God Never Fails. 1 Samuel 5:6–12
Opening Prayer
“Father, we are very grateful that we have had this time to get
together, that we live in a nation that still has the freedom to proclaim the
truth of Your Word. It still has the freedom to proclaim the truth of the
gospel that Jesus Christ died for our sins, and that by believing in Him alone
we have eternal life. Salvation is by faith alone.
Father, we are thankful for Your Word that when we are regenerate, when
we become new creatures in Christ, we are not left like new
born babes. We have Your Word to feed on. It nourishes us and
strengthens us. It gives us the focus we need to make it through the challenges
of life.
Father, we pray that as we study Your Word today, You
will open our eyes to truth of Your Word to see the principles of Scripture
that they may be applied to our lives. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Open your Bibles with me to 1 Samuel 5.
We are going to continue our study. One question I got—I do not know
where I made this statement in class, whether it was last Sunday, Tuesday
night, or Thursday night—but sometime last week I did get one question that
came in live streaming. Then I had somebody in the congregation ask me. I had
made a statement last week about the fact that in the future we are not going
to remember what has taken place in this life. That was a new thought for a lot
of people. I thought, no, I have taught that before.
There is only one verse that I know of where that is stated. It is
implied in Revelation 21—that there will be no more sorrow, no more tears, no
more pain for the old things have passed a way. That is after the Millennial
Kingdom. That is in eternity. That
indicates that a lot of the regrets, a lot of the things that happen in this
life will not be remembered. There will not be any kind of source of heartache,
remorse, guilt, or anything like that in eternity. But in the Old Testament there is a promise given to Israel
in Isaiah 65:17 where God says:
“For behold, I create new heavens
and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered or come to mind.”
That also indicates that all of the evil, all of the pain, all of the
heartache, everything that went on in this life is not going to be remembered.
How does that happens? Do not ask me. I do not
have God in front of my name. I do not know how He is going to do that, but we
are still going to have our identities. We will know the people we know. I do
not know how that is going to work out.
Last time I titled our lesson “What Happens When it Seems
that God has Failed?” And tonight it is “God Never Fails.” It only appears to
us in terms of our finite understanding, because we expect God to do one thing,
and something else happens. Then we are disappointed. Sometimes it is so serious in our lives
that what happens is some people react. They become bitter and angry toward God
only because they have assumed that God is going to perform according to their
plans, their desires, and their wishes. The world is filled with people like
that.
Israel at this time is in a situation like that. God has been captured.
The Ark has been taken by the enemy, by the Philistines.
In that culture, if that happens, you have not only been defeated militarily
and culturally, but in terms of Israel’s hope in God, Yahweh as the living God, they have just been devastated. The whole
foundation for their existence, as having been called by the Creator-God, the
God who created the heavens and the earth and the seas and all that is in
them—this God has vanquished.
So Israel goes into a period of about 20 years of darkness as God takes
them into a time of judgment. All of this is preparatory. That is what I want
you to remember as we look at this. God is giving us an overview of how He is
working through history to bring about this true reformation within the nation.
It takes time. Just as we look back on the time in Israel’s history, the time
of the judges, it took time to turn things around. It is certainly going to
take time to turn things around in this nation.
This nation did not get where we are in one or two presidential terms.
It has been coming on for the last 110–120 years. God may have to take us
through some very dark times as a nation (if we are going to survive as a
nation), that we may have to go through to turn things around and to deal with
the evil that has come to be accepted and to permeate our culture.
In this section in 1 Samuel 5:1–6:21, we are going to see how God, Yahweh, establishes the means for
delivering Israel. Remember the
time frame. I keep going back to this. This is still the period of the judges. Eli, who just died because he heard that
the Ark was captured, is the last judge. Actually, he is not the last judge.
Samuel is the last judge in the period of the judges. Eli was also a judge.
This is near the end. It is probably just a few years, if that,
from the time that Samson destroys the temple of Dagon in Judges. As we get
into this particular text, what we have seen is the battle of Aphek, which takes place at the base of the hill country of
Samaria.
The area along the coast, the coastal plane of Canaan, or Israel, is
called the Shephelah. Looking at the map, this is
Joppa, and this area surrounding Joppa is where modern Tel Aviv is located.
This battle area is right off of the interstate highway. It is all developed as
suburbs of Tel Aviv now. This is where the Ark is captured.
The Ark is taken prisoner. It seems as if God has been defeated, but God
never fails. We are going to see how God turns things around in 1 Samuel 5.
