In a spiritual vacuum, God taught the pagans and the Jews, a painful lesson about being familiar with him or what is sacred to him.
Hannah then sang before the Lord (Chapter 2)
It is a Psalm voiced
against the proud, but uplifting to the humble.
Though poor, she felt
rich in her blessing. Later God compensated her faithful sacrifice by giving
her 3 more sons and two daughters. Her reproach was finally broken.
Yet she remained
dedicated to her special child. She made him a little coat, and young as he was
he ministered in the temple with a small linen ephod. Her love for him was
steadfast.
I submit that a lot of
the Samuel that emerged was thanks to the love and dedication of that righteous
woman. She reminds me of Diana and her two sons.
The unrighteousness that
she spoke against, was in the temple. The priests had grown weary of
sacrificing to God and cared little for their traditions.
Instead the sons of
Eli helped themselves and took meat that was not fully cooked, still rich
in fat. They scorned the temple and did evil in God’s sight.
They also slept around
and failed to uphold any of the values of their father. Their friends, sons of
Belial, turned temple life into a circus, a spiritual fiasco.
A man of God (probably
an angel) thus prophesied to Eli that his family would be cut off forever and
his memory would be expunged from Israel.
Here am I Lord, your servant hears
Samuel heard a voice in
the night and ran off to Eli. Three times Eli said, “it wasn’t me who called
you”. Then he told him to say, “Here am I Lord, your servant hears”.
Samuel's sense of God but not fully formed and not really able to, given the contradictions
he witnessed every day, but on the 4th
call, he communed with God.
God then promised to
do a new thing in Israel that would end the house of Eli.
By then Samuel must
have grown enough to engage God, so a good few years had elapsed since God sent
a prophet to warn Eli of a pending judgment.
The suspension was
lifted in the second encounter and the matter was thus sealed.
The Philistines closed in (chapter 4)
They also prevailed
against Israel and killed 4,000 men, so the Jews, presuming the ark to be some
kind of charm, fetched the ark and shouted as it arrived.
It didn’t help. The
Philistines beat them again, killed the sons of Eli and took the ark. It was
set down in the house of Dagon, the fish god, that same one that bowed to Samson.
When Eli heard all the
news, he fell over backwards and broke his neck. He was 98 years old and had
judged Israel for 40 years.
However, he had a
surviving daughter-in-law, widow of Phinehas. She died in
labor but bore a son, named Ichabod, for God’s glory had departed Israel.
The nation was in
crisis. But it was ripe for the arrival of Samuel. God had not lost control.
A
new priest was rising and this time he would solidify the role of the priesthood,
while distinguishing it from the other two pillars of state: the king and the
prophet.
The Philistines learned about a real God (Chapter
5)
At Ashdod, Dagon was not able to stand before the Ark, so that deaf, dumb,
useless god, finally did
something useful.He fell before the God
of Israel.
It was also the last
thing he did, because he was reduced to an armless, legless stump.
A plague, the emerod,
broke out among the Philistines and many died, so they sent the ark to Gath, the
last redoubt of the giant Anakim and home of Goliath.
Well, that was the end
of them too, for the plague showed no respect for size. They moved
the ark to another of the 5 cities of Philistia, Ekron, and they also died.
After 7 months, the oxen bore the ark straight
back to Israel
God was no lucky charm to be used by either his people or the pagans to bless their
undertakings. He is God. We bow to him and serve him. He doesn’t serve us.
The priests of the Philistines
advised the 5 kings of Philistia to send the ark back with a trespass offering,
for they were in a really bad way. Many were dying.
The trespass offering
was of 5 golden emerods (boils) and 5 golden mice or rats. It suggests that the plague was
bubonic, which hints at the decadent lifestyle of the Philistines.
The priests also
insisted on a new cart and two milch cows, cows that were in milk.
They argued that if the
ark went to Bethshemesh, or house of the Sun, that it would
mean that the plague was sent by God.
The cows did go straight
there and over 50,000 souls of Bethshemesh died as they gazed at the ark.
It ended in the
fields of Joshua at the stone of Abel, where they used the wood from the cart
to sacrifice the cows to God, as the Levites set the ark on the stone.
Remind me never to
familiar with the sacred things of God.
If I am ever near the ark I will
approach it backwards and use very long poles to move it. It truly is a fearful thing to fall the hands of a living God.
(c) Peter Missing @ bethelstone.com
