Read the session · 17 min
The plan that wasn't a prayer
Chapter 4, verse 1. Israel goes out to fight the Philistines, and they lose. Four thousand men. And then verse 3, which is the whole chapter. "Why has the LORD defeated us today before the Philistines? Let us bring the ark of the covenant of the LORD here from Shiloh, that it may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies."
What's wrong with that? They ask a question and then they do something. What's missing in between? Notice how quickly they move from asking why to fetching the ark.
"Why has the LORD defeated us?" is the best question anybody asks in this chapter. It's the right question. And they don't wait for an answer. Nobody inquires. Nobody prays. Nobody goes and asks Samuel, who is now the guy God talks to. They ask "why" and then, in the same breath, they go get the box.
Now, there's a real conversation among the commentators about exactly what the elders were thinking. The ESV reads it as "the ark... that it may save us," and a lot of people read this as Israel treating the ark like a good-luck charm. Bergen, one of my commentaries, pushes back a little; he thinks the Hebrew points to the LORD being the one who saves, and that the elders weren't as dumb as we make them. Fine. Either way, here's what's true on any reading: they didn't ask God anything. They didn't repent of anything. They assumed the problem was that God wasn't close enough, so they went and got him. And they brought him with Hophni and Phinehas. Verse 4: "the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were there with the ark of the covenant of God."
They're carrying the ark into battle. The guys who took the meat with a fork are now escorting the presence of God onto a battlefield. Verse 5. The ark shows up, "and all Israel gave a mighty shout, so that the earth resounded." They're pumped. This is a pep rally.
And now my favorite part of the chapter. The Philistines hear the noise, and they figure out what it is, and they panic. Verses 7 through 9. "A god has come into the camp... Woe to us! For nothing like this has happened before. Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods? These are the gods who struck the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness."
Now, I love the Philistines here. They're terrified. And they're wrong about almost everything. "A god." Then "gods," plural. Then "the gods who struck the Egyptians with plagues in the wilderness." Baldwin, another of my commentaries, says it drily: the Philistines "do not appear to be very precise theologians or historians." The plagues were in Egypt. The wilderness was later. They've got the story like somebody who heard it once at a party.
But here's the thing. They've got the fear. They've got "woe to us." And they're right to be afraid, because that box is the throne of the God who drowned Pharaoh's army. The Philistines are scared of the right thing and Israel is throwing a party next to it. Hold that. It's going to matter.
Verse 10. Israel loses. Thirty thousand foot soldiers. Verse 11: "And the ark of God was captured, and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, died." Exactly what God said in chapter 2, verse 34. Both on one day.
Now the camera cuts back to Shiloh. Verse 13. Eli's sitting in his seat by the road, and the narrator tells you why: "for his heart trembled for the ark of God." That's a real detail, and it's kind. Eli cared about the right thing, at the end. Then a messenger runs in with his clothes torn and dirt on his head, and Eli, who's ninety-eight and blind, says "How did it go, my son?"
And the messenger gives it to him in order. Israel fled. Great slaughter. Your two sons are dead. And the ark of God has been captured. Verse 18. "As soon as he mentioned the ark of God, Eli fell over backward from his seat by the side of the gate, and his neck was broken and he died, for the man was old and heavy."
There it is. "The man was old and heavy." Kabed. The narrator could have said "old and frail." He said heavy. Remember chapter 2: you've been making yourselves heavy on my offerings, you gave your sons more weight than me. And Eli, who gave the wrong thing weight, dies under his own. Baldwin says it in four words: Eli dies under his own weight.
Now verses 19 through 22, and this is where the chapter is going. Eli's daughter-in-law, Phinehas's wife, is pregnant. She hears the news, and the shock puts her into labor, and she's dying. And the women say, "Don't be afraid, you've had a son." And she doesn't answer. She names the boy and dies.
Verse 21. "And she named the child Ichabod, saying, 'The glory has departed from Israel!'" Glory. Kabod. Same root. Ichabod means something like "no glory," or Tsumura's reading, which I like better, "Where is glory?" It's a question with no answer. A dying woman looks at her newborn and names him "Where did God go?"
And I want you to put this next to chapter 1. Two mothers name two boys in this book so far. Hannah names hers Samuel: I asked God for him. This woman names hers Ichabod: God's gone. One name is a prayer answered. The other is a funeral.
Here's the Hebrew. "Departed" is galah. It usually means exiled. Carried off. In the ancient world, when you conquered a city, you carried off its gods. Tsumura points out that even idols went into exile. So what she's saying is: God got captured. God got deported. The Philistines have him now.
And Tsumura asks the question I want you sitting with: whose glory left? Israel's? Or God's? Because if God's glory left, chapter 5 is going to be a very strange chapter.
God fights alone
Chapter 5. The Philistines take the ark to Ashdod and put it in the temple of Dagon, their god, right next to the statue. That's not random. That's a trophy case. That's "our god beat your god, and now yours lives in his house."
Verse 3. They come in the next morning. "Behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the ark of the LORD. So they took Dagon and put him back in his place."
