CALL TO CONFESSION

James 1:2-4

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

Guiding Father, even as you called Abraham out of his country into unknown circumstances, so you often call us to walk through frightening, lonely, or unstable times. In response to trials of various kinds, we have certainly not counted them as joy. Forgive us for our lack of faith. Like sheep, we are prone to wander at these times to our own way. In moments of suffering, we have looked for wisdom from this world, comforting ourselves with man-made schemes to deal with our suffering or escaping into addictive patterns of numbing behavior. Our vision for what you are doing in our lives in the midst of suffering is blindingly clouded by fear and anger, and we have consistently settled for our own limited, self-centered vision as the final word of truth.

Yet in your immeasurable grace, the Good Shepherd has laid down his life for his selfish, wandering sheep. Holy Jesus, thank you for the life of doubtless faith that you lived on our behalf. In the midst of every kind of trial and temptation, you responded with utmost trust and faith in your Father's will, even as your Father turned his face away as you were crucified for our sin of unbelief, you remained faithful, to your final breath, declaring your atoning work as finished. What vast, free, abounding grace!

Spirit of God, bind our wandering hearts to you as we walk through the paths that you have ordained for us. When we suffer, be our vision by teaching us to count this cost as joy and strengthening our belief that you always have redemptive purposes in the suffering of your children, as we see so clearly in the cross of Christ. Grow our faith in the promise that you will not leave us nor forsake us, because we are yours. In Jesus' name, amen.

“Take a few moments to personally confess your sins to the Lord.”

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

“Hear these words of comfort and assurance.” 

John 10:7-11

So Jesus again said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. 8 All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. 11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 

• At the conclusion of chapter of 4, a dying woman in Shiloh named her newborn son, Ichabod, “where is the glory?” 
• The ark of the covenant had been captured by the Philistines. Eli the priest was dead. His corrupt sons lay among the thousands of Israelite soldiers killed on the battlefield. 
• Israel tried to use the ark like a magic charm in an attempt to manipulate God to overcome their enemies. 
• Instead, the centerpiece of Israel’s worship fell into enemy hands. 
• The glory had departed. Had God abandoned his people? 

• For the Philistines, their victory would have been a sure sign that their god had triumphed over Israel’s God. 
• What they’re about to discover is that the living God doesn’t need a human army to defend his honor. 
• He will not share his glory with another and He alone will vindicate his great name. 
• If you’ve ever wondered whether God is actually in control when everything around you is falling apart, these two chapters are for you. 
• As we walk through this extraordinary text, we’re not merely reciting the history of an ancient battle. 
• We are seeing a revelation of the character of our God: who is supreme over all false gods, who severely judges all rebellion, who is sovereign over every circumstance, and whose sanctity must be revered in our worship. 
• He is not a God who can be managed by us, who needs us to defend him, or who is to be treated lightly. 
• He is holy! 
• And these truths have everything to do with how you and I approach him and how we live our lives each and every day before him. 

1 Samuel 5:1-5

• While the news of the ark’s capture had brought death and despair for the Israelites in Shiloh, the Philistines were marching back to their home with a trophy of war. 
• They head to Ashod, one of five Philistines cities deep in the heart of their territory.
• They did with the ark what was customary in that time for a pagan nation, they would bring the spoils of war into the temple of their god.
• In this case, their god was Dagon, a prominent Philistine deity who was worshiped as the god of fertility and harvest.
• “They set it up beside Dagon…,” placing the captured ark in Dagon’s temple was a profoundly theological expression of who had won. 
• The Philistines had triumphed over Israel, their god was superior. 
• So what happened next must have really rocked them. 

• The following morning, the priests unlocked the temple doors, only to find their god Dagon lying face down before the ark of the Lord.
• Notice the posture: face downward; the posture of submission in the ancient world.
• Without the involvement of any human hand, Dagon had assumed the posture of a worshiper before the God of Israel.
• So they pick up their god and put him back in his place.
• Don't miss the absurdity of what has happened. 
• They had to lift their god up to place him back on his perch. 
• What kind of God is this who needs his own worshipers to pick him up off the floor?
• Isaiah, centuries later, must have thought about this particular scene as he mocked this exact kind of absurdity; gods fashioned by human hands that are so helpless their worshipers have to carry them.

