Original Meaning

Original Meaning

THIS IMPORTANT PARAGRAPH introduces the final chapter of the first extended unit of 1 Samuel (chs. 1–7). The so-called Shiloh narratives (chs. 1–3) traced Yahweh’s intervention on Israel’s behalf. He initiated and orchestrated the downfall of the nation’s wicked priestly leadership and replaced it with Samuel, his chosen leader for the next great period of Israel’s history. The ark narrative (chs. 4–6) related another deliverance at the hands of Yahweh. He turned military and spiritual defeat into victory for Israel, even if the people failed to understand his nature or the full implications of his salvation.

These two units appear on the surface to have little to do with each other. But woven together into a single narrative tapestry, they prepare us for the anointing of Saul and ultimately for the arrival of Israel’s greatest king, David. In various ways, these narratives introduce us to the great kingmaker, Samuel, and to the concept that Israel desperately needs a king.

Permeating the whole is this wonderful and perplexing truth: Israel is still living in relationship with Yahweh. Her religious leadership has been wicked. She has tried to manipulate God and to use him for military advantage over the enemy. In sum, she has been plagued with sin and failure. But through it all, he graciously continues to find a way to save her and draw her closer to himself. After chapter 7 the narrative leads directly to the issue of kingship.1 In the present passage, the text deals more directly with the relationship between Israel and Yahweh. The ark has been returned to Israel, but the Philistine military threat is as serious as previously. Nothing has really been resolved, only now Samuel stands as a legitimate prophet to lead the people and reexamine their relationship with Yahweh.

For twenty years, the ark rests in Kiriath Jearim, presumably without a proper tabernacle (such as it had in Shiloh). The people during this time apparently have a change of heart. Whereas their mourning in 6:19 was the result of the tragedy at Beth Shemesh (“The people mourned because of the heavy blow the LORD had dealt them”), their remorse in 7:2 is accompanied by a seeking after Yahweh.2 Functioning in his role as prophet, Samuel seizes the opportunity, seeing that the people are ready for genuine repentance.

Verse 3 contains a number of set phrases characteristic of Israelite prophetic preaching. Some scholars take their combination here as indication that this verse (or indeed, this paragraph) is a later addition by an exilic redactor.3 It may indeed be true that these so-called “Deuteronomistic” themes have a shared common origin and may even be part of a larger editorial framework. But they probably also reflect genuine Israelite prophecy at its best, even in the earlier periods.

The first of these characteristic phrases is the most important Old Testament expression for repentance: “if you are returning to the LORD.” To “return” (šwb) to the Lord implies acknowledging, confessing, and forsaking sinful behavior (cf. Jer. 3:22–4:2 for the steps of repentance), making it possible to be reinstated in a right relationship with him. It is both a turning away from one’s sins, which have caused the separation, and a turning unto Yahweh, who can forgive and restore.

This returning is intensely personal. It is not a mechanical or physical positioning but a relational and associative allegiance. It occurs throughout Old Testament literature but notably in Deuteronomy (Deut. 4:30; 30:2), prophetic texts interspersed in the historical books (2 Kings 17:13; 2 Chron. 7:14; 30:6), and particularly in the prophets. “Returning” (or simply “turning”) is particularly important in Jeremiah’s preaching.4 and is the climactic call in Hosea (Hos. 14:1–2). Perhaps the text that illustrates best the use of this word in the prophets is Joel 2:12–13:

“Even now,” declares the LORD,

“return to me with all your heart,

with fasting and weeping and mourning.”

Rend your heart

and not your garments.

Return to the LORD your God,

for he is gracious and compassionate,

slow to anger and abounding in love,

and he relents from sending calamity.

