We come now to 1 Samuel chapter
4. This chapter really kicks off
a stretch of four chapters that teach the church of God about
our true help. It is to teach us the stone of
our help and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. What the Lord does is He gives
us a word, and that word is Ebenezer. And it first appears in chapter
4, verse 1. Let's read that. It says, And
the word of Samuel came to all Israel. Now let me just stop
there for a moment. What word? What word of Samuel
came to all Israel? This appears to be referring
to that word of the Lord that came to Samuel by night, about
Eli and the end of Eli's house and that word that Samuel spoke
to Eli and what it means most likely is that either
A, that word began to spread to all Israel and they heard
what the word of the Lord was to Samuel and to Eli, that is
the house, his house was coming to an end, or it means that now
is the coming to pass of that word which came to Samuel concerning
Eli. Now here's how it happened. Now
Israel went out against the Philistines to battle and pitched beside
Ebenezer. And the Philistines pitched in
Aphek. Now historically, the writer
is saying this is where Israel camped, by that place that we
now know as Ebenezer. That's what he's saying there.
Look at chapter five, verse one. It's repeated again. And the
Philistines took the ark of God and brought it from Ebenezer
unto Ashdod. This is the fourth chapter. Then
Samuel took a stone and set it between Mizpih and Shen, and
called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, hitherto hath the Lord
helped us. And so this is in chapter seven
when it receives its name Ebenezer, but it's being referred to here
and now. And what the Lord is teaching
Israel, beginning here, he's bringing them to see and to know
your help. is the stone of help. Your help
is the Lord, the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And that's what our
God does. He teaches us who our salvation is. Because as we'll
see with Israel, their hope and their understanding of their
blessings were completely misplaced. They were entirely misplaced.
They weren't looking to the Lord. They were looking to other things
and things that cannot save. And so the Lord delivered them
from that. And that's what the Lord does.
He's going to make his people to know who the help of our salvation
is. He's going to make us to know
who all our salvation is. And, you know, Peter, The Apostle
Peter learned this. He said to Cornelius, when he
was sent of the Lord to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, he
said to Cornelius, the Lord is no respecter of persons. And
Peter knew this. The Apostle Peter understood
this by experience that the Lord is not a respecter of persons. And Peter knew this because what
happened? Well, on the night in which our
Lord was betrayed, On that night, he told the disciples,
you're all going to forsake me. And what did Peter say? Not me,
Lord. He threw all the others under
the bus. He said, these all may forsake you, but I won't forsake
you. And then the Lord told them,
you're actually going to deny me three times before the cock
crows. And he did. And that's what happened. Peter not only forsook the Lord
just like all the other disciples, but he denied his Lord three
times. And the Lord restored him. And so what the Lord is showing
us through his word and teaching his people is that we are very
proud. And we think we're something
when we're nothing. And our confidences are fixed
in this flesh. And they're fixed in the strength
of this flesh and in our wisdom and what we think that we can
accomplish. And the Lord separates his people
from vain fleshly confidences. that we should find our all in
the Lord Jesus Christ. And so this is why we see the
Lord, what we'll see the Lord doing here is he's gonna bring
Israel low, he's gonna strip them of their vain confidences,
even to the point where his name is dishonored in the mouths of
their enemies. God is willing to do that, to
bring even His name down so that the enemies think they've triumphed
over Him in order to teach His people what we have need of understanding
and knowing and learning by the grace of our God. To see that,
no, I don't save myself. No, it's not in the things that
I do for myself. It's all of Christ. I need Christ. And He does this to drive us
to the Lord. And so, some of the things that
our Lord teaches His people here in this chapter is in their humiliation,
He brings us through trials, He brings us low in ourselves
to strip us of those things that we might find our glory in the
Lord, that we would glory in Him, that we would confess, Lord,
You're my Ebenezer. You are the stone of my health. And then, we won't really get
into it today, but the Lord, having humbled his people, we
actually see the triumph of the Lord. In that humility, we see
a picture of Christ triumphing over all our enemies. And I'll
touch on that today at the end, but we'll look at that more probably
the next time. So, we're gonna focus on three
things that our Lord teaches his people here in Their defeat
by the Philistines because they get they get whooped here They
get defeated by the Philistines here, and there's three things