They propped him back up. I want you to picture that. Grown men, priests, coming in at dawn and hoisting their god back onto his pedestal. "There you go, buddy."
Verse 4. Next morning. He's down again. And this time "the head of Dagon and both his hands were lying cut off on the threshold. Only the trunk of Dagon was left to him."
That's not a statue tipping over. That's what you did to a defeated enemy after a battle. You took the head and the hands. Tsumura says it plainly: this is the result of his defeat in war. Dagon didn't fall. Dagon lost.
And nobody swung a sword. There's not one Israelite in this chapter. Israel's army is dead or scattered. Israel's priests are dead. Israel's ark is in enemy hands. And God is winning.
Bergen has a line for this whole stretch that I think is exactly right. The capture of the ark was "only an apparent conquest." He calls it a divine ruse. God let himself get carried into Philistia so he could win on a bigger stage.
Verse 6. "The hand of the LORD was heavy against the people of Ashdod." Heavy. Same word. Eli was heavy and died. Now God's hand is heavy on the Philistines. The narrator's not being subtle anymore.
Then tumors. Ashdod. They send it to Gath. Tumors. They send it to Ekron, and the people of Ekron, verse 10, say the funniest honest thing in the book: "They have brought around to us the ark of the God of Israel to kill us and our people." Verse 11: "the hand of God was very heavy there."
Seven months of this. Then chapter 6. They call in the priests and the diviners and ask, how do we send this thing back? And here's the answer, verse 4. "Five golden tumors and five golden mice, according to the number of the lords of the Philistines."
There they are. Little gold mice and little gold, well. Tumors. I'll let you look up what the King James calls them. The idea is a guilt offering shaped like the plague: you send the god a picture of what he did to you and say, we get it.
But verse 6 is the part that should stop you. The Philistine priests say: "Why should you harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts?"
The Philistine priests just gave Israel a sermon. What do they know? Listen to the story they're drawing on. They know the Exodus. They know what happened to the last people who tried to hold onto God's people. Pagan priests are quoting Israel's own story back at them, and, by the way, "harden" is kabed too. Make heavy. The Philistines are being warned not to make their hearts heavy the way Pharaoh did.
And then the test. Verses 7 through 9. Take two milk cows that have never been yoked. Take their calves away and shut them up at home. Put the ark on a cart, hitch the cows, and let go. If they walk to Israel, it was God. If they turn back to their calves, it was chance.
Now, if you've ever been around cattle, you know what they just set up. A mother cow with a calf locked in a barn is going to do one thing. She's going to go to that calf. Every instinct she's got points home. The Philistines built a test that only God could pass.
Verse 12. "And the cows went straight in the direction of Beth-shemesh along one highway, lowing as they went. They turned neither to the right nor to the left."
Lowing as they went. They're crying for their calves the whole way. And they don't turn around. Two cows walk God home, and they're not happy about it, and they do it anyway.
That's chapter 6 through verse 18. God gets captured, God wins alone, God comes home on a cart pulled by two grieving cows. And Israel did nothing. Zero. They lost the ark and God brought himself back.
So: whose glory departed?
Israel gets it wrong too
And you'd think that's the happy ending. The ark's home. The people of Beth-shemesh are harvesting wheat, they look up, there's the ark, they rejoice, they sacrifice the cows. Great.
Verse 19. "And he struck some of the men of Beth-shemesh, because they looked upon the ark of the LORD. He struck seventy men of them, and the people mourned because the LORD had struck the people with a great blow."
Here's what happened. The Philistines were terrified of the ark. They handled it like it was radioactive. The Israelites, who should have known better, treated it like a parade float. Numbers 4 says nobody outside the priesthood is even supposed to look at the thing. And these guys are gawking at it in a field.
The Philistines were terrified of the ark and got it exactly right. Israel was casual with it and got it exactly wrong. Where are you more casual with God than the people outside the church are? Familiarity hasn't protected Israel here.
And they get exactly what the Philistines got. Because God is not a mascot. He's not on Israel's side the way a team is on your side. He's holy. He's holy in Ashdod and he's holy in Beth-shemesh.
And then verse 20, which is the most revealing line in the chapter. "Who is able to stand before the LORD, this holy God? And to whom shall he go up away from us?"
Is that a good question, or is that Israel asking God to leave? I think it's both, and I think that's the point. "Who can stand before this holy God" is the right question. It's the question the whole Old Testament is asking. But look at what they do with it. They don't fall down. They don't repent. They send messengers to the next town over: come get this thing. And the ark goes to a farmhouse in Kiriath-jearim, and verse 2 says it sits there twenty years.
Twenty years. God's presence in a barn, because the people who wanted him for a weapon couldn't handle him as God.
Now, the footnote. Some of your Bibles say "seventy men," and the footnote says most Hebrew manuscripts read "seventy men, fifty thousand men." Here's the honest answer: that number is a well-known problem. Fifty thousand is more people than lived in that whole region. Josephus, writing in the first century, just says seventy. Most scholars think "fifty thousand" crept into the text early and shouldn't be there. One of my commentaries defends the big number anyway. I think seventy is right and the ESV agrees. And nothing in the story changes either way. God struck people who treated him casually, and it was enough that the town wanted him gone.
