“They feared the Lord, and served their own gods”

(2 Kings 17:33)

Well known and dearly loved by us all is the story of the good Samaritan. Jesus gave us this parable of beauty and tenderness, a parable that has brought new meaning to our conception of mercy and neighborliness. The parable of the good Samaritan will live forever in our hearts.

Not so well known is the story of the bad Samaritan, the sinful Samaritan. Yet it is a story that modern American church people need to hear and heed. Let me tell you that story, the story of the origin of the race and faith of the Samaritans.

The Scriptures’ first mention of the Samaritans as a race of people is in the second book of Kings in the passage we just read. The time was the period immediately following the going away into Assyrian captivity of the ten tribes of Israel. The Assyrian emperor took away into captivity the princes, the noble families, and the leaders and rulers of the people to remove every possibility for revolt and rebellion among those left in the conquered province. The greater portion of the poorer population the Assyrians left in their Israelitish homes. Then, to take the place of the captives transported from Israel, the Assyrian emperor transplanted other captive people from the four corners of his empire to Israel and established colonies of these foreigners there. The mongrel race that developed from the intermingling and intermarrying of the Israelites with their foreign neighbors was called Samaritan after the name of Israel’s capital city, Samaria. Such was the origin of the people called Samaritan.

The Scripture that furnishes us this account of the origin of the Samaritans also tells us the bizarre story of the beginnings of their religion. According to the narrative, ferocious lions began to appear in the old land of Israel, frightening and devouring the Samaritans. The notion arose among them that the damage and danger of the lions were due to the fact that the Samaritans were ignorant of the manner of the god of that land and were causing his displeasure. Apparently, the priests and prophets had been taken into captivity, too. So the Samaritans appealed to the emperor of Assyria to send them from among the captives a priest who could instruct them in the worship of the god of that land, and thus deliver them from the danger of the lions.

The priest came, so the story goes, and taught the Samaritans how they might properly worship God, but this was the tragic result: “They feared the Lord, and served their own gods.” That is, they became syncretists in religion. They combined the religion of the lands from which they had come with the worship of Jehovah. They tried to worship the one, true God along with their idols. They attempted to mingle pagan practices with a righteous ritual. The Samaritans became mongrel in faith as well as in race. “They feared the Lord, and served their own gods.”

All through their history this seems to have been characteristic of the Samaritans. When in later years Antiochus Epiphanes, the Syrian king, took Jerusalem and desecrated the temple there by putting up a statue of Jupiter in the holy of holies, the loyal Jews died by the thousands in their resistance to this abomination, but the Samaritans were quite ready to welcome Antiochus, to address him as god, and even asked his permission to call their place of worship on Mount Gerizim the Temple of Zeus Hellenius. The Samaritans syncretized; they combined; they made peace with idolatry and with evil.

An excellent example of the Samaritan spirit is to be found in the sinful woman whom Jesus engaged in conversation at Jacob’s well. We read in John’s Gospel in chapter 4 that when Jesus tried to talk with her about her personal morals, she attempted to turn the conversation into a discussion on theology. Jesus asked her why she was living in adultery, and she countered by asking which was the proper place to worship, Mount Gerizim in the land of the Samaritans or Mount Zion in the land of the Jews. The Samaritan woman whom Jesus met at Jacob’s well was certainly the moral and spiritual child of those first Samaritans who “feared the Lord, and served their own gods.”

Through the years this was their history. There was reason for a Jew’s holding a Samaritan in contempt, reason for the common Jewish quip, “Thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil.” One of the chief reasons Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan created such a sensation was its almost impossible intimation that there might be a good Samaritan. For Samaritanism stood for intermarriage with idolatrous people, for adopting pagan ways, for laxity in morals, for becoming in every aspect of body and soul mongrel, low, and degraded.

Now I have been talking about the old Samaritan situation, and the Samaritan spirit, because here is to be found one of the most trenchant biblical analogies to modern American Christianity. Here is a parable of our times, not of the good Samaritan, but of the sinful Samaritans. For Samaritanism, this evil spirit of syncretism-a disposition to accommodate to the ways of a lost world-the most fearful of all “isms” that have come upon our troubled times, is with us yet. In the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ there are “those who fear the Lord, and serve their own gods.”

