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.
Hitherto is the word doing the work, and it is a boundary marker. It reports a distance and stops. It tells you how far the help has come and says nothing about tomorrow morning. A stone reading the LORD will help us would have been a different stone making a different claim, and Samuel did not carve that one.
The name is stranger than the word. Ebenezer was already on the map, and it was the worst place in living memory. Israel went out against the Philistines to battle, and pitched beside Ebenezer, and lost the day and the ark, which the Philistines brought from Ebenezer unto Ashdod. Then Samuel sets a stone at a different spot and hands it the name of the field where everything went wrong. The text offers no explanation, and none is needed once you have noticed it.
The limit proves itself almost at once. The chapter closes well: the Philistines subdued, the hand of the LORD against them all the days of Samuel. Turn the page. Samuel is old, his sons have turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment, and the elders arrive at Ramah asking for a king to judge us like all the nations. The stone was still standing through every line of that, and it was still telling the truth, because it had only ever claimed a distance.
That is what a marker is for. A fixed point behind you saying the help got you this far, put down by somebody who knew that further on was another matter and refused to pretend otherwise.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 178 is Abiding Forever (1 John 2:17).