the Lord is teaching us here in this So picking up again in
verse one, and then we'll read into verse two. Now Israel went
out against the Philistines to battle, and pitched beside Ebenezer,
and the Philistines pitched in Aphek. So what's going on here? Israel has a good endeavor. They're
oppressed by the Philistines. They have the rule over them
to a certain degree, and they're oppressing them and troubling
them, and they want to throw off the shackles of their oppressors. And most believe that the timing
of this is in relation to judges right after Samson defeats the
Philistines himself. And they think maybe this mobilized
Israel. Now they want to cast off their rule. Others think,
well, maybe it was a little after that, like 40 years after that,
because Eli was a judge for 40 years himself. And I don't know
how much they overlapped, the judges. But it's somewhere believed
to be after Samson's death. And the Philistines put themselves
in array against Israel. And when they joined battle,
Israel was smitten before the Philistines. And they slew of
the army in the field about 4,000 men. And so Israel, endeavoring
a good thing to cast off their oppressors, gets defeated. They
get beat, so that 4,000 men die in the field of battle. Now,
who are the Philistines? We've seen how in scripture when
we read of the Philistines or any of the other nations that
troubled Israel, they really are a good picture of the enmity
of our indwelling sin, of the sin that yet dwells in this flesh. Sin is yet present in our flesh
and we see its effects and we are troubled by it. It comes
on us just like the Philistines would attack the Israelites and
oppress them. And so what the Lord is showing
us here in Israel's defeat in this first round, they wanted
to cast off their oppressors. They wanted to be free of the
shackles of those that oppressed them and troubled them, but they
couldn't defeat them. They could not defeat their enemies. They could not free themselves
of their enemies. So what's the Lord teaching us
here? You and I cannot deliver ourselves from our foes. We're not going to have the victory
over our enemies and over our sin and over our oppressors.
We're not going to deliver ourselves by our wisdom and by our strength. We can't do it. We cannot do
it. If the Lord allowed it, we would
glory in our wisdom. We would glory in our strength. We would glory in the things
that we did to save ourselves rather than looking to the Lord
and fleeing to the Lord and going to the Lord for his salvation.
The Lord is saying He shuts us up, He prevents us from delivering
ourselves and He brings us in to defeat before our sin and
our own enemies and the troubles that we yet feel in order to
show us that's not your salvation. You don't deliver yourselves.
I've provided your salvation in my Son Jesus Christ. You're
going to look to Him. He is the Savior of my people. He's your salvation. And so the
Lord makes his people to know that we are sinners, that we
died in Adam, and we must be justified before God, but we
don't know how. We don't know how to save ourselves.
We don't have that ability. And we need the grace of God
to deliver us. And so the Lord, he allows us
to go out, to go at our sin. And we probably all have experiences
where we try to address and deal with some sin or some trouble
or something that we felt and recognized was not right and
that we shouldn't do. or say, or whatever it is, and
we tried to fix it and failed. And the Lord allows his people
to hit that wall and to experience that defeat and to suffer that
sorrow and that pain because if he allowed us that victory,
we would have confidence, more confidence in ourselves. And
our confidence would grow in the thing that does not save.
rather than in the one who does save, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so our Lord does this, that
we might learn that we are sinners by nature, that we would, to
the degree that he purposes, we know and understand that we
are dead in Adam, dead in trespasses and sins, that we cannot save
ourselves, that we've got problems, and only Christ can save us from
those problems. That's what he's making us to
know. And so Israel, they tried to throw off their oppressors,
seemed like a good thing. Why wouldn't the Lord bless that?
Well, because they would then have trusted in the strength
of their own arm, and they would have had confidence in themselves.
All right, verse three. And when the people were come
into the camp, the elders of Israel said, wherefore hath the
Lord smitten us today before the Philistines? We thought we
were doing something good. Let us fetch the ark of the covenant
of the Lord out of Shiloh unto us, that when it cometh among
us, it may save us out of the hand of our enemies. And so they
thought, well, maybe we forgot to include the Lord properly. So they got this idea, and they
go and get the ark and bring it up from Shiloh. And the people
are real excited, and they're shouting. And the enemies hear
the shouts, and they begin to realize, uh-oh, the ark's come
into the camp. And this is new. This wasn't
like this the other day. Now they've got the presence
of their God with them, and they were fearful. They were fearful.
