1 Samuel 12:1 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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1 Samuel 12:1

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Chapter 12 gives us the recorded last sermon of the ageing Samuel, and it is a reproof of the nation. All the people are gathered, and Samuel makes an extraordinary statement to Israel: ‘Behold, I have hearkened unto your voice in all that ye said unto me, and have made a king over you.² And now, behold, the king walketh before you.’ They have got what they ask for, and Samule must now step aside as judge over the nation. Their new king will govern the nation in their chosen form of government. Samuel has been proven as a faithful servant of God, and he is confirmed by his life: ‘I am old and grayheaded; and, behold, my sons are with you: and I have walked before you from my childhood unto this day.³ Behold, here I am: witness against me before the LORD, and before his anointed: whose ox have I taken? or whose ass have I taken? or whom have I defrauded?’ He challenges them to witness against him if he has been guilty of any theft, dishonesty, fraud, or oppression; but they cannot. They know him to be a man of utter integrity. Samuel is demanding of them a clean bill of health, and he rings it out of them as he hands over. Why does he do this? Because he is going to leave them with a serious charge: that they have offended against the Lord, and they better from now on be prayerful and obedient to him, and love him and serve him, because they are actually guilty before him. It is most important for the establishment of God's truth that the integrity and the good conduct of Samuel will be contrasted with the failure of the monarchy that follows. So Samuel, no doubt moved to God, makes sure that on a public occasion any accusers come forward, and in the absence of any accusers, the heads of the tribes and the families swear an oath, which is put in writing and attested by the new king: that Samuel was entirely blameless and innocent. That will silence the whisperers, who would spoil the emergence of the truth: that God's order was good, and that monarchy was inferior by contrast. Samuel is going to die soon, and after his death, there will be people who will try to debunk him, so he wants it on witness now. It would spoil things if they could start murmuring against Samuel, which is what so often happens in ordinary life. Somebody is displaced; a new order comes in, new staff, new arrangements, and then people want to justify what they have done, and they may say, ‘Those former people: they did everything wrong; they weren't worth paying; they made too many mistakes. They did this, they did that.’ If there has been change, it often happens. Now Samuel doesn't want them to be able to make up all kinds of stories; it would make them feel better about having cried out for a king if they could tarnish Samuel's reputation, and then they would no longer feel that they had wronged God, and they would escape the indictment. So Samuel rings out of them a statement, a legal statement: ‘We agree: you never did anything wrong.’ But when you read it you think, What mean-spirited people! Don't you think some of them might have thought, ‘We should be doing more than just confirming that he did us no wrong. He did a whole lot right. He delivered us time and again. We asked him to pray for us when we were in serious trouble, and because he interceded for us we were delivered. He has held the country together. Let's round up something for him.’ But no, not a bit of it. They just about give him what he requires of them, which is a clean bill of health, and off he goes. This is an amazing incident: that he just about gets them to acknowledge that he has been utterly straightforward. He has been a man of prayer; he has been a man of immense patience, called to minister and hold the people together in times of rebellion and difficulty, when they couldn't even have the ark of God present in their holy place. The Lord was not with them, and yet Samuel carried out his duties; he kept his circuit going; he judged the people in the major cities. He was open and available to them, approachable by them the whole time. He was constantly faithful to them, calling them to order and to service of the Lord with no reward. But Samuel wasn’t searching for a reward on earth, and neither should we.

Application

We should be very disturbed about the trend these days to single out various ministers and various personalities, and to publish their biographies. Now as a great enjoyer of biography, I am speaking somewhat hypocritically here, because I have read many biographies of Christian people and ministers, and enjoyed them and benefited from them. But on the other hand, there is an area that makes you very uncomfortable. You read of those who are retired and give the rest of their lives working with their biographers. Whatever for? Samuel did not do that. There is no biography of Samuel in First Samuel. There is a history of the kingdom, but you look in vain for much personal detail about Samuel. When he could have been applauded, he doesn't look for it, he doesn't demand it. He has got a reward in heaven. He is a servant of the Lord, and that is the best thing: for our eyes not to be on reputations, or what people think, or what might be left behind when we are gone, but just on the Lord and his work. Of course, we look forward to the eternal reward, which we shall never deserve, and which we shall never earn, but which we shall receive anyway because of the grace of God.

These are good words for today. You read of churches where people complain – not just one or two, but many – that in that church they were oppressed by the leadership of the church. It wasn't humble leadership; it wasn't a leadership that existed in order to nurture and help and comfort and inspire the people, but to command and lord it. So people were oppressed, and people were defrauded, where the leadership has been after money, and they have become rich men, and so on. Whether it's defrauding people or oppressing people; all these terms, you can see today, even in some churches. It is shocking the way some people, in the name of the Lord, particularly in whole sections of the Charismatic churches defraud the people and take from them and extort offerings from them on the basis of absurd and fraudulent promises. It is not universal in the Pentecostal world, but it is in very large sections of it: sheer fraud.

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1 Samuel 12:1 Commentary and Bible Study