1 Samuel 15:23 For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the LORD… Among the moral difficulties of the Old Testament is the apparent disproportion between particular acts of sin and the temporal punishment with which God visited them. Even when we have considered the points on which Dr. Mozley insists in his masterly lectures upon "Ruling Ideas in Early Ages": when we have recognised how God accommodated, as it were His will to the possible or current conceptions of men's minds, that out of each stage in the education of our race He might elicit the very best character that it could produce: even when we have made allowance for the need of teaching rough people by rough means, and of driving plain truths into the heart of a rude and obdurate age by strong and sudden judgments: — still it may be strange to us that the most awful weapons in all the armoury of wrath should be sometimes brought out against offences which at first seem little more than faults of taste or policy or a passing temper: faults such as even good men might commit in a moment of carelessness or irritation, or on what we should call their unlucky days. How could it be equitable in a life thus rude and wild, a life where only the broadest distinctions were as yet apparent, and where the subtler lines of moral definition had not yet been traced, to doom with so terrible a sentence the hasty word of an angry woman or of a soldier flushed with peril and victory? Surely a part of the answer to such questions is found when we reflect how infinitely different may be in different lives the moral significance of the very same act. It is not only that the real quality of every action depends upon its motive: there is often a further and a deeper meaning to be read in the inner history of that character out of which, perhaps, the motive itself has come. That which on the surface seems too trivial to be heeded, may be the only outward evidence of a change which has been going on in us for years; there perhaps alone may be revealed the drift and volume of the stream which from some far-off spring has been flowing for many a mile beneath the ground: and the silent, secret course of half a lifetime may be betrayed beyond recall in that one glimpse. There are trivial acts which may disclose the bygone stages of our moral history, just as some trick of gesture or pronunciation lets out the secret of a man's parentage or nationality, or as some faint and useless trait connects a species with the ancestry of its evolution. Some such critical significance in Saul's neglect of the Divine command seems to be suggested in the strange comparison by which Samuel illustrates it: "Rebellion," he says, "is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is at iniquity and idolatry." The likeness is not, on the surface, clear; there seems no near or necessary connection between disobedience and superstition: but perhaps their link of kindred may appear if we look more closely into the meaning and history of the act which had provoked the sentence. We shall, I think, find it to have been the outcome and revelation of a deep disorder such as always tends to bewilder or distort the religious impulses of the soul. The spirit then which came to Saul on that great day of his anointing was the prophetic spirit of insight into the true drift and order of the world: he was admitted to the counsels of the Almighty, and recognised the Divinity that shapes our ends. Thus was be prepared to reign: thus did he see the truth of history in all its lines stretched out and ordered in the sight of God: thus did he learn the law whose conscious service was to be his sovereignty. What might not Saul have been, where might he not have placed his name among the beloved and blessed of God and men, if only he had enthroned the revelation of that day for undivided empire in his heart: if only, like another Saul, he could have looked back to the day of his conversion and declared that he had not been disobedient unto the heavenly vision: if only like him he had thenceforward striven "to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christy." For is not this the secret of all his failure and misery, his madness and his superstition, is not this the deep significance of hit sin — that while he saw the Light he would not live by it? he knew the Law and would not work by it: he heard the Counsel of God and held hit will apart from it. "He was," says Dean Stanley, "half-converted, half-aroused; his mind moved unequally and disproportionately in its new sphere": until "the zeal of a partial conversion degenerated into a fanciful and gloomy superstition." All through his life there went the maddening elements of discord: day after day the higher and the lower fought within him for the throne of his irresolute, distracted heart: day after day he woke to hear two voices clashing and disputing for his guidance: and now he followed one and now the other: yet when he chose the better he still looked wistfully at the lower life, and when he chose the worse he trembled at the thought of God. He could neither say, with the frank self-degradation of the heathen satirist, "I see the better and approve it: I pursue the worse"; nor yet with the man after God's own heart, "Teach me Thy way, O Lord, and I will walk in Thy truth: O knit my heart unto Thee, that I may fear Thy Name." And so he lived in discord, and he reigned by anarchy: restless and aimless, suspicious and dissatisfied, halting between light and darkness, and beset in that twilight by weird unhealthy thoughts like the evil dreams that make it bliss to wake, ever falling away from that which he saw and owned as God-like There is surely a deep meaning in the submission with which such a life as his welcomes the influence of music. The moral discord, the distraction and disorder of his will spread at times over all the powers of the mind: and the strain and irritation of that restless conflict broke out in gusts of terror and frenzy. "And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him." Even through his misery there came the great and constant prophecy of music: above the discord of his soul he heard those merciful echoes of a higher harmony; he knew that somewhere out, side all the chaos of his broken life, there were steadfast principles of melody, and calm and measured ways, and the eternal rhythm of an undisturbed song: he felt once more that the Most High is He Who sweetly and mightily ordereth all things, and there is peace for those who love His law. For "there is a rest which remaineth for the people of God." That great prophecy of music is among us still: still "the true harmony of tuneful sounds" helps men to be patient through distress and conflict, and to hope that their steps may yet be led into the sure ways of peace In the recess of a wall in the Catacomb of St Calixtus there is a painting of Orpheus: in his left hand he holds a lyre: the right is raised as though to mark the rhythm of his song: and round him are the wild beasts, tamed and hushed to listen while he plays. There is no doubt that the picture represents our Blessed Lord. Though the artist as he painted it was surrounded by the bodies of those who for Jesus' sake had borne the cruelty of persecution even unto death: though he himself, it may be, had left all to follow Christ and to be a partaker of His sufferings: still he knew Him as the Master of all Harmony, the Prince of Peace: still he felt that only since be took the Crucified to be his Lord had all the wild discord and conflict of his soul passed into mysterious and most blessed confidence of union with an eternal law of Melody. And we, if out of the confusion and bewilderment of our days, from the weakness and hesitation of our faith, we look back with a bitter sense of severance and strangeness to the simple and unhindered self-surrender of those saints of old: still let us hold fast by this — which is indeed a truth that all may test and prove: — that in proportion as the perfect obedience of the life of Christ comes through humility and prayer and thought to be the constant aim of all our efforts: we shall with growing hope and with a wonder that is ever lost in gratitude know that even our lives are not without the earnest of their rest in an eternal harmony. (F. Paget.) Parallel Verses KJV: For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king. |
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