The principle we should remember is that at times we feel that God has
let us down, that God has failed, that God is defeated, and that the Word of
God does not seem to work. I have heard this so many times from people. They
will ask me do you really believe that I can solve this problem in my life.
Usually it is some sort of emotional problem, psychological problem, or some
area of temptation—that I can really solve this by trusting the Bible; I do not
need to go through counseling; I do not need to go through all of these other
things.
I’ve said that is the promise of God. God can sustain us. He has given
us the spiritual skills in Scripture to be able to face and handle any and
every situation. It does not mean it is going to be easy. It does not mean it
is going to be simple. It does not mean that it is going to be solved just by a
single prayer at night. But like we saw the other Sunday morning with the
casting out of the demon from the boy having seizures in Matthew 17, is that it
takes faith. We have to learn to trust in God.
God is showing this here. He is teaching both the Philistines and the
Israelites that He is in charge. There is no situation no matter how much it
appears to overwhelm God, there is no problem, no
difficulty, no situation that is too great for the Word of God. He is the One who will provide the
solution. His solution is the only permanent solution because ultimately the
Bible teaches that all of our personal problems, all of our problems that
relate to what we classify today as emotional problems, psychological problems,
or behavior problems, are all traced back to the sin nature. We live in a
corrupt body that too often has been controlled habitually by this body of sin,
as Paul puts it in Romans 6. We are to learn how to put to death the deeds of the
flesh.
The principles that we see here and the warfare events that we see in
the Old Testament often are pictures for us of principles related to our
individual spiritual warfare when we get into various New Testament passages. What
we see here in 1 Samuel 5:1–5 is that God is showing
that He is superior to all cultures and all religious systems and all political
systems.
In 1 Samuel 5:1–2 we read, “Then
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.”
The first thing we see here is a reminder of who the Philistines are.
This was an ancient group that is described in ancient texts as the sea
peoples. They are described that way by the Egyptians.
They came from the area of Crete and Caphtor. They
had a combination of Hamitic background, plus some
influence from the Greeks. They initially came to the area of Canaan after
being defeated by the Egyptians. In the period just prior to the time of
Abraham, the Philistines tried to set up colonies along the coast of Egypt on
the Mediterranean and were defeated by the Egyptians. They went further east to
the coastal plain of Canaan. There were a few points of contact between Abraham
and Isaac and Abimelech and the Philistines at that time.
By the time we get into the period of the book of Samuel, we have gone
from the time of Abraham, which is 2000 BC, to the time of Samuel, which is about 1100 BC.
We are 900 years later. By this time the Philistines are well
established in that territory that was known as Canaan. There have been a
number of conflicts with Israel and the Philistines. In fact Shamgar defeated them. He is raised up by God to defeat
them in Judges 3:31. Samson was raised up to be a deliverer, but he failed
because he is never obedient to the Lord. He disobeyed categorically every
aspect of his Nazarite vow. But God used him in spite
of his disobedience, in spite of his carnality, in order to just cause trouble,
to keep things stirred up between the Israelites and the Philistines.
Otherwise, the Israelites in their disobedience to God would have accepted the
religious system of the Philistines. They would have absorbed it and
assimilated.
That has been a trend off and on through the history of the Jewish
people—this tendency. We saw it with the sons of Jacob back in Genesis when
they settled in Shechem. They were intermarrying with the Canaanites, which was
a violation of God’s command. We see it again and again in the period of the
judges. We will see it later when they come back. You would think they had learned their lesson after the
Babylonian captivity, but when they come back from Babylon they start
intermarrying with the people who are settled in the land during the time of
Ezra and Nehemiah.
They had to enforce a divorce decree so that the men would divorce the
Canaanite women. Otherwise, it would lead to a point where the Israelites would
be completely absorbed and assimilated into that pagan culture, and they would
disappear.
It has happened in modern times. Under a very strict Jewish orthodoxy,
the Jews were isolated often because of Christian anti-Semitism, which was
terribly wrong, but it isolated them, which protected them during much of the
early and middle part of the church age. Once they began to move out of the ghettos and out of the
towns with what was known as the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment that began in the
middle part of the 19th century, they began to assimilate again.
They began to think of themselves first as Germans, French, Russians,
Italians, or Brits. The Jews began to be absorbed again. This ultimately gave
rise to an anti-Semitic backlash, which was seen in the Dreyfus trial in
France. That led to Theodor Herzl realizing that there was never going to be a
successful assimilation. The only hope for Israel’s survival was for them to
have a national homeland and go back to their national homeland.
