Transcription of the Video: Confronting Evil

The ancient land of Israel is a testimony and evidence, if you will, of the greatness of what God did in that country, a testimony to the truth of the words that we find in the pages of the Bible.

The Bible speaks often of a great civilization we know as the Philistines. The Philistines lived out on a coastal plain, powerful and cultured. The Israelites at the time - the time of the judges - lived up in the hills almost as if they were afraid to face that Philistine culture. In between the two, several valleys which connected those mountains with that coastal plain. Beth Shemesh, one of those ancient tells, stands as a guard house between the people of the coast and the people of the hills. 

...the work area of olive processing and other kinds of things like that in their industry. Area C was a city gate with huge fortifications probably from the time of that battle. And area A down there is part of the outer defenses of the city from the Iron Age. But beyond that, I don't know.

Welcome to Tel Beth Shemesh, as we call it. We're sitting on another one of these huge mounds that's made up of several layers of civilization. You'll notice on this one, there's some recent excavation. So you can see how archaeology's being done. They found some enormous defensive structures here in the area where we are and a little bit down below, a huge work area. Probably an olive processing area. So this was an active, ongoing city probably in the period of the Iron Age - late Iron Age. Maybe the time of Rehoboam or shortly before or after (about 920 B.C. shall we say). So that kind of gives you the setting. 

The town of Beth Shemesh is called Beth Shemesh - Beth means house, Shemesh - sun. So the house of the sun. If we go to the west here, we come out to the coastal plain, and it's not very far. Three, four, five miles down this valley, you would be out in that broad coastal plain where that main road ran between the eastern empires and the western empire. If you go to the east of us in this direction, very soon you would be to the Judaean Mountains. I can see the tops of the Judaean Mountains there behind where you are. You can just see them there in the distance going on up to 3,000 feet and more. And that's, in Bible times, at least in the Old Testament, where most of the Israelite people lived. 

Around us, the Shephelah, the low foothills that separate those two. And we can actually say, if you look particularly over here in this direction, you can see where some of those foothills are that separate then the mountains from the coastal plain. 

Now our focus will be-- and this will be throughout our day today-- is the fact that there are places where there are these broad valleys that come up from the coastal plain through the Shephelah and even some distance into the Judaean Mountains. And what that does then is it gives you access back and forth. If you live in the mountains and you want to come down to the coastal plain, this is the place to go. If you live on the coastal plain and you want to come up into the mountains, this is the place to be. So a place like this is very, very significant for the strategy of this area because it separates. It guards the entrance to the mountains, if you will, or from the perspective of the people down here, it guards the entrance to the coastal plain. So this place was often battled over, often mentioned in the Bible. 

That's our geographical setting. We're in the Shephelah that comes up into the mountains. This one is called the Soreq Valley. This particular territory right here in the Shephelah and out into the coastal plain was given to the tribe of Dan, a very small tribe. Probably the smallest of the twelve tribes. The tribe of Dan was given this in the Book of Joshua as their inheritance. That was where they were placed. However, for whatever reasons, the tribe of Dan was never able to or never chose to push the Philistines away. But one of the aspects of the faith lesson I want to talk about in a few minutes is the fact that when God gives them a role he wants them to carry out, failing to carry it out creates problems. And the tribe of Dan for whatever reasons was unable to carry out their task of subjugating this particular area and pushing the Philistines away. 

Relate that to yourself. When God calls you to a particular task and a particular place, it becomes important that in your carrying out your calling, whatever that calling is, it becomes really important to carry it out fully. And if there's some aspect of our life that we don't bring under the dominion of God's value system or God's way of life, we jeopardize our whole mission. It doesn't do any good to be distinctively committed to God in a part of your life and then let the rest of it go. And that, we see here. The tribe of Dan left the Philistine presence and that was going to create problems for a long time for the Israelite people.

