1 Samuel 6 Just Like the Pagans

to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series in First Samuel, Timely Prophet, Tragic King.

Let's listen in. Well, good morning, everybody. I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here, and I just wanna start off by saying thank you for gathering together as God's people on this

Sunday morning. It is a privilege that we have to gather together, and so I hope you count it that way, and I hope you're refreshed, encouraged, and even make some good connections with people while you're here.

I just wanna point out something that probably all of us know is quite obvious, and that is that Recast is a kind of funny name for a church, and most of us here know what that name means, but I just like to clarify that from time to time and go over those core values.

It is indeed an acronym for our core values. It's a little bit of a double meaning because it originated out of Luke chapter five.

One particular translation of the Bible talks about the disciples fishing all night and catching nothing.

That's what they were experts at, and they got a big goose egg. They didn't catch a single fish, and so Jesus comes to them on the shore and says, hey, you guys, recast the nets to the other side.

They obey, they haul in a bunch of fish, and he says, you're no longer gonna be catching fish, but you're gonna start catching men, so that's where the idea of Recast comes from, but it also is an acronym for our core values, which are replication, community, authenticity, simplicity, and truth.

We're hoping to get those core values on one of the walls in here at some point, and so there's a decorating committee that's working on that.

Probably on that back wall back there, but getting those up there so they're in front of us regularly, and the church values simplicity, and that makes us look a little bit different than many churches.

We don't have a busy schedule of programming. We don't have a bunch of stuff going on during the week, and a program or some event or some activity for you to do every night of the week.

That is intentional, intentional because we want you to connect with your community.

We want you to connect with people outside of the four walls of this church. We want you to make friendships with your next door neighbor, and the people who live across the street, and the families that play

Little League with your kids, and we want you to be able to coach your son's Little League, or your daughter's volleyball team, or whatever it might be, and so we want you to be involved out in the community, so that's intentional, and we also, that intention then means that there's three primary things that we're looking for for everybody here, everybody who's sitting in a seat right now.

Our goal is that you would be growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service.

Those are the three primary areas, and so part of the reason that we gather together on Sunday mornings is not just because that's what churches do, there actually are churches that don't gather together on Sunday morning.

Surprising to some of you, but yes, there are, and so one of the reasons that we do that is to grow in our faith by taking in the truth of God's word, and that's why we're gonna walk, we're gonna open up the

Bible together, we're gonna read a passage of scripture, we're gonna talk through that because we believe that faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of God, and that's what has the transforming power in our lives.

I mean, I hope you know you need more than this, you need more than just gathering together, you need to be in the word of God consistently and regularly, this is not,

I don't at all deceive myself into thinking that this is the sum total,

I get up and I preach, and you guys just are filled for the rest of the week, and you just go out from here. You need constant reminders from God's word, but I do believe that this has the power to transform us by coming together and hearing from his word.

And this morning we're gonna see God behaving in ways that can be confusing. That's part of the reason why we need to come to the word of God is to be corrected in the way that we view

God. I would suggest to you that when you encounter a passage where God behaves in a way that is counter to your thinking, is different than the way that you perceive him, it might just simply be that you have adopted some of our culture's view of God.

Did you know that the world out there, and America in general, has a view about God? Our culture, the media, the things that we read, and the songs that we listen to, will portray a view of God to you.

And I'm not just talking about on the secular radio station, I'm even talking about the Christian radio station, I'm talking about Christian televangelists and people that you might tune into or listen to, and there's all kinds of messages bombarding us about God, and the only standard that we have to turn back to, to test all of these voices that we hear, is

God's word. And how many of you praise God that it's a written word? It's something you can turn to, you can see with your eyes, you can study it.

It's not up for grabs, or whatever you feel today, or whatever I feel tomorrow, or I'm very grateful that I don't have to get up here and tell you my opinions.

I'm very grateful for that. I mean, I could, I could get up here and you would hear the same message over and over with just a different covering on it, and you'd get bored and tired of my soapboxes, my five point series on this or that or whatever

I feel like for the day. But instead, we've got God's word here, and so we need to let

God's word correct us. You see, the American God is not very holy. I don't know if you noticed that. He might be a little bit holy, but he's not super holy, like scripture seems to indicate.

We see, we've tamed God. That's the American way. We've spun a

PR campaign to make the Christian God a little less holy, a little more relatable, a little bit more agreeable to sin, and maybe even a little bit more agreeable to our specific brands of sin.

So when we come across the end of this passage this morning that we're gonna read in a moment, we can imagine the echoes of our culture telling us, not my

God. My God would never do what we find him doing at the end of this passage.

He wouldn't do that. And so I think I'd like to start off just by cautioning all of us to be careful to seek the truth regarding the nature of the

Almighty God. Let the Bible be the capital T truth in your life, and particularly when it comes to the way that you think

God rolls, when you think about the way that he acts. The Israelites, in our text, had fallen far from a relationship with God, and they misunderstood his holiness to their own detriment, to their own pain, to their own suffering.

They pushed aside sound theology. So let's open our Bibles. If you're not already there, you can turn over to 1

Samuel chapter six, and we're gonna read all the way through the first two verses of chapter seven.

So we'll read all of six and then those first two verses, and I just tell you that because sometimes the guy that was in the

Middle Ages that sat down to break up the Bible, how many of you would like that job of breaking the

Bible up into chapters and verses? Ugh, tough job, and boy, he doesn't always get it right, and it's abundantly clear.

