Now, in order to grasp this passage, you need to know what came before. And I'm going to paraphrase it quickly, you have the responsibility when you go home today to read the chapters that came before to make sure that I'm being honest about them and to enrich your knowledge of what came before. But the children of Israel, that group that had been selected specifically by God in a covenant relationship with Him to reflect what He was going to do to bring about salvation for people. They had turned their back on God.
They were worshiping God, but at the same time, they were also worshiping the false gods of the land where they had settled the land of Canaan. So the Israelites would go to the tabernacle and they'd offer sacrifices to the Lord as they were called to do, but then they would go to a high place and they'd offer a sacrifice to the Baal, or they'd go to an astropole and they'd commit indecencies in front of that because their view was, well, we're being faithful to God. We're doing what He asks, but we're also doing these other things too. And this sin began to pervade the people, even to the point that the high priest's sons were acting in ways that were contrary to the word and character of God.
And so God said to them, He said, I'm going to judge you. He's actually very blunt. He said, the people around about their ears will tingle when they hear what I'm going to do to you because you have forsaken me and you've walked in your own ways and I will allow judgment to come upon you. Now there was a people group that had come to the coast of Canaan and they were the Philistines.
They had migrated there and they were slowly moving from the coast and they were moving inward and they were taking territory. And Israel was there. And so the Philistines began to raid and attack the communities in Israel. So Israel's like, well, we have to do something.
We have to fight against these Philistines. Now they had no relationship with God, but they had the stuff of God. They had the Ark of the Covenant. And so they came up with this great idea, hey, we're going to go into war with the Philistines and we'll take the Ark, that centerpiece with the mercy seat, with the presence of God would dwell and he would interact with the people and we'll take that Ark to war with us because let's face it.
We have to win if we bring God with us. And so they take the Ark against the Lord's express command because the Ark could not be moved unless the Lord directed it so, but they just took it anyway and they marched off into battle with the Philistines. They were feeling really good about it. When the Ark arrived in the camp of the Israelite army, they cheered so loudly.
Scripture says that the ground shook because, hey, God is with us. The statement of every army in history. I remember I used to teach high school history and at one point we were talking about World War II and we were talking about the different armies in World War II and one of the Canadian students said, well, the good thing with us is that when we went to war, God was on our side. And I had an exchange student in my class.
He was German. And he said, you know what it used to say on all regular German soldiers? Belt buckle? God is mittmümst.
God is with us. So, apparently everybody went in thinking that God was with them. Now, the Philistines heard the cry that joyous roaring of the Israelites was like, oh no, they've got their gods with them. We've heard about their gods.
They're the gods that did all those things to the Egyptians. What's going to happen to us? And so they figured, well, we've got to at least try. We've got to try to fight against them.
And so the Philistines meet the Israelites and they just slaughter them, hammer them, defeat them and capture the Ark of God, totally devastating the morale of Israel. And the Philistines take the Ark back. And they're so excited about this. They bring it into the temple of their God and they sit it there in front of this massive statue of Deagon was the primary Canaanite deity of the time considered the father of Baal and they put this there.
It's like here, we have subjugated the God of Israel. The Israelites have all run off in panic and fear. And then we see God at work. That awesome Sunday school story where the next morning the priest of Deagon gets up in the morning and he's whistling and he's, you know, oh, how sweet to trust him, Deagon.
And he goes and he opens the temple doors. He comes in and much to his horror, there is the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord sitting where they placed it. But the statue of Deagon is lying face down on the ground in front of the Ark of the Covenant because the Lord of glory is showing who is being glorified in this place. And so this is awkward and embarrassing until they stand back up again.
It's like, okay, obviously we didn't have that kind of sturdy enough there and I'm sure they probably brought in some good maintenance guy just to make sure it was all good and we won't talk about this among the people or anything. And the next day they come in again. It's like everything's great except this time they come in and Deagon's down on his face again and his head and his hands are broken off. It's even more awkward.
And then the Lord begins to bring a plague on the city of the Philistines that has the Ark and this plague begins to, to devastate the people. And so we don't know what this is but I think it has something to do with the Ark so we're going to send it to our next city state. So they take the Ark and they send it to the next city state and as soon as it arrives the plague descends on that, those people as well and they send it from city to city and the plague just follows it around and finally the Philistines are like, what are we going to do with this? Because we don't want it.
