When it Looks Like God is Defeated. 1 Samuel 5:1&2
Opening Prayer
ÒOur Father, it is a tremendous privilege we have to come before Your throne of grace, because the Lord Jesus Christ rent the
veil in two and opened the pathway. And because He is our High Priest, we have
access to Your throne of grace.
Father, we come before You as citizens of this
nation and as believers. We recognize that we are clearly in the crosshairs of
satanic attack in the grand scheme of the angelic conflict. We recognize that
his aim is to destroy nations that are the bulwark of truth, the bulwark of
gospel presentation, the work of evangelism and missionary activity. For the
last 100 years we have seen the corrosive effects of epistemological
liberalism, rebellion against the authority of Your Word, epistemological
liberalism, which produces both social and religious liberalism that has
destroyed the very core of what was founded in this nation through the Puritans
and through the original settlers who came here, and our founding fathers.
Father, the only thing that will ultimately provide a change is a change
of heart. That comes only by putting our faith and trust in Jesus Christ. But
there are many other things we can do that come short of that ultimate goal. We
need to have the courage and the intelligence and knowledge to be able to
affect those changes one day at a time. Give us the courage of our convictions
to be involved.
Father, we pray that You would challenge us
with the teaching of Your Word this evening, recognizing that all of Your Word
is breathed out by You and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction and for instruction in righteousness. We pray that we might be
responsive to Your Word tonight. We pray in ChristÕs Name. Amen.Ó
We are in 1 Samuel 5. In 1 Samuel 4, the Ark of God, the Ark of the Lord of Hosts, Who dwells between the cherubim, has been
captured by the enemy. He has been captured by the Philistines and taken
off. Israel is devastated! They have counted on victory in the past. Bringing the
Ark into battle has always given them victory, but now that has failed. They
have failed. They have been unsuccessful in defeating their enemy. God has been
defeated it appears.
We always have to remember that when we are looking at a lot of these
Old Testament events and stories, that they are historical events. But as Paul
says in 1 Corinthians 10:11, they are for our benefit. They are recorded as an
example for us. There are a lot of analogies that we can draw between what
happens to the nation and what happens to us as individuals. The nation is in
spiritual rebellion. God has stepped back and removed His restraint on their
spiritual life so that they are going to reap the consequences of their
rebellion. He is going to allow the Ark to be captured, not because God is
defeated, but because He is going to teach Israel a lesson.
A lot of times the same thing can happen in our own lives
because we do not learn how to really trust in God. We end up going through the
motions. We are not really walking with the Lord. That is what happened to
Israel.
We are about to go into 1 Samuel 5, which in my opinion is one of the
most humorous chapters in all of the Bible. It is a
chapter that is not politically correct.
It is a chapter that if you were to be here for the first time tonight
as a new believer, fresh out of the culture of the world around us, you might
even be offended at what God does in this chapter, because the human viewpoint
thinking that dominates our world today emphasizes the fact that we need to treat
every religion as if it has equal value, every belief system as if it is
equally beneficial, whether it is a belief system that is extremely primitive,
involving animism and spiritism, or whether it is a
more elevated ethical religious system.
But see, God does not operate that way. That does not justify us in
being somewhat cavalier or disrespectful or just downright snotty with
somebodyÕs religious system, because we are not God. But God can poke fun at
them because well, God is God. He knows everything. He knows exactly what is
going on. He is not going to allow His reputation to be treated cavalierly. He
is not going to allow Himself to be dishonored. He is going to allow Himself to
be captured, but not defeated.
I have entitled this lesson When it
Looks Like God is Defeated because many times in our life we reach places
where we are struggling with something in our life. It looks like our trust in
God is somewhat misplaced.
As we look at this particular chapter I am reminded of what Peter says in
Acts 10:34. This is when Peter first wakes up to the
fact that God is going to work in the Gentiles as He has been working inside
with the Jews. Peter makes this statement. He says, ÒIn truth I perceive that God shows no partiality.Ó I like the King
James translation even though the New American Standard or New King James is
more accurate. The King James says, Òis no respecter of
personsÓ. That also captures the idea there. God is not elevating one
person over another. That is often what happens in human viewpoint
systems—that we elevate ourselves more highly than we ought to. We
elevate human religions more highly than we ought to. We do not want to offend
somebody by saying that what they believe is wrong. But there are certain times
in life when we need to tell people the truth. We need to do it in a manner of
generosity, grace, kindness. But they are wrong. If
you saw somebody that was on the path to some accident, or they were going to
become burned, or they were going to create some trauma in their life, then it
would be our responsibility to stop them, to tell them the truth.
When we live in a culture where truth has been rejected and people
believe that there is no truth, then it becomes difficult for people to operate
on an absolute of right and wrong and tell somebody,
ÒWell, I am sorry, but what you believe is wrong. I will be glad to help you
think it through. The truth is that there is a God. He loves you. He has
provided a perfect solution to your problems, which is Jesus Christ in His
death on the cross.ÓWorking through that is not as
quick as I said, because often there is much more to it than that.
We have looked at this outline in 1 Samuel 1–7, which is the
preparation. This is really the introductory section to Samuel, the full books
of Samuel, which, in the English Bible, is 1st and 2nd Samuel. In
the Hebrew Bible it is just one book. It is preparing the nation for this
change. Yahweh is going to prepare
the nation for change, but in order to prepare them for the change He has got
to straighten out a lot of the problems in the nation. They have rejected Him
and His provision. They are living in idolatry. They are living in gross
immorality. They have adopted a system of moral relativism. They have rejected
God. God is going to first have to bring some discipline, some judgment, into
their lives in order to get their attention so that they will begin to look
toward Him. This is part of the preparation.
In 1 Samuel 1–7 there are basically two events that take place:
Samuel becomes a central person here. As we saw in this outline, God (Yahweh) is orchestrating the collapse of
the old order. We looked at 1 Samuel 4, where Yahweh causes Israel to be defeated and allows the Ark to be
captured—to demonstrate His sovereignty over the enemies of Israel and
their gods.
So that is part of what He is going to do. God multitasks. He does not
just do one thing. And the same thing is true in our lives. He will let us go
through some situation. He is going to accomplish five things:
This has got to be the hardest lesson for Christians to understand. I
have been teaching this and referring to this in 1 Peter on Thursday nights,
teaching it some as we are going through Samuel. We will be hitting it in some
ways this coming Sunday. It is interesting how this week everything complements
each other.
I am coming to understand that we are to trust God exclusively. What
that means is that God is sufficient. His grace is sufficient. His power is
sufficient. The Word is sufficient. The cross is sufficient. Everybody nods
their heads and says ÒamenÓ when you say those phrases, but when you start talking about
what that actually means in facing day-to-day traumas, challenges, and issues,
people then go, ÒWell, wait a minute. I do not agree with that.Ó That is why
you are not being very effective in your Christian life. That is exactly what
we are going to see on Sunday morning when the apostles fail after many
successful times of casting demons out. They fail, and they fail miserably. We
will discover the problem is that they have quit thinking in terms of the
sufficiency of ChristÕs power and trusting in Him. This is what happens in
peopleÕs lives.
In 1 Samuel 4 we saw the capture of the Ark. In this next section in 1
Samuel 5, we are going to see how God is establishing the means for delivering
Israel. That takes us down through the end of 1 Samuel 6. As we look at this,
just a reminder of Samuel. Samuel is such a pivotal person. He is critical to
understand what is taking place in this transition period in Israel. He is the
first real national prophet to show up on the scene since Moses. We had
Deborah, who is classified as a prophetess. I really think that that refers to
something else. You have several women mentioned as prophetesses in the Old
Testament, and with the exception of one, it is always followed by a hymn that
they wrote.
That word ÒprophetÓ we will study more when we get into 1 Samuel
9–10, but in 1 Chronicles it talks about those who prophesied with the
lyre and the harp and the musical instruments. The word ÒprophetÓ is used in
some unusual situations where it refers to singing hymns. It refers to what we
might normally refer to as worship. Often we take words and we pigeonhole them
into one area or another. We think a prophet is someone who foretells the
future. That was only a secondary aspect of the gift of a nabi, a prophet.
The neviÕim
were really the prosecuting attorneys for God to address the nationÕs failures
to obey the Law. Since the consequences of that failure would come in the
future, they would foretell the future judgments. That is how we come to think
of prophets as those who were telling the future. But their primary function
was to challenge the people in light of the Law of God. There seems to be
another use of that word. We will get into that later.
