2 Samuel Lessons 53
David and the Ark, Part 1 – 2 Samuel 6:1-11; 1
Chronicles 13:1-4
2 Samuel 6 continues our study of the first section, chapters 2-7 of 2
Samuel; because this is the area where God is establishing the base of David’s
kingdom. And if you pay attention
carefully to the sequence of events and how God works with David you will have
a Biblical view of politics. This text
is actually a political handbook on how God blessed politically. There are many spiritual lessons, but don’t
forget that the primary interpretation of the text has to do with
politics. It has to do with the greatest
political leader of all time, excluding the person of Jesus Christ. And from chapters 2-4 the first thing that
God did when David became king, when he took office, was to unify the country
under him; not all the country because there many dissidents, but there was a
general unification that took place, and so in chapters 2-4 we have how God
gave David control over the twelve tribes.
In any successful political office, reign, tour of duty, whatever you
call it, chapters 2-4 shows you what has to be there. You can’t have any man successful in politics
unless he commands the respect of the people, at least a large and influential
segment of the people. And God gives
David the control and it is not because David goes out and campaigns. It is because God works all things out
together for good, and as a result David is solidly in office with the people
behind him.
Then in chapter 5 we saw how in the next step of securing David’s
political base is God gave him military victory over the central land
area. There was an east-west road that
runs from Jerusalem and a place called Giba to Gezer, out to the west, and it’s
this east-west road that God opens up and therefore David not only controls
Judah but he controls the area around Jerusalem. And he has possession of a vital line of
communication and he is going to use this line of communication for a very,
very important purpose. So these steps
are logically ordered, they are very careful, they follow political sense,
obviously David, even if he has the support of the people can’t do what he’s
going to do in this chapter unless he has transportation and
communication. So God is one by one
taking care of his needs. I want you to
notice this, this doesn’t come overnight.
So far David has spent seven years reigning in
Now the trouble with many, many believers today is that we are trying to
rush ahead of God, big hurry, crisis coming tomorrow. The principle is that you do what God told
you to do and learn the Word and apply it, and if He comes tomorrow, that’s His
problem; we do what He tells us to do. Now
Christ coming tomorrow in the New Testament has a proper place, don’t misinterpret,
I’m not ridiculing the proper place it has, but it is not proper to use that
doctrine of Christ’s Second Coming as a club to beat people over the head to
get them to witness. Wrong, for the
reason that people don’t witness is not because they don’t know how, people do
not witness because they are afraid to, and they are afraid to witness because
they are not sure of what they believe; for two reasons, either they have never
grown or they are personally disobedient to the Word of God and obviously don’t
have any confidence that the Lord is with them.
But if a person has the confidence that the Lord is with him and if he
is adequately prepared, the Lord opens doors.
You will find this, the more you are prepared with the Word of God, you
will have so many doors open for witnessing opportunities you couldn’t possibly
fulfill them; there’ll be many opportunities.
I don’t necessarily mean right away God is going to provide a thousand
opportunities in numbers but maybe God is going to give you one this month;
one, and he is going to drop it right in your lap and it is going to be
something that is vitally related some way to what He has been teaching you
recently in your life, some area of doctrine where you have just mastered, or
things that you’ve just learned, and you’ve finally got a good grasp of it and
God will present you with one opportunity.
And He’ll watch to see what you do with it and how you handle that will
depend on whether you get other opportunities.
Now you can rebel against that operation and set your own goals and say I’m
going to witness to 10 or 15 people this week and if God doesn’t like it,
that’s too bad, but I’m going to do it anyway.
That’s out of line. God will open
the door for you and you ought to be alert when the opportunity comes, when the
situation arises. And you’ll find if you
recognize the opportunity that God sends and you take advantage of it, that in
turn opens a whole bunch of other doors, and soon you have tremendous opportunities
and it comes about by recognizing the leading of the Holy Spirit instead of
dictating, Holy Spirit bless me because I’m going to witness today. And maybe the Holy Spirit isn’t interested in
you witnessing today because maybe you’re not in shape to witness today and you
get in His way. So here is where
sensitivity is required to the operation of the Holy Spirit.
Now this passage in 2 Samuel 6 has a lot to do with this kind of
sensitivity to the Holy Spirit, because in this passage we’re going to deal
with many, many things. Tonight we only
have to deal with one thing, the first 12 verses of the chapter that have to
do, and this is a classic illustration of all time of how to do a very
wonderful thing in a very wrong way and getting blasted for it. Some of you who do not have an adequate
background in the Word are going to read this passage and you are going to
shout, God is unfair in what He’s doing here; it’s unfair of God to do what
He’s going to do. Well, you can view it
that way and I hope God will correct your attitude but this is not unfair; God
does operate this way and you can call it unfair from now until hell freezes
over and God is not going to be impressed because this is the way His character
is and this is what He does.
Now to fill in the details of 2 Samuel we have to remember that there
are six books of the Bible that you have to get together. 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, and
then two other books written later on, 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronicles. In the Hebrew Bible these are separated; the
Chronicles books are way at the end of the Bible, and Samuel and Kings are in
the middle of the Hebrew Bible. The
reason is that these are considered prophetic writings; Chronicles is not. And the difference is that Chronicles takes
all the history of God’s Word and summarizes it; actually Chronicles covers
everything from Genesis up to the time of the exile. And it summarizes it from one perspective;
from the perspective of the priesthood. It
was the priests who put together Chronicles and everywhere God worked with the
priesthood, in music, in the writing of the Psalms, in worship, it’s recorded
in Chronicles. Chronicles, therefore,
looks at history from a priestly point of view.
