"Mine Ebenezer"

1 Samuel 7:7-13
Acts 8:9-23

There is a movement underway for the Evangelical community to stand behind Israel. This movement is in the face of mounting Antisemitism in Europe and increasing pressure within the US to review its pro-Israel policies and support a homeland for the Palestinians.

Politically, the Jewish people have a grim history of being persecuted in Europe. The primary nation to consistently stand behind a Jewish homeland has been America. Today that position is under attack by both the liberal elite and the mainline Protestant denominations.

Politically, as well, it is unclear from history that Palestinians do really want a homeland. They have been brought to the table many times and have been given opportunity to bargain for a homeland, but they seem not to have made it their No. 1 priority. What they want is incomprehensible to the Western mind and obviously very complex. Whatever it is, it keeps them in a state of turmoil.

The Christian Right is emerging as the darling of Israel. As that takes place some raise the question as to whether the Christian Right really does love the Jews, or whether the Jews are a pawn in their eschatology, or doctrine of things to come.

Premillennial Dispensationalism (PD), a predominant doctrine in Evangelical circles, is the teaching behind such books and movies as the Left Behind series. It teaches that the world is getting increasingly worse and that because of that, Jesus is coming soon. Due to the imminence of His coming, Evangelicals are notorious for minimizing long-term national goals such as environmental stewardship.

PD teaches that the saints will soon be taken up in what is known as the Rapture, escaping a worldwide purge under the leadership of a world leader referred to as the Antichrist. After the great persecution, there will follow a great battle, the Battle of Armageddon.

At that battle, Jesus will defeat the enemies of the Gospel, and the blood of the dead will flow to the horses’ bridles in the Plains of Zesreel.

Jesus will then bring the saints back to Jerusalem and set up his throne to reign for 1,000 years.

Biblically, I don’t buy this teaching for a whole range of reasons that I have neither the time nor space to get into here. Suffice it to say that, if you want to know my position on the subject, read my book, “Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship.”

Those who adhere to this belief are focused on the Middle East. They admit to not caring much about anything else because they are certain that Jesus will return soon. The danger comes when foreign policy is driven by this theology. The teaching requires the destruction of the Moslem Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and rebuilding of the Jewish Temple.

This thinking , by inference, suggests that the Kingdom of God is away and that somehow God's people have a role in accelerating its return to earth. I focus on the Kingdom of God in my teaching because I believe it to be a present reality in the life of the Christian but not yet fulfilled – a construction project in process. This Kingdom is a spiritual kingdom that cannot and will not, in my reading of Scripture, be set up in Jerusalem. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world” and consistently rejected any offer of worldly power.

The problem with this doctrine of Premillennial Dispensationalism is that it makes the Kingdom of God a replacement nation for Jewish Israel. Its objective is to flow with a misreading of redemptive history that insists that God's primary purpose is to make Christians out of the Jewish people.

Paul made it clear in his writings, however, that we who claim Jesus Christ as Lord have not taken up a new national identity but are grafted in to God’s covenant people, Israel. Ours is not a replacement kingdom. We are invited guests to be grafted in to God’s chosen people, the Jews. The Christian is, then, a completed Jew. God’s ultimate plan for the Jewish people cannot be divined by any one of us, but it must be accepted that He has a plan for Jews as well as for non-Jews.

What is alarming about this doctrine is that there is a very real danger that we as a nation can become so obsessed with this thinking that we turn the Mid-East into a self-fulfilling prophecy – into a Battle of Armageddon of our own making.

I do not see this as love for the Jewish people and their nation, Israel. I see this as a reckless strategy to turn the Mid-East into an inferno, killing millions. The agenda is to get as many Jews as possible saved, and to Hell with those who fail to buy the program. This is, instead, a patronizing form of Antisemitism. The Jewish people become a pawn in a scheme to force God to act.

At the root of this thinking is a dumbing down of four basic orthodox Christian beliefs – the authority of Scripture, the sovereignty of God, the Lordship of Christ and the presence of the Kingdom.

