Behind Enemy Lines
One of my favourite story devices is "Trojan imprisonment" or "infiltration via imprisonment." A great example is from the Return of the Jedi, where Luke Skywalker is captured by Darth Vader on Endor. The first time you watch the movie, you're thinking—seriously? Why aren't you even putting up a fight?
But then you catch on to his real plan. He let himself be captured. His goal was to confront Darth Vader on his own turf. And—spoiler alert—his plan works. Vader is redeemed, he turns on the Emperor, and shortly afterwards the Rebel Alliance achieves total victory.
It's such a great story device and that's one reason why it's used time and time again. Sometimes bad guys do it—like Loki in The Avengers. But it's better when good guys do it—like Aragorn and company deliberately walking into a trap at the Black Gates in order to give Frodo his opportunity at Mount Doom.
It's so great. And as far as I can tell, the first person to ever do this, in real life, was God. I mean, not literally. Nobody can "capture" God. But the ark of the covenant—this golden box with the angels on the top, which represented and embodied His presence—it was taken by the enemy.
If you were reading 1 Samuel for the first time, if you were experiencing 1 Samuel for the first time, the events at the end of chapter 4 would have you saying "What in the world is going on?" The ark of God captured by the Philistines? How is this even possible?
I mean, two people literally died from the shock of just receiving that news. It was totally devastating.
And it was totally on purpose. God let His ark be captured. He did to rebuke Israel, who thought they could live as they please and yet pull out his ark like a good-luck charm when they needed it. Nope. He wouldn't let them treat him like any other idol or god from any other nation.
But… doesn't being captured by the Philistines kind of defeat that purpose? Didn't that send the message that He is like any other god, and His ark is like any other idol, and the Philistine's gods were stronger than Israel's?
And that's what today's passage is about. Behind enemy lines, God reveals His bigger plan and shows the Philistines—and us—who they were actually dealing with.
1. Yahweh vs. Dagon (vv. 1-5)
Let's pick up at verse 1. After hearing the devastating words from Eli's daughter-in-law, “The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured" (1 Samuel 4:22), we move to the ark itself. “1 When the Philistines captured the ark of God, they brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. 2 Then the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it into the house of Dagon and set it up beside Dagon” (1 Samuel 5:1–2).
A few things we want to notice here. The narrator of 1 Samuel never lets us forget that the ark of God is not God himself. It is the "ark of God," not God himself. Meanwhile, the chief god of the Philistines, Dagon, is totally identified with his idol. Look at verse 2: they set the ark up, not beside Dagon's idol, but beside Dagon. It's as if the author wants us to know that God is a lot more than just his ark, but Dagon is nothing more than a statue.
Second, it's not too hard to guess what's going on by them bringing the ark of the Lord into Dagon's temple. This is the kind of thing people did back then. They're basically saying, "Dagon gave us the victory over the God of Israel." Adding the ark to Dagon's temple is like putting a trophy to the trophy case. It's like mounting the head of a big buck on the wall of your man cave.
But third, this is not the first time we've seen a showdown between Dagon and someone or something important that the Philistines captured from Israel. Remember Samson? Remember how “the lords of the Philistines gathered to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their god and to rejoice, and they said, ‘Our god has given Samson our enemy into our hand’” (Judges 16:23)? Remember what happened?
If Samson killed 3,000 worshippers of Dagon that day, what is Samson's God going to do to Dagon himself?
We don't have to wait long to find out. Verse 3: “And when the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the ark of the Lord."
Dagon is face down before Yahweh. Face down is the position that people fall in when they encounter the God of Israel. This is what Abraham and Joshua and Ezekiel and John the Apostle do when they see the glory of Yahweh.
Dagon bows down before Yahweh. Could it be any clearer that Yahweh is God of gods?
And we've just gotten started. What comes next, in the rest of verse 3, is frankly humorous: "So they took Dagon and put him back in his place” (1 Samuel 5:3). If the Bible used emojis, there would be the "laughing till you cry" face right here. This is hilarious.
Dagon needs help up from his people. They worship him, but he needs their help—because he's just a statue! Just an idol! Isn't that hilarious?
This is one of the many places where the Bible roast idol-worshippers and shows how completely stupid it is to worship a thing that you made. Dagon, the lifeless block of stone, needs help up from the people who worship him. How can he help his people when he needs help from his people?
At this point, you think they'd get that and start to ask those questions. But they don't. Another night passes, and the next day, verse 4: “behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the ark of the Lord, and the head of Dagon and both his hands were lying cut off on the threshold. Only the trunk of Dagon was left to him” (1 Samuel 5:4).