Historically now, the Philistines live out here on the coastal plain to the west. About 1100 B.C., a little bit earlier, there was a migration of people coming from the Aegean world, from the area we might say Greece. They migrated along the Mediterranean world all along - down the coast of the Mediterranean here on the eastern side of the Mediterranean. Several groups of those Aegean people known in history as the sea people (the people who came from the sea) settled along the coast of Palestine, the coast of Israel here. 

The ones who settled here, apparently, became what we know to be the Philistines. Over here, we had the Philistine cities Ashdad, Ashkelon, and Gaza and Ekron more inland. We call that Tel Miqne today. And that's only about three miles from here. They settled in kind of city-states. A very important detail you ought to know about the Philistine people who lived out here on the coastal plain is that they were the sophisticated culture of the day. 

The Philistines had technology. The Philistines had iron - we'll talk about iron at Azekah - something the Israelites didn't have. The Philistines had an olive-processing business that was incredible. In fact, they may have processed more olive oil in those Philistine cities than is processed in the country today. 

Now that's an important detail to keep in mind. Don't think of it like the Israelites had it all together and they have this fine sophisticated culture and the Philistines are barbarians. Look at it as exactly the opposite. The Israelites were the unsophisticated folk, the people that didn't really have it all together. And living down here on the sea coast are these very sophisticated, cultured, developed Philistines and how that attractiveness to the Israelites created problems. Because these Philistines who lived out here to the west also had a religion that was very contrary to the one of the Israelites. They worshiped the gods of fertility again. In some cases, the god was called Dagon in our Bible, who was the grain god apparently - the god of fertility, the god who provided the rain. 

As you can see by the flat land here, the wheat and so on was dependent on the rain so they worshiped the grain god. Not very far from here at Ekron, they worshiped a fertility god who was named Baal Zebul. We say Beelzebul if you will, which means Prince Baal. And just to show you that confrontation, the Israelites nicknamed him, by changing the Hebrew word a little bit, Baal Zebub. We say Beelzebub. And Beelzebub meant lord of the flies like maggots and death and filth and garbage. So they nicknamed him the lord of the flies. He's mentioned in several places in the Bible. 

Jesus later, to the north of here, uses that word Beelzebub, to refer to the devil. So what's going on here, people, is not some little thing but very critical to the very thing that God is doing in this place in this country.

The Bible picks up with that in the book of Judges 13. And the Bible says it like this. "The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, so the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for 40 years." So there's a 40-year period now where the Israelites are drawn to the culture. They're attracted to its religion. They're attracted to its lifestyle. They're attracted to its technology and all of the other things. And they bought into it. So God basically turned them over to Philistine domination. 

Now a certain man of Zorah-- and we can say over here is a settlement known as Zorah. So if you can imagine Zorah as a little settlement. I'm not saying it's that one, but maybe up on the hill beyond a ways. "A man of Zorah from the tribe of Dan had a wife who was childless." You know this story. "An angel of the Lord appeared to this man and said, 'You're going to have a child. Now see to it that this child becomes a nazirite.'"

A nazirite, according to the Old Testament, was someone who didn't drink wine, who didn't touch or come into contact with an unclean, dead thing, dead body, and was also a person who didn't cut their hair. Now those particular things were not so much moral things. But what they did is they set the person up as being somebody strange, somebody different, somebody unique. You didn't cut your hair. The Israelite people trimmed their hair. You didn't drink wine. Everybody drank wine. That was the beverage. You couldn't eat meat. That made you very odd in this culture.

Now the point of that was not so much that there was anything sacred about those things, but it was a faith lesson. It was a visual aid where God said, "You do those things to be different so that when people see you, they will understand that they have to be different." Different from what? Different from the culture they live in.

So Samson is called to be an example of being different, being unique, being set apart as a nazirite. "He grew and the Lord blessed him, and the Lord began to stir him while he was in Mahaneh Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol. I want to say two things about that. The word there with Dan - Mahaneh Dan - means the tent or the camp (the tents or the camps of Dan), which probably indicates that the people of Dan were so primitive yet at this point, they didn't even have a city to live in. They were living in tents. They were living in a camp. They were more like Bedouin than they were settled people. That gives you a contrast between the Philistines and the Israelites.

