Joel Gregory: Is Your God Wobbly? (1 Samuel 5:1-5)

0:38 Bless the Lord, O my soul and all that's within me. Bless his holy name. How good it is to be in God's house on this August Sunday. Thank you to Dr. Ralph Douglas West Sr. who's invited me to stand here for him for a few days as he girds up for all that is ahead in the exciting Sundays just before this church. I should also note today, while he's down at the other campus preaching, this is his 39th preaching anniversary. So lift it up for Dr. Ware, 39 years of preaching the gospel. Your dear founder and pastor and my beloved friend. It's good to be here today and invite you to consider me the subject that I'll put to you as a question. Is your God wobbly?

1:40 Open the Word of God to 1 Samuel. 1 Samuel chapter 5, the story of God's Hebrew people, his Old Testament church. This story is in itself one of the funniest stories in the Bible, unless you're a Philistine.

2:10 1 Samuel chapter 5, please hear the word of God. Then the Philistines took the Ark of God and brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. When the Philistines took the Ark of God, they put it into the house of Dagon and set it by Dagon. And when the people of Ashdod arose early in the morning, there was Dagon fallen on its face to the earth before the ark of the Lord. So they took Dagon and set it in its place again. And when they arose early the next morning, there was Dagon. fallen on its face to the ground before the ark of the Lord.

3:17 The head of Dagon and both of the hands of it were broken off and on the threshold and Dagon's torso was left of it. Therefore neither the priest of Dagon nor any who come into Dagon's house tread on the threshold of Dagon and Ashdod to this day. What a strange thing. They had to prop up the God who was supposed to prop them up. Would you be seated? It was in April of 2002 that Saddam Hussein ordered a 39-foot statue of himself to be erected in the central square of Baghdad, celebrating his 65th birthday.

4:15 What an irony that one year later, April 9, 2003, the Allies put a chain around the neck of that statue and with an M88 armored vehicle pulled the statue of Saddam Hussein down as the Iraqis cheered. When it fell over, its head fell off. And they dragged it through the streets of Baghdad as the Iraqis hid it with their shoes. An ultimate insult in Iraq. You probably remember that. It was on television all over the world. Their leader, fallen over, his torso on the ground. I can tell you something more recent than that in the last two weeks.

5:10 Vladimir Putin has tried to invade the Ukraine and reclaim it for Russia. The nationalists in the Ukraine have pulled down 90 statues of Nikolai Lenin, the founder of communism. In fact, you can look on YouTube and they've put together a music video of pulling down his statue in city after city. Now don't look right now, listen to the sermon. But they've put it to contemporary music. Linen falling, head falling off, arms falling off. It's happened the last two weeks. There's something about a statue falling over that arrests us. It catches us. It pulls us in. Statues look so permanent and so stable.

6:05 It's strange when just a little tug can pull them and they fall over flat. That leads us to this story in 1 Samuel chapter 5. Dagon was the ugly, idle god of the Philistines. Dagon was the definition of ugly. He had the head of a man with a long beard but the body of a fish. Kind of a mermaid in reverse. Dagon, God of the Philistines, when they captured the Ark of the Living God and put it like a trophy at his feet, he fell over in his own temple. Let me give you a little word about the Ark. 3,000-year-old box, we would say today, it was made by Moses out of acacia wood covered with gold. It's named 200 times in the Bible. The ark was the visible presence of the invisible God in the middle of his people.

7:08 The Philistines were the enemies of the people of God. They were kind of like the neighbor next door who has a rottweiler that runs up and down your fence. And there's a hole in the fence. And you're always watching for the dog to get into your yard. Ironically, the Philistines lived in a place that's in the news every day now. the Gaza Strip. That was the location of the Philistines. They were a mysterious people. They had some individual warriors like Goliath, and then they had storm troopers and terrorists that were always going through the fence at the Hebrews, and that sets up this situation. Our text has both a prequel and a sequel in order to understand this text. One of the many times the people of Israel go out to fight the Philistines. They had iron. They owned iron. They owned the iron trade, and that made them formidable enemies.

