The whole of this history which gathers round the capture of the ark, and its return to the land of Israel till it found a home in Jerusalem, is of very great interest.
I. Let us first, then, look at this connection between declension and defeat. At the root of the calamity which befell the nation and the dishonour to the cause of God, there was a deep moral apostasy. The spiritual condition of the people had never sunk lower, from their abasement in Egypt to their captivity in Babylon, than at this time. The character of the priesthood had become thoroughly corrupt, and this is one of the most ominous signs that can appear in any society. The priests have the heaviest responsibility, no doubt, but sins of priests and people generally go hand-in-hand. Then, if there is to be recovery at all, convulsion is not far away. Churches and ministers with a very decent exterior may be standing in the same relative position as the people and priesthood in this olden time. We may be as far beneath the Sermon on the Mount as they were beneath the commandments of Sinai. We must never forget that the great test of all religion is its moral results. Is it making men lead higher, purer, more self-denying lives? Is our Christianity presenting itself in the spirit of Christ? Are ministers following the example of the apostle who could truly say, “I seek not yours, but you”? To have Church and land safe, is not enough to be free from the profanations which led to the capture of the ark; we must be in some conformity with the Christian standard. There was another feature of the declension of the people of Israel connected with this. They had changed their religion into a formal superstition. After their first defeat by the Philistines they began to think of higher help. But it was not of God they thought, the living God, but only of His ark. “Let us fetch the ark of the covenant, that it may save us out of the hand of our enemies.” And like all men when reality begins to fail, they are great in lofty phrases--“The ark of the covenant of the Lord of hosts which dwelleth between the cherubim.” When religion comes to this it sinks into a hideous idol, and the petrified shell must be broken in pieces if the spirit is to be saved. It is the natural result of the corruption of the word of life. So it was with the Pharisees in the time of our Lord. They made broad phylacteries with texts on them, and washed cups and plates, and made much of tithing little things, and then religion ascended a cross and hid itself in a grave. How deep it is in human nature to put the letter for the life! And when we take the Bible into our hand and call ourselves evangelical Christians we are not safe from this same danger. It is quite possible to possess an orthodox creed and put it in place of a true, unselfish life, to hold fast by our Bibles, and make the having them and reading them a charm, as truly as the Israelites, with the ark of Shiloh. There comes to the Church of Christ an evangelical revival. But in time it loses its efficacy. The same truth is preached, the very same words are used, but they have passed into a formula which glides over the tongue of the speaker, and falls on the ears of the hearers without any movement of the heart, or perhaps any distinct significance to the mind. The revival of Christian doctrine will ere long lose its power, unless it lead to a corresponding revival of Christian life. Now, there is a further stage in the ark’s history before it reaches its lowest fall. It has been dissociated from the living God, and has become not merely a common but a desecrated thing. To redeem the Israelites from their error, they must learn that the ark is powerless if God forsakes them, and that the symbol cannot save without the living presence. “The Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and the ark of God was taken.” Natural human courage proved itself stronger than corrupted religion, and hypocrisy was broken and scattered. No doubt the Philistines imagined they had vanquished Israel’s God, and some of his sincere but short-sighted friends thought the cause of religion lost, but the victory was for God and truth. “The corruption of the best thing becomes the worst,” and life, in some lower form, rises and overthrows what has lost its spirit, though it may still bear a higher name. We may think that catastrophes like these are very far from our own country, and from the churches of God among us, but there may be a slow decay which brings about the same end. Unless we can raise our Christian life in some measure up to our profession, and make it higher than the natural virtues which are found outside the Church, we shall suffer defeat in point after point, which shall bring on us serious detriment. If, for example, dishonesty and faithlessness to engagements be permitted amongst us, which would not be suffered in the common walks of life, we cannot maintain our place as the guardians of righteousness. If men of science show an unwearied love in the study of nature, an enthusiasm in gathering stores of knowledge from earth and sea and sky, and a skilfulness in applying them to practical use while we are indifferent and inert in the pursuit of spiritual truths. Careless about the hidden treasures of wisdom which cast light on the ways of God and meet the wants of souls, we shall not inspire confidence in our sincerity, or give men much interest in the contents of God’s Word and the work of Christ’s Church. The world is ready to judge a cause by the spirit it creates and thy fruit it produces, and if we do not surround the ark of God with all the things that have virtue and praise of which the apostle speaks, man will not believe in us, and may come to treat it with contempt.
