Desiring A Dangerous God: Why Did God Kill Uzzah When He Was Just Trying To Help? - 2 Samuel 6:1-12 Series

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Introduction

This has got to be the ultimate example of raining on someone’s parade. The people are the happiest they have ever been – singing and dancing with all their might. And they are not celebrating a touchdown or home run or some earthly thing. They are celebrating before the Lord in worship – rejoicing over the presence of God. What could be better? You might think that now that the people have turned back to God and His way, and are worshipping Him with such genuine hearts that they have exuberant joy in Him, you might think God would do everything possible to avoid spoiling this in any way. Like a mother who spends two hours trying to get a colicky baby to sleep, and finally succeeds – at that point the mother will do anything to avoid waking the child up. Israel is finally doing what she should be doing – rejoicing in God. And the godly might be looking around at that and saying, “Don’t do anything to rock the boat.”

And then, right in the middle of the whole celebration, God kills Uzzah. The ox stumbles, the Ark is about to take a tumble, Uzzah reaches out to steady it and is instantly struck dead. He just did not want it to fall down in the dirt – what is so bad about that? What kind of harshness is this – that God would strike a man dead who was in the middle of worshipping Him and joyfully serving Him? We are going to learn from this chapter some of the most important principles about worship and about the nature of God that we will ever learn. And the whole chapter focuses on emotions. I think if we go through the emotions described in this chapter one by one we will get what this section of God’s Holy Word is teaching.

But before we jump in to verse 1 let me just say a couple things about emotions. There is a well known book written by James Dobson titled, Emotions, can you trust them? And I think most Christians, when they hear that question, would answer, no – you cannot trust your emotions at all. And in one sense that is true. You cannot trust your emotions to show you right and wrong – that’s for sure. Sometimes something can feel so good and so right, and yet it is deadly and evil. Sometimes something can feel so loving, and yet Scripture says it is unloving. If you use your emotions to discern right and wrong you will get into all kinds of error.

So you cannot trust your emotions to show you right and wrong. However there is another sense in which you can trust your emotions. Your emotions are a perfectly accurate indicator of what is in your heart. Your emotions are important for several reasons, and one of them is they always tell the truth about what is in your heart. If someone gets hurt and you do not feel any compassion – then you do not have any compassion. If you do feel compassion, then you do have compassion. If you do not feel any desire to come to church, then you do not have any desire to come to church. Your emotions always tell the truth about what is in your heart.

And that is of immense value in assessing your spiritual condition. Very often Christians will fall into thinking that as long as they are resolved to do the right thing, that is all that matters. They figure, If I don’t have any desire to pray or commune with God, that is OK as long as I force myself to do it anyway. That is not true at all. Scripture is filled with warnings about the evil of serving God with a grudging attitude. God loves a cheerful giver. He rebukes the priests in Malachi 1 who serve Him while saying, “What a burden.”

Deuteronomy 28:47 Because you did not serve the LORD your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity, 48 … He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.

Resolve and commitment are not enough. There must be joy and eagerness and delight and if those emotions are missing, the heart is not as it should be. And I wanted to take a moment at the beginning to make that point because this whole chapter is all about emotions – desire, then joy, then anger, then fear, then desire, then joy, then indifference. So we are going to spend a lot of time (two weeks at least) studying the significance of these emotions in worship. And if you have a mindset that says emotions are unimportant, secondary, unreliable, non-essential in worship, then you will miss what this chapter is teaching.