But what happened? Verse 10. Drop down to verse
10 and 11. And the Philistines fought, and
Israel was smitten. And they fled every man into
his tent, and there was a very great slaughter. and there fell
of Israel 30,000 foot men, and the ark of God was taken, and
the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain. So Israel
lost again. And not only did they lose again,
but this time the defeat was even greater. They lost even
more fiercely. They lost 30,000 men. Why? Israel turned to the Lord, didn't
they? They went to the Lord. They tried
to get Him more engaged in their efforts. I don't know what they
did the first time, but the second time they were much more careful
to include the Lord. So why were they defeated? Well, what the Lord teaches his
people is that not only are you not going to save yourselves
from your sins and overcome your enemies, but you're not going
to do it with a form of religion either. And we do that by nature. And we turn to religion. And when we fail, the natural
thing for us to do in religion is to get a little more serious
about our religion. Maybe I've not been consistent
enough. And so we start coming to all the services as consistently
as we can. We read our Bible more and we
pray more and we try to remember to pray about something more
consistently in the hopes that now the Lord will bless it and
he'll give us that blessing. And we do that. And that's because
the natural man is very the fond of that outward form of religion
and we think this is where I receive my blessings and for these things
this is why God blesses me and why God will be favorable to
me because I'm doing this. And we get all kinds of vain,
crooked, and false ideas thinking that God is pleased with the
form of religion and that because I'm partaking and practicing
this religion that God is sprinkling grace upon me and blessing me
for those things to keep me in it. But that's what Israel did. And Israel got defeated even
more fiercely in trusting that because the Lord is not going
to allow His people to continue in dead-letter religion only
to die and find out that they're not in Christ and are yet outside
of Christ. And so He strips us those vain
confidences. It's not the strength of the
flesh and it's not religion that saves. It's Christ Jesus himself
who is the stone of our health. And so the means that he gives
us are good. They're a means of comfort. There
are means of teaching us, and strengthening us, and turning
our eye upon the Lord. But where we err is thinking
that because I'm doing this, and in this thing, this is why
the Lord blesses me. And so we look to those things,
believing that this is how the Lord, why, or when the Lord blesses
me, rather than seeking Christ. And that's what the Lord is bringing
us to do. Go to Christ, worship Him, seek Him, and the blessings
that you and I need, He'll provide them. He knows what we have need
of even before we ask Him. And we can bring to Him our cares,
and our fears, and our worries, and our doubts, but we go to
Him confessing our need, and we go to Him seeking His help
in our time of need. We're not going because we say,
well, this is what God requires of me to bless me, is doing these
things. No, he calls us and draws us
to Christ himself because that's where he blesses all his people. Our God does not bless us because
we're religious or practitioners of religion. He blesses us in
the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ who hath blessed us with all spiritual
blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That's where
we're blessed. That's where we're comforted.
That's where we are taught and instructed. And that's where
he's teaching us through his word to go, to him. Because the error is in doing
religion and the form of religion thinking this, for this I'll
be blessed. Because that's what Israel did
and they weren't blessed. They were defeated. And so we
see that too and we know we've been in, a lot of us have been
in religion for decades and thinking this is my salvation, this is
where I get the blessings, is doing this and then adding A
and B and C and taking this away and doing this and we're all
defeated and constantly dejected and rejected and down because
that's not the blessing, that's not salvation. Salvation is the
Lord Jesus Christ and going to Him and looking to Him and trusting
in Him, that's where we find peace. That's where we're given
peace and obtain that which we seek and are delivered from the
fears and the doubts and the worries and being confused and
wondering, why am I suffering all these defeats? And because,
well, because you're trusting in the flesh, that's why, that's
why, rather than trusting Christ. And once you look to Christ and
find him, there is peace and he comforts you and delivers
you from trusting vain, vain things. He said, seek ye first
the kingdom of God and His righteousness. That's Christ. Christ is the
kingdom of God. Christ is the righteousness of
God. And all these things will be added unto you. That which pains you in the flesh
and you're struggling with in the flesh, He'll bless you in
His perfect time. And it may not be a deliverance
from those things, it may be reconciling your heart to trust
the Lord, that the thorn in the flesh, it's for my good. Because
when I'm weak, then I'm strong. I'm strong. And so he does it
perfectly, going to him, looking to him, resting in him. He does
it perfectly. You can love him and trust him
and worship him and leave it in his care. And he'll provide
for you everything you need. You can trust him in that. And
then finally, the ark was a visible token of God's presence. And once Israel entered into
the land of promise, he told them, I'm gonna put my ark down
in a place, and it's not to be moved from that place. We're