II. We come to the other side of the subject, God’s victory. The Philistines carry the captive ark in triumph to Ashdod, their capital, and set it up as a trophy in the house of Dagon, their god. But the ark, which could not be defended by great armies, and round which thirty thousand men fell in vain, showed the power of the God of Israel when it was left alone and in exile. Dagon fell prostrate before it and when the priests set up their idol again it brought on it a heavier ruin. Disease spread through their coasts, and they began to feel that they were in conflict with a mysterious power, though they were slow to admit their weakness. What to do with God is the world’s great trial, as what to do with Jesus was the difficulty of Pilate. For the world cannot make God to its mind, and in the end the world cannot do without Him. It carries His ark hither and thither, seeks to bring Him to the level of its own conceptions, to subject Him to its own idols, but finds in all its efforts no true rest till it suffers Him to take His own way to His throne, from which in His own time He shall make good His word by still higher victories--“Over Philistia will I triumph.” We are still in the midst of this history, but we have reached a wider phase of it. We see it now more frequently, not in the attempt to put Dagon above the God of heaven, but to put man above Him. This brings us to the last remark, that if the ark of God is to find its true place it must be committed to the hands of men who love it. Men who have no real faith in it may be made instruments in God’s Providence of showing its powers, even by their extorted acknowledgments; but if it is to reach its throne it must be set within the border of its own land, and be borne from house to house and village to village till it gains Jerusalem. Even the God of the ark will not carry it to its end without human agency. That cross is our ark of the covenant, and in the joy that welcomed it to Jerusalem, when “David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet,” we seem to catch far off the anticipation of that time when “the temple of God shall be opened in heaven, and there is seen in it the ark of His testament: and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The Kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of His Christ; and He shall reign forever and ever “(Rev_11:1-19). And so let us, in closing, gather up the spirit of the history as it applies to ourselves. We need never despair of the cause of God; it has had its defeats where all seemed lost, but every defeat has been the herald of a new victory and of a higher rise. From Shiloh to the house of Dagon; but thence to Jerusalem to put on more spiritual beauty, and to be surrounded with those songs which go deep into Christian hearts. Let us not faint at its many vicissitudes. (J. Ker, D. D.)
The Ark of God taken
I. The text exhibits the terrible consequences to which ungodliness in the church and the weak or sympathetic toleration of it will lead. No one can fail to perceive that this was a most crushing catastrophe. “The ark of God was taken.” Looked at merely as a military reverse it presents a very gloomy aspect. Overwhelming must be the defeat inflicted when it reaches even to the capture of the general’s tent or the pavilion over which fleets the royal standard; and this was what happened. On some of the sculptured tablets which adorn the walls of the British Museum you may see representations of triumphal processions, in which the gods of the congregated people are being carried into captivity. Something like this happened, I suppose, after this battle of Aphek. With jubilant, and it may be mocking shouts, a procession was formed, and the sacred prize was borne to the temple of their chief idol. To Dagon they owe their success, and Jehovah is now the prisoner of Dagon, and must own the superior Deity. And in this way, of course, their own spiritual nature was injured. The inevitable and irresistible tendency of sin, wherever it exists, is to bring calamity upon the individual, upon the family, upon the nation; but when wickedness lifts up its head in the Church there is, if I may use the expression, a cancer of the heart; the very centre of life and vigour is stricken. “Ye are the salt of the earth, but if the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” If the light that is in the world be darkness, how great is that darkness! And the end of it will be that God’s name will be discredited, souls injured most desperately, the Lord’s own people plunged in gloom, and the cause of truth and righteousness smitten with a staggering blow, if not covered with disgrace. Hence the folly and guilt of an easy toleration of open sin anywhere, but especially in the Church. The command to leave the Sates never means that I am to let alone those who are manifestly thorns and weeds and poisonous herbs. No, no. Persecution, of course, we must not allow, but discipline we dare not neglect.
II. The text exhibits the outrageous folly of attempting to compensate for the absence of godliness by superficial excitement and superstitious attention to religious forms.
1. It indicates that they had not consulted the Lord before they commenced the campaign. You remember the time when the earlier generations of those redeemed out of Egypt came to the borders of Canaan, and the command was given to go up and possess the land? Spies were sent to explore the country, and they brought back an evil report. The people lost heart and began to murmur bitterly. The Lord in His righteous anger said, “These people shall not go in at all; their children shall go in, but as for them, they shall die in the wilderness.” Then their murmuring changed into penitential mourning, and they said, “We will go.” Moses retorted, “It is now too late, the Lord will not be with you.” Nevertheless they presumed to advance, “but the ark of the covenant of the Lord and Moses moved not out of the camp.” It was a superficial, undisciplined, unconsecrated impulse, and it met with defeat. They anticipated Providence. They precipitated an immature crisis and produced abortion.
2. They showed very shallow conceptions in regard to the principles of the kingdom to which they belonged, and the first conditions of success. “Why had the Lord smitten them!” Surely there was little need to ask that. Was not gross iniquity tolerated in high places? Were not the services of the sanctuary steeped in defilement?
3. Their language shows that they were utterly blinded in regard to the true nature of religion, and had no glimmer of that faith in the power of which their fathers had conquered, and which is evermore “the victory that overcometh the world.” They said, “Let us take unto us the ark,” as if the ark were everything. The grand old war cry, “Arise, O Lord, Thou and the ark of Thy strength,” had become dwarfed and dried up into confidence in what was nothing better than a wooden chest, as if, having that, they had all they needed, or could at least compel God to go with them. There is a tendency of the soul in all ages which may be thus expressed--little religion, much religiousness; little purity, much ritual; indifferent morals, the most polished manners. When people neglect the “weightier matters of the law,” all the more devoutly do they “tithe mint and anise and cumin.” Herod cannot atone for Herodianism, by building a splendid temple. You cannot atone for doing a wicked deed, or cherishing a wicked thought, by ejaculating in a parenthesis, “The Lord forgive me.” You cannot make up for betraying the cross by bowing to the crucifix. You cannot make up for living sour skim milk, or putrid water, by serving it up in a silver cream jug. You cannot hide the ghastliness of death by beautifying its shroud, or stay the corruption of Hades by adorning its sepulchre. You cannot cover hypocrisy or avert the consequences of formalism by running to the ark for shelter.