Because Scripture is employed by the Christian Right as a book of rules rather than an inspired account of God’s overarching love for His people, it is stripped of its authority. Once you take select verses of Scripture and force them into a previously-adopted doctrine, you are now engaged in Bibliolatry – the worship of the Bible – rather than the worship of the God of the Bible. The Bible becomes a book of ethics, or problem solving, rather than the written revelation of the nature of God.

Once you begin to weave together what you think God is going to do next and when you think He is going to do it, you strip Him of His sovereignty. Once you begin to manipulate events to verify your theology, God is shoved out of the picture. You are left to build your Tower of Babel, or in this case the Temple in Jerusalem.

As for the Lordship of Christ, once you begin to put Jesus into some distant galaxy except in some mythical way in your heart, you strip Him of His sovereign reign over God’s people and take over that position yourself, or in this case substitute nation, creed or denomination for King Jesus.

And of course, if Jesus is away and we are just groaning souls waiting between His first and second Advents, the Kingdom becomes totally future rather than present, and God’s people take it upon themselves to get the earth ready for the Kingdom to descend. In order to do that, there has to be a lot of bloodshed and suffering.

It is a sign of hope this morning that the Prophet Samuel and the Apostle Philip did not buy it either.

The people of Israel are about to be invaded by the Phillistines. What do they do? They lament, or become sorrowful, before the Lord. For twenty years, the Ark of the Covenant had been in storage, so to speak – away from the holy of holies of the tabernacle. Without the Ark of the Covenant, God’s direct presence in battle would be uncertain.

Spiritual decay had set in with God’s people, and they find themselves about to be overrun by the Philistines. The symbol of God’s presence, the Ark, was missing. So they sought out the Prophet Samuel.

Samuel lays two conditions on the people of Israel to incur the protection of the Lord. He does not open the Scriptures and foretell what is going to happen and how they can play a role. He does not point to a ritual or a prophecy to tell them what they should do next. He lays on them two conditions to invoke the Lord’s presence – repentance and getting rid of their idols.

“Repent and put away your strange gods.” Those are the conditions that Samuel placed on the nation of Israel for their divine protection. “It was because you forsook God and served other idols that God has delivered you into the hand of the Philistines.”

Repent and abandon your idols. That is the condition of God’s presence and blessing on His people. To repent means to humble yourself before God and confess your sin. To abandon your idols means to do away with all that detracts from the sovereignty of God.

Those are the rules of the Kingdom, are they not? Repent and abandon your idols! The problem with God’s people is that they want their cake and eat it too – their idols and their God. In our case, the primary idol is money. This doctrine of Premillennial Dispensationalism is a doctrine that brings in the money. If our money comes to life it must be worthy of our worship!

I read this past week a comment by a well-meaning Christian lady to an orthodox Jewish rabbi: “Don’t worry about any Holocaust; we are going to take care of you.” To that I say, ‘Repent and abandon your idols – your particular interpretation of Scripture, for example.’” You want God to establish His Kingdom? Repent and abandon your idols, and you will find God’s Kingdom coming to life within you.

It would do us good, I think, to take inventory to see what our idols really are!

The people of Israel smashed their idols, gathered at Mizpeh, fasted and made a public confession of their sin. The Philistines went up to Mizpeh against them.

As Samuel was offering a burnt offering before the Lord, the Philistines appeared. God terrorized them with thunder, drove them into confusion, and the Israelites chased and slew them. But that was not the end of the story.

Samuel raised an altar to the Lord and called it Ebenezer, saying, “The Lord has helped us thus far.” Sounds conditional, doesn’t it? It is conditional. The arm of the Lord is stretched out all day long for his people. It is the people's responsibility to reach out to the arm of the Lord. There are two conditions – that God’s people repent and abandon their idols – their false beliefs and their worship of power and money.

If you ask me, God’s people in our day are a far cry from either. They have put the doctrine of the Gospel of the Kingdom into storage, hoping for God’s protection without holiness.

I received an email this past week including an article by a hymn writer by the name of Gary Parrett. I have no idea who Gary Parrett is. He laments the efforts of hymn writers to change the words to the song, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” written by Robert Robinson in 1758. Instead of “Here I raise my Ebenezer,” suggested revisions include, “Hitherto thy love has blest me,” or “Here by grace your love has brought me,” or “Here I raise to thee an altar.”

