Nearly a quarter-century after most of the world signed a convention outlawing the use of antipersonnel landmines, the number of people being killed or maimed by these insidious and lethal weapons remains high—and rising. The Landmine Monitor for 2021, released on November 10, reported 7,073 casualties in 2020, including 2,492 people killed and 4,561 wounded. Syria was the worst affected country, reporting 2,729 casualties. One of the worst things about this is that many of these people will have died or been maimed by a mine that was laid years, perhaps even decades, previously, but which have not yet been detected and neutralized. More than half the casualties in the report were children.
A similar kind of invisible but lethal danger surrounded the unauthorized approach to the altar; we saw that in the earlier books of the Old Testament. It was really dangerous to be in the presence of YHWH without an express invitation.
And the Israelites knew it. When God spoke to Moses at Mt. Sinai the people begged Moses to speak to God on their behalf; “You speak to us, and we will listen,” they said, “but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” [Ex 20:19]
In Leviticus 16:2, “YHWH said to Moses: 'Tell your brother Aaron not to come just at any time into the sanctuary inside the curtain before the mercy seat that is upon the ark, or he will die; for I appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat.'”
The book of Numbers tells of when Korah and some of the other Levites stirred up dissension against Moses because they wanted the privilege of burning incense before the altar, like Aaron and his sons; they felt like second-class citizens. God told Moses to go ahead and let them try it; when they did, they were destroyed for sacrilege. The ancient Israelites had chapters upon chapters of complicated instructions about how to prepare themselves for worship. And when they ignored them, or took the privilege of God dwelling in their midst lightly, the consequences were very severe.
During the whole of their history, they kept getting it wrong and blowing themselves up. For instance, before Samuel became Israel’s judge, the people took the ark into battle against the Philistines as a sort of good-luck charm. The Israelite troops were slaughtered, and the priests responsible for the sacrilege killed. Even up to the time of David, when the ark was brought into Jerusalem, if you accidentally touched the ark you got incinerated.
"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 shook it. The anger of YHWH was kindled against Uzzah; and God struck him there because he reached out his hand to the ark; and he died there beside the ark of God." [2 Sam 6:6-7]
King David himself - that man after God’s own heart - was so scared of getting it wrong that he left the ark right there where Uzziah had been killed. David was afraid of YHWH that day; he said, “How can the ark of YHWH come into my care?” [2 Sam 6:9] He left it there for three months before he got up the nerve to ask permission a second time to bring it up to Jerusalem.
And now here we are in 2 Chronicles. It’s been over 300 years since David brought the ark into Jerusalem, 250 since Solomon built the temple, almost that long again since the kingdom split into two. And the kings of Judah have seesawed back and forth between following YHWH and worshiping the Canaanite gods. The temple has been desecrated so often it’s a wonder anyone is left alive at all. In fact, when Hezekiah becomes king, he has to tell the Levites, “Sanctify yourselves, and sanctify the house of YHWH, the God of your ancestors, and carry out the filth from the holy place.” [2 Ch 29:5]
But if the people in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, where the temple was, were unfaithful, the people of Israel in the Northern Kingdom were even worse. By the time Hezekiah took the throne in Jerusalem, the Northern kingdom had fallen to the Assyrians and most of the population had been hauled off to slavery.
"So Israel was exiled from their own land to Assyria until this day. The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon [and other places] and placed them in the cities of Samaria in place of the people of Israel... When they first settled there, they did not worship YHWH therefore YHWH sent lions among them, which killed some of them. So the king of Assyria ... commanded, 'Send there one of the priests whom you carried away from there; let him go and live there, and teach them the law of the god of the land.' So one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria came and lived in Bethel; he taught them how they should worship YHWH. But every nation still made gods of its own and put them in the shrines of the high places that the people of Samaria had made ... So they worshiped YHWH but also served their own gods, after the manner of the nations from among whom they had been carried away. To this day they continue to practice their former customs... They do not follow the statutes or the ordinances or the law or the commandment that YHWH commanded... " [2 Ki 17:24-34]
That’s the situation when Hezekiah decided to restore the worship of YHWH and reverse the moral and religious decline of the past decades.
