Here I am - 1st Samuel 3

At this point, Eli has had “a man of God” come curse him and his family because of their wickedness and I’m sure that weighed heavily on him because he’s not a bad guy. TB gave an excellent summation of Eli and it was a very powerful commentary on leadership in God’s kingdom. He said, “We must be careful not to mischaracterize Eli as a thoroughly wicked man and thus worthy of destruction; he was not and thus God did not destroy him. Rather Eli was a decent man who loved the Lord, but he was a weak man, not strong enough for the challenging and critical role as Israel’s High Priest… Eli’s lack of fortitude led to allowing his sons to run rampant over God’s people… Undoubtedly Eli had inherited (and not created) a dysfunctional priesthood along with 12 dysfunctional tribes to oversee, but there is also no evidence that he did any more than to passively man his post, enjoy the honors and privileges of his lofty office and abide by the many questionable manmade traditions that developed and now existed and operated in place of God’s authorized sacrificial rituals and worship protocols.” Eli fell into the trap of passivity , and that’s not to say that problems need to be created when there are none, but there were serious problems in the priesthood of Israel at the time and he didn’t do anything to remedy that.

But here’s the powerful part about leadership, TB says, “There is a lesson here for all who would aspire to be a leader of God’s people. First, one had better be called and equipped by Yehoveh for the job because second, if you accept a leadership role of whatever lever (whether called of now) you WILL be held responsible by God for what transpires on your watch. Obviously no. leader can know everything that goes on or control every detail; but a leader is expected to be diligent, vigilant, and to obey the Lord and do what may be difficult versus what is popular or even usual. Eli took over a mess but rather than endeavor to clean it up, he preferred to leave it a mess. That made it his fault; now he owned it and all the repercussions that came with it.” I thought it was an interesting commentary on the preparation process required make a leader strong enough to bear the mantle of responsibility required.

I think it’s a loss that we don’t have any other records of the preparation process that the prophets and even of Jesus went through in the scriptures. Like we see what they can do at the end when they are in their ministry, but we don’t know what they went through in order to get to that point. The most we get is that Jesus grew in stature and from grace to grace. We know that Alma and even Joseph Smith grew through fasting and prayer, but what does that look like? Did it look similar for all these leaders? Was it different and very individualized? Did they all arrive at the same conclusions regarding doctrine. Alma, Paul, and Joseph Smith all come to mind when I think that there was no school that they could attend to learn all the gospel truths that they preached, so those teachings had to come from God personally, right? Even Moses and Abraham had extensive knowledge about the cosmos, but there’s no way that they knew that except it was taught to them by God. What trials did they suffer? How did God’ teach them? Maybe that’s the point, that I don’t need to know about what they went through, it’s not a competition, we all have our own ways and requirements for our own individual tasks, and I have to trust that God’s plan is perfect and that His plan for me is perfect.

Anyway, Eli has probably been thinking about this curse given by this man of God and shortly thereafter, TB says at most a couple of years after this man curses him, and as Eli got older, “the child Samuel ministered unto the Lord before Eli. And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open visions.” This IM says that this means that there was no prophet to receive the word of God in behalf of the people. So somewhat of an apostasy. Also I was wrong that the “faithful priest” the man of God told Eli about is not Samuel, but instead was probably a man named Zadok, who anointed king David. I was wrong about that.

One night as Eli and Samuel were asleep, God calls to Samuel and he gives the famous answer, “Here am I,” and he runs to Eli to see what he needed. I just want to point out how cute this is that Samuel RUNS to the aged Eli to help him with whatever he needed, and the scriptures point out specifically “ran”. Eli says “I didn’t call you, go back to bed.” And this happens three times before Eli realized that this is God calling Samuel. This is understandable because God didn’t usually talk to the priests or anyone those days because of their wickedness. But once Eli realizes that it is God calling Samuel, he tells the boy that it was God calling and if God called again, to answer, “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.” It’s noted that Samuel himself didn’t recognize that God was calling him because “Samuel did not yet know the Lord, neither was the word of the Lord yet revealed unto him.”

