Written by Rev. J.T. Tarter |
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Not only did Eli have the familial authority to restrain his sons, he also had the civil authority to do so. Remember, Eli was the High Priest, in charge, and yet, he chose not to restrain his sons and because of that the people of God were hurt. Eli knew what his sons were doing, he even confronted them, but he did not restrain them, until eventually he couldn’t. 

Growing up, I regularly spent time with the Berenstein Bears. You may have really loved those books—I certainly did, and do—but you may or may not be aware that the Berenstein Bears series caught a lot of controversy for being some of the first children’s books that displayed what has been called “The Doofus Dad,” the prototypical display of the dad character as being a sort of fumbling, passive, lazy, incompetent dad, a depiction of the dad character that later became all the rage in the 90’s family sitcoms. My family almost every night turned in for one of these Doofus Dads: King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, the Simpsons, Family Guy, and–of course–Home Improvement with Tim the Tool Man Taylor.
The Doofus Dad makes great Comedy. I remember just howling in laughter with my family as we watched King of Queens and Home Improvement, but it makes for a really bad reality. We love the passive/dumb dad of the sitcoms…until you have one. That’s not the dad you want, and, as a dad, that’s not the dad I want to be! And, I will add, I was blessed, myself to have the opposite.
Life is not meant to be a fumbling, lazy, passive experience; it is made and crafted to be an involved experience, to be lived with intentionality. Our role as Christians is not just to get saved and wait to die. No, God calls us to intentional living. Alas, the Bible teaches by both positive and negative example, and in the pages of the book of 1 Samuel, we meet Eli, a priest and father, who is passive, indulgent, somewhat lazy, and rather content with the status quo.
Eli was a priest. The Old Testament shows us Israel, a community of people whose social identity, religious beliefs, and ritual practices were deeply enmeshed in matters related to the priesthood. Simply put, a priest was supposed to serve God and the people of God by acting as the official mediator between God and his people. Jews, from an early age, were ingrained into the reality that they, as human beings, were separated from God by sin. The sacrificial system reminded them again and again of this separation, and the priests were entrusted with a sacred duty: ensuring that this sacrificial system was done properly. They were to be the leaders of God’s people as it related to knowing and following God. In that way (but not every way!) they are similar to pastors today. Pastors don’t mediate a sacrificial system, but rather we teach God’s Word and ultimately point the Church to Christ, who is the ultimate and final sacrifice on our behalf.
To understand Eli’s story better, we must know four things about priests in Israel. First, the priests were important. The people went to them in order to understand God and his will for their lives, and they functioned as leaders in their community and even as judges at certain points on Israel’s history. Second, their rule was hereditary. They were of the line of Aaron; their sons would serve God as priests after them; and so on and so on through the generations. Third, they handled the holy things, the sacrifices, the altar, tabernacle, local shrines, and later the temple in Jerusalem. And fourth, they cared for the people. In both their words and lives, the priests were to teach and care for the God’s people, to model before them a godly life, to demonstrate the process of following God.
The first time in the Bible that we meet Eli the Priest is in 1 Samuel 1:3, where we are told not directly about him but about his sons and the city in which he was a priest, Shiloh. Shiloh was an ancient city in the region of Samaria, itself the central region of ancient Israel. The present Shilo, still called by the same name, is a small Israeli settlement (of about 4,356 residents) in the northern West Bank, located 28 miles north of Jerusalem. In Eli’s day, however, Shiloh was the main center of Israelite worship, the location of the tabernacle (Joshua 18:1). In other words, Eli wasn’t simply a priest, he was the High Priest, the most prominent representative of God in the most important religious city of the country. Under his charge were two other priests, his sons, Hophni and Phinehas.^
The main issue with Eli in not only ministry, but his entire life, was that he was simply “going through the motions” of his religious duties. We see this in 1 Samuel, chapter 1. Far more important than Eli in the overall narrative of this chapter, are two other characters, Elkanah and Hannah. Elkanah, and Israelite man, had taken two wives (something that never ends well in the Bible). As verse 2 states, “He had two wives. The name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other, Peninnah. And Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.”
Elkanah would go up year after year from his city to worship and sacrifice to the Lord at Shiloh. This reveals that Elkanah was a devoted Jew, not simply worshipping in his local shrine up in the hill country of Ephraim, but coming down to the main hub of Shiloh to worship and sacrifice every year.
After the sacrifice, Elkanah would give portions for the sacrificial meal to his two wives, but verse 5 reports Hannah as his favorite: “But to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the Lord had closed her womb.” One can imagine the rivalry, and the Bible reports it. Not only does Hannah have her own sadness, but, predictably, it reports conflict between her and Peninnah: “And her rival used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the LORD had closed her womb. So it went on year by year. As often as she went up to the house of the LORD, she used to provoke her. Therefore, Hannah wept and would not eat” (v.6-7).
Hannah was grieved, not only could she not have children, but she was mocked by her husband’s other wife! Hannah’s heart was wrecked:
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Jesus tends to our needs in our ordinary lives each and every day. He blesses, protects, gifts, and comforts us. As we celebrate Christmas, remember that our ordinary lives are blessed with a divine benediction as those who love God and are loved by God—a most amazing gift.