If you're reading this without the numbers in it, I think you might disagree with him too. The first two verses of chapter seven go with this text that we're looking at here.

But if you're not already there, you can turn over to page 131 in the Bible that's in the seat under in front of you.

I'm navigating your device. However, you can follow along in 1 Samuel chapter six so that we can all pay attention to God's word here for this minute or two that we read.

The ark of the Lord was in the country of the Philistines seven months, and the Philistines called for the priests 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. 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 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, did they not send the people away and they departed?

Now then, take 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 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 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 two milk cows, 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 it were the golden figures, and they set them up upon the great stone, and the men of Beth Shemesh offered burnt offerings and sacrifices, 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 some of the men of Beth Shemesh, because they looked upon the ark of the

Lord. He struck 70 men of them, and 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? So they sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kiriath -Jerim saying, the

Philistines have returned the ark of the Lord, come down and take it up to you. And the men of Kiriath -Jerim came and took the ark of the

Lord, and brought it to the house of Abinadab on the hill, and they consecrated his son Eleazar to have charge of the ark of the

Lord. From the day that the ark was lodged at Kiriath -Jerim a long time passed, some 20 years, and all the house of Israel lamented after the

Lord. Let's pray. Father, I pray that you would help us to see you rightly.

We come with a lot of concerns, we come with a lot of issues, we come with a lot of our feelings, a lot of our baggage, even just things that happened this past week that could weigh us down.

Distractions, and all different kinds of things that could draw our attention away from an accurate understanding of who you are.

We're a hodgepodge of education, experience, problems, troubles, concerns, fears, sins.

Father, I pray that you would help us to lay all of that aside, and that you would open our eyes to your holiness, to your awesome, and awesome power, and glory, and beauty, and majesty.

To your great mercy toward your people, that often comes to us in the form of correction, often comes to us in the form of making it uncomfortable when we sin, so that we'll turn, and change, and repent, and come back to you.

Father, I pray that that would be a reality for each one of us, and that even now, as we have an opportunity to sing songs to you, we would sing as the people who are being redeemed by you day by day, and most importantly, being redeemed by the blood of your son.

An event that already has happened, an event that we can look back to, and recognize your great love for us.

A love that was expressed to us first, so that we can now, in turn, love others, and love you back. So, Father, I pray that it's from hearts that love you, that have experienced your love, that we would rejoice, and sing, and Father, that you would move us in our spirits, that we would be encouraged, and strengthened, and built up, even in the praise together with one another.

And I ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Yeah, you can go ahead and be seated, and I do ask that if you do me a favor and keep your

Bibles open to 1 Samuel 6. Again, that's gonna be walking through that text is what we're gonna do over the remainder of our time together.

So, 1 Samuel 6, if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee, or juice, or donuts, you're not gonna distract me, so feel free to take advantage of all of that stuff that's back there while supplies last.

And yeah, restrooms are out the double doors and down the hallway in case you need those as well at any time during the message.

I wanna just start off by saying something that's obvious. I think it's obvious. I think that probably all of us gathered together know this, but that is simply that the

Lord God Almighty is holy. Did you already know that? Raise your hand if you already knew that.

He's holy. He is, what that means might be different in each person's mind here, but it is a fundamental truth of God that he is holy.

And when you hear that phrase, just kinda start to think this is the fundamental seed of that understanding of what it means that he is holy, and that is just simply he is not like you and me.

He is so utterly different, so much better, so much higher. He is greater in his power. He is greater in his majesty.

He is greater in his wisdom. He is greater in his love and mercy. And he needs nothing in order to exist.

He needs nothing to complete himself, nothing to sustain him. He does not need oxygen. He does not need food.

He does not need anyone to worship him for him to be okay. He's completely and utterly self -sustaining, self -existent, and he is the creator of everything that you've ever encountered in your life.

So in the past couple of weeks, we saw the Ark of the Covenant of Israel captured in battle.

God's, this holy God's box, this Ark of the Covenant, this thing that was given to the people of Israel to represent his presence among them, and it was captured in battle by the coastal warring tribe called the

Philistines. They took the Ark, again, which represented God's presence among his people, and they took it back to their temple as an offering to their chief god,

Dagon, an idol that they worshiped not just simply as stone, but the belief that there was indeed this god of the sea that was behind the statue itself.

But in the middle of the night, after the Ark had been placed there, the statue of Dagon fell as if bowing before the

Ark of the Covenant of the Lord God Almighty, and on the second night, behold, his head and his hands were broken off.

The statue was broken as you see there in the picture. So, and then further beyond this event that happened here to the

Philistines' god, their chief god among the pantheon of gods that they worshiped, and he's broken and he's having a hard time getting put back together, further beyond that disease and illness that struck the

Philistines wherever the Ark of the Covenant went. And so, in a somewhat ironic twist that we saw last week in our time together, the

Ark was passed off from city to city to city throughout Philistia, the Philistine territory, bringing with it judgment and death wherever it went.

And the people were afflicted by tumor -like swellings that most scholars believe was the bubonic plague.

We'll see here in a minute mentioning mice and different things, and that's probably likely what it was.

Please, please follow this piece of advice. Do not Google images for bubonic plague.