Parett says he thinks they miss the point because of the tendency to conjure up that old curmudgeon, Ebenezer Scrooge. The biblical grounds on which he protests these efforts are that it refers to a great delivery by God of His people.

The stone, Ebenezer, translated from the Hebrew as the stone of help, is at the very point
where God’s mercy is poured out on His people. Samuel dedicated that stone as a landmark monument to God’s help, God’s faithfulness and God’s eternal covenant. As the people got on with their lives, the stone stood there, visible to all who passed by, a reminder of judgment and repentance; mercy and restoration.

The monument was conditional. God has helped us thus far and will continue to do so. But always there is a condition – repent and abandon your idols.

The Kingdom, then, takes on a fluid state. When God’s people set about making idols of their doctrines or religion or money, the enemy moves in against them. When God’s people repent and abandon those idols, the enemy is vanquished. We don’t have to go to war to win, then, do we? We don’t have to manipulate events so that we can tear down the Moslem Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and put the Temple in its place, do we? Our job is to repent and tear down our idols. The victory is God’s.

Would to God we would set up our Ebenezer stone as a continual reminder that we are forgiven, that we have chosen a new direction and that God has made a permanent covenant with all who have put their faith in Jesus Christ instead of America or our eschatology.

Philip has the courage to go down to Samaria to preach Christ. You will remember Samaria as the place that devout Jews tried to avoid in their pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem. They had to go through Samaria in order to get to Jerusalem, and they were taunted by people throwing rocks and insults at them. The Samaritans, you see, were what was left of the 10 tribes of Israel. They had merged with the Gentiles and were jealous of the Temple worship. It was their position that they could effectively worship God on the mountain. The Jews and the Samaritans hated each other.

There was great joy in Samaria at the preaching of the Gospel because, at last, God had expanded his covenant to include the Gentiles. We are told that evil spirits came out of many, and many paralytics were healed. Then we come to Simon the Sorcerer, a magician who had billed himself as a divine power from the Great Power.

What turned both Simon and the people of Samaria around was the new teaching of good news. We are told specifically in Acts 8 what that good news was. It was not the good news of salvation by grace. It was not the good news of a New Jerusalem. It was the good news of the Kingdom God and the name of Jesus Christ which included salvation by grace alone and the announcement of the New Jerusalem.

Philip preached the gospel of the Kingdom of God – a gospel with which you have become familiar in this church. What is significant about this is that if we restrict the gospel to repeating the sinner’s prayer, it loses its vitality – its fluidity; its power. The Sinner’s Prayer is only the repentance part. The Kingdom part is abandoning our idols and living in the community of the righteous – traveling on Isaiah’s Highway of the redeemed.

The gospel is not a static moment in time. There is traveling involved; there is learning involved; there is surprise involved; there are miracles of grace involved; there is a monument involved called Ebenezer. That monument reminds us of where we were when we were delivered. It is a benchmark of the beginning of God’s movement on our lives, grafting us into His divine plan.

If the gospel of the kingdom of God was Philip’s gospel, we can come to no other conclusion but that the Kingdom and Jesus are synonymous terms. Last week we visited the proclamation that it is in God that His people live, move and have their very being. That is about motion – progress. But also, it is about repentance and abandonment of our idols.

Simon the Sorcerer did not abandon his idols. He tried to buy from Peter the power to lay hands on people so that they might receive the Holy Spirit. Peter’s answer was this: “May you and your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money. You have no part or share in this ministry, because your heart is not right before God.”

Money buys respect, status, protection and power. Money can even buy a good seminary education at the finest universities in the world. But money cannot buy a calling from God, nor can it buy gifts of the HS. Simon should have raised his Ebenezer to remind him that in Christ Jesus he had been forgiven his previous greedy lifestyle.

We have raised a church building here as our Ebenezer. When we approach it, is it an object of pride, or does it remind us of God’s help? That same help is at our disposal today. But the same two conditions remain that got us this far – repentance and abandonment of our idols.