GOD SPEAKS WITH A HEAVY HAND
1 Samuel 5;   Romans 1:16-32

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, there are a couple of awful verses in the last book of the Bible, Revelation chapter nine, in which we read: “One third of mankind was killed by these plagues, by the fire and the smoke and the brimstone. And the rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues did not repent of their works, so as not to worship demons and the idols of gold and silver and brass and stone and wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk; …and they did not repent of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their immorality, nor of their thefts.” 

It is an old, old story. God speaks but man refuses to listen. And sometimes God shouts to get our attention and we still refuse to listen. And sometimes God shouts again – he speaks with the heavy hand of judgment, yet still we refuse to listen. "Therefore the hand of the Lord was heavy on the Ashdodites and he ravaged them and smote them with haemorrhoids, both Ashdod and its territories. And when the men of Ashdod saw that it was so, they said, 'The ark of the God of Israel must not remain with us, for his hand is severe on us and on Dagon, our god.' And the men who did not die were smitten with haemorrhoids and the cry of the city went up to heaven," 1 Samuel chapter five, verses six, seven and eleven. 

The cry of the city may have gone up to heaven but it wasn’t a cry of repentance. There is a slight difference between the reaction of the Philistines in this story and the reaction of the two-thirds of mankind left after the plagues in Revelation chapter nine. The Philistines at least acknowledge that their problems had something to do with the ark of the Covenant and the God of Israel. They realised that it was God who ravaged them and smote them with haemorrhoids. For the two-thirds who were left alive in Revelation chapter nine, the problem was just plagues. They didn’t see them as coming from God; they didn’t see them as a judgment from God. 

God made man and he loves the creatures of his hand. He does not leave us alone even though we have gone astray and rebelled against him from the beginning. When we first sinned in the Garden of Eden, God came looking for Adam and Eve and spoke to them and gave them the promise of salvation. But he also impressed on them the seriousness of what they had done by speaking to them in judgment. He banished them from the garden. 

The events recorded in these early chapters of 1 Samuel happen in the times of the Judges when "there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in his own eyes." Even so, God had not left them alone. He still spoke to them. As you will recall we read in chapter two, verse twenty-seven, there was still a man of God to come and warn Eli of a judgement that was coming on his house. And then with the birth and the development of the ministry of Samuel, God began to speak to them in a new and fuller way. In the first verse of chapter three we read, “Word from the Lord was rare in Israel in those days. Visions were infrequent.” But by the time we get to the end of chapter three, which records the story of the call of Samuel, we read, "Samuel grew and the Lord was with him and let none of his words fail and all Israel from Dan even to Beersheba," from the North Cape to the Bluff we would say, "knew that Samuel was confirmed as a prophet of the Lord. And the Lord appeared again at Shiloh because the Lord revealed himself to Samuel.” 
But Eli and Israel would not listen. So Eli is judged. His two sons are killed in one day. Israel is judged. They were defeated and the ark, the symbol of God’s covenant, the covenant that God made with them to be a God to them and show them mercy and live among them and fellowship with them, is captured by the Philistines. 

And so, you see, God is speaking to them not only through the word of his prophet; he is also speaking to them through providence. He speaks through the way he rules the world. We’re inclined to look at these things, and secular historians will look at things, and say, “Well, that’s just the ebb and flow of history. That’s just the rise and fall of nations that you see in the history of the world." Every dog has his day kind of idea. We see things as diseases and we study them and we give them a clinical diagnosis. But our text is telling us that all of these things, whatever natural forces might be working in them, or political or military or social trends might be working in them, ultimately God is ruling through them. 

In this way God spoke to the Philistines, but they don’t listen. So God judges them and in particular he judges them for subjecting him, the one true God, to their false god, Dagon. God answers this. Let us have a look at that this morning and see how God does this and see how they react to it.  First of all, congregation, 

1.	GOD SHOWS HIMSELF TO BE SUPREME
The Philistines had won this great victory over Israel. They had captured the centrepiece of Israel’s worship, the ark of the covenant, the symbol of God’s love and forgiveness, the symbol that he dwelt among them. They took the ark and put it in their own temple in Ashdod and, we read, they set him by Dagon, their chief god. They had many gods. You can read about them in various parts of Scripture. But they put the ark of the covenant by their chief god Dagon. 

