Set Apart in the Eternal Ark
On David's spiritual journey
There’s never going to be good timing for the upward ratchet of political violence, and the least of concerns is how historical moments on Saturday night affect those who have to preach on Sunday morning. But this is not just a preacher’s dilemma these days, for social media can fill everyone with anxiety to put out an official press release for how they, as a personal brand, stand on a public issue. Lord have mercy on all of us who feel that pressure, and I wish for you to feel free from needing to say anything at all. But I do have a weekly schedule to keep, and as for the event, all I can say is I am grateful that Trump was not hurt worse, it is horrible that innocent bystanders were hurt and killed, and it is as good a time as any to pray for his health (and for Biden’s much-maligned health, for that matter) and for the nation.
While the lectionary gives us a story of political violence in King Herod’s assassination of John the Baptist in Mark 6, I will pass on the opportunity to exegete much on this. Simply, the story shows through highlighting Herod’s evil that the way of the cross is non-violent resistance and praying for our enemies, whoever they may be, and grieving when violence occurs. And as crazy as it is to pray for things like a hope for peace, a greater reign of sanity, and the well-being of those who oppose us, these are the exact kinds of crazy things prayer was made for. So that’s my press release.
This said, I believe what I had been preparing for in 2 Samuel 6 is as relevant as ever for Christians in the midst of strife, because within it is a part of David’s spiritual journey deepening his relationship with God.
While David rediscovered the Ark of the Covenant with some trial, error, and angst, some of us rediscovered Jesus as the Ark of the New Covenant. Ifwe’re lucky, we are still rediscovering him. 2 Samuel 6 teaches Christians a bit about what it means to carry this new ark with us.
David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, thirty thousand. David and all the people with him set out and went from Baale-judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts who is enthroned on the cherubim. They carried the ark of God on a new cart and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart with the ark of God, and Ahio went in front of the ark. David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals.
2 Samuel 6:1-5
Set apart
There’s too much to say about the Ark of the Covenant, and what I’m focusing on is from the Reformed theological tradition. While we might remember Indiana Jones or vague illustrations of children’s Bibles of Israel carrying it into battle, at its most essential, the ark is a sign of God’s holy presence traveling with and among God’s people. Inherent in its existence, then (as Indiana Jones’ Nazis learned), is that it teaches all who relate to it some basics about our relationship with God.
But we might need to back up to remember something about the nature of holiness. For something to be “holy” is to be “set apart.” One of the reasons God sets things apart is to teach us something vital. Just as good writers know you get to the universal through specifics, God sets things apart in order to illuminate everything else. He sets apart the Sabbath as holy to teach his people about life, a relationship to work, a relationship to creation, and a relationship to him. This set-apart day doesn’t diminish the rest of the week, but illuminates the everyday.
Likewise, in Scripture, God sets apart his relationship with Israel not to condemn other nations, but as a very specific teaching example; they are set apart and highlighted sometimes to much embarrassment for the benefit of all human learning.
And so he sets apart this symbolic Ark not because he literally lives only in this little boxy get-up with golden angels, but to teach us some basics about how to relate to his present through this example (and for ancient Israel, getting really specific about it in the Torah). And if we and David and Saul and all of Israel had been paying better attention, we would never forget that in his presence there is abundance, and life, that our actions have spiritual consequences. But nobody was paying close attention..
So David’s excitement turns to carelessness, and then he violates one of God’s “spiritual physics.” There were proper ways to handle the Ark by certain people (Kohathites for the nerds) that the Torah lays out, but David kinda just wings it on a new cart like he saw the Philistines do; maybe he thought it looked cool. He then learns the hard way that the consequences of spiritual ignorance can be dire. David’s joy at rediscovering a relationship with God turns sour, and he’s pretty upset by this revelation:
When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen lurched. The anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him there, and he died there beside the ark of God. David was angry because the Lord had burst forth with an outburst upon Uzzah, so that place is called Perez-uzzah to this day. David was afraid of the Lord that day; he said, “How can the ark of the Lord come into my care?” So David was unwilling to take the ark of the Lord into his care in the city of David; instead, David took it to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite. The ark of the Lord remained in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite three months, and the Lord blessed Obed-edom and all his household. It was told King David, “The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-edom and all that belongs to him because of the ark of God.”