Therefore the same event will occur in these events books but it will be
looked at in different perspectives.
So tonight I’m going to give you a chart of 2 Samuel 6, and I will be
moving back and forth from these two areas of the Word, so you won’t get
confused and lose the forest from the trees, here’s the way it’s going to
go. Here are the Samuel passages and
here are the Chronicles passages: 2 Samuel 6:1 matches 13:1 in 1 Chronicles;
then there’s a passage, from 1 Chronicles 13:2-4 that has no counterpart in 2
Samuel. When the Levites wrote the history they injected this in there to show
you something. Then 2 Samuel 6:2-12a
corresponds to 1 Chronicles 13:5-14.
Then you have another passage in Chronicles which has no counterpart in
2 Samuel, 1 Chronicles 14:1-15:24. Then
2 Samuel 6:12b-14 and that’s paralleled in Chronicles by 15:25-27. Then you have 2 Samuel 6:15-19a paralleled by
Chronicles 15:28-16:3. Then you have a
passage in 1 Chronicles that does not appear in 2 Samuel, 16:4-42; and finally
the last two verses, 2 Samuel 6:19b-20 correspond to 1 Chronicles 16:43.
Samuel Chronicles
6:1 13:1
13:2-4
6:2-12a 13:5-14
14:1-15:24
6:12b-14 15:25-27
6:15-19a 15:28-16:3
16:4-42
6:19b-20 16:43
So you can see by looking at this chart that we have two historians
writing about the same history, there are no contradictions, this is not two
ideas of what went on as the liberal higher critics would say. This is the same situation you have in the
Gospels in the New Testament where you have four men writing and they are
writing about the same history from four different perspectives. The principle is that finite man can never
entirely grasp what God is doing and so we have one man look at it this way,
another man looks at this way and so forth.
So here you have these passages.
Tonight we’re going to go down to the end of 12a and we’ll cover one
passage in Chronicles that is not covered in 2 Samuel. And as we flip back and
forth between Samuel and Chronicles, I want you to notice how Chronicles was
written. I’m not going to exegete Chronicles
as a book because it overlaps Samuel and Kings and if you know Samuel and Kings
you basically know Chronicles. But here
is an excellent opportunity for you to get the feel for how the books were put
together.
So we’ll only read up to verse 12 and I want you to notice these three
verses. So you see what I’m going to do,
we’re going to start with this verse, then go to 1 Chronicles, then back to
Samuel. And later on we’ve got to spend
a lot of time in 1 Chronicles because of what’s being set up here. Actually, we dealt with the Psalms so much in
David’s life and you’re used to seeing the lament Psalms. What you’re encountering here is what
scholars call the development of the cultists, not a cult, the cultists. The cultists is the place where worship
occurred at the center of the nation.
Here is where national worship was begun under David and his musicians
headed by Asaph, and this is the prior history where you have organized musical
worship begin in the nation. So it’s a
very good historical situation to watch how all this came about.
2 Samuel 6:1, “Again, David gathered together all the chosen men of
Israel, thirty thousand.” This is
talking about after David attains his capital.
Remember his capital, Jerusalem, and David calls it by his name, the
city of David, he places his name over it.
There’s a lot of minor motifs or themes that come up here, and I’m in a
dilemma to figure out how I can point out all the themes and not have you lose
the forest for the trees, so just hang on if it’s a little disconnected. But one of the motifs in this chapter is to
give you a contrast with Saul, so while we’re talking about the ark, that’s one
thing that the Holy Spirit’s doing, but He’s also doing something else, He’s
also saying now you look at these details and I want you to see how David
differs from Saul; how compound carnality differs from a spiritual believer; I
want you to see this and I want you to see it clearly. So that’s another motif or theme that will come
up here.
Now David, after he labels his city, “the city of David,” we get into
another motif, and this is the fact that the king of Israel must be God and
man. And so the capital takes the name of the humanity of the king, the city of
David. David’s name, his human name,
placed upon the city. In this chapter
God’s name is going to be placed on the city in the form of the ark; so you
have the union of the humanity and the deity, which ultimately foresees the
God-man King-Savior, Jesus Christ, both natures and attributes of Christ.
Verse 1 is repeated in 1 Chronicles 13 so turn there because now we have
to go to the other history that was written of this thing and look at the
additional details we have. “And David
consulted,” see the additional details here, it’s going to tell you what he’s
doing, and this lets you in on what a diplomat this guy, David, was. He was not only fantastic in the battlefield
but he was fantastic at the negotiation table.
“And David consulted with the captains of thousands and hundreds, and
with every leader.” So you see what he’s
doing; he is getting a very broad base.
Now I point this out because it’s always the tendency to say well David
was a spiritual believer and he just kind of walked along and God dropped it in
his lap. Not at all; David made us of chokmah in the political arena. Because David was a spiritual believer does
not immunize him from using chokmah
in the details of life and this should be a source of relief. Perhaps some of you who are in business, it
is not unspiritual to be a good businessman and know now to make money. There’s nothing unspiritual about it, certain
motives may be, yes, but there is nothing unbiblical or unscriptural about
that. If you’re a businessman you ought
to be as good a businessman as you possibly can be, and that means making the
most skillful use of the resources you have to produce. If you are were a farmer you would want to
produce the maximum from your land; then why do we consider it suddenly
unspiritual and carnal for a businessman to want to get maximum profit off his
investment? Why is that suddenly
unspiritual? It’s not, and here David is
a politician and he wants to be the best politician, and so he’s using chokmah and skill. So he consults with every leader.