But such returning to Yahweh must by definition be wholehearted. The combination of “returning” with “the whole heart” has been identified as central to the preaching of Old Testament historical narrative.5 Samuel, as Joel would do later, calls on Israel to return to Yahweh “with all your hearts” (7:3). Halfhearted returning will not do. Most such references to the “heart” in the Old Testament (lebab and leb) refer to the seat of one’s intellectual commitments rather than singularly to human emotions, as we tend to use it in modern English.6

Such repentance, if it is to be genuine, must also be accompanied by three other characteristics, according to Samuel in 7:3. These characteristics are marked in the text by three phrases, each beginning with an imperative verb. (1) “Rid yourselves of the foreign gods and the Ashtoreths.” This imperative (hasiru, Hiphil of swr) connotes a putting away, or laying aside, of something to be picked up no more. The Ashtoreths were local manifestations of one of the important goddesses of Canaan, the goddess of love and fertility.7 As the Israelites put away their “Baals and Ashtoreths” (7:4), they are rejecting the leading Canaanite deities of fertility, which were associated especially with sexual rituals at local Canaanite shrines. Their identification as “foreign gods” is more than a reference to their non-Israelite origins. They are, in fact, other than Yahweh, who requires exclusive devotion (“serve him only,” 7:3; see below). The Lord cannot be worshiped along with other gods as though he merely supplements their benefits. To worship Yahweh is to reject all others.

(2) The next phrase of Samuel’s call to repentance is “commit yourselves to the LORD.” Literally, the Hebrew idiom is to fix or establish (imperative hakinu) one’s heart on something, which often pictures a fixing or setting permanently one’s heart on Yahweh. The idea communicated here is one of tenacious determination to remain faithful and loyal to God; it is the antithesis of being stubborn and rebellious (Ps. 78:8, see also 2 Chron. 30:19; Ezra 7:10). This commitment is a logical, though not necessarily chronological, concomitant of the first imperative. When one fixes one’s heart on Yahweh, it involves a repudiation of the fertility gods of Canaan. These are two sides of the same theological commitment, and one automatically entails the other. Loyalty to Yahweh requires rejection of Baal and Ashtoreth.

(3) “Serve him only.” This imperative (ʿibduhu) is the common word for “serve” and, in the context of serving a deity, connotes “worship.”8 The restrictive modifier “only” gets at one of the most important distinguishing characteristics of Israelite religion: Yahweh requires exclusive devotion. Syncretism, or the worship of Yahweh alongside other deities, is forbidden for the ancient Israelite. The Philistines had followed an idolatrous approach to God; they presumed upon his sovereign freedom, as though he were Baal or Dagon or some other ancient Near Eastern deity. There is something about this God of Israel unlike any other deity of the ancient Near East: You either worship him “only” or not at all.9 Any repentance that clings to vestiges of hope in other gods is no repentance at all.

Samuel concludes his plea by noting that such genuine, heartfelt repentance will result in deliverance from “the hand of the Philistines.” The capture of the ark and subsequent humiliation of Israel had been blamed on the sins of Eli and his family. But Samuel’s preaching now makes it clear that there are wider and more disturbing origins of Israel’s failure. The nation has succumbed to the cultural pressure to worship local deities in addition to their devotion to Yahweh. They have walked away from exclusive service to Yahweh; they have rejected him. As is typical in biblical narrative, the text looks beyond the political and military causes for events to the more important explanation, the theological one. The nation has failed because its leadership is corrupt; what is more, her population has abandoned Yahweh. If there is to be a future for Israel and they are to continue in Yahweh’s land, they will have to face their own sin and repent.

Samuel’s role as a prophet of God is to explain the nature of repentance and call the people to it without timidity. He calls on them to turn their sorrow and remorse into genuine repentance. Such repentance works from the inside outward. It begins with a heartfelt turning to God, an internal commitment to make one’s relationship with God a priority over everything else. It moves from this to actions—either a rejection of wrongful deeds or a renewed commitment to righteous deeds. It is not enough to regret; one must also repent from sin.

The paragraph ends with the terse but encouraging statement, “So the Israelites put away their Baals and Ashtoreths, and served the LORD only” (4:4). Samuel’s preaching is effective, and the Israelites are now prepared to be led into their future.