That was the birth of modern Jewish Zionism. You have always had this
kind of problem with assimilation. Samson was stirring up trouble, so that did
not happen.
Another thing that happened with the Philistines is they placed the Ark
of God in the Dagon temple, which is in Ashkelon. But it was the temple of
Dagon down in Gaza that Samson destroyed. So the Philistines are finally
defeated. They are not wiped out, but they are defeated militarily. They are no
longer a significant problem for Israel by the end of David’s life.
1 Samuel 13:19. The
Philistines kept Israel under control by limiting their access to armament.
This is a great verse today in terms of all the talk related to gun control. It
is to realize that the way tyrants control people is to limit their access to
weapons. The Philistines enacted this kind of policy in the ancient world. They
would not let the Israelites have iron. They would not let them have
blacksmiths. They could not make swords or spears.
In 1 Samuel 5:1–2, we see the Philistines are taking the Ark of God to
Ashdod.
1 Samuel 5:1–5. The
Philistines are making a theological statement. They understand what is
happening here religiously. Their god has defeated the God of Israel. Their god
is superior to the God of Israel. This means that Israel is now completely
vanquished because their God has been completely vanquished. This means that
they are set to completely defeat and dominate Israel.
In the ancient world, something that is very different from the modern
world is that all of the governments’ politics were completely entwined with
their religious system. In Egypt the Pharaoh was divine. In the area of the
Fertile Crescent, Assyria and Babylon, those areas, the kings were thought to
be the sons of god. There is this deeply embedded religious rational for
government and for power, not unlike the relationship of legal theory in Islam,
Sharia Law to Islam.
Islam is as much a political system and a legal system as it is a
religious system. Because we live in the West, it has become so secularized
that people no longer understand the connection between religion and these
profoundly deep political and legal ideas. They cannot understand what is
happening with Islam—how the current mass migration of Muslims to the West is
really a new form of invasion. The Muslims understand exactly what they are
doing, and their goal is to establish Sharia Law.
The Muslims are establishing beachheads for this in numerous places in
Europe. There are areas where police and other law enforcement officials will
not ever go. They have basically ceded this over to Islamic control. Even though
this is an ancient idea, it still has a modern manifestation. God is showing by
what He does here that He is the One who is still in control. Their god has not
defeated Him.
The Philistines take the Ark as the symbol of Yahweh’s Presence. They set it up in the temple of Dagon, who is
their chief god. He is a fertility god, as we will see. He is considered in
Canaanite mythology to be the father of Baal.
The name Dagon is not a Philistine name. Remember, the Philistines, if
you go back to Genesis 10–11 and trace the table of nations there, the
descendants of Ham, Shem, and Japheth—the Jews and the Arabs are descendants of
Shem. That is why they are called Semites.
Western and Eastern Europeans are descendants of Japheth. The Africans,
Egyptians, the Philistines, the Asian people are all descendants of Ham.
The Philistines are not a Japhetic Indo-European people. They absorb
some, but originally they are descendants of Caphtor.
They are Hamitic, which means that this word Dagon,
which is a Semitic name, is not a Philistine god, but one that they adopted
once they came into the area of Canaan. That god was already there.
Once the Ark was captured, it is taken south. Ashdod is on the southwest
coast. Today it is a little further away from the coast, but it is still a port
city. In the ancient world it was also a port city. Like most port cities there
is an ethnic mix, a lot of different ideas that go into that mix, a lot of
different religious influences, as well as a lot of immorality associated with
those fertility cults. What we see here is that as they take the Ark into the
temple, they are going to place it in a position to indicate that Yahweh has now become a servant, a
slave, a vassal of Dagon. Dagon has defeated Yahweh.
What happens is as nightfall occurs, God is
perfectly capable of handling the situation. God probably sent a few angels
down there to redecorate the temple. The next morning, early in the morning,
when the Ashdodites came in to see what was going on,
they found that their god Dagon was down on his face in a position of worship,
in a position of doing homage to the God of Israel. The Ashdodites
were just absolutely stunned by this.
What we know about Ashdod is that it was also one of the cities where
there were still remnants of a race called the Anakim.
This was an ethnic race of giants. They are the descendants of the Anakims survived in Ashkelon, Gaza, and in Gath. Why is
that important? There is a giant by the name of Goliath of Gath that comes
along. He is, on one side of the family, a descendant of the Anakim, which is why he has that giant position.
Let us talk a little about Dagon. When we are studying the Bible, one of
the things that is important for us to note is things like repetition—how many
times words are used, how many times words are repeated or phrases are
repeated. When we get into these first five verses, what we discover is that
Dagon is used nine times. The house of Dagon, referring to the temple of Dagon,
is used two times, for a total of eleven references to Dagon.