2 Chronicles 13:2, “And David said unto all the congregation of Israel,”
now here it sounds good, as far as it goes it is good, but it’s not far
enough. “And David said … If it seem
good unto you, and that it be of the LORD our God, let us send abroad unto our
brethren everywhere, who are left in all the land of Israel, and with them also
to the priests and Levites who are in their cities,” see them brought in here,
because who wrote Chronicles? The
priests and Levites. “…who are in their cities and suburbs [pasture lands],
that they may gather themselves unto us. [3] And let us bring again the ark of
our God,” now in verse 2 he says “If it seem good unto you,” he’s not trying to
just get a human viewpoint consensus; what he is trying to do is what a local
church does when we have a congregational business meeting.
Why do we have every member vote in the church congregation; why do we
have that. It goes back to the principle
of the Holy Spirit. If we believe the
Holy Spirit indwells every believer, we’ll have some believers who are mature,
others who are not, some in between, and you’ll have a congregation made up
like this and so what we do is we put it to a vote and by putting it to a vote
we expect these believers to consider issues in light of the Word of God and
then begin to pass judgment. And the
idea of a congregational vote is simply to get a readout of the Holy
Spirit. It’s not just a vote in the
normal political sense of the word, that’s not the point. The reason that you go to your membership is
to get a consensus of how the Holy Spirit is leading. Now some people will read it inaccurately and
others will read it accurately so you’re not always going to get a unanimous
vote on things, of course. But the point
is by going to the congregation at certain points this is an automatic means,
if the congregation understands, of monitoring the leading of the Holy Spirit
for the entire congregation. Now the
congregation has invested the board with its leadership responsibility;
obviously you don’t want to have a congregational vote every time we have to
buy a roll of toilet paper. The deacons
ought to be able to take care of things like that and they do. But when it comes to major issues then the
board, to be sure, goes to the congregation.
David’s operating on the same kind of principle here, it’s not that he’s
trying to just get a human viewpoint consensus; he is trying to see how the
Lord is leading in the nation, to check the response of the people. He wants to see, now is it really true that
these people want the ark. Now why does
David seem to make a federal case over the ark.
What does the ark stand for? The
ark is a synonym for the presence of God.
There are three things that have gotten mixed up here in Samuel. Let’s sort them out: the ark, the tabernacle
and the ephod. The ephod is the priest’s
garment, the Urim and Thummim, and it was that that was used for divine
guidance. Now where is the ephod? The ephod was with the high priest that went
with David. Remember, Saul got left without his hotline. David got the phone, Saul doesn’t have any
phone; the Urim and Thummim was like a telephone to God, in the sense that it
gives a yes/no answer. And so that was
taken with the high priest.
The tabernacle was at Shiloh, but the ark that was supposed to be in the
tabernacle, that was taken a long time ago, back in 1 Samuel 4 the Philistines
took the ark; they took it into Philistia and they were going to have lots of
fun with the God of Israel, and God had lots of fun, if you recall the details. Therefore, when the ark of God came back to
the nation, the ark, being a sign of the presence of God, was manifesting a
testimony both to the Philistines and to Israel. Remember what the testimony was? The ark didn’t have to be delivered, the ark
delivered itself. And the idea is that
God has a certain typology for the ark.
We have a book done by some scholars in Israel; Israeli scholars in the
20th century, particularly in the last ten years actually, I was
told that at the Hebrew University they’re having courses in research and
trying to recover what temple worship should be like, because in order to have
temple worship they’ve got to carefully research what do you do in a
temple. The Jews have been for 20
centuries without a temple, so they’ve forgotten what temple worship is like,
so they have many professors on the faculty of Hebrew University in Jerusalem
doing research on trying to recover what do you do when you authorize temple
worship.
But the ark, they built a model of this based on the best Biblical
sources, and this is what the ark looks like as far as they are concerned. The only debatable piece, it’s a box,
obviously you can see with two things on the top; those two are cherubs and the
cherubs, usually the King James puts cherubim; “im” is plural ending, “s” is
the English plural, the cherubs are special angels. The only thing that’s debatable about this
presentation is the form of the cherubs; nobody to this day knows what the
cherubs looked like. All we know is that these angels have the face of a man and
they have wings. That’s, by the way,
where you get all this stuff about angels having wings; angels do not have
wings except the cherubs and everybody thinks all the angels are like the
cherubs. The cherubs must be very
insulted to think that we humans have to picture all the angels like they are;
they are pretty high up on the pole, it must be a definite insult.
So the cherubs have a particular form and this is a guess; another guess
that has been suggested in scholarly circles is soemthign like the sphinx,
where you have this kind of a thing because some have thought that the sphinx
is a cherub as it was revealed to Egypt many, many years ago and the Egyptians
have forgotten what it really stood for.
But the cherubs do exist on God’s throne.
Now these three things, the ephod, the tabernacle and the ark were
originally all together. It was God’s
design that they be all together. It was
God’s design that the ark be inside the tabernacle. It was God’s design that the high priest who
ministered in the tabernacle wear the ephod.
So all three of these things were originally together. But in the chaos
of what we can call the middle ages, the dark ages of Israel, during the 400
years of the judges, everything was in chaos because of sin, and the sin eventually
manifested itself in political chaos and finally religious and spiritual chaos
of the overt type like this.
