Bridgewater, Massachusetts, January 13, 2002
2 Samuel 6:1-8 Uzzah
steadies the ark
David
again brought together out of Israel chosen men, thirty thousand
in all. He and all his men set out from Baalah of Judah to bring
up from there the ark of God, which is called by the Name, the
name of the Lord Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim
that are on the ark. 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 and
they brought it with the ark of God from the house of Abinadab,
which was on the hill, and Ahio was walking in front of it.
David and the whole house of Israel were celebrating before the
Lord with all kinds of instruments made of pine, and with harps,
lyres, tambourines, sistrums, and cymbals.
When
they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out and
took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. 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.
Then
David was angry because the Lord's wrath had broken out against
Uzzah, and to this day that place is called Perez Uzzah.
Matthew 8:1-4 Jesus
touches and heals a leper
When
Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed
him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said,
"Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean."
Jesus
reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am
willing," he said. "Be clean!" Immediately he was
cleansed of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, "See that
you don't tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and
offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them."
Arcana Coelestia
#878.7 Uzzah touching the ark
The
ark represented the Lord; so it embodied everything sacred and
heavenly. When Uzzah reached out to the ark, it represented our
own power, which is our ego. And since our ego is unholy, the
word "hand" is left out--though it is understood. It
is left out so that the angels would not sense that something so
profane had touched what is holy.
Apocalypse
Explained #700f.30 Uzzah touching the ark
Uzzah
the son of Abinadab died because he seized the ark with his
hand, since "touching with our hand" means
communicating. We communicate with the Lord through the goodness
of love. Yet Uzzah was not anointed as the priests and Levites
were--and when they were anointed, this caused them to represent
the goodness of love. Also, the cherubim on the mercy seat that
was on the ark symbolized a safeguard to make sure that the Lord
would not be approached except through the goodness of love.
When
they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out and
took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. 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. (2 Samuel 6:6, 7)
The
story of "the sin of Uzzah," as our reading from 2
Samuel traditionally known, is a favorite one for skeptics to
bring out as evidence that the God of the Bible is not worthy of
our belief. Such a simple and natural act--steadying the ark to
keep it from falling--and poor Uzzah is struck dead by God! Who
could believe in such a petty, oversensitive God?
Even
king David found this hard to take. He responded to God's
destructive anger against Uzzah with anger of his own.
Naturally, he was also very much afraid. As the story continues,
instead of bringing the ark up to Jerusalem as he had planned,
he took it aside to the home of a man named Obed-Edom. It wasn't
until David saw that the Lord blessed the household of Obed-Edom
because the ark was there that he finally did bring the ark up
to Jerusalem, three months after his original attempt.
Now,
let me be right out front and say that I don't believe God
strikes people dead. Ever. Yes, I know that the Bible says he
does. But this is what our church's teachings call an
"appearance of truth." When we humans are in a state
of mind that is very far away from the love and truth of God,
then God's love looks like wrath and anger to us, and God's
truth looks like a destructive, deadly force. And since the
Bible must reach out to us even in our lowest and most distant
states of mind, it often speaks in terms that we'll understand
and appreciate--but that aren't the way things really are from
God's point of view.
A
wonderful passage illustrating the principle that God appears to
us according to our own character is Psalm 18:25, 26. The
Psalmist is addressing the Lord when he says:
With the loyal you
show yourself loyal;
With the blameless you show yourself blameless;
With the pure you show yourself pure;
And with the crooked you show yourself perverse.
Like
a good parent, God is willing to have us believe that he is
angry with us and will punish us for doing wrong, if that's what
we need to believe to motivate us to straighten out our act. But
in fact, the punishment only appears to come from God. It
is actually evil itself that punishes us, as expressed in this
passage from Jeremiah:
"Your
own wickedness will punish you, and your backslidings will
convict you. Consider then, and realize how evil and bitter it
is for you when you forsake the Lord your God, and have no awe
of me," says the Lord God of hosts. (Jeremiah 2:19)
And
two chapters later in the same prophet:
"Your
own conduct and actions have brought these things upon you.
