The Message Remix (89 page)

INTRODUCTION
01//02SAMUEL

 

Four lives dominate the two-volume narrative, First and Second Samuel: Hannah, Samuel, Saul, and David. Chronologically, the stories are clustered around the year 1000 B.C., the millennial midpoint between the call of Abraham, the father of Israel, nearly a thousand years earlier (about 1800 B.C.) and the birth of Jesus, the Christ, a thousand years later.

These four lives become seminal for us at the moment we realize that our ego-bound experience is too small a context in which to understand and experience what it means to believe in God and follow his ways. For these are large ives—large because they live in the largeness of God. Not one of them can be accounted for in terms of cultural conditions or psychological dynamics; God is the country in which they live.

Most of us need to be reminded that these stories are not exemplary in the sense that we stand back and admire them, like statues in a gallery, knowing all the while that we will never be able to live either that gloriously or tragically ourselves. Rather they are immersions into the actual business of living itself: this is what it means to be human. Reading and praying our way through these pages, we get it; gradually but most emphatically we recognize that what it means to be a woman, a man, mostly has to do with God. These four stories do not show us how we should live but how in fact we do live, authenticating the reality of our daily experience as the stuff that God uses to work out his purposes of salvation in us and in the world.

The stories do not do this by talking about God, for there is surprisingly little explicit God talk here—whole pages sometimes without the name of God appearing. But as the narrative develops we realize that God is the commanding and accompanying presence that provides both plot and texture to every sentence. This cluster of interlocking stories trains us in perceptions of ourselves, our sheer and irreducible humanity, that cannot be reduced to personal feelings or ideas or circumstances. If we want a life other than mere biology, we must deal with God. There is no alternate way.

One of many welcome consequences in learning to “read” our lives in the lives of Hannah, Samuel, Saul, and David is a sense of affirmation and freedom: we don’t have to fit into prefabricated moral or mental or religious boxes before we are admitted into the company of God—we are taken seriously just as we are and given a place in his story, for it is, after all, his story; none of us is the leading character in the story of our life.

For the biblical way is not so much to present us with a moral code and tell us “Live up to this”; nor is it to set out a system of doctrine and say, “Think like this and you will live well.” The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us, “Live into this. This is what it looks like to be human; this is what is involved in entering and maturing as human beings.” We do violence to the biblical revelation when we “use” it for what we can get out of it or what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives. That results in a kind of “boutique spirituality”—God as decoration, God as enhancement. The Samuel narrative will not allow that. In the reading, as we submit our lives to what we read, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but to see our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

Such reading will necessarily be a prayerful reading—a God-listening, God-answering reading. The story, after all, is framed by prayer: Hannah’s prayer at the beginning (1 Samuel 2), and David’s near the end (2 Samuel 22-23).

 

 

From:
Samuel is one book broken into two scrolls because there were physical limits on how long a scroll could be. The anonymous author may have been connected to the communities of prophets who kept their fingers on the pulse of what God was doing in each generation. The author had a prophet’s unwillingness to whitewash even the illustrious founding fathers of his nation.

 

To:
The average citizen of Israel may have been politically and financially more comfortable than in the time of Hannah, Samuel, and Saul. But relative comfort tended to make people self-focused and self-satisfied, forgetting that they were part of God’s great story. They tended to put their national heroes on pedestals so that they, the ordinary people, could get off the hook from living into the story of God.

 

Re:
About 1075-975 B.C. During the period of Judges and 1 Samuel, a technological revolution swept through the Mediterranean world: Iron replaced bronze as the metal of choice for weapons and agricultural tools. The Philistines brought the new technology to Canaan when they invaded, and their longstanding iron monopoly frustrated Israel’s leaders. Philistine iron chariots and other weaponry gave them an edge over Israel’s soldiers.

I’m bursting with GOD-news! I’m walking on air.

I’m laughing at my rivals. I’m dancing my salvation.

Nothing and no one is holy like GOD,
no rock mountain like our God.
Don’t dare talk pretentiously—
not a word of boasting, ever!
For GOD knows what’s going on.
He takes the measure of everything that happens.
The weapons of the strong are smashed to pieces,
while the weak are infused with fresh strength.
The well-fed are out begging in the streets for crusts,
while the hungry are getting second helpings.
The barren woman has a houseful of children,
while the mother of many is bereft.

GOD brings death and GOD brings life,
brings down to the grave and raises up.
GOD brings poverty and GOD brings wealth;
he lowers, he also lifts up.
He puts poor people on their feet again;
he rekindles burned-out lives with fresh hope,
Restoring dignity and respect to their lives—
a place in the sun!
For the very structures of earth are GOD’s;
he has laid out his operations on a firm foundation.
He protectively cares for his faithful friends, step by step,
but leaves the wicked to stumble in the dark.
No one makes it in this life by sheer muscle!
GOD’s enemies will be blasted out of the sky,
crashed in a heap and burned.
GOD will set things right all over the earth,
he’ll give strength to his king,
he’ll set his anointed on top of the world!