And then you had the good analytical thinking Philistines who goes, well, we're not quite sure yet whether this is indeed, you know, divine retribution or not. So we need to find a scientific method whereby we can determine this. So this is what we're going to do. We're going to take a cart and we're going to put the Ark on the cart and we're going to take two cows that just cuffed.
So they've just had their calves. We're going to put the calves over here, pin them up. And we're going to take the cows and tie them to the cart and we're going to put some gold offerings on the cart as well just in case they're needed. And we're going to let the cows go.
Now I asked the farmer about this who deals with cows and calves all the time and he said, getting a calf away from a mother is a dangerous thing. So they released the cart and they said, if the cart heads right toward Israel, then we know that it was their God that was at work here. He was the one who was punishing us. If the cart just sort of manders right over here to the little pin where the calves are, well then we know, okay, it's obviously just, you know, bad hygiene on our part or something like that and we'll get our, you know, health sciences people on it.
So they release it and of course it goes straight down the path toward Israel. And there the people of Israel who are still devastated not knowing what to do and here they see coming down the road is the Ark. That is where they were. A people who had turned their back on God, a people who had thought they could use God and it had led to their suffering and to their failure and defeat because the Philistines now were constantly on them.
And yet God had showed himself that he would not be subjugated to the Philistines just as he would not be subjugated to Israel because he was the Lord. Now where we began to read this morning, 20 years have gone by and scripture tells us that during those 20 years the people of Israel mourned and sought after the Lord. There was a change happening in the people. And it came to the point where they went to Samuel, their judge and prophet and said, we want to follow the Lord.
And so he said to them, well, this is what you have to do. If you are going to follow the Lord, if you're going to be the people that he calls you to be, then you've got to repent from all that you've done. Separate yourself from all the other things you put your trust in and put your trust in the Lord alone and follow him. And so the people gathered together and they drew water and poured it out before the Lord.
And so we see in verse 6 which was a symbol of repentance, of the outpouring of repentance and of the cleansing that comes with repentance. On that day they fasted and there they confessed we have sinned against the Lord. So here is this, the nation gathered together in repentance turning back to God. Then we come to the next verse.
When the Philistines heard that Israel had assembled at Mitzvah, the rulers of the Philistines came up to attack them. And when the Israelites heard of it, they were afraid because of the Philistines. So here in their moment of turning back to God the adversary comes. And he's like, oh they've all gathered together.
They all gathered together in the same region. We're back 20 years before we just trounced them. Let's trounced them again. And the people are afraid because they probably remember their past.
They remember what's happened in the meantime. And they said to Samuel verse 8, do not stop crying out to the Lord our God for us. The He may rescue us from the hand of the Philistines. And notice there's a change here and you'll see it as you read the previous chapters before it was we're going to fight the Philistines.
We'll just take God's ark with us and we will have victory. Now it's we're crying out to the Lord that He would have mercy on us, that He would deliver us. The recognition is the power is the Lord's, the authority is the Lord's, the sovereignty is the Lord's. Then Samuel took a suckling lamb and offered it up as a whole burnt offering to the Lord.
He cried out to the Lord on Israel's behalf and the Lord answered him. When Samuel was sacrificing the burnt offering the Philistines drew near to engage Israel in battle. But on that day the Lord thundered with a loud thunder against the Philistines and threw them into such a panic that they were routed before the Israelites. The men of Israel rushed out of Mitzvah and pursued the Philistines, slaughtering them along the way to the point below Bethkar.
So here are the Philistines coming to do to them what they had done to them over and over again, overpowering them because they were stronger than Israel, which has always been the situation. It was a situation you go back when Israel didn't want to go into the Promised Land, they looked and said look, they're stronger than we are and they were right. They always were the weaker ones. God did that on purpose because every time they were victorious they were victorious only because of the God they followed.
The victory was always the Lord's. And now we see the Lord intervenes, the Philistines sweep in and the Lord thunders against them and scares them in spittness. And as they turn in fear Israel pursues them and wins a great victory. And in verse 12, then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mitzvah and Shen.
He called it Ebenezer, which means stone of help. And saying thus far has the Lord helped us. So the Philistines were subdued and did not invade Israelite territory again. Throughout Samuel's lifetime the hand of the Lord was against the Philistines.