8:03 So they go out to fight them, but they forget to take the ark. They leave God over here, and 3,000 of the Hebrews are killed on the battle. Well, they say, we tried it without the ark. Let's try it with the ark. God, come here. God in the box, and they're defeated again, even with the ark there. What a mystery. Indeed, it's a disaster. the biggest disaster in the Old Testament up to this time because the Philistines capture the ark and take it to the house of Dagon. And it's a trophy that Dagon's people can beat the living God's people. But then the funny thing happens. When they come to church at the Dagon temple the next day, Dagon has fallen over in front of the ark. They prop him back up, and they come back the next day, and not only has he fallen over, he's come to pieces.

9:04 You say, what a strange thing, Joel, to be talking about. No, it's just as contemporary as your life today. You need to understand that if you have to fix up your God rather than him fixing you up, you need to look for another God. Now, if you have to hold the one up who's supposed to hold you up, you may not be worshiping the living God. I'm going to hand you a few things from this, and I'll sit down. First of all, the prequel. Sometimes even the people of God seem to suffer a mysterious defeat. Here was this ark, 200 mentions. It was a box, 54 inches by 30 inches by 30 inches. It was the visible presence of the invisible God.

9:58 Sometimes we Baptist folks have a little bit of difficulty with holy objects or religious symbols. We think about our Catholic friends or Episcopal friends or Orthodox friends, and we don't quite know what to do with these things that stood for God. Well, just understand this. The ark represented God, but God was bigger than the ark. just like this church represents God, but God is bigger than this church. I'm standing here as a representative of God as a human being, but he's way bigger than the preacher. When you come to the communion table, that bread and wine represents him, but he's way bigger than that bread and wine. And that's what the ark was. If you permit me to put it this way, the ark was like a magnifying glass when you catch the rays of the sun. If you hold up a magnifying glass, you can catch the sun rays and you can set a piece of paper on fire. That ark was one place on earth where God said, you're going to catch all my light and I'm going to focus it on this box.

11:00 Because you see the God who's everywhere is also the God who's willing to be somewhere. That's the mystery of God. If you don't believe that, you can't believe in Jesus. The father was everywhere. But he said, I'm going to be somewhere. And that's in the person of my son. The ark got more famous in 1981. If you're a certain age, you remember it. When Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford. Some of you all remember that? Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Nazis were going to get the ark. Harrison Ford had to keep the Nazis from getting the ark. It brought the ark back to public attention. In fact, in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa, the Christian church claims to have the ark. The Ethiopian Christians say they have it, that the Queen of Sheba brought it there 3,000 years ago. The only problem is they won't let anybody see it.

11:57 This was a disaster out of hand. Not only did God's people lose, the ark was captured. carried off by the godless Philistine put like a trophy in the temple of their god Dagon. You understand what that meant. That meant Jehovah God was going to be the servant of Dagon. Dagon's ugly statue here, the ark down here. Not only that, the keeper of the ark, Eli, the godly man of the shrine at Shalom, when he heard the ark was captured, just fell over dead. His godly sons also fell over dead. It's a mess. Ark gone, national spiritual leader gone. It was as if the entire Old Testament was put into reverse. What God had done when he called Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when he delivered Israel in the Exodus, all of it now canceled the Ark of God at the feet of Dagon.

12:58 Well, let me try to give you an equivalent, a rough equivalent. Putin is on the march. Putin, the Russian leader, is trying to take the Ukraine. Putin, if he doesn't slow down, could possibly start World War III. What if he did that? What if he won? What if he came to D.C., took over the Congress, the White House, and what if he said, I want some trophies to take back to Red Square and put them at the Kremlin? So he took the statue of MLK, the Bible of Abraham Lincoln, from the Library of Congress, Declaration of Independence, of the Constitution, put them in red square and said, look what we've done. That's exactly how the Hebrews felt when they lost the ark and it was in Dagon's temple. You say, Joel, this is 2014. Why are you talking to us about a 3,000 year old 54 inch box? Well, if you'll look inside that box, it's got a couple of lessons for you. First of all, God will not let himself be used. You see, the Israelites said, we'll go to battle. There's not a word of prayer, not a word of prophecy, not a word of sanctification, not a word of fasting, not a word of preparation.