There is Merriam. There is Hanna. There are a couple of other women whom
it seems their gift of being a prophetess had to do more with music and the
writing of divinely inspired hymns, than it had to do with functioning in the
same way that Moses and Samuel did. There were others like Joshua, who perhaps
had a gift of prophecy. You had the unnamed man of God in 1 Samuel 2, who is
clearly a prophet. But someone who has a national stage, a
leader of the nation as a prophet? Samuel is the first one on the scene
since Moses.
If you remember, we have studied this on Sunday mornings the past couple
of weeks. In Deuteronomy 18:15 Moses predicted that there would come Òa prophet
like meÓ. That is taken by New Testament writers to be a messianic prophecy. When
you think about who Moses was, he was the Law giver.
That would be part of it. He served as a prophet. He served as a Law giver. He is also from the tribe of Levi. He was a
priest. But the other thing that distinguished Moses from all of the other
prophets is that Moses spoke with God face to face. No one else spoke with God
face to face. This is what makes him distinct.
Samuel is not a prophet like Moses. He does not give the Law. He does
not interpret the Law. We do not see that fulfilled until Jesus comes along. He
is Prophet, Priest, and King, Matthew 5–7. He interprets the Law for the
people, which is in the role of Moses. He, of course, has a face-to-face
relationship with the Father, which distinguishes Him. He is going to be the
future King. He is the Son of David, the future King. His role as prophet is
important.
As I pointed out, Samuel is a judge also. He has a political leadership
role. He is a priest, but he is not at the same level as Moses, but he is the
most significant one to come along. He is going to establish a new role for the
prophet. I pointed this out Sunday morning—that
he is going to be the predecessor to a king. From now on, before any king is
anointed, he will always be anointed by a prophet. This
is important because it shows that the king is not a law unto himself. The king
is under the Law. The king represented the highest form of civil authority in
the land. He is under the Law, and the Law is given by God.
He is under the authority of God. He is not a law unto himself. He is put in
his position as civil authority in order to serve God.
As we get into the next few chapters, we are going to see the
development in these chapters of a biblical view of leadership, of political
leadership, of civil leadership. This culminates in a great indictment of a
strong federal head type of government in 1 Samuel 8. The understanding of
these chapters, as well as certain other chapters in the Torah, was fundamental in the development of English political
theory in the period following the Reformation. It took a while to develop
things, but by the end of the 1500s as you move into the 1600s, a group
developed within the English ecclesiastical system that was running counter to
the Anglican Church. They wanted a more pure form of biblical teaching and less
of an emphasis on the rituals of Roman Catholicism because they wanted to
purify the worship in the church and get rid of the various manifestations of
Roman Catholicism, like Christ [still] on the cross, the paintings, all of
these other things, and just have a more simplified service. They were called
Puritans. The Puritans were a fun-loving people. They loved games. They brewed
beer. They had a great time. They had a zest for living because that came from
the Word of God.
Most people today in Western civilization have a wrong view of the
Puritans. What they think of as a Puritan was really a
Victorian. This was what characterized British evangelicalism in the 19th
century—how they redefined Christianity in different groups. It involved
a lot more legalism. But the Puritans were not that way.
The Puritans were struggling with a group of leaders, James VI of
Scotland, who became James I of England, and his son Charles I, and their
assertion of a doctrine called the Divine Right of Monarchy. Of course this led
to a tremendous conflict between parliament and the king because the vast
majority in parliament were Puritans. They believed that the power, the
authority of the king, was not infinite. It was not absolute. It was to be
restrained by the law. This led to the writing of a book by Samuel Rutherford
in 1644 called Lex Rex. That is Latin for The Law is King. This developed from
their understanding of the Scripture. The king is under the law.
This is exactly what we are seeing with Samuel. He is the prophet of
God. When the king shows up, which will be Saul, Saul will be under the
authority of the prophet, under the authority of the Law. This is what
developed into British understanding of law and the rule of law. You will hear
a lot of that today. We talk about how it seems like the Supreme Court, the
Congress, the President, have all lost their understanding of the rule of
law—that the Constitution is the law of the land and everyone is under
the authority of the law. That is what has happened. When we slip into more
relativism, you lose a sense of any kind of ultimate rule
book. How would that look if you lost the rule book
in the NFL, or in major league baseball? People want the rules followed
stringently when it comes to their sports. But when it comes to the law of the
land, they want to make all kinds of exceptions. They want to change
everything. They do not even want to read the rule book,
and most of the time they do not.
