The gods of the Philistines
JUDGES 1:28-30
28 And it came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute, and did not utterly drive them out.
29 Neither did Ephraim drive out the Canaanites that dwelt in Gezer; but the Canaanites dwelt in Gezer among them. (Their young children playing together on the streets and things)
30 Neither did Zebulun drive out the inhabitants of Kitron, nor the inhabitants of Nahalol; but the Canaanites dwelt among them, and became tributaries. (They are now in the Promised Land that God through the ministry of an exodus prophet had taken them to, but rather than destroy all the inhalants as God told them, they put their captives to work as a means of an economic benefit to them. But their association with these people would eventually cause their downfall because of their gods)
JUDGES 2:1-3
1 ¶ And an angel of the LORD came up from Gilgal to Bochim, and said, I made you to go up out of Egypt, and have brought you unto the land which I sware unto your fathers; and I said, I will never break my covenant with you.
2 And ye shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land; ye shall throw down their altars: but ye have not obeyed my voice: why have ye done this?
3 Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them out from before you; but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you.
It was not the people themselves that would become a snare, but the gods of these people that would become a snare to them.
JUDGES 10:6 – this is around 200 years latter (the book of Judges cover a period of around 400 years from around 1400–1000 B.C.)
6 ¶ And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the LORD, and served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, and the gods of Syria, and the gods of Zidon, and the gods of Moab, and the gods of the children of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines, and forsook the LORD, and served not him.
The gods of the Philistines
*If we were to reflect back over the course of known history, it is clear to see that mankind across all times and cultures have expressed (by various means) his inherent inner desire and need to know and to have a relationship with God.
*We know from reading the bible in Genesis that fellowship between God and man was interrupted in Eden because of sin, and so since that time man has been mostly alienated from knowing the true God, and so because of this he can mostly only use his imagination as to what this God is like.
And so he begins to imagine a God that is obviously of a far more superior power to himself, and of which he is able to serve and worship this God in some way and find favour with this God, and in return this God would reward him back and be a help to him in times of need.
**And so in the imagination of the heart of man, he would begin to think about what this god would be like of his character and nature.
Maybe he would think of a god that was like a big angry god of war, or maybe a god of fertility, or another god of prosperity – he couldn’t imagine just one God with all these attributes, so it made sense to him that there must be many different gods with different personalities and powers that could do different things.
And so in his imagination he would begin to form all these ideas of certain types of different gods until all these gods would become so real to his belief that he would even begin to pray and to even make sacrifices to these different gods. We know that this concept is called polytheism, and especially since the time of Nimrod this concept has been popularised in the minds of generations of people and is still very much predominant in our world today. But the bible teaches us that there is only One God.
EXODUS 20:3
3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
*All the thousands of gods that have been invented over the course of history have all come out of the imagination of a man’s heart because that his fellowship was broken with the true God.
**And so because a man is designed to be joined to God in fellowship, then if he can’t find the true God, then he will begin to serve and worship and even sacrifice to a god that he has completely formed out of his own imagination, and he will even believe that this imaginary god will be able to do things back for him of supernatural power of what he cannot do for himself.
We see this played out with the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel – when challenged by Elijah, they thought that their god Baal would answer them by sending fire upon their sacrifice.
I KINGS 18:25-28
25 And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one bullock for yourselves, and dress it first; for ye are many; and call on the name of your gods, but put no fire under.
26 And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.
27 And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.
28 And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them.
***And so all this is clearly showing us of a deep that lies within a man of his need for a God to love and worship, and for this same God in return to help him in times of trouble and need, because this is how God has designed a man to be in his nature – and that is why a man will never feel complete and spiritually satisfied without a true relationship with God.
“You may search this whole world o’er, but you’ll be just as before. You’ll never find true satisfaction, not until you’ve found the Lord, for only Jesus can satisfy your soul”
THE.MIGHTY.GOD.UNVEILED.BEFORE.US_ PHIL.PA V-3 N-22 MONDAY_ 64-0629
68 In the beginning, He wasn't even God. Now, our English word today, God, means "an object of worship." How confusing it is to the mind. You can make somebody a god. You can make anything a god.
We know that the English word “God” can sometimes mean different things to different people, but the basic meaning of the word “God” means an object of worship.
*So not even the true God became God until he was first worshiped by angels.