14:18 They said, we know how to beat Philistines. And they went out and the Philistines killed 3,000 of them. So then they presumed on God. They said, go fetch the ark. Let me tell you something, church. God will not be anybody's rabbit foot. He will not be anybody's lucky charm. He's God, maker of heaven and earth. How many times we go out to battle life without him and then life starts to go south and we say, hey, I think I better go get God. How many people live like practical atheists? That is, they run their family without God. They run their business without God. They go to school without God. They travel without God. And then all of a sudden, the doctor says, we've got to look a little further into this.

15:11 Go get God! Or the business goes broke, the market goes down, oh God, I'm going to lose everything. You understand what I'm saying? You know, you go to school without God, study without God, and all of a sudden you've got the biggest test. It's, oh God! this reminds us that God will not be presumed on. Let me tell you something. He will not be a rabbit's foot. He wants a relationship with you. Let me say that again. A relationship with you. Even Jesus would not presume on God. Jump off the temple. No, I'm not going to test God. Let me tell you something. When it comes down to living, some of us are practical atheists, and then we become theoretical theists.

16:08 If you want God, you need a relationship with God. Let me tell you something. When you're in the ambulance on the way to the emergency room and they don't know what is going to happen, you're going to wish that you had a relationship with God. He's not going to be a God in the box that you call for over here just because you need him. Second thing I want you to understand, please hear this, as a person of God, I've lived it. You will have some unexplainable, temporary defeats. but you recognize as a person of faith that ultimately God will win. Now let me say that again.

17:03 If you're going to walk by faith, some people in the church culture today think every day is a total victory. No, no, no, no. You need to read the Bible. Ask Job, the best man alive. No, no. you will suffer some temporary defeats. Faith means you walk every day knowing that God will ultimately win. Here we're to Hebrew. This week, this last Wednesday, at the Faculty Dining Hall in Baylor University, I had lunch with our distinguished guest, Reverend Dr. Samuel Cargbo. Samuel Cargo is pastor of the First Baptist Church of Freetown, Sierra Leone in West Africa. He can testify that sometimes you have temporary defeats.

18:04 He lived the plot of the movie Blood Diamond. Anybody see that movie? He lived it. He watched his brother assassinated in the street, another believer. Pastor Carbo, his wife, five children had to literally run to the hills to keep from being assassinated themselves. Defeat, defeat. He watched the Bible school that he'd helped build in Freetown decimated by the rebels. Though every book in the library destroyed, the furniture bashed, defeated. But he recognized even though there's temporary defeat, God going, he's back here talking to us. They're refounding the school. We're sending him books for the library. Students are going to come back and study. They put the church back together.

18:54 But now on top of all of that, he is pastoring at the very center of the Ebola pandemic. And yet even in that, even in that, he confesses, we know how to contain it. We will contain it. Even though he has lived with some defeats, he knows that ultimately God's going to get the victory. Somebody here needs to hear that in your life. It was December 15, 1956, the first time anybody heard these famous words that had become part of American popular culture. It was outside of Shreveport, December 15, 1956, and announcers said, Elvis is no longer in the building. That phrase has entered into America.

19:46 In fact, they've even made a movie called Elvis. The reason they had to say that after every one of his concerts is because people wouldn't leave. They wanted another encore. And they just kept waiting. And they had to tell people he's gone. He's not in the building. He's not coming back. Get out of here.