This political theory is laid down in the Scripture. This is what impacted,
especially the British Empire. They exported this kind of thinking through
their armies in their conquest of the colonies of America, Canada, Australia,
India, Africa, China, and that was responsible for taking the gospel to
millions and millions of people.
There are a lot of things that did not go right in their empire. There
were things where they made mistakes, but the greatest thing about the British
Empire was that it took the gospel throughout the world. Millions were saved
because of that. That does not mean everything they did was right, but that was
how God used the British Empire.
The reason I am making all of these different points is that we have to
understand the nature of slavery and the nature of freedom.
What we see in Israel is that they really had a great system of freedom
under the Mosaic Law, but they rejected it. As a result of rejecting it and
getting involved in idolatry, God allowed them to succumb to the defeat of
foreign powers. That is the whole story of the book of Judges under the
authority of the Philistines.
The core problem is a spiritual problem. The core problem that we face
today is a spiritual problem. It does not mean that we ignore political
involvement. Sometimes you have people like John Nelson Darby, who is the founder
of dispensational theology. He thought that it was a sin for anybody to even
vote.
But see, we have to think a little bit more precisely about politics.
Politics basically develops when you get a group of 10–20 families
together and they establish a village. Then they have to think about things
like:
All these kind of things the 15–20 families have to chose somebody or a group of people who are going to take
care of those things. That is politics at the basic level. To eschew that as
being somehow wrong is to plunge a society into basic disorder and confusion.
God is not a god of confusion or a god of disorder.
But once you get away from the Scripture, which provides the ultimate
framework, and you reject that, the only solution is to look to yourselves as
the ultimate source of any kind of criteria. This is what happened during the
period of the judges.
What happens now at the end of this period, is
that God is going to really bring this judgment upon them. They are going to be
defeated militarily. They have been defeated many times. That is what the book
of Judges covers. But at this point, they are going to be defeated at the
Battle of Aphek, and the Ark of the Covenant was
captured.
This is critical because the Ark of the Covenant is the visible
representation of the Presence of God among the people. It is the sign of the
fact that God has entered into a personal covenant with Israel. What is inside
the box? What is inside the box is a record of the covenant that God made with
Moses, the tablets of the Ten Commandments. That is why it is called the Ark of
the Testimony. This is the legal repository.
If you go buy a house you are going to buy it and sign a deed. What
happens to that deed? A copy gets put on file down at City Hall, and you get a
copy. What happened in the ancient world when you had a covenant with God, one
copy goes into the temple and the other copy is available to the people. That is what has happened here. GodÕs copy of the
covenant is inside the Ark. The Ark has been captured. GodÕs been defeated. We
cannot imagine the psychological and spiritual level of defeat and despair that
ran through Israel at this time. I think that it is a lot like we find with
some Christians today. They are not really trusting God. They do not know the
Bible. They do not know how God works in peopleÕs lives. They do not give
enough attention to prayer.
I ran across a story the other day of a man who was being given a tour.
A visitor from America went over to England. He met Charles Spurgeon, who is
considered the prince of British preachers in the Victorian period. Spurgeon is
taking him around the church and showing him everything. He took him down in
the basement and said, Òwell, I am going to show you
the boiler room.Ó The man said, Òthe boiler room? Why do I need to see the boiler
room?Ó
Spurgeon said, Òthe boiler room is what keeps
everything in the church working.Ó He opened the door to the boiler room, and
there were 300 people there who were in prayer and prayed around the clock.
There was always a prayer meeting going. Spurgeon said this is a heart of what
keeps this church going. It is those who are in prayer, those who are trusting
God for everything.
What has happened is that God has been removed. The Ark of the Covenant
has been captured. It has now been taken into possession by
the Philistines. The Israelites are in tremendous shock. They go into
about a 20-year ÒDark AgesÓ at this point. They are almost at the very bottom
of the Old Testament experience except for the time when they are defeated by
the Assyrians and the Babylonians later. As I pointed out last time, what we
see with the Ark of the Covenant is that it is basically a box.