THE.EASTER.SEAL_ PHOENIX.AZ V-2 N-6 SATURDAY_ 65-0410
61 … I want my minister brothers to try to understand this. See? In the beginning, God, the Great Spirit, He wasn't even "God" then. He was the Eternal One. God is an "object of worship." He had nothing to worship Him. There was no--there was no Angels, no nothing. Just God alone, Him alone, is Eternal. But, in order to be God, there had to be something to worship Him, so He created Angels, and Beings, and Cherubims, and so forth, to worship Him. His great plan begin to unfold.
**So these gods (with a small “g”) of the Philistines - we know that they were not actually living gods (apart from being alive in the imaginations of their inventers), and so because they were not alive, then it becomes obvious that these gods had no power to deliver and save people and to help people win their battles, and to bring them prosperity and all these things that humans beings need help with through life.
**All these gods were simply objects of their own imagination that they were worshiping of what they had created in their minds to satisfy their need for man to have a god with a higher intelligence of wisdom and power – we are saying this because this is what we are also facing in this day with the advancement of AI technology of man coming into relationships with higher forms of AI intelligence – they are even debating whether these AI intelligences have developed consciousness or not, because they have asked these advanced AI chat bots certain questions that you would have to be a conscious being to answer in a certain way, and some of these chat bots are answering these questions as what seemingly only a conscious being could, but they are still just dead gods, but they are becoming alive in the imaginations of men and woman and boys and girls, and now the problem is that deep and even loving relationships are beginning to be formed between human beings and these higher forms of intelligence, because this is actually what man was design for from the beginning.
***Man was design for fellowship with an all knowing and loving God of superior intelligence.
**But Israel’s God was known to them as the living God, because all of these other gods of the other nations were not living gods but gods that had been form from within the intelligence of the imagination of man.
*Remember that this is the story of the book of Judges after an Exodus prophet had come and gone.
JOSHUA 3:10
10 And Joshua said, Hereby ye shall know that the living God is among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites.
**And so all this worship and sacrifice given by man toward these false gods was totally in vain because they were not living gods.
The only form of the existence of these gods was in the deception of the imagination of the worshiper, and this is what we are coming into a greater manifestation of in this hour.
**But then as believers of the message in this hour, we know that there is actually another layer to all of this that is even worse than that deception, because we have been taught by a third exodus prophet in this generation that there is actually a real and living god of this evil age, and that is Satan himself, and that he is actually the one who is vicariously gathering all of this false worship of all these other gods of the imagination of men’s minds unto himself.
THE.GOD.OF.THIS.EVIL.AGE_ JEFF.IN V-4 N-9 SUNDAY_ 65-0801M
131 This modern knowledge-loving age could have no better leader than the one they've got, Satan, a perverter of the Word of God, like he started off in the garden of Eden, but a religious person relying upon his own understanding.
As I've said before, Proverbs 3:5, that, "We're not to lean to our own understanding."
They must have a god, for they are human. Yet, he makes them what they want. As being a human being, always, all human beings... When we come here, we found the Indians even worshiping idols, and the sun, and everything. As a human being, they must have a god. So this great intellectual age must have a god, so it's become... The god of this world has become knowledge, denomination, science, (3 things he tells us here) "having a form of godliness, but denying the Power thereof."
132 Notice, their god makes them just what they want. They lust for the flesh, and that's what he gives them.
…165 See the two opposing spirits at work in this evil age? Can you see it? Each very religious, Cain and Abel, spirits again coming to their heads, still same as they started. One, worshiping by beauty, and by knowledge, and by education, and by science, and by ethics. And the other One, by faith of the revelation of the Word of God. Both of them is standing right in this building this morning.
**In the ancient times we find that the heathen nations erected temples and shrines for the purpose to house and to worship their gods in, and many of these temples were no doubt very costly to build because of the expense of the materials and the man power that would have gone into building these temples for their gods.
**And so even in our modern times, man has continued on with this temple building idea with the construction of our modern sports stadiums and rock concert venues and casinos and sky towers and all the other places of worship that people go to in this age to participate in their rituals and worship.
JUDGES 9:27
27 And they went out into the fields, and gathered their vineyards, and trode the grapes, and made merry, and went into the house of their god, and did eat and drink, and cursed Abimelech.
*All their great buildings and shrines of entertainment and drinking places are just modern temples of worship that are built as houses to their gods.
