. And I will teach you the way that is good and right. But be sure to fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all your heart; consider what great things he has done for you. Yet if you persist in doing evil, both you and your king will be swept away"

1 Samuel 12:23-25

We have noted that Samuel's story is found at a critical point in the history of Israel and the story of the church in the Old Testament. The historical record at this point divides into three sections -- a period when there was no king, a period then when the people's king, Saul, sat on the throne, and a period when God's king, David, sat on the throne, the reign of David and his successors characterised by the special covenant relationship into which God entered with them.

This is really the transition period between the period of the judges and the monarchy in Israel. Samuel is really the last of the judges whom God gave to his people to show them His ways, and to instruct them in the things of God. We all need that kind of instruction; it does not matter what stage of life we may be at -- whether children, teenagers, adults, parents, grandparents -- we all need to be taught the things of God. We may find ourselves at critical points in our lives -- we need to know God's word and will in these situations. That was Samuel's calling and function in Israel at this critical moment, moving from the judges to the monarchy.

It is interesting to discover that from this point in the book of Samuel, the man after whom the book is named is removed from centre stage. He moves into the sidelines and the shadows. His influence is still felt, and he will reappear; but this chapter 12 is really Samuel's last great speech to the people -- his last great sermon. Saul has been anointed king and placed on the throne.

We have already noted that Saul's appointing was a sign of the rebellion of the people against Jehovah; yet his anointing was a signal that God's hand was in all of this. And God, even now, in his grace, is saying to the people that if they serve Him, all will be well. Even though they had turned aside from God, God's grace was greater than their sin and rebellion -- even now, God was summoning them to come in repentance and faith to walk anew in his ways.

Do you realise that this is the very essence of the Gospel? Here is the great grace of the God of the covenant shining through the pages of the Old Testament. God had chosen Israel to be his servant, his people, his treasure. And in spite of sin, waywardness, rebellion and backsliding, his heart was to them, and his grace was stretched out to them still. That is the very kernel of the evangel; whatever we may have done in our life, whatever transgression committed, whatever blot there may be on our character, whatever mess sin may have made, the grace of God is greater than the sin of man. Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. Even now, in this hour of darkness and rebellion, when Israel has moved from God, God says through the prophet that there is grace for them if they seek the Lord.

Is this not the grand theme that runs through the Bible from beginning to end? Whatever we may be like, there is grace, salvation and mercy for us if we seek the Lord. That is the offer; that is the Gospel invitation. It is to all who have sinned and come short of the glory. It offers the cleansing of the blood of Calvary to every sinner who comes to Christ. It excludes none and draws all.

That is what Samuel lays before the people at this juncture. He is really making his great defence before the people. It is as if Samuel is testifying before the people, as a witness in a courtroom drama, as if you had asked him, "After all you have now seen, and experienced, and gone through, what have you now to say?" Here is Samuel's great defence of his ministry and his prophetic work among the people. "I am here," he says in verse 3: "bear witness against me before the Lord and His anointed." Samuel gave them the opportunity to lift their finger against him, to invoke God as prosecuting counsel against him. "If I have moved away one inch from the path of truth," he says, "say it now. See if my life does not conform to the standard of God's word and revelation!"

How many of us can say that? How many of us would be able to lay our lives open to this kind of scrutiny before the world and testify that our Christian witness and integrity are all that they ought to have been? I know that I could not do it in this way. What would men say of us and of our lives, of our Christian profession and ministry, were we to place ourselves in the dock, and stand before them?

Or, which is even more important, what would God say of us? Can we say with David in Psalm 26, "Judge me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity"? Or in Psalm 139 "Search me, and see if there is any wicked way in me?" Are our lives all that they should be at the great bar and touchstone of God's word, God's truth and God's law? What are we like? What kind of people are we?

The Gospel finds us far away from God, but there is reconciliation for us before God in Christ. He calls us to come to Jesus, to have our sins washed, to live as his people, to walk before him and be blameless (Genesis 17:1; cf. 1 John 2:1). How do we fare in terms of these absolute standards?

Samuel took a great risk. Here he was, before the whole congregation of Israel, offering them this great opportunity to witness against him. I think that Samuel pleads three things in his defence, three things to which he unashamedly draws the attention of the people as he speaks of his own faithful life as a follower of Jehovah. And nothing matters more than personal faithfulness of God.

The Bible shows us this time and time again. Important as other things might be, what matters ultimately is not our faithfulness to our friends, or church, or denomination -- these things are of secondary importance. What matters supremely is our faithfulness to God, whether we are ministers, elders, members -- the great question is "Are we faithful to the God of the Bible?" Do you see the ultimate foundation of the Gospel is the faithfulness of God to us -- he is faithful, having called us into the fellowship of his Son (1 Corinthians 1:9), faithful to forgive us and cleanse us from all sin (1 John 1:7). He is a faithful, trustworthy, gentlemanly God, who will not renege on his promise. We can lean on him, and he will not move.

