Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - You Might Be Undervaluing God | Historical Books | 1 Samuel 4:12-22

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

Are you undervaluing God? Have you lost Life itself? What's keeping you from slowing down? In today's episode, Jeff shares how 1 Samuel 4:12-22 encourages us to slow down and appreciate God's glory. If you're listening on Spotify, comment below one takeaway from today's episode! Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 1 Samuel 4:12-22

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrott. Back in 1962, a random unknown man entered a New York City pawn shop, presenting a violin to exchange for a loan of $15. The next morning, the owner of the pawn shop grew suspicious when he read in the newspaper that a violin had been stolen from Carnegie Hall the day before. After looking at the violin in his shop more closely, it was determined that what he had was, in fact, the violin that had been stolen from Carnegie Hall.

That $15 loan on the violin paled in comparison to its true valuation of $15,000. And the worth of that violin was only amplified when people learned that it was at that time 220 years old that had been owned by virtuoso musicians in the past, and it was played the night of its theft by the one and only, Izzak Pearlman. That $15,000 violin, getting pawned for $15, is the story of severe undervaluation. It was far more precious than the thief or the pawn shop owner

could have possibly imagined. And I wonder if you and I suffer from a kind of undervaluation of God and of his special presence with his people. If we, like the violin thief for the pawn shop owner, don't fully realize how precious or valuable the presence of God really is. Our passage in 1 Samuel today shows us what happens when we undervalue and miss the preciousness of God's special presence with his people. And we'll be confronted with a choice, with a decision.

We can be like that violin thief who takes the severely undervalued loan, of $15 and then leaves, or we can be like the shop owner who investigates and slowly comes to appreciate the full value and preciousness of the violin he holds. As we approach God's word together, let's slow down and ask for his grace, for his truth to move through this time

that we have with one another. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gifts of life and breath. Thank you for your word. These are gifts of your grace. grace, we're thankful. We bring before you every part of our lives, things we can control and the things that we can't. We bring before you our joys and our sorrows, our anxiety and our excitement, our calendars and our contingencies. God, with all these things before you in this time and this space, would you meet us here? Jesus, help us abide in you and remain in you to stay connected to

you as we engage with and grapple with your truth. Holy Spirit, we ask you to move in and through this time in 1 Samuel. And as we read these words, let these words of yours read us and restore us. In Jesus' name, amen. Okay, we have a lot of events that have just occurred leading up to our passage in 1 Samuel 4, some important context to set up. Back in verse 11, we learned that the Ark of God was captured in battle by the persistent enemy of the Israelites, the Philistines. And we also read about the death of Eli's two sons, Hoffney and Phineas. In our text for today, we see the lament of that loss and how the loss of God's presence sends shockwaves into people's lives.

As we get into verse 12, we read about a messenger who runs 22 miles from the battle line against the Philistines all the way to Shiloh, with a message for God's people. And when verse 13 comes at us, we get a sense of intense urgency and suspicions. as Eli awaits the words from this messenger, his heart trembles. And what's interesting here isn't simply that Eli's heart is trembling. It's what Eli's heart trembles for. Knowing that he may be getting news of the death of his sons, we may be surprised to learn that Eli's heart isn't trembling for them. Verse 13 says that his heart trembles for the ark of God. This establishes for us the

main question, the main point of this passage. It's this, is the special presence of God still with his people or not? And if it's not, what does that mean? When Eli asks the messenger about the news from the battlefield, this is the response that he gets in verse 17. The messenger says this, Israel fled before the Philistines and the army has suffered heavy losses. Also, your two sons, Hoffney and Phineas, are dead. and the Ark of God has been captured. Now, the degree of loss here is difficult to fathom. It's significant.

Eli has just lost his two sons in battle, along with many other Israelites. Now, to zoom out a bit, a big theme in 1 Samuel so far has been the faithlessness and the wickedness of Eli's two sons, and we know that their death is an act of judgment against their corruption.

