The ark of convenant (1 Chronicles 13) & David

Many people have often questioned why God in the Old Testament seemed so cruel, their favourite example is the killing of Uzzah on the incident of touching the Ark of Convenant.

I have listened to a VERY good sermon from Dr. Wong Ka Leung. (Listen here. It's in Cantonese.) A kinda new perspective on this incident.

Instead of concentrating on the killing of Uzzah, he asked what David was doing in this case.

David attempted to move the ark back to Jerusalem in order to make Jerusalem the worship centre of Israel. This was still the early days of his reign and he still needed to establish more power.

And he started out seemingly in the right way, he asked "if it seems good to you and if it is the will of the LORD our God". In the end, "the whole assembly agreed to do this, because it seemed right to all the people." What about God?

This is like what we normally do. "If this is YOUR will, please give THAT thing to me." Not this, but THAT thing. Are we really leaving everything to God? When we need to compromise something, the first thing we compromise is GOD! This is because we don't believe NOT doing things in God's way have ANY serious consequence (e.g. death), or maybe we do believe, but God is so good to us, He'll forgive us when we pray for forgiveness.

This was not a correct way of moving the ark, if you have checked with Numbers/ever heard an explanation on this, you probably already knew.

Why they did move the ark in this way? Were they this ignorant? The ark was moved by Philistines in exactly the same way. It is possible that they knew both ways, and Philistines did it this way and was successful, that is why they did it the same way.

Modern churches often do things in the modern way. (just like business organisations) e.g. the method of worship, the structure of our church, or EVEN the number of people in our church! (Is it that important??! Numbers have never been an important thing for God, e.g. Gideon's 300 people army)

In the original Hebrew Bible, it is not just "the ark" like the Chinese Union Version. It is "the ark of God" except where Uzzah touched "the ark" (not of God here.) We talk about the work of God, until it fails, then oh, we try to rescue OUR work! When it fails, "God we're just trying to doing things for you, why did you kill me?" You weren't doing things in God's way in the beginning. And our concern is for OUR work not for God in the end.

When we ask for God's will, it's not that we don't know what the right way is, we often know the way to do things, but we don't want to do things in that way, that is why we ask.