1 Samuel 4:22

1 Samuel 4:22

We do not know her name, nor her years, nor her previous career, this poor brokenhearted woman who died with these words on her lips. No doubt her short life had had its blinks of sunshine, but she abides in our memory an image of the deepest tragedy, and after these few minutes of supreme anguish she goes back to the silence whence she came. There is something that comes very straight to our sympathy in the picture of one fairly beaten, one who has quite given up, brokenhearted. It was not with this woman the passing despondency through which human beings get again into the cheerful sunshine. With her it was the last of this life; and thus giving up, she died.

I. We see in the wife of Phinehas both piety and patriotism.

Putting aside her own individual losses, she summed up what had killed her in one woeful wail: "The glory is departed from Israel, for the ark of God is taken." There are some, indeed, who, in circumstances as desperate as those of Israel on that black day, would have risen to the need of the occasion and gone, with heart and soul, to the work of setting things right again. Such was Luther; such was Knox. But there are few indeed to whom God has given such strength and courage.

II. The great lesson conveyed by the text is that the glory of a nation depends on God's presence with it; that is, on its religious character, on its solemn holding by what is right and abhorring what is wrong.

III. The glory was departed from Israel when the ark of God was taken. That was the emblem, the flower, the culmination, of all the national faith and consecration. The loss of the mere wooden chest was nothing, except as a reminder of the vital and essential loss of God's presence which had gone before. It is the Spirit that quickeneth; it is the earnest reality of the worship that alone avails; the outward form, except as it expresses the spirit and is instinct with it, profits nothing at all.

A. K. H. B., The Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson,3rd series, p. 57.

References: 1 Samuel 5:2. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxiii., No. 1342. 1 Samuel 5:4. A. Scott, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxi., p. 237. 1 Samuel 5:7. J. Ker, Sermons,2nd series, p. 162. 1 Samuel 6:9. Homiletic Magazine,vol. vii., p. 257. 1 Samuel 6:20. Bishop Thirlwall, Good Words,1876, p. 17. 1 Samuel 7:3. Parker, vol. vi., p. 269. 1 Samuel 7:8. Homiletic Magazine,vol. xi., p. 140. 1 Samuel 7:12. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ix., No. 500, and Morning by Morning,p. 365; G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount,p. 201. 1 Samuel 7:15. G. B. Ryley, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiii., p. 206 1 Samuel 7:17. Parker, vol. vii., p. 61.