Chapter 9. The Samaritan.
IF YOU look in the end of your Bible, you will probably find a map, entitled “Palestine at the time of our Lord,” and if you examine it carefully you will notice the small district of Samaria lying immediately between Judea and Galilee. How was it that in the very midst of the Holy Land, we find a race of people with whom, as we are told in John 4, “The Jews had no dealings,”? To answer this question we must go hack several hundred years before the birth of our Lord Jesus. Perhaps you remember that when Solomon, the great and wise king of Israel died, the nation was divided. Ten of the tribes following the wicked Jeroboam, and only two, besides the Levites, remaining true and loyal to Rehoboam, Solomon’s son. Some years after this division, Omri, one of the kings of Israel, as the ten tribes were called, bought the beautiful hill of Shemer, and built upon it a magnificent city, which he named Samaria. But I am sorry to tell you it was a very wicked city, and after bearing with it for many years, God gave it into the hands of the king of Assyria, about seven hundred years before the Lord Jesus came to this world. Listen to what we are told about it in 2 Kings 17, “Then the king of Assyria came up and besieged Samaria three years, and he took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria. For the children of Israel had sinned against the Lord, their God, and walked in the statutes of the heathen, and set them up images and groves in every high hill, and under every green tree. For they served idols whereof the Lord had said, ‘Ye shall not do this thing.’ “Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of His sight. And now the beautiful land, the land of vines and figs and pomegranates, the land flowing with milk and honey lay desolate. This did not please the great conqueror, Shalmaneser, so he brought men from Babylon and other places to till the land, and people it. These men were heathen; they worshiped the false gods they had brought with them, and “feared not the Lord.” But a terrible punishment fell upon them; down from the mountains, and out of the rocky ravines came lions, and slew some of them. When the king of Assyria heard this, he sent one of Israel’s priests back to the land to teach the people how to worship the Lord. And so a mixed religion sprang up, for the people feared the Lord, and vet they served their own gods.
There was always a feeling of hatred and bitterness between these Samaritans and the Jews, and about three hundred years after this, when the Jews came back to their own land, after their seven years of captivity, we find the Samaritans trying in every way to hinder them from building the temple. This enmity was still going on when our Lord was walking up and down in the land of Israel; on one occasion when passing through the Samaritan country, He was refused a lodging because He was on His way to Jerusalem; but how did the lowly Jesus receive this insult? Did He return evil for evil, did He hearken to the bitter words of His disciples, and call for fire to come down from heaven to destroy the city? O, no, had He not come to seek and to save the lost, even the poor Samaritan, and would He destroy him?
And we all know how the woman in Jno. 4, thought it strange that He would ask a drink of water from a woman of Samaria.
On the side of the well He sat in the burning midday sun, talking to that poor woman, and finally telling her the wonderful fact, that He, who to her eyes, had appeared a poor weary traveler, was in reality the Messiah, the Saviour, the Son of God.
At another time we hear of His healing a poor Samaritan leper, who with nine others, companions in misery, had sought His help, and our Lord does not forget to draw attention to the fact, that the only one of the ten who returned to give thanks, was “this stranger.” On one occasion we read that the Jews called Jesus “A Samaritan,” as a term of the greatest reproach. He does not contradict them, but on another occasion, in a parable, He takes the Samaritan as a picture of Himself. For as that good Samaritan came down to where the poor man was, bound up his wounds, and put him on his own beast; so had the Lord Jesus come down to where sinful man was, helpless and hopeless, that He might take upon Himself the punishment of his sin, and make the sinner fit for the presence of God.
If we turn on to the Acts of the Apostles, we shall again find Samaria mentioned. The evangelist, Philip, went down and preached Christ to that city, and the people received the word with joy. Many of the men and women and even children must have remembered that lowly Man, who a few years before had sat on Jacob’s well, and afterwards remained two days with them teaching them about God and the One whom He had sent into the world. And now what wonderful tidings for them to hear, that this same Jesus, the very One whom they had seen and heard, was God’s own Son, that in the form of man, He had died upon the cross, bearing their sins in His own body on the tree, and that now He was risen and seated on the right hand of God. Do you wonder that “there was great joy in that city”? And yet this is the same message that to-day is brought to you. Have you received it as these poor despised Samaritans did, and has it caused great joy in your heart?
ML 11/03/1912