1 Samuel 5:1-7:2, What Do You Do When God Has Lost?, Dr. John B. Carpenter

The Ark Captured and the Philistines’ False Victory

1 Samuel 5, verses 1 to 7, verse 2. Hear the word of the Lord. When the Philistines captured the Ark of God, they brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. Then the Philistines took the Ark of God and brought it into the house of Dagon and set it up beside Dagon.

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. So they took Dagon and put him back in his place. But when they arose early on the next morning, 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. This is why the priests of Dagon and all who enter the house of Dagon do not tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod to this day. The hand of the Lord was heavy against the people of Ashdod, and he terrified and afflicted them with tumors, both Ashdod and his territory.

And when the men of Ashdod saw how things were, they said, the Ark of God of Israel must not remain with us for his hand is hard against us and against Dagon our God. 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?

And 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. 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, that tumors broke out on them.

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 God of Israel to kill us and our people. They sent it, therefore, and gathered together the lords of the Philistines and said, send away the Ark of 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. The men who did not die were struck with tumors, and the cry of the city went up to heaven. The Ark of God was in the country of the Philistines seven months, and the Philistines called for the priest and the diviners and said, what shall we do with the Ark of the Lord?

Tell us with what we shall send it to its place. And they said, if you send away the Ark of the God of Israel, do not send it empty, but by all means return him a guilt offering. Then you will be healed, and it will be known to you why his hand does not turn away from you.

And they said, what is the guilt offering that we shall return to him? And they answered, five golden tumors and five golden mice, according to the number of the lords of the Philistines. For the same plague was on all of you and on your lords.

So you must make images of your tumors and images of your mice that ravage the land and give glory to the God of Israel. Perhaps he will lighten his hand from off of you and your gods and your land. Why should you harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts?

After he had dealt severely with them, they did not send the people away, and they departed. Now then, take them and prepare a new cart and two milk cows on which there has never come a yoke, and yoke the cows to the cart, but take their calves home away from them, and take the Ark of the Lord and place it on the cart and put it in a box at its side, the figures of gold, which you are returning to him as a guilt offering.

Then send it off and let it go on its way, and watch. If it goes up on the way to its own land, to Beth Shemesh, then it is he who has done us this great harm. But if not, then we shall know that it is not his hand that struck us.

It happened to us by coincidence. The men did so and took two milk cows and yoked them to the cart and shut up their calves at home, and they put the Ark of the Lord on the cart and the box with the golden mice and the images of their tumors, and the cows went straight in the direction of Beth Shemesh along one highway, lowing as they went.

They turned neither to the right nor to the left, and the lords of the Philistines went after them as far as the border of Beth Shemesh. Now the people of Beth Shemesh were reaping their wheat harvest in the valley, and when they lifted up their eyes and saw the Ark, they rejoiced to see it.

The cart came into the field of Joshua of Beth Shemesh and stopped there. A great stone was there, and they split up the wood of the cart and offered the cows as a burnt offering to the Lord. And the Levites took down the Ark of the Lord and the box that was beside it, in which there were the golden figures, and set them upon the great stone.

And the men of Beth Shemesh offered burnt offerings and sacrificed sacrifices on that day to the Lord, and when the five lords of the Philistines saw it, they returned that day to Ekron. These are the golden tumors that the Philistines returned as a guilt offering to the Lord, one for Ashdod, one for Gaza, one for Ashkelon, one for Gath, and one for Ekron.

And the golden mice, according to the number of all the cities of the Philistines belonging to the five lords, both fortified cities and unwalled villages, the great stone beside which they set down the Ark of the Lord, is a witness to this day in the field of Joshua of Beth Shemesh.

And he struck down some of the men of Beth Shemesh because they looked upon the Ark of the Lord. He struck 70 men of them and the people mourned because the Lord had struck the people with a great blow.

Then the men of Beth Shemesh said, who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God, and to whom shall he go up away from us? And so they sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kiriath-Jerom saying, the Philistines have returned the Ark of the Lord.

Come down and take it up to you. And the men of Kiriath-Jerom came and took up the Ark of the Lord and brought it to the house of Abinadab on the hill, and they consecrated his son Eliezer to have charge of the Ark of the Lord.

From the day that the Ark was lodged at Kiriath-Jerom, a long time passed, some 20 years, and all the house of Israel lamented after the Lord. The Lord had his blessings through the reading of his holy word.