Bridging Contexts

Bridging Contexts

REPENTANCE. THIS PASSAGE is an important one for understanding the nature of biblical repentance. There are two errors in how most modern Christians perceive repentance. (1) We tend to think of it only as remorse or a sorrow for having done something wrong. But this passage and others teach us that repentance is primarily a radical turning to God as truly God, which involves also a turning away from our sin and from other gods. It is possible to be painfully sorry for something we have done, but make no effort to stop the painful action.

(2) We often think of repentance as it relates to a single individual, or more precisely, as it relates to a specific deed committed. But Samuel is calling the people of Israel to repent as a nation for their sinful behavior. In fact, biblical repentance is often national in scope, and the nation is generally led to such contrition by a decisive leader who calls them to repentance, instructs them in the nature of repentance, and repents by example.

Repentance was obviously a central theme in the earliest stages of Christianity. John the Baptist came “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). The core of Jesus’ early ministry may be summarized succinctly: “Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). The Greek words for repentance (the noun metanoia and the verb metanoeo) have “change of mind” at their root meaning, but they clearly connote much more in these contexts.10 It seems likely that in these early Christian uses, repentance has the full and rich content of the Old Testament in view and denotes the complete reorientation of the sinner (cf. 2 Cor. 7:9–10).

An early example occurs in Genesis 35, where Jacob returns to Bethel, builds an altar to God, and leads his entire household in corporate repentance. Interestingly, the same phrase for laying aside foreign gods is used in 35:2 as we find in 1 Samuel 7:3: “Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you.” Centuries later, the Lord appeared to King Solomon after the dedication of the new temple. God promised that in years to come, whenever calamity struck his people, he would forgive and heal the land if they repented (2 Chron. 7:14): “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn [šwb] from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Jeremiah’s classic object lesson of the potter working at the wheel, shaping the pot of his own choosing, is another example of prophetic repentance (Jer. 18:1–12). Though the overarching theme of that passage is the sovereign freedom of Yahweh to act as he chooses, the prophet is also making a point about repentance. God may plan to punish any given nation for their sins. But given due prophetic warning, if that nation repents (šwb, v. 8) of its evil, God will change his plans and act toward that nation in a different manner. Likewise, if God plans to bless a nation, which however commits some evil act, God will reverse his plans for blessing the nation (v. 9). The point of the object lesson, of course, is that Israel should repent (v. 11): “Turn [šwb] from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.”

We also have examples in the Old Testament of national leaders repenting on behalf of the people, even when those leaders did not themselves hold responsibility for the sins committed. Ezra is informed that leaders and officials of the people have intermarried with the foreigners of Canaan, making themselves susceptible to the abominable practices of the Canaanites (Ezra 9:1–2). His reaction is one of personal shame and sorrow (9:3–4). That evening, he leads the people in a prayer of national confession, in which he speaks repeatedly of “our sins” and “our guilt” (9:5–15). Finally, he concludes, “Here we are before you in our guilt, though because of it not one of us can stand in your presence” (9:15). In a moving display of unity, a large crowd of Israelites, “men, women and children,” gather around him and join in the prayer of confession and repentance (10:1).

One of the most moving prayers of the Old Testament is that of Daniel on behalf of his people in Daniel 9:4–19. After acknowledging that God is a covenant-keeping God, Daniel confesses the sins of his ancestors in strikingly personal terms:

We have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws. We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. (Dan. 9:5–6)

It is important to remember that most of the sins Daniel is confessing were committed before his birth. He is leading the people in repentance for national sins committed by their ancestors but which have lasting consequences for the people in Daniel’s day.

All too often in the modern church, repentance is tucked away in the personal and private lives of people who want to obtain absolution without thought for the continuing effects of sin. We look for exoneration rather than justification and restoration. We prefer to concentrate on the compartmentalized sins of our lives at this controlled and controllable moment rather than to view the ugliness of our idolatry on the grand stage of life. It is not only the passing adulterous thought or murderous deeds of today or yesterday that the Bible addresses when it speaks of repentance; rather, it refers to the lifelong pattern of idolatry that needs confessing.