The word for ÒarkÓ means a box. It is a box that is made of acacia wood,
which is one of the hardest woods, and it is least destroyed. It is not going
to rot. It is not going to be penetrated by termites and bugs and other things.
It is going to firm up the hardness. The impermeability of the acacia wood is
used to symbolize the perfection of the humanity of Jesus Christ. The pure gold
represents His undiminished deity. The whole of the Ark of the Covenant is the
picture of the Lord Jesus Christ. Inside of the Ark are the Ten Commandments,
the sin of man that has broken the Law of God. The solid gold lid that is
placed on the top represents the Mercy Seat. That is what this is
called—the Mercy Seat. Paul refers to this in Romans 3:24–26 when
he says that we have been Òjustified
freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His
blood.Ó The Greek word there, HILASTERION, refers to the Mercy Seat. That is where
propitiation took place.
Last week when I taught on this, it was the eve of Yom Kippur. We are
now in Succoth, which pictures the Millennium. But what would happen on Yom Kippur
is the high priest would take the blood from one of the goats that had been
sacrificed. The scapegoat was taken out into the wilderness. The high priest
would put the blood on the Mercy Seat and the cherubim, the two angels, would
look at the blood. These cherubs are always associated with the holiness and
righteousness of God. It is a picture of GodÕs holiness and righteousness being
satisfied. That is what happened on the cross. The Mercy Seat on the Ark of the
Covenant is a picture of how God will be satisfied through the death of Christ
on the Cross, the payment for sin. The Ark is
extremely significant because it is through the death of Christ that something
happens.
Galatians 5:1. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Real
freedom starts at the cross. There can be other levels of freedom, other types
of freedom, but I am always reminded, when I speak of this, of the
confrontation in John 8 between the Pharisees and the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ
says if they would listen to Him that they would know the truth. That is the
truth about Him, the truth of GodÕs Word. And then the truth would set them
free. They are all offended because they say, ÒWell, we are free.Ó He said no
you are not. You are not free for a number of reasons. You are not free because
you are under a legalistic system that has perverted the Law of Moses. You have
become enslaved to religion. Religion in the Old Testament is the source of
evil.
Read through Kings and Chronicles sometime. What you will get is this
drumbeat over and over and over and over again about some king did evil in the
sight of Yahweh. They worship the Baalim and the Asherim. They
worshiped in the high places. They worshiped the idols. Evil in the Old
Testament is defined again and again as idolatry. That is evil. Evil is being
involved in a religious system that may have high morals. It may be involved
with wonderful people that may do all kinds of wonderful things, but because it
denies the truth of the gospel it is evil because it is not giving people the
truth—that by faith alone in Christ alone you can have eternal life.
It is evil because it is allowing people to go to the Lake of Fire. It
is not giving them the solution. It is like those on the Titanic going down.
Nobody would throw any lifejackets to anybody, or launch any lifeboats to save
anybody. That is real evil. That is the BibleÕs view of religion. Christianity
and the Old Testament Judaism, biblical Judaism, was a relationship with God
based upon His grace. Jesus Christ gives us freedom. Once we understand freedom
spiritually, then we can begin to understand freedom socially and politically. Ultimately,
it has got to be grounded in that understanding of what happens, that
transaction on the cross, when the certificate of our debt was nailed on the cross,
and we are set free from sin. That is the foundation.
When we live in a system of moral relativism, there is no sin. This is
what happened in Israel. There was no sin. We saw that when there is no sin,
when there are no absolutes, there is no sin. What you have is a perverted
priesthood, a corrupt priesthood, where the priests are perverting the women
who are serving in the temple. These women are now being forced into religious
prostitution. Women were abused in that system.
The bottom line is: If you do not get right spiritually, you are never
going to be able to recover. When God is defeated at Aphek,
He is not really defeated. This is part of GodÕs strategy—to wake the
nation up to the fact that they need to get right with Him first before they
can go forward. That is a message that resonates with many of us individually
and with this nation specifically. If we are ever going to recover to where God
blesses this nation, there is going to have to be a spiritual renewal at the
very heart of it, a return to the truth of the Word of God, and a return to the
truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what God is doing through this
defeat. It is to go through a process that is horrible if you were a Jew when
you were experiencing it, but God is going to use that eventually to turn them
back to Himself.
