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January 28, 2007
Jesus, Stone of Help
I Samuel 7: 3-12/John 11: 32-44
January 28th, 2007
This morning I tried to recover for our children a wonderful Old Testament word that has become lost among Christians: Ebenezer. We know Ebenezer as the first name of the hero in Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Carol”, Ebenezer Scrooge. So we think that Ebenezer must be a by-word for coldness of heart, of stinginess. Christians don’t know this word so it has been removed in most hymnals from one of my favorite hymns, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”.
But the name has quite an opposite sense than coldness of heart. Though there is some oddness to its happy meaning. In our reading from I Samuel 7, Ebenezer is called that because here and then the Lord miraculously delivered Israel from their dreaded enemies, the Philistines. God “thundered with a mighty voice that day against the Philistines and threw them into confusion . . . so Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jesharnah and called its name Ebenezer, for he said, ‘Hitherto the Lord has helped us’.” Ebenezer means “stone of help.” Or as it is in Hebrew more specifically, “stone of the help.” It was one particular time of help Samuel had in mind.
The oddness comes when we look at the two other places in I Samuel where this place is mentioned. Ebenezer is first identified as the place where the Philistines defeated Israel, slaying thousands of Israelite troops. In the second, Ebenezer is where the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant. It seems that at Ebenezer twice the Lord did not help Israel. It is at the third and final mentioning of Ebenezer that it seems the place got its name from God’s help at that place. What’s going on?
On the one hand the place gets its name from God’s special help. On the other hand, the place is named that already before we learn that Samuel set up a stone to celebrate God’s deliverance. And God does not deliver His people there.
We see this kind of thing elsewhere in the Old Testament with regard to another place full of wonder. In the Book of Genesis long before Jacob was born we learn that Abraham pitched his tent near a place called Bethel. Yet in Genesis 28: 16 we read that Jacob re-named a place that used to be called Luz, Bethel, which means House of God, because God appeared to him in a dream. He woke from his dream and said, “God was in this place and I did not know it. This is none other than the house of God, the gate of heaven.” So he sets up a stone and calls the place Bethel, house of God. It was a custom in the time of the Patriarchs to set up standing stones as signs of God’s special presence there.
This is puzzling enough to beg for some explanation. Here is what I think is going on here. Genesis and I Samuel were written well after the events being described. In Genesis 12 Moses tells of Abraham at Bethel using the name by which this place was known in his own time, not in Abraham’s time. And in I Samuel we read of Ebenezer twice before we learn why the place was called Ebenezer because this was how the place was known ever after.
After Samuel set up a stone in the vicinity where God delivered Israel from its enemy, the Philistines, the people remembered God’s help to them there. It was for the people of Israel somewhat like the importance you and I put on special places. I think of what comes to mind when we hear the name Gettysburg. Who thinks of Samuel Gettys, who purchased land from Wm. Penn at this spot and built a tavern there in the mid eighteenth century? We think of the Battle of Gettysburg, and President Lincoln’s famed address there a hundred years later rather than of the man who gave his name to this place.
Ebenezer was the place where the Lord helped Israel in a special time of need! Indeed, you and I have places that we think of in this way. I set up no monument there, in fact the building has been torn down where I remember the night when I determined I wanted to be a Christian for real. I pass that spot near LaSalle St. in Chicago and there zooms to mind that night in March of the year 1961 when in great need for the mists of my life to clear I prayed so deliberately, “Lord, take my life. I want to be yours.” I was not the same person after this.
Any time Christians go to Bethany, a small town near Jerusalem they think, “This is where Jesus went to the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.” Here is where for four days Mary and Martha wondered why Jesus neglected them in their time of need. But then Jesus came and brought Lazarus back to life after lying in the cold stone tomb four days.
We began reading from this remarkable eleventh chapter of John’s Gospel at the place we left off last Lord’s Day. I chose as our Old Testament lesson this morning the passage of I Samuel mentioning the name Ebenezer, Stone of Help, because it connected so suggestively with the word stone in John 11. At first we read of the stone that was rolled in front of Lazarus’ tomb, blocking the entry way just as the stone that would soon thereafter block the mouth of the tomb where Jesus was buried.
Mary and Martha stood before that stone and wept. It seemed to represent Jesus’ failure to respond to their need. No stone of help here. There would have been no stone in front of that tomb if Jesus had only come when He was needed. That tomb would have remained empty. They would not have given that spot a second thought. But Jesus seemed to fail them in their time of need. That stone was a symbol to them of Jesus’ failure to help them, for a while.
My mind travels to the connection the Apostle Paul draws between Jesus and the stone from which God supplied the ancient Israelites with water.` Moses arrived again at Mt Horeb, the other name for Mt. Sinai where God gave the Law to Israel. There was no water. The people feared they would die of thirst. So God told Moses to strike the rock. Water gushed out of the rock. It was a stone of help.
Paul remembers this story and wrote to the Christians at Corinth, “That rock was Christ.” Paul refers to the story that developed among the Jews that this rock followed Israel in the desert. It was a sign of God’s help back then just as Jesus remains a sign for us of God’s help that pursues us wherever we are.
And so we confess and believe. Jesus said, “I will never fail you nor forsake you.” We cling to this promise in time of need.