Just don't do that, okay? I would recommend, I mean, the things that I do for research for you guys, I'm warning you, don't do it, okay?

Just trust me on this one. Now you're gonna do it, don't do it. We'll hear a couple people, a couple people, bleh, in the back because they haven't followed what

I said, so just don't do it, okay? Especially not here. So last week, leaders of the

Philistines all got together at Ekron and determined to send the ark back to where it came from.

They said, get it out of here. We don't want it in our territory anymore. They were obviously feeling the judgment and wrath, and it said that the heavy hand, the hand of God Almighty was heavy on the people in the

Philistine territory during this time. And so that's where we pick up our text this morning in verse chapter one.

It just needed to set a little bit of that stage. This text doesn't make a whole lot of sense without, again, as we're flowing through history and narrative, it's kind of important that you understand, and if you miss a week, then the context doesn't, it needs to be caught up.

But the ark of the Lord was in Philistine territory, we see right here at the beginning, for seven months. And that means that Israel has had enough time.

Think about what seven months means in your life. As I get older, seven months is smaller and smaller, increment of time, anybody relate to that?

It's not as much as it used to be. But seven months is enough time to get some stuff done, isn't it?

I mean, I believe that life has kind of returned somewhat, some semblance of normal.

We don't know exactly what that means for Israel, but back in Israel, things have kind of, well, the invasion didn't happen, and they didn't get subjugated right away, and the

Philistines didn't bring the attack back to them again, so we don't know what the religious atmosphere was like in the absence of the ark.

I'm kind of curious, I don't know if you ever get curious about things that you read in here, but I don't know, did they still bring sacrifices?

Was there still an annual festival? I don't know if they missed one in here or not, what the timing was, but we do notice at least a couple of things, that in that seven months since the ark was captured, the

Israelites have not sought to win it back. They didn't go to battle against the

Philistines and try to get the ark of the covenant back, and I imagine that they wanted to. I imagine that if they had the means to, they would have, and they don't here in the text.

But we also acknowledge that the Philistines could not muster a force enough to go and conquer the

Israelites during this time. God had them busy at home doing other things. You saw that in the text last week.

The Israelites, weakened by battle, the ark captured and stolen from them, and the

Philistines who took that and captured that could not muster a force to come back in because of all this illness that God is causing behind enemy lines.

And the Philistines, so then they had enough in our text last week, in chapter five, verse 11, it says that they had already made up their minds to send the ark back, so now we're actually gonna see the event of that happening.

Last week they decided, we gotta get rid of this thing. Now we come to the actual way that they did it.

And so they do what they know to do. They sought out spiritual advisors, they got their religious leaders, their priests, their pagans, their shamans, their witch doctors, whatever you wanna call them, and the ones who were probably over the various deities or priests to the various deities that they served, they call them all together and they talk about how to return

God's golden box. How are they gonna return the ark of the covenant? And I just,

I think it's kind of an interesting question that they ask, how do you return something that you stole from a god?

Like how do you do that, like what do you do? And although that's somewhat of a funny question to pose, it's an interesting one that I think everybody in this room should pay attention to.

We ought to pay attention to the answer to this. You see, we who have stolen glory from God, we who have stolen time from God, we who have stolen honor and fame that belongs only to the

Almighty ought to pay attention to what it means to return something that's stolen from God.

We ought to pay attention to what these, and so we ought to look to see if we can glean any truth from the middle of these pagan ideas.

The priests are gonna give their pagan ideas about how should somebody return something to a god, and the interesting thing is they're onto something here.

They've got, I mean, all truth is God's truth. How many of you ever, have you ever met an unbeliever who had some significant truth that they could share with you?

Right, like I mean, I don't know if the guy who fixes my car is a believer or not, but he knows a whole lot more about car engines than I do.

All truth is God's truth, and at the end of the day, you don't have to be a Christian to know things, right? And these guys actually get some truth.

They get some stuff here. They determine that they should not attempt to return the ark without a sacrifice.

That's probably a good word. And further, they believe that the sacrifice should have some symbolic connection to the problem that they're experiencing.

Another interesting truth. I find that the question in verse four is somewhat humorous, though.

What is the offering we should give to him? This is like buying a gift for their company, Christmas Gift Exchange, and what do you buy?

You know, what are you gonna get for that person who you've picked? So, are you gonna get him an iPod or an oven mitt? I mean, what kind of things are you gonna bring to, did anybody get that?

Five of you? Maybe a little reference to the office there. I don't know. But seriously, they perceive their problem to be swellings, tumors, the word interchangeably there, probably better translated swellings.

Again, our mind turns, I mentioned it last week, our mind turns to cancer right away. It was swellings. And mice, those are the two things.

Now, mice is introduced here as a unique part of the problem. We didn't see that last week, but it is here. So, mice or rats, the

Hebrew language is not particularly distinct when it comes to the animal kingdom, and so we don't always know what the animal is that's mentioned there, but it's mice or rats.

But one of those two are bringing the disease, and so they determine to make golden swellings. What? Anybody like, what's the shape of that?

It's just a lump of gold. There's a golden swelling right there. I don't know what that looked like.

I mean, kind of weird, fashioned in an oval, I don't know, kind of a ball of gold.

And then golden mice, we have an idea of that at least, but to return those to God as a sacrifice.