Now what David is going to do is gradually bring these three
together. The first move that he makes
is to recover the ark. Now of these
three things which one do you think Saul was most interested in? Obviously the third one, the ephod. Why?
Because it gave him something that he needed, he needed a hotline to God
and that’s the only one of these three things Saul ever had an interest in. He
never manifested an interest in anything else.
What is it that David shows an interest in? The ark.
Why? Because David cherishes the
presence of God Himself; to him that’s the issue, and he wants the ark.
So when we come here you understand why David says what he does, in 1
Chronicles 13:3, “And let us bring again the ark of our God to us; for we
inquired not about it in the days of Saul.”
That is a description of the kingdom of Saul and his administration; all
during that time the ark was parked in a place just on the boundaries of
Philistia and Israel, a place called Kiriath-jearim, and the battle line went
right through this town, so the town was not in a militarily secure area. Remember the Philistines just go it out, just
get it out of here, and they put it up here, but they apparently maintained
semi-control of the area and the Israelites never managed to get hold of
it. And interestingly, in all of Saul’s
campaigns he never once sought to open the road to recover that ark, and the
commentator here makes a point of bringing our attention to the words of David,
when David says now all during Saul’s administration we didn’t care for God’s
presence nationally, there wasn’t an overbearing concern that God be here
indwelling the center of the nation.
1 Chronicles 13:4, “And all the congregation said that hey would do so;
for the thing was right in the eyes of all the people.” Here’s something very, very much like what we
studied this morning about groups and how to train children to analyze the
group they’re in. Again you see the Jew does not look upon everything that
occurs in the group, he’s interested in whether I appeal to the conscience of
the group, and I appeal to the conscience of the group only in the area of
respect, not whether the group likes me.
Whether somebody likes you or not is entirely beside the point. The issue is whether they respect you and
that’s the central preoccupation of the Old Testament at this point. Since we’ve exhausted the passage in
Chronicles that has given us this added detail, let’s come back to 2 Samuel 6
and pick up the narrative there.
In 1 Samuel 6:1 note a little detail; David gathered these people
together, chosen men, and they numbered thirty thousand. Stop there, thirty thousand… does that ring a
bell. There’s something very peculiar about that number. Turn back to 1 Samuel 13:2, Saul chose for
himself how many men? Three thousand, in
the battle, remember the battle where Jonathan started, he couldn’t wait for
his father and he started the battle; Saul had three thousand men. Turn to 24:2, how many men does he take out
to get David? Three thousand. 26:2, when he goes out to pursue David again,
how many chosen men does he bring with him?
Three thousand. Now put three
thousand into thirty thousand and notice something. What was the theme of the song that the woman
sang? Saul has killed his thousands and
David his ten thousands. And what were
the women saying? David is an order of magnitude greater than Saul, thirty
thousand men David has and Saul has three thousand, and history testifies to
just that point. Wherever Saul went with three thousand, David went with thirty
thousand; David beat Saul ten times over.
And this is an empirical historical evidence of blessing. Blessing is not some sweet little feeling in
the Bible; blessing includes physical blessing and here you have one of those
fine points of Scripture but watch the theme develop here. There’s several places it occurs. Look at the end of 2 Samuel 6, remember the
sub theme of the chapter is David versus Saul, and how does 2 Samuel 6
end? With damnation upon Saul’s only
royal descendant. So again the theme,
David triumphs and Saul falls.
Verse 1 again, why thirty thousand?
Why so many? Why does it take
thirty thousand men… imagine thirty thousand men, how long would it take you to
count them, 1, 2, 3, 4, that’s a lot of men.
It’s bigger than an army division,, and he takes all these men, one
whole division, to go get an ark the size of the picture I showed you. Now why take thirty thousand men? That’s also involved in what’s on David’s
heart. To David the ark is the throne of
Yahweh, the Lord of armies. Now there’s
something that’s going to happen here and David’s wife doesn’t understand it.
That’s why Michal gets out of it. To
David, he wants to have a victory parade of God Himself leading the army into
Jerusalem. To David this becomes a
military parade with Yahweh at the head.
And his wife did not understand it, and many believers at that time did
not understand what David was doing here, why David is dancing as we’re going
to see later on.
Now why does David link the ark with such a militant military type
situation. Turn back to Numbers 10:35,
“And it came to pass when the ark,” this is how the ark was used originally,
when they went to battle or when they moved, when the camp moved in the
wilderness, here’s what happened. “And
it came to pass when the ark set forward that Moses said,” the Levites picked
the ark up, and as the Levite priests, remember the ark hand handles on it, and
the Levites would be the four men on the handles and they’d lift this thing up
to move it, and when they’d go to pick this thing up to move it, then it would
be that Moses said this: “Rise up, Yahweh,” do you see that he connects the
physical elevation of the… they’re actually lifting it physically and as they
lift it he says, “Rise up, Yahweh,” that shows you that to Moses’ mind and to
the Jews that He was physically present sitting there. That was His throne; when the throne moved,
Yahweh moved. So he says, “Rise up,
LORD, and let thine enemies be scattered, and let them that hate You flee
before You,” the Lord Himself goes into battle. [36] “And when it rested, he
[Moses] said, Return, O LORD, unto the many thousands of Israel,” and they
would seat the thing down. It’s a
ceremony they had in the tabernacle, so it was a very ceremonial type of
operation that’s going on. You’ve got to
visualize it in those terms.