Dagon has fallen over again—and this time he's broken in pieces. His head and hands are broken off. In the ancient world, fallen enemies often had their heads and hands chopped off. It was easier to carry those parts around than the whole body as proof of their death.
So the symbolism here is that Dagon has been defeated in battle. Yahweh has conquered him. It's also interesting that his head and hands are all the way on the threshold of the temple. The threshold—right at the doorway. I don't know exactly how big the temple was, but they probably travelled quite a distance. And it seems to me to give the suggestion that Dagon is trying to escape and get away from Yahweh. "Somebody help me in here!"
When the Philistines put the ark in there, they thought Yahweh was locked up in there with Dagon. They didn't understand that Dagon was locked up in there with Yahweh, and he's getting the snot beat out of him.
“You shall have no other gods before me” said the Lord (Exodus 20:3). And he meant it. And this wasn't just for Israel. Yahweh was the God above all gods, and He sent Israel into the promised land to take out the gods of the nations and prove His supremacy over them all.
And if they weren't going to do it, He'd do it himself. And two nights in a row he takes Dagon to the mat, on his home court, to prove it.
Because that wasn't Dagon's home court. The earth and all that is in it belongs to Yahweh. Dagon was an imposter, a traitor, a trespasser, stealing worship that belonged to Yahweh on land that belonged to Yahweh from people who belonged to Yahweh.
So off with his head. And his hands. Puny god.
This first section ends on another comedic note, telling us that this is why all the priests of Dagon who entered his house there in Ashdod avoided the threshold up to that present day—a practice which, some evidence suggests, continued for hundreds of years. Literally every time they entered that building they commemorated the time that Israel's God curb-stomped their stupid idol.
2. Yahweh vs. the Philistines (vv. 6-12)
a. Ashdod (vv. 6-7)
Dagon's hands might have been broken off, but the hand of Yahweh was at work and was not just against Dagon—but his people as well. Verse 6 tells us that “The hand of the Lord was heavy against the people of Ashdod, and he terrified and afflicted them with tumors, both Ashdod and its territory” (1 Samuel 5:6).
The language of the "hand of the Lord being heavy against" a people recalls the book of Exodus, in which God's hand was heavy against the Egyptians. In fact, we're going to see a lot of parallels throughout these verses between this situation and the Exodus.
In the Exodus, God's hand was heavy against the Egyptians and their gods so that they would let His people go to worship Him. Here, God's hand is heavy against the Philistines and their god so that they will let Him go—or, at least we can say, let his ark go—so that His people can worship Him.
One of the plagues that he struck the Egyptians with was boils, an affliction connected to tumours by Deuteronomy 28:27: “The Lord will strike you with the boils of Egypt, and with tumors and scabs and itch, of which you cannot be healed.”
It's happening here to the Philistines. We don't know if these are cancerous tumours, or just weird growths. Some of the symptoms here sound a lot like the bubonic plague, which causes the lymph nodes to swell and bulge up. The point is, this is a plague, just like the plagues the Lord sent on Egypt.
And in their favour, the Philistines are a bit quicker to get the lesson than the Egyptians. “And when the men of Ashdod saw how things were, they said, ‘The ark of the God of Israel must not remain with us, for his hand is hard against us and against Dagon our god’” (1 Samuel 5:7).
They know what's going on. They know that Yahweh is at war with them. It would have been much better for them to repent and worship him.
b. Gath (vv. 8-9)
But instead, they call a committee meeting. Of course. Verse 8: “So they sent and gathered together all the lords of the Philistines and said, ‘What shall we do with the ark of the God of Israel?” They answered, ‘Let the ark of the God of Israel be brought around to Gath.’ So they brought the ark of the God of Israel there” (1 Samuel 5:8).
What makes them think it's going to be any different in Gath? I don't know. But it goes to Gath. Where… the same thing happens.
“But after they had brought it around, the hand of the Lord was against the city, causing a very great panic, and he afflicted the men of the city, both young and old, so that tumors broke out on them” (1 Samuel 5:9).
c. Ekron (v. 10-12)
And of course, when the ark of God has brought plagues on two of your cities in a row, the most sensible thing to do is send it off to a third of your cities, right? Yep. Verse 10: “So they sent the ark of God to Ekron. But as soon as the ark of God came to Ekron, the people of Ekron cried out, ‘They have brought around to us the ark of the God of Israel to kill us and our people’” (1 Samuel 5:10).