It is our human tendency to turn away from God unto the gods of fertility all around us, to neglect our relationship with him in our pathetic attempt to grasp the promise of momentary significance by depending on anything other than God. The Bible calls us to repent of our pattern of sin, to repudiate the worldly life of idolatry, which seeks to find meaning in any other way besides living in harmony with him and him only. It is perhaps time to consider whether the church’s emphasis on personal repentance actually hinders the biblical call to repent as a church, as the people of God.

Contemporary Significance

Contemporary Significance

IT IS ALWAYS easier to attend a church service once a week and to listen to a public prayer of confession than to acknowledge and confront personal sin and guilt. Perhaps more than any other twentieth-century author, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated most forcefully the inconsistency of a gospel without a call to repentance: “Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner.” Cheap grace, taught Bonhoeffer, is that grace we bestow on ourselves and is in truth “the deadly enemy of our Church.”

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.11

Bonhoeffer has shown that such grace is counterfeit and ineffective. Similarly, John Wesley spoke of repentance as the “porch of religion,” while faith is its door and holiness “religion itself.”12 One cannot avoid the porch of repentance while walking through the door of faith. Moreover, repentance does not cease, Wesley thought, once we enter the door, but rather becomes a way of life.13 The more we grow in grace and the more we become Christlike, we experience a commensurate awareness of sin and move more readily toward genuine repentance.

A few years ago, I met a man named Jim (not his real name). Through a series of seemingly unrelated encounters, Jim and I became casual acquaintances, which is to say we knew each other’s first names and generally began to acknowledge each other’s existence. Jim and I had nothing in common. He knew nothing of me as a professor of Old Testament to ministerial students. Our lives crossed periodically so that he saw me routinely in public, dressed as most professors have to dress. He probably saw me as one of those professional types who work in office buildings and go out for “power lunches.” I am sure he must of thought of me as one of those “college boys,” who was incapable of changing the oil in my car or dry-walling a house. By contrast, Jim was one of those men in the work force who was “between jobs.” He had a number of handyman skills, but he always seemed to be “down on his luck.” When I met him, he was working at a modest job making minimum wages and barely making ends meet.

With so little in common, it was somewhat surprising that with continued regular encounters over the period of several months, our acquaintance began to develop into a friendship, with genuine interest in each other’s lives. One day when we had opportunity to have a lengthier conversation, Jim began to tell me about troubles he was having with his girlfriend. Neither were Christians, and they had been living together for quite some time. But things were not going well. Jim was depressed and worried. We had by now become better friends, so I had an opportunity to tell him about my personal faith and urged him to consider Christianity as the answer to his questions.

His first response was extremely negative. He related experiences from his childhood that made it difficult for him to see God and Christianity in a positive light. He and his siblings were raised by a single mother in near abject poverty. Jim vividly remembered the day when, as a small boy, he and his mother, brothers, and sisters were asked to leave a church service because they were not properly dressed for worship. That rejection was Jim’s only experience with Christianity. He wanted nothing to do with it. But over time, I had other opportunities to explain that the way that particular church treated his family was not really Christian and that God was the answer to his needs.

One day while working in my office, Jim called me. In one of our conversations I had given him my office number, though he had never been to the seminary or really talked much about what I do for a living. On this day, he was in real trouble. His girlfriend had moved out of their home, and Jim sounded almost suicidal. At my invitation, Jim came to my office to talk. He shared honestly and openly about their problems. They had aired out their differences in a serious fight, and she had broken off their relationship and moved out for good. His family lived in another state, and he was lonely and depressed.

I felt that Jim knew enough about me and what I believed that he must have sought me out for a specific reason. He knew what I would say. I believed he was reaching out for guidance, some means of finding peace and forgiveness. For the first time in our friendship, I had an opportunity to explain systematically the simple gospel message and invite Jim to become a Christian. He was ready and willing to listen. That day, I invited Jim to pray and accept Christ as his personal Savior. He hesitated. He wanted to go home and think more about what I was saying. We prayed, and Jim left my office.

