1 Samuel 4

1 Samuel 4:1-7

III THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF ELI, AND THE RISE OF SAMUEL1 Samuel 4:1-7:17 I will give, in order, the passages showing the rise of Samuel over against the descent of Eli. Samuel, more than any other book of the Bible, excels in vividness of detail, and especially in showing progressiveness in character, either upward or downward – growing either better or worse. Over against the iniquities of Eli’s sons and the doom pronounced on his house, we have in order, these passages: 1 Samuel 1:27-28; 1 Samuel 2:18, and the last clause of 1 Samuel 2:21; 1 Samuel 2:26; 1 Samuel 3:1-4; 1 Samuel 19-21; 1 Samuel 4:1.

The progress is: (1) For this child I prayed. (2) The child prayed for is devoted to Jehovah. (3) His home is God’s house and there he serves and worships. (4) The child is called. (5) The child grew in favor with God and man. (6) The child kept on growing. (7) He is recognized as a prophet by all Israel from Dan to Beersheba. In the meantime Eli’s house steadily descends until the bottom is reached. Macaulay, in his History of England, in telling about the great men in power at a certain time, including Lord Halifax, substantially makes this remark: “These great men did not know that they were even then being eclipsed by two young men who were rising up, that would attain to greater heights and influence than the others had ever attained,” and he gives the names of the two young men as John Somers and Charles Montagu.

We may apply this throughout life: A train once in motion will run for a while on its own impetus, but in both cases the motion will gradually cease unless new power be applied. So in every community there are leaders holding positions from past momentum, while new men are rising that will eclipse and succeed them. As in nature when a tree quits growing it begins to die, and when a stream quits flowing its waters stagnate, so when a leader quits studying he begins to lose power and must give place to younger men who are studious. And it will some day be so with you, and you will enter what is called the declining period of your life. For a while it will astonish you that you are not cutting as wide a swath as you used to cut, and unless you live only in God, that will be the bitterest hour of your life. Very few people know how to grow old gracefully; some of them become very bitter as they grow old. The following is a summary of the events connected with the fall of the house of Eli:

1. An enemy is strengthened to smite them. The absence of purity, piety, veneration, and fidelity in God’s people, either his nominal people like Hophni and Phinehas, or his real people, as Eli, always develops a conquering enemy. The case of Samson, Eli’s contemporaneous judge, illustrates this. When he betrayed the secret of his strength, he went out as aforetime and knew not that the Spirit of the Lord had departed from him, and so became an easy victim of the Philistines, bound, eyes put out, enslaved, grinding in the mills of God’s enemies, a sport to them, with the added despair that the cause suffered in his downfall.

The devil has known from the beginning that his only chance to win against God’s people is, by their sins, to turn God against them. He knows that as long as God is for you, nobody can be against you. He knows that he cannot fight against you when you have God back of you, but if you become estranged from God, the devil will show you very quickly that when it comes to a wrestle he can give you a fall, and it does not take him long to do it.

It was in this way that he influenced Balaam to suggest to Balak the plan to make Israel sin with women, as a step toward idolatry. His slogan was: “If you can make them sin against their God and put him against them, then you can down them.” The Phinehas of that day, how different from this Phinehas, Eli’s son! Naming a child after a great and good man does not make him like his namesake.

One of the most unpatriotic men I ever knew was named after George Washington; one of the greatest failures as a preacher was named after Spurgeon; one of the poorest excuses for a statesman was named after Sam Houston. Now here is Phinehas, the son of Eli, named after that other Phinehas of Balaam’s time.

The devil, here called Belial, is never more satisfied than when he can nominate his own children as ministers of religion. Hophni and Phinehas, children of Belial, were priests. The prevalent evils of today arise from the fact that children of Belial occupy many pulpits and many chairs in theological seminaries and Christian schools. Always they are the advance couriers of disaster to God’s cause, and herald the coming of a triumphant adversary.

When preachers and professors, in schools begin to hawk at and peck at the Bible, and rend it with their talons, or defile the spiritual feasts like harpies) you should not only count them as unclean birds of prey, but should begin to set your own house in order, for trouble is coming fast.

2. The Philistines won a battle. Four thousand Israelites were slain.

3. Stimulated by fear, the sons of Eli resorted to an expedient, tempting God. They sent for the ark of the covenant, taking it from its appointed place to be used as a fetish or charm. So used as an instrument of superstition it had no more power to avert evil than a Negro’s use of a rabbit’s foot, or the nailing up of a horseshoe over a door to keep off witches.

As religion becomes decadent its votaries resort to charms, amulets, relics of the saints, alleged pieces of the cross, images and other kinds of evil, instead of resorting to repentance, faith, and obedience. So used, the most sacred symbol becomes worse than any common thing.