You see, these pagan priests are clearly trying their best. They're trying in their own wisdom and their own knowledge to appease this

God who they obviously believe has made, they've made angry, but they certainly don't know, and it's interesting to just note, they don't know

Yahweh. They don't know him, and so they're just grasping at attempts, much like maybe many of us have done in our lives, to grasp at attempts to please the

God that we don't quite know yet. And that's what religion really does for us. Religion is a grasping at attempts to try to please

God, but not really understanding his heart or what he wants to do for you yet. And so they don't know him, they don't know that mice are an unclean animal, unacceptable, just straight up unacceptable as a sacrifice to God.

You would never offer him a mouse or a rat. They do, they're like, I don't know, let's give him mice, let's give him a rat,

I don't know. And then further, what they really don't understand is that the only acceptable guilt offering mentioned in the scripture is a young male lamb without blemish, that's the only acceptable sacrifice that's given in the

Old Testament for a guilt offering. It's interesting that the phrase guilt offering is a very specific kind of offering that shows us a little bit about what the

Philistines understood here they were doing. It shows us a little bit of their ignorance, and I don't mean that in a negative way, just the lack of knowledge or lack of understanding is kind of multiplied here.

Not only do they give him rats, golden rats as an offering, but further, they are offering to pay for unknown sins, that's what the guilt offering was.

I don't know if I've sinned, so at the annual festival, I'm gonna offer this lamb just in case I've sinned this year.

Okay, that's the idea of the guilt offering, and people would take that up regularly and routinely. How many of you have ever just been there?

Like, you've just been praying and saying, God, forgive me, and I don't even know, I mean, forgive me for the stuff I don't know to say, and I don't even know to confess to you.

Anybody with me on that, am I the only one? There are times when I'm just like, I know I've sinned, and I can't keep track of all of it, and so this is the idea behind this offering here.

Interesting thing that I mentioned, their ignorance, they didn't even know what they had done wrong? I mean, I think that they might have some kind of an idea about having stolen this golden box, and they are obviously returning it, but just in case, and I think the issue here is primarily for them, they're trying to cover their bases.

Do you get that? Like, however we've offended this God, we wanna just cover, man, let's give a broad spectrum to this thing, and let's just cover our bases and give him what, let's go over the top in giving him an offering so that we can be sure to cover and get on his good side, so to speak, that he'll forgive us.

But consider that even the rudimentary understanding of these pagan priests has some information that is valuable to us today.

The first is just simply this concept that they have, and that's returning things that belong to God requires a sacrifice, requires a sacrifice.

And the number one thing, let me suggest to you, the number one thing that needs to be returned to God from your life is yourself.

You have wandered away from God. Every human being that is from Adam and Eve down to us today has wandered away from God, and we need to be returned.

We have, in essence, stolen, we are stolen goods, and we have stolen ourself. Every time that we sin, we are stealing ourselves from the one who has created us, the one who has made us.

We're taking that which he has gifted and corrupting it and using it for our own means and for our own stuff.

And so for a fallen, sinful human being to be returned to God, there must be a sacrifice.

There must be a sacrifice, and that sacrifice, of course, gloriously, what beautiful truth, that sacrifice has been offered on our behalf by Jesus Christ himself.

We needed a sacrifice to bring. We had nothing to offer, and so God provided the sacrifice for us.

Get this beautiful picture of a lamb, a ram caught in the thicket. A ram caught in the thicket where Abraham is about to sacrifice his own son, and God says, stay your hand, stop,

Abraham. And he shows him a ram caught in the thicket and says, sacrifice this instead, in the place of your son, in the place of your sacrifice, let me show you a sacrifice.

God has provided the lamb to be offered in our place, and his name is Jesus Christ. The second thing that these pagan priests understand is the sacrifice needs to be in kind.

There needs to be relationship between the thing that is desired and the sacrifice itself. You see, we who needed our sins covered needed someone to become sin on our behalf.

We needed our sins covered, so the sacrifice became sin for us. Like the

Philistines making golden images of tumors and mice, that was their main problem, and then sending those away,

Jesus also became the image of our problem to put to death, to be put to death.

And this is why Paul says this in the New Testament. For our sake he, this by the way is a quote from 2

Corinthians 5 .21, for our sake he, that is the Father, made him, that is

Jesus Christ, to be sin who knew no sin. He lived a sinless life, he was the perfect lamb of God, but he knew no sin and became sin so that in him,

Christ, we might become the righteousness of God. Christ becoming sin on our behalf.

You see, they sent away tumors and mice in attempt to get rid of tumors and mice.

God put to death our sin in Christ to get rid of our sin. It has been nailed to the cross, never to be brought up again.

A beautiful sacrifice. And the last observation about these pagan priests is that they knew to never seek

God without a sacrifice. They're like, by no means should you ever approach God without a sacrifice.

That shouldn't happen. And let me suggest to you that that's the same for you and I. Our only hope for withstanding his righteous wrath is that an acceptable sacrifice have been made to him to remove our sins.

And only on the basis of the blood of Jesus Christ, only on the basis of his sacrifice for you, do you have any right to enter the presence of God.

It's only for those who come to Jesus by faith and accept his forgiveness and follow him as their king, but for us, we have free access to God because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

But woe to anybody who would enter the presence of this holy God without a sacrifice covering them, covering their sins.

