David again brought together out of Israel chosen men, thirty thousand in all. ^2 He and all his men set out from Baalah of Judah^a to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the Name,^b the name of the Lord Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim that are on the ark. ^3 They set the ark of God on a new cart and brought it from the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab, were guiding the new cart ^4 with the ark of God on it,^c and Ahio was walking in front of it. ^5 David and the whole house of Israel were celebrating with all their might before the Lord, with songs^d and with harps, lyres, tambourines, sistrums and cymbals.

^6 When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out and took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. ^7 The Lord’s anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act; therefore God struck him down and he died there beside the ark of God.

^8 Then David was angry because the Lord’s wrath had broken out against Uzzah, and to this day that place is called Perez Uzzah.^e

^9 David was afraid of the Lord that day and said, “How can the ark of the Lord ever come to me?” ^10 He was not willing to take the ark of the Lord to be with him in the City of David. Instead, he took it aside to the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite. ^11 The ark of the Lord remained in the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite for three months, and the Lord blessed him and his entire household.

^12 Now King David was told, “The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and everything he has, because of the ark of God.” So David went down and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with rejoicing. ^13 When those who were carrying the ark of the Lord had taken six steps, he sacrificed a bull and a fattened calf. ^14 David, wearing a linen ephod, danced before the Lord with all his might, ^15 while he and the entire house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets.

^16 As the ark of the Lord was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart.

^17 They brought the ark of the Lord and set it in its place inside the tent that David had pitched for it, and David sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings^f before the Lord. ^18 After he had finished sacrificing the burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord Almighty. ^19 Then he gave a loaf of bread, a cake of dates and a cake of raisins to each person in the whole crowd of Israelites, both men and women. And all the people went to their homes.

^20 When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him and said, “How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, disrobing in the sight of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!”

^21 David said to Michal, “It was before the Lord, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the Lord’s people Israel—I will celebrate before the Lord. ^22 I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of, I will be held in honor.”

^23 And Michal daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death.

Last week I mentioned how Johann Sebastian Bach was acquainted with much grief, having lost his first wife and eleven out of twenty of his children. In 1993, Karen and I had the privilege of visiting the church where Bach was the director of music for 27 years in Leipzig. We were able to see the organ where Bach composed and played his musical works of art to the glory of God. We walked up to the altar in front of the church to see the place where Bach is buried. Sadly, St. Thomas Church no longer plays worship music to the glory of God, but is a state sponsored museum. But at one time his music had filled every inch of the massive stone structure. You can imagine the classic works of Bach played by Bach himself on a grand pipe organ accompanied by a highly trained choir. Now that would have been great worship, right? Well, maybe yes and maybe no. We often make the mistake of assuming that worship that is big and well done is God-glorifying worship. For some reason when we attend a conference or a large church, there is a temptation to think he worship is better simply because the worship atmosphere is bigger.

This was the fatal mistake that David made when he decided to bring the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem. This was a massive undertaking. David assembled thirty thousand chosen men for the task: priests, Levites, singers, musicians, soldiers. This was one enormous worship service on parade and David assumed the whole procedure was God glorifying. But he was mistaken. The whole thing had the pretense of reverence, but was absent a genuine fear of the Lord.

This is one of those stories that assumes a great deal of historical background. The writer of the story assumes that you have read, at the very least, the entire book of 1 Samuel, and if you really want to understand the story, you really should have read the entire O.T. history up to this point. I won’t summarize half of the O.T. this morning, but this serves as a good reminder to us regarding our personal Bible reading and study. Often we read a section of Scripture but we have trouble understanding it because we don’t have a grasp of the full story. To read this chapter out of context is a bit like trying to understand Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without knowing anything about the Civil War. You could make the same statement about any one chapter in Scripture, but this chapter is especially dependent upon an adequate understanding of the preceding events.

David wanted to bring the ark to Jerusalem. Jerusalem, the City of David, would become the center or religious life in Israel, but not at this time in history. The city had just recently come under control of the Israelites. First, let me trace the wanderings of the ark. The ark was built during the early part of the forty year wandering in the desert. The ark was constructed as a work of art which was to be visible illustration of God’s salvation. The covering of the ark was called the atonement cover or mercy seat. It was on top of the mercy seat that the presence of God dwelt in the cloud of glory. During the time of Joshua, the ark found a home in the town of Shiloh. Shiloh became the center of religious activity. Eli and his sons lived in Shiloh and when Samuel was a boy, he used to sleep in the tabernacle not far from the ark.  The ark remained in Shiloh for about 250 years until the Israelites brought the ark into battle with them against the Philistines. They lost that battle, Eli’s two sons were killed and the ark was captured by the Philistines.

