1 Samuel 5:1-5 KJV And the Philistines took the ark of God, and brought it from Ebenezer unto Ashdod. [2] When the Philistines took the ark of God, they brought it into the house of Dagon, and set it by Dagon. [3] And when they of Ashdod arose early on the morrow, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the LORD. And they took Dagon, and set him in his place again. [4] And when they arose early on the morrow morning, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before the ark of the LORD; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him. [5] Therefore neither the priests of Dagon, nor any that come into Dagon's house, tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod unto this day.
I. INTRODUCTION—THE BACKGROUND OF THE STORY
-This story ushers us into one of Israel’s dark times. There are days of darkness and days of light in all of our lives and how we react to the light and darkness will have much of an impact on the destiny of our soul. I am sometimes sad to say that the days of Israel very closely mirror our own relationship with God.
A. The Attack of the Philistines
-At the beginning of this time, history is quite silent concerning the Philistines. The last we have read of them are during the days of Samson who had troubled and terrorized them greatly before his swan song of killing somewhere around 3000 of them. He had jerked down the pillars in their feasting house and had destroyed them amidst their jeering at him.
-The passage of time has been somewhere around 20 years. But this passage of time had only brewed in their heart a desire for revenge and the festering wound had been infected with the disease of revenge.
-They had waited patiently with a sense of wrath brewing for the perfect time to get the Israelites back. The situation ripened for them at Ebenezer. They had managed to capture the Ark of the Covenant from their enemy.
-The cost of the battle had been about 30,000 men of Israel and that night in four thousand homes of the people there had been great weeping for the loss of lives and the loss of the Ark. The sad part is that Israel needed some firm discipline and God was willing to use the Philistines to accomplish his purpose.
-The sons of Eli had desecrated the house of the Lord with their immoral actions and God had grown weary of it. Eli had refused to deal with the terrible mischief of these men and it had caused a very low ebb of spiritual life to come to Israel.
-The loss of the Ark was seemingly a morbid loss for them to contend with. Yet it was God’s providence in action at the time. How often it seems that God is working in reverse in our behalf with in fact He is working in a forward direction for us! From our view it looks backward but in God’s wisdom it is a forward move.
-Taking the Ark into battle had seemed like a brilliant idea. One of the elders had suggested that they do so and the next thing you know, others have caught up with the mob mentality urging them to take it into battle.
B. Don’t Get War and Worship Mixed Up
-It is important that we don’t get mixed up what God needs to use in battle and what he needs to use in worship. The Ark was an article of worship not of war!
-There should have been some objections to using the Ark in this manner.
• First, the elders had no control of the Ark. It was the responsibility of the priests.
• Secondly, the Ark should have never been used in the manner as a superstitious charm to save them.
-But when the Philistines had attacked, the Ark had been carried right into battle and it had promptly been lost. Somewhere in the vicinity of the Ark being captured the vile sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas are slain along with thirty-thousand of Israel’s footmen.
-How fleeting and short-lived were the sinful pleasures of Hophni and Phinehas. With weapons of rebellion in their hands and guilty stains on their souls, they had been sent into eternity to face the presence of the One they thought would bring them the victory.
-Six calamities had taken place in the terrible day:
• 1—Israel had fled before their enemies.
• 2—A great slaughter had taken place.
• 3—Hophni and Phinehas had been slain.
• 4—The Ark of God had been taken.
• 5—Eli had died after falling backward from his bench.
• 6—A child had been born named Ichabod—the Glory has departed!
-But the Philistines were not finished with their mayhem on that bloody day. The Bible tells us in other places (Psalm 78:60-64; Jeremiah 7:12; 26:9) that their revenge had stirred in them a rage that would only be satisfied with blood and destruction.
• They marched on to Shiloh.
• They massacred the priests.
• They wrecked the city.
• They left it as a monument of desolation.
-I have no doubt that they exulted in their victory on that day as they remembered the loss that Samson had brought to them. They had defeated the Israelites and they had captured Israel’s God.
II. DAGON AND THE ARK OF THE CONVENANT
-However the story begins to turn and showcase the power of God. The Ark is taken to the city of Ashdod so it can be placed in the great temple of their god, Dagon.
-You can almost believe that it is placed in a subordinate place so that the huge towering, glowering idol appears to absorb it. These heathen, idolatrous Philistines serve Dagon, the fish-god, who most likely had some demonic power associated with it.