The Law, Legalism, and the Need for Grace

Now, last year I crossed a milestone in my life. As of last year, I've lived in North Carolina longer than I lived in Alabama. But still, out of habit, I often say, somebody asked me where I'm from, I'm from Alabama, because I grew up there.

At what point should I start saying I'm from North Carolina? I was raised to be an Alabama football fan and was a loyal fan through the late 80s and 90s and early 2000s when they weren't great, just kind of above average.

Over the last decade or so, though, I've seen lots of people wearing Alabama jerseys and t-shirts. I've been on the Danville River Walk and people going by in Alabama shirts. Because Alabama has been such a dominant champion, Alabama now has a lot of new fans, probably most of them fair weather fans, who will soon disappear when Bama starts being average again.

What do you do when your team is a loser? A lot of people just pick a new team. What do you do when God has lost or appears to have lost? Of course, we're told today that, well, that can never happen.

You expect to hear in church that that will never happen. Don't even consider it. But the truth is that God may appear to lose for a time, to sift out the fair weather fans, the kind who are all for Jesus when the church is large and growing and popular, but when it's seen as a hate group and you're called a bigot for your Christian beliefs and the church is small and meeting in a gym, then they're deconstructing their faith, the newest euphemism.

God may appear to be on a losing streak here or there. Now, sure, we know that God is sovereign and His plan is never thwarted, that if He appears to have lost, it's only because our view is limited. But in too many places today, we're told that God never loses because, well, with God and me, there's a majority, whatever that means.

We tell people to believe in themselves because God is on their side. God believes in you. God, according to Joel Osteen, God always, quote, always confirms your value. He will never give up on you. Well, that encourages narcissism.

We've raised a generation or two or maybe three of narcissists who have no sense of guilt or of shame, of a wretch like me. The church has failed over the last couple of generations by failing to preach the law.

And by preach the law, I don't mean preach legalism. Legalism is the idea that you can earn God's favor. If we keep His laws, we can gain a good standing with the Lord. We can stand before the Lord because I've done this and so.

Legalists are actually not been humbled by the law. They not really understand their own sinfulness. Well, that's legalism. Preach the law means declare God's moral standards, like the Ten Commandments.

You know, the gods of your life, including mammon, or the relationship, don't murder, don't commit adultery, sexual immorality, don't steal, which were renewed. All these laws were renewed and reapplied by the Lord Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.

Don't just not kill, or not commit adultery, or don't just not steal. He said, don't be hateful, don't be lustful, don't be greedy. God sees your heart and He knows if you're a lawbreaker there. So, at the end of Matthew 5, He says, be perfect.

But you know, because of the law, because the law has been preached to you, you know you're not perfect. So, you're humbled and you know you desperately need grace. So, you cry out, like at the end of Romans 7, who will save me from this body of death?

That's what preaching the law does for you. But because we haven't been doing that over the last century or so, either because some people have taught that the law is for a previous, quote, dispensation, or they've just gotten caught up in the spirit of the age and taught that what we need really is the power of positive thinking, or we need Robert Schuller's Gospel of Self-Esteem.

And so, now we have generations of people who think that the church exists to tell them, like their parents have, and their teachers have, and their coaches have, to tell them how great they are. We have people who have never been humbled by the law, by seeing their own sinfulness, like looking into a mirror and seeing how dirty you are.

So, they take it for granted that they can stand before God, that they can approach God any way they want. They can live as they want, be the church's fair-weather fan, and yet still, they'll be able to saunter up to the judgment seat, boasting to God of what they've done.

It never occurs to them to ask themselves, am I able to stand before the Lord? What happens when such people really encounter God? Well, we see that here in three parts. First, the exile. Second, the exodus.

And finally, the exclamation. The ark is in exile. It's been captured, like later Jerusalem was captured and taken into exile. It was taken from Ebenezer, the battleground, to Ashdod, one of the five main cities of the Philistines.

The ESV here hides, I think, maybe they didn't mean to, but they did it the way they chose to translate the words, it hides the repetition from between verses one and two. In Hebrew, every word is the same in verses one and two except at the end of verse two, and the word order is different.

Here in the English, it says in verse one, they captured, the Philistines captured the ark, and then in verse two, the Philistines took the ark. Actually, in Hebrew, it's the same word, captured and took.

So, it should be, in my opinion, it should be translated the same. So, almost verbatim, verse two repeats verse one with the changes highlighting what is emphasized and also moving us forward. So, literally, it says, the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it from Ebenezer, which is the battleground, to Ashdod, in verse two, and took the Philistines, the ark of God, brought it to the house of Dagon.

Now, the first time it emphasizes the Philistines as the subject acting, and the second time it emphasizes took, what they did, and then at the end is more specific about where the ark is taken. Dagon's temple, where it's been set up beside Dagon, which is the idol, Dagon, as if it's a trophy.

This is Dagon's, this ark of the covenant of the Lord is Dagon's trophy. It's like a hunter having a stuffed elk's head on his wall. Look what I got. The ark of the covenant is put on display as if Dagon has captured the Lord, which is exactly what the Philistines think has happened.

The God whose army wins is the strongest. What do you do when your God has lost? For pagans, if their God is on long enough a losing streak, at some point, they just ditch their God and then look for a winner, maybe the one that beat, that conquered them, that beat them.

Ever wonder what ever happened to all these pagan religions in the Old Testament? Dagon worship, Baal worship, all that. Well, many of them just disappear when their nation is defeated because the people who used to worship Dagon or whatever, they think, if he couldn't save our armies, I'll drop him and go with the God who wins.

They were fair weather fans. But for now, here, Philistines don't have that problem because they think their God won. What do you do when God has lost or when he looks like he's lost? What do you do? Now, the positive thinking, self-esteem gospel, always positive and encouraging tell us never to consider that.

But in reality, sometimes it looks like God has lost and fair weather fans then disappear. My friend from college, my roommate for a year and a half, seemingly so zealous for God in church every time it was opened, but he's so zealous he thought that Baptist College in Alabama that wasn't on fire enough for God for him.

And so he transferred to a Pentecostal college in Oklahoma only to drift away to being out of touch and now declares himself to be an atheist and a homosexual. What do you do? We celebrate Eric Little for being so uncompromising for the Lord, willing to not run his race in the Olympics.

And we love the story because he runs another race and he wins. But what do you do with him so uncompromising for the Lord going to China as a missionary and he dies as a civilian prisoner of war of the Japanese?

What do you do? What do you do when you bring the Ark of the Covenant into battle with you for the supernatural power that you can get from it only to lose in a crushing defeat and you even lose the Ark too?

What do you do? Oddly enough, the Lord laughs. Why do the nations rage in Psalm 2? They plot against the Lord and the Lord laughs at them for their silliness. Like you might laugh at a little child who thinks he can fight you.

The Lord derides them because they're not a threat to him. Now here in this story, this retelling of history, with the Lord appearing to be in exile, he's laughing at them. This is parody here in chapter 5.

He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Philistines thought that they could put on display the superiority of Dagon to the Lord. Put the Ark, this is the closest thing that Israel has to a symbol for the Lord and probably in the Philistines' mind equivalent to an idol for the Lord.

They're going to put it on display as a trophy of Dagon. This is what Dagon has captured. And so the Lord makes fun of Dagon. In verse 3, the next day after putting, you notice the next day, immediately after putting this Ark on display in front of Dagon, they get up.

The people of Ashdod get up early. They enter Dagon's temple and presumably it's locked and secured all night and they find Dagon lying face down. His face is in the dirt. That phrase should be familiar, face in the dirt, because it occurs many times in the Old Testament.

Talk about someone greeting some king or somebody or something powerful. They do oboeissance on the ground. This is if Dagon is doing oboeissance for the Lord, before the Ark of the Lord, as if prostrating to the Ark.

People, think of this, people bowed before Dagon all the time. They came into his temple, they would bow, prostrate before him. And now the Lord makes Dagon bow before the Ark, which in the Philistine's eyes is the symbol of the Lord.

In Israel, the Ark is never used in worship. The Old Testament believers are never told to or shown to be bowing to the Ark. Just this morning, I saw some pictures, some artists made a priest prostrating before the Ark.

That never occurs in the Old Testament. It's not supposed to be used that way or any other symbol for the Lord. Using objects in worship is never allowed in the Bible because it is idolatry. But the Lord figures it's okay, I guess, to have an idol bow before the Ark.

You know, idols, I guess, can practice idolatry. Why not? Because idols are nothing. So why not let the Dagon idol do some idolatry? You know, why? Just for fun. The Lord's making fun of Dagon here. So the keepers of Dagon have to set it up again.

Hint to the Philistines, if your God can't set himself up, you've got the wrong God. In other religions, the worshipers are constantly having to do something for the God or the spirit or whatever it is he or she can't do for himself or itself.

They have to feed it. You know, a God or spirit that relies on you to feed it is not a God you need to be worshiping. Don't put in your time. Anyway, but that's the way many other religions are, the pagan religions are.

You have to feed it, you have to provide for it. In Singapore, I once went into a Buddhist temple with a large kind of chubby Buddha sitting cross-legged. It's so large, the statue is, that you can go around the back where there's a door, you can go inside it, and there's another Buddha inside it, life-size, reclining.

And people leave gifts to it. When I was there, someone had left a bag of M &Ms because Buddha has to have his candy. There was an attendant there because Buddha has to be attended to. He won't claim himself.

And if you serve money as your God, you'll find you'll have to set it up when it falls down and it can't make your family happy. Here, the Philistines are so full of themselves that their Dagon has beaten the Lord.

And so often, the best thing to do with people who are full of themselves is to laugh at them. The very next day, they opened the Dagon temple. That sounds funny, doesn't it? The Dagon temple, that Dagon temple.

Anyway, they opened it up early in the morning after being locked and secured overnight. And behold, in verse 4, now this isn't meant to be a boringly pious kind of, behold. This is a believer in the Lord, this narrator here talking to us, telling this story.

It's a believer in the Lord around a campfire telling us kids, pay attention to this. This part's hilarious. Behold, Dagon is again face down on the ground, again before the Ark of the Lord. Makes that specifically clear.

This worshiping it. And this time, his hand and his heads are cut off. His head, I guess he got one head, lying right at the threshold. So as you walk in the door, the first thing you see is his hands and his head.

And the priests say, Dagon it, I guess. Just a joke. Dagon has lost his head. I can keep this going. No, I can't. I'm not a joke, sorry. So in verse 5, the priests of Dagon being superstitious people, don't step on the threshold after this.

Neither do the worshipers. It's bad luck or whatever. This is where his head and his hands were. You think they would figure, we should just stop coming to this God. He's not working. But they don't. They just walk around the spot.

Now, I guess they had to take big steps to get over it. I don't know how they did it. Looking silly. While he who sits in the heavens laughs. And the Lord has the last laugh because now there are no priests of Dagon because no one believes in him anymore.

Hands are a theme here. Dagon has lost his hands, but the hand of the Lord is about to be on the Philistines. The hand of the Lord is heavy. In verse 6, the hand of the Lord was very heavy. It didn't say very, actually.

It was heavy against the people of Ashdod. The word heavy, Hebrew is kabod, related to Ichabod, where there's no glory. But kabod means heavy, glory. So the word heavy there is the same word as glory, as if to say the Lord's hand was glorious.

To have glory is to be heavy, to have weight, to have gravity. The Philistines thought the Lord was light. They could just, they could put him on display. And so the Lord makes light of Dagon and has his hand come down heavily on the people.

Verse 6 says, the Lord terrified and afflicted them. Literally, he ravaged them and struck them. Using the same word, struck, the same word as the plagues of Egypt, which were literally 10 blows, 10 strikes, like being struck with a fist or a rod, being hit.

Here the Lord, after laughing at them, is hitting them with what he calls tumors, which could be boils or could be swollen lymph nodes, buboes. It could have been the bubonic plague, since there's some connection to mice, as we'll see.

So the people of Ashdod, Ashdodites, concluded that their plague was because of the ark of the God of Israel. It must not remain among us because his hand is hard or severe or harsh against us and against Dagon, our God.

Their God is losing. So they had a conference, bring together the heads of the five city-states that made up Philistia, and here they take counsel together, and in verse 8, you know, what should we do with the ark of the God of Israel?

Now, I have a feeling, doesn't say here, but I have a feeling that the Ashdodites didn't tell the other cities that Dagon has been caught giving obeisance to the Lord, and his hand and his head have fallen off, and the hand of the Lord is crushing them.

Notice that no details are given in verse 8, as if to say, you know, we've had this trophy, you know, guys, we've had this trophy long enough. Maybe you guys, maybe you guys at Gath, why don't you take it off our hands, put it on display?

You can monetize it, make it into a tourist attraction. And so Gath goes, yeah, okay. And after they carried away to Gath, the hand of the Lord was against that city too. There in verse 9, the Lord also caused a great panic, turmoil, because he struck them.

There's that word again, hitting them like in the plagues. He struck them. The Lord causes a panic. The Philistines had been so courageous before, remember? When they heard, the Philistines had heard that the ark was brought into the Israel's camp, and they were intimidated by its magic, but they gave themselves a pep talk, and they mustered up their courage, calling on a virtue to oppose God, and now their courage is gone.