You see, men will say things to us, and we will trust them, but often our trust is misplaced and our hopes disappointed. We discover that their promises are empty. But God is not like that. His people can lean on him, and he will keep them and not move. The greatest blessing and assurance we have in the Gospel is not what we are, but what he is -- not the kind of people WE are, but the kind of GOD that is revealed in the Bible in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. Every day change is written over our lives, but he does not change. We have friends that come and go -- but he remains with his people, the friend who is closer than any brother. We can lean on him all the while, whatever the weather, and whatever the difficulty may be. God's people have discovered the truth of Proverbs 3:5 -- "Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding". They have discovered that at the heart of the Gospel is the faithfulness of this covenant-making and covenant-keeping God.

What, then, ought our response to be to such a God as this? That God is calling us to Gospel, evangelical faithfulness. That is our debt to him. Let's fly over all the years that are left of this world's history; let's come to the great climax of history, to the judgement seat of Christ, when he will be revealed and will divide men and women from each other. What will be his criterion? On what basis will the division be made? What will he say to his people? He will say "Come, you blessed of my Father -- inherit the kingdom prepared for you. You were faithful in a little; I will make you inherit great things.

God's people, as the Book of Revelation tells us, were called, and chosen and faithful. Yes, Faithful is his name; Jesus is called Faithful and True (Revelation 3:14; 19:11). But his people are also exhorted to be faithful to death, for then they will receive the crown of life (Revelation 2:10). And those who overcome, those who are 'with the Lamb' are described as "called, and chosen and faithful" (Revelation 17:14). You cannot separate these things -- if God has called us by His Spirit, it is because he chose us in his love. And if that is true, the result of it, and our responsibility, is to be faithful to him -- faithful to what he has said in his Word; faithful to what he has declared in the Bible, faithful to the God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ.

So let us take this lesson from the great risk Samuel took, when he exposed his life to the scrutiny of Israel, and was seen to be transparently faithful to the God of the covenant. There are, I think, three great characteristics of Samuel's faithfulness: there is, first, the integrity of Samuel's personal life; there is, secondly, the consistency of his public witness; and there is, thirdly, the constancy of his private devotion.

The Integrity of Samuel's Personal Life

Listen to what Samuel says: "Witness against me before the Lord," he says in verse 3, "whose ox have I taken? Whose ass have I taken? Whom have I oppressed? From whom did I receive a bribe to blind my eye to it?" You know, that's what a bribe does -- it blinds your eyes to the truth, so that you conveniently omit to see what you ought to see, ignore what you ought to register. Samuel never did that. To a man they all said, "you never defrauded us, or oppressed us, or took anything from any man's hand".

So Samuel could say with truth and confidence that the Lord was a witness against them that they had not found anything wrong in his life. Samuel's faithfulness is written not on his church affiliation, or his doctrinal orthodoxy, but in the integrity of his personal life. He was a man who had a position of power which he never once abused. He had a position of responsibility which he never once shirked. He never took advantage of anyone, whose hands were clean and whose heart was pure. The Bible asks -- "who can ascend God's hill or share God's tent?" (Psalm 24:1). The answer is supplied -- the qualification for staying in the same tent as God is that our hands must be clean, and our hearts pure; our eyes must be free from looking on sin, our hearts and lives must be clean.

It is one of the sobering tests which the Bible applies to our Christian profession and our Christian name -- are we faithful? Being faithful has nothing to do primarily with church affiliation or denominational preference, nothing with which version of the Bible we use or which personal pronouns we adopt in prayer. It is not anchored in these outward forms; you can have the most religious and pious-looking man, yet whose personal life lacks integrity. Give me a man who can move among men with a conscience free from offence, who can leave his life and behaviour open to the searching and the scrutiny of others, and who knows that nothing can be found in that life inconsistent with what that man professes in his religion -- and there is a man who is being faithful to the God of the Bible. The great, acid test of our Christian profession is not what we appear to be to men before a great congregation, but what we are in our everyday lives, before men, as we put our hand to our work and go about our daily responsibilities. When we go about our business -- are we faithful to Jehovah then?

Here is a man who professes to be a Christian, but he has never done an honest day's work in his life. Where is his profession there? It has come apart. Here is a man who professes to be a Christian, but he is never at home. He never spends time with his wife and children, he's going here there and everywhere -- perhaps to every religious service that is going. But his Christian life lacks integrity at the fundamental level of his domestic responsibilities. His profession is belied by the kind of lifestyle he follows.

