<TITLE>05. Par 30-34</TITLE>L-30 Must have been a hot day. They had had a great celebration. And it makes me feel bad, every time I think of it, because the nature of that religious celebration. You know, a celebration is all right, but it's according to the nature of the celebration. And this was one celebration that I certainly hate to refer to. It was in the land of the Philistines. And they were celebrating, it just makes me feel bad to say it, "victory over God's servants." God's disobedient servant had brought a reproach upon the Name of the Lord, and went down in defeat, and these Philistines were celebrating the--the great time of victory, that their "fish god had gotten victory over Jehovah's servant."

L-31 If that isn't a text to end up a meeting on! But I felt led, as I was looking through some five or six hundred texts that I had there. My eyes dropped upon this text here, and I thought, "I believe I'll just talk about that a little while tonight." And maybe that's what the Holy Spirit would want us to know something about in here. The... about...

L-32   Hot day, I believe, and the sacrifices was burning in the fire around this great fish god, and there were three thousand Philistines looking down at the pair as they entered the great stadium. It must have been like a mushroom, the way they fixed it. Like, I'd say, something on the order of a--of a mushroom or a toadstool, turned up like this, with two great pilasters, or--or pillars, holding up the stadium, as it sit like more on this shape, maybe, so that the people in this great stadium could look down to the entertainment that was going on down on the main floor.

L-33   And highly-polished war lords attended that meeting, and their fine jeweled ladies was at the meeting. And they all stopped suddenly, to lean forward, the main event was just about to take place. We have sometimes, what we call, the preliminaries, they... and then the introduction, the prelude to the--the main event. And they had had much entertainment, as they did sometimes, sacrificing and killing, and so forth. But now the--the main event was just about to take place, and all this bunch of fine celebrity, of all the... of the regions in the Philistines' land. They raised up, because they were a--a privileged. They were sitting up, in this big, we'd call it, like a mushroom. And perhaps the poor, and so forth, were down here on the--on the floor. But they sit up where they could get a good look, and see all the entertainment. It was a--it was a celebrity box. Three thousand of them! The air was stinking with drinks, drunken revelry all day, drinking and slobbering, and carrying on, the way a drunken brawl can be like that. And they all stood up, because the main event--event was about to take place, and they leaned over. They wanted to get a good look. They couldn't afford to miss this, for this was the main event.

L-34   What did they see? A little boy leading a blind man out to the middle of the floor, in the celebration of the fish god, Dagon. The lad led this stumbling, blind bulk of flesh, blind, unto the post, and stood him by the side of the post, to make sport.


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