So the Philistines make plans to send the Ark of the Covenant away with five golden tumors, the swellings, and enough golden mice to represent every city and village in the whole area of Philistia, all

Philistine territory. So there's a lot more, you have to have in your mind not just five golden mice and five golden tumors, you have five golden mice or rats or whatever they are, and then,

I'm sorry, five golden tumors, and then you have a bunch, a scad of rats or mice or whatever they are.

So there's a ton of those because there's one for every village, every city, even walled or unwalled village, that they have a bunch of those to represent them.

So that's the image that you have to have in your mind. This box is probably pretty big. We don't know how big each one of these castings was, but it would still be a lot.

And I don't even know, nobody told me how many actual cities or villages that there would have been under Philistine territory during this time.

But so the priests come up with an interesting test to determine if the plagues actually came from the

God of Israel. Now, they didn't get it yet. They still think there's a chance that maybe this illness, this disease, has just been coincidence.

So they're unsure, and it isn't that they're thick, it isn't that they're ignorant. I mean, you could go, well, every place that the ark goes, the disease goes.

But how many of you know disease travels and follows people? Did you know that? They're not ignorant during this time.

They knew that it was communal, and one village would get sick, and then the next village would get sick, and somebody would travel to that village, and then they'd be sick.

So they saw patterns. They were human, just like you or me. They were able to make connections and reasonable things.

And so, I mean, how many of you have ever read this text and wondered, is it just a disease that just travels around?

Is it just an illness that's going around? And they saw spiritual things in it or whatever.

So they're doubtful. They're not even sure if this is really God -working.

So they're gonna set up this test to see. And it's kind of interesting. I think we live in a world where coincidence seems like a plausible explanation for everything.

Anybody a little bit skeptical, like I am? Are you put together that way? Some of us are a little bit more, you know, we just give our faith out more freely.

I've been one who's just had to be convinced a little bit more. And, you know, somebody claims that they saw a miracle, and I'm like, well, let's see, you know, we'll see.

Let's show me and prove it. And I don't necessarily, I'm not quick to grab onto that kind of thing.

And coincidence, I mean, God could appear here in our midst, and some people would say it's an alien, right? I mean, do you know what

I'm saying? There would always be some kind of different type of explanation for anything that God would do.

God could do a miracle here in our midst, and there'd be 17 different ways that people perceived it and thought that it happened.

So this week, I consulted with Angel Wold, who is my resident expert in the life and times of cows.

And she gave me some excellent insight regarding bovine culture, okay? I learned a lot about cows this week, primarily because cows factor into this test pretty significantly here.

And I gave her this passage, and she actually testified to laughing as she read, picturing doing the things that they do with these cows, with the cows that are on her dairy farm, her dad's dairy farm where she works.

She said it was kind of funny to picture individual cows trying to hitch them up, trying to get them to walk in a straight line, trying to get them to pull a cart together in unison in a direction.

And she was able to give me a lot of good insight into some of the ins and outs of what is kind of funny in this test and what doesn't necessarily work out.

So the test that they set up is to intentionally make it crazy unlikely, very, very unlikely that the ark will ever get back to Israel.

They wanna give God a smidgen of a chance, but God's gonna have to act miraculously to get the ark back.

He's gonna have to go against bovine nature, the way that cows act, in order for the ark to get back to Beth Shemesh, which is the closest border town to the

Philistine city of Ekron. And so that's where it's all going down. So they're setting up this test, and they take two milk cows that have recently given birth, that's significant.

They yoke them together, that's significant. They make a new cart, one that functions well, so they're at least trying to make that not an issue in the thing, but carrying the ark of the covenant and these golden statues back.

So they set them on the road to see if they take it back to Israel, but first they separate the mama cows from their calves.

Okay, so that's significant as well. And I wanna just point out that what I share beyond this point,

I think I touched a cow once in fourth grade, I think, not 100 % sure. So absolutely zero of these insights about cows.

Anybody with me on that, by the way? Anybody that would just kind of take that one with me? You just haven't really been around cows much?

Everybody else, really? You guys are just like, you guys are cow experts. I should have just consulted the congregation, I guess.

You guys all know about it. I got no insights about cows. And so cows form a significant bond with their calves.

I guess I was supposed to know that. Well, I mean, I did know that, of course I knew that. I don't know. So there's a significant bond, and the longer that the cow is with its baby, the more tight that bond becomes.

So Angel mentioned that for every day that they're together, you expect one day of grieving when they're separated.

So if they're together for three months, you kind of might expect about three months of problems or something like that.

And so that's kind of the way that they work in this bonding time. And this past week,

Angel told me that two cows at their farm had been raising four calves. I don't know, was it twins? Is that how that works then?

They adopted them, okay. So they have these two cows that were raising four calves between them, and then just last week they were separated.

So she had an exact, like this past week, illustration of this. She said the cows both broke out of their pen in search for their calves.

They broke out, so picture that happening. Like they're that desperate to get to their calves. They physically broke out, and then all of the calves went hoarse and lost their voice bellowing for their moms.

So that's the kind of picture that you have about this bond that happens. So how many of you think that's insightful to this passage?

Like that's how desperate a cow is to get to their calf. Like it's that significant, and that happened just right down in Marcellus this past week.

And so that's the kind of thing that dairy farmers have to work with and work through. So I mean, it's abundantly clear that the natural direction for a cow who has recently calved, when they're set free to wander, it's going to go to where?