The other thing is that if Zorah is over here on this end of the ridge, Eshtaol is there on the other end of the ridge. So as you look out here today, you can honestly say that someplace between there and there, the Spirit of God began to stir in Samson, and he began to feel his calling. So somewhere not far from here, he lit the foxes' tails on fire. And you can see them running through wheat fields. We were here in June and that whole field there was just beautiful. We had pictures of the wheat field back here toward Beth Shemesh and it was really neat. So you can see that.

Somewhere near here, Samson took the city gates and carried them all the way up into the mountains at Hebron and stood them against a tree over against Hebron. It was like 45 miles he dragged those city gates through here. Unfortunately, however, he's not particularly effective in his calling for a specific reason. First, of all, it says, "Samson went down to Timnah and saw there a young Philistine woman." And so begins the story and the problem of Samson when he goes down to the Philistines constantly. And rather than being in confrontation with them, Samson ends up being a person who participates in exactly the culture that he's called to confront. 

Now I would like to add that to the faith lesson. Samson's failure was not simply that he drank wine, he got his hair cut, and he touched a dead body. Those things were simply indicative of the fact that Samson's failure was he began to participate in exactly the cultural value system that he was supposed to be confronting. And it's impossible for us to live out this God-centered existence in confrontation of the cultural values that we live with, with which we disagree if we participate in the value system that we oppose.

I think one of the great failures of the Christian faith and the Christian community is its tendency to adopt the cultural values and the lifestyle values of the very culture we're supposed to be distinct from. 

You know the story. He goes down this valley to the Philistines. He meets with their culture. He becomes attracted to it and he begins to participate particularly in the lifestyle of Delilah. He breaks all three of the commands. He goes down and he kills a lion with his bare hands the Bible says. To that point, Samson had been destroying other people and things with instruments like the jawbone of a donkey. By touching the dead body of that lion with his bare hands, he's come into contact with a dead body, number one.

He has a wedding party and the Hebrew word there indicates that the party he went to in connection with that marriage is a drinking bout, an orgy. So he breaks the second standard, which is don't participate in the drinking. 

Then of course, Delilah gets him and finally finds out the last secret of this strength and gets Samson to get his hair cut. Now suddenly, he's weak. When he lived a lifestyle that was completely separated to God's values, he was effective. When he compromised with the value system that he represented, he lost his power. And that, people, is as practical for you as it was for Samson. 

By being born in the Shephelah, Samson had a task. What's his task? His task is to be a part of this confrontation between the culture of God, if you will, and the culture of the world. To be born in America is like being born in the Shephelah. Because America, it seems to me, is in some sense on the cutting edge of where cultural values are happening. And the cultural battle over right and wrong and good and evil is happening, in my opinion, in western culture in the media and in all of these other things. To be born in America is to be born at the point where that battle is happening in our world right now.

I want you to think of yourself. You are like Samson in a sense, born in the Shephelah. About 20 miles north of here, after the time of Samson-- Samson had been dead already a long time-- there's a shrine near a place called Shiloh. And in that place-- now, I'm talking back at the time of the Judges or sometime thereafter-- is the Ark of the Covenant. And the priest who's ministering - kind of the high priest, if you will - is a man named Eli. The Philistines already now up in the mountains. And there's a battle up there up in the mountains between the Philistines and the Israelites. They're up on the plateau. They are jeopardizing the very plan of salvation in a sense that God is at work doing. 

Eli decides against his better judgement, apparently, to send the Ark of the Covenant into battle. The Israelites had not been living out their distinctiveness. They had not been willing to confront their culture, but somehow at the last minute, they think maybe God will rescue us. Let's get him into this thing. 

