Are You Sure You Are Ready To See God

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Pastor Ed Pruitt

ARE YOU SURE YOU ARE READY TO SEE GOD

PART 4

Sunday, June 17 2007

2 Samuel 6:11-15 (NLT)

11 The Ark of the LORD remained there in Obed-edom’s house for three months, and the LORD blessed Obed-edom and his entire household.

12 Then King David was told, “The LORD has blessed Obed-edom’s household and everything he has because of the Ark of God.” So David went there and brought the Ark of God from the house of Obed-edom to the City of David with a great celebration.

13 After the men who were carrying the Ark of the LORD had gone six steps, David sacrificed a bull and a fattened calf.

14 And David danced before the LORD with all his might, wearing a priestly garment.

15 So David and all the people of Israel brought up the Ark of the LORD with shouts of joy and the blowing of rams’ horns.

David is the new king over Judah.

David wants to do a great job.

More than that, because he has a heart for God, David wants to be a godly king.

More than anything else, David wants to establish the presence of the Lord for his term as king.

He had seen the errors of pride and ambition in Saul.

David wants to be a king after God’s own heart.

David was wise enough to know that at this time the central, visible representation of the presence of God was the ark of the covenant.

The ark is a physical symbol of God’s abiding with them.

The commandments of God are in that ark.

The mercy seat is on top of that ark.

The tokens of God’s special presence as He delivered millions of Jews from Egypt and the hand of Pharaoh were in that ark.

And David knew he still had lots of enemies to be delivered from.

And somehow David related that ongoing deliverance to God’s presence among them.

And God’s presence - at least His manifest, delivering presence - was related to Israel’s worship.

That’s an important insight.

David wasn’t some wild and crazy guy.

He just wanted to defeat his enemies.

That’s the whole reason David wanted that ark back in its rightful place in Judah.

Saul really hadn’t cared that much about the ark.

He actually left the ark, totally unattended, ignored at the house of Abinadab, for twenty years.

He never even bothered to send some delegation of troops to bring it back home.

Saul is forever a picture of a man who got so involved in pursuing his own ambitions as leader that the central place of the worship and presence of the Lord became stagnate in the lives of the people.

Allow me to give a little history of this.

We need to go back in time to the final years of the reign of Saul, the capture of the ark of the Lord by the Philistines, and the collapse of the priesthood of Eli.

Judah was defeated badly by the Philistines and failed to take the time to discern the reason for her weakness.

1 Samuel 4:1-2 (NLT)

The Philistines Capture the Ark

4 At that time Israel was at war with the Philistines. The Israelite army was camped near Ebenezer, and the Philistines were at Aphek.

2 The Philistines attacked and defeated the army of Israel, killing 4,000 men.

Now, those two verses give the bare-boned explanation of what happened.

Judah took a whipping from the Philistines.