Yet at the same time, when their deaths are lumped in with the heavy losses of Israel's army, there's really a staggering sense of how precious life is here. Life is being lost all around. And yet as tragic as the loss of Eli's sons and the other soldiers, as tragic as those losses are, verse 18 opens us up to the greatest loss of all. Let's see what happens when Eli hears the news of what happened on the battlefield. In verse 18, when he, the messenger, mentioned the ark of God,

Eli fell backward off his chair by the side of the gate. His neck was broken and he died, for he was an old man and he was heavy. Now let's zoom out on this passage just a bit. Now do you notice the same focal point here as we noticed back in verse 13, when Eli's heart trembled for the Ark of the Lord? Verse 18 couldn't be more explicit. Eli's death comes in response to the news that the arc has been captured. The loss of God's presence leads to the loss of his life. This passage is

trying to get us to see the strong connection between the presence of God with his people and the life of his people. The same theme continues when we get to verse 19 and learn about another death. This time it's Eli's daughter-in-law. Before dying, she gives birth to a son and gives him a name that encapsulates the thrust of this passage. Let's read what she says in verses 21 through 22. She named the boy Iqabad saying, the glory has departed from Israel because of the capture of the ark of God and the deaths of her father-in-law and her husband. She said the glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured. Now, the Bible is using the value and the preciousness of one thing to amplify our sense of how valuable and precious another thing is.

So here in this passage so far, we've seen the value and the preciousness of human life. It's being lost left and right, and that's highlighting the preciousness not only of human life, but of God's presence, which is also being lost. God's special presence with His people is worth far more than we tend to assume, so much so that when God's presence is lost, life is lost. The very glory of God, the glory that Israel was made for, departs along with it. If you were reading this or hearing this as an ancient Israelite in the time of exile,

this concept of God's glory departing would really stand out. Because that Hebrew word departed in verses 21 and 22, it doesn't simply mean to go in a different direction or go to a different location. It means to go into exile. This moment in Israel's history presses on the hard yet honest reality that living in exile doesn't mean that they've simply lost life in themselves because of sin. They've lost the life they were meant to have with the creator of life. The goodness and the glory of what things could and should have been is gone.

Because wherever God's special presence leaves, life is lost. In a significant way, God's people end up in exile. because they undervalued and pawned off the presence of the one who made them and loved them. They played the role of the violin thief who carelessly undervalued that precious item they held. And in that way, this passage really is meant to convict us. Think about your life. I mean, are there ways that you've taken God's presence for granted, that you've undervalued it? Now, of course, we know that God is not bound by space or time.

He is omnipresent and reigns over all things. And yet we can't escape the biblical truth that there is a special sense of God's presence with His people that's more precious than we realize. So are you undervaluing that special presence of God in your life? Here's some signs that we might be taking God's special precious presence for granted. If our prayer is replaced with scheming and planning to get the life that we want on our own terms, if our work, whether it's work in an office or a school or at home or in retirement,

if our work, our labor, our vocation, if it's all done for our glory, not his. Another sign is if our repentance from sin is replaced with resting in our sin. That's a good sign that we're taking God's precious presence for granted. We're undervaluing it. The list could go on and on, but the main point is that when we undervalue God's presence, we drift into idolatry and injustice, neglecting love for God and love for others that were meant to embody. That's the direction we take if we go with the role of the violin thief. But remember, there's another posture, another choice. That's the posture of the shop owner,

who slowed down, investigated, and as time went by grew in an awareness of how valuable that violin really was. And that's what the conviction here is meant to spur on. It's meant to catalyze our sense of how worthy and wonderful and needed God's presence is in our lives. When we grow in seeing the preciousness of God's presence, we become the kind of people who depend on the promises of the Father, not on the schemes that we've orchestrated for ourselves. We become the kind of people who work hard and rest well, knowing that Jesus is the one who's at work in us and through us. We become the kind of people who resist sin and injustice, knowing that the Holy Spirit is at work,

renewing us and renewing the world around us. Instead of paunting God's presence off, we're meant to be the kind of people who cling to it, who long for it, who depend on it. Because wherever God's presence goes, life grows. Heavenly Father, we confess the ways that we undervalue and minimize the significance. significance of your presence. Jesus, we thank you for making a way for us to be in your presence,

to have new life with you through your death, resurrection, and reign. Holy Spirit, we ask you to fill our lives with the reality, with the movement of your life-giving presence so that whatever you have for us today can be done by your grace and for your glory. In Jesus' name, amen.