Now why does David have a whole division of soldiers going down to move
this little box? Because that is the
importance, David values the box, or he imputes that value to the box, the aron, the ark. Now he can do this in verse 1-2 because he
has previously been given the east-west communication link. Remember the last verse of chapter 5, he
opened the road from Geba to Gezer, that means that that east-west road is now
open to the Israelites and their armed movements. And so moving down the road in force, he goes
to the place, Baale-judah, Kiriath-jearim, to bring up from there the ark of
God. [“And David arose, and went with all the people who were with him from
Baale-judah, to bring up from there the
ark of God.”] And then a peculiar thing
happens in the text; it’s very difficult text and hard to interpret but it says
literally, “the ark of God over which is” the name, “called, the name the LORD
of hosts,” the word “name” occurs twice in the original language, “over which
is called the name—(dash) the name of Yahweh of armies.”
Now the armies that God is the commander of includes not just the
physical armies of Israel but the angelic armies that we saw in 5:24, remember
the mulberry trees moving. Why do you
suppose God said now David, just hold back your soldiers until you see those
trees moving and there’s going to be no wind, the trees are just going to bow
down and you’re going to hear the sound as though many soldiers are marching
and it’s not going to be your soldiers and it’s not going to be the
Philistines, you’re just going to sit there and its going to be one of the most
puzzling things you’ve ever seen in your life, trees moving, looking like a
whole army is walking on them. And when
you see that, go into battle. That means
that at that point God was mobilizing His army to fight with David, there was always
the human and the divine moving together whenever David did anything.
So here he recognizes this, he says I want “the ark, over which is
called the name of the LORD of armies,” and then he adds a descriptive clause,
“who dwells constantly between the cherubim.”
The word “dwell” is the participle and here again you have the fact that
although this is a model of it, if this was the real thing, of course we
wouldn’t be able to look on it if this was the real thing we’d be all dead, but
if we were the high priest and got in there once a year with the blood, in the
way it was originally and then apparently later on it was moved either with a
cover on it or maybe it had the cover off of it and God was more lenient, but
originally no one except the high priest could look upon it. But in between these cherubs was the Shekinah
glory, and it would be just whatever it looked like, the Bible doesn’t clue us
in to what it exactly looked like, but God had a way of picturing His holy
presence there, and it was the God of Israel dwelt between those cherubs, and
that’s why His other name here is called the God who dwells between the
cherubs. In the book of Revelation that
picture is again seen as the beasts surround His throne.
So they go and they begin to do something in verse 3 that is going to
doom their little operation. So far it
was divine viewpoint, so far it was admirable what David cherished God’s
presence, it was admirable that He takes a division of soldiers to stage this
great military procession, but at this point he is going to blow it, and here
is one of those places where you’re going to think God is very unfair. I’m not going to comment on the unfairness of
God until after we present the details of what happened, then we’ll comment on
how it is that God is fair and He can do something like this.
Verse 3, “And they set the ark of God upon a new cart, and brought it
out of the house of Abinadab, which was in Gibeah; and Uzzah and Ahio, the sons
of Abinadab, drove the new cart.” And the word “drove” in verse 3 is a
participle, it means a picture. I want
you to see this thing, here’s the cart moving now, it’s a participle, and he
wants you as a reader to see in your head this ox cart, slowly moving up, just
surrounded with men as far as you can see, thirty thousand men marching with
this ox cart ahead of them. Verse 4,
“And they brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was at Gibeah,
accompanying the ark of God; and Ahio went before the ark.” Now there were two
of them, two sons, Uzzah was along the side of it, and Ahio was before the
ark. Verse 5, “And David and all the
house of Israel played before the LORD,” we’ll cover that in a moment, “on all
manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and on psalteries, and
on timbrels, and on cornets, and on cymbals. [6] And when they came to Nacon’s
threshing floor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God and took hold of
it; for the oxen shook it. [7] And the
anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his
error, and there he died by the ark of God.”
Now there are a lot of implications in this so we have to proceed
slowly, then we’ll defend, so to speak, God’s actions at this point. First verse 3, “the set the ark of God upon a
new cart.” Now at this point they are
making a mistake; you can say it was an innocent mistake. Tough, it was a
mistake. To show you they later realized
this mistake, if you’ll turn to 1 Chronicles 15, after it happened and David
had a chance to think about it, he was mad when it happened but he cooled off
and sat down and thought about it, and then he realized what he’d done
wrong. 1 Chronicles 15:12, he’s going to
try again, this is later on, he’s going to try to move the ark again, and this
time he says, “And said unto them, Ye are the chief [heads] of the fathers of
the Levites; sanctify yourselves, both ye and your brethren, that ye may bring
up the ark of the LORD God of Israel unto the lace that I have prepared for it.
[13] For, because ye did it not at the first, the LORD our God broke forth upon
us, because we sought him not in the due order [proper way].” “After the due order,” in other words David
says, we sought Him, that was fine, but we didn’t do it according to Biblical
instruction; that is, the Levites were supposed to do this.
To see that the Levites were supposed to do this turn to Numbers 4:15,
here’s the instruction they did not use, and people say well, goodnight, I
wouldn’t have remembered it either.
Well, you would have got killed too.
“When Aaron and his sons had made an end of covering the sanctuary and
all the vessels of the sanctuary, as the camp is to be set forth, after that
the sons of Kohath shall carry it,” in other words, only certain authorized
personnel are to carry the thing.