-This idol was a material representation of a demon but in the case of the Ark of the Covenant there was only a throne, the Mercy Seat. Never had there been an attempt to fashion a god out of their hands by the Israelites, it was just clear to them that the Shekinah power of God dwelt between the cherubim.
-When the fish-god, Dagon, was confronted by this Ark, it was as though the demon spirit and the divine Spirit of God had a face-off. The result was that the inferior god fell face down on the ground.
-The next morning the Philistines came in and propped their god back up. They left Dagon to contend with Jehovah another night. The next morning after that when they came back in to see about Dagon, he was flat on the ground again. Except this time his head and hands had been broken off the Bible says that only the stump of Dagon was left to him.
-What a powerful lesson this was to the Philistines. I am sure it was one that was similar to the one that was learned by the Egyptians.
-But there is an even greater lesson in that if Israel had to contend with the Philistines and Dagon, we will have to contend with these spiritual enemies as well! The forces behind them are not confined to ancient history.
III. MODERN DAY DAGONS
-We transition that story to our times in a way that we must meditate on it. We have modern day Dagons that we have to contend with also. Idols are not something that belongs to the ancient people of the past.
-The command in Exodus 20:3 is just as relevant now as it ever was.
Exodus 20:3 KJV Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
-That same principle holds true for us in the 21st Century as it did for the Israelites 3500 years ago. American idols are just as dangerous for us as Canaanite, Philistine, and Babylonian idols were for Israel.
-Paul would come along and write it out like this to the church in Colosse.
Colossians 2:8 NLT Don’t let anyone lead you astray with empty philosophy and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the evil powers of this world, and not from Christ.
-We have to be vigilant in our times so that cultural compromise doesn’t cause us to give in to the loose ways of this world. Never in my life have I been more aware of the evil of evil and the sinfulness of sin. Its corruption can destroy anything it comes in contact with!
-In 2006, Bob Hostetler wrote a book entitled American Idols: The Worship of the American Dream. I am using the chapter titles to provoke your thoughts as to what the modern Dagons look like.
A. The Ebay Attitude
-The Ebay Attitude is the insatiable desire to have more. More things, more stuff, more money, and more notoriety. It has created an epidemic of desire in such a way that we are never satisfied because of cravings for more.
-We believe that having more will make us happier. We believe the having more will make us more important. We believe that having more will make us more secure.
-At its deepest motivation is the dark sin of covetousness. The remedy for it is to get the Ark into the dark place of your heart.
Colossians 3:2 KJV Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.
B. The Trap of Individualism
-The idol of individualism comes from the emphasis on individuality, self-expression, self-esteem, and self-fulfillment. It’s all about me.
Douglas Wilson—In the conservative church today, the sin that has us by the throat is individualism. And the reason it has us by the throat is that we see it as a virtue—the rugged individualism that made America great.
• I don’t need anyone to help me.
• I can do it myself.
• It’s mine, mine, and mine!
-Not only will it wreck churches, it will wreck marriages, families, and friendships. This attitude can be particularly challenging when it attempts to get into the confines of the church. Suddenly worship turns from the Creator to the creature and worship turns us into spiritual pygmies.
-The need of the hour is to revisit John 13 and get a fresh vision of the Lord washing his disciples feet.
-The fact of the matter is that you really need people. You need the interaction of the saints. You need the connection of relationships. You need the connection that creates accountability.
C. The Idol of Success
-The idol of success is another huge trap and it keeps far too many running the treadmill of exhaustion.
-James and John fell into that trap in Mark 10:35-41 when both of these good brothers wanted a position in the future kingdom. One to sit on the left and one to sit on the right was the motivation of what they were asking.
-Leave your success in the hands of God. Let Him open the doors and you walk through them when He determines for you to go through them. Don’t rage at the doors that are closed just faithfully serve where you have been called to serve.
-Most of the time our test comes not from being asked to do the big things for the Kingdom but the small, seemingly insignificant things.
D. The Eros Ethos
-The next idol hasn’t just slipped in the door, it has kicked in the door. It is the Eros problem, our society has overdosed on immoral sexual behavior. Kids in my generation had to seek out things that had sexual overtones and it was usually pretty difficult to find it.
-This generation doesn’t have to look for it, instead they are having to run from it.
The Kaiser Foundation conducts research regarding sex on television. In a recent study of 1,114 randomly selected programs, the study discovered sexual content on 68% of all shows, up sharply from 56% just two years earlier. Not only that, but the closer you look the worse it gets. For instance, 84% of all sitcoms and 89% of TV movies involved sex or sexually oriented language. During prime time hours, 75% of all shows featured sexual content of some kind. And the participants are getting younger: in the two years between the studies, the portion of the characters involved in sexual relationships that were teens tripled.
-Tack on the information superhighway of the internet and we are choking in a sea of idolatrous immorality and sex. Pornography is literally wilting the life out of our men; it is killing our prayer lives, diverting us from the Word, and choking out our worship.
-Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoker in their book Every Man’s Battle write:
You’re still teaching Sunday School, still singing in the choir, still supporting you family. . . You’re getting ahead, living in a nice home with nice cars and nice clothes and a nice future. People look to me as an example, you say. I’m OK.
Yet privately your conscience dims until you can’t quite tell what’s right and wrong anymore, watching things like Forrest Gump without even noticing the sexuality. . . And nagging you is the worship. The prayer times. The distance, always the distance from God.
-We must get the Ark in the chambers of your heart! Dagon will fall down if you ever get the Ark loaded up!
E. The Other Idols
-I don’t have enough time to get to all of the others but they are just as soul-crushing.
• The Passion for Fashion—Closets loaded with clothes, shoes, and the attachments.
• The La-Z-Boy Life—Comfort, Complacency, and Apathy. Such an attitude makes it difficult to know that we need churches started in out-lying communities and towns. It is difficult to get you interested in reaching the lost when you get so comfortable in a spiritual sense.
• The Love of Money—When we lose the desire to give our tithes and offerings to God. Squandering what we do make and we can’t make all the ends seem to meet. We are just like the bunch that Haggai described, we put our money in sacks that have holes in them.
• The Martha Syndrome—Busy. . . I’m so busy. . . I too busy to do this or that. The fact of the matter is that you probably ought to take an inventory of where your time is being spent and you will probably discover that you aren’t nearly as busy as you think. . . just a lot more selfish than you realize.
IV. CONCLUSION—LET GOD DO HIS WORK!
-Remember when I told you that there were some other places in the Bible that gave a bit more detail as to what happened on that day the Ark was captured. Let me read it to you:
Psalms 78:60-64 KJV So that he forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent which he placed among men; [61] And delivered his strength into captivity, and his glory into the enemy's hand. [62] He gave his people over also unto the sword; and was wroth with his inheritance. [63] The fire consumed their young men; and their maidens were not given to marriage. [64] Their priests fell by the sword; and their widows made no lamentation.
-But it does not end with that, there is more:
Psalms 78:65-66 KJV Then the Lord awaked as one out of sleep, and like a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine. [66] And he smote his enemies in the hinder parts: he put them to a perpetual reproach.
-There needs to be an element of faith to rise up in every one of our hearts that despite the fact that there may be backslidings, slippery places, spiritual coldness and deadness, and a host of other spiritual difficulties . . . if you can just remember that when the presence of God comes into contact with the enemies of God, the idols will fall flat on their faces! God will break their neck and their hands!
-Bring the Ark of God back into your life. Set it down in your heart and the Dagons that have held their sway over you for so long will fall down one after another. Let the Lord walk in! That is the one need of your soul, is for the Lord to take full possession of your life!
-That is why we have to have a move of God every time we come into the house of the Lord! It does things to the idols that attempt to rise up and choke the spiritual life out of you.
-Note times of confrontations that Jesus had with demons. . . sickness. . . death. . .
Isaiah 2:18 KJV And the idols he shall utterly abolish.
-Then let God do His work!
Isaiah 27:9 KJV By this therefore shall the iniquity of Jacob be purged; and this is all the fruit to take away his sin; when he maketh all the stones of the altar as chalkstones that are beaten in sunder, the groves and images shall not stand up.
Ezekiel 36:25 KJV Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.
Ezekiel 37:23 KJV Neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions: but I will save them out of all their dwellingplaces, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be their God.
Zechariah 13:2 KJV And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered: and also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.
Philip Harrelson
November 25, 2011