This is your wickedness. How bitter it is! How it pierces to
your very heart!" (Jeremiah 4:18)
With
these thoughts in mind, we can return to the story of Uzzah
reaching out and touching the ark, and dying as a result. To us
today, this seems like a punishment all out of proportion to
Uzzah's actions. But in the context of his own culture, it makes
more sense. Some background will help.
Uzzah
and his brother Ahio, who were guiding the cart on which the ark
was being carried, were sons of Abinadab, in whose house the ark
had been for a long time--at least twenty years, according to
the figure given in a passage in 1 Samuel (7:2). Having spent
that much time with the ark in their house, Uzzah and his
brother must have known that there were very strict rules about
how the ark was to be handled. One of those rules was that no
one was ever to touch the ark. Even when the ark was carried, it
was always carried by the poles on either side of it, without
touching the ark itself.
Uzzah
would also have known from the recent history of the ark, just
before it came to its house, that death and destruction came
very quickly to those who did not treat it with proper respect
and reverence. (See 1 Samuel chapters 5 and 6.) And further, the
proper mode of carrying the ark was not on a cart; the priests
were supposed to carry it on their shoulders--holding it by its
rods, of course. If the ark had been carried properly, this
whole episode could not have happened, because there would have
been no cart holding the ark, and no oxen pulling that cart who
could have stumbled.
Seen
in this light, and in this context, the "sin of Uzzah"--and
its severe punishment--begins to make a little more sense. Uzzah
knew the rules, but he broke them anyway. From our perspective,
it looks like he was trying to protect the ark. But from the
perspective of an Israelite of that time, reaching out and
touching the ark was a sign of supreme disrespect for it--and
for the Ten Commandments, which were in the ark, and the God who
gave those Commandments. It was a sign that Uzzah was more
confident in himself and his own power than he was in the power
of the ark of God to take care of itself.
Once
again, I don't believe that God literally struck Uzzah dead;
that is only how it appears to us. However, the people of those
ancient times were steeped in superstition, and they believed
strongly in the life-and-death power of the supernatural. For
them, a serious breach of sacred protocol such as Uzzah
committed when he reached out and touched the ark would be quite
sufficient to bring powerful spiritual and psychological forces
to bear--forces that could very easily cause Uzzah's instant
death.
We
know that people who believe strongly enough that they are going
to die can cause their bodies to shut down even when there are
no natural causes sufficient to kill them. Uzzah's own
consciousness of his terrible sin--according to the beliefs he
had been steeped in all his life--was likely what killed him.
And so the saying of Jeremiah came true for him: "Your own
wickedness will punish you."
What
can this story possibly mean for us today? After all, most of us
don't believe that God will strike us dead if we improperly
handle something sacred to us, such as the Bible. In our
culture, cases of divine vengeance smiting sinners to death on
the spot are quite rare!
We
can begin to get at the deeper meanings in this story if we
consider the state of mind Uzzah was in when he reached out and
grasped the ark in order to steady it. He thought that he, Uzzah,
could guide and direct the ark of God. He thought that his own
hand was more powerful than God's to keep the most sacred
physical embodiment of God's presence among his people on its
course. At the moment when Uzzah reached out and steadied the
ark, he thought that he was more powerful--more in control of
the situation--than God.
Do
we ever think this way?
It
isn't all that hard to come to the conclusion that God really isn't
in control of the situation here on earth. One look around us at
all the war, poverty, disease, and injustice in the world is
enough to convince us that something is seriously out of whack
around here. Why doesn't God get things under control? Why
doesn't God right the wrongs, and bring justice to all the
earth, as the Bible promises? Perhaps it is because God really isn't
in control--or just doesn't care enough about us to bother.
At
any rate, it certainly does seem that if we don't get busy and
fix things up around here, God isn't going to do it for us. So
who's in charge here, anyway? Doesn't everything depend upon us?
