In Jeremiah 7v8-15 he calls the people to go visit Shiloh and see what God did to a complacent people who treated him with contempt and led double lives full of idolatry, adultery, murder and perjury yet sure they could come and worship and be safe.  God will do the same again in destroying the temple and taking his people into exile.

As human beings we’ve an amazing ability to make the extraordinary, ordinary.  To stop being wowed.  We do it with our bodies.  It takes an amazing number of systems to work correctly for our body to be able to do everyday tasks.  But we just do them and take it for granted.  We do it with the world around us, with orbits and gravity and water cycles and the way things grow and so on.  We do it with relationships.

Tragically we do it with God, what was mind-blowingly amazing – that God would set his love on us and send his Son, who willingly became a man, live a perfect life, and compelled by love died on a cross to pay the penalty for our sin and save us from a lost eternity, freeing us from slavery to sin to be his very own, redeemed for his spirit filled purposes as a citizens of his kingdom and member of his family, can just become ordinary. So ordinary we miss the wonder of it every day and every minute of every day. That’s what we drift from, wonder and praise!

We miss the glory of God all around us in creation, in one another redeemed and repurposed, in the kingdom we are called to seek.  We treat gathering with God’s people as just coming to church.  We treat glorious things as mundane again and again.  This chapter shows us the danger of that.

Twice God has warned Eli of the consequences of his sons treating him with contempt and Eli’s honouring his sons more than he honoured God.  Twice he’s warned him they’d die on the same day.  Now as blind Eli sits beside the road awaiting news “his heart feared for the ark of God.”  Eli sits with his heart trembling.  He knows God keeps his word, he knows his sons have sinned, but he hasn’t repented, and he knows God will not allow his glory to be diminished by his people.

When Eli hears the news of the ark of the covenant being lost (14-18)he falls back off his chair, breaks his neck and dies.  The lesson isn’t your teacher was right, rocking on your chair can be dangerous.

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