In the Old Testament there are several occasions where God worked dramatically—and his work turned heads—including fire coming down on Sodom and Gomorrah, the ten plagues in Egypt, the defeat of Jericho, and the cloud that hovered over the Tabernacle. But there are also times that God worked behind the scenes, through ordinary and humble means, such as in the story of Joseph (brotherly jealousy, a corrupt wife, the mistakes of Pharaoh’s butler and cupbearer).
Considering the magnitude of Jesus’ coming into the world, it may surprise us that God came with limited announcement (only a small handful of people heard the angels, and only an isolated group of searchers followed the star). In fact, there was much surrounding Jesus’ birth that was very ordinary and humble. God’s use of ordinary and little things amid declaring his glory and bringing comfort to his people should not only be an encouragement but also a source of praise and delight for his people as we live out our faith every ordinary day at a time.
God comes quietly.
In Luke 2:1 we read: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.” At the very beginning of Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth, we are greeted with the pomp and circumstance of an earthly king who has “all the world” at his fingertips. This stands in stark contrast to the ruler of the universe who would be born naked and helpless, wrapped in rags, in a small insignificant village. John 1:3 states, “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Yet, Jesus came quietly into this world, lacking the pomp and circumstance the world could offer. Luke 2 is startling as it recounts the ordinary, little ways in which God chose to come and dwell among us, as well as recounting the divine majesty that surrounded Jesus’ birth. We are reminded by this narrative that God is glorious, and that he is also quietly near to us in our daily lives.
God comes in ordinariness and humility.
The account of Jesus’ birth is full of not only the ordinary and humble but also the divine and heavenly. This mix of lowly situation and glory reminds us of the mystery of Jesus being truly God and truly man. Humanly, so much was ordinary or humble surrounding Jesus’ birth: A king gave a decree, as kings will customarily do, and the ordinary citizens obeyed. Joseph and Mary did what every other family would have been doing—traveling. They experienced not only the stresses of travel during late-term pregnancy but also the horrible (but ordinary) isolation that happens among family when you are seen as an outcast since Mary was known to be pregnant before she married Joseph. Nothing was outwardly special about this little family trudging to Bethlehem, nothing glorious. In fact, they would have been viewed as very unfortunate.
They would have struggled through their day, with Mary going into labor after traveling on a dirty and dusty road and Joseph scrambling to find any place for his pregnant wife to rest and deliver the child. Luke describes the scarcity of their situation: “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). Can you imagine? There are no extravagances, no extras. And yet, even in the most humble and, in many people’s eyes, shameful circumstances, the glorious God of the universe brought comfort to Mary and Joseph. He drew near to them in their sparse situation.
God reveals his glory, and comfort is shared.
While there is much ordinariness about the beginning of Luke 2, there is also great glory for we get to see the ordinary happenings of earth from God’s perspective.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, August 22, 2023
“Queerness as an interpretative tool” seems to be no more than the blunt assertion that today’s questions are the only ones worth asking and today’s categories the only ones worth applying. Never mind that when the ship sank, the crew drowned and that these artifacts spoke of real human lives that were lost and families that were presumably devastated. It is all about today’s categories such as gender and queerness. Difference need not be respected. Perspectives unsanctioned by modern Western progressivism need not apply.

The anti-Western left has been exposed for its sexual imperialism over the last few months. Evidence is all around. American Muslims have led protests against the imposition of LGBTQ policies and curricula in schools, leaving American progressives uncomfortably caught between two pillars of their favored rhetoric of political thought-crime: transphobia and Islamophobia. The Washington Post opined that anti-LGBTQ moves in the Middle East were “echoing” those of the American culture wars—as if Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan had been listed by the Human Rights Campaign as favored vacation destinations until their ruling elites started reading the website of Moms for Liberty.
It is, of course, the nature of imperialism that everything, everywhere, is always to be measured by the imperialists’ standards. And that is also what makes them so impervious to spotting their own imperialism. “Queering the Mary Rose‘s Collection,” an article on the website of the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England, is a recent example of this. The Mary Rose was a Tudor warship that sank in 1545 and was raised from the seabed in 1982 in a groundbreaking act of marine archaeology. The museum is dedicated to displaying artifacts retrieved from the wreck, some of which are now being analyzed “through a Queer lens.”
The specific examples are an octagonal mirror, nit combs, a gold ring, and Paternosters. Apparently, looking into a mirror can stir strong emotions for both straight and queer people, and for the latter it can generate, for example, feelings of gender dysphoria or euphoria, depending on whether the reflection matches their gender identity. Combs would have been used by the sailors to remove the eggs of hair lice. Today they are reminders of how hairstyles can be the result of imposed gender stereotypes, but also make possible the subverting of these through hairdos that break with social expectations. Rings are a reminder of marriage and, of course, that the Church of England founded by Henry VIII, king during the Mary Rose’s working life, still does not allow gay marriage. Finally, the Paternosters remind us that the crew were “practicing” Christians and that, once again, Henry VIII, via his initiation of the English Reformation, facilitated the civil criminalization of homosexual acts.
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