***So much money and time and sacrifice is poured into these places because of the love that people have in their hearts for their sports gods and their rock concert gods, and their Hollywood gods, and their night club gods, and all of the thousands of other gods of this evil age that we are now living in.
**But the true and living God doesn’t dwell in any of those temples that are made with bricks and mortar by the hands of man, because God’s true temple is man himself – the statue of a perfect man.
*Man is the temple that God dwells in.
101-1 EPHESIAN.CHURCH.AGE - CHURCH.AGE.BOOK CPT.3
…Man was to be the temple of God. The place of God's rest (the Holy Spirit) was man, the temple.
**The direction that we are trying to go in is that I want to try and show us that in this day (of us being in the new land of the message of this hour of the full word being restored back to us again), that we are surrounded and are being advanced upon by the gods of the Philistines and by the gods of all the other nations in the same way that the people of God were in the times of the Judges - and so this is the same conditions and testings of what Israel had in the times of the Judges of what we are faced with overcoming in this hour.
So like Israel in the time of the judges we need the protection of a judge of whom God has appointed for this time, because we also find ourselves mixed together with an unbeliever world that is full of temples erected to false gods, and with people who believe and worship those false gods.
**And this is why that God has sent a prophet’s voice to us in this hour, to be a judge that will keep us protected from the onslaught of the gods of the Philistines.
I PETER 5:8
8 ¶ Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:
**Satan is doing his best in this age to pervert the attribute that is in you to serve and worship the true God, into serving and worshiping some dead god of the Philistines.
“The gods of the Philistines”
THE.STATURE.OF.A.PERFECT.MAN_ JEFF.IN V-2 N-18 SUNDAY_ 62-1014M
12-3 The people couldn't understand how Jesus talked to the Father, and He and the Father are One. Well, that's where the whole thing is. Sure, it just unfolds it, certainly. See, it's not three gods: three offices. Three mani... What is it? God condescending to His creation. God wants to be worshipped. The word "God" means "object of worship." And it's God trying to condition His people so He can get from them what He created them for.
(True worship is an attitude that is developed by God in the heart of the believer that can only come from a true understanding of the character and nature of God – this great one that was able to condescend to a fallen creation in order to lift them back up to where he was)
He never made you to be something else besides a son and daughter of God. If you have missed that, of being son and daughter of God, you've missed the mark.
SIRS.WE.WOULD.SEE.JESUS_ DALLAS.TX V-19 N-8 WEDNESDAY_ 64-0304
12 God is Life, Life Eternal. "In the beginning was God." He wasn't God at that time, because god, the English word god, means "object of worship," and there wasn't nothing but Him. He was the Eternal, just the Eternal One. There was no moon, no stars, no Angels, no nothing. But in this Being, that we call "God our Father," was attributes. In Him was attribute to be Father, in Him was attribute to be God, in Him was attribute to be Son, in Him was attribute to be Saviour, in Him was attribute to be healer, and all these things that we see now is just displaying His attributes.
13 Now, if you were in His thinking, at the beginning, if you've got Eternal Life, there is only one form of Eternal Life. Eternal Life had no beginning and it has no ending. So if you have Eternal Life, you were an attribute of God's thinking before there was anything but Him.
(***It is very important for us to realise that if we are believers in this hour, then that can only be because God thought of you to be that from the beginning or you would never have become a believer now – and that is why the evidence that you were in His thinking at the beginning is because you have recognised His word in this hour, because it would be totally impossible for you to recognise His word for this hour unless you were a part of God at the beginning. “He that heareth the word of God for their age is passed from death unto life” – Jesus said “my sheep hear my word” and His voice is His word)
14 Your form, your shape, and what you're in now, is just a negative, when you come up to around twenty, twenty-two years old. You were a negative, and death develops the picture to the positive, "that when this earthly tabernacle be dissolved, we have one already waiting." See?
THE.EASTER.SEAL_ PHOENIX.AZ V-2 N-6 SATURDAY_ 65-0410
60 Look at the millions on earth that didn't receive It when Jesus was here. But how thankful that we should be this morning, to know that we have the direct evidence and the Bible proofs, that we are included in that great resurrection morning coming, that great Easter. We have the earnest of it, right now in our mortal bodies. The predestinated ones are the first, of course, to be quickened, when the Holy Spirit comes to claim Its own.