So they run back to the tabernacle, the shrine. They take the Ark of the Covenant. They go into battle and the ark is taken, and it ends up out here on the sea coast on the Philistine cities. And things begin to happen. You remember the story. The Philistine god, Dagon, falls over and he ends up flat on his face. His head falls off and he's bowed down to the Ark of the Covenant in the temple. So the Philistines are thinking, "Hey. Maybe this God is more than we realize."

So they send the Ark of the Covenant to Ekron, and they have all kinds of problems. They develop tumors and they have a plague of rats, which probably those two things went together. 

Finally, they decided, "Maybe we ought to send this Ark of the Covenant back. Maybe this God thing is bigger than what we realize." So this is how they say it. "Get a cart ready with two cows that have calves and have never been yoked. Hitch the cows to the cart, but take their calves away and pin them up. Take the Ark of the Lord and put it on the cart. And in a chest beside it, put some gold objects that we're sending back. Send it on its way, but keep watching it. If it goes back up to its own territory, toward Beth Shemesh, then we know that the Lord has brought this great disaster on us."

"They placed the Ark of the Lord on the cart with the gifts in it. Then the cows went straight up toward Beth Shemesh, staying on the road lowing all the way. They did not turn to the right or the left. The rulers of the Philistines followed them as far as the border of Beth Shemesh. 

Now where is that? Well let's set a couple of things. When you have a city like this, if you look around, obviously, there's not a huge amount of farmland. So where you have nice farmland, you farm. If you look along the left-hand side of this valley, way in the distance, almost at the base of that hill, you see a road. That's probably about how it was. The Philistine cities are out there. So we can imagine that cart coming down the road and the Philistine rulers coming back in this far. "Let's find out whether this is God causing this problem or if we have another problem." 

"Now the people of Beth Shemesh were harvesting wheat in the valley. And when they looked up, they saw the ark, and they rejoiced at the sight. The ark in the cart came to the field of Joshua of Beth Shemesh and there it stopped beside a large rock. The people chopped up the wood of the cart and sacrificed the cows as a burnt offering." I always felt bad for those cows. They did exactly the right thing, and when they got here, they ended up getting slaughtered as a sacrifice.

"The Levites took down the Ark of the Lord together with the gold objects and placed them on the large rock. On that day, the people of Beth Shemesh offered burnt offerings and made sacrifices to the Lord. The five rulers of the Philistines saw all this and then returned that day to Ekron," about three miles down this valley here. "And the large rock on which they set the Ark of the Lord is a witness to this day in the field of Joshua of Beth Shemesh."

Now you have a standing stone again. Now when people saw this large rock, they could say, "Wow. What happened here?"

And you could say, "Let me tell you about what God did."

I really understand about what happened to Eli. Because it's so easy for me to compromise with the value system of the culture and not be very effective in my Christian walk. And then at the last minute to say, "God, I blew it. Come and help me." That kind of use of God in the face of my unfaithfulness isn't going to work. Not that God won't rescue you in time of trouble, but I'm saying if I refuse to be faithful to his lifestyle, his value system, to ask him to bale me out at the last minute just doesn't work. 

When you retain a commitment to God and live in close relationship with his value system and his ways committed to him, he works through you. You can have powerful impact in what you do in little ways or big ways. You can be the standing stone that represents the power of God. When you compromise that by not being distinct, you compromise your witness, you compromise your ability to make impact. I can just say to the students, a lot of you are on this trip because you appeared to other people to be committed to Jesus Christ. That's why you were selected. That's why you were asked to come. Because your faith was very real to the people who were assembling this group. 

But if you live by the value system of the world that you are distinct from, you will compromise any opportunity you have to make an impact. And Samson's problem was not that he got his hair cut. Samson's problem was that he was not willing to remain distinctively committed to being separated to his God and his God's way of life.

So fortunately for us, this Beth Shemesh doesn't only represent cultural compromise and ineffectiveness, but this place of Beth Shemesh also represents God is still the one who is at work. And so somewhere here in this valley is a large rock which stood for them as a reminder that no matter how unfaithful they were, God was still going to work it out according to what he had planned and he had going.