In 1 Samuel 5:1, we read that the Philistines took the Ark of God and
brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. When the Philistines took the Ark of God
they brought it into the house of Dagon and set it by Dagon.
What we see here in 1 Samuel 5 is that the scene now shifts from Shiloh.
It went to Shiloh, then to Aphek, and now to enemy
territory. God has now been captured by the enemy. He
is inside enemy territory. He is inside the pagan temple. Remember, the Old Testament
in Deuteronomy (and Paul does the same thing in 1 Corinthians 10), says that
the idols of the Gentiles are demons—that Satan is behind all of the
false religions. You can think about them. We saw one all last week on
television. There are many others. Behind every false religion, anything other
than biblical Christianity, there is demonism. We live in a world that is not
restricted to what we experience with our senses. But there is a spiritual
conflict, an angelic conflict, that takes place behind
the scenes. That is going to be part of what we look at when we come to our
passage Sunday in Matthew.
There is going to be a spiritual battle take
place here in the temple of Dagon. The Philistines have now captured God,
thinking they have defeated Him and thinking they can control the God of
Israel. Instead, God is going to bring them under severe judgment. It is going
to be a little amusing from our perspective, but from their perspective, it
would have been quite miserable.
As we look at the Philistines, just to remind you, they were originally
the group that came out of Kaftor and Crete:
Some of those names sound very familiar because there are cities in
those locations still. The Gaza Strip, Gaza City is in the Gaza Strip. Ashdod
is in Israel just north of the Gaza Strip. Frequently, when Hamas fires rockets
into Israel, they will fire them at Ashdod. It is within 10 miles or less than
that of the border with Gaza. Ashkelon is very close there as well. We are not
sure where Gath was located. We think we do. Ekron
would be in what is now IsraelÕs territory.
The Philistines in their initial approach to colonize this area are
mentioned during the time of Abraham. We remember the episodes with
Abimelech—Abraham going to stay with Abimelech and lying
about Sarah his wife, saying she is his sister, which is a half truth because
she was his half-sister.
Abimelech is warned by God, and then Abimelech comes down on Abraham. Abraham also entered into a
covenant with Abimelech. It had to do with the water wells at a place called
Beersheba, which is the place of the seven wells. Some of you have been there
with me in Israel.
That was the early incursion. There was a later incursion in Judges. We
hear of Shamgar defeating the Philistines in Judges
3:31. But the real troublemaker with the Philistines was Samson. Just a
reminder—Samson is mentioned in Hebrews 11. We know that at some point
Samson trusted God because it says so Òby faith.Ó Hebrews 11 lists Gideon, Jephthah, Deborah, Barak, and Samson. But Samson probably
trusted God only at the very end of his life. But for most of his life, when you
read Judges, he is not in obedience to God. He is a rabble
rouser.
I do not know about you, but I grew up listening to my mother read me
stories from HurlbutÕs Stories of the Bible by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut. It was a big book and it had nice pictures in it.
It told a story and you think, oh, this Samson is just really great! The reason
Samson lost his power was he broke his Nazarite vow
because he got a haircut.
The trouble is he had broken his vow again and again and again. Samson
was not supposed to touch anything related to grapes. He was not supposed to go
near a grape or a grapevine or wine. Yet, he does that on a couple of
occasions. He is not supposed to touch a dead body. We all know the story about
how he singlehandedly killed a lion. But Samson went back to the carcass of the
lion, a dead thing, which he is not supposed to touch. The bees have developed
a honeycomb inside that carcass. He reaches inside that carcass to get the
honey. Samson defiled himself there.
He marries a Philistine in violation of the Law. He deserts her. She
gets turned back and married to somebody else. It is just a mess. He is a
womanizer. He is rebellious against his parents. He violates his Nazarite vow every time he can turn around. Finally God
says this is it. I am going to end this whole travesty here. But God is going
to use it. God is multitasking. When Samson gives up that his secret is his
hair to Delilah, they cut his hair. God finally judges him. He has been
extending grace all through this time. God is going to discipline Samson. He is
going to lose his power. He gets arrested by the Philistines and thrown in
jail. They put out his eyes, and at the end he is going to pray to God to give
him the strength one more time to bring DagonÕs house down.
