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During my final year in college, I was walking from my dorm to the cafeteria when I head a scratching sound followed by a shriek. I looked up to see another college student yelling and carrying on about the scratch that had just been caused on her car. I don’t remember the specifics about how it happened, but what I do remember was thinking about how grieved she seemed to be over what looked to be a fairly small scratch that would probably be a pretty simple fix.
I also remember God speaking these words to me, “It’s hard when gods fall.”
Obviously, I couldn’t judge what was in that young lady’s heart and I didn’t take the word from God as a statement about her heart as much as I did as a warning about my own. He was telling me to make sure not to ever allow my possessions to possess me. He was using her situation as an illustrated sermon about what happens when we allow anything to rise to a god level in our lives other that Jesus, and I’ve never forgotten it because it was so powerful.
It’s hard when gods fall.
There’s an interesting story in 1 Samuel 5 that illustrates this truth even further. The ark of God — a symbol of the Lord’s presence — had been captured by the Philistines, enemies of God’s people. The Philistines brought the ark back and placed it in the temple of one of their false gods, Dagon. And that’s when things got weird.
The next day, the idol was face down on the floor in front of the ark of God. The people, assuming maybe something had caused it to fall over, put it back in its place, only to come back the next morning and find it had fallen again, and this time it was broken. The head and the hands of the idol were lying in the doorway, and as a result, the priests of that god stopped stepping on the threshold whenever they’d walk into the temple.
What does all of this have to do with us in 2021? I’m glad you asked.
First, I believe that we’re living in a time when we are witnessing gods falling left and right. I’m sure we could list a bunch of them, but let’s just mention the obvious ones: the god of politics, the god of nationalism, the god of individualism, the god of capitalism, the god of sexuality, the god of identity, the god of religion, the god of denominations, and the list could go on. The names of the gods aren’t as important as what we do when they fall, and if we’re not wise, I’m afraid we’ll find ourselves responding the same way the Philistines did when their god, Dagon, fell.
What did they do? First, they put the god back in its place. I believe that everything we’ve experienced — COVID-19, social and racial tension, lockdowns, and quarantines — has been used by God to cause many of the previously listed gods to fall. Will we learn from this, or will we attempt to put all the previous gods back in place? I fear that we are trying to go back to what was instead of seeking to move forward into what will be.
Second, instead of acknowledging that God wanted them to bow to his authority, the Philistine priests simply changed the way they worshipped their false god. God wanted them to turn away from the temple and the worship of Dagon, but they instead added something new to the old ways. They decided never to step on the threshold! What does that mean for us? Simply this: we can’t bring new things into old ways. When gods fall, the goal can’t be to improve what was wrong to begin with. They were still trying to honor the idol. How many today are still trying to honor what God has clearly revealed was a false god?
Finally, they sent the ark away. Instead of recognizing that the ultimate power and authority of the one true God was greater than the false gods they had been worshipping, they simply got rid of the power that was breaking their system.
Friend, I hope you can see the obvious application of this in our time. We’ve reached a breaking point in our country and in the church. In the midst of one of the darkest times our country has known, the presence of God has grown stronger, and it is breaking our comfort zones and preferences. The presence of God is challenging us to rethink not only how we worship, but what we worship, and too many are finding that their gods have fallen. The gods of preference and pride are lying broken before the presence of God. The gods of religion and rules are lying broken before the reign of God.
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And it all leads to this simple question: what will we do as our gods fall?
I don’t know what that young lady did after her car was scratched that day. Maybe she realized that her car held far too much power over her life and decided to shift her priorities? Maybe she didn’t. But the more important question for about us. Will we recognize that God is overpowering the lesser things in our lives that have held far too much influence over us, or will we simply push the disrupting presence of God as far away as we can so that our polite worship of unworthy gods can continue?
May we receive the fallen gods in front of the risen Lord as the gift it is, and return to the place where nothing matters more than just sitting at his feet, even if that means sitting among the broken pieces of the gods we once knew.