Let me put it another way. Might there not be some people who have been put right off the Gospel because of the lack of integrity in the lives of God's people? Maybe they have seen right through the profession some people have made; perhaps they have watched Christians assume and exercise positions of leadership and authority in the church on Sunday; but then they have seen them on Monday. How different they are at work! when no-one else is around, and then there is no integrity in the way in which they live. They have found a way to compartmentalise their profession -- packaged in a religious Sabbath routine, it is belied by an inconsistent weekly routine.

The world is well able to detect hypocrisy and guile. It can see right through a false profession, and will not hesitate in saying so. Sometimes the behaviour of God's people is the worst advert for the Christian Gospel. I do not ask people to come to Christ because of the behaviour of God's people; I ask them to come to Christ in spite of what some Christians are like, and because of what Christ himself is like. He remains the sinless, spotless Lamb of God; and it is because of his integrity that there is Good News for us in the Gospel.

That is the basis on which we must plead with men to come to Christ and entrust their eternal destinies to the doctrines of the Bible -- not what the Church is like, but what the Christ of the Church is like.

What a sobering test this is for all of us who profess to be the disciples of Jesus! Can we plead the integrity of our conduct and our behaviour as a defence of our relationship to him and our service for him? Can we point to our faithfulness as husbands, wives, parents, children, workers, employers -- in our daily living? I am not interested in a Christianity that can be parcelled up in neat packages for a Sunday morning or evening, or for a midweek meeting; no -- I am interested in a Gospel that works its way through, and shows itself in, a particular kind of living that evidences to the world each day what Christ means to us.

The news headlines have been dominated in the past with men in positions of power abusing it and making a mockery of their Christian profession. This is a plea for integrity in daily living, which remains the supreme test of our devotion. If we have strayed and sinned, then let us repent and return to Christ; let us follow him anew, with a desire to grow in holiness. Samuel could say 'I never once robbed, or defrauded -- what you saw was what you got'.

Those who are familiar with computer language will know what WYSIWYG means -- "What you see is what you get". It means that what appears on the screen is exactly what will be printed out on your printer. That is the kind of Christianity the Bible commends, because far too often what men see is not what they get. They see pious people, legalistic people, orthodox people -- but they get lazy, obnoxious, ill-tempered people. They see religion, but they get worldliness. They see every apparent evidence of regeneration, but they get no evidence that these men have been born again at all. They see religion, respectability, men in authority in the church, men at the Lord's Table, and praying in the Prayer Meeting, and sitting on church courts, boards and committees, but they see the same people cheating on their taxes, lazy at their work, inconsistent at some level of daily life.

Churches may be open one day a week, but our Christian profession has to be open seven days a week. It must be carried with us into every aspect of our life and behaviour.

The Consistency of Samuel's Public Witness

What is Samuel's message to the people? "Take your stand," he says, "that I may plead with you before the Lord concerning all the righteous acts of the Lord which he did for you and your fathers" (12:7). He takes them right back to the revelation of God's salvation, back to the fundamental and defining acts of God in redeeming his people by the hand of Moses and Aaron and bringing them to dwell in the land of covenant promise and blessing. He is taking them back to the Bible.

That is where his public witness -- to the Bible, to the Word of God. It was enough for Samuel to believe a thing to be true because God said it and because God did it. That is what was said of Charles Hodge, the great American theologian -- it was enough for Hodge to believe something was true if he read it in the Bible. That is where his public profession began, and that was where it ended. That was the touchstone and the test at which every belief he had was measured, not by the opinion of men, but by the opinion of God.

Is that not what Samuel is saying here? He wants to plead, to preach, to reason of what God did in the past for his people. The Christian faith is not built upon the vain imaginings of men, but on God's self-revelation, his self-disclosure -- the infallible, inerrant truth of his own word.

People say today -- we cannot believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. We cannot believe that everything we read in the Bible is true. But, you know, we use the concept of inerrancy every single day of our lives. If we plan to sail away from the island, we need to get the ferry timetable. And we operate on the assumption that the timetable is inerrant, and that the ferry will sail exactly when the timetable says. You look up some paper to see when a particular programme will be broadcast on television, and you operate on the principle of the inerrancy of the document which gives you the television listings.

So, you see, every day we operate on the principle of the inerrancy of the information on which we base our lives and our behaviour. But one of Satan's greatest weapons over the past century and a half has been to call in question the inerrancy of one document more than any other -- to question the whole question of the inerrancy of Scripture. The supreme source of truth is in the revelation of God in his word.

That is where Samuel's message begins -- he brings Israel back to what God did when he saved his people. That is where the public witness of the church must always begin -- with the preaching of God's saving acts and saving work, revealed in the Bible. Let the Word of God set the parameters of our thinking and of our preaching. Let the Bible hedge around our public message to the world.

