That’s Not Normal! (Part 2 of 2)

It's hard to imagine worse news Today on Truth for Life, we'll learn of the news that really shook Phineas' wife to her core.

This is part 2 of a message titled That's Not Normal. Alistair Begg is teaching from 1 Samuel 4, where in verses 12–22. Now, here's something that ought to give us pause when we read this. We have to say, I'm not sure I remember many places in the Bible where somebody's weight is mentioned. So therefore, it must be a significant thing.

Well, you could say, yes, in sheer terms of the physicality of it, that would explain why, if he was heavy in that way, a fall would be sufficient to bring about his death. But actually, we know that it's more than that. Because what was the problem early on with the three-pronged fork and the digging in the meat? It was that they despised the place that God had appointed, decided that the preoccupations of themselves and their father took precedence over their own earthly longings, over their own needs. Hey, you give us this stuff, or we'll take it from you forcibly. Don't you worry about Almighty God. We're the custodians of Almighty God. Just do what we're telling you. We'll take the fat.

So what do you have? Where's the glory? In one sense wrapped around Eli's belly. For his girth is in itself a physical expression of the spiritual chaos represented in the priestly function of Shiloh. And the writer is making a play on words throughout this saga, showing how when those who are fastened on themselves and their own significance seek to rob God of his glory, they treat him as if he is light and may be manipulated, and so they themselves, regarding themselves as heavy, take precedence in everything. This little scene here is a sad scene, isn't it?

The Son is sitting on Eli's life. He dies miserably. But I want to believe that he didn't die eternally. The Lord knows these things. I say that because even in his death, it's actually clear that his deepest concern is not what is happening to him or even what happened to his sons but the news that God had forsaken his dwelling in Shiloh, the news that the ark had now been captured, the news that the glory, if you like, had departed. Eli is one of a number of individuals in the Bible, particularly in the realm of religious profession and in religious exercise in terms of priestly or pastoral function, if you like, who stands as a huge warning—a warning that is encapsulated in Paul's words, remember, in 1 Corinthians 10.

Let anyone who thinks he stands take heed, lest he falls. I want to believe that Eli died of a broken heart rather than of a broken neck. I want to believe that the former preceded the latter. I don't know.

What is main and plain? Eli died. Second little scenario is probably one of the most touching and one of the loveliest in Old Testament record. We don't even know this lady's name. Simply, his daughter-in-law, the wife of Phinehas.

I encourage you to read this on your own. Will you agree with me that it's both touching and tragic, that it is quite a drama that unfolds in a matter of just a few words? Do you ever see somebody just in passing?

Perhaps you're on a bus or something, and you look at them, and you realize there's a whole life wrapped up in that person. Well, you look at this, now his daughter-in-law. What had this lady's life been? It must have been peculiar in many ways, because we know how it ends. You see, crisis as in this does not create this response.

Crisis reveals the nature of the person by their response. Now, here she was married to this character as she was married to a priest. Presumably, on the occasion of their marriage, there would have been great joy and celebration.

How wonderful it is this! Not only is she married to a priest, but her brother-in-law is a priest, and so she lived her life in the goldfish bowl of a priestly home. As time went by, she became aware of her husband's double standards.

He went out into the community, and he did his priestly stuff, but he also slept with women. She was aware of his adulterous behavior—a behavior that was a matter of public knowledge, as we know from the text. She would have felt the sting when people said of her as she passed by in the marketplace, You know, that is Phineas's wife. And then she would have heard somebody say, And we all know about Phineas, don't we?

She would have been aware of what the public would not be aware of—what went on behind closed doors. Whether Phineas actually sought God in the private place. Whether there was a growing distance between his function and, if you like, his fellowship with God. She would have been aware if the distancing of himself from that which is sacred produced in his experience activity that was a job, but it was not a joy. It had been a joy, but it became a job.

