When Samuel grew old, he appointed his sons as judges for Israel. – 1 Samuel 8:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (November 30, 2012): 1 Samuel 8

Erwin McManus tells a story of a man coming up to him on his way into Mosaic (the church that Erwin pastors.) The man apparently recognizes Erwin and comes up to him and says “I am an atheist. Is it okay for me to go in here?” Erwin says that he looks the man in the eyes and replies “Sure, there are a lot of other atheists in there.” The response was not quite what the man had expected. “Really?” “Yep, but you can’t tell by just looking at them – they all look like humans.” I love the response, because they look like humans in my church, too. One of the problems is that outsiders often seem to expect something different. Maybe another way of phrasing Erwin’s response is that it is hard to find the Christians, because they look like humans too.

I have told my church that they clean up well. They do. Any given Sunday you can walk into the church that I attend and you will be hard pressed to find the ones that are really struggling – the ones that have somehow stopped believing that they really have any right to be a part of the community. But I know that they are there – they just clean up well. And I have to admit that there are days when I wish that I could just wave my hand magically over the crowd and reveal the struggles that their neighbor is suffering through, just so that they could realize - even just for a moment - that they are not alone.

One of the things that I love about the Bible is that it does not seem to pull any punches. We get to see people with all of their imperfections. I sometimes laugh at old paintings of the apostles with Halo’s over their heads, because the Bible would seem to of a different (and imperfect) set of Apostles. We see the imperfections of a Peter – or the James and John, the Sons of Thunder. In the Hebrew Bible, we see the ways that Jonah or King David failed. And all of that gives us hope, because we fail too.

But there are two exceptions - two almost seemingly perfect people in the Hebrew Bible. The first is Joseph, the son of Jacob who was sold into slavery by his brothers, and the second was Samuel. Samuel was one of the godliest men in the Bible. He is never specifically said to sin, but here he seems to have fallen to the temptation, because it was never man who chose the Judges, it was God. But Samuel chose his sons to follow him. The belief seems to be that Samuel was growing too old to fulfill the demands of everything that needed to be done. And so he chose his replacements. But the problem was that God was not finished with Samuel yet, and Samuel had never been doing the job in his own power anyway – he had been doing it in God’s.

The truth is that we cannot delegate to others the things that God has placed on us. If God has called us to the task, he will give us the strength to complete the task. The reality is that Samuel choice to download the task of Judge to his sons only complicated his life. And in the midst of the complications, there were still things that God was calling Samuel to do. 

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 1 Samuel 9