2 Samuel 6:6-12
And so David realizes that this relationship with God thing is going to be harder and more fearful than he thought he was signing up for. After his anger at God, he kinda freaks out. In no longer wanting to carry the ark, David had a crisis of faith, symbolically saying he didn’t want to have a relationship with God. If you’ve ever regretted going down a spiritual path and wish you could unlearn some things, you’re right there with David.
But Scripture knows that David’s newly rekindled fear is not just a blessing in disguise, but part of the journey. The “fear of the Lord” is one of the most, well, feared phrases in the Bible among people on the fringes of faith. It doesn’t sound like a relationship we want to have. But one way to think of it might be a deep respect that we are not in control and that we are beholden to laws beyond our preferences. And so God teaches through the Ark is that there are “spiritual physics,” spiritual “laws of the universe,” that aren’t great to break. But as shown in the blessing of Obed-edom, the Ark’s overall message is that the presence of God is life-giving when we keep showing up with intention, sincerity, and humility.
The Ark as a sign of God: Ruler, Redeemer, Revealer
So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom to the city of David with rejoicing, and when those who bore the ark of the Lord had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatted calf. David danced before the Lord with all his might; David was girded with a linen ephod. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet.
2 Samuel 6:12-14
Again from a Reformed lens,1 there are at least three aspects of God that the Ark proclaims to us: God is here, God is in control, and in God are redeemed. These all correspond to the three offices of Jesus Christ that my theological tradition teaches:2 Jesus as prophet, king, and priest.
Again, on the most basic level, the Ark shows that our God is a present God. He is with us in the world. He is not confined to any given place, and he is not visible—while the Ark has a seat from him, there is no image of him on it. But he travels with us, and the Ark proclaims his presence. So when Jesus acts as a prophet, he is also proclaiming God’s presence.
Second, the Ark is like a throne because it teaches God is not only present, he is in sovereign control…you know, the Lord. Eventually, Jesus Christ would arrive as the king of kings.
Perhaps less known to Christians is how the Ark predates and reveals God as a redeemer, thus previewing Jesus as priest. For as Richard D. Phillips explains, “On the annual Day of Atonement, the high priest would sprinkle sacrificial blood on the sin-offering lid atop the ark, so that the people learned that they could be forgiven through the substitutionary death of a sacrifice.” This was known as the “Mercy Seat.” Therefore, the proclaimed reign of God’s presence is the proclamation of a God of redemption, a God of mercy, a God of love.
For many forms of Reformed worship, the Ark has not one but two kinds of sacrificial offerings that became incorporated into Christian worship: offerings of atonement and offerings of peace. As Phillips says:
[For atonement, ] 1 Chronicles 15:26 relates that they “sacrificed seven bulls and seven rams.” These animals were typically used in the sin offerings (see Lev. 4:3; 5:15). With these offerings, David and Israel humbled themselves as sinners before God’s grace, acknowledging that all their service was tainted by sin and appealing to the divinely appointed means of forgiveness. We likewise come to God today, confessing our sin and appealing to the blood of Christ, which “cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7)… In addition to the sin offerings were thank or peace offerings, which expressed the people’s sense of gratitude to God. The ox was used for these offerings (Lev. 4:10; 9:4), as was the “fattened animal”—that is, an animal that had grown fat on a year’s worth of feeding.
Because David took the time to renew himself and his relationship with God, he began to have a more intimate understanding of our participation in the life of the living God. While I haven’t seen much dancing in the pews recently, we model in worship every single week two offerings—confession and gratitude—that go all the way back to the Ark, for both continue in Christ.