People always ask me, When do you leave pastoral ministry when your joy is supplanted by just doing a job? It will not suffice. But here, they obviously still were intimate with one another. She was pregnant. Had they turned over a new leaf? Had he said, You know what? I'm done with all that stuff. It's going to be a new day. We don't know. What kind of farewell was it when she embraced him as they left, he and Hophni, to take this ark to the field of battle, especially in light of the fact that she knew, because the word of Samuel hadn't fallen to the ground, and because the people of Israel knew the word of Samuel, which was the word that was the reiteration of the word that had come by the certain man who brought the word of prophecy concerning the demise and destruction of the house of Eli.

It's hard to imagine that. And now she heard the news. And when she heard the news—now, notice, when the news is given to Eli, it goes in ascending order. Ah, the army has fled, there's been a slaughter, your sons are dead, and the ark—he's the punchline. Notice, in this case, the punchline heads the list.

And when she heard the news that the ark of God was captured, and that her father-in-law and her husband were dead, she bowed herself and gave birth, for the pains had come upon her. Now, here's where I find myself all week. I wish you could be with me sometimes during the week so you could see what it's like up there in my cave, you know, surrounded by sheets of paper that I keep crumpling up and throwing in the bin. But this lady's got me stumped throughout the week and I find myself sitting again going, That's not normal. Because think about it. Under any natural circumstances, surely the death of a spouse would head the list.

Surely the real issue would be, Forget about the box for the time being. My man's dead. If you've lost a loved one, you know that every other consideration in the world falls to the ground in relationship to that reality. So what are we discovering here? Well, the cumulative impact of it all induces labor.

But what we're realizing is that the physical response is outweighed by the spiritual. And we know this because of what unfolds. When she realizes that she's not going to survive the ordeal, the women attending her, seeking to rally her and encourage her, say to her, Hey, you know, the baby, it's a boy. Every Hebrew mom wanted a boy.

The whole story begins with a woman, Hannah, who's thrilled with a boy. What possesses somebody, even in that extremity, to not answer or pay attention? That's what it says in verse 20. But she didn't answer or pay attention. Now, my first thought was, Well, that's because she was so physically distressed. She couldn't.

No. How do you know? Because she named the child. If she was blotto, if she was just out of it, then she'd be out of it. She didn't answer or pay attention. But she said, I want you to call the child Ichabod, saying the glory has departed from Israel.

Now, you notice that's in quotation marks. Then the commentary of the writer, because the ark of God had been captured and because of her father-in-law and her husband. And she said, back into quotes again, The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured. Now, Ichabod simply means no glory. Or where is the glory? How can it be?

How can this be? It must be that this lady, somehow in a way that is not disclosed to us in Holy Scripture, lived in the presence of God. That when her husband let her down, when she was aware of the discrepancy between public profession and private reality, that somehow or another she must have been saying to herself, God is a very present help in trouble. He's a refuge for me.

The name of the Lord is a strong tower. Into it I can run and be saved. She must have been doing that.

Because otherwise you're not going to get a response like this. She must somehow or another have had a theology which comes out so clearly in her death, and so this lady, whose name we do not know, who lived faithfully a hidden life, will be laid to rest in an unvisited tomb. Don't you want to believe—I do—that somehow in all of her pain and disappointment and loss, somehow deep inside, she had laid hold of something that even those closest to her had not grasped? If I was… This is another thing that I do that is just silly, but I hear music when I'm reading the text.

It's all imagined, of course. I thought, I imagined I could hear her voice. And as her life ebbs away, she's singing, … my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

He has plundered out the vintage where the grapes of wrath… See, she knew. She knew that Hannah, when she prayed, was on it. There is none holy like you, O Lord. What is God's glory? It is the manifestation of his infinite perfection and holiness. It is bringing up and out into the public arena all that God is, all that he means.

Why, all that matters. Why, the psalmist says, I'd rather spend a single day within your courts than thousands spend anywhere else. What is it that brings that about? It must only be that in the deep recesses of the human soul there is an engagement with God. That's why the psalmist has so much on it. Psalm 19, The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. In other words, the clouds shout to you in the morning, shouting out to you.

The evening sunlight shouts out. It expresses the glory of God. She must have seen this. She must have believed this. She knew that the glory of God was to be declared among the nations. Therefore, for the ark to be captured, for it to be carried away amongst the pagans, then God must be in this.