This is what Samuel is pressing home on the people at this point -- will they obey the God of the Bible or will they not? Will they serve the God of the Bible or will they not? Will they follow the God of the Bible or will they turn aside from him? That is exactly what our situation is still. That must still characterise the evangelical pulpit in our day -- the proclamation of a message that begins and ends with the salvation declared in the Bible, and applied to the lives of men and women.

We believe a thing to be true not because a minister says it, but because the Bible says it. The minister ought to be saying what the Bible is saying. And if there is an incongruity between the Bible's message and the preacher's message -- tell the preacher he's wrong. The one non-negotiable is that the Bible could be wrong. Nothing will do except what God has done. And nothing will save but what God has done. It is God's great word and revelation that must be the alpha and omega of our public witness.

Samuel could say in defence of his own faithfulness to Jehovah that he had never moved away from the revelation which came from God. Like Paul in a later age he could say that he was innocent from the blood of all men because he did not shrink from declaring to them the whole purpose of God (Acts 20:26-27).

That is the great test for a church -- will it remain faithful to what God has said, and proclaimed and taught in his word. Can we say that we have done nothing more and nothing less than stood by the word of God in its entirety and sufficiency. And it is that Word that challenges men still and says -- will you turn aside and disobey, or will you follow the voice of Jehovah?

What will it be for us? As preachers -- will we let the Bible shape our proclamation? As hearers -- will we let the proclamation shape our lives? There is only one God, and Jehovah is that God. Jesus is that God, and his claim over us is absolute. Blessed are those people who sit under the ministry of the Word of life, in which Jehovah-Jesus presses home his claims of truth upon men and women.! This is the God with whom we must do business -- the God of the final, infallible revelation of the Bible.

The Constancy of Samuel's Private Devotion

Listen to these beautiful words: "God forbid that I should sin against God by ceasing to pray for you" (verse 23). Here is this man who heard God's voice calling to him, and who has now learned what it means to talk to God, a man who has learned the discipline of heart religion. He knows how to pour out his soul in the presence of God.

Do you know -- do I know -- that kind of religion? Do we know how to do business with God? How to pray to God? Do we know what it is to come with all our problems, and all our burdens, and all our anxieties and lay them before God, who remains the God who hears and answers prayers (Psalm 65:2). Here is Samuel, faithful to God; where do you see his faithfulness? Not only in his daily, public life; not only in the orthodoxy of his public witness and proclamation. No -- follow him to his private devotion before God as he comes to God praying for the children of Israel.

Could you catch a glimpse into Samuel's secret room, his secret place into which no-one else would come -- what would you find him doing there? You would find him pleading and praying before God in the interests of his church and his people and his kingdom.

What would God find us doing in our secret place? Do we have a devotional life lived in the very presence of God. Do we know how to come to God with all that concerns your life, your family, your church? Do you pray to God for his cause, and for his church, and for your responsibilities, and for those lives that God has entrusted to your care; God forbid, was Samuel's desire, that I should sin by ceasing to pray.

What about you and me? Have we 'ceased to pray'? Have we stopped praying? For ourselves and our loved ones. Have we sinned against God because we have stopped praying for others, for the church, for the work of the Gospel all over the world, for the ministry of the Word, for the blessing to come to you through the preaching of the Gospel. Samuel wanted a ceaseless prayer life.

The secret of our religion does not depend on what we are before men. Now, that might seem to contradict all that I have been saying in this study. What we are before men is of supreme importance. But it is not the essential thing. The essence of our religion is what we are before God. As someone has put it 'what a man is before God is what a man is'.

What are we before God? Do we come to him? His ear is not heavy; he needs no aid to his earing. There is nothing in his ear that would stop him hearing our prayer; but there is much in our hearts that would stop us praying to him. God forbid that we should sin against God by ceasing to pray! Ceasing to do the most important thing of all -- unburdening ourselves in his presence and seeking his blessing upon our own lives and the lives of others.

Here is a truly great man -- faithful to God, and able to stand, unashamedly before the gathered tribes of Israel testifying to his personal life marked by integrity, that his public life is marked by consistency and that his personal devotion is marked by constancy in the presence of God that leaves him interceding for Israel time and time again.

Are we faithful? Must we stand before him with our heads hung in shame because of our faithlessness? Or are we seeking grace to live even more faithfully to the God of the covenant, who in Jesus Christ loved us and gave himself for us. May God deliver us from a religion that is content with outward form and show, and that is not, like the house Jesus commended, built upon the sure rock-foundation that is Jesus Christ!

© Iain D. Campbell 2001