So as Israel experiences this victory, this victory that comes because of their repentance, this victory that comes because they turned back to God, Samuel sets up this standing stone, this Ebenezer, the stone of help named after the place where they were. And if you look back, this was the same region where they had suffered their great defeat before. And now God had given them victory. And he says, here's the stone, because the Lord has helped us thus far.
So that in the days to come when Israelites were traveling to and fro and going about their business, they would look and see this stone and go, do you remember when the Lord helped us in the past? When we turned to him and submitted to him and repented before him, the Lord was gracious to us and the Lord helped us thus far. We see that pattern happens a number of times in Scripture. When we go back, we see when Joshua and the children of Israel were entering the land.
They instructed them to take stones from the Jordan and to take them and come on dry land. In the first place they encamped, they piled these stones and they said, so that when your children and your children's children see that pile of stones and ask, what does that mean? Say, this is when the Lord backed up the Jordan and brought his people into the land on dry land. Ebenezers are important to us to look back and see how the Lord has brought us thus far.
So my question to you this morning is what are your Ebenezers and have you looked at them lately? What are those things where you can look and see how the Lord has brought you thus far? See we need those because this is what the Lord uses to grow our faith. There is this general idea in regular culture that faith is this blind leaping into the dark.
It's like, I don't know what's out there. I am simply going to and hope I land on something. But that's not faith. The Scripture presents it.
Remember once hearing this television program and they had several characters in it and one was a very analytical, atheistic character and the person was in this grave problem with another individual, another character in the story and this person was waiting for their partner to come and rescue them. And the atheistic scientist said, I know my partner will rescue us. And the other character said, you have amazing faith in him. He goes, no, no, I don't have faith.
That's just this random trust and nothing. He said, I know my partner. I've seen how determined he is. I know his ability and I know he'll rescue me.
The other character looked back and said, baby, that's faith. Faith is trusting our future based on the knowledge of who we've seen working in the past. The children of Israel were told again and again to remember how God had brought them out of the land of Egypt, how he fed them in the wilderness. So when they came into the promised land, what are we going to do today?
We've got this crisis today. Remember the same Lord that we're following now fed us for 40 years. Oh, to nothing. Split a sea.
Defeated the Egyptians. I think he can handle today. So I come back to the question. What are your Ebeneers and have you revisited them?
This fall I was laid off for my job and discovered that it was a huge thing to me. In the first few days I was home with nothing to do. I spent most of the time just sitting in the dark and realizing that that probably wasn't a healthy thing. So one day I got up and I go, okay, I'm going to go for a walk.
So I went for a walk and just sort of wandered in around through Dartmouth, one street and down the other. And eventually as I walked, I found myself in familiar places. Having grown up here, I found myself standing in front of 96 King Street, which is where we lived when I was small. And I sat there by the street and just thought about it.
And that was the place when I was around six years old at the coffee table in the living room that I trusted the Jesus Christ and paid the penalty for my sins. And that by trusting in his finished work that I could be redeemed. And I stood there and I thought about that and got a little teary, which 50 year old men are allowed to, that in 44 years he has never forsaken me. That's one of my Ebeneers.
Coming here, the first week we came here, this place is one of my Ebeneers. Because I can remember when we came here and I was small and coming into this place, of course this part didn't exist. We all met down there and then had to go outside to go down into the basement. And the first Sunday I was going out with the children's time, I was laughing and I couldn't open the door to the outside and stood outside and was absolutely petrified.
But councilman will deal with that. But this place, seeing how the Lord worked through his people, seeing people growing and trusting him, seeing people walk through challenges, having people open up the Word of God and say, we need to look into the Word of God. It becomes an Ebenezer for me to look back and see how the Lord has brought you, has helped you thus far. But ultimately, we all, if we know Christ, have our greatest Ebenezer and that is Christ himself.
The rock Christ Jesus is our greatest Ebenezer because he is the one who paid the penalty for human sin so that if we believe in him that we are redeemed and he said, I will never leave you or forsake you. So the Apostle Paul says in Acts 26, 22 when he is recounting his testimony and he says the words, but I have had God's help to this very day. How could he stand there in front of officials and magistrates in front of governors? How could he go to Rome to share his faith and his testimony because God had been faithful to him to that day in every circumstance?
And we look at Paul and he had lots of circumstances. Bobbing in the ocean is one of those circumstances I pray the Lord will never share with me. But the Lord was with him in the depths of the sea, the Lord was with him in the face of persecution. The Lord was with him.