This is almost like a Monty Python sketch. "Send the ark to Ekron!" "No, we don't want the ark. Are you trying to kill us or something?" This is sadly hilarious.
But what else are they going to do with the ark now?
The answer, of course, is call another committee meeting. But here, they actually decide something sensible.
“11 They sent therefore and gathered together all the lords of the Philistines and said, ‘Send away the ark of the God of Israel, and let it return to its own place, that it may not kill us and our people.’ For there was a deathly panic throughout the whole city. The hand of God was very heavy there. 12 The men who did not die were struck with tumors, and the cry of the city went up to heaven” (1 Samuel 5:11–12).
The irony here is that the last time we've heard about a cry going up to heaven, it was Israel, in Egypt, crying out for help. It's yet another echo of the Exodus story, and showing how the Lord—single-handedly—had put the Philistines in as great of a bind as Israel was in when the Egyptians enslaved them.
And they decide their best plan is to send the ark back. Put as much distance between them and Israel's God as they can.
And that's what they do in chapter 6, which continues this complicated and frankly hilarious story of Philistine foolishness. But we're going to save that for next week so that we have time in each of these chapters to really soak in the material that's here.
Lessons Learned
Let's summarize what we've seen in these twelve verses. And we'll group it together under two big headings.
a. God Doesn't Need Our Protection
First, we've seen that God is able to defend himself. As His ark goes behind enemy lines, we see clearly that God doesn't need His people to protect Him. God doesn't need our protection.
Maybe some of the people of Israel got that idea. The ark needed to be kept and guarded and housed away in the holiest place of the tabernacle because God needed to be protected. Is that why Eli's heart "trembled for the ark" as he sat by the road looking for news (4:13)?
Several years after this point, when the ark is on its way to its final resting place in Jerusalem, a man named Uzzah seemed to make the same mistake. The oxen carrying the ark stumbled, and Uzzah put out his hand to steady the ark. As if God needed steadying. And Uzzah died on the spot.
See, the ark of God wasn't protected as if He needed protection from us. The ark of God was protected because we need protection from God. His glory, his power, His holy zeal for His own name—these are dangerous to us in our sin.
The Israelites might have seen the ark being carried off and thought that God was defenceless, at the mercy of the Philistines without the priests to mediate in between God and people. And the opposite was true. The Philistines carrying back the ark was the stupidest and most dangerous thing they could have done. Without the priests, without the tabernacle, there was nothing coming in between the sinful Philistines and the Holy God. And judgement was the result.
So what does this have to say to us, as a kingdom of priests today? I wonder if sometimes we think that part of our mission as the people of God is to protect God. We'd never say it with our lips, but this attitude shows up in a hundred different ways. It shows up in our fearfulness to evangelize—as if whatever those people have to say is bigger and scarier than anything God has to say. It shows up in defensive apologetics, feeling the need to come up with slam-dunk arguments to impress unbelievers.
It shows up in the way we freak out when our government moves to limit religious freedom, like they're trying to do again with Bill C-9. It might show up when it comes to our own lives, when we think and feel and act like holiness is a fragile thing, easily corrupted, needing to be carefully preserved. We look at how evil the world is, how messed-up people are, how much evil and moral filth is being dumped into us from every media outlet, and we respond in fearful pearl-clutching or hand-wringing defensiveness.
That was the kind of environment I was raised in. Our home felt like the spiritual equivalent of a chip factory or a high-tech laboratory, where you had to put on special clothes and scrub yourself when you came in lest you brought in any dirty worldliness with you.
And we can easily start to get it so backwards. God doesn't need to be protected from the world. The world needs to be protected from God. God's holiness isn't like a petri dish that needs to be kept clean in a hermetically-sealed Christian bubble. God's holiness is a fire that shakes the temple and makes Isaiah cry out "woe is me!" and will one day consume his enemies in eternal judgement.
That's why when the apostle Paul saw a church he loved dearly being persecuted by a hostile world, he didn't panic as if God was on the defensive. He wrote to that church and said “4we ourselves boast about you in the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions that you are enduring. 5 This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering— 6 since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, 7 and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels 8 in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, 10 when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed” (2 Thessalonians 1:4–10).
When people persecute the church, the church isn't in trouble. The church's persecutors are in trouble. When people suppress the truth, the truth isn't in trouble. The truth-suppressors are in trouble as the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against their ungodliness (Rom 1:18-32).
Brothers and sisters, we know that our world is so messed up right now. Some of our most fundamental realities are in question. We can't tell the difference between boys and girls. We live in a country that spends tens of millions of its citizen's dollars killing thousands of its most vulnerable—pre-born children and the terminally ill—every year. Our elected officials celebrate wickedness in public.
And God is not the least bit in trouble. Our world is in trouble. Our country is in trouble as it stores up judgement for itself. God does not need our protection from a wicked world. Our wicked world needs protection from a Holy God.
And this connects to how we understand the gospel itself. The gospel is not a personal invitation to maybe, if perhaps you're interested, see if you might maybe want to find out what Jesus could do for you. The gospel is an announcement that Jesus of Nazareth died and was buried for our sins, and now God “commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead’” (Acts 17:30–31).
b. God Doesn't Need Us At All
But even here—even as we think about the mission Jesus has given His church to proclaim this good news to a world that needs it—even here, 1 Samuel 5 reminds us that it's not just that God doesn't need our protection. God doesn't need us at all.
Much of the time, He worked through His people. That was the plan at the beginning. He made Adam and Eve and told them to have dominion over the earth. Much of the work that He does, He does through people.
But not all of it. Certainly not all of it. I was once at a prayer meeting where a missionary taught us that God doesn't do anything unless His people pray for it first. And I thought, "I'm pretty sure none of us prayed for Jupiter to stay in orbit this morning." There are trillions of things going on in this universe right now that we are barely aware of that God is doing very capably with out. And the events of this chapter are a humbling reminder that God doesn't need His people for anything. He can take care of Himself. He can handle Himself.
Dagon can't. Dagon can't even get up after he's fallen over without His people's help, because Dagon is just a block of stone. But “24The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24–25).
God doesn't need us. God doesn't need anything from us. God doesn't need our time, our strength, our talents, our money. He doesn't need any of it because He's the one who gave it all to us in the first place. And any time He wants, He can take it back.
When God chooses to use us, it's a privilege and a gift—to us. Again, think of what Paul said. Being called by God to travel around the world sharing the gospel—that was mercy. As he wrote in Ephesians 3,“7 Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. 8 To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:7–8).
And if Paul hadn't have done it, it would have been someone else. Like Mordecai said to Esther, “…if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish”” (Esther 4:14).
Just think for a moment of all of the things that you think that you need to do for God that feel burdensome to you. For some of you, it's loving and serving your family in a way that pleases the Lord. For some of you, it's a ministry that either is your job or dictates your life in significant ways. Maybe it's service to another person in this church or community. Fill in the blank.
Now taste the freedom of knowing that God could do all of those things without you. His mission was doing just great before you were born, and His mission will be doing just great after you've gone to be with Him, should He delay His return.
God doesn't need our protection. God doesn't need us, at all.
Which doesn't mean we don't have responsibilities as a kingdom of priests. It means those responsibilities are gracious gifts given to us by a Father who, like a dad asking his toddler to pass him a paint brush, loves to include us in His work in this world.
God didn't need the Levites to carry His ark around and he didn't need Israel to fight His battles. But He gave them the privilege of serving Him. And God doesn't need you to make sure your neighbours hear the gospel or to make sure that your kids turn out okay or to make sure that your family stays together or to make sure that this church stays healthy. God can do all of those things just fine without you.
But He delights to use you, because He wants to.
This perspective frees us from discouragement. “Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart” (2 Corinthians 4:1). It frees us from pride. “For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed” (Romans 15:18). “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).
And it frees us from laziness and inactivity. When God gives us a job to do, it's our pleasure to serve Him with all of His strength. “For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me” (Colossians 1:29).
c. Behind Enemy Lines
As we close, let's think back to where we began: with the storyline of the hero letting himself be captured, going behind enemy lines alone, only there to reveal his true strength and deliver the knock out blow to the enemy.
It's not only seen in 1 Samuel 5 today. It's not only seen in so many stories and movies throughout history. It's also seen in the greatest story ever told, when a 33-year old rabbi, who can knock people over just with his words, lets Himself be arrested in a garden, lets Himself be beaten and tortured, says little to nothing during His trials, and then lets Himself be nailed to a cross to die in front of a cheering crowd.
And there on that cross, judgement fell. On Him. The cry from His mouth went up to heaven. But by taking our judgement on to Himself, what was Jesus doing on that cross? Single-handedly, without anybody's help, abandoned by His friends, He was saving His bride. He was saving you.
And as we go to the table now and remember this Saviour's death and this Saviour's resurrection, we can remember that He doesn't need a thing from us—but He delights to give us all that we need as we get to serve Him in whatever responsibilities He's given us.
Let's come to Him and seek His grace together now.