Second, “they shall not touch any holy thing, lest they die.” So that’s
the second instruction. Now it doesn’t
require any hairy interpretation to see what God is saying. By the way, notice that God expects us to
interpret His Word literally, not allegorically. It says “they die,” and you can ask Uzzah
when you go meet him, he died. So it was
a literal death. He would never have
been tempted to allegorize, well death means… you know; yeah, it means die,
that’s what it meant, literal interpretation.
Now another point and here it shows you what was going on and how easy it is to
get infiltrated with human viewpoint when you least expect it. 1 Samuel 6:3, this is when the Philistines
have their problem and when they’re getting rid of the ark. They are going to send the ark away, and the
priests, notice in verse 2 who is giving this advice, priests; what kind of
priests? Dagon’s priests, apostate
priests. What you now have is a
suggestion made by an apostate clergy and they are going to devise a method of
transportation beginning at verse 7.
What is their advice, “make a new cart,” and carry the ark on a new
cart, “take two oxen [milk cows]” with it, and then in verse 11, “And they laid
the ark of the LORD upon the cart,” and by the way, notice they are not
penalized for touching it; the Philistines are bodily touching the thing and
dropping it on the ark and everything and nothing happens to the
Philistines. Why doesn’t God break out
His wrath? Because God didn’t tell them
the instructions on how to handle it; He did the Jews. The Philistines are people without the Word
of God, they’re not judged for that. But
the people of Israel, where you should know better, are. And so they laid the thing on the oxcart,
verse 12, “And the oxen took the straight way … and went along the highway,
lowing as they went, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left; and
the lords of the Philistines went after them unto the border of
Bethshemesh.”
This must have been a marvelous thing, they were just watching where
these animals were going to go because you can imagine the possibilities in
this kind of a thing, and these animals, they put them in the yoke and there
they went, just all by themselves, just as though… well, God was guiding
them. And they finally came to
Bethshemesh, verse 13, at the wheat harvest, “they lifted up their eyes, and
saw the ark, and rejoiced to see it. [14] And the cart came to the field of
Joshua, a Bethsehmite, and stood there, where there was a great stone. And they split the wood of the cart, and offered
the oxen [cows] as a burnt offering unto the LORD.” You can see why the priests prescribe a new
cart; that was the wood for the fire, and the animals that drew it were to be
used as a sacrifice. But the suggestion
came not from the Levites; it came from Dagon’s priests.
So when we come to 2 Samuel 6 and David amasses the whole division to go
down the road, pick the thing up, which in itself is a good motive, how are
they doing it? The same way the pagans
did it, by the instruction of an apostate clergy, that’s how they’re doing
it; and they’re going to find out it
doesn’t work. So in verse 5 we have them
going, “And David and all the house of Israel played before the LORD on all
manner of instruments. Again, please
notice God authorizes instrumental music.
And they had a fantastic orchestra playing as this procession moved down
with the ark. And then [6] “they came to
Nacon’s threshing floor,” now that’s an item that could take an hour to exegete
but a threshing floor in this time, in this era, was often used for an altar;
there are many, many places of this.
We don’t have it said here but apparently it stopped the thing at this
threshing floor. This procession took
time, obviously, thirty thousand men to move along a road is going to take some
time, and they got to this threshing floor and they apparently stopped there,
either to have a short ceremony or something.
The ceremony they had here isn’t going to compare with next time; next
time they’re going to have a sacrifice every six paces when they move this
thing, every time they move 18 or 20 feet there’s going to be a sacrifice; then
they move 18 more feet, sacrifice, and 18 more feet, sacrifice. [In Message 53
he says he ran across a passage in Chronicles that seems to indicate they did
it just once.] That’s finally how the
ark is going to get in the city. But
here they don’t use that procedure, here they’re just stopping, and the oxen
apparently shake the thing, and the verb means that the thing is beginning to
topple, it literally is beginning to topple. And you say this is very, very
unfair, here Uzzah sees the thing toppling and he’s just putting his hand up to
stop the thing, that’s all, and he gets blasted. Now what is the deal?
Why is it that God acts so violently, so rapidly, to a man that was
simply just trying to help out. Well,
that’s the problem, you don’t help God, He doesn’t want your help. And here is a vast theological area, if you
understand it, it’ll solve a lot of problems in your Christian life and if you
don’t understand it, try to and maybe five years from now when you’re put
through the wringer you’ll understand it.
There’s such a thing as grace, and God, in back of His grace, is the
Creator. Now I want you to see the
order, it’s not grace first. God is creator
first, and He will not share His glory with any other person, period. And when it comes to those areas in God’s
Word where His character is at stake He becomes violently angry when it’s
compromised. What was this ark? This ark was to be a typology of God’s
presence; that’s what that ark was to be, a typology of God’s very
presence.
Now what is a type? A type is
something that is going to picture God’s truth.
When He designs a type He does not want people to tamper with it. Now this is manifest in communion, this is
why we always warn you in the communion service, God is just as particular
about us observing communion properly because that is a type of His work, and
He has designed it to be done in a certain way, and if we do not do it in a certain
way we can receive damnation, as the church in Corinth did. It’s the same thing here, God doesn’t have
anything personal against Uzzah, that’s not the point. The point is that when he reached up to
support that thing, he was helping God and God says no, no creature helps Me, I
am free, and I am autonomous. See,
autonomy is a sin for the creation but not for the Creator; I am totally free,
I am totally autonomous and I do not need even a hand of support, I will
support myself.
