Samuel worshiped at a high place? Yes and No.

“High places” are routinely vilified and destroyed in the books of Old Testament Scripture which cover the monarchy period. In those books, high places are associated with the worship of pagan gods and are violations of Israel’s unique covenantal relationship with the Lord.

This being the case, when one reads 1 Samuel 9:12 (and 1 Samuel 10:5), a momentary pause can come over the reader. In 1 Samuel 9:12, Samuel, the prophet/judge of Israel, is clearly participating in worship of the Lord at a high place at the district of Zuph. In 1 Samuel 10:5, men in a procession of prophets (often called a School of the Prophets) have just left a high place.

The topic was raised in Bible study last Sunday, and here is the essence of the answer I provided. Given that others may have the same question, I’ve decided to post the information here at the website for anyone else seeking an answer on the issue.

Several things need to be considered in these verses before we truly understand how and why Samuel and the School of the Prophets were participating in activity at a high place.

Samuel, as imagined by artist Claude Vignon, painted in the 1600s

High places, as the name suggests, were numerous locations that were geographically elevated. Israel is a very geographically diverse region – it contains plains, hills, valleys, and mountains. Many Israelite cities contained an area that was designated as a “high place.” Often, the high place was located just outside the city or district, as seen in the example provided here in 1 Samuel 9 and 10. For the most part, high places were open-air worship centers without walls or ceilings, although some did have shrines or other buildings built on the area.

At the time of this story in 1 Samuel, the Temple was still a generation away (one may even say two generations away) from being constructed. Also, the nation’s future capital where the Temple would be built, Jerusalem, would not become Israel’s national center until after David was made king.

The future importance of recognizing Jerusalem as the religious capital of Israel would become linked to recognizing the authority of the king’s government. The early government, after all, only existed through the blessing and recognition of the Lord. After the monarchy was established in David, Jerusalem made the capital and the Ark of the Covenant brought to the city, (and later when the Temple was completed there) little doubt remained that the city of Jerusalem was an important part of Israel’s national identity.

The Old Testament prophets understood that pagan worship on high places was, in essence, treason against the Lord and treason against the king, since government and people were both blessed by the special covenant relationship they had with the Lord. As such, good kings often outlawed high places and destroyed them as threats against the nation. Evil kings turned a blind eye to the high places, or worse, participated in pagan worship rites themselves.

As a result of later generations of false worship on elevated sites, the very term “high place” eventually became associated with idolatry and pagan rites. During the time of the Divided Kingdom (after David and Solomon), kings of Israel and Judah were often judged in part by whether or not they had purged their lands of the high places (see 2 Kings 12:1-3 and 14:1-4 for just two examples). Archaeology has uncovered small idols at such sites, and it is clear that worship of fertility gods and other agricultural-based worship rites were held at elevated places.

However, at the time of this story in 1 Samuel the monarchy is not yet established. There is no capital city yet, and the temple is not even in its planning stages. While there was probably indeed false worship at some high places at the time of this story (and before), that does not mean there was false worship at all high places.

In this story, Samuel and the prophets are at a high place which poses no political threat since there is no monarchy, and we see that the worship performed there was not false worship. Samuel’s presence makes it is obvious that it was indeed the Lord who was worshiped. While Samuel was just a man and as capable of error as the next, we see that Samuel’s zeal for the Lord is clear throughout the Scripture record. The prophet was never corrected for actions of worship at any time, including his actions at the high place outside the district of Zuph.

Thus, in these two passages we can conclude that Samuel and the prophets did nothing that displeased God in worshiping at this particular high place. The sacrifices, worship and prayer offered at this time at this high place location were indeed honoring the Lord and pleasing in His sight.

While high places in the Old Testament would later deserve an overall negative connotation because of the false worship that was practiced at the overwhelming majority of them, there is nothing about the activity in 1 Samuel 9 and 10 to give us pause. As the later story of the anointing of David makes very clear, “the Lord looks to the heart,” and there is nothing in the heart of Samuel here that should cause us to cast doubt on the judge/prophet of Israel.

Great question

We had a great question about the “high places” of the Old Testament that will give me plenty of website writing this week. Expect a website update examining the topic in the next few days. (Sent fom my iPhone)

Welcome back.

How amazing are the days in which we live? Simply in the area of communications, I am now able to update a website using a telephone, and load the same website with sporadic mini-updates through Twitter, also through the telephone if I so choose.