The Ark is mentioned six times: The phrase “the Ark of the Lord” is used two times. The phrase “the Ark of God” is used four times.
This gives us twelve different references to God or the Ark of God.
The emphasis here is eleven references to Dagon and twelve references to
God or Yahweh. In five verses that is
a lot of references. What that tells us is that this is all about this conflict
between Dagon and Yahweh. Obviously,
that many uses show that Dagon is very, very significant here. What the writer
is bringing out is that this conflict between the Philistines and Israel is not
simply a physical conflict. This is part of a broader spiritual conflict that
is indicated by the angelic conflict, spiritual warfare, the rebellion of an
angel named Lucifer in eternity past against God, described in Isaiah 14.
Lucifer claimed that he wanted to be like God. He led approximately a third of
the angels in rebellion against God.
It is also described in Ezekiel 28:14ff. This angel Lucifer was one of
the highest angels. He is referred to as the anointed angel, the anointed
cherub, who covered God. He served right at the throne of God. He was overcome
with arrogance, a desire to be like God. He led these angels in rebellion
against God. You have this development of this angelic conflict, which is a
backdrop for the creation of the human race and for spiritual warfare.
The things that happen on a physical plain in human history are often
influenced. We do not know quite how. It is not important that we know how, or
God would tell us. He never tells us these things. He just tells us that this
is the way it is. There is a connection between things that happen in the
physical realm and influence in the spiritual realm.
When we talk about these false gods, whether you are talking about the
false god of allah, or whether you are talking about
the false god they call god the father in Mormonism, or whether you are talking
about the false gods of the Greeks or the Romans or the Babylonians or the
Egyptians in the ancient world—these were all represented by statutes, by idols
of wood, or stone, or precious metals. These gods are not simply idols of
stone, wood, and metal. There was something evil behind them. There was a demon
that was associated with them.
We get a warning of that in Psalm 106:35–38. Notice what the psalmist
says, talking about the ancient Israelites and their failures. See, they
assimilated with the Canaanites. They mingled with the nations. They learned
their practices. That is why God said they needed to come out from them and be
separate from them.
The Israelites served their idols. Notice the parallelism in the poetry
here. “They served their idols, which
became a snare to them.” The idols are a
snare in Psalm 106:36.
Psalm 106:37 tells us how they were a snare, “They even
sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons.” The demons are
associated with those idols. They are not just innocuous, meaningless blocks of
stone or wood or metal. It goes on
to say they shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters whom
they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan. Notice Psalm 106:37 says
they sacrificed them to demons, and in Psalm 106:38 they sacrificed them to
idols. The idols, those false religious systems, were the product of Satanic and
demonic influence of the ancient world.
That is not just taught in the Old Testament. In the New Testament in 1
Corinthians 10:20 Paul says, “No, but I
say that the things that the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and
not to God.” The whole context here in 1 Corinthians 10 is dealing with the
issue of meat that has been taken to the temple and sacrificed to idols. What
Paul is saying is that this is not completely innocuous because there are
demons that energize these false religious systems. That is all part of
representing Satanic thought and demonic thought.
In an earlier passage in Deuteronomy 32:15–18, this is Moses talking.
When I quoted the passage from the Psalm that was much later, reflecting back
on this same period. This is Moses just before he dies. He is talking about how
the Israelites, as they came out during the wilderness generation, how they
succumbed at times to the idolatry of the Gentiles around them and what had
happened to them in the past. It says “Jeshurun”—that is
a term for Israel— “grew fat and kicked.”
That is prosperity. “You are grown fat,
thick, and sleek — Then he forsook God who made him, and scorned the Rock of
his salvation.”
Deuteronomy 32:16, “They
(Israel) made Him jealous with strange
gods; with abominations they provoked Him to anger. They sacrificed to demons
who were not God.”
The Israelites did not know that they were sacrificing to demons, but
when they had Aaron build a golden calf, that is a demonically inspired
energized religion that they had learned about in Egypt. When they are
sacrificing to the golden calf they are sacrificing to demons.
That is what lies behind that false religious system. They are
identified as “gods whom they have not
known, new gods who came lately, whom your fathers did not dread.”
We are still involved in spiritual conflict. Paul says in Ephesians
6:11–12, “Put on the whole armor of God,
that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”
I always like to point out here that Paul does not say to attack, to
rebuke, to charge or to stomp on. I saw one deliverance guy on television one
time act like he was stomping all over the devil.