Now my question was, if Samuel had been serving in the temple for the last several years, why didn’t he know the Lord yet? TB answers this, saying, “The special relationship between Adonai and Samuel (much like believers have with God) hadn’t formed yet partly because Samuel was much too young to understand such lofty spiritual matters and also partly because Eli apparently hadn’t done much to teach him.” This is also perhaps one of the reasons why Eli’s sons had such problems spiritual matters, Eli probably didn’t teach them much either. Now, teaching them isn’t a guarantee that they won’t go astray, but not teaching them almost guarantees that they won’t learn it, unless God intervenes like He did in Samuel’s case. This is also a good commentary on the fact that just going through the repetitive motions of spirituality doesn’t mean you know God or develop a relationship with Him. So it takes more than just doing the things, it takes more effort and desire because I have to believe that God wants a relationship with all of us, but we have to try and make even a small effort otherwise we won’t be receptive to anything He wants to teach us.

God does indeed call Samuel a 4th time and when Samuel answers Him, God goes into a long rant about the destruction that he is going to bring to Eli’s house. Now my question is, here’s this young children, maybe 8 or 10 years old, speaking to God for the first time, why is this the message that God gives Samuel? Like I would have thought that it would have been something like “God loves you” or something like that I don’t know. Why tell this poor frightened child about the destruction of the family of the man that is taking care of him? TB notes that this message might have been because “Preparation was underway to make Samuel the Lord’s official earthly messenger and for Samuel to be a judge over Israel. He would have to grow up fast, now. He had learned of the Lord’s intent to severely harm Eli and his family… It seems that the first thing that the boy who didn’t know God learned that God will punish wickedness among His own people and especially among those set-apart to serve Him. I would imagine that this event had much to do with shaping Samuel’s life and his determination to be faithful to God at all costs.”

I have often wondered why there’s so much emphasis on punishment for disobeying God, like why is the focus mostly stick instead of carrot, and I think that’s because I just don’t operate that way. I mean, I’m not only good because it’s the right thing to do, but avoiding punishment isn’t really that strong of a motivator to me, I mostly respond to the promise of reward, which I think is probably unusual. But there is a lot of emphasis on fire and brimstone and eternal torment and I think that a lot of people respond to that and maybe that’s why God led with that, the lesson that serving in God’s kingdom comes with high expectations and serious consequences. I also think that maybe Samuel was getting to the age where he was going to start seeing the conduct of Eli and his sons and mimic it like most young boys do, so God wanted to set the record straight that their behavior was unacceptable in His eyes and wouldn’t be tolerated.

God told Samuel all about the bad things that were going to happen to Eli and his family, and of course, Eli had been the one to recognize that God was trying to speak to Samuel, and I wonder if Eli was able to go back to sleep after that realization. I wonder if Eli was disappointed that God was speaking to a child and not to him, or if he was relieved. In the morning, Samuel woke up to start his duties and Eli wanted to know all about what God told Samuel, so poor Samuel was probably terrified, but he told Eli everything that God said, and to his credit, Eli’s response was “It is the Lord: let him do what seemeth him good.” Eli seems resigned to fact his family is going to be destroyed and that it was partially his fault. But Eli didn’t fight it, he recognized that God was right to do this and accepted responsibility for the outcome, that is at least impressive. I feel bad for Eli, he’s a decent guy and I hope the next life treated him ok and he was able to get right with God.

Here's another example of prophetic preparation that we just aren’t given any descriptive information about because all it says is “and Samuel grew, and the Lord was with him, and did let none of his words fall to the ground.” This means that everything that Samuel prophesied came to fruition. Interestingly, Samuel was so prolifically prophetic that he was accepted to be “a prophet of the Lord’ from Dan to Beer-sheba.” This is an ancient Hebrew phrase that meant from Dan in the south to Beer-sheba in the north, meaning the entirety of the land of Israel. Now Israel at this time was very divided and tribal so for Samuel to be a agreed upon, unifying force for God was significant because they probably didn’t agree on anything else.

Not only did Samuel grew in favor with God and man, but he was had the Lord appear to him in Shiloh. Pretty impressive.