God laid a heavy burden of judgment upon the Philistine towns that housed the ark. You remember the ten plagues that God poured out on Egypt because they would not let his people go free? In a similar way, God poured out two plagues on the Philistines—a plague of tumors and a plague of disease infested rats—because they would not let his ark go free. One of the Philistine diviners, said the following. “Why do you harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh did? When he treated them harshly, did they not send the Israelites out so they could go on their way?” This diviner of spirits was a pagan man who knew his Israelite history. He knew that the God would do to them as he did to the Egyptians, unless they sent the ark back to Israel immediately. Finally the Philistines placed the ark on a new cart and hitched the cart to two cows that had calved, but had never been yoked. The cows led the ark straight into Israelite territory to the town of Beth Shemesh. At first they rejoiced at the ark’s return, but soon after seventy men were killed because they dared to look inside the ark. Like the pagan Philistines, the people of Beth Shemesh did not want the ark to be near them, so they sent it off to the town of Kiriath Jearim where it remained for about seventy years until David decided to bring it to Jerusalem.

This brief history reminds us that Israel had an established pattern of mistreating the ark of God. They carelessly brought the ark onto the battlefield, treating God as if he were some kind of secret weapon. They were locked in an ancient arms race with the Philistines. First, the Israelites boasted saying, “We have swords and spears!” The Philistines responded with a greater threat, “We have horses and chariots!” Not to be outdone, Israel uncovered their prototype nuclear weapon and said, “Oh yeah! Well you can forget your chariots and horses, because we have God on our side!” They treated the ark of God like the one ring of power in Tolkien’s trilogy. It’s like they said, “We don’t fully understand this ark thing, but we know it has great and awesome power. It has the power to topple kings and kingdoms and we’re sending it your way!” After the ark was captured, Israel learned that God was not a mere impersonal force to be manipulated for their own advantage. This is a lesson we still need to learn today. If God is little more than your golden ticket to heaven, then you have reduced him to an impersonal force. If God is the one who heals your colds and flu symptoms, the one who keeps a roof over your head and food on the table, then you have reduced him to an impersonal force.

This is where we have to be so careful, because God is the one who heals our sickness and keeps a roof over our head and food on the table. He does all these things and more, but he does not merely do these things. I am guessing that many of you took antibiotics this past winter. Chris mentioned to me that he has never seen so many prescriptions for antibiotics go out the door of the pharmacy. Through the power of medical science, that little pill contains the power to kill the bacteria in your body and make you better. That little pill is an impersonal force with inherent power to help you. Too often we treat God like a little pill. We are more than satisfied to get our daily does of God. Or even worse, we find we don’t really need God while things are going well, but when the trials of life come our way, we run out and get a ten day regimen of God pills to make us better. God is not a force to be manipulated for our benefit. God is a person to be worshipped. God became a man. You cannot get more personal than that.

The sad part of this story is that David and company believed they were doing the right thing. They believed that the ark deserved a place of recognition and that it should not gather dust in some small, obscure Jewish town. The ark deserved to be in Jerusalem—the City of David! You can’t just send three or four men to brink back the ark. That wouldn’t be right, so David sent thirty thousand men, and he led the procession himself. If you would have been in the parade that day, you probably would have turned to your neighbor and said, “Man, this is great worship, isn’t it? Check out those cymbal and harp players! They are really awesome!” It was quite a sight. Verse five tells us they were celebrating with all their might. Now when was the last time you worshipped the Lord with all your might? (illustrate/elaborate) I am not even sure what that would look like today, but it sounds like a lot effort.

Everything was going along just fine until poor Uzzah reached out his hand to keep the ark from falling off the cart. Instantly, Uzzah was struck dead for an act which the Bible calls irreverent. If you read this chapter out of context you may draw The conclusion that God is a malicious God who kills people when he feels like it. After all, Uzzah was not doing anything wrong. In fact, he was trying to help God. He didn’t want the ark to fall off the cart. God should have rewarded Uzzah instead of killing him. What’s the big deal with this anyway? The first clue is given in verse three. “They set the ark of God on a new cart.” At least they didn’t put the ark on an old, manure cart, right? It is helpful to compare what David did with what the Philistines did when they sent the ark away.

