And when the ark of the covenant of the LORD came into the camp, all Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the earth rang again…And the Philistines were afraid, for they said, God is come into the camp. And they said, Woe unto us! for there hath not been such a thing heretofore. – 1 Samuel 4:5,7
The Israelites, instead of seeing to God Himself, went to Shiloh to fetch the ark of the covenant. The ark was the sacred place where God revealed Himself in the days when His people truly served Him; but it was devoid of power, without the presence of Him who dwelt between the cherubim. The Israelites were mistaken, for they shouted long before they were “out of the woods.” Before they had won any victory, the sight of the ark made them boastful and confident. The Philistines fell into an error of a different kind, for they were frightened without any real cause. They said, “God has come into the camp;” whereas God had not come at all. It was only the ark with the cherubim upon it; God was not there.
It has pleased God, even in our holy faith, to give us some external symbols—water, and bread, and wine. They are so simple, that it does seem, at first sight, as if men could never have made them objects of worship or used them as instruments of a kind of witchcraft…It is sad, indeed, when the symbol takes the place of the Saviour! Man is by nature both an atheist and an idolater. These are two shades of the same thing. We want, if we do worship at all, something that we can see…Anything which we can see, we pine after…we want some symbol, some token, something before our eyes; and if it can be something artistic, so much the better. We lay hold of something beautiful, that will charm the eye, and produce a kind of sensuous feeling, and straightway we mistake our transient emotion for spiritual worship and true reverence.
Let us each one look after his own life and see that all is right there; then the life of the Church will soon be at flood-tide, and when we go forth to the battle, the Philistines will know of a truth that “God is come into the camp.”
He Hath Said 