That might have meant that they intended that Yahweh, the Lord should do obeisance to Dagon. Or it might just have meant that they added him to their product range. That was their attitude. They had a different god to cover every kind of situation. At any rate, next morning, they find Dagon fallen down before the ark of Yahweh. “H'mm, that’s strange,” they said, “as a matter of fact that’s terrible. But, oh well, accidents do happen.” So they pick him up and put him on the shelf again. I’m sure the writer of Samuel had a good laugh when he wrote that! But next morning Dagon is on his face before Yahweh again, only this time with his head and hands broken off! 

Surely God is saying something, isn’t he? At the very least, he is saying to them what he spent a lot of time teaching the nation of Israel throughout the Old Testament; “I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is no one like me,” Isaiah forty-six. "There is no God alongside me." 

We live in a day, at least in this respect, not unlike Samuel’s, in which God has been personalized, he’s been privatised, he’s been cut down to size, your size, my size, whichever size fits. But hey, that doesn’t matter, for there are many gods and it doesn’t matter if he’s small. We are exhorted to think like this and we are exhorted even to strive to find our own god, either in this religion or that way of meditation or channelling or whatever. Maybe you will even find god within yourself. 

But the Ten Commandments were not just given for Christians. They weren’t given just for Israel. They were given for all mankind and God is now enforcing the first – “You shall have no other gods beside me.” He will not sit on a shelf with other gods. “For,” as he says twice at least, in Isaiah forty-two and forty-eight, “I will not share my glory with another.” 

But related to this, there is something else we are being taught here, although in a more subtle way, that is also not unlike our own day. All the nations of the time had specialized their gods. A general practitioner god was no longer in vogue, so you had a god of the hills, you had a god of the plains, you had a god of fertility and good crops and you had a god of war and on you go. Dagon was the giver of all earthly good. 

We do it in not quite the same way, but we also live in a very specialized world. But, of course, we try to kid ourselves that we are not religious; rather, we are secular. So we don’t call our highest authorities gods any more. We call them experts. So who is the authority on morals in our society? Well, parliament. Or the university ethics committee. Who is the authority, almost, on whether someone is guilty or not in the law court? The psychiatrist. Thus we limit the Bible and banish it from certain areas of life. As a matter of fact as a nation, as a people, we make sure the Bible stays very firmly in the Church and doesn’t go out of it. 

And the great lie by which this is promoted, even among Christians, is to say that the Bible is not a textbook on science. It's not a textbook on physics. It’s not a textbook on psychology. It’s not a textbook on sociology. It’s not a textbook on ethics. Well of course the Bible is not a textbook on science. We all know that – on any kind of science. For that matter the Bible is not even a textbook on Theology, the science of God. It’s the source-book of Theology. Just the same as the world is not a textbook on any kind of science either. It is the source-book of our study of everything in the natural world, and we do our study and then we write our textbook. That is a nonsense, that statement! 

It is the same God who wrote the Bible that made the world and controls history. And the Bible, the Word of that God, gives us the basic principles by which we study anything, by which we are to think at all. "For from God and through God and to God," eventually, "are all things,” Paul tells us in the book of Romans. And if we don’t have that foundational fact lodged in our minds, we are going to do poor and wrongheaded study of whatever we study. 

And God teaches us this in this story. He doesn’t just make Dagon bow before him in the temple. In verse six we read, “The hand of the Lord was heavy on the Ashdodites and he ravaged them and smote them with haemorrhoids, both Ashdod and its territories." God struck their very bodily health. We don’t know what it was, maybe it was a form of bubonic plague; that’s a possibility, but it was some terrible disease. He also struck them in the field, in agriculture, for in the next chapter, verse five we read that the Philistines talk about mice that ravaged the land. 

You see, God is saying, ”I am the true God and the only God and I rule all of life.” Well the people of Ashdod got the message and they realized that Yahweh had something against them at any rate. So they sent the ark to the city of Gath but the same thing happened there. "Well then, we better send it on to Ekron," they said. But the city fathers of Ekron had got the picture by now and they met it at the gates. This God was defeating the gods of every town in Philistia. He was laying claim to all of life. 

And that is the point. “Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one.” That’s the old Jewish confession, Deuteronomy chapter six. There simply is no other. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the only God that ever was, is or shall be.” And he doesn’t claim just Sunday and he doesn’t rule just in the Church or in the Church grounds, or even only in our private devotions. He is the Lord of all of life. He is the Lord of the whole world. And what God so very clearly says in the Bible he backs up with his rule of life and history. 