Happily Jim did not delay long. Within days, he called me again. With near euphoria he told me of his acceptance of the gospel. He had reread the verses I shared and in fact had started reading the Bible all during the night. He related that when he prayed alone, he felt an overwhelming sense of joy and forgiveness that he had never known before. The honesty with which Jim shared these developments and the innocence of his understanding of them was refreshing and sincere. We began meeting weekly for Bible study and prayer, and over the next month or so, Jim grew as fast as any new Christian I had ever seen.

Then one day Jim came to my office for our weekly meeting with the news that he and his girlfriend were getting back together. She was moving back in, and Jim was so happy. He saw it as confirmation that his new relationship with Christ was the answer to his problems. As yet, he saw no contradiction between his new faith and his relationship with his girlfriend. After they began living together again, Jim and I continued our meetings, and I began praying about how to handle the situation. After a few weeks, I decided that the next meeting would be a time for me to explain to Jim the inconsistency between his love for Christ and his continued relationship with his girlfriend, at least under their current arrangement. I prayed about how to explain everything and prepared myself for several options in the conversation.

What happened in our meeting that day was a beautiful testimony to God’s grace in our lives. After an opening prayer and before I could begin with my plans to confront Jim, he surprised me with the news that he had asked his girlfriend to leave. He said he could not understand what had changed. He was shocked that he was the one breaking off their relationship. He honestly confessed that something about their relationship “just didn’t feel right anymore.” When I began to explain delicately what I believed was happening in his life, he was amazed and excited to know more. Jim was no longer comfortable with her because he was a different Jim. His new faith had invited God’s grace into this life, and God was in the process of changing Jim from the inside out. I explained that as he grew in grace, God would undoubtedly begin to reveal more things about his life that would need to change.

God’s grace and love were sufficient to make all of this happen. Within a year, Jim met a Christian woman at a church he was attending. She became his wife. I have come to believe that Jim is a wonderful illustration of the correlation of devotion to God and repentance from sin. He learned repentance when he first became a Christian, but he also “turned from” his illicit relationship with this girlfriend as he grew in grace. The way he did it willingly, without my nudging, illustrated the genuineness of his faith and the effectiveness of God’s grace in his life.

As 1 Samuel 7:2–4 teaches, there is a natural connection between committing ourselves to the Lord exclusively and ridding ourselves of the foreign gods, whatever they may be in our contemporary context. We will put away our Baals and Ashtoreths, not only because we must, but because they no longer function as they once did. They no longer satisfy if the Lord is truly our object of worship. For today’s believers, any object of our affection may potentially become a “foreign god,” interfering with our relationship with God. Whenever and wherever this happens, the message of the prophet needs to be heard again: Return to the Lord wholeheartedly by ridding yourselves of foreign gods, committing yourselves to the Lord, and serving him only!

As important as these truths are, we must not lose sight of the corporate scope of the present passage. As Samuel led the nation in communal repentance and as Ezra and Daniel led Old Testament believers of their day in corporate repentance, so today’s Christians must call the contemporary church, in all its rich diversity, to prayers of repentance for past sins.

Many Christians in North America appear to be unwilling to face the sins of our own ancestry against African Americans and Native Americans. Centuries of racial prejudice and forced slavery are crimes that beg for repentance. Many white Americans today refuse to take personal responsibility for our nation’s sins and to repent for the crimes of our heritage. But the biblical principle is clear. Like Samuel, Ezra, and Daniel, we should ourselves repent for the nation’s sins and call the nation as a whole to join in that repentance. Once the church orders its own house, we will be in a position to model repentance to the larger society, leading the nation to repentance. But until the church rises up to unite the nation in one voice of national repentance, it is unlikely that God will hear from heaven, forgive our sin, and heal our land (2 Chron. 7:14b).