The Philistines still do not get the message that the God of Israel is
greater than their god Dagon. The Philistines are going to come back and place
the Ark of God in another Dagon temple in Ashdod to indicate that God is a
servant of Dagon, that Dagon has defeated Him and now
God is his personal slave. The Philistines ultimately will not be defeated
until David defeats them in 2 Samuel 21. With this defeat at Aphek, what we now see is Israel has reached a place where
they have become slaves to this pagan power.
The analogy there in terms of the Christian life is that often when we
reject God, and we make idols out of the details of life, the world around us,
and the lust of our flesh, then what happens is God gives us over to the power
of our sin nature. We re-enslave ourselves to the power of the sin nature.
There are some lessons we have to learn. One is that if we are going to
recover, we are going to have to get right with the Lord again. That begins
with confession of sin.
What happens with the Philistines is they mirror a technique that is
used by tyrants down through the ages in order to keep people under control and
to keep them subservient. They practice an early form of disarmament.
This is seen in 1 Samuel 13:19. We have seen other examples of
disarmament. You have Adonibezek
back in Judges 1:1–7. After they defeated him, what did they do to disarm
him? They cut off his fingers, thumb, and big toe. That was disarmament. It is
hard to throw a spear or hold a sword when you do not have a thumb. It is hard
to run after your enemy if you cannot keep your balance because you do not have
big toes. This was one practiced in the ancient world. It is practiced today.
This is why there is such a battle. It has been going on for the last
50–60 years against the Second Amendment. Once you disarm a citizenry,
then the tyrants can do whatever they wish. In fact, what we learn from this
example in Scripture is citizens need to be able to defend themselves against
government. The government should not have weapons that the citizens do not
have or be able to defend. Now we have all types of helicopters, missiles, and
all kinds of things. It is difficult to let every citizen
have whatever they can to defend themselves against the government. We
are greatly outnumbered if the tyrants want to defeat us.
You will hear a lot of conservatives and other pro-Second Amendment
types beat their chest and say, Òwell we are going to fight back.Ó No, you will
not. I do not think we will because the government has got us greatly
outnumbered and out armed. People will be quickly herded into camps or
whatever. The idea that we are in the old west and we can fight back is just a
fantasy. We do not have the kind of weapons the military has. We do not have
fully automatic weapons. We do not have hand grenades. We do not have all these
other things that the military has. It is going to be easy to dominate the
citizenry.
The Philistines come along. They take the Ark. They are bringing it back
to Ashdod. What God is doing at this point is saying to Israel, you have
succumbed to pagan thought for the last 20–30 years in this recent cycle.
You have been succumbing to pagan thought again and again since the time of
Deborah and Barak. You have constantly been compromising. Now that you have compromised
with the fertility gods and goddesses of the Philistines, I am going to let you
be defeated by them, and let you attempt to assimilate to their culture. You
are going to get a real taste of what it is to be a slave and to be dominated
by a foreign power. God is using these unbelievers as a tool to discipline
Israel. In doing so, it appears that God has been defeated. The people are in
despair. They wonder how in the world they are ever going to have victory.
There are a lot of people that wonder that today even in our own political
system.
What we have to remember is that whatever the problems are that we face,
whether they are personal problems, we have a lot of problems, because we are
corrupt fallen sinners. We have problems with our emotions. Our sin nature
frequently influences us in the direction of anger, bitterness, resentment,
worry, anxiety, depression. And all of these things
flow out of our sin nature. We struggle with those things. We are supposed to
struggle with them.
It is not easy in the Christian way of life, but we do have victory
because we have the Holy Spirit. We have the Word of God and the promise of
victory. We can actually see things change even though it is difficult, even
though it is a battle. Too often today people opt out for quick-fix solutions.
What that does is short circuit GodÕs grace and His power. God is trying to do
the same thing with them as He does with us to teach us to rely upon Him and
not on something else.
We also have people who struggle with other problems, such as sexual
identity. You talk to somebody who has problems because they are attracted to
someone of the same sex. They feel like this is an irreversible condition. You
talk to them and they say, ÒI was born this way. I have always been this way.Ó
But God says that this is not the case. This is a result of volition and if you
get right with God, if you walk with Him, this can change. He changes it.
There are hundreds and thousands of Christians who have seen God work in
miraculous ways in changing them because they fall in love with the Savior.
They fall in love with the Word of God. They walk by the Spirit. God changes
the desires of their heart.