Why shouldn't we reach out and grab hold of the course of
this world's social evolution before things go to complete ruin?
It's a lot better than waiting for a God who doesn't seem at all
ready and willing to take charge and fix up our world.
Isn't
this just the same kind of thinking that was running through
Uzzah's hand as he saw the oxen stumbling, and reached out his
hand to steady the ark? It was all up to him, wasn't it, to make
sure that no harm came to the ark? And it's all up to us, isn't
it, to make sure that no harm comes to this world of ours--to
its people and its natural environment.
Yet
our attempts at building the perfect society have been dismal
failures. Throughout the ages, humans have attempted to build
empires in their own images--and the result has been war,
slaughter, oppression, and slavery. Even those who sought to be
"benevolent dictators" ended out presiding over
despotism and disorder. In the twentieth century, we thought we
could do it better. We set up totalitarian states falsely named
"socialism," "communism," and even
"capitalism," and tried to force our populations to
become a society of perfectly socially adjusted, altruistic
people who lived one for all, and all for the one.
None
of these social and governmental experiments has worked. They
have all been based on the idea that if the right enlightened
group of human beings (us!) could just get into power, we could
fix up this world of ours through the sheer force of our own
enlightened theories and ideas. We believed--and apparently
still continue to believe--that we are better than God at
running this world.
And
we are wrong. Our so-called "enlightened theories"
have only made things worse. We have reached out our hand to
steady the ark, and millions of people have died.
Sooner
or later, we will realize that we can never get our world on the
right track through the so-called power of human ingenuity. We
have tried over and over again to get things right, and it
hasn't worked. We are still trying--and will probably keep
trying for many more years before we finally admit that human
intelligence is simply inadequate to the job of guiding our
world. Our minds are limited, finite, and faulty. The job is too
big for us.
Only
the mind of God can guide such an incredibly complex organism as
our earth--with all the amazing complexities in the world of
nature, and all the staggering diversity of its human cultures
and peoples. And only when we turn to God for guidance will we
even begin to gain the insight that we need to act wisely
and constructively even in our little corner of the world, let
alone being able to run a nation or the world as a whole.
Let's
return to the ark for a moment. Why was it so sacred? The ark
itself was nothing particularly spectacular. It was a wooden box
overlaid with gold, and with golden cherubim (winged human
figures) on its cover. Yes, it might have been impressive to an
ancient Israelite with all that gold--but nothing for people to
be struck dead over.
It
was not the ark itself, but its contents that made it sacred.
Within the ark of God were the Ten Commandments--the most sacred
core of the ancient Jewish law, spoken in God's own voice from
Mt. Sinai, and written in God's own finger on the stone tablets
that were the only contents of the ark. These Ten
Commandments summarized and symbolized the entire law of God. An
awe and reverence of the Ten Commandments, and the ark that
contained them, was an expression of awe and reverence for the
entire Word of God--for all of God's divine commandments,
teachings, and laws.
These
are the same laws that govern our universe and our world. They
are the laws that govern all of human society, and every human
community. They are the laws that govern our own individual
lives every day, and every moment. In the end, these divine laws
cannot be violated any more than the law of gravity can be
violated. They are fixed and eternal--and all people who set
their face against them will, in the end, bring certain
destruction upon their own heads because they are flying in the
face of the very nature of reality.
If
we think that we can run our world or even our own individual
lives better than God can, then we, like Uzzah, are reaching out
and steadying the ark of God. And like Uzzah, in our pride and
arrogance we will bring our own destruction upon ourselves.
But
if we recognize in our heart, mind, and life that the Lord is
truly in control--and that this is good--then we can once
again bring the ark of God up to Jerusalem with singing and
dancing, and place God's eternal laws at the center of our lives
where they belong. Amen.
Music: Dimensions
© 1999 Bruce DeBoer
Graphic of the Ark
Courtesy of Broderbund Christian ClickArt Collection
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