It's calf, that's where it's gonna naturally gravitate to. Further, yoking a cow who has never been in a yoke, the text is abundantly clear that these cows who have never been in a yoke without training would have two likely outcomes depending on the cow's personality.

Now Angel testifies that there are two primary attitudes that cows have. There's two types of cows, there's crazy and lazy.

She said they only come in two flavors. And so the crazy ones would go all rodeo if you try,

I mean picture a rodeo, some of you have that image in your mind, they're gonna go rodeo on you if you try to hitch them up and put all the harnesses on them and the yoke.

Yoke, by the way, just simply is a device that holds two animals together. It goes over the neck and it would actually yoke them either to a hitch or yoke them together and so that's the picture that you have going on there.

And so, yeah, you would have, either they would go all rodeo or they would be totally happy with everything that's going on, munching on the grass with no intention of going anywhere.

That's the lazy one, he's gonna be like, oh yeah, she's gonna be like, what, this is cool. Just keep this going, it's all right.

So that's what's gonna happen if you try to hitch them up is you don't expect, you have to train them.

You have to train them to pull a cart. It's not, they're not training them, they're just gonna hitch them up. And to add to this training, training would be required to get two cows to even pull together.

So you hitch two cows together, say that they're both okay with that, they don't kick you in the teeth and you don't have to go to the hospital afterwards and all that kind of stuff.

So they're okay being put together, you still have an issue about them learning as a team to pull together.

So if one goes slower than the other, this pesky thing called physics kicks in and they do a lot of circles together. Or they wander around and one gets angry at the other and that kind of thing and that's what you can picture happening.

So the last observation is that even if these cows are willing to be yoked and they're willing to be yoked together and even if they pull together at the same speed and are not desperate to get back to their calves, they're still extremely skittish and curious.

So it wouldn't take much to knock them off the path toward Beth Shemesh. They would be easily distracted by things like clumps of tasty grass or the wind rustling through trees or rustling leaves or even the strange feeling of the road under their feet might set them off.

So all of these things are packed against the idea of the ark naturally making its course back to Israel.

So it's a shocking surprise to anyone who knows cows that these two mama cows yoked together for the first time, pulling a cart along a road, separated from their calves, the text says this, they went straight in the direction of Beth Shemesh.

But it's not a surprise to people who know cows that they were lowing as they went because cows vocalize when they're in distress, when they're in fear, when they're hungry, when they're separated from their calves.

They have concern, apparently these cows have some concern for what's happening, but they don't have the self -control to be able to go back to their calves.

They pull together in a direction that is definitely against their nature.

That's what we have here. So I just want to point out just this one simple caveat, this one simple thing that I think is valuable for us to understand in the big scope of things.

Our God is certainly sovereign over the animal kingdom. He can push back the natural instincts and drives within an animal.

He can shut the mouth of a hungry lion. He can cause ravens to bring food to a starving prophet.

He can speak through the mouth of a donkey and he can move a cow down the road away from its calf if he so chooses.

That's what we have happening in this text. God Almighty directing the course of these two cows.

And on a nice day, probably around the middle of June, because of the wheat harvest that we see here, the people of Beth Shemesh were out in their fields, they're harvesting wheat, when they saw the ark on a cart pulled by two cows shows up.

Can you imagine the shock and awe that would have been on the faces of those people out in that field? I mean, they probably, many people in Israel probably thought the ark was gone for good.

We're never getting this thing back. Maybe they even melted it down and made their own graven images out of it. Who knows?

I mean, it's made out of gold and it was valuable. And I mean, why in the world would the Philistines ever return it?

And it comes by itself down the road and shows up back in Israel.

And here it returns on a cart. The cows pull up next to a large flat rock and come to a stop.

It's like a ready -made sacrificial kit that shows up there. Wood for burning, flat rock for sacrifice, two cows, peel back the wrapper, minimal assembly required.

You gotta wallow presto. You got an offering right there. It's all included. God supplies it.

And Beth Shemesh was a Levitical town, meaning that some of the priests who were strategically spread throughout

Israel were lodged here so that only the priests were allowed to make sacrifices and you would have had priests on site because of the location that the ark comes back to.

So they are supposed to, I say supposed to know how to handle the ark. We'll see that they don't correctly here in a moment.

But they also know how to perform sacrifices to the Lord God Almighty so that people all rejoice, they celebrate, think in terms of like singing, dancing, bowing, enthusiastically praising

God. There's a loud ruckus there in Beth Shemesh as they celebrate the return of the ark of God.

And these two cows become the special guests at a community barbecue in Beth Shemesh, right? They're the special.

Remember that those sacrifices are not thrown on the altar and just burned and consumed in their entirety.

A portion of that was for the people that were making the sacrifice to eat. And so there is,

I mean, you gotta thank two cows. This is a barbecue that's going on here, a lot of meat, and they're gonna eat well in Beth Shemesh that day.

To quote Angel's dad, who's been on a dairy farm for all of his 70 years, minus the only time he's been off the farm was for three tours in Vietnam.

And aside from that, he's always been with cows. And he says this, I love this quote.

Write it down, get your pencils ready. Cows, speaking of cows, he says they have a choice. They can make the milkshake or the burger.