20:07 You can never say of the living God that he's no longer in the building. He's the God who always has an encore. Now I want to come to our text. All of that's the prequel. Here's the text itself. One defeat does not mean that God's not going to have an encore. Somebody needs to hear that in God's house today. There's a phenomenon known as premature obituaries. The newspapers keep the lives of hundreds of famous people up to date, so when those people go, they'll have an obituary ready. But what happens every year is that some of them are printed prematurely. Marcus Garvey, Mark Twain, Joe DiMaggio, Alfred Nobel, and hundreds of others have read their own obituary.

21:08 got up in the morning and there it is because it was printed by mistake Marcus Garvey the great humanitarian and leader from Jamaica was in Chicago when he read his own obituary accidentally put in the paper in his case it was a tragedy because reading it affected him so much that it killed him literally when he read it Mark Twain read his Joan Imagio was very much a liar Alfred Nobel was a great inventor and salesman of dynamite, destruction. When he read his obituary in the paper, it called him a merchant of death. And he said, I don't want to be known as that. So he founded the Nobel Prize. Premature obituaries. The ark of God has been captured. It's been put in the temple of Dagon.

22:05 An un-God. That morning when the Philistines got up, went to their front porch and got the Philistine daily telegraph, there was a headline, Jehovah dead, buried in the temple of Dago. That was a premature obituary. The reason I wanted to preach this story is what happened. It really is one of the funniest stories in the Bible, unless you're a Philistine. Here was the Ark of the Cup built by hand by Moses, the national treasure, a trophy in the temple of their enemy's God. That meant Dagon had defeated Jehovah. And it meant that Dagon was going to suck all of the power out of Jehovah and he would become more powerful like some kind of science fiction movie. That's what the Philistines, they had a worship service.

23:02 In fact, it's interesting. It sounds a little bit like the New Testament. Early in the morning. Verse 3. I can just see them lined up. The Dagon priests, the Dagon deacons, the Dagon elders, the Dagon worshipers. They're on their way. Blessed assurance. Dagon is mine. To Dagon be the glory. Great things he has done. And they get inside the church. And Dagon has fallen over. in front of the ark of the living God. One of the funniest things in the Bible. Well, they pop him up. Say, well, there must have been an earthquake, maybe a very local earthquake. There must be some pranksters. You know how people are breaking into churches these days. And they pick their God up and put him back up. I'm sure somebody said, I'm going down to Lowe's.

23:56 I'm going to get some clamps. Somebody else said, I'm going to Home Depot to get some super glue. and somebody else went over to ADT and said let's get some motion detectors and let's make sure nobody's messing with Dagon. So day number two, did you read it? Early in the morning. They come back for another worship service. Holy, holy, holy, Dagon almighty. But this time he's not only fallen off his throne. This time he's been the object of a ritual execution. They have cut his head off. They've cut his hands off. The message is, this God can't think. And this God can't hold you. God. You understand God has flipped the script.

24:59 All of a sudden the God that was real is unreal. And the God that was unreal is real. The God that was humiliated is exalted. and the God who was exalted is humiliating. And here's the funny part, the temple of Dagon has become the temple of Jehovah God.

25:23 Listen, he's a God who always has an encore. In fact, when you look at what this says, Dagon fell down on the threshold. God chased him out of his own house. Now you may say, Joel, wait a minute. what's the word for me? You're talking about a 3,000 year old box and a God that looked like a man and a fish. I've got kids to raise, bills to pay. Let me tell you what this says to you. It says something to everybody in this house with a beating heart. And that is our God is so great that sometimes he can let himself look like he's defeated because it'll get him greater glory. Now, whoa, whoa, whoa, you didn't hear that. If you don't get anything else out of this, if you want to tweet one tweet, hear the tweet.

26:26 Our God is so great that he can let himself look defeated in order to get greater glory. You see, our God is a real operator. He's operating on multiple levels. he had to teach his people a lesson. Don't presume on me. I'm not God in the box over here. But he had to teach the Philistines a lesson that he was the living God. And he let himself look defeated in order to gain the greater victory. Don't you understand that's how God likes to operate. You say, how does he operate that way? Well, I'm standing. Let me give you example. I'm standing a few years ago. It's St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Russia, up on the Gulf of Finland. Fourth largest church in the world. When the Communist Revolution took over Russia, they blasphemed it. They tore down the cross, took out the dove of the Holy Spirit, and turned it into a museum for atheism for decades.

