The last of the judges to serve Israel before she asked for her first king, and after whom the two books of the OT, 1 & 2 Samuel are named.
Samuel has grown well on Christians probably because of the amazing grace that attended his birth and his call to the ministry in place of the blind and feckless Eli that is told in 1 Sam 1-3. Though he served Israel till his old age (8:1; 12:2) we, in fact, are told fairly little about his ministry. The summary of God's presence and ministry through him in 3:19-21 is immediately followed by the account of the loss of the ark to the Philistines in Chaps 4-6, in which he does not feature at all. He reappears briefly in the account of the Philistine attack in Chap7. Chap 8 opens with Samuel an old man, whoses sons he had appointed as judges over Israel were rejected by the people because of their thirsts for gain and they ask for a king. He was led to anoint Saul as king, and later, after Saul was rejected, David. His ministry that is well-known to us is, therefore, that told intertwined with the story of Saul.
Though little, Samuel's ministry is highly significant. His birth took place in the context of some of Israel's darkest days when, as the author of Judges put it, "everyone did what he saw fit" (Judg 21:25). God's gracious satisfaction of the desperate cry of a unkindly treated woman hangs up as a dim light lights up darkness. The childlike trust of the juvenile Samuel strikes sharply against the spiritual inaptitite of Eli the priest. Samuel may be absent from Chaps 4-6, but those chapters make a vital point: Samuel was not to be a part of the superstitious recklessness of the Israelites who turned the ark of God into an object of magic. He would, instead, represent a break with the spiritual darkness of the past. For all the towering figure he represented in the break with past, Samuel was not without his faults. Whether he intended to establish a dynastic house or not, in his old age he appointed his sons as judges, which invites comparison with disastrous career of Abimelech, the only judge not apppointed by a divine manifestation of power as a symbol of
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