• But it isn't over. The next morning, Dagon is discovered to have fallen again.
• Only this time, they find him with his head severed and both hands cut off. 
• Those broken pieces were lying on the threshold of the temple. 
• In the ancient world, the cutting off of the head signified the complete defeat of a ruler, and the cutting off of hands, symbolized the removal of power and the ability to act.
• God had not merely toppled Dagon from his perch, he dismembered him, and destroyed every claim Dagon had to authority, power, or divinity.
• The event was so traumatic that the priests created a new superstitious tradition.
• From that time forward, anyone who entered the temple and hopped over the threshold, remembered this night when Dagon's head and hands were lopped off. 
• The tragic thing is that they remembered the power of Israel's God, but they did not repent.

THE FOLLY OF IDOLATRY

• The story reminds us that our idols cannot stand before the presence of the living God. 
• What is an idol? 
• An idol is anything you make an ultimate thing in your heart.
• An idol as anything that occupies the place in your heart that belongs only to God. 
• An idol is anything you look to for security, identity, power, comfort, meaning, or satisfaction apart from the living God.
• Anyone of us can take a good thing and make it a “god” thing in our heart. 
• John Calvin famously wrote that man’s heart “is a perpetual factory of idols.” 
• Why? Because we are born worshipers, and if our worship isn't directed towards God, we will turn it inward and outward and make other things ultimate in our lives. 
• We will look to other things to be our functional saviors.

• Maybe your idol is seeking the approval of your peers, a desperate need to be liked, to fit in or to be accepted. When the opinion of others controls you, that’s your Dagon! 
• Think about your relationship with your smartphone. In particular with social media. 
• Pay attention to what happens in your heart when you pick it up. You may be worshipping a digital Dagon!

• But here is the good news, whatever your Dagon is, God loves you too much to let your idols stand.
• He will topple them. He will crush them. Sometimes he will do it tenderly, other times in dramatic fashion. 
• Not because God is cruel, but because he is jealous for you and he knows that every idol will ultimately destroy you.

1 Samuel 5:6-12 

• Dagon’s destruction was only the beginning. 
• What followed was a devastating campaign of divine judgment moving systematically from one city in the Philistine territory to the next. 
• There is a powerful phrase the narrator repeats that becomes the controlling image of this story—“the hand of the Lord.” 
• In the OT, the “hand of the Lord” is a term for God’s direct, personal, sovereign intervention both in salvation and in judgment. 
• The writer of Hebrews warns that, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” 
• The phrase is also a stark contrast between the handless image of Dagon thrown to the dirt, and the one whose name the ark bears who is NOT handless!

• Now this is difficult to see in the text, but there is a powerful wordplay in the Hebrew.
• Remember the Hebrew word for glory, ‘kabod.’ It means “weighty” or “heavy.” 
• Well, the hand of the Lord was “kabod;” the hand of the Lord was heavy. 
• Where is the glory? In Ashdod, where the hand of the Lord was ‘kabod.’

• Note the escalating pattern of judgment.
• In Ashdod, people are afflicted with tumors, probably something like boils, and they are terrified. It’s like a plague breaking out. 
• They determined they needed to send the ark away. 
• But not back to Israel. They have no intention of relinquishing the ark. 

• They summoned the lords of the Philistines and asked, “What shall we do with the ark of the God of Israel?”
• They need to get it out of Ashdod so they decide to send it to Gath.
• In Gath, the affliction intensifies. A great panic ensues. The people know they are under attack from the Lord of hosts. 
• So off to Ekron the ark is sent.
• By the time it reaches Ekron, the people are in absolute terror. There was a deathly panic throughout the whole city. 
• The people demand the ark be sent away so that they wouldn’t be killed by Israel’s God. 
• V12 states that the men who survived were covered with tumors, and then a remarkable phrase, “the cry of the city went up to heaven.”
• The story has unmistakable echoes of the Exodus account. 