III. The text shows us how God in defeat and disaster sows the seed of ultimate deliverance and victory, “The ark of God was taken.” Yes; “but the ark was taken and Hophni and Phinehas were slain”; that is, the material prop upon which they were weakly and vainly leaning was removed, and the main causes of their national deterioration were destroyed. There are some successes which are worse than any defeats. If a builder is raising a house upon a rotten or weak foundation, the higher he is enabled to raise it without a check, the more overwhelming is the collapse which he is preparing in the long run. A student who is relying on luck and succeeding by a cram, has met with a misfortune which might well make him tremble. There are victories which, confirming a false principle and strengthening a vain self-confidence, do but lure the triumphant conqueror forward into the heart of a more tangled mass of difficulties, and land him in a more utter overthrow. God can afford to let His ark be taken; for, although the ark of God be captured, the God of the ark is never outwitted nor overreached. (R. H. Roberts, B. A.)
The two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain.
Clerical warriors
It ill becomes the minister of peace to mix in the clang of arms. It was an evil day for Hophni and Phinehas when they took the ark of the covenant from Shiloh, and sought to work on the fanaticism of the people by unveiling the Holiest of all. Unprepared to die, and guilty of profaning holy things, they provoked the judgment which shed their blood. It was an evil day for Zuingle when he left his chaplain’s post to wear a helmet, a sword, and a battle axe covered with wounds, insulted, killed, he lay under a tree at Cappel--not yet forty-eight years of age, his body cut and burned, and his ashes driven to the winds. “He had wielded an arm that God had forbidden,” says the historian; “the helmet had covered his head, and he had grasped the halberd. His more devoted friends were themselves astonished, and exclaimed, ‘We knew not what to say--a bishop in arms!’ The bolt had furrowed the cloud, the blow had reached the reformer, and his body was no more than a handful of dust in the palm of a soldier!” It was an evil day for Walker--that noble-hearted clergyman, who in the memorable siege of Derry attained such eminence, and did such service to his country by his patriotic and Christian discourses, for which he received the thanks of Parliament, the mitre of a bishop, and a monument in the city where his words and example kept up the courage of his famished fellow citizens for many weary days--it was an evil day for Walker when he rushed unbidden and unnecessarily to the battle of the Boyne. “He ought to have remembered that the peculiar circumstances which had justified him in becoming a combatant had ceased to exist, and that in a disciplined army, led by generals of long experience and great fame, a fighting divine was likely to give less help than scandal. The bishop-elect was determined to be wherever danger was, and the way in which he exposed himself excited the extreme disgust of the royal patron, who hated a meddler almost as much as a coward. A soldier who ran away from a battle, and a townsman who pushed himself into a battle, were the two objects which most excited William’s spleen . . . While exhorting the colonists of Ulster to play the man, Walker was shot dead . . . William thought him a busybody who had been properly punished for running into danger without any call of duty, and expressed that feeling with characteristic bluntness on the field of battle. ‘Sire,’ said an attendant, ‘the Bishop of Derry has been killed by a shot at the ford.’ ‘What took him there?’ growled the king.” Godly men may make mistakes, enter suspicious circles, and endanger their sacred calling and their influence for good; but when the wicked rush into sin, and die under the chastisement of God, the calamity involves the ruin of their immortal souls--Ichabod is then written upon their eternity. (R. Steel.)
Eli’s death
I. The utter destruction of the grossly wicked. “And the two sons of Eli, Hophni, and Phinehas, were slain.” The greed and lust and irreverence of the sons of Eli met with swift punishment. It was no accident which sent them together to their bloody death. So sometimes sudden destruction comes upon the enemies of God. We may not tell when or how, but its coming is sure. Here or beyond, there shall be a day of righteous retribution. But we do not come to half the evil of the lives of these wicked priests if we only look at their deaths as the outcome. For they were leaders of the people. No bad man is alone in his destruction. If the final judgment is to be deferred to a one last day, which shall be the end of probation for all, is it not in order that the results of good and evil may be worked out to the end?
II. The implication in evil of the weakly good. Eli stands out in the gallery of Old Testament characters as the most conspicuous example of weak goodness. Influence is not measured by the correctness or the intensity of the emotions, but by strength and direction of the will. We shall be judged, not by our feelings of sympathy or kindness, but by the deeds which express our earnest purpose. It was here that Eli was lacking. There was just force enough in his convictions to control his emotions; when that was done, their force was spent, and his speech was weak and his conduct wavering. It is not only open sin, positive disobedience, violent breaking of God’s law, which comes within the scope of sure retributions. III the safety of God’s cause. That the Lord is able to take care of His own cause is no reason why we should be careless of it, or lightly imperil its interests. (Monday Club Sermons.)