There is in modern Christian faith and practice a continuous watering-down process going on, an insidious obliteration of the distinctions between right and wrong, a belief that openness is the supreme virtue, and that intolerance is the only unforgivable sin, a growing spirit that anything is all right. The modern Samaritan does any and every thing his pagan neighbors do. He fears the Lord and serves many strange gods. The observance of the Christian Sunday as a holy day, set apart, the abstaining from abuse of drugs and alcohol, the cultivation and display of certain noble traits of character — these acts were once the bright red badge that marked the Christian. But this badge of the Christian is becoming more and more conspicuous in its rarity. The spirit of Samaritanism is pervading modern Christianity. An eminent physician remarks that he can tell no difference between those of his patients who are Christians and those who are not by the manner in which they encounter and endure suffering, pain, tragedy, and death.

Back during the Second World War, Alfred Noyes, the celebrated English poet, traced the terrors and horrors of that awful epoch to a revival of the Samaritan spirit. In The Edge of the Abyss, Noyes said:

The spirit of this evil thing which is assaulting civilization from without and within has no national or racial boundaries. It is not an isolated phenomenon. It is active everywhere, in art, in literature, in the drama and theatre. For 50 years the pseudo intellectual has been preparing his way and making his path straight by scoffing at every distinction between right and wrong in private human relationships, in marriage and the home, as well as in wider spheres…. For a great part of the world, the authority of conscience, that God within the breast, has been lost.

Noyes pointed out then that the pseudointellectuals’ practice of scoffing at anything higher than themselves undermined the foundations of civiliza­tions, “picked the mortar from between the bricks,” and prepared the hearts and spirits of men and women for that worldwide moral and spiritual collapse. Do we not discern an incredible timeliness in Noyes’ remarks for us today? Is he not describing vividly our spiritual condition now? Allan Bloom says in his book The Closing of the American Mind that we Americans now are justifying any way of life by calling it our lifestyle, providing a “moral warrant for people to live exactly as they please.” If we call ourselves Christians and at the same time choose to live a life to the tune of “I Did It My Way,” our golden text is, “We fear the Lord and serve our own gods of selfish indulgence and pride and plenty and careless ease.”

So we are in the process of developing a new and more horrible form of hypocrisy than history has ever known, a hypocrisy that no longer says, “Thank God I am not as that publican,” but “Thank God I am not as that Pharisee.” In modern Christianity we have produced the astonishing hypocrisy of actually priding ourselves on having watered down our faith and our morality, on having blotted out the difference between right and wrong.

The horror of this modern Samaritanism — this religion of fearing God and serving our own gods, this easy acceptance of the moral laxity of our worldly neighbors as our own, this blotting out of the distinctions between good and evil, this attitude of just anything goes — is that it destroys the souls of men and women.

C.S. Lewis some years ago wrote an intriguing little book called The Screwtape Letters. It consists of a series of letters written by Screwtape, an important official in his Satanic Majesty’s Lowerarchy, to Wormwood, Screwtape’s nephew and a junior devil on earth. The letters are instructions in temptation, methods of corrupting and bringing to hell “the patient” to whom Wormwood has been assigned. At one place Screwtape writes:

You will say that these [temptations I have suggested] are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy [which is, of course, God]. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without mile-stones, without signposts.

Yes, the result of Samaritanism is that people gradually give way more and more, here and there, little by little corrupting faith and practice until the soul is dead. And then stark, naked tragedy’s hollow laugh croaks at the desolation through all the cavernous halls of hell.

Arthur John Gossip, in his book In the Secret Place of the Most High, notes that Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, has warned us “that all the evils of primitive man are still crouching, alive and ugly as ever, in the dark recesses of our modern hearts; and that it is only Christianity that is holding them in check; and that, if the true faith be neglected or forgotten, all the barriers it alone keeps in being against them will go down, and the old horrors sweep in a roaring flood across a dumbfounded world.”

And Gossip quotes Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian religious philosopher, affirming that “there is no longer any room in the world for a merely external form of Christianity based upon custom. The world is entering upon a period of catastrophe and crisis, when we are being forced to take sides, and in which a higher and more intense kind of spiritual life will be demanded of Chris­tians.”

My friends, we have been called to be the true servants of God, a peculiar people set apart for the purpose of righteousness and not a mongrel breed fearing the Lord and serving our own gods. Therefore, stand fast by your faith. Shun worldly lusts. “For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?… Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty” (2 Cor. 6:14; 17-18).