All Articles For Day of Shadows

Having called Samuel and revealed to him the doom of Eli’s house, “the Lord appeared again in Shiloh,” so we read, “for the Lord revealed Himself to Samuel in Shiloh by the word of the Lord. And the word of Samuel came to all Israel.” As was explained, the word of Samuel that came to all Israel was not a command to the effect that Israel march to battle against the Philistines. But it was indicative of the fact that the Lord again was about to do great and terrible things, that, in other words, the salvation of the faithful...

At first, 1 Corinthians 13:12, we read, “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known.” The apostle here compares the rights and privileges of God’s believing people in this present dispensation of the world, with their privileges and rights in the state of heavenly perfection and glory of the church on the new earth. And he discerns a remarkable difference. “Now they see through a glass darkly; then, face to face. A rendering that comes closer to the original text...

The Ark had fallen into the hands of the Philistines. In the language of the Psalmist, the Lord had delivered His strength into captivity, and His glory into the enemies’ hand. And the question was what the Philistines would do with God. By the treatment that they afforded God’s Ark and His people, they heaped contempt upon His name. The Ark they brought into Dagon’s temple as an offering to him by whose assistance they imagined that they had achieved the victory; and they set the Ark near Dagon’s image, in order that by this position it might set forth...

So had the Lord driven the kine by which the Ark was being drawn in the straight way to the way of Bethshemesh. And they of Bethshemesh were reaping their wheat harvest in the valley, when they lifted up their eyes and saw the Ark and they rejoiced to see it. The cart came into the field of Joshua, a Bethshemeshite. Here by a great stone the animals were stopped not by human hands but by the Lord Himself. The Bethshemeshites bestirred themselves. Coming forward, the Levites took down the Ark of the Lord, and the coffer that was with...

No sooner had the Ark arrived in Gath than there occurred there, too, a new revelation of the wrath of God over the unrighteousness of the Philistines. “The hand of the Lord was against the city with a very great destruction: and he smote the men of the city, both great and small, and they had emerods in their secret parts.” So had the plague followed the Ark to Gath and broken out in that city. Still the Philistines persisted in saying that it was a chance that happened to them. This is indicated by the fact that the matter...

So had the Lord driven the kine by which the Ark was being drawn in the way to the way of Bethshemesh. But when the Bethshemeshites saw the Ark, they rejoiced to see it. But, as we stated, they had reason to hide themselves in the dens and the rocks of their mountains; for the Lord was again amongst them—the Lord, who is a consuming fire—and they had not put away the strange gods from among them and prepared their hearts to serve the Lord. In a word, the nation had not repented. The people of Israel at this time,...

We must now concentrate on the two terms “Eli’s house”, and “Eli’s father’s house” and determine the scope of the operation of divine wrath in the offspring of Ithamar in punishment of its sins. The distinction “Eli’s house”, and “Eli’s father’s house” is contained in the doleful message of the unnamed prophet to Eli, “Behold the days come that He—the Lord—will cut off thine arm and the arm of thy father’s house, that there shall not be an old man in thine house,” I Sam. 2:31. Aaron had four sons, Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar. Nadab and Abihu were...

Though the people of Israel had put away their idols and were again serving the Lord, the Ark of God was not restored to the tabernacle of Shiloh; it continued to abide in the house of Abinadab many decades, definitely until David had it removed into a tent that he, himself, had pitched for it on Mt. Zion. This tent was not the tabernacle of Shiloh, the one constructed by Moses in the wilderness. The reason that the Ark was not removed to Shiloh’s tabernacle is that this tabernacle had been permanently abandoned by the Lord. We read of this...

As we have seen, great things had been accomplished through Samuel, his prayers and prohesyings. Eli’s wicked sons had been destroyed, the gods of the heathen put away, the Philistines discomfited, and the people of Israel delivered in the way of repentance and return to the Lord. Having thus overcome, Samuel judged Israel, going from year to year in circuit to Bethel and Gilgal and Mizpah. Having thus been engaged perhaps for some fifteen years, he on a day was paid a visit by the elders of Israel, who came to him in Ramah. Their request was that he make...

Though the people’s asking for a king was deeply sinful, the kingship as such was not a sinful institution. It was needed to shed a new light on the promise. David, the warrior-king, to whom the Lord swore truth, and Solomon in his glory typified Christ. But the people did not ask for a king because of their desire to serve the cause of the Gospel; their purpose was to rid themselves of Jehovah, whom in their hearts they had rejected, that He should not rule over them. And the Lord gave them their way; He did set a king...