So firstly congregation, God is supreme. He’s the only God. He rules all of life. But secondly, let us see, 

2.	MAN IS VERY OBSTINATE 
Although God says this so very clearly in the Bible, although he backs it up so graphically with his rule of life in the world and in history, we are very slow in getting the point.  We are obstinate. We love unbelief despite all the drawbacks, despite all the problems it brings on us. And this is not the only time that this is spoken about in the Bible. We read exactly the same sort of thing in Romans chapter one. 

Paul tells us there that mankind in general knows that God is and that he has eternal power and wisdom. We know it, simply because we all live in the world God has made and that world cries out ‘God made me’. For anything that exists must have been brought into existence by someone. Furthermore, the sheer wonder of everything that exists points to the God of the Bible. 

And because we all know this great God made us, we should and we know we should, bow down and worship and serve him. But we don’t because we want to go our own way. We don’t want to be beholden to anybody. That is the essence of sin. That is the root of all mankind’s problems. We want to be able to sing with Frank Sinatra, even on the patent wreck we make of our lives, “I did it my way.” And to try and justify this, Paul says, “We suppress the truth of God that we all know in unrighteousness, in the unrighteousness of rebellion and self-rule.” 

This story this morning gives us a classic example of this. For right up to the end of the chapter we read of no repentance on the part of the Philistines and the chapter following gives no hint that the Philistines repented either. Israel’s God had defeated them in the temple, the centre of their religion. He had defeated them in the health of their bodies. He had defeated them in the fields. Mice were out there in their thousands, hundreds of thousands, eating the crops. Why wouldn’t they then stop and evaluate the situation and conclude that Israel’s God might have been trying to tell them that he was supreme, he was the only God, he was the God over and above all pretenders, even though he had allowed them to defeat his people yesterday? 

For this isn’t the first time the Philistines had been brought face to face with this. Nor is it, as a matter of fact, the first time they had been in great fear of Israel’s God. Two weeks ago I preached on first Samuel chapter four, but I left out one bit. In First Samuel chapter four, you remember, Israel went out and fought with the Philistines and they were defeated. But not so completely on that occasion that they could not still come back to camp and do a debriefing; at which they decided that the reason they were defeated was because they had left God at home. So they went back and got the ark of the Covenant and brought it into the camp and there was a great shout of joy and victory. When the Philistines heard the noise of the shout, verse six of chapter four, "they said, 'What does the noise of this great shout in the camp of the Hebrews mean?' Then they understood that the ark of the Lord had come into the camp. And the Philistines were afraid, for they said, 'God has come into the camp.' And they said, 'Woe to us, for nothing like this has happened before. Woe to us, who shall deliver us from the hand of these mighty gods? These are the gods who smote the Egyptians with all kinds of plagues in the wilderness.'" 

They even knew the story of God’s marvellous deliverance of Israel from Egypt and they feared Israel’s God greatly. But they would rather worship a false god and still do things their way than worship the true God even if it did mean being subject to the true God’s people. They "knew the truth but they suppressed it in unrighteousness." And they had suppressed this truth in unrighteousness for three hundred and eighty years! That is how long ago the Exodus was. That’s pretty stubborn obstinacy, isn’t it?  Well thirdly, 

3.	WHAT SHOULD OBSTINATE MAN DO IN THE FACE OF THIS ONE ONLY GOD? 
For in general, mankind is still doing the same thing – suppressing the truth that he knows in unrighteousness. I want to give just one example. It’s not a nice example but it is a very very clear example and it is one you hear talked about every day. The whole sexual revolution that got into full swing in the sixties has been a terrible failure. It has not liberated us. It has not brought us greater happiness. The Family Planning Organization continues to tell us that the solution is greater education. For over thirty-five years I have heard that and we’ve had nothing but more education and more explicit education. Yet, all we do is dig ourselves further into the moral and social pit. 

The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases continues to grow, including HIV/AIDS. And that is still a homosexual disease as much as they try to deny it. The life expectancy of homosexuals is twenty to thirty years lower than the average. Yet what is the propaganda we are fed? Anybody can catch it. True enough in principle, but pretty rare in this country and even then, usually through promiscuity. And, we are constantly told, it can be prevented with safe sex.  Completely untrue and the authorities know it. 

