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God First, Man Second: Fool's Edition

Today's foolish people are brought to you by the letters I & P and the numbers 5, 6 & 7. That would refer to the Israelites and Philistines of 1 Samuel 6 and 7.

To save space here I'm going to refrain from copying all 3 chapters here, but if you want a glance at ridiculousness by pagans and believers alike, I encourage you to check it out. But here's the short version.

The Philistines capture the Ark of God, the very symbol of where God rests, and take it back to their own country. They place the Ark next to the idol of their own god Dagon. They come in the next morning to find their god fallen and bowing to the Ark.

That should be a sign.

But they put Dagon back next to the Ark and leave again. The next morning Dagon is fallen again, this time with his head and his hands fallen off. This scares the Philistines into worrying what might happen to them. But instead of turning to a clearly more powerful God, they decide it would be best to get rid of the Ark.

Ummm, why not just start serving the true God?

The Israelites are worse, treating the Ark with virtually the same contempt, while they take 20 years to need to be told to stop serving other gods and expecting God to help them. I know these people didn't have Facebook, but could no one share a story with one another?

God, in just a few short chapters, shows his superiority to false gods and foolish people. I hope we can learn from their drastically bad mistakes and put God first.
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