The Weight of Glory

Scripture Text: 1 Samuel 5:1-12 and 1 Samuel 6:1-7:2

Quotes for Reflection

Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods
In any culture in which God is largely absent, sex, money, and politics will fill the vacuum for different people. This is the reason that our political discourse is increasingly ideological and polarized. Many describe the current poisonous public discourse as a lack of bi-partisanship, but the roots go much deeper than that. As Niebuhr taught, they go back to the beginning of the world, to our alienation from God, and to our frantic efforts to compensate for our feelings of cosmic nakedness and powerlessness. The only way to deal with all these things is to heal our relationship with God.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.

Martin Lloyd-Jones, Old Testament Evangelistic Sermons
When you think you have him defeated, then he is active; when you think you have him captive, he knocks down your god. He is God who cannot be restrained, illimitable, absolute, eternal—the living God.Application Questions

Application Questions

1. How can negative emotional responses reveal idolatry? What is a recent example that you can identify?

2. God crushed the Philistine god Dagan. How might that reframe difficulty in your life?

3. What resonated most from this story about the unique love of God ultimately expressed in the gospel of Jesus Christ?