“Standing” is a defensive term. You are designed to stand your ground
and let God go on the offense. It is God the Holy Spirit who is on the offense
for us. We are to stand our ground, putting on the armor and hold fast. We are
to do like William Barret Travis did at the Alamo. We
are to take up a defensive position, but hopefully we will not be overrun like
they were at the Alamo.
Paul goes on to say, “For we do
not wrestle against flesh and blood.” Obviously there was antagonism. Paul
is the one who has been beaten with rods three times and whipped by the Jews
many more times. He has been thrown in prison a number of times. He has certainly been opposed by flesh and blood human beings.
But Paul recognizes that the
ultimate enemies are not the human beings. They are not the democrats. They are
not the liberals. They are not the progressives.
What is behind that, which is the real enemy, are the forces of Satan
that are influencing the human race with these evil and horrible ideas. Paul
says in Ephesians 6:12, “For we do not
wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of
wickedness in the heavenly places.” This tells us a little bit about
spiritual warfare. That is what is going on in Israel in 1 Samuel 5.
We need to learn a little more about Dagon. I want to run through a
couple of different things. He was a western Semitic and Mesopotamian deity.
That means that the cultures in Canaan, up through Syria, and across the
Fertile Crescent, over down through the area of modern Iraq, all through that
area that were later known as Persia and Babylon and Assyria—all of those areas
were deeply steeped in the worship of Dagon. What we are seeing here is that
these territories are really under the control of these demonically inspired
religious systems. God is bringing the Israelites into that territory in order
to establish a beachhead to create this counter culture kingdom in this land
that God has promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
There is not only the physical warfare component that is going on
between the human empires. That is really described in a lot of the visions
that Daniel had in Daniel 2, 7–8. This is represented through these battles
with these religious systems.
The Philistines are fighting against Saul. The Philistines are a problem
all the way to the end of 2 Samuel. Saul is defeated when we get to the end of
1 Samuel. He is defeated at Mt. Gilboa. He is fatally
wounded. He does not want to be captured and tortured by the Philistines. He
tries to get his armor bearer to kill him, and he will not do it. So Saul falls
on his sword. Afterwards, when the Philistines get his body, they take his
armor. They decapitated him and placed his head and his armor,
guess where? They placed it in the temple of Dagon at
Bet She’an, 1 Chronicles 10:9–10. The reason they put
Saul’s armor and his head in the temple of Dagon is to show their power over
Saul, their power over the Israelites and the God of Israel.
We know that the cult of Dagon continued down through the period between
the Old Testament and the New Testament. There is
evidence of that in 1 Macabees 10:83–84, when the Macabean high priest, Jonathan, burned down the temple of
Dagon at Ashdod about 150 years before the time of Christ. The Dagon cult
lasted at least until 50 BC. There may have been some remnants of it even up
into the New Testament period.
An older view of looking at this that gets kind of fun and interesting,
and it ties some things together for you, is that the first three letters D-A-G in
the name Dagon related to fish. The Hebrew word for fish is dag. That was set forth by a couple of
medieval rabbis, Rashi, the acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, and Rabbi David
Kimchi. These were men who lived right around AD
1000. Rashi lived about that time. Kimchi lived a little bit later.
These men basically retooled Judaism to completely remove Messianic
prophecy from the Old Testament. Between those two men they basically got rid
of that. This is one reason they are significant.
In terms of this study, they both put forth a view that Dagon was a fish
god. No evidence has ever been found to indicate that, although Dagon is
probably, on the basis of other evidence, viewed as the god of grain. That
could be possibly a connection with fish, because fish were used for
fertilizer. We still use fish for fertilizer. That would fit because Dagon is
part of the whole fertility cult, which, in an agricultural society, people
were concerned about their crops having a lot of fertility and productivity the
next year. They would engage in sexual acts with the ritual prostitutes to try
to motivate the gods to make their crops productive during the coming year.
What was interesting is if you have ever read this book by Hislop, “The Two Babylons,” it is
a very popular book written around the turn of the 19th century
(1853 and expanded in 1858). We
have a whole history in Protestantism where we are very hostile to Roman
Catholicism. Roman Catholicism has often been viewed by
Protestants as the Mystery Babylon, the false religion of the end times.
One of my favorite posters I saw last week when the Pope was here just said
very simply, very succinctly, “Protestants: Ignoring the Pope Since 1517”.
