Good Monday to you my ‘Walking with Jesus” friends,
One week from today will be Christmas Day! Normally, Israeli hotels would be filled to overflowing with tourists from all around the world, and many preparations would have been made for Christmas related events in Bethlehem. Bethlehem today is not a small village, it’s a city, with thousands of people! I saw it from a distance of only a few miles when I visited Israel just three months ago. Bethlehem today is a Palestinian city in the “West Bank” area of Israel, about 5 miles south of Jerusalem.
As you may know, this Christmas week 2023 hotels in Israel are empty, and virtually no Christmas celebrations are happening in Bethlehem due to the war resulting from the October 7 Hamas attacks on several Israeli kibbutz communities near Gaza.
In recent days, in our “Walking with Jesus” journey, we’ve gone back in time 3000 years to Israel, walking through a similar time of violent war between the ancestors of Hamas, the Philistines, and the ancestors of modern-day Israelis, the Israelites. We’re following the record of 1 Samuel and yesterday we rejoiced with Israeli harvesters who were gathering in their wheat, when unexpectedly they saw the reflection of the sun from something on a cart on the road in the distance. The cart was coming from Philistine territory, with two cows hitched to it, but no driver. On the cart were two chest type boxes, one of them covered in gold was reflecting the bright sunshine that day. As the cart got closer, the harvesters were stunned to see the precious Ark of the Covenant of the God of Israel which had been captured by the Philistines 7 months before!
You’ll recall that 1 Samuel 6:14 tells us the cows stopped near a large rock in the wheat field of a man named Joshua of the town of Beth Shemesh. The Israelites put the two boxes from the cart onto that large rock, then chopped up the cart and offered the cows as burnt offering sacrifices to God, and they had a great celebration!! The five Philistine rulers who had been watching from a hillside in the distance, were also celebrating that maybe the brutal suffering of cancerous tumors and rats in their towns would end, since they’d sent the stolen Ark of God back to Israel. In their exuberance, the inquisitive Israelites opened the box on the cart and found five golden balls and what appeared to be five golden ‘rats’. These were offerings sent by the Philistines in hopes the judgment of God upon them would stop.
For the Israelites, it was time for an important lesson. God had NOT abandoned them even though their leaders had made a very foolish decision to take the Ark of the Covenant out of the Tabernacle and send it into battle. God Himself had brought the Ark back to Israel. Sadly, in all of us there is an inquisitiveness which can sometimes cause us to make unwise decisions and pry into places we should not go. Someone, or several someones in the group of celebrating Israelites that day, approached the Ark of God and lifted the lid, looking into the Ark.
Perhaps their motives were pure, wanting to be sure the Philistines had not stolen the Tablets of stone Moses had brought down from Mount Sinai and put into that Ark centuries before? But God had warned Moses, Aaron and the original Levites, the Kohathites, whose job it was to carry the Ark from place to place as the Israelites traveled, to be very careful in their handling of the God designed, holy artifacts of worship that were in the Tabernacle. (Numbers 4:1-20)
The Ark and other holy artifacts were to be carefully wrapped and covered BEFORE the Kohathites would come to pick them up and carry them. Numbers 4:20 was clear instruction from God: “The Kohathites must not even look at the holy things, even for a moment, or they will die.” From God’s perspective, the handling of the Holy Ark had been disrespectful, a mockery of His holiness and God responded.
The record says: “God struck down 70 of the men of Beth Shemesh because they had looked into the Ark of the LORD. The people mourned because of this heavy blow the LORD had dealt them. They asked, ‘Who can stand in the presence of the LORD, this Holy God?” (1 Samuel 6:19) May I ask, what is your understanding of the holiness of God? How do you respect God’s holiness in your worship, your prayer, your daily life, and even how you speak about God?
In their shock and fear those Israelites in the fields near Beth Shemesh made an important but very wrong decision. Rather than sending the Ark back to Shiloh where the Tabernacle was, and from which the Ark had been foolishly removed, these frightened Israelites looked for the fastest way to send it somewhere, into some shelter.
The record says: “They sent messengers to the people of Kiriath Jearim saying, ‘The Philistines have returned the Ark of the LORD. Come down and take it up to your place.’ So men of Kiriath Jearim came and took the Ark of the LORD up to Abinadab’s house on the hill and consecrated his son Eleazar to guard the Ark of the Lord. It was a long time, 20 years in all, that the Ark remained at Kiriath Jearim…” (1 Samuel 6:21-7:2)
Now my friends, what do you see happening here? The Ark of the Covenant had that name because the Tablets of the Covenant between God and Israel were inside that Ark; and the Ark represented the very presence of God for Israel. Yet Israel had been led by such failed spiritual leaders Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, and now 7 months with the Ark in the hands of their enemies, that it seems Israel as a nation had turned far away from God and had no idea how to honor God in His holiness.
The Israelites had drifted so far spiritually, that it appears they put the Ark in the back room of a man’s house for 20 years, that’s an entire generation! I invite us all to look around our world today, our city, our neighborhood, our own families, even our own lives.
Is that situation in 1 Samuel 7 an accurate reflection of how our world is treating God this Christmas season 2023? Has God been pushed so far out of daily human life and every aspect of our societies that Christmas has little SPIRITUAL meaning to most everyone in every society of our world?
What will it take for your heart and mine, your family and mine, your city and mine to find a spiritual hunger well up in us that would motivate us to make this Christmas a season of desperate pursuit of God? A passionate return to honoring God and His remarkable plan of redemption from sin for our world, which motivated God to send His Son Jesus to come and live among us for 30 years, and eventually die a sacrificial death to pay for our sinful rejection of God, so we could be restored into living glorious, God honoring lives, in hope filled relationship with God?
What more needs to happen in our world before there will be a worldwide outcry for God’s help and an honest acknowledgment that we have pushed God away, we have done what the Israelites did, and God is not welcome among us!? Yet if we’ll look and listen closely, God is still reaching and calling to us, offering His help this Christmas season! Here’s a song to help us reflect on this very important reality…
Today’s Scripture is 1 Samuel 6:19-7:2.
Choose below to read or listen.
1 Sam. 6:19-7:2 1 Sam. 6
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1 Samuel 7
Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
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Pastor Doug Anderson
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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