Scripture Daily

Context No. 387 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

Context · Reflection

1 Samuel 5:1-6: in context

1Now the Philistines had taken God’s ark, and they brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. 2The Philistines took God’s ark, and brought it into the house of Dagon and set it by Dagon. 3When the people of Ashdod arose early on the next day, behold, Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the LORD’s ark. They took Dagon and set him in his place again. 4When they arose early on the following morning, behold, Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the LORD’s ark; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off on the threshold. Only Dagon’s torso was intact. 5Therefore neither the priests of Dagon nor any who come into Dagon’s house step on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod to this day. 6But the LORD’s hand was heavy on the people of Ashdod, and he destroyed them and struck them with tumors, even Ashdod and its borders.

After a disastrous battle, the Philistines have captured the ark of God, the sign of the LORD's presence among Israel, and they do the natural thing for victors: they carry it into the temple of their own god, Dagon, and set it beside him, as a trophy. The message is clear. Our god has defeated your God; now yours can stand in the corner of ours. Israel's God looks, for the moment, captured and beaten.

But the Philistines wake up the next morning to find Dagon fallen on his face on the ground before the ark, flat in the posture of worship. They pick their god up and prop him back in his place. The next morning it is worse: Dagon is fallen again, and this time his head and his hands are broken off on the threshold, and only the torso is left. The captured God, who needed no one to fight for him, has quietly toppled and dismembered the rival god in the rival god's own temple. And then the LORD's hand falls heavily on the whole city. The point is hard to miss and a little bit comic: the true God does not need defending. Even when he appears defeated and captured, propped in the corner of someone else's shrine, he humbles the false god on his own, while its worshipers are reduced to repeatedly standing their idol back up because it cannot stay on its feet in his presence.

There are two things worth taking from that. When God seems, in some season, to have been defeated or captured, I do not need to panic on his behalf; he vindicates himself. And there is a picture here of every idol: something I keep having to prop back up, that cannot stand on its own before the living God. What have I been anxiously trying to defend that God defends himself, and what Dagon do I keep setting upright again that keeps falling on its face before him?

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