When It Looks Like God Is Losing
It’s no fun when someone takes something from you that you weren’t looking to get taken. It’s just not a good way to start your day when you walk out to your car in the morning to find a thief has substituted your wheels with cinder blocks. How many ice cream stand owners out there have to have their cow mascots purloined by bovine bandits before we say enough is enough? Or on a somewhat larger scale, would it be too much of an inconvenience for North Korea to return the USS Pueblo they poached off us 50 years ago? Now think back to Israel in the days of Samuel and Eli. The Philistines just vanquished them in battle (killing 34,000 Hebrew soldiers) and to top it all off—they poached the Ark of the Covenant off of them. God’s people are defeated. They are whipped! They’re discomfited! Israel lost, but did God lose? Does God ever lose?
The world might think so; even Christians might sometimes be tempted to think so. The rising tide of immortality is palpable. The television receiver and the World Wide Web are easy-come superhighways of lawlessness. Liberal political agendas are fashionable. Christians struggle to gain victory over sin. Friends and loved ones die without Christ while faithful believers witnessed and prayed for years. Is God losing? Here are a few devotional thoughts from 1 Samuel 5 that show that God doesn’t lose, even from the “victorious” Philistine’s frame of reference.
The world doesn’t want God to be the winner (1 Sam 5:1-2).
As far as the Philistines were concerned, their god Dagon beat Yahweh. The Ark is the closest thing Israel has to an image for their God so it becomes a trophy in their pagan temple. The world wants to worship anything but the one true God. They have no desire to recognize “the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God” (1 Tim 1:17).
God always has first place whether we recognize it or not (5:3).
But their refusal to recognize His exalted position doesn’t detract from its certitude. God knocked over Dagon and made him a worshipper of the one true God. God is superior to every weak, empty, and helpless idol you can try to replace Him with (even our newfangled idols of the twenty-first century). Take a look at Psalm 115 for a keen reminder that idolatry is horse feathers. Dagon was a disappointment. He fell down on the job and had to be propped back up. Idols disappoint. They fail to satisfy; they promise emptiness and hurt. But so often we prop them back up like good little Philistines.
Worshipping anything other than God is delusive and dangerous (5:4-6).
Round two and Dagon takes it to the chin (and the hands!). He’s down for the count despite the best efforts of the Philistines to elevate him above God. In one fell swoop, God proves that idolatry is a foolish delusion and a grave danger as the outbreak of tumors testifies. Have you ever looked back in hindsight on a situation where you put something else before God and found it to be a good judgment call?
The world actually does recognize God’s powerful hand (5:7-9).
The Philistines’ fears from chapter four over the horror of falling under God’s hand come to fruition. They recognize exactly what’s happening. They recognize His hand, but they reject Him just as Paul later describes men who “when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God” (Rom 1:21). It’s all a matter of how people respond.
But the world responds with the wrong cry (5:10-12).
And the Philistines do respond. They cry out in their affliction of death and tumors as the Ark is passed around like a hot potato of divine wrath. They respond with a cry, but it’s the wrong kind of cry. Theirs is a cry like we read about in Revelation 6 when the unsaved cry out in despair during the Tribulation. They don’t want to get right with God, they just want to escape the consequences of rejecting Him. God wants our cries of defeat to be cries to Him. Like Israel did when they found themselves between the Scylla of the Red Sea and the Charybdis of Pharaoh’s army and “the children of Israel cried out unto the LORD.” That’s the right cry to a God who never loses. Even when it looked like God suffered His greatest defeat as the incarnate God died on a Roman cross, it was the greatest victory. “But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 15:57).
Brent Niedergall is the youth pastor at Catawba Springs Christian Church in Apex, North Carolina. He holds an MDiv from Shepherds Theological Seminary and is pursuing a DMin from Maranatha Baptist Seminary.
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