Ebenezer Road

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen.  He named it Ebenezer, saying, "Thus far has the Lord helped us."  So the Philistines were subdued and did not invade Israelite territory again (I Sam. 7:12-13).

The word Ebenezer is a combination of two Hebrew words -- eben (stone) + ezer (help), the last connected to the primary root azar, which means to surround, to protect.

Yesterday I wrote about the Old Testament people who walked with God.  Of course, the people as a whole, formed by their communal experience of escape from Egypt and gathered into a nation with common laws at Mount Horeb, all together "walked with God" as they journeyed across the wilderness to the Promised Land.  Until they had all learned to trust God as they walked, they were not ready to settle down as a people.  It does no good for one person to trust God if his neighbor is still bent on taking whatever he can get and waging war until he gets it.  There is no "land of milk and honey" until every person and every tribe believes that the land he/they own is the land given to them by God Himself, that He has led them to this place and that it has not been done by their own hands.

Moses warned the Israelites as they stood on the threshhold of the Promised Land:

When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land He has given you....Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks have grown large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  He led you through the vast and dreadful desert, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions.  He brought you water out of hard rock.  He gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had never known, to humble and to test you so that in the end it might go well with you.  You may say to yourself, "My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me" (Duet. 8:10-17).

As a testimony to the help of God, to His Presence with them in the desert, the Israelites set up altars, or piles of stones as memorials in the wilderness --- and later, as in the Book of Samuel -- in the land itself.  And they called the stones "Ebenezer," meaning 'thus far has God helped us.'  The altars were reminders to them of the events where God was present to deliver them, as well as testimonies to the next generation, who saw the stones and heard the stories of God's faithfulness to His people.

We have all heard the Old Testament stories, but until we walk our own journey and set up our own memorial-places, we do not really get it.  It has been said that God has no grandchildren.  We can tell our children that "God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in distress" (Ps. 46:1), but until they make their own journey, they will not really believe it.

Faith is nothing more than confidence in God's willingness and ability to be with us in all circumstances. We will never gain that confidence by hearing other people's stories, although those stories may give us the courage to begin our own journey with God.  But faith cannot be passed on -- it is an I-Thou relationship with God, based on our own experience. 

Jesus told Peter, "unless you let me wash your feet, you will have nothing to do with Me."  Unless we allow God to help us, to surround us, to protect us -- until we take a chance and surrender our circumstances to Him, we will never know Him, but only what other people say about Him.

The Christmas after Katrina, we rented a cottage at the top of the Smokey Mountains because we had no place to live.  We did not know where we would spend the next 18 months....but God had already provided marvelous places for us, places of safety and welcome, with plenty of food, with jobs that remained to provide our needs.  We did not know it at the time, but He had already marked out the path we would travel until we could settle in our own land of Promise.  In the mountains, I found a beautiful, heavy rock that I just had to have, so my husband and I spent a morning trying to "roll" the rock up a 45-degree slope of loose gravel until we could get it in the car.  That rock sits on my front lawn today; it's name -- you guessed it -- is Ebenezer!  Everytime I look at it, I am reminded, "thus far has God helped us."