Fighting God's Battles Without God's Preparation

Israel's first defeat at the hands of the Philistines carries a lesson that Maclaren extracts with surgical precision: the nation fought unbidden and unrepentant, and therefore was sure to fail. The critical error lay not in taking up arms, but in the absence of penitent return to Him—the prerequisite that Elohim Himself establishes for victory. Maclaren identifies a telling symptom of Israel's spiritual condition: the elders recognized that the Lord had smitten them, yet they possessed "not the faintest notion that the reason was their own moral and religious apostasy."…