1 SAMUEL 5
Read 1 Samuel 5:1-12
We saw last time that the Israelites treated the Ark of the Covenant a bit like a superstitious good luck symbol by taking it into battle and trusting that it would give them victory. God allowed the Philistines victory in battle; they captured the Ark and carried it back triumphantly to one of their major cities, Ashdod. There they put the Ark into the temple of their chief God, Dagon, to show that their god was superior.
Funny thing, when they came to look next day, the Philistines found their god flat on its face apparently worshipping the Ark. ‘That’s not right at all’ they thought and stood their god up again. But the next day, the same thing happened. There was Dagon, face down worshipping the symbol of the Israelite God, and this time Dagon’s head and hands were broken off. This emphasised the impotence of this false god Dagon. He had no hands so he could not do anything. He had no head, so could not think or say anything. God had demonstrated that he did not need an army to subdue his enemies, he could do it perfectly well himself. There is a children’s song that says of God, ‘we are his hands, we are his feet’, and that is true to a certain extent. He chooses us to work with him and going right back to Genesis we see that God created the Garden of Eden for man to work in and tend to (Genesis 2:15). He could have made and tended a garden himself but such is his love for us that he wants us to help and that goes today. He calls upon us today to serve him in all sorts of ways, not because he can’t do things himself, but because he loves us and he wants us to work alongside him.
Back to Ashdod, and we see and the Lord continued to work amongst the Philistines bringing cancerous growths upon the populace. The citizens of Ashdod recognised this as a consequence of being an enemy of God, summoned a council and resolved to get rid of this troublesome God. Their solution was to send it to another Philistine city, Gath. This may have been good news for the people of Ashdod, but it threw the citizens of Gath into panic because they knew what was coming – bad news for them. They got the cancer and immediately shuffled the Ark on to another Philistine city, Ekron. The folk of Ekron said, ‘don’t send it here; send it back where it came from’.
Of course it was not the Ark causing all this trouble, the Ark was simply a box. A very ornate box and one with very strong symbolic overtones, but nonetheless, a box. It was the Lord who was bringing judgement upon the Israelites. We read in v6 that ‘the Lord’s hand was heavy upon the people of Ashdod’, in contrast to the hand of Dagon which was useless having been broken off. Judgement is a reality; and those who oppose the one true God, (who is not just the God of Israel but the creator of all the earth and everything in it) leave themselves open to being judged by him – now every bit as much as in days of old.