27:36 It was a center of atheism, anti-God propaganda. And yet, when communism fell, one of the first things that happened, when that Dagon fell, they put the cross back in, the spirit back in, reconsecrated it, and now it's a church. You understand God got more glory in what looked like a defeat than he would if they'd never blasphemed him. Listen, somebody here this morning. You love God. You come to church. You give. You try to walk the walk and not just talk the talk, but it looked like things are going downhill. Maybe you've lost your job. Because of that, you lost your money. Because of that, you lost your house. Because of that, you may have lost your health.

28:29 maybe about to lose your family it looks as if you're defeated I want you to understand our God is a God who can take what looks like defeat in your life and can get himself glory out of what looks like defeat that ought to make somebody here happy today that he can take the worst thing that happens to you and turn it around and get more glory out of it. You say, did you read that in a book somewhere? No, I've lived that. One or five years ago when I was as high as I could be in the religious world, it looked as if I was totally, completely defeated and God got more glory out of my life by that than he would be if I'd gone from strength to strength. And you say, I don't know if things work that way. Look at Jesus.

29:27 raising dead, sending demons back to hell, stilling storms, healing sick. And then he lets himself be a victim, captured, humiliated, put away in Dagon's temple of death. But see, God was up to something. God is enough. Let me tell you something. But hear this. If Jesus had lived to be 75 years old and died in a bed in Galilee. We might say, wasn't that a wonderful teacher? But because he let himself be captured, let himself go to a cross, let himself go in the temple of death, we don't call him teacher, we call him Savior, Lord.

30:17 Our God is a great God. And he lets himself sometimes. Look like he's defeated. But here's where I want to get. The second thing I want to talk about from this box, 3,000-year-old box, is to ask you this question. Do you have to prop your God up or does your God prop you up?

30:44 If you're worshiping something that has to be stabilized instead of stabilizing you, You say, now wait a minute, Joe. Do you think you're in front of a bunch of people bowing down to idols? No, no, no. I doubt anybody in here, unless you belong to another world religion, is bowing down to an idol. But don't confuse what idol means. That ugly Dagon, that's kindergarten idols. Our idols today are that to which we give our ultimate commitment. Now come close to me.

31:25 What are you absolutely devoted to? What if you say, if I lose everything else, if it kills me, I'll have this. That's your ultimate devotion. Oh, it can be many things. I couldn't even nominate all that. some of us worship the idol mammon another name for money money is the idol and it's interesting what that does to people I don't say this judgmentally I say it with a great sense of empathy you know people say I got to have more of it incidentally I know how much money you'll need every one of you I know exactly what you're going to need you heard it here 20% more than you'll ever have okay

32:19 but people work seven days a week never stop to worship God so they wear themselves out so they have to have more vacations because they work so much and then they come back got to work harder to pay for that vacation get the next one and what it is is propping up a God or let's say not that you don't care about money but you sure like to feel good so your God is pleasure whether it's sensual pleasure or the pleasure that comes from the abuse of some substance all of us ought to know that that God has to be propped up again and again and again if you say I'd give anything just to feel good you know you remember several weeks ago y'all all laughed I quoted that great theologian Mick Jagger I can't get no one in a faction. Every time you make pleasure of your God, you're going to spend your life propping that God back up. It can be a house. Nothing wrong having a house. Love my house.

33:27 Like to work. Like to pillow around the house. But I want to tell you what, some people can turn a house into a God. Divine service is performed every Sunday morning in their yard instead of at God's house. No. But let me say this. I'm a minister. Even ministry can be turned into a God, my pro, my visibility, my presence, anything short of the living God is a God you have to prop up. It's a leaning Lord. It's an unstable savior. Be sure that your God's the living God because he's a God who props you up. You don't have to prop him up. He's the God who stabilizes is you. You don't have to stabilize him. Now here's the sequel, and I'm going to sit down very quickly. A prequel, the story, the sequel. These people didn't learn anything. Have you known anybody that doesn't make a difference what life does to them? Huh? They don't seem ever to learn anything. Dagon's fallen over. He's fallen over again. His head's off his hand. And you know what they do? This is just crazy. Because in verse 5, he fell on the threshold.