They're panicking. Kind of like the panic we saw in this country about three years ago, because of a virus that mostly only hurt people in easily identified groups, like the elderly. At least here, the Philistines, with this panic, they are all potential victims.

Their panic was a little more reasonable than ours. And the people of the city, all of them, were afflicted, both young and old, it says in the middle of verse 9. That could actually mean, the word there for young is small, and the word for old is large.

It could mean from little children to full-grown adults, like it's translated in the ESV, or it could mean from lesser people, like peasants, to great people, rich and powerful, aristocrats. Well, the point is, either way, the point is that the Lord was undiscriminating in his blows against Gath.

All kinds of people were getting it. You couldn't say, well, only this one kind of people is getting the tumors. No, all of them were getting it. The tumors, the boils, the buboes, whatever they were.

And so Gath gets rid of it, sending it to Ekron. Take it, Ekron, the third Philistine city. Immediately, the ark of God coming to Ekron, the people there panic. News has gotten around by now, out of Ashdod and Gath, that this ark is dangerous.

By the time it gets to Ekron, the people are crying out. Even before the plague starts, they have brought around to us the ark of the God of Israel to kill us and our people. They're not courageous now.

So in verse 11, they have another meeting of the five heads of the Philistine city-states, and they decide, 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.

You know, they're sounding panicking here. Notice the way that phrase is repeated. It's kind of the way panicking people are. People in this area, they're just obsessed by one thing, and they just repeat it and focus on it.

Here, this thing is going to kill us and our people. Notice how magical thinking works, too. They think it's the ark causing the trouble. It, this impersonal object, is killing us. But the Aspire writer here tells us that it was the hand of the Lord hitting them, striking them.

His hand is heavy on them for, in the middle of verse 11, is the effect of God's heavy hand on them. There was a deathly panic, deathly panic, a panic that causes hysteria and irrational decisions that end up killing people.

So they resolved to send the ark back because they were losing their minds, and the parody has become a tragedy. Next, in chapter 6, the Exodus. The ark will be brought out of exile through plagues, the blows, and miracles like the Exodus.

The Ark Returns by Guilt Offering and Divine Sovereignty

Verses 1 to 8, the Philistines discuss how they can return the ark. And this is all important because it proves God's sovereignty, His control over all this. The magical are perplexed because they think that if the Lord is so powerful that He can cause plagues and panic in three Philistine cities, you know, so much hysteria that the men who were so brave before are now terrified and they're desperate to get rid of this thing.

If He's that powerful, then why didn't He use His power to defeat them in the battle? You know, that's probably what the magical people in both Israel and Philistia were thinking. Why didn't He do this before?

The Israelites are saying, that's what we wanted Him to do when we brought it there. The Philistines were thinking, that's what we were afraid He was going to do. This is just the disaster that they were afraid of when they first heard that the ark had been brought into the battleground.

Woe is us! And they wailed, and then they mustered up their courage and they won. They assumed that their magic was superior to Israel's magic, but now they are being beaten. The Lord is hitting them with the plague and there's mice running around everywhere, eating their grain, probably with fleas, giving them a bubonic plague too.

They don't know that. And so the Lord is powerful after all. Now they see it. But the question is, why didn't He do this before? Why didn't He strike the Philistines when the Israelites wanted Him to in the battle?

Because the Lord will not be controlled. He's not going to turn the bread and the wine into the literal body of blood of Jesus just because a so-called priest says, hak es corpus. He's not going to make someone regenerate or make a covenant with them, for that matter, just because we pour water on their heads and say the magic words.

He's not going to make us rich or healed just because we confess it and we send in a course, we send in our donation to the man on TV who tells us. God will do that. He will jealously guard His own sovereignty.

Fairweather fans of the Lord will drift away when they realize that they can't use His power as their magic. Here the Philistines consider, how can we be sure that this is a sovereign God doing this? But they do consider this could be a coincidence.

So the Philistines may be superstitious people, but they understood that sometimes there are coincidences. There are sometimes unrelated events. Correlation is not causation. They had the ark for seven months.

They passed it around like a hot potato. They got their priests and the diviners, the specialists in magic, and they asked them in chapter 6 verse 2, what should we do with the ark of the Lord? They don't mean whether we keep it or not.