It must be. Be exalted, O God, she might have said before she went to bed. Exalted above the heavens, let your glory be over all the earth. You see, she knew that God's glory mattered more than Eli's name, mattered more than Shiloh, mattered more than present victory.

That's not normal. Because by nature we cannot see God's glory. By nature, our eyes are hidden from the glory of God.

Therefore, I say to you, if it isn't natural, it has to be supernatural. 2 Corinthians and chapter 4, and even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. And we are all perishing until we find life in Christ. It is veiled to those who are perishing.

Now, why is this? Well, in their case, the God of this world—small g—has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. So you sit and listen to me or my colleagues preach. And you say, That was very interesting," or, That was very boring," or, I just frankly don't get it. Well, of course you don't get it.

You can't get it. Your eyes have been blinded by the God of this age. You and I, we're all tempted to believe that this is it, that this matters more than anything else, that whatever is up and out and beyond there, somehow or another, that's another realm that doesn't matter. This is the real realm. But you see, God opens blind eyes. God softens hard hearts. For what we proclaim is not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake, for God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, which is a reference to the creation, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Do you see this? What happened at Shiloh is long remembered. You'll be surprised now, I hope, that as you read through your Bible and you come across a reference, for example, like Psalm 78 verse 60, you'll say, Oh, yeah, I get that. When God heard, he was full of wrath, and he utterly rejected Israel.

He forsook his dwelling at Shiloh, the tent where he dwelt among mankind. Jeremiah the prophet speaking at a time in the history of the people of God, when they were also tempted to use God to say, You are useful rather than you are worthy. And in that context, the word of warning to them is directly in relationship to Shiloh. Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the LORD. Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it, because of the evil of my people Israel. Go now to my place at Shiloh. There is not only a warning here for each to ensure that we do not fall, we who believe ourselves to be standing, but there is a striking warning here to every assembly of God's people. I could take you throughout Scotland and, to shame and sadness, stand with you outside boarded-up buildings that were once called Holy This or the Church of the That. And what is written across them metaphorically is just one word, Ichabod. Where is the glory?

No glory. When we say to one another these things about the next generation and the importance of the passing on of truth and the ensuring that our children and our children's children are nurtured in the things of Christ, we're seeing it in light of the fact that we wouldn't be the first church that in a hundred years from now people drove past and said, You know, I think in the early 2000s there was a congregation there. That's what they said in Ephesus.

Candlestick removed. I hate the thought, perish the thought, that Parkside Church will one day have its name changed to Ichabod Community Church. Because the leadership were just doing their job, but they lost their joy, and the congregation was so fixated on the now and the me and the what that any notion of the glory and majesty and transcendence of God was to be lost. There is a danger for any of us to take God's glory for granted, either as individuals or as a church. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life.

Please keep listening. Alistair will return shortly to close with prayer. As Alistair mentioned, it's vitally important that each of us know the truth and pass it on to the next generation. That's why our mission at Truth for Life is to teach the Bible and only the Bible every single day. We do this knowing that God uses the teaching of his word to convert unbelievers, to bring believers into a closer relationship with himself, and to strengthen both pastors and local church members. To help you share Jesus with the next generation, it's important that you take time to really understand who he is and all that he's done. And that's why we're recommending to you a book titled Name Above All Names. The authors, Alistair Begg and Sinclair Ferguson, guide you through the whole sweep of Scripture as they examine seven key qualities of Jesus' identity and ministry. Among other things, you'll find out how the suffering servant written about in Scripture is also the conquering king for whom Israel was longing.

Discover how the whole Bible is a book about Jesus. Request Name Above All Names when you donate today. To give, click the image in the mobile app or visit us online at truthforlife.org slash donate. Now here's Alistair with a closing prayer. Lord our God, look upon us, we pray, in your mercy. Thank you that your faithfulness extends from generation to generation. We want to heed the warnings, even as we trust your promises. Hear our prayers, personally and corporately, for your son's sake. Amen. I'm Bob Lapine. Be sure to listen tomorrow when we'll hear how God remains victorious, even when his people seem completely defeated. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.