34:46 Here's their takeaway. Dagon fell on the threshold. He's so holy, we're never going to stand on the threshold again. We'll jump over it. You talk about people who are clueless. That's their takeaway. It says until this day, they won't step on the threshold. An adventure in missing the point. You know the safest thing you can ask God? I seek to ask him this every day when I get up and spend time with him. God, help me to hear what you are really saying. Here they saw an act of God not once but twice. And all they took away from it was, ooh, Dagon's so holy. We're not going to step on his threshold. Instead of repenting and turning to the living God, they went, and you know what?

35:40 When you do that, God can get more serious. I don't have time to preach this sequel, but if you read the rest of the chapter, when they wouldn't hear God, they got a plague. Some scholars say it was a bubonic plague, born by rats. Other scholars say that it was dysentery that gave them other difficulties. If you want to be humiliated, they were humiliated. So what did they do? Instead of repenting, they said, send that box down to Gath. Ashdod was New York City. Gath was Chicago. They said, send it on to Chicago. When it got to Chicago, the Chicagans didn't believe it either. Same thing. They said, send it down to Ekron. That was Kansas City. And when the Ekronites said, don't bring that thing here. In fact, they were ready to call out the bomb squad. We don't want anything to do with that. Now hear me, hear me, hear me, hear me.

36:39 This is not popular preaching. It's tight, but it's right. God, God, God, he will whisper to you. He will woo you. He will try to shape your circumstances. He'll take things from you and give things to you to get you to come to him. But if none of that works, his hand can get heavy. There's an interesting thing in here. If you read this chapter and look at hand, Dagon loses his hand, but God's hand gets heavy. Let me plead with you. You don't want God's heavy hand. That's why we're here this morning. But I can't leave that back there. The same thing happened in a much higher, holier, heavier way. Way back there, the Philistines captured that ark. But I know a savior who was praying in the garden and he let himself get captured.

37:56 The Philistines took that ark and they put it in the pagan temple of their dead god Dagon. They captured that savior and after beating him and crucifying him, they didn't put him in the temple of Dagon. they put him in the temple of death. The temple of death where no one had ever gotten out. Heaven cried. Hell said he's a trophy in death's temple. The demons and his own disciples said he's in death's temple now. But what they didn't know was what was happening behind the door. On Friday Death fell off his pedestal On Saturday Death's head came off He can't scare me anymore Death's heads came off He can't hold me anymore On Sunday early Just like they came to Dagon Early They came to embalm him But they found out he turned the temple of death into the temple of life.

39:09 Does anybody here know a savior like that? Every God falls in the presence of Jesus. Every knee will bow. Every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. Death said, I've got a trophy. And God said, no you don't. and God took the weakest defeat and turned it into the greatest victory. Now let me tell you, that's good news for somebody here today. It's your time now. Come close to me. One somebody here is wobbling.

40:05 You can't have thousands of people together. There's got to be a few folks here. You want wobbling. You understand what wobble means? You're about to... You know what? Life makes you wobble. Somebody here is leaning. and like Dagon, you're about to fall over. You need God.

40:35 I'm talking to somebody, you've been chasing some devotion. I mean, you're obsessed with it. A person, a thing, I don't know, God knows. You know. And your life is consumed with that. and your life is just as empty as it's ever been. And you keep on trying to prop up that God. You need a God that props you up, not a God that you prop up. I'm going to ask all of the helpers in this church to come and stand in this altar and up and down these aisles. These are the pastors, helpers, Dr. West, friends.

41:24 I have a great sense of urgency this morning that somebody's God's fallen over and you need to meet the Lord.