Christ was faithful as he promised. So my encouragement to you if you know Christ, look first of course to him, looking to Christ, the author and finisher of our faith. No matter what 2019 may have looming in the distance, what 2018 may have hit you with, what are your Ebenezers? Look to them first to Christ and then how Christ has worked in circumstances.
My last Ebenezer is my house. I was going to show you a picture because it looks really funky right now. But the Lord has taught me more things through my house outside of his word, probably than anything else. We bought a fixer upper and I'm neither a fixer or an upper and we discovered that it needed even more fixing than we thought when we bought it.
But we knew it was the house that the Lord had given us. And my wife and I will debate that sometimes. I remember that the Christian Realtor called us the day that they had accepted our offer and he said, Stephen, your prayers have been answered. And I said, you'll have to be more specific because I don't know if we're praying the same way.
Stephen, your prayers have been answered. You've been provided the house. We had to work on the house. But over and over again in practical ways, the Lord showed his faithfulness.
I remember one in particular, the house that was supposed to be three weeks to get it ready to move into and we were now on week eight and everything was still a disaster because we found new disasters and new disasters and I was supposed to be back at work ministering the church that I was involved in and there were some crises happening there. And I was just born out and tired and one morning I was trying to fix something and I sat on a ladder in the shambles of our living room and I said, Lord, I'm done. I said, I just can't do this anymore. So I can't give the time I need to give to the folks in the church and my family sleeping on floors and now moved to the second or third place and everything still amass and I'm absolutely useless manually anyway.
I'm just done. And then I looked out the window as soon as I finished saying that and a truck pulled out and a couple who had helped us early on got out and the lady starts coming to the door and her husband is pulling all these tool things off the truck and he opens the door and he started bringing in tablesaws and all the stuff. I'm just going, why are you here? Don't ask me.
Ask my wife. And I went, okay. And I turned to her and she goes, the Lord woke me up at two o'clock this morning and said, we need to go back to Stephen's house. So I elbowed my husband and said, tomorrow we're going to Stephen's house and he went whatever you say.
And they showed up and I remember being overwhelmed by the fact that in that small area, the Lord had spoke to them at 2 a.m. and I didn't even realize my desperate need until the next morning. He is faithful and has helped us thus far. If you don't know Jesus Christ, if you haven't experienced his transforming power in your life, then you are simply staring off into the dark and your past may simply be just up moments and down moments and down moments and there's no Ebenezer's there because we have the first experience Christ to know him and his fullness, to experience his salvation, his transforming work, the filling of his spirit in us to have life and hope and a purpose.
And then he walks with us and does it mean that it doesn't get dark? Oh, absolutely not. But he is faithful in the darkness. Does it mean that we won't have moments of discouragement?
Absolutely not. But he is faithful because we look even in that discouraging moment. It doesn't compare to what we have in Christ. As Peter says, these afflictions are but for a small time compared to the richness of what we have in him and what we look forward to.
As we go to pray, I would encourage you even as we're praying, if you know Christ, have him remind you of your Ebenezers. There was moments where he has demonstrated to you through experiences, through his word, of how he has been faithful thus far. And let that grow your faith in the days ahead that we don't know what will come. Let's pray.
Our Lord and our God, we thank you that you are true to your word. Just as we see that when the people turn to you, you fulfilled all your promises. You told them that you would stand with them and no one would stand against them and succeed if they stood with you. And you stood with them when they turned to you.
And Samuel set up to stone and say thus far the Lord has helped us so that they could look back and remember. And Lord, for those of us who know you through Jesus Christ, Lord remind us of that time when we came to you, broken and helpless, dead in our trespasses and sins. But you redeemed us and gave us new life, hope and a purpose, a new identity in you, a new creation in you, or that we would see that. We would see you high and lifted up our Ebenezer, the one who says he will never leave us or forsake us.
Lord, remind us of those times where you have demonstrated in practical ways and spiritual ways of your faithfulness and answer prayer and encouragement from your word and the support of our brothers and sisters. Lord, remind us that you will continue in whatever lies ahead for you are faithful even when we are not. Lord, we praise you this morning and ask that you would be with us as we go from this place. And Lord, if there is any here who do not yet know you have not experienced the saving work of Jesus Christ, that today they would stay and ask the questions and hear what it means to have life in you.
We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.