We have problems with addictions, which we used to just call bad habits.
We have bad habits of thinking. We have bad habits of doing. God says He can
replace those bad habits with the good habits and the discipline that comes as
self-mastery that is part of the fruit of the Spirit. We are always reminded
that it does not matter how badly we fail. It does not matter how badly Israel
failed. GodÕs grace was always there to help them recover. God always met them
where they were. He meets us where we are. He is not saying, ÒWell, you have to
fix all these things you just screwed up. Then I will give you a little more
grace.Ó He meets us where we are. That is what GodÕs grace is. It is always
sufficient. The Word of God is always sufficient. The cross of Christ is always
sufficient because Christ paid the penalty for every sin at the cross. We see
these lessons emphasized here.
In these next five verses, what we see is that God is superior to all
religious and political systems, 1 Samuel 5:1–5. First we see an emphasis
here on the faithfulness of God. That is foundational. The sufficiency of GodÕs
grace and His power and the faithfulness are foundational to everything else
that we believe in the Christian life. God never changes. He is the same
yesterday, today, and forever. The God who delivered Israel at the Exodus is
the same God that can deliver you and me from whatever is oppressing us. The
Jesus who cast demons out during the incarnation is the same Christ that has
the same power to give us victory over whatever we are struggling with today.
That has not changed. We have to understand the faithfulness of God. We see an
example of this here in four ways:
The Israelites were defeated by the Philistines
because of their spiritual condition. We are going to see that the
Apostles are not able to cast the demon out of this epileptic boy, who is not
really epileptic. That is the translation. He is really being oppressed by a
demon, if not indwelt by a demon. The Apostles fail miserably because they do
not trust God. That is the bottom line. We have to trust God.
The Israelites were trying to win the battle through their own efforts,
through human viewpoint thinking and human viewpoint methodology. But God is
going to give them a lesson that it does not matter how powerful they are, how
skilled they are. It does not matter what their technology is. That is not why
they lost. They did not lose because they had bad technology. They did not lose
because they had bad military leadership. They did not lose because they were
not in good enough shape. They lost because they trusted the wrong thing. God
has to make that point.
That is the same thing we have to learn. When we feel that God has let
us down at certain times, and that the Word of God just does not work. I have
heard people say, ÒWell, doctrine just does not work for me.Ó
I told a story a few weeks ago about a deaconÕs wife who finally made it
really clear. The reason she could deal with the problems in her life is that
she went through psychotherapy. Oh, so Bible doctrine does not work. Light
bulbs went off. Everybody realized what the issue was. You are not really in
love with the God of grace, the God of the Bible. That is because you have made
God some sort of academic exercise. There is no problem that we face that is
too great for the power of God and the Word of God. We need to quit looking for
solutions somewhere else.
This brings us to the fact that God is superior to all these religious
and political systems. We will start with 1 Samuel 5:1 next time. It is one of
the more humorous studies. Think about this. You ought to read this. You ought
to be reading ahead as we go through this to get a good grasp of what is
happening. This is one of the most significant sections of Scripture dealing
with political theory. Since we are in the political season leading up to the election
next year, we are going to learn some important lessons. We are going to learn
how bad Òbad leadershipÓ can be. Saul demonstrates that. We are going to see
what the essence of good leadership is when we come to David toward the end of
the study of 1 Samuel.
Closing Prayer
ÒFather, thank You for this opportunity to study Your Word, to be
reminded even when we appear too defeated in our Christian life, you are never
defeated. Your power is never diminished. The only thing that causes problems
for us is our own sin nature, our own volition, our own failure to trust You, our own failure to rely upon Your Word and make it the
center of peace and the center focus of our lives.
That as Paul said, ÒI can do all things through Christ who strengthens
me.Ó Paul has been in situations where he has absolutely nothing, in times when
he has a tremendous amount. What he was saying was that he could face any and
every circumstance because his stability, his hope, his happiness, his joy was
not dependent upon the details of life or circumstances. It was dependent upon
his relationship with the God of the universe, the God who created the heavens
and the earth and the seas and all that is in them. Only because of that he
could have this great joy that he talks about in Philippians.
Father, we pray that You would challenge us in
our own spiritual lives to focus upon You and focus upon Your Word, to make it
a greater reality in our lives. We pray this in ChristÕs Name. Amen.Ó