Sometimes we wonder where they get these interesting costumes. Where do
these things like some of these hats come from? This is a picture here of the
miter. You see it on these cardinals here in the lower right of the slide. You
see it on the Pope up here. It is this hat that has this odd looking shape to
it. In the ancient world, the priest of Dagon wore a hat just like that. Is
that not interesting?
Hislop in his book argued
that this was the shape of a fish. Maybe, or maybe not.
This picture in stone from the Assyrian period, this diagram [in the lower
left], these diagrams, are all in stone. These are ancient artifacts showing
that whatever the origin of this hat was, this was the kind of headgear that
the priest in the mystery religions, the fertility religions of the ancient
world, wore.
As Roman Catholicism developed after the time of Constantine, and it
began to spread throughout the Levant and throughout the area of the
Mediterranean and on into other areas, they would absorb ideas. They would
assimilate to the pagan religions. If they went to some town and they had ten
gods and goddesses, they would suddenly become saints. The saints would be
associated with the same things as those gods and goddesses were associated. If the god was
the god of good luck or the god who would help find things, then the saint
would be a similar name. He would be the saint who would help you find things. Things like that. A lot of the ritual, a lot of the
accoutrements, and a lot of the costumes that are worn by the hierarchy in
Roman Catholicism came right out of ancient paganism. I thought you would be
interested in that. You see this coming from Dagon.
There was a large temple of Dagon in Mari, which is located in the area
around the Euphrates, not far from Babylon. Hammurabi conquered Mari. We
discovered about 20,000 cuneiform tablets from Mari that even though they do
not talk about biblical events, they give us a window, a picture, into the
ancient world between about 2800–1800 BC. What is described in these cuneiform tablets
from Mari fits with the kind of culture the Bible describes.
Dagon was very popular in Mari. There was a huge temple to him that is
dated to the 1700 period, 18th century BC. Dagon is also
mentioned about a century later in the Amarna
Letters, which was a collection of 350 cuneiform tablets from around the time
of the conquest and the Judges period. It included correspondence between
rulers in Canaan and rulers in Egypt and some of the other nations surrounding
Canaan.
A temple of Dagon was discovered in Ugarit, which is located in the
northern part of the country formerly known as Syria. Who knows what he is
going to be known as later, or if the remains there at Ras
Shamra, Ugarit, the tel
where they discovered all this, will survive if ISIS captures it and all
these wonderful artifacts are destroyed?
We see that Dagon was extremely prominent in the ancient world. He also
was in the temple in Gaza, which Samson destroyed after they put his eyes out
in Judges 16:21. Dagon was the god of that temple.
What is interesting in Judges 16:23, is after they cut off Samson’s hair
and they blinded him, they put his eyes out, then they got together and had a
victory dance. And it says, “Now the
lords of the Philistines gathered together to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon
their god, and to rejoice. And they said,” notice this, this is really
tweaking God’s nose. They said, “Our god
has delivered into our hands Samson our enemy!”
That is just like throwing down the gauntlet for God. This is where God
is going to get back at them in Judges 16. What we see in terms of background
is that the Ark represented the military power of Israel. God is not equated to
the Ark, but the Ark is viewed as His throne. He is the God who is enthroned
upon the cherubs. The Ark manifests the Presence of God, though God cannot be
limited by space and time.
In Numbers 10:35 we get the instructions given for holy war. Holy war is
often misunderstood. There is a biblical doctrine of holy war. It was the
instructions that God gave to the Israelites to destroy every man, woman, and
child, and in some cases all the livestock of the Canaanites. God has given
them from the time of Abraham in roughly 2000 BC to the time of the
conquest in 1400 BC, almost 600 years, to turn to Him.
God is a God of longsuffering and a God of grace, but instead of turning
to God, the Israelites had become more and more perverse. The Israelites had
developed these religious systems. They are sacrificing their children alive in
the fiery furnace of Molech and Chemosh
and these other gods and goddesses. They are engaged in all kinds of perverted
sexual rituals to placate their gods. It was one of the most perverse and
destructive cultures in all of human history.
If we think about this perverseness as someone who has cancer, this is a
very virulent form of cancer that needs to be destroyed. It cannot be completely
irradiated or cut out, but as it reaches certain stages, there has to be
radical surgery to prevent immediate death. That is the analogy. God allows
these things to happen. He treats these cultures in grace, but when they reach
a certain level of perversion, like with Sodom and Gomorrah, they have to be
destroyed for the human race to survive.
The instructions are given for holy war, Numbers 10:35–36, “So it was, whenever the ark set out, that
Moses said: ‘Rise up, O Lord!’ ” At this point they are going into battle.