They want to get rid of it one way or another, but they made up their minds for that. But how? How are we going to get rid of it? And they advised these priests and diviners and magicians in verse 3, if you send away the ark of the God of Israel, do not send it empty, but by all means, make sure you do this, return him, that is the Lord, a guilt offering.

In other words, appease his anger at what you've done to him. Give an offering to atone for the sin of treating him like a trophy for desecrating his ark. And they say, then you will be healed. Then there's an odd sentence that's hard to understand.

Here in the ESV translated, it will be known to you why his hand does not turn away from you. Probably meaning something like when you have been ransomed with your guilt offering, then why should his hand not turn away from you?

The priest and the diviners advise that the offering should be five replicas of their tumors. I don't know what that would look like, but whatever. And five mice, golden mice figurines, all made of gold, one for each of the Philistine cities.

Do that, and in verse 5, give glory to the God of Israel. They put the ark in Dagon's temple to give glory to Dagon. Now forget that and give glory to the Lord. Now treat him as heavy. And if you do, perhaps, no guarantees.

It's as though they've learned, the Philistines have learned, this God is sovereign. He doesn't use his magic when you turn him on at the battle, but he is powerful. Perhaps, he will lighten his hand from off of you and your gods and your land.

And then they warn in verse 6, don't be like the Egyptians. Learn a lesson from the Egyptians and Pharaoh. They harden their hearts. In the end, they lost. What do you do when your God is lost? I don't know.

The Lord's undefeated. Then the priests and the diviners come up with a test to make sure it was the Lord striking them and not some other cause. Starting in verse 7, get a new cart. This hasn't been used for anything else, especially then for this purpose, so it's holy.

Get two cows that have never been yoked, so they've never been trained to pull anything. So if they start pulling it, it's not because they're training. And two cows that have recently calved, so they have a strong instinct to provide milk for their calves.

And put the ark on the cart with the golden tumors and the mice and a box there with it, and yoke the cows to it and let it go without a driver. Now, normally, I don't know what they would do. They would go wandering off who knows where.

Then they say, watch, in verse 9. This is a test to see if the cows will act contrary to nature and they will go unled, undriven to Israel. They're left to themselves. They'll probably go back to where they can find their calves.

Well, but if it does, if it goes to Israel, to Beth Shemesh, they say, then we'll know that it was the Lord who has done us this great harm. They'll know which God has lost. So the Philistines did exactly that, confining the calves to the barn to see if the cows would be driven away from them against their natural instincts.

The cows went straight, though, not back to their calves, but straight toward Beth Shemesh, a nearby Israelite town, a Levite town, lowing as they went. In verse 12, they're distressed for their calves, but they keep going to Beth Shemesh, driven by an invisible driver straight down the road, never veering off course, and with the heads of the Philistines following behind.

And when it gets to Beth Shemesh, the people are out harvesting their wheat and they see this odd, it's got to be a really weird sight, of a cart, two cows pulling it, no visible driver, coming down the road with the Ark of the Covenant in the back and a box, another box beside it, where the golden objects were, and this retinue of Philistines, of dignitaries and Philistia trailing some distance behind.

And the people of Beth Shemesh rejoiced to see it. Now, they had thought, like Eli's daughter-in-law, that the glory has departed, that they had lost it. But now, here it is, coming down the road, on a cart with two cows, no visible driver, making its exodus.

And it stopped in the field of Joshua, where there was a great rock there. So the Levites took down the Ark and used the cart for wood, sacrificed the cows to the Lord. So again, like sacrifices before, they could have a great feast with it.

They sacrificed the meat, they burned the fat, they eat the rest. And the Philistines saw it, they're amazed that their guilt offering has been accepted. They realized the Lord hasn't lost, and they went home to their five cities.

The Ark had been in exile, the glory had departed. They thought, Israel thought, and then the exodus with miracles. But Israel still hasn't learned its lesson, leading to the exclamation. In verse 19, some men of Beth Shemesh apparently looked into the Ark.

The word there, apon, in verse 19, probably means into. That is, after the sacrifice and the celebration they've had, they seem to have opened the Ark to take a peek. Now, they probably thought, well, we're Levites, we can take a look.

But the Levites are told in Numbers chapter 4, verse 20, they shall not go in to look on the holy things, even for a moment, lest they die. But they treated it, again, lightly. They probably thought, well, we're not Philistines.

The Lord's not going to strike us. But he did. He struck 70 of them. And it's probably a small town, so killing 70 men is a big proportion of the population. So they mourned and exclaimed in verse 20, who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God?