However, even with the emergence of social media like facebook and twitter, it seems the long-form blog and/or website still have places on the electronic frontier (especially for those of us who have trouble isolating our thoughts into neat packages containing only 139 letters/spaces).

So, while this post really doesn’t contain any information or insight, it does contain an expression of a desire to provide posts that aren’t as restricted by letter/spacing counts.

The posts through the rest of the month will be somewhat experimental – getting used to how the new technology allows me to update the site through different mechanisms. Hopefully, beginning in March, I’ll have gotten used to how a new set of tools allows me to share information and ideas.

Testing, round 2

Conducting some more tests with the blog via the iPhone. Please ignore, nothing to see here…

John’s Gospel as weapon against heresy

I’m teaching two Life Change Small Groups this semester, and since they meet on different nights with different participants I decided to give myself a bit of a break and teach the same subject matter to both: lessons from the writings of John the Apostle.

The Apostle John as imagined by the painter El Greco in the 1600s.

During the days when John was writing his Gospel, the letters we know as I, II and III John and the Revelation, there were already false teachers about, making a name and profit for themselves by speaking about Jesus to crowds. One way these false teachers attempted to grow their audiences was to make changes to the story of Christ, hoping to make Jesus more embraceable and palatable for their listeners.

In John’s day, a lecturer named Cerinthus was teaching that “the Christ” had never actually been a man, but rather that a normal man named Jesus had the “spirit of the Christ” come upon him at his baptism. This same spirit, as Cerinthus’ false teaching goes, left the man Jesus just before the crucifixion. This heresy had a willing audience among those who could not accept that a human being could also be divine, or that anything divine would be able to suffer pain in this physical world. Cerinthus also taught that as a “reward” for his suffering the pain of the cross, this normal man Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day. Strangely enough to us today, people embraced this false teaching because many in that day thought that anything in this physical world was by that same nature corrupted. Anything of the spiritual world, they thought, was pure and incapable of being harmed in the physical sphere. The idea of one wholly man and wholly divine simultaneously offended their preconceived notions of how the universe functioned.

Docetism was another heretical concept in John’s day which taught the falsehood that the divine Jesus only seemed or “pretended” to suffer during his passion, in a “playing to the crowd’s expectations” sort of way.

When we read John’s writings, we should not be surprised that he tackles these types of false teachings head-on, stressing both Jesus’ divinity and His humanity repeatedly throughout his Gospel. Whereas two other Gospel writers had already provided Jesus’ human ancestral family tree in their accounts (Matthew 1:1-17, Luke 3:23-38) John cut straight to the point and immediately proclaimed Jesus’ divine “ancestry” by declaring “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1); and that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth (John 1:14). Early in his Gospel, John shows us Jesus’ humanity, providing us examples that He became zealous for His Father’s house (John 2:17), and that He tired from long journeys as any other man would (John 4:6).

To those who embraced the lectures of Cerinthus and ideas of docetism, John’s Gospel was tremendously challenging. It was already well-known in Christian circles that John knew Jesus personally and was one of the trusted “inner circle” apostles along with Simon Peter and John’s own brother, James. This same John now assaulted these false teachings and made it unmistakably clear: Jesus is both human and divine. One cannot claim Jesus only suffered in His humanity; one must accept that He also suffered in His divine nature. One cannot say Jesus did not really feel temptation because of His divine nature; one must accept that because of His humanity He felt tempted, but was able to endure and overcome all temptation.

Today we still see people trying to manipulate definitions of the person of Jesus Christ for their own means and purposes. Attempting to appeal to human greed, many false teachers proclaim that Jesus is obligated to repair all financial difficulties if called upon in a certain way. Trying to find an audience with the sick and infirm, many false teachers guarantee the Lord’s power can be manipulated into performing miraculous feats of healing. Still others attempt to link the Lord’s will with affiliation to political parties, ignoring the fact that Christ had little or nothing to say about the very Roman Empire government which carried out His crucifixion. Attempting to justify a religion of their own design, some apply the name of Jesus to any power they acknowledge outside themselves, whether it be new age superstition or “enlightened self-actualization.”

John makes it clear that Jesus is not concerned with being redefined to be “more acceptable” to the people of this world, nor does He want His followers to be more like this world. “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (John 17:16).

When we read John’s writing and see his declarations of Jesus’ humanity and divinity, we are seeing the Apostle waging war with the all-too prevalent heresies of his day. May we likewise never back down from defending the truth about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, in this world which continually seeks to redefine Him for its own advantage, comfort and temporary ease of mind.