Another dimension to God?

     Sometimes I think we "New Testament Christians" have a tendency to make God like Santa Claus and to "declaw" the Holiness Righteousness of God.  In reading I Samuel 5 and 6 one gets a different dimension of God.
     The Ark of the Covenant is captured by the Philistines and they try to display it but run into problems. Everywhere the ark goes trouble comes to the people in that town. In the temple of Dagon, the statue of Dagon keeps falling down before the ark. Finally it falls down and its head and hands come off. The Dagon Priest say "Get that thing out of here."  So they move it to five different cities and five different cities have plagues.
     Finally they decide to send the ark back. But they have to send some kind of "hostess gift" to Israel for having kept the ark.  The Scriptures seem to interject some levity as the gifts are gold statues of tumors and mice. That is what it says Tumors and mice. God wants compensation for being housed in Philistine country and needs five statues of gold tumors and five golden mice.
     The obvious message here is you don't mess with the Holy Ark. It is not nice to handle the ark. In fact, when the cows come up the road with the ark and the people of Beth Shemesh welcome it back to Israel, it is still not safe.  The people burn the cart, sacrifice the cows and worship the Ark. You would think that God would be happy, but he kills seventy people of Beth Shemesh because they looked into the Ark.
     This is no pussy cat God who is being dealt with here.  Taking gold mice for payment and killing 70 of his own people for looking in the ark gives us a little different picture of the Holiness of God than we get with just the New Testament.