Have any of you noticed, over the past decades, the decline in religious observance and the ignorance of the basics of what used to be the dominant national faith? See any similarity between our condition and Judah's? Turning that ship around is not easy. But Hezekiah does his best. He does better than his best. He could have simply washed his hands of the northern tribes; after all, they hadn’t been worshiping in Jerusalem for at least 250 years. He sends messengers inviting all the descendants of Jacob to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem, as YHWH had commanded Moses. Not very many of the northerners respond; in fact, most of them jeer and ridicule the royal messengers, but a few do. Somehow, the desire to return to the God of their ancestors had survived the years of ignorance, idol worship and general corruption. But they don’t have any idea what’s involved. They’re so clueless the Levites even have to slaughter the Passover lamb for them. They don’t know whether they are ritually clean or not, or how to make themselves clean if they aren’t. They don’t know the rituals that YHWH had prescribed for celebrating the Passover.
And Hezekiah knows that this is dangerous; but he also knows that they wouldn’t have shown up if they didn’t want to be reconciled to God. So he prays for God to forgive them. “The good YHWH pardon all who set their hearts to seek God, YHWH the God of their ancestors, even though not in accordance with the sanctuary’s rules of cleanness.” YHWH heard Hezekiah, and healed the people. [2 Chr 30:19-20]
Now the reason I’ve spent all this time on the history of Israel is because we can’t understand the lesson in this passage without it. These people are making mistakes in the worship of a God so powerfully holy that they could die from any one of them. But their mistakes are happening in the context of a nation doing its very best to grope their way back to a God whom they have almost forgotten.
And God forgives them.
No, that’s not quite correct. What happens is that God heals them.
What’s the difference between forgiving and healing? Forgiving means choosing not to punish the wrongdoer. Healing means fixing the damage already incurred. It’s the difference between catching a poacher and deciding not to take him to court, and sewing up the wounds of a poacher who has stepped in a trap. The point being that even in Hezekiah’s time it was still dangerous to take God’s holiness lightly.
Now, in my view there are two points of relevance for today in this passage.
First of all is the context. Spiritually speaking, we are in much the same position as the Israelites: not quite sure of what God requires of us, only a few really interested, and the rest inclined to mockery. “Many of us worship Christ, well, sort of, but also serve other gods - or spiritual forces - after the manner of other peoples who have come to live among us...”
Secondly, most Americans have gotten so used to the mercy and forgiveness that we have been given in Christ that we have taken for granted the safety we have in the presence of God. We tend to forget the holiness of God, and his power.
A friend of mine back in Minneapolis illustrated a sermon in a way that might get me thrown out of this church, given our history of losing the building to fire. He set a rolled up a newspaper on fire to show what happens when sinners - that’s us - come in contact with God’s holiness - that’s the fire. He also had a bucket of water standing right there which he doused the fire with after he had made his point. And then he explained that the water in the bucket was like the waters of our baptism. Because once he drenched the newspaper with water, he couldn’t set it on fire again. It was protected.
And so are we protected by the waters of our baptism, because Christ’s sacrifice was perfect, even though we are not. The writer to the Hebrews puts it this way:
"Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who approach... But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, 'he sat down at the right hand of God' ...For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified." [Heb 10:1,12,14]
How do we manage to be confident of our safety and security in Christ without taking it for granted, without presuming on God’s mercy and goodness? That’s what I want us to think about today. Where do you scant what is due to God? How do you prepare yourself for worship? How seriously do you study the Word? Do you forgive as God has forgiven you? Do you give your first fruits or your leftovers? How about keeping the Sabbath?
Even though the physical danger of approaching God has been done away with, many of us continue to keep our distance, just as the Israelites did at Mt. Sinai. And I can understand that. Getting close to God involves risk - risk of seeing ourselves as we really are, risk of being changed, risk of leaving our comfort zone. But our avoidance really puts us at much greater risk.
Because the real danger to us, our spiritual land mines so to speak, are the temptations to take God’s mercy for granted and to neglect the practices that allow us to draw close to God. Because we still cannot draw near to God without them. Each one of these commandments is a pathway to God; they connect us to the source of life. Every one of these spiritual disciplines - from tithing to regular attendance at worship - are God’s provision to keep us spiritually alive. They are also how God heals us from the consequences of disobedience.
The danger from these land mines isn’t as immediate as the ones left behind in Bosnia; the consequences of avoiding God are put off comfortably far into the future. But the reason God has given us a margin of grace is so that we might draw near, not to encourage us to stay away.
