As a priest Samuel replaced and terminated, in a sense, the stale Aaronic priesthood. He did not rebel against the house of Aaron, and he did not usurp anything of the house of Aaron. There was no revolution; there was only revelation. As Samuel was growing, God arranged the environment to perfect him and to build up his capacity to do everything that was needed for God to change the age. In the recovery the Lord will never allow any kind of rebellion, but He will bring in many changes, adjustments, and improvements, not through rebellion but through revelation.
Samuel had a clear view of God's economy and also of what the enemy had been doing to devastate God's economy on earth. Samuel was thus a person full of insight concerning God's economy and concerning the environmental situation. Eventually, God did something to match him, and there was a change among the people of Israel. The people returned to God, lamented before God, and were willing to remove all the idols. Before this change took place, there was preparation on two sides: on the side of the people, who returned to God, and on the side of Samuel, who was perfected, equipped, and qualified for God's move on earth. In this situation the Philistines, who knew certain things concerning Israel and God and who tried to bribe God with their kind of trespass offering, were defeated to the uttermost.
In this replacing priesthood, Samuel anointed Saul and David to be kings (10:1; 16:1, 13) as God ordained that he should go before His anointed continually (2:35b) to supervise the king, observing what the king was doing. This indicates that Samuel, the acting God on earth, was greater than the king. Samuel could be qualified to such an extent because for many years God had been perfecting him for His economy, not for anything else.
When God's economy is carried out among His people, they are blessed. This means that our welfare, our well-being, is altogether linked to the carrying out of God's economy. We should not seek our well-being apart from God's economy. Because this has been neglected and even lost, it needs to be recovered. I wish to say, especially to the young saints, that we should not expect to have prosperity for ourselves. Rather, as saints in the Lord's recovery, we should expect that through us the Lord will do as much as possible to accomplish His economy. Then we will be blessed.