Now the tendency in Christian circles is to forget this, because we are
so imbued to the concept of grace we think God’s sloppy and we take a very
sloppy view. Now we slop around and the
result is we have Christian slop. And
that’s why issues aren’t clear. God at this point is clarifying something and
something that He periodically does.
Watch it in history. When Moses
hit the rock twice he got clobbered, in the wilderness. And you say, wasn’t that unfair? For crying out loud, I would have hit the
rock five times if I had a million creeps on my hand like Moses had, he
listened to these people gripe for forty years, gripe, gripe, gripe, gripe, I’d
have hit the rock, I’d have hit them; never mind the rock. But when Moses goes to take the rock and he
hits it twice, he has smashed one of God’s types and for that you don’t go into
Canaan. When other things occurred in
the Bible, for example, Abraham and his son, remember He called Abraham, I want
you slit your son’s throat this morning, what did Abraham do? Yes Sir and got up and started it. Now why did God order that? Why is God so hard-nosed on what looks to us
as trivial little details? Why doesn’t
he get hard with David in the area of his polygamy, why not that; why does He
get so hard-nosed over something like this?
Why does he get hard-nosed with Abraham?
Why does He get hard-nosed with Moses, for those little innocent
things? And then He lets a whole bunch
of sins go by and never even bothers with it.
Why does our God work this way? It
goes back to the idea of a witness. Now
I’m going to take this principle not by way of interpretation, I’m going to
take it by way of application to predict in your life where God is going to
bear down hard and where he isn’t. Now
don’t misuse it, this isn’t to give you an escape from discipline, but God is
going to lay into you at the point where He considers your life to be critical
in His program. He has given you a
calling of some sort, be it housewife, be it businessman, somewhere, He has
given you a calling, and He wants something in your soul to be a testimony in
history and He is going to get it, where He has to rub your nose in the ground
to do it, He will. But He is going to
get that out of you in history. And this
explains something; it explains why over here you can have certain sins in your
life that you know of on the basis of Scripture, so it wont’ offend someone,
we’ll say bubble gum, red dresses, blue suits, something like this, make sure
nobody commits this, be perfectly objective.
So we have all of these things that you perceive from Scripture to be
wrong; you know they’re wrong, and yet you know as a matter of fact you’ve
fallen down many, many times and it appears that God hasn’t made an issue out
of it. And yet over here you’ll be
miserable, miserable, you say well I’m going to try to straighten this out or
that out; that’s not the issue.
I’ll give you an illustration; let’s take smoking. Don’t worry smokers, I’m not going to hit too
hard. You know that you’re not helping
your body out by loading it with crud that you pay for, and you know that it is
eventually going to shorten your life and therefore cut away certain things
from your life and you know it’s wrong.
But you also know that at this point God hasn’t made it an issue; yet on
the other hand you will find certain mental attitudes that you can express and
you know when you get in that mental attitude you are going to be worse than
miserable, absolutely depressed all over, complete. Now why is it that He hits so hard over here
when as a matter of fact He lets you get away with all this?
Now here is where the legalist is way out to lunch. And that is what is wrong with the fundies,
all over the place, they never see this issue.
They’re worried about who took a drink at somebody’s party or who took a
puff outside the church. Now when you
see people around this city worried about if you have a beer and if you smoke,
you are looking at the numbskulls of fundamentalism. And it is exactly those people that are way
out. Why? Because God the Holy Spirit
isn’t making an issue, why should they.
Are they better than the Holy Spirit?
What’s the Holy Spirit making an issue out of? Mental attitude sin over here. Usually the mental attitude sin of pride; now
why does God make an issue out of pride?
What is Satan’s sin? Pride. Do you think Satan fell because he had a
cigarette? What was the reason? Did he have a beer party in Eden? He went to see a pornographic movie under the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
Why did Satan fall? Because he
rebelled against God’s authority, that’s why, and that’s the mental attitude
sin of pride and that’s where you and I become most satanic, pride! And that is why God lowers the boom in that
area.
Now why does He insist on doing this?
Because He is bound and determined, if you are part of the body of
Christ, the fundamental thing that God wants clear is a concept of a person who
is grace oriented, a person who understands who and what God is, a person who
understands what sin is, and a person who is doing something about his sins,
that is, he is trusting and looking to grace moment by moment by moment. In other words, his life is basically
submissive to God. That’s what God is
after. And you may have these other
things, yes, and God may eventually make issues out of these and He may clobber
you for them, but the point is He is not going to clobber you for these as long
as this is there, as long as these horrible mental attitude sins are in your
life, that’s where the Holy Spirit is doing His work. So this will save you lots of hours of time
and sweat, of campaigning against NBC or CBS because they’re going to show a
X-rated film. If you don’t like it, turn
the set off, very simple.
Uzzah is one of these types, and let me show you how the two connect
up. Uzzah apparently is a very righteous
person; Uzzah is a very religious person.
He’s obviously a very admirable person because who did David pick to the
high honor of accompanying the ark in the middle of his procession? He picked somebody they could look at as a
person of reputable personality, a person who was trustable, a person who had
some sort of a social impression on the group.
But there was a flaw in his soul and the flaw has to do with pride, but
a particular kind and version of pride.
What is fundamentally pride as far as the creature goes? It’s essentially elevating myself to the
point of the Creator. Pride always does
this, here’s God and here’s the creature.
There is an absolute difference between the two; a qualitative absolute
between the two. Pride always destroys
this.