not gonna be wandering around all over the countryside anymore
once we get there. He said in Deuteronomy 12, We
can go there in Deuteronomy 12 verse 5. But unto the place which the Lord your God
shall choose out of all your tribes to put his name there,
even unto his habitation, shall ye seek, and thither thou shalt
come. He says, I'm going to put it
in a place and you're going to come and seek me there in that
place. And then verse 11 of that same
chapter, then there shall be a place which the Lord your God
shall choose to cause his name to dwell there. thither shall
ye bring all that I command you. And so the Lord's saying, I'm
gonna be planted here, you're gonna come to me. But Israel
said, no, we're gonna go and get the ark and we're gonna bring
it to us and we're gonna take it around with us on our little
campaign here. We're gonna do what we want. Well, the third thing that the
Lord does for us here that we see in this is that he settles
us in Christ. So long as we're running to and
fro and doing what we think we need to do and what we think
works or is going to save us from our sins, we're going to
be tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine. Our endeavor,
like Israel, especially in religion, our endeavor is, I've got to
get rid of the sin. I've got to cast off these oppressors. I've got to quit being troubled
by the sin, so I've got to take care of this. I've got to do
things. I've got to fix things. I've got to fix myself. And so
that's what we get to working on. And when that fails, we incorporate
more religion. I can tell you that, like me,
there's many that have raised their hands many times, rededicated
their life to the Lord, walked many an aisle, been baptized
once, twice, three times, done every and anything they could
because they couldn't get rid of the sin. And that was their
focus. Cast off my oppressors. Get rid
of that which is troubling me in the flesh. You and I can't
do it. That's why you fail. And you
never will. If you do succeed, then you're
not in Christ. You don't know the Lord, because
the Lord's left you to yourself. But if you fail, and then you
failed in religion, that's a good place to be. Because the Lord
says, look to my son. I sent my son Jesus Christ to
save my people from their sins. And you're going to know him.
You're going to cry out to him and confess him. And so all your
defeats and all your failures has been to bring you to this
place here to look to Christ, to believe him, to rest in him,
to trust his blood. Stop trusting yourselves, because
as long as you're running to and fro in religion, you're tossed
to and fro, carried about with every wind and wave of doctrine.
And I certainly was. I was constantly troubled by
it because I thought so long as I saw the presence of sin,
something's wrong. It didn't take. It didn't take. I better try again. I better
do something else. And so I kept going with this and going with
that and tossed all over the place. And the Lord settles his
people in Christ through the preaching of the gospel, which
says, stop your doing. Look to Christ. He's everything. He is the Savior of His people. And we'll see that in the next
hour. He's the Savior of His people. There's not an ailment
from sin that Christ doesn't save His people from. Everything,
everything that is the result of sin, He demonstrated perfectly
that we are delivered from it. And though we walk by faith now,
we know, because he showed us and has given us faith, we know
that he has accomplished redemption for his people. Thanks be unto
God. And so he does that. Come to
the Lord Jesus Christ for everything. Had Israel just gone to the Lord
and worshiped him, he would have taken care of their oppressors.
he would have defeated the Philistines. And in fact, as we go through
this, we'll see that's exactly what he did. He destroyed them
without any help. Without Israel being able to
do a thing, he delivered his people from their enemies. And so believers, you're to seek
Christ. Seek him, worship him. When you
go to the Word, you're looking for the Lord Jesus Christ. You're
not looking to be more holy. You're not looking to be set
up better for the weak. You're looking for Christ, because
He's worthy of all our praise, our adoration, our focus, our
hearts, our thoughts, our prayers. He's everything to us. He's our
God and our Savior. We're weak, and He is strong,
brethren. And so the Lord does this. We're
to come to him with no fleshly confidences. We're gonna, and
he's gonna strip them. He's faithful to humble us. And he's faithful to give us
those failures and to strip us of vain confidences. And he's
faithful to not let us fixate and think that our religion is
what's saving us. He's faithful in that because
He loves the Son, and He glorifies the Son, and He glorifies the
Son in our hearts, so that Christ is made all and all to us. And so what we'll see more of
the next time is, you know, Israel was broken. When they took the
Ark of the Covenant, they were humbled. and it looked like God
was defeated and they were upset and miserable but it was in that
humiliation just like our Lord in his humiliation when the disciples
thought this is it they took him away and they crucified him
well it was in that humiliation in that weakness there that Christ
defeated and conquered all his foes. He triumphed gloriously
in that humiliation and that's what the Lord does. He brings
us to see that our triumph is in Christ who himself came in
weakness and in humiliation believing God, fulfilling all the will
of the Father perfectly as our sacrifice and accomplished our
redemption all by himself. And so we, brethren, may rest
in Christ. He's everything. So I pray the
Lord bless that word to our hearts and comfort us in the Lord Jesus
Christ. Amen.