1 Chronicles 15

The chapter is the second attempt at the ark, and the whole weight of it rests on a phrase David learned the hard way: the due order. The first attempt ended with Uzzah struck down at the threshingfloor of Chidon, because they carried the ark on a new cart after the Philistine fashion instead of on the shoulders of the Levites. Here David says plainly, none ought to carry the ark of God but the Levites: for them hath Yahweh chosen. The lesson is not that Yahweh is capricious; it is that he is approached on his terms.

But the stroke fell on a specific man, and that has to be reckoned with. If the fault were only procedural, David and the captains were the more culpable — David convened the assembly, David built the cart; