Have you ever come to a story in the Bible and thought, “what was that?”  The other day as I was again making my way through First Samuel and I came across just such a story.

             The Israelites were fighting the Philistines and it was not going well.  The Israelites had lost about 4,000 men and so they called for the Ark of the Lord.  They knew that in days before Israel had been defeated when they did not bring the Ark and that they had been victorious when they had.  So, bring up the Ark.  “And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were there with the ark of the covenant of God (1Sa 4:4).”  Now these guys had not been representing Israel well.  In fact, the allegation was that they, “were blaspheming God (1Sa 3:13).”  However, in their current station their job was to bring up the Ark.

             Now, when the Ark was brought up all the Israelites gave such a great shout that the Philistines wondered what was going.  They must have consulted their intelligence officer because they knew that the Ark had been brought forward and they were afraid.  “These are the gods who struck the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness (1Sa 4:8).”  Amazing!  They remembered the “gods” who had delivered the Israelites from Pharaoh.  As a result, they were so disheartened that their commander had to appeal to their manhood, “…Take courage, and be men… (1Sa 4:9).”  This rousing speech motivated the Philistines to fight and the Israelites were defeated; thirty thousand Israelites died, including Hophni and Phinehas, and the Ark was captured.

             The Philistines took the Ark of God and placed it in the house of Dagon.  Dagon was the god of the Philistines who may have been, according to their ancient pantheon, the father of Baal.  Baal was one of the gods that the Israelites were continuously turning to in their rejection of God.  This was not a place of honor for the Ark of God either.  It was customary to give the spoils of war to the god of the victor in thanks for the god’s efforts in the victory and to show the superiority of one nation’s gods over another (Clarke 1810-1826, 1Sa 5:2).  However, when the Philistines woke up the next morning, they found their statue of Dagon tipped over on its face before the Ark.  They set him back up and the next morning they found him tipped over with his head and hands broken off.

             But that was not all.  The Lord afflicted the Philistines with tumors.  It was so bad the people in the city said, “hey get that Ark out here” and they moved it to another town.  The next town panicked because they had heard about the tumors and rightly so because they were also afflicted with the same tumors, so they sent it back to the original town.  That town said, “what are you trying to kill us?  Send it away!”  For seven months the Philistines wrestled with these tumors.  Finally, they considered sending it back to Israel and here is where the story gets really weird.

             The priests of the Philistines said, “hey, if we send it back, we can’t just send it back empty.”  They ended up putting the ark on a cart pulled by two milk cows along with five golden tumors and five golden mice. The milk cows used bare a strange similarity in that they almost match the requirements of the red heifer used in some Jewish sacrifices. Could the Philistines in their imperfect understanding of the law been trying to get their sacrifice right?

             Anyway, these passages and these stories are so foreign to us because they are written in a context that is removed from our own culture and contemporary understanding of the world that we can be discouraged in our attempts at finding their meaning.  Scholars believe that Samuel was called of God almost 1100 years before the birth of Christ and the times of Jesus predate us by 2000 years.  This chronological distance is one of the things that makes it difficult to understand the intent of the authors. But that doesn’t mean that the meaning is lost to us.

             Let us take a closer look at one particular element of this story.  What is this thing called an Ark?  We find the instructions for the construction of the Ark in Exodus 25 and 35 and we find the account of its construction in Exodus 37.  According to those passages the instructions came directly from God.  He had explicit intentions concerning its construction.  It was a box, almost four feet long three and a half feet wide, made of acacia wood and overlaid with gold.  It had rings that handles could be thread through so that no one would touch it in the process of moving and carrying it.  The lid was called the mercy seat and was solid gold with two cherubim statues on its top.  Inside, were kept the table of the law, upon which was written the law as given to Moses by God. This next part will blow your mind. Are you ready?

             “The word for propitiation is translated, “mercy seat” in Hebrews 9:5 (KJV) where it refers to the lid on the Ark of the Covenant (Forlines 2001).”  Propitiation is a term that denotes atonement.  It is that which Christ accomplished on the cross.  Paul writing in the book of Romans writes, “…all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith (Rom 3:23-25, ESV).”  The mercy seat, placed on top of the Ark, is the symbolic representation of the place of propitiation; the place where Jesus would fulfil the law.  “The tables of the law represented the demands of the law which were: (1) absolute righteousness and (2) a penalty against sin in case of disobedience. When the High Priest slew the goat on the day of atonement and took his blood into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled it on the mercy seat, it was as if he were saying to the Law, “This symbolizes the meeting of the demands that you require from sinners (Forlines 2001).”  The Ark, that the Israelites were carrying, was the symbolic representation of God’s plan of salvation 1100 years before it was to be enacted and 3100 years later it is still the only path to salvation for you and me.

             When we add this understanding to this story what do we find that is relevant for us today?  First, is the seriousness with which God took the pre-planned execution of His plan as contrasted with the near disdain with which the people of Israel, at least in this story, and particularly Hophni and Phinehas placed on that with which they had been entrusted by God.  When the Philistines had returned the Ark some of the men of Beth-shemesh, Israelite men, looked inside the Ark.  A violation of a specific command of God (Num 4:20) and He struck them down; seventy of them (1Sa 6:19).  God’s plan of redemption is precious to Him because you are precious to Him.  So precious that He will brooch no offense against it in order to keep it open for you.  How seriously do you take your salvation?  When you sin do you recognize the level of contempt that it shows for what God has done for us?  Do you rest lightly in God’s forgiveness?  Do you take His forgiveness for granted to the point that repentance is unnecessary? In doing so you bring contempt upon the Word of God.

The Israelites brought forward the Ark in order that they could bend God’s will to their own.  They thought that they could continue in their disobedience with an expectation that they could bend God’s power to their own desires.  I am afraid today that these very same men can be found amongst us.  They are on our church boards, church committees, and even preach from our church’s pulpit not to mention those who sit in our pews.  Are you among them? They are those who willfully continue in their sin on the expectation that God will forgive them with the utterance of a word and a complete lack of repentance.  For all intents and purposes there is no heart of repentance, no desire to change, only a desire to continue in the pursuit of their own selfishness. Could it be that to accept God’s forgiveness apart from a heart of repentance is to blaspheme that very forgiveness?  The allegation against Hophni and Phineas was just that charge. They were brining contempt upon the Word of God.

Christian, I am not calling you today to a life of perfection.  I am calling you to perfect your heart before your Lord and savior.  Take your salvation as seriously as God does because its preciousness is the source and proof of your preciousness before Him.  Do not cheapen it by continuing in your desire to sin!  Jesus endured the cross for the joy that was set before him (Heb 11:2).  You are that joy and when you continue in your own selfish desires you are treating His joy with contempt; your are blaspheming the Word of God.

I’m going to leave today’s thoughts right here.  There is so much more to this passage that needs to be explored and I would encourage you to do so.  I want to explore if the Philistines in offering a guilt offering to the nation of Israel is a foreshadowing of an offering that Pilot would officiate before Israel thousands of years later.  There is an interaction here between the Jewish and Gentile world that might provide insight into the later interaction.  Christians, find a church body, get involved, and study God’s word for all that it is worth!

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Clarke, Adam. Adam Clarke’s Commentary On The Bible. Public Domain, 1810-1826.

Forlines, F. Leroy. The Quest for Truth: Theology for Postmodern World. Nashville: Randal House Publications, 2001.

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