But as I have heard various ones of you remind me in times of your distress, you wonder why God does not answer your cry for help. Where is Jesus when I need Him? This was the very question Mary and Martha asked. It was the question the Israelites asked when at Ebenezer they were crushed by their enemies and the Ark of the Covenant was stolen by the Philistines. Where is God, my Stone of Help, when I need Him most?
This is a serious matter for us when we have waited a long time, prayed a long time, and our prayers seem to fall on deaf ears in the heavens. I’m tempted to say that though God has put eternity in our hearts he has put the sense of time in our heads. And we try to juggle the two, trust in God ultimately—in God who does all things well, and trust in God now, when we have grown weary in our waiting and praying. Some people give up on God when no help comes. They read the psalmist’s question and answer, “From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” And it sounds so good when times are good. But when we imitate the psalmist and call out to God in our distress, it’s as though prayer is an empty exercise.
Let me say I’m not immune to this same reflex. I look back over the years I’ve been a pastor and remember some long stretches of time when I felt I was walking in a wasteland. There have been some long years of waiting for God to lead me from the wilderness, difficult times, difficult people, when it was my duty still to get up in the pulpit on the Lord’s Day and speak cheerful, inspiring words that would enable my folk to face life with confidence in God’s presence. Every now and then I remember some of those long stretches of time. The promises of Scripture echoed as words in a canyon. “I am with you,” the words bounced off the canyon walls while no help came.
This kind of experience comes to most of us at one time or another. There are some for whom there seems no escape from it.
I have thought that some are “wired” in such a way that they’re capable of more optimism than others. There are some people who have a natural optimism, able to smile into a hurricane, rejoicing that there is still a half glass of water left. No worries, as the Australians say. And there are others who face immense good fortune and see a half-empty glass. Pessimism. Gloom. It’s a matter of perception.
And there are still others who are worn down by circumstances. It’s not a matter of seeing a glass half full or half empty. They have hurt for so long, faced harshness from a spouse or a boss for so long, faced illness for so long, been on the brink of financial ruin so often for so long. They turn to their faith in God with trust that somehow continues on even though it has grown thin as a thread. I’m speaking of some here this morning.
I marvel at how life seems to go so smoothly for some and so precariously for others. And it is not of their deserving. It just happens that way. And it is the same Jesus, the same Stone of Help, the same rock to which we all turn. Some times it is as it was for Israel that God delivered them from the Philistines, and at other times the Philistines got the best of them. It is as it was for Mary and Martha with Jesus; He didn’t show up until four days after Lazarus was dead.
May I say that I have learned never to give up, never to draw the curtain and say I will not trust in God any more. It is helpful to read of the experience of others who waited every bit as long as I have in situations still more perilous. I have seen that our solutions, the ones we pray for, may not be the best solutions. Our inward needs are far greater than our outward needs. When I read the biography of George MacDonald, for example, and discover that he faced the utter rejection of his congregation at Arundel, and that his family lived in dire want afterward. And he had no idea that he would turn out to be one of England’s greatest Victorian novelists and most beloved preachers. He had no idea that today people would buy his stories and that C.S. Lewis would bring him fame by calling attention to his place in his own legendary career. All he had was the present. All he could see was the moment of his distress. I think of Edith Stein, a Roman Catholic nun born a Jew—killed because of this by the Nazis. Where was her stone of help?
We now think MacDonald and all like him wise for keeping on trusting in God. We now admire him as a very wise and good man. Perhaps God so made him that he could only respond this way to his hard times. But I don’t think God wires us to respond this way. We all have the same wires in our heads and hearts. We forge our own outlooks. It’s just that some dare to trust God, determine to obey God in the small disappointments and are fortified for the large ones. Sometimes the outcome of this trust in God is more favorable circumstances. Sometimes this is not the case.
We don’t trust in God in order for things to get better. It’s not a means to an end, a way to pull the strings on the Divine puppet. “Faith is the evidence of things not seen.” Heidelberg Catechism question 1, “In life and death”, Christians in famine and disease ridden parts of Africa are grateful to remember. Still keep on.
So I urge you not to give up in whatever your trial is. But I also urge us as a congregation to be responsive to one another. In order to be responsive to one another we cannot be cut off from each other. Some of us need to see that God has a place for us not merely to find encouragement, to find peace in a church agreeable to our theology and preferred style of worship. God has put us here to be part of His on-going work of grace in behalf of others.
I urge you to come together here in the various ways we come together. Come pray with us on Wednesday morning. Come to Sunday School and listen not only to the lesson but also to the people who need you to see into their hearts so that you can be part of God’s supply to them.
The on-going lesson of Israel was of a people God did not give up on though they faced centuries of distress. The on-going lesson of Mary and Martha was that Jesus did come and raise Lazarus from the tomb. And you and I have an on-going story too. Don’t abort the story by giving up on God. Don’t neglect to take your place in God’s way of caring for others. The psalmist wrote, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” He did not say how God provides this refuge and strength. Sometimes it is miraculously supplied. At other times God uses the method He intended when He created us not only for Himself, but also for one another.
I pray God may deliver us in our times of trial and wish He would not make us wait. I hope you will and that I will continue to trust long after trusting has seemed futile. And then I pray that when God answers our prayers in our time of need we may be able to hear and recognize how near and gracious God is.
O Lord, our Stone of Help, the Rock of our salvation, grant to us grace to realize how very true are your promises, and how near and present You are. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at January 28, 2007 10:35 AM