Cows have a choice. They can either make the milkshake or the burger. Both sound great, like great options to me, and I think they go well together.

I mean, I don't know. So yeah, I think that's great. Only a guy who works with cows probably really, really, really deeply gets that.

But verse 16 gives us a funny realization that the powerful leaders of the Philistines, these five most prominent leaders of the entire nation of Philistia have been following the cart along the way the nine miles up the road.

This is a funny picture. Five powerful kings spying on a cart pulled by two cows. Like, are they flitting from tree to tree?

Like, where's it gonna go? Is it going straight? Is it gonna keep going? Wonder what that looked like. But the Philistines got their answer. God was the cause of the plagues.

He had indeed been judging them, but now he has returned the ark of his presence to his people.

And the great stone where the sacrifice took place, it said it was commemorated even to the author's day.

They could go, when the author was writing, people could go and see that very stone where these offerings were made. But the celebratory nature of this text takes a dark turn in verse 19.

You see that the people of Israel, they're glad, they're celebrating, they're enthusiastic, they're having a barbecue, everything's going great, but things are still not fixed between the relationship of the people to the holiness of God.

And just like the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, 70 guys decide to look into the ark and he struck them dead.

The text doesn't quite explain if their faces melted off or not, but Hollywood seems to think that that's what happens if you look inside the ark.

I don't know. I wasn't allowed to watch that as a kid, but it was kind of one of these, like, hey, close your eyes.

And I was like, oh, that's gross. Freaking out. Some of you know what I'm talking about. Some of you were like, we didn't watch movies.

And I'm like, oh, sorry. But verse 19 should draw us up short with really no laughing matter, no jokes about verse 19 in the end because I am pulled up short in my study going what is

God doing here? Didn't they just make sacrifices to him? Didn't he just bring them back their religious comfort object, their spiritual blankie, so to speak?

Isn't he bringing back comfort to the nation and here he kills 70 men in this event?

Shows that not all is well between God and his people. The restoration of the ark does not mean the restoration of the relationship.

They still disrespect him and his rules. They were told to cover the ark with cloths whenever it was out among the people.

And this ought to have been step one by the Levites who apparently didn't do this. In Numbers 4 .20,

the book of Numbers 4 .20, the people were commanded to never look directly at the ark let alone lift the lid and peer inside.

And the Hebrew language here would be well translated, they looked inside the ark.

But regardless of which one they did, whether they just looked at it or they opened the lid and looked in, either way they have broken

God's law, God's definitive, clearly stated rules for their practices. So let's just tackle head on what many of us might be thinking.

This seems unfair and kind of extreme. What was this sin? Is it curiosity? Is that a sin?

I mean, death seems like a harsh punishment for this seemingly minor thing. But this calls into question our own thoughts about sin and our own motivation.

Ask yourself this question about this text. Do you believe that God got it right?

Do you believe that he got it right? Do we trust God to get it right when it comes to judgment? Often, if we're honest, often we don't.

In our darker moments we find ourselves considering ourselves to be more gracious than God Almighty. Are we more kind than him?

Do you trust God to get it right regarding these 70 men who he put to death? Let me suggest that if we cannot trust

God with a temporal fate of 70 ancient men that we've never met, we certainly are gonna struggle to trust him with our day in and day out lives.

Especially with those that we love that are close to us. The celebration of the return of the ark turns to mourning and sorrow.

And the people of Beth Shemesh ask two very Philistine -type questions. And I believe it's a bit of a snide question.

Who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God? Who can stand before him in their anger they've lost?

They're mourning, they're sad, and they're angry. It shows what their heart attitude was to God to begin with.

Before trouble comes, did you know that in the midst of trouble, that's where your heart is shown in your relationship to God?

I think before this they already had an animosity towards him and then they say this. Where can we send him away to get away from us?

When we encounter the holiness of God, we really only have two possible responses. Either humble ourselves and come to him in the way that he's prescribed or try to escape.

Try to push him away, try to get away. And that's what the people of Beth Shemesh choose to do.

You see, the Philistines had opted for sending him away. Now, the people of God in Beth Shemesh follow suit.

And they send the ark 15 miles to the town of Kiriath -Jerim. And the people of Kiriath -Jerim set up the ark in the home of Abinadab.

They seem to be pleased to deal with this. They seem to have, at least this community seems to have their heart right in relationship to God.

And they appoint Eleazar as the Levite in charge of caring for the ark. And the ark found its home there for the next 20 years.

And it says, while the people of Israel lamented in sorrow before the Lord. I believe that this lament is not a biblical lament in the sense of the

Psalms, but that they're feeling sad for their circumstances. We don't see them coming back to the

Lord in humility, though. They feared his holiness, but not enough to come to him according to his laws and his rules.

Not enough to come to serve him in the way that he has designated. So I would suggest to you that the people of Israel during this era and this time, they fear him, but they do not respect him.

They fear him, but they don't respect him. So this is a strange text that has some practical applications for where we live.

And we'll run through these real quick before we come to communion together this morning. The first is that God needs no help in returning his ark.

Again, a holdover from last week, but we see it fleshed out here. The same application from last week, just at the start here.

He is sovereign and can prove himself as sovereign whenever he wants to, even over cows.

He can use any and all circumstances to draw us to himself. But again, remember that he cannot be coerced.

God chose to work through the Philistines' test, but he didn't have to. He chose to, by his own sovereign will.