“ ‘Let Your
enemies be scattered, and let those who hate You flee before You.’ And when it
rested, he said, ‘Return, O Lord, to the many thousands of Israel.’ ” There
is a time for war and a time for peace. It did not go on. That was holy war.
The Bible recognizes two types of war: holy war and just war. Just war,
as is indicated, is when a nation is involved in war to protect itself from
attacks from the enemy. This is what has been going on with the Philistines.
They have defeated Israel. God has allowed that to happen. They take the Ark of
God.
Notice, when the writer is writing the story from the perspective of the
Philistines, because he has shifted his vantage point now. Before, the writer
is talking about Israel going into battle at Aphek,
but now they have been defeated. Now he is looking at things from first the
vantage point of the Philistines, and then the vantage point of God. When he is
talking from the vantage point of Philistines, the Ark is always called “the
Ark of God.” But when he talks from the vantage point of truth and Israel, it
is called “the Ark of Yahweh, the Ark
of the Lord.”
Then in1 Samuel 5:1–2, “Then the
Philistines took the ark of God.” That is how they viewed it. This is just
another god. They 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.” It is now a servant of Dagon.
1 Samuel 5:3, “And when the people
of Ashdod arose early in the morning, there was Dagon, fallen on his face to
the earth before the ark of the Lord. So they took Dagon and set him in his
place again.”
You have to prop up your god. In all false religions you have to do
something to prop up your god because he cannot pull through for you. This god
is down on his face worshipping Yahweh.
They have to set him back up on his feet.
Then they get up the next morning, 1 Samuel 5:4a, “And when they arose early the next morning, there was Dagon, fallen on
his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord.” But this time God said
we are going to make sure that you are not going to prop him back up again.
When Dagon was knocked down again the hands were cut off and was decapitated.
It is a very violent picture here. Dagon has had his head cut off, his hands
cut off.
Why cut off the hands? You become disarmed. That is where that term
comes from. You cannot carry a sword or spear. You cannot fight in battle if
your hands are cut off. This was one of the ways that the Canaanites practiced
disarmament when they defeated an enemy. The Israelites practiced this when
they defeated Adoni-Bezek at the beginning of Judges.
They cut off his thumbs and his toes. You cannot hold a spear or hold a sword
if you do not have thumbs. It is hard to run and to maintain your balance if
you do not have your big toe.
That is what happens. God defeats him. He falls on his face to the
ground into the posture of worshipping the Ark of the Lord. 1 Samuel 5:4b, “The head of Dagon and both palms of his
hands were broken off on the threshold; only Dagon’s torso was left of him.”
I do not know how clearly you can see the picture in the slide, but it clearly
shows the head and the hands that have been cut off from Dagon. I thought that
was a great picture.
You have this interesting thing that goes on with the threshold that
gives rise to the superstition to never step on the threshold. Temple
thresholds in the ancient world were considered worthy of respect because these
separated the sacred area from the common area.
Also, there is a scene from Judges 19 where the woman who is the
concubine of the Levite. You have a scene that is reminiscent of Sodom and
Gomorrah, where everybody in town wants to gang rape this Levite’s concubine.
Finally, in a very ungentlemanly performance, the Levite opens the door, throws
her out to the mob, and shuts the door. She is abused all night long. She is at the point of death.
She crawls back to the door and has her hands on the threshold. This is a
depiction that she is pleading for her life. The imagery behind this in the
ancient world is that the threshold is a place where you can plead for your
life and reach a certain level of security.
The next thing we see here, beginning in 1 Samuel 5:5, is a pretty
simple story, “Therefore neither the
priests of Dagon nor any who came into Dagon’s house tread on the threshold of
Dagon in Ashdod to this day.” That is just explaining the origin of this.
They viewed this somewhat superstitiously.
Then it goes on in 1 Samuel 5:6a, “But
the hand of the Lord was heavy on the people of Ashdod.” That means that
God is just knocking the stuffing out of these people. I do not know what the
population was there, but they are starting to experience some rapid deaths.
They are having a plague in the city. Their population is being decimated.
There is nothing they can do about it. The “hand
of the Lord is heavy against the people” is an idiom for the fact that God
is taking them out. 1 Samuel 5:6b, “He
ravaged them”, which indicates they are dying. They are suffering
miserably. “He struck them with tumors,
both Ashdod and its territory.”
The word “tumors” is in the New King James Version. The old King James
Version translated it “hemorrhoids”. We always have a lot of fun with that, but
there is a reason for that. Some other translations translate it as
“hemorrhoids.”