We will see later in Jewish history the idolatrous worship of the brazen serpent made by Moses, and we will hear good King Hezekiah say, as he breaks it to pieces, “Nehushtan,” i.e., “it is only a piece of brass.” As a symbol, when lifted up, it was of great use, but when used as an object of worship it became only a piece of brass. A student of history knows that a multiplication of holy days, pyrotechnic displays, games, festivities, plays, and cruel sports, until there are no days to work, marks the decadence of a people. We need not be afraid of any nation that gives great attention to fireworks, a characteristic of the Latin races.

We shout in vain: “The ark of the Lord! The ark of the Lord!” when we fail to follow the Lord himself. No issue is made in that way, as it is not an issue of the Lord against Dagon, but a superstitious and impious use of sacred symbols against the devil, and the devil will whip every time. In the medieval times, early in the history of the crusades, we see that even the cross so used falls before the crescent, the sign of Mohammed followers.

We might as well seek the remission of sins in baptism, or salvation in the bread of the Supper, as to expect God’s favor sought by any such means.

When Elisha smote the Jordan with Elijah’s mantle, he trusted not to the mantle, nor did he say, “Where is Elijah?” but he said, “Where is the Lord God of Elijah?” and so he divided the waters.

4. The Philistines won another battle. Thirty thousand Israelites perished; Hophni and Phinehas were slain; the ark was captured; Eli died, and the wife of Phinehas died in premature labor, naming her new born babe, “Ichabod,” that is, “The glory is departed from Israel”; Shiloh was captured and made desolate forever, ceasing to be the central place of worship; both the ark and the tabernacle became fugitives, separating never to meet again, and so Israel lamented after the Lord.

5. The Philistines regarded the capture of the ark, (1). as a triumph of their god, Dagon, over Jehovah, the God of Israel, and so they placed it in a subordinate position before Dagon in their temple. (2) They regarded it as the capture of Jehovah himself, obligated by his captivity now to serve the Philistines as be had heretofore ministered to Israel.

The prevalence of such conceptions in ancient times is very evident. For ages the presence of a deity was associated with his symbol. To capture his symbol, or image, was to capture the deity, as in the story of Aladdin in The Arabian Nights, whoever held the lamp of the genie controlled the genie himself. Assyrian sculptures today exhibit the idols of vanished nations borne in triumphant procession, and the parade is always to show that they have triumphed over the gods of that country.

The Hebrew prophets allude to this custom frequently. The passages are: Isaiah 46:1; Jeremiah 48:7; Jeremiah 49:3; Hosea 10:6; Daniel 11:8. Cyrus, when he captured Babylon, adopted its gods, but the Romans under Marcellus brought to adorn their own cities the captured images and pictures of the Greek gods. Nebuchadnezzar carried away the sacred symbols of Jerusalem when he captured that city, as did Titus after our Lord’s time, and we see in Rome today carved on the Arch, the sevenbranched golden candlestick which Titus carried from the Temple of Jerusalem in triumph to Rome. The Roman general, Fabius, when he captured the city of Tarentum, said to his soldiers, “Leave their gods here; their gods are mad at them; so let us leave them with their gods which they have offended,” and so they left the idols. It would have been a good thing, as after-events show, had Nebuchadnezzar done the same thing, for when Belshazzar, his successor, on a certain night at a drunken feast, used the sacred vessels of the Temple for desecration, it was then that the hand came out and wrote on the wall, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.

Jehovah showed the Philistines that their victory was not over him: (1) By causing the image of Dagon to fall down before the ark, and when they set it up again, caused it to fall down again, and to break its head and arms off; (2) by sending two great plagues: tumors or boils, violent and fatal, under which thousands died, and field mice that swarmed so as to destroy the great harvests of grain that made their land famous; (3) by causing the cessation of the worship of Dagon in Ashdod, for after taking the falls and breaking his head and arms off, no man would go in and worship Dagon.

A natural inquiry when an individual or a people is subject to a series of severe and extraordinary disasters is, What sin have we committed and how may we expiate it, or avert its judgment? Such an inquiry is inseparably connected with any conception of the moral government of God. Men may indeed often fail to note that all afflictions are not punitive, some being disciplinary, or preparatory to greater displays of mercy. We see this problem discussed in the case of Job and his friends; also to those who asked Jesus, “Who did sin, this man or his parents?” He answered that this affliction did not result from personal sin of either of them, but that the glory of God might be manifested. It is the most natural thing in the world for anybody who has suffered one buffet of ill fortune after another, to ask, “What have I done?” and it is perfectly natural for the neighbors to point out that one and say, “Ah, you have been doing something against the Lord: your sin is finding you out.” Therefore it was the most natural thing in the world for the Philistines, when they saw such disasters coming in connection with the capture of the ark, to put the question, “What is our sin?”

We will see what expedients the Philistines adopted to determine whether their calamities came only in a natural way, or were supernatural afflictions connected with the ark and coming from the offended Jehovah, and if from Jehovah, how be was to be appeased. 1 Samuel 5:7-11 gives us the first expedient: “We will move this ark from Ashdod to the next one of the five cities, and see what happens then. If the same things happen there, we will move it to the next city, and if the same things happen there we will move it to the next city, and so on around the circle of the five cities, and if the same results follow all of these cities, such a series of incidents will be regarded as full proof that the judgments are from Jehovah.”