Now pride doesn’t make the creature necessarily on the same plain as
God, all it does is just make this happen, God is here and I’m here and I’m on
a scale, God is higher up on the scale and I’m down here; He’s higher than I am
but we’re on the same scale. Not
true! The Creator is qualitatively
different that you are. That means He’s
of an utterly different kind, He has shared His personality with You but He is
an infinite person, He’s not just higher up on the scale; in other words, if
you have an IQ of 150 God has an IQ of 1500, that kind of thing, in other
words, God and you work together to solve problems, God is smarter than you are
but still He has to work on the problem—NEGATIVE! God has no problem; do you realize that God
has never learned anything. That’s
omniscience. God has never learned a
thing and He’s been around for all eternity, He’s never learned one thing;
there’s nothing new to God. Pride
eliminates this barrier between God and man and the effect this pride has after
it does this is God and I are going to work things out. God’s on your team, He’s a bigger boy and he
has more muscles than you do, but nevertheless you count too, you and He
together are working on the problem.
NO! God alone works on the
problem and He doesn’t need your help.
Uzzah had made this apostate human viewpoint obsession in his soul that
stemmed from pride that made him reach over and touch it, got to help God out,
God and I are working on the problem of keeping the ark aright. And why becomes violent at this point, and He
breaks out, and the word is peraz,
suddenly He breaks out, it’s the same verb we saw in chapter 5; God breaks out,
verse 8, “And David was displeased because the LORD had made a breach upon
Uzzah; and he called the name of the place Perez-uzzah to this day.” There’s the word, peraz, He made a breach, He suddenly broke out, because God at this
point was concerned more for His glory than He was of the life of Uzzah. That shows something else; is human life the
highest value in the creation? Negative,
the glory of God is the highest value and never get those values reversed. The humanist, the apostate humanist today has
only one highest supreme value, the life of man. God says no, there’s one greater, My
glory. And when it comes to choose
between whether men shall die or whether My glory shall prevail, My glory shall
prevail and men will die. And at this
point God just simply discards Uzzah from the arena of life; you’re in My way,
and he’s rubbed out.
Now this is an aspect of God that you see every once in a while, break through
suddenly; that’s the kind of God that we have.
And the lesson that you learn from verse 8 is the lesson that David’s
responding to; David was displeased, he was angry, but the Hebrew has a very
interesting construction here; it says David was displeased as David, which
tells us a lot. It tells us that David,
when he saw this happen, and he lost Uzzah, he thought I’ve done it again. There’s the sensitivity of David; see how
sensitive he is. He knows he’s committed
a mistake, but immediately he links it with mine, that was my fault.
And the next reaction in verse 9, which is a very normal reaction in
this situation, “And David was afraid of the LORD that day, and said, How shall
the ark of the LORD come to me?” Now the
fear that David has of God in verse 9 is something that you would have expected
in the early days of David’s life.
Didn’t we say that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,” a
respect for God. Here’s another lesson
to pick up and use in your Christian life.
Let’s look at David’s life and then look at our life. Here’s David’s life, it starts off as a
believer, probably in the house of Jesse, and he had a basic respect, he
learned respect for God way back here.
But what this narrative tells you is that God never let him forget the
lesson, that periodically in David’s life, not all the time, but periodically
there would be crises that would arise in David’s life by which God would
remind David, My glory first David, My glory first, not yours, Mine! And I am going to have My way, and you’d
better never cross My path; when I am out to get the glory, don’t get in front
of Me or you’re going to get run over, and even how much I love you, no matter
if you are a believer in union with Jesus Christ, don’t get in the way of God’s
glory and get run over.
Remember who got ran over in the book of Acts? Ananias and Sapphira;
were they believers? You bet they
were. What happened. People had stolen for centuries in the church
and never got blasted like Ananias and Sapphira. Why did God pick on them? Because they got in God’s way. God wanted to give a testimony to the
pristine purity of the Christian church in the early chapters of Acts and they
marred it, and they paid for it with their life. God will not tolerate people
getting in the way of His glory, no matter you are, no matter what office you
are in. And David had to be reminded and
David’s response was fear. This means
fear, fear and respect of what kind of a God it is we serve.
Conclusion, verses 10-11, “So David would not remove the ark of the LORD
unto him into the city of David; but David carried it aside into the house of
Obed-edom, the Gittite. [11] And the ark of the LORD continued in the house of
Obed-edom, the Gittite, three months; and the LORD blessed Obed-edom, and all
his household. And all during this time visualize the picture; the ark was just
sitting outside the city. The house
where Obed-edom was was just outside the city wall. The ark had almost gotten
to Jerusalem, almost got there, and then it stopped and David left it
there. So what happened to the household
where God’s presence was? It’s being
blessed. And it was close enough to the
walls of Jerusalem that every time he’d walk out of the city they’d say look at
that guy, look at his crops, fantastic, what’s with the guy. The ark of God is there. How come the ark isn’t in the city? We can’t move it. It’s right outside the city.
Now what was needed to bring the ark back in the city? Numbers 4, just follow the Word; all he had
to do… three months of wasted time, all he had to do was go back to Numbers 4,
find out how to move it, do it the way God told him to do it and he could have
moved it in that night. It was only a
matter of hundreds of feet, literally, that they had to move this thing, but it
sat there for three months because nobody took the time to go back into the
Word of God and find out how do we do it.
It was all written there, I showed you Numbers chapter 4, the
instructions were all there, the Bible was written very plainly, all the
Levites, theoretically knew it, they just never applied it. It’s an interesting lesson. How many blessings are we missing outside the
city walls; they’re not ours because we’re not following instructions. With our heads bowed…..