Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 178 · June 27
Hitherto
“Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us.”
"Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us."
The word doing the work is hitherto, and it is a boundary word. It means "up to this point." It measures a distance and then stops. It tells you how far the help has come, and it says nothing about tomorrow morning. A stone promising help for every day to come would have been a different stone making a different claim, and Samuel did not carve that one.
The name Ebenezer means "stone of help," and it is stranger than it first looks. The same name appears earlier in the book, at the worst place anyone could remember: "Israel went out against the Philistines to battle, and pitched beside Ebenezer." They lost that battle, and they lost the ark of God as well: "the Philistines took the ark of God, and brought it from Ebenezer unto Ashdod." Now, after a victory, Samuel sets up a stone and gives it the name of the place where everything had gone wrong. The text does not explain why, yet from that day the name stands for help.
The limit of the word soon shows. The chapter ends well. The Philistines are beaten, and "the hand of the LORD was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel." Then turn the page, and Samuel is old. His sons "turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment," and the elders come to him at Ramah asking for "a king to judge us like all the nations." The stone stood through all of that, and it was still telling the truth, because it had only ever claimed a distance.
That is what a marker is for. It is a fixed point behind you that says God's help has brought you this far. Samuel set it down knowing that what lay ahead was another matter, and he did not pretend otherwise. Yet the God who helped hitherto is the same God who goes on ahead, so every stretch of road He brings you through becomes one more place to set a stone.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 178 is Abiding Forever (1 John 2:17).