Congregation, God judges deliberate and persistent sin. Paul said in Romans one, “They receive in their own persons the due penalty of their error.” So why, in spite of this onslaught of disease that is quite clearly a judgement from God, is this free and perverted sex agenda persisted in? We "suppress the truth in unrighteousness" because "we love darkness rather than light." And if we acknowledge the truth we would have to repent and change our ways. We would have to acknowledge God and bow before him and repent and worship him. But like the Philistines three thousand years ago, we obstinately want to go our own way despite the hurt and the ruin that we bring on ourselves. 
We have a number of visitors here this morning. I don’t know you all and I’m making no assumptions, but maybe you are not a Christian. Are you in the position of these Philistines? There are people in the world and New Zealand today who will acknowledge that there is a God and they will acknowledge the historical facts of Christianity but they will not bow before the Lord Jesus Christ, because to do so requires admitting our own inadequacy and sin. It requires admitting our inability to save ourselves and make ourselves righteous enough for a holy God. 

I would implore you friend, do not be so foolishly stubborn! Why should you cling to a fictional independence and self-rule only to lose your soul in hell for eternity? For God is a holy God. Why should you die, especially when Jesus endured that suffering on the cross, and much more in his soul than in his body, to bear that punishment for sinners who repent, to save them from that? Why continue on in your folly? There is only judgment in the end. 

Most of us here this morning claim to be believers. How should we look at all this? Does this speak to us at all? I have no doubt that whenever this book was written, probably some forty years later, maybe in the reign of David, when people then read of the hassles the Philistines had with the ark, especially that Dagon their god fell before it breaking off his head and hands, they must have laughed loud and heartily. And that would have been right and proper because that is what God does. Psalm two: “He holds them in derision.” 

Yet the laughter needs to be a bit sorrowful, because it’s not so funny that thousands of Philistines are dying from plague. And it’s not so funny that millions die around the world from sexually transmitted diseases, or anything else for that matter. And the Israelites needed to remember how the ark got captured by the Philistines. For that was as a result of Israel’s sin because they thought they could use the furniture of their religion as a kind of magic charm; take it into battle and God would give them the victory. 

The ark was a symbol of God’s presence with them. It was the ark of the covenant. And in that sense it’s a little bit like circumcision. Which brings us back to this morning. Because baptism in the New Testament stands in the place of circumcision. Baptism is God’s sign to us that he is our God, that he will be a God to us. So we’ve baptised little Miriam this morning. Baptism is a sign that God has extended his covenant to Miriam and in that baptism and in that covenant God has said to Miriam, “I claim you as my child. I promise you eternal salvation. Believe in me, receive me, love me, live for me.” 

That’s a wonderful blessing to be born into and it’s a comfort to parents to know that their children have been born to that right. But congregation, it’s a promise, not a prophecy; it’s not a fail-safe guarantee that will more or less turn out automatically. The promise becomes reality only as we receive it by faith in God and in the Lord Jesus Christ. So we need to ask, and we can ask this nationally: is the situation we are in as Christians, in danger of losing our religious freedom, as Israel lost the centrepiece of it’s worship that day and thus went on to lose a good deal of its independence – is the situation we are in as Christians in New Zealand today because we haven’t taken our religion seriously? Because perhaps we have had the outward form of the Church and Church life and thought that God would automatically be with us? Is it because we have even relied upon the covenant and church membership in a very easy-going way as if by baptism and church attendance we had everything sewn up and our lives were right? 

That’s magic! That’s superstition! That’s not faith. That’s not Christianity. Congregation, God is saying to us today that he is supreme. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and father of the Lord Jesus Christ is the only God and he is the true God. He says that plainly in his Word. He shows it by still keeping his Word even as today he is judging sin just as he said in Romans one that he would. How do we respond to this? Will we be obstinate, either in complete unbelief like the foolish Philistines? or like Israel in far too easily resting on God’s covenant promises but without really living them in our daily lives? 

The Lord offers us a full and free salvation in Jesus Christ. Let us hear him when he speaks to us. Let us heed him when he speaks to us. Let us believe him when he speaks to us, truly, fully, and let us show our true faith by living it heartily and sincerely in all our lives and every aspect of our lives.			       Amen.

John Rogers, Reformed Church of the North Shore, 20th June, 2004