David’s rediscovery of the sign and the Signified
Prior to this episode, Israel had stopped caring about the Ark. It had gotten taken in battle, the Philistines got rid of it, and Saul didn’t care enough to find it (representing his general sloppy and entitled attitude to God anyway). Symbolically, they were saying that “God’s presence doesn’t really matter to us,” taking God for granted. And so here comes David, and he’s excited to bring it back. But he doesn’t know what he’s really doing. This is a lot of us, I think, when we flirt with the idea of Christianity again.
We could do worse than pay attention to David. David does this process of rediscovering a forgotten tradition, unintentionally messing it up, paying attention to where God is continuing to work in the world, then going back to study some more and figure out where he went wrong. All of us can learn from this: we think we have God figured out, but if we keep studying Scripture, it is impossible to not notice ways that we do not really “carry the Ark” in our daily lives.
After David recovers from his spiritual wounds, he eventually realizes, a-ha, God is trying to teach me the foundations of life. But David is still learning about the differences between what the Reformed tradition calls “the sign and the Signified,” in other words, the difference between the signs of God and who God really is. Next week, we’ll see that David tells God, you’ve got this dinky little Ark, I want to build you a big temple, and God says, “No, you still don’t quite get that it’s not about the building. My building is where you are, and my relationship with you is what matters.” And so the Ark as a holy sign, a “set apart” thing, also teaches that it’s not the things themselves that matter.
For God is present with us, but not in a single place. God is a king, but not a king like this world’s kings, but a king who rules through the power of weakness, humility, and sacrifice. God is a transformer of our suffering, not through more violence, but through pure forgiveness and redemption. And this is why David dances, dances, and dances for joy.
The Eternal Ark
And this is what Jesus Christ would show us gentiles even more, and what a parallel lectionary reading Ephesians 1:3-14 also points to:
…He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
Ephesians 1:4-10
For Christians, Jesus Christ is the new holy sign; the one chosen by God to choose us. In him, the sign of God, is no longer a man-made object, but God incarnate among his people. And through him, God keeps saying, “There’s even more I need to teach you. So take this human, set apart as holy, who will then set you apart as holy…not because you are better than anyone, but so that they might know something of me through your relationship to him. That’s the challenge and the stakes of the gift. Don’t take it for granted.” Sadly, like Israel’s saga in the Old Testament, we Christians often teach people about God by our failings in light of whom we claim.
But for our shortcomings, this holy human that God has been sacrificed in our place; the Mercy Seat is within our hearts. And holiness itself will be sacrificed so that nothing is set apart from anything, for all things and all people are in Christ. And this holiness will be humiliated; sanctity itself will be enslaved, beaten, and destroyed; Divinity will die powerless. But in his death and Resurrection, you have the opportunity to carry that sign—the Ark of the Eternal Covenant—with you, the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ.
We don’t need to be the Kohathites, picking up a beautiful physical box with careful goatskin in procession. But there are, indeed, standards that God asks us to uphold when we claim to to carry the Ark of his Son, to carry ourselves as his dwelling place, to accept his invitation to live in us despite none of us being perfectly fit for it. To carry Christ carefully is to really revere him, to make ourselves a sign of him but not because we mistake ourselves as him. In doing so, the only thing that sets us apart is that we have been given the gift of seeing the gift, and we might hope that others see the gift. If we are set apart it is not to feel righteous, but that we might teach others about God—as St. Francis said, using words when necessary.
So if you were waiting for a final punchline of how the Ark tells us anything at all about how to act in the wake of an assassination attempt, in the midst of wars and genocides and many subtler accepted evils, perhaps we can come away with question: What is there for you to rediscover? How are you carrying the living God with you? Do you know, or have you forgotten, that you have been called to be his dwelling place? Do you know that you have been set apart for the eternal Ark?
For the king is here and has been here, and he has redeemed you even from death, and perhaps even more miraculously, from the destruction of hating your enemies. And he says, “Go and do likewise.”3
Much of this commentary draws on Richard D. Phillips’ commentary on 2 Samuel.
See the Westminster Shorter Catechism
Luke 10:37