We recall the story of the boy and the cow bells: He said, “When my father found a cow bell, Ma and I were mighty glad, for we needed one. And when he found another cow bell we were glad again, for we really needed another one, but when Dad found another cow bell, Ma and I became suspicious.” A man would not naturally find three cow bells one after another, so they thought that “Dad” had stolen them. So when five cities, one after the other, had the same afflictions, they could not call that chance.

I knew of a general in a terrible battle who, when a bombshell as big as a water bucket came from a gunboat, cut through a tree and sank into the ground, making an excavation that you could put a house in, ran and put his head right into the hole where the shell came. Somebody asked him why, and he said that such a shell as that would never come twice in the same place. And so the Philistine idea was to move the ark from Ashdod to the next city, and if nothing happened, then they were mistaken about this being chastisement from Jehovah, but if wherever they took it there came the mice and boils on the inhabitants, they were not mistaken, and they could not misunderstand.

That was their first expedient. Their second expedient was to call upon their religious leaders, their diviners and soothsayers, and to ask them to tell them how they could conciliate Jehovah. And the diviners told them that the ark must be sent back, and it must be sent back with a gift, and the gift must signify their confession of sin. In the olden times if a man was healed of a wound in his hand, the Lord was presented with a silver offering to commemorate the healing of the hand. So they had five golden mice made, one for each city, and five golden tumors, one for each city, to symbolize their conception that the evils had come upon them for this offense to Jehovah. But as there still might be a question as to whether these afflictions were natural or supernatural, they tested it in this way: They went to the pen where were cows with young calves (you know what a fool a cow is over her first calf when it is little) and hitched two of these cows to a cart, put the ark on it, to see if the cows, against nature, would go away and leave their calves willingly, and still thinking about the calves and calling them, would carry the ark back to some city of the Levites; that would show that Jehovah was in it.

That was a pretty wise idea of those Philistines, and so when they took a new cart and put the ark on it, and took those two mother cows, they never hesitated but struck a beeline for the nearest Levite city, about twelve miles, and they went bellowing, showing that they felt the absence from their calves. These were their two expedients.

1 Samuel 6:19-20 says that some of the people at Bethshemesh looked into the ark to see what was in there, and the blow fell in a minute. No man was authorized to open that sacred chamber over which the mercy seat rested and on which the cherubs sat, but the high priests of God. If you will turn to the Septuagint, you will find another remarkable thing which does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, viz.: all of the Levites of the city of Bethshemesh rejoiced at the return of the ark of God, except one man, Jeconiah, and his family, who refused to rejoice at its homecoming, and God smote that family in a moment.

Now, a later instance: The ark, at the request of the citizens of Bethshemesh, was moved to Kirjathjearim, and stayed there until David had been reigning a long time; he sent after it, and Uzzah, when the ark was shaken by the oxen stumbling, reached up his hand to steady the ark and God struck him dead. His attempt was well meant, but it presumed that God was not able to take care of himself. It was a violation of the law for any man to touch that ark except the ones appointed by Jehovah. Which one of the Psalms commemorates the capture and restoration of the ark?

After twenty years Samuel led Israel to repentance and victory. 1 Samuel 7:3-12 tells us all about it. It says that Samuel called upon them to repent truly of their sins; if they ever wanted the favor of God any more, to cast off their idols and obey God. This is like John the Baptist saying, “Repent ye, repent ye.” Every prophet, in order to be a reformer, was a preacher of repentance. The people repented of their sins, turned from their idols, and returned to God. He assembled all Israel at Mizpah; the Philistines heard of it and came with a great army. Samuel and Israel met them and smote them hip and thigh, and broke their power.

The next paragraph in the Harmony tells how Samuel judged Israel and the regular circuit he made while living at Ramah. He would go to Beth-el, Gilgal, and Mizpah, then come back, holding special courts of judgment, and with such wisdom, purity, and impartiality that he must be classed as the last, best, and greatest of the judges.

1. Cite, in order, the passages showing Samuel’s rise over against the descent of Eli.

2. What said Macaulay on this point, and what other examples cited by the author?

3. Give a summary of the events connected with the fall of the house of Eli.

4. How did the Philistines regard the capture of the ark?

5. Show the prevalence of such conceptions in ancient times.

6. How did Jehovah show the Philistines that their victory was not over him?

7. What is the natural inquiry when an individual or a people is subject to a series of severe and extraordinary disasters?

8. To what expedients did the Philistines resort to determine whether their calamities came only in a natural way, or were supernatural afflictions connected with the ark and coming from the offended Jehovah, and if from Jehovah, how was he to be appeased?

9. How else did Jehovah manifest the sanctity of his ark, both at Bethshemesh and later, as we will find in the history?

10. What Psalm commemorates the capture and restoration of the ark?

11. How does Samuel lead Israel, after twenty years, to repentance and victory?

12. What cities did Samuel visit in his judgeship, and what can you say of the judgments rendered by him?