1 Samuel 7:2 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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1 Samuel 7:2

Comments

‘And all the house of Israel lamented after the LORD.’ Does that statement belong to the following verses? Did they come to lament after the Lord after twenty long years? Or did they lament for the Lord throughout those twenty years, but in the wrong spirit? And there is great diversity of opinion about this. Curious as it sounds, it is more likely that the lamenting after the Lord took place throughout the twenty years. The Philistine oppression went on; the children of Israel were downtrodden and slaves, as it were, to the Philistines; they farmed for them, and worked for them. They had no positive national identity during that period and they lamented after the Lord, but without perhaps repentance, without giving up Baal and Ashtaroth, the false gods, the gods of the Philistines; not yet; that comes. So they were committing presumptuous sins. They knew better, but the people at large said, we will worship the true God, and, for good measure, we will worship the gods of our pagan neighbours as well, and so we will be rewarded by all of them. And this syncretism went on, and they knew they shouldn’t do that. All that time, throughout the twenty years, we have to assume that Samuel was not silent. There was a prophet in the land, and he had been attested before them. The previous chapter tells us that all Israel knew Samuel was a prophet of the Lord, and he would have been appealing to them throughout this time. So they had the light, but they took no notice. It took twenty years for them to desire that the ark should be taken to Ramah the high place where Samuel exercised his ministry, and until that happened, the token of the presence of the Lord was not with his people. They had worship; they had sacrifices, but they did not have the presence of the Lord. What a tragedy! No evidence of God's great goodness with them, no joy, no fruits of a walk with him, no fellowship with God, not to any extent, while the ark of God remained in this provincial place.

Application

Now this is the relevance to us. Here we are getting a picture of an Old Testament period of spiritual declension, in which the people still worshipped, but they worshipped other gods too, and they didn’t give them up. The people still worshipped, but they didn't yet call upon Samuel, their prophet levite priest, to pray for them and to intercede for them. They didn't yet repent. So it is possible in a period of declension for the church to be longing for awakening, longing for a breath of the Spirit, for souls to be saved, for the country to be woken up once again with vast numbers of people becoming believers instead of the church in every town being a tiny, almost immeasurable minority in that community. It’s possible for the church to desire and lament, but simply not obey God in taking the steps necessary to reverse the decline.

Is that the state of affairs we are in in the UK, and the West generally at the present time? There are churches where the Lord is loved and owned, and the truth is preached, and the pastors are nice people and godly people, yet the decline goes on, and the churches go on shrinking. As decade passes decade, the trend is only downward. There is no change; there is no awakening; there is no evidence of a work of the Spirit at large in the churches. Are we in the Israelite’s situation with the Philistine occupation? They lamented all right, but they wouldn’t do the right things.

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1 Samuel 7:2 Commentary and Bible Study