The Meaning Of Life

https://biblehub.com/nkjv/1_samuel/5.htm

The Ark of the Covenant, or the Ark of God as it has been referred to in this book, is now in the hands of the Philistine. How were they able to touch and move it without perishing? I can only assume that since the ark is no longer in the hands of the children of Israel, it has lost much of it’s Holiness, that the Spirit of God has left the ark.

The Philistines ends up parking the ark next to their idol Dagon, and when they awoke the next day, their idol had fallen over on the ground before the ark. This was a good sign as it meant God was still in control of the ark. So the Philistines set their idol back up, but the next morning, Dagon had fallen over again, this time damaged.

Today, you can expose people to the Bible, quote scripture to them, reason with them, give them logic, and they still deny God. If I were a Philistine in those days and awoke to find my god bowed down to the God of Abraham, more than one eyebrow would have been raised. And after this, the Philistians in the city of Ashdod were struck with tumors.

I equate this will someone who goes to church, but does not have the Spirit in them. The ark, like a church, is a Holy place, and even though the Glory of God had left the ark, it was still Holy enough that it made the wicked physically ill just to be near it. So the people of Ashdod turfed the ark to the city of Gath.

And once the ark was in Gath, the people of Gath also broke out in tumors. So they turfed the ark to the city of Ekron, and many were killed, and those who weren’t killed were stricken with tumors.

So the people of Ekron Called meeting of the lords of the Philistines, and they decided to send the ark back to the children of Israel. The built a new cart on which is can ride, the set the ark on it, and they connected two milk cows to the cart.

And it’s a shame their superstitions were greater than their respect for the power of God, because the turned the cows loose and said, (I’m paraphrasing) “If the cows lead the cart back to Israel, we know it was the God of Abraham who inflicted us, but if the cows stay here, we know that it is just a coincidence that we fell ill every time the ark was near us. And when they turned the cows loose, they immediately headed for Israel and came to the town of Beth Shemesh, and when they saw the ark, they were immediately rejoicing that it had returned to Israel. But you know, sometimes reading the Bible is like watching a Laurel and Hardy episode, or Abbott and Costello, because when you read some of these stories, you have this thought of “what were they thinking?” And unfortunately, you receive they had the same level of intelligence as many of us have today.

The people of Beth Shemesh just couldn’t resist. They could not honor God’s law, they couldn’t accept the sanctity of the ark. They couldn’t accept what their forefathers had told them, and had to find out for themselves. So they looked inside the ark.

And scripture says that over 50000 men of Beth Shemesh perished because the Lord “struck them with a great slaughter”.

The more I read the Bible and read passages that describe God’s wrath, or God’s anger, or that God “killed someone”, I makes me examine the Bible that much closer. In the job I had before I retired, I had to teach people critical thinking, and one of the drills I used was a poll asking for their impression of words like, “a few”, “sometimes”, “frequently”, “several”, terms that were subjective, just to show them the vast difference in the way we all perceive things.

For example, someone could running into the buildings yelling, “there’s a pack of several dogs outside and they tried to attack me!” One person might interpret that statement to mean there or four or five dogs in the pack, while someone elses immediately thinks it is a band of a dozen or more dogs. The drill was to teach people to understand someone else’s description of something may not match the perception we have.

Because of that, when I read passages, like the one in Chapter 6, that “God” struck the people with a great slaughter, I have my doubts. “If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father”. Does the character of Jesus sound as if he would strike and slaughter over 50,000 people in one act? Jesus had many enemies, the Romans, the Pharisees, the Saducees, even many of the Jews, and He had the opportunity to strike them all and slaughter them. In fact, that is what the Pharisees perceived their Messiah to be like, they expected Him to come into town riding on a white horse in full battle array, ready to kick some Roman butt! That was what God was like, and the Messiah would be just like Him. So when Jesus came in as a gentle, kind, loving, and forgiving teacher, they didn’t think He was the Messiah.

So once again, when I read that the people of Beth Shemesh couldn’t control themselves and opened the ark, it is my opinion that once the ark was back in Israel, the Glory of God returned to it, and anyone unrighteous who touched it perished.

As I stated earlier, many people have been searching for the lost ark, yet the people of Beth Shemesh sent a message to the people of Kirjath Jearim, telling them to come and get the ark.

These two chapters tell a story about many people who were afraid of the ark, when actually all you had to do was respect the ark and treat it as Mosaic Law instructed it be taken care of.

I urge you, if you believe God to be a vicious tyrant who kills people for failing to obey Him, read the Bible again, taking into consideration what the people of those days had been taught and what was the social environment of the times that affected how people perceived of things which obviously affected the way they described and wrote these accounts.