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Day by Day - 2 Samuel
Reverence For The Wonder Of God
Clif Johnson
(Lifeword)
Aired on Jul 10, 2024
Show Day by Day
Jul 01, 2024
Duration:
00:03:36 Minutes
Views:
27
devotionals who is God? worship

To have proper worship, we must fully recognize God’s holiness. #daybydaylw Interested in learning more about becoming a devoted follower of Christ? Go to follow.lifeword.org!   ~~~   Restoring worship, the reordering of your life around God means this: A reverence for the wonder of God 2 Samuel 6 contains one of the most disturbing passages in the OT, in all of the Bible. A man was struck down for saving the ark of the covenant from falling into the dirt. So shocking to our system is this passage that some so-called theologians have attempted to get God off the hook by explaining that Uzzah had so much respect for the Ark, that when he touched the Ark, he was so overcome with fright that he died on the spot of a heart attack. It was his own terror that caused his death. But that would not do justice to the text. God is not seeking to be let off the hook. God does not hide at all what he does in this passage. He makes it plain and clear for all to see, yet we can refuse to see it, because we don’t want a God like this. This story offends our sense of justice. What exactly was Uzzah’s sin? To get at that answer, we must look backwards into recorded word of God and see the instructions that were given to the priesthood regarding carrying this special, sacred box. There was one special branch of priests, the Kohathites, who were commissioned and consecrated by God to carry the ark (Numbers 4:4-6). The ark was to be covered by three different coverings. And there was a special way to carry the ark. And Aaron is warned in Numbers to relay this instruction to the Kohathites and not to look upon the holy things so that they would not be killed. Listen to what R. C. Sproul had to say—“Uzzah’s sin was his assumption that his hand was less polluted than the earth. But 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. It brings forth its yield in its season. It obeys the laws of nature that God has established…the ground doesn’t commit cosmic treason. There is nothing polluted about the ground…God did not want His holy throne touched by that which was contaminated by evil, that which was in rebellion to Him, that which by its ungodly revolt brought the whole creation to ruin.” Sproul, Holiness of God, 108 Uzzah was not an innocent man, and yet, we find ourselves siding with him. Why is that? Because we do not properly understand the holiness of God, and we overestimate our own goodness and intentions. If we are ever to have restored worship, our lives ordered around God, then we must have a growing awareness of God’s outright, absolute, holiness.

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