He said, this is the way I'm gonna do this thing. But God needs no help from you or I.

He certainly is gracious to enlist us, to include us in his plans. How many of you are grateful for the way that he's put you together, the opportunity that you have to serve him?

Anybody testify to that? The second observation is that God is first holy and then your friend.

Holy first and then your friend. You cannot have God as your friend until you have trembled before him in reverent awe.

His attention to us without a covering for our sin is dangerous and deadly for humanity.

You do not want the attention of the holy God without a covering for your sin. The third observation is that God is indeed still involved in pursuing his people, even for discipline when we do wrong.

He is faithful to bring us back to himself. He doesn't give up on his people, even when we stray, even when we wander, even when we find ourselves mired in sin.

And sometimes that means, unfortunately for many of us, it means re -centering us on his holiness by bringing discipline to us in practical ways.

And sometimes those ways are painful. Sometimes those ways are stark, that he has to shake us to get our attention.

And that's part of his grace. Part of his grace is the conviction and the consequences that come to us when we stray away from him.

And the last thing is that God has a bigger plan than we often, that we often cannot see.

These events are only a sliver of the big picture of God bringing forward King David and moving his ark toward a resting place in the temple in Jerusalem that's gonna be built by David's son

Solomon. These events are preparing a nation for a kingdom. We need to submit to a king.

Humanity needs a king, a benevolent king, a good king, a righteous king, and his name is

Jesus. And that good king is the sacrifice that we needed in order to come to God's presence without fear.

Without the sacrifice of Christ, we should live in fear. But you might be really confused about why

God seems so angry and easily ticked off in the Old Testament, right? I mean, if God smokes people for looking at or into, whichever one it was, his golden box, then maybe we should be a bit more respectful at church, right, maybe

I should be wearing a suit and tie, and maybe we should just be a lot more formal about the way that we think of God, and we should come in in hushed tones and with incense and all kinds of things to create an ambiance here of deeper piety and solemnity before this

God who could get really angry if we shout out or if we get up and get more coffee during the message, or God forbid, spill our coffee on his holy floor, right?

That all misses the point, right? That faith uses fear.

Faith uses fear and God's holiness at the beginning to bring us to the end of our own hope.

Without a savior, I'd be toast. Anybody raise your hand to that? Without a savior, you'd be toast, you'd testify to that?

If it depends on me to keep the law and to make him happy with me, to dress in a way that makes him happy, to act in a way that makes him happy, to run my business in a way that makes him happy, or my relationship with my wife or my kids or whatever guilt and stress you can heap on your life that God wants of you, if it depends on us, we're all in big trouble.

That's one thing I know to be true of you. You can't meet his law. You won't. So as we let the fear of that sink into us, and hopefully everybody in this room has had that fear at some point.

You've let that sink in, that woe is me, I'm undone before a holy God, I am toast,

I am gonna be crushed under the weight of his righteous and holy demands over me.

So then you've let fear have its way in your life, and that's meant to drive you to your own reality of your inadequacy, your own inability.

You're on your face before the holy God saying, I can't do this, I can't please you enough, I can't do enough, it's impossible.

And that is when we recognize that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is our only hope. It's in that brokenness, and that's the purpose of fear.

The purpose of fear is to bring you in, but not to keep you there. Because once you experience that love and he adopts you into his family, perfect love casts out all fear.

And that's when he says, my friend, my friend, only after you've acknowledged him as holy, only after you've acknowledged him is so much different than you or I.

So if you've come to a place where fear of the holiness of the righteous God has driven you to your end and you've submitted to Christ and asked him to save you, then

I'd encourage you to come to one of these tables in the back with joy this morning. That you need not fear any longer.

You were once an enemy, and through the blood of Christ, you've been adopted into his family. You've been washed clean, you've been made new, and if that describes you, then go to those tables and take a cup of juice to remember his blood that was shed for you, and take a cracker to remember his body that was broken in your place.

The punishment that you deserved was heaped on him. And do this this morning in remembrance of the sacrifice that has removed your sin and taken the wrath of God from you forever.

Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the sacrifice that is our place of hope.

I thank you for the fear that has driven us to you, the fear that has reasonably brought us to the end of ourselves and the recognition of our need.

Without it, without that fear, without that reasonable understanding of who you are and your holiness and your immense and crushing law over our lives, we would all be in deep trouble.

To be quite honest, we'd be seeking to compete with one another here. This couldn't be a church, this would be a big competition to see who can be more righteous and who can be more holy and so we can feel better about ourselves.

But Father, I thank you that Recast is not that. We love one another, we encourage one another, we rebuke one another, we bring one another along, and we are encouraging to grow in Christ, each one of us.

I thank you for this community and I thank you for your love and I thank you for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that is our unity and as we have an opportunity to remember,

Father, I pray that you would release us from fear. Anybody who is truly your child here present, that you would release us from fear to joy and celebration in light of the great mercy that you have shown to us.

And Father, if there's anybody here who has not been released from that fear, they're still trying to go it alone, they're still trying to be saved on their own merit because of what they've done,

Father, I pray that you would give them boldness to both skip communion this morning, take in this song, and then come and talk with me after the service, or come to talk with one of the band members, and just get an opportunity to start fresh with forgiveness and a relationship with Jesus Christ, and it's in his name that I pray, amen.