Can you imagine your mother naming you “Ichabod”? The daughter-in-law of Eli, on learning that
her husband and his father both had died that day and that the ark of God had
been captured by the Philistines, gave birth and named her child Ichabod
because the glory of the Lord had departed from Israel in these events. Had it?
Certainly, the ark was the greater loss and who knew what its loss
portended for the nation. It should
never have been sent to the battle in the first place, in the ridiculous belief
that its presence in a place mattered when the Lord had already proven Himself
to be more than a local god. The deaths
of Eli and his sons had long been foretold and their misdeeds well known, so
their loss was certainly not significant on anything other than a personal
level. Who could have known at the time
that the rise of Samuel would lead to the glory returning to the nation, not
its departure? Sometimes we have to look
beyond what we can see and trust the Lord that He is actually working for His
glory when it seems all is lost.
The disciples believed in a version of the prosperity
Gospel. Prosperity was a mark of God’s
favor and that was a biblical understanding, certainly something that could be
inferred. If there were no way to make
the narrative fit that belief it would have died out long ago, but there are
many places in Scripture where the Lord promises blessing to His people who are
righteous. Jesus has just shown with the
rich young man that he may want to inherit the kingdom of God but his desire
was for earth, he was unable to walk away from his earthly inheritance to
receive a heavenly one. The kingdom of
God must be all for us, not simply an add on to what we already have. For the rich to be excluded from heaven would
have been a scandalous idea to the religious people of the day. Jesus doesn’t say it is impossible for the
rich to enter, only that it is very difficult, impossible for us but nothing is
impossible for Him.
James sees something about wealth as well, “So also will the
rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits.” What matters most is what we are
pursuing. Here, James counsels his
readers to seek to be steadfast and to seek wisdom from the Lord. Trials will come, they are for our benefit to
train us to trust and remain in Him. We
tend to get angry when trials come our way, to rebuke them, ascribe them to
satan, and yet James seems to believe that trials aren’t always of satan,
sometimes they are for our building up.
It may feel like we are being torn down but sometimes trials simply
expose our desires are misordered. We
can be like the daughter-in-law of Eli and believe wrong things because of our
attachments to the way things are.
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