God has made your heart his throne. May you never forget who dwells within you.
There’s a certain Bible story that bothers me and I bet you’ll agree.
Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada, and we can all point to Bible stories that run counter to what we think is fair or right. Sometimes you read things in the Bible and you think, “What?! What’s this all about?” Well, 2 Samuel contains one of those stories. It describes the time that King David and 30,000 of his men went to bring the Ark of the Covenant back to Jerusalem. With pomp and ceremony, they set the Ark on a cart, and as it rumbles along, everybody is celebrating – the Ark where God dwelt between the cherubim and above the mercy seat – that Ark would now be brought to its final resting place in the City of David. But the ox pulling the cart stumbled and Uzzah, one of David’s men, reached out to steady it. He put his hand on the ark to keep it from toppling on the ground. And instantly, God struck Uzzah, and he died. Everyone was filled with fear, especially David. He was so afraid of the Lord that that day that he was not willing to take the Ark of God anywhere. Let alone to his city.
Okay, so that’s the story. And there’s not a person who reads it who doesn’t question, why did God strike down Uzzah? The man was only trying to help, to keep the ark from hitting the ground. But listen to what Dr. R.C. Sproul says. This is what he writes; he says, “It wasn’t the ground that would have desecrated the ark. It was the touch of man. The earth, the ground is an obedient creature. It does what God tells it to do. It brings forth its yield in its season, and it obeys the laws of nature which God established. There is nothing polluted about the ground. The ground doesn’t commit cosmic treason. But man has. And God did not want his holy throne to be touched by that which was contaminated by evil, that which was in rebellion to him, that which by its ungodly revolt had brought the whole of creation to ruin and had caused the ground and the sky and the waters to groan together in travail.” When I read that, by R.C. Sproul, it gave me fresh understanding of what happened that day on the way to Jerusalem. It also gave me a clearer appreciation of the holiness of God.
Besides, David should have known that a wooden cart was not the way to transport the throne of God. He forgot what the law said about handling the Ark of God. You’d think that someone in that group of 30,000 would’ve remembered Numbers 4, where it states that the Ark is to be handled and carried a certain way – by only certain people, the Levites, they were the ones to transport it. And even then, they had to cover the Ark a certain way with a certain kind of cloth. And then, certain poles had to be inserted into the rings on the bottom of the Ark. And only when the poles were in place and the Ark was properly covered in that certain way was it then to be lifted up on the shoulders of the Levites and carried.
To me, it’s an amazing story all about the holiness of God. The story also tells me how I am to live, not carelessly or disrespectfully or in just any old way I feel like. It teaches me how I am to move with the Spirit of the Living God dwelling inside of me. Because just like Uzzah, the sins I commit – even if they were done with good intentions – they are still sins, they are still an offense to God. Which makes me all the more grateful to Jesus Christ for covering all my sins. And it makes me all the more careful of the way I live, knowing that a Holy God whose throne was once an Ark, now makes my heart his throne. May I never forget who dwells within me. And may you never forget either.
© Joni and Friends