Worship matters (2 Sam 6; 1 Chr 13; Ps 60; Acts 23)

What a shocking event! How do you feel about the LORD putting Uzzah to death for steadying the ark of God? Does it seem a bit extreme? Whatever you make of it, surely it’s a pointer to the divine origin of Scripture – you just wouldn’t make this stuff up! As biblical scholar Dale Ralph Davies notes “this God is not very marketable.”

King David had a right desire to bring the ark of God into Jerusalem. The ark showed God’s desire to dwell with His people, it was a sign of His blessing. It was right for David to want the ark in Jerusalem. David gathered huge crowds for the occasion and there was great celebration and excitement until the oxen pulling the cart stumbled, and the ark nearly fell to the ground. You can imagine the gasps, and then the relief as Uzzah steadies it. And then the absolute silence when Uzzah falls down dead. But this was no accident, we are told very clearly “God struck him down there because of his error.” (2 Samuel 6v7).

Why?

Tragically David had ignored God’s Word about worship. God had very clear instructions about how the ark was to be moved. In Numbers 4 we see that the Ark needed to be covered with goatskins, carried on poles by the Kohathites, and must not be touched.

So why was David bringing the ark on a new cart? Perhaps because that is how the Philistines had returned the ark to Israel (1 Samuel 6). It seemed to work all right, and so instead of looking to God’s Word for instructions on worship, David looked to what other people were doing. This was a fatal error. Fatal for Uzzah anyway. Uzzah had assumed it was better for him to touch the ark to steady it than to let the ark fall to the ground. Perhaps he had got too comfortable with religious things that he had lost his reverence for God. He thought his touch was better than it falling to the ground. but as RC Sproul points out:

“it wasn’t the ground or the mud that would desecrate the ark; it was the touch of man. The earth is an obedient creature. It does what God tells it to do.”

Here is a powerful lesson about the holiness of God and the danger of being casual in our worship. The danger of being so comfortable with religious things that we lose our reverence of God. Or the danger of following what the world is doing rather than what God says.

The Ark of God showed God’s desire to dwell with His people, but because God is holy, we can only dwell with God on His terms. Wonderfully all our sins can be washed away by Jesus, the one who offered the perfect sacrifice so that all our sin can be blotted out. But in order to receive the blessing of forgiveness and the joy of having God dwell with us, we must repent of our sin and seek to worship God the way He tells us. We must follow what God says rather than what the world says.