• What is it that is absent from their response?
• At no point do they repent. They recognized the power of God, they were terrified of the power of God, but they never turned to him in genuine faith.
• Sadly, this is a picture of how unbelieving hearts respond to divine conviction.
• They feel the weight of God's hand, but instead of falling on their knees in repentance, they look for a way to end the discomfort without actually surrendering to God.
• Have you ever felt the heavy hand of God on your life?
• What did you do with that conviction? Did you repent? Did you run to Christ or did you just pass the conviction along into your next distraction?
• The good news of the gospel is that the severity and kindness of God is meant to lead us to repentance.
• The Holy Spirit convicts our heart to lead us to Christ.

1 Samuel 6:1-12

• The Philistine people endure seven months of unrelenting suffering.
• So they figure it is time to call in the experts: the priests and the diviners.
• The Philistines recognized that the God of Israel cannot simply be dismissed. “Tell us with what we shall send it to its place.” 
• The priests recognized that the God of Israel must be appeased. The ark can’t be sent back empty but it must be returned with a guilt offering. 
• There is in their response an acknowledgement that they had incurred debt against the God of Israel that must be repaid and that when they do that, they will be healed and know that it was the hand of the Lord that had been against them.
• What is the guilt offering they should return to him? 
• Five golden models of their tumors and five golden mice. The mice indicate that the afflictions were more extensive than what was recorded.
• Why would they do this? To "give glory to the God of Israel, perhaps he will lighten his hand from you and your gods and your lands.” 
• V6 contains an Exodus analogy. They had the knowledge of the gospel of the Exodus and they saw their situation as being like that of the Egyptians. 
• They warn that they should not harden their hearts as the Egyptians because that brought the heavy hand of God upon them.

• Vv7-9 the priests designed a test rigged to fail.
• They chose nursing cows who had never pulled a cart, separated them from their calves, and pointed them in the direction of Israel. 
• These nursing cows would fight with every natural maternal instinct to turn back to their calves. 
• If the cows went straight to Beth-shemesh, the closest town in Israelite territory, then it was the hand of the God of Israel that did this to them. 
• If not, if they turn back to their calves, which was the natural expectation, they could conclude the plagues were coincidence. 

• The cows went straight toward Beth-Shemesh. They didn’t turn to the right or the left. 
• Don’t miss this beautiful detail. The cows went straight…lowing as they went. 
• They were crying for their calves the whole time. Every fiber in their being wanted to turn back to their calves. 
• But they could not! The invisible hand of God was guiding them against their natural instincts.

• The Philistine lords watched the whole thing. They had devised the test and God passed it on his terms. 
• God used their own pagan reasoning, their own experiment, their own criteria of proof, and  turned it all into a testimony of his sovereign power.

• This is one of the most comforting truths in all of scripture for those who belong to Christ.
• Our God is sovereign over all circumstances. He governs the instincts of animals. He directs the decisions of pagan priests. He takes the very tests that unbeliever's designed to disprove him and turns them into demonstrations of his glory.
• Charles Spurgeon preached that “When you go through a trial, the sovereignty of God is the pillow upon which you lay your head.”
• Are you in a situation right now that seems impossible? 
• Remember these cows. They lowed the whole way. They felt the pain, they experienced the pull in the wrong direction, but they arrived exactly where God intended them to be.
• Obedience to God’s sovereign will doesn’t always remove the grief. Faithfulness and sorrow can coexist.
• But you're heavenly Father, who can direct untrained grieving cows along a straight highway is more than able to guide your life to the destination he has appointed.
• Will you trust him even when the path makes no sense and every natural instinct in you wants to turn back?

1 Samuel 6:13-21

• The ark arrived in Beth-Shemesh, and initially it was greeted with great joy.
• You can imagine the seven months for the people of Israel, mourning the loss of Israel's great symbol of God's presence.
• The cart comes to a rest in the field of a man named Joshua. This was a Levitical city, so the Levites, the only ones authorized to handle the ark, are called. 
• They took down the ark from the cart, they took the wood of the cart and made a fire and sacrificed the cows as a burnt offering to the Lord.
• It was a scene of celebration, worship and great relief! The ark has returned! God has not abandoned his people! 