**You have been quickened to the revelation of the truth of this hour, and so because you have received that word as the truth of this day, then that is the evidence that the Holy Spirit has claimed you as His own for this hour – that is thus saith a prophet of God.
GO.WAKE.JESUS_ TUCSON.AZ SUNDAY_ 63-1103
141 They should have known that He was God that created the winds and the waves. See? God created the wind. Yes. That's air. God created the water. Yes. That's the H2O. He, He created that. But, you see, what it is, the Devil got into that wind, and then the Devil come to something else, got into it, and that caused the storm.
142 And that's the way it is with believers sometimes. They let down the bars, to unbelief, and then Satan comes in in a whirlwind, see, causes fusses, and stews, and arguments, and everything. That is the Devil getting among people.
143 Devil gets amongst the--the air and whirls it up, causes death; gets amongst the water, whirls it up. See? God created it, but they permitted the Devil to come in. The Devil got into it, "the prince of the power of the air." Notice, he got into it, and there come the winds and the waves.
144 Now, those disciples should have said, "Why, there's nothing wrong now. Why, there lays the Creator, laying right here. He's sailing with us. See? Why, just look at the things that He has done. Well, what do we care about the waves."
145 Oh, if we could feel like that about it, how much different it would be. Yes.
146 God, the Creator of the heavens and--and earth, God the Creator of the winds and waves, would not they have to obey His Word? The only thing He had to do was speak it. See? He is the Word, but God had to use man to fulfill, or to display His attributes.
147 God, in the beginning, was just God. He wasn't even God; God is "an object of worship." He was the great power, God. Then He created Angels, and Angels worshipped Him, so He was God. Then He created man.
148 Now, He's a Saviour. So, there's nothing lost; something had to be lost, so He could display His attribute as a Saviour. You believe that? [Congregation says, "Amen."--Ed.]
149 He was a Healer. So, there's nothing sick; so there had to be something sick, to display His attribute, to show that He was.
150 He was Father, see, and something had to be. He had to have a Son, to make Him Father. See?
151 And all these things displaying His attributes, there's nothing out of line. See? There's... God is making every wheel click just exactly right. Everything is all right. The Creator, hallelujah, the Creator is in the boat that we're sailing in.
152 "Though the skin worms destroys this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, Whom I shall see for myself," said Job. That's right. David said, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I'll fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Though I make my bed in hell, He's there. Though I take the wings of the morning and fly away, He's there." Sailing over life's solemn main!
And lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
With partings, leave behind us
Footprints, (like This) on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
While sailing over life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
In seeing, shall take heart again, ("If God did that for that brother, He will do it for me.")
Let us be up and doing, then,
With a heart for any strife. That's what I'd...
Be not like dumb, driven cattle, have to be drove in anything.
Let's believe, be a hero in the strife!
153 Psalm Of Life. Longfellow's poem, A Psalm Of Life. I love it. It tells something. It manifests something. It's got real something into it, some meanings. I like something that's got colour in it, got meaning. Music, poem, whatever it might be, I love it if it's real.
THE.UNVEILING.OF.GOD_ JEFF.IN V-9 N-1 SUNDAY_ 64-0614M
84 Like the attribute, see, it is in God. A attribute is your thought. God in the beginning, the Eternal, He wasn't even a God. He was the Eternal. He wasn't even God; God is an object of worship, or something. See? So He wasn't even that. He was Elohim, the Eternal. But in Him was thoughts He wanted to become material. And what did He do? Then He spoke a Word, and the Word was materialized. That's the whole picture, from Genesis to Revelations. Is nothing wrong. It's Elohim materializing so He can be touched, feel. And in the Millennium, there is Elohim sitting on the Throne, see, that's right, with all of His subjects around Him, that He predestinated before the foundation of the world.
85 Like a man building chimes or making chimes, the molder. Each bell has got to ring different from the other. The same materials, but so much iron, so much steel, so much brass, to make it give the "ting."
86 That's the way God did. He bred this one to that one, to this one to that one, to this one to that one, till He got exactly what He wanted. That's how He come down. God unveiled Himself in a Pillar of Fire down through the prophets, then into the Son of God, which, He was God. See, it's the same God bringing out exactly, from perfection to perfection, from glory unto glory. That's the way the Church goes.