Mizpah
Chapter 7, verse 3. Twenty years pass. And the text says something quiet and beautiful at the end of verse 2: "all the house of Israel lamented after the LORD." They missed him. Not the box. Him.
And Samuel, who's been off the page since chapter 4, comes back with a sermon. Verse 3. "If you are returning to the LORD with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you and direct your heart to the LORD and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines."
Notice what's different from chapter 4. In chapter 4, the answer to "why did God let us lose?" was "go get the ark." In chapter 7, the answer is "put away your other gods and turn around." One is logistics. The other is repentance.
And they do it. Verse 4: they put away the Baals and the Ashtaroth and serve the LORD only. Verse 5 and 6. Samuel gathers everybody at Mizpah. And they do three things. They draw water and pour it out before the LORD. They fast. And they say, "We have sinned against the LORD."
Nobody's totally sure what the water means. There's nothing else like it in the Old Testament. The best guess, and it's Gordon's, is that it's self-denial: we're pouring out on the ground the one thing we can't live without, because we want you more than we want water. Whatever it is, it's the opposite of chapter 4. Chapter 4 was a shout. Chapter 7 is a confession.
And here's where the story gets good, because the Philistines hear that Israel's all gathered in one place, and they think it's a war council, and they come. Verse 7. And Israel's terrified. And what do they say? Verse 8. "Do not cease to cry out to the LORD our God for us, that he may save us from the hand of the Philistines."
Put that next to 4:3. Same situation. Philistines coming. What's different about what they ask for? The change is right there in the words they use. Chapter 4: bring the ark that it may save us. Chapter 7: cry out to the LORD that he may save us. Same verb. Different object. That's the whole book in one comparison. The first is using. The second is trusting.
Verse 9. Samuel offers a lamb and cries out. "And the LORD answered him." Verse 10. "As Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the Philistines drew near to attack Israel. But the LORD thundered with a mighty sound that day against the Philistines and threw them into confusion, and they were defeated before Israel."
Samuel didn't carry anything into that battle. He carried a lamb to an altar. And God thundered. Chapter 2, verse 10. "The adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces; against them he will thunder in heaven." She said it in chapter 2, and it happens in chapter 7. Baldwin catches this: those are two of only three places in the whole book where that word for thunder shows up. Hannah sang it before there was anything to sing about, and Mizpah is where it comes true.
Verse 12. "Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer; for he said, 'Till now the LORD has helped us.'"
Ebenezer means "stone of help." Now, if you've sung "Come Thou Fount," you've sung "Here I raise my Ebenezer," and if you're like me you sang it for twenty years with no idea what it meant. This is what it means. It's a rock in the ground that says: God got us this far.
Go back to chapter 4, verse 1. Where did Israel camp when they lost the ark? The name matters now. And here's the detail almost nobody catches. Ebenezer. The place they lost is called Ebenezer. Tsumura doesn't think it's the same spot; he thinks Samuel named the stone with the earlier disaster on purpose. Either way, the book wants you to hear it. The place where Israel tried to use God and lost everything, and the place where Israel turned to God and he thundered, have the same name. Stone of help. One was a lie they told themselves. One was true.
"Till now the LORD has helped us." The Hebrew can mean "this far on the map" or "this far in our story." Tsumura says both, and I think he's right. Up to this spot, and up to this point. Not "forever." Not "from here on it's fine." Just: to here, he's been faithful. And that's enough to put a rock in the ground.
"Till now the LORD has helped us." What's a stone you could put in the ground today and say, "He got me this far"? Think of one. That stone remembers help received, and it brings the contrast with chapter 4 into focus.
Israel asked the right question in chapter 4, "why has the LORD defeated us," and didn't wait for the answer. They went and got the box. And they lost the box, and their priests, and thirty thousand men, and a dying woman named her baby "Where is glory?"
And then God answered the question she asked. He knocked Dagon flat. He put his heavy hand on five cities. He came home on a cart behind two cows who cried the whole way. Nobody carried him. Nobody rescued him. Glory didn't leave. Glory went on a road trip and came back undefeated.
Chapter 4 and chapter 7 are the same crisis twice: Philistines coming, Israel afraid. What did Israel do differently the second time, and what had to happen in between to get there? The return of the ark wasn't the end of that story.
And the actual rescue for Israel didn't come when the ark came back. It came twenty years later, when they finally stopped wanting God to win for them and started wanting God.
You can't carry God into a battle. You can only turn around and let him fight it. Some of you are in chapter 4. You've asked God "why" and you didn't wait for the answer; you went and got something. A plan, a person, a program, a box. And you're wondering why it didn't work. The book doesn't shame you for that. It just tells you what comes next: put it down, turn around, and say the hardest three words in this chapter. "We have sinned." And then watch what he does with a lamb and a prayer.