The Bible is like a treasure hunt, you read and read and read, then all of the sudden a jewel begins to shine and as you lean into the shining, it opens up a revelation that brings clarification to a situation. Bill Johnson says it this way, “I read until I get a revelation.” I think we as people limit our reading to how long a devotional says we should read, a bible plan says we should read, or even our schedule says we should read. Unfortunately, these do not produce the fruit that revelation produces in us and then eventually we lose the desire to read our bibles. What if we tried to read until we got a revelation? I wonder how that would change our love for the word of God.

This morning I was reading 1 Samuel 5 and it speaks of how the ark of God was captured by the enemies of God and taken into the house of their god. It says, “The Philistines took the ark of God and brought it into the house of Dagon and set it up beside Dagon. And when the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the ark of the LORD. So they took Dagon and put him back in his place.” While reading this the Holy Spirit showed me, one how there is no competition between the living God and the dead idols. No matter where the ark was placed, it remained superior to any other idol, even in that idols own temple. Yahweh is alive and He is powerful.

The second thought the Holy Spirit shared with me is how when we worship idols, dead things, we must serve them, maintain them, pick them up, put them back in their place. Living people serving dead idols sounds absurd, but we do this all the time. We realize Yahweh is knocking over our idols, but we pick them up and put them right back in the place they fell from and continue to serve them. Idols can’t serve us, they can’t love us, they can’t help us, yet we continue to pick them up and put them back in their place.

God is knocking over idols in our hearts, churches, cities, and nation. From household idols to national idols, God is knocking them over. Our job is to recognize what God is doing and not go in behind God and set back in place what God is knocking down, because if we set it back up, God will knock it down again but this time it is going to be broken beyond repair. “So they took Dagon and put him back in his place. But when they rose early on the next morning, behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the ark of the LORD, and the head of Dagon and both his hands were lying cut off on the threshold. Only the trunk of Dagon was left to him.”

May we not pick up the idols God is knocking over. May we recognize what God is knocking over and realize that God is raising up the living and dealing with the dead things in our lives, so we can truly live. He is the God of the living not the dead and He is offering us life and life abundantly.