• Now the story takes a tragic turn in v19. 
• Some of the men, out of irreverent curiosity, decide to look into the ark of God and incur God’s judgment. 
• God had explicitly commanded that they must not go in to look at the holy things or they would die. (Num. 4:20)
• The ark was not a curiosity to be examined. The ark was the dwelling place of God’s manifest glory. 
• The people were devastated. And their response was a question that echoes throughout Scriptures, “Who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God?”
• Noticed the tragic irony. The Philistine's suffered for treating the ark as a trophy to parade before their idol. Now the Israelites suffer for treating the ark as a curiosity to satisfy their fascination.
• The lesson is the same from both sides. God is holy, and he will be treated as holy, whether by pagans or by his own covenant people.

• The final point here is important for us, for those of us to call ourselves the people of God.
• It is entirely possible to be genuinely glad about the things of God, to rejoice in his work, and yet to approach him with a casual familiarity that dishonors his holiness.
• We live in a culture that prizes informality and has trained us to evaluate everything by what we get out of it. And many, without even realizing it, have brought the same consumer mindset into their worship. 
• Think about how people talk about the worship service. “I didn’t get much out of the service today? The music didn’t really do anything for me today.” “That sermon didn’t speak to me.” 
• What is the posture behind those statements? It is the posture of an evaluator, critic, a consumer sitting in judgment, deciding whether God’s worship was worth the investment of their time. 

• When you walked in today, what posture was your heart in? Did you come waiting to see if the service will deliver? Or did you come in humbled that you have been granted access to the throne room of the God of the universe, ready to offer him the worship he is due regardless of what you feel?
• And how do you approach God in your private devotional life? Is there a sense of holy wonder when you open his Word or has it become routine?
• It is a glorious thing that we can call God, our Father. But never forget that our Father is the One before whom angels cover their faces and cry, “Holy, Holy Holy!”

CONCLUSION

• In these two chapters we've seen a God who is supreme over all idols, severe against our rebellion, sovereign over all circumstances, and whose sanctity must be guarded in worship.
• And if that is all that we know of God, we would be left trembling, like the men of Beth-Shemesh asking, “who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God?”
• The answer to that question is—no one. No one can stand before this holy God on the basis of their own righteousness, merit, or their own religious performance.
• But this is why the ark of the covenant points forward to something greater and someone greater! 
• Inside the ark where the tablets of the law, the righteous standard of God that no sinner could keep. 
• And the top of the ark was the Mercy seat. The sacred lid where the high priest sprinkled blood once a year on the Day of Atonement. 
• Inside was the law that condemned us. On top, the mercy that covered us. 
• The ark was the place where God's holiness and God's mercy met.

• That meeting place of holiness and mercy has now been fulfilled in a person. 
• Jesus is the true ark of the covenant. In him, the fullness of God’s holy presence dwells bodily. In him, the law has been perfectly fulfilled. In him, the mercy seat has been sprinkled, not with the blood of bulls and goats, but with his own precious blood, offered once for all. 
• On the cross, the full severity of God’s judgment against sin, was fully poured out, not on us, but on his own Son as our substitute.
• On the cross, God’s sovereignty was displayed in the most breathtaking act of divine providence; the greatest act of human evil became the greatest act of divine salvation. 
• And through the cross, we are given access to approach the sacred presence of God, not with terror, but with confidence, because the blood of Jesus has opened a new and living way.

• If you're harboring an idol in your heart—lay it down today.
• If you've been running from the conviction of God's Spirit—stop running.
• If you're in a season of confusion and pain—take heart.
• If you've grown casual in your walk with God—ask the Holy Spirit to restore holy reverence in you.

• The men of Beth-Shemesh asked, “Who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God?
• In Christ, the answer is—you are!
• Not because of anything in you, not because of anything you've done, but because of everything in him.
• Let us come, then, with humble hearts, with reverent awe, and with bold confidence, to the God who fights for his own glory, and who, by sheer grace, has made that glory our everlasting joy.

APPLICATION AND REFLECTION

In light of today's message....

• What did I learn about the gospel?
• How can I apply what I learned about the gospel to my life?
• With whom can I share the gospel this week?