What is interesting is there is an addition to this text that shows up
in the Septuagint and the Vulgate. What is important about that is in the
ancient world when you get a couple of ancient texts that disagree with the Masoretic text, you ought to pay attention to it. It is a
strong likelihood it was part of the original. This would make sense in light
of what is going to happen. The Septuagint and the Vulgate add this following
statement, “And mice multiplied in their land, and the terror of death was
throughout the entire city.” This has caused some people to think that what we
have here is something like the bubonic plague—that these tumors would be large
abscesses or something of that nature. The bubonic plague is called that
because these kinds of cysts or tumors are called buboes.
Here is the Hebrew word ofel, which is translated emerods. I am not sure where that
comes from, or hemorrhoids. It is also a cognate of the Arabic word, aflun, meaning
tumor or a boil of the anus, which is where we get the idea of hemorrhoids.
That is about as graphic as I am going to get, but it was pretty painful. God
is really kicking them in the rear end. He is really taking advantage of them.
This is a lot of fun to imagine all of these Philistines. They are
having problems with these anal tumors. The Philistines have got some kind of
disease that is going on that is killing them. Their population is being
decimated. Finally, the men of Ashdod get together and say, we have got to get
rid of God. He is too much for us.
1 Samuel 5:7–8, “The ark of God of
Israel cannot remain with us. His hand is harsh toward us. Dagon is our god.”
(Let us get rid of Yahweh here.)
Notice, they always call Him the God of Israel, not Yahweh. “Therefore they sent
and gathered to themselves.”
They got everybody together. We are going to have a huge meeting and
decide what we are going to do with this Ark of the God of Israel. We cannot
give it up because if we do that means we admit defeat. If you own the God of
the enemy, you won! He was your servant, but if they give Him up, that is
massive. That is admitting defeat and admitting that Israel really won the
battle. They are going to take him to Gath.
This map shows us the route to Gath. They went to Ashdod first, then the
Ark went to Gath, then up to Ekron,
then it is going to be sent back to Israel. It is interesting, neither Ashkelon
nor Gaza, that is further south, is mentioned in the text. Gaza is probably not
mentioned because they are still dealing with this reconstruction project of
the temple of Dagon. They were all messed up because of the influence of
Samson.
1 Samuel 5:7–8.
What happens? The Ark is taken. The Philistines say they are going to send it
to Gath. They send it to Gath. The people at Gath were not too excited about
it. After they carried it away, the hand of the Lord was against that city.
1 Samuel 5:9–11. “The hand of the Lord was against that city,”
according to 1 Samuel 5:9, and “He struck
the men of that city both small and great, and tumors broke out on them.”
If it is something like the bubonic plague, then it is going from one town to
another. The Philistine population is being decimated.
The men of Gath say, “we cannot keep this thing here.” They are going to
send it to Ekron. They send it to Ekron.
The people of Ekron say, “why
are you sending the Ark here? This god is going to kill us!” They again have a
meeting of all the lords of the Philistines, and they decide that they are
going to send it back, “let it go back to
its own place, so that it does not kill” our people anymore. The text says,
“there was deadly destruction throughout
all the city; the hand of God was very heavy there.” Their population is
being decimated.
Notice the last verse, 1 Samuel 5:12, “And the men who did not die were stricken with the tumors, and the cry
of the city went up to heaven.”
What do you think about that? It goes up to Heaven. That is not where
Dagon is. Yahweh is in Heaven. The
God of Israel is in Heaven. Dagon is not in Heaven. He does not live in Heaven.
That is what is interesting. It is that God has gotten their attention. They
want deliverance. It is going to come, but it has come at a cost to them. We
will look at the further travels of the Ark when we get into 1 Samuel 6.
To tie it together here in 1 Samuel 6:1, “Now the ark of the Lord was in the country of the Philistines
seven months.” Think about that. This is the 10th month, so from
last March until now you would be going through this kind of devastating plague
where you would be losing maybe 30–40 percent of your population due to these
horrible tumors, boils, hemorrhoids, or whatever they were. God just has a
great sense of humor in the way He defends Himself. He does not need our help.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this time to study Your Word. May we be reminded
that You are more powerful then any religious system,
any political party, or any false religion. That we do not
need to fear any of these things. That as we watch world events, we can
relax knowing that You are in control. You are
allowing things to develop the way they are through Your permissive will in
order to bring about Your endgame plan for human history. Our responsibility is
to be faithful in being a witness and in proclaiming the truth of the gospel.
We pray that You will give us the strength and the
courage to do so, in Christ’s Name. Amen.”