David now gathered all the young men of the land, thirty thousand in all. His goal was to bring the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem. Note the names given to God: the Name, Lord Almighty, enthroned between the cherubim. This is emphasising the greatness and holiness of God.
Note that David is following a similar pattern to that of the Philistines (1 Sam 6:7) in getting a new cart, rather than the Levitical commands (Ex 25:12-15; Numbers 4:5,6,15). David's actions seemed good and were well intentioned, but he was following the way of the world, rather than the way of God. This, and the later incidents, are a warning to the church in the way we act.
David and the whole of Israel were celebrating before the Lord. All seemed to be going well when disaster struck. The oxen stumbled and Uzzah reached out to steady the ark. The anger of the Lord burned against Uzzah and He struck him down dead!
This is one of the periodic incidents in the Bible where our natural tendency is to react against it. We think this is not fair, this is not the act of a just God. There are a couple of things to say about this. First is that God is God and He is holy. We are made in His image, not He in ours. We do not have the right to tell God how He should or should not act. Secondly, the root of the problem was not the oxen stumbling, but the failure to follow the Levitical way of handling the ark (carried by priests), rather than the worldly way (carried on a cart). If they had followed this way the problem would not have arisen.
So often something goes wrong and we complain, but if only we had followed God's plan from the beginning we would have avoided much trouble.
No comments:
Post a Comment