“Now then, get a new cart ready…take the ark of the Lord and put it on the cart, and in a chest beside it put the gold objects you are sending back to him as a guilt offering.” (1 Sam 6:7-8) The Philistines knew nothing about what God required, but they at least knew they should treat the ark with some respect. They put the ark on a new cart and placed a chest of gold objects next to the ark. Do you see? The pagan Philistines actually treated the ark with more respect than the Israelites. Though they had nothing to guide them, the Philistines thought long and hard about how to treat the ark. The Israelites should have known better. Had they really cared what the Lord wanted, they could have consulted the Penateuch for answers. They could have discovered that the ark was to be carried with long poles on the shoulders of purified and consecrated Levites. They should have asked some simple questions like, “What are these gold rings on each corner of the ark for?” “What does God require of us?”

To you and me, it may seem like empty religious ritual to have to worry about how to carry an ark. After all, doesn’t God care more about matters of the heart than he does legalistic rules? If we tend to think this way, as I am tempted to do so myself, it is because we fail to understand how God has revealed his will through the ages. God revealed himself to Moses in a burning bush and he revealed himself to the nation of Israel in an ark of testimony, the resting place for the shekinah glory of God. The ark was not a box or a fancy religious altar. The ark was the manifest presence of God himself. On that fateful day, Israel showed that they possessed a shallow, irreverent view of God. Poor Uzzah was the one on whom the wrath of God fell, but we must not draw the conclusion that God is malicious because Uzzah was killed. Uzzah was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any one of the men walking next to the ark could have been killed. This was not so much an outpouring of God’s wrath as it was an act of mercy. All thirty thousand people deserved to die that day but God, in his mercy, limited it to one person. What we might see as God’s vengeance is actually a massive act of lovingkindness. The mercy of God restrained the wrath of God.

The Israelites had what I would call a Veggie Tales view of God. I am entertained by Veggie Tales as much as the next guy, but you have to admit that Veggie Tales represents a shallow, often irreverent view of God. All you can get out of Veggie Tales, other than a few laughs, is some nice, moral platitudes about God and how to be nice to one another. I guarantee you that you will never see a Veggie Tales carrot flogged and left to die on a cross. You will never see a Veggie Tale asparagus stoned to death for his faith in Christ. You will see neither the wrath of God nor the mercy of God. Veggie Tales are cute, comfortable and safe. At the beginning of the journey, Israel thought that God was cute, comfortable and safe. But Uzzah and the other thirty thousand Jews realized that day that God is not cute and comfortable and safe. He is a holy God with holy standards. Our response needs to be one, not of familiarity and casualness, not of manipulation of power, but of reverent submission.

I titled this message, “Whatever Happened to Reverence?,” but I don’t at all mean the kind of reverence you feel when you walk into the great sanctuary of a church like St. Thomas Church. A pagan or a secularist or a Muslim can feel the same kind of reverence in a setting like that. The kind of reverence that I mean is a Christ-centered, reverent submission that continually asks, “What does God require of me?” What does Jesus require of me in my marriage? How can I submit my job the will of God? The giant parade led by David had all the trappings of reverent ceremony, but it lacked a humble fear of God. It was a reckless, self-absorbed religious ceremony. David was so afraid of the ark that he left it in a nearby town for three months to see what would happen. The Lord blessed the man who housed the ark, so David decided to try again to bring the ark to Jerusalem.

The second time (verse 12) they again had a huge procession of people; singers, musicians, and the like. The second time they celebrated before the Lord with all their might. In many ways, the second attempt looked much like the first, but with two notable exceptions. The second time they carried the ark as prescribed in the Law and the second time David humbled himself before God. He leapt and danced in worship, but it was not the kind of “Hey everyone, look at me” dance, but a “Hey everyone, look at God” kind of dance. The mighty warrior and king humbled himself in the presence of all the people. Both celebrations were nearly identical, except for the all-important attitude of reverence and humility. Don’t forget—the ark was a mercy seat. Those who humbled themselves before God were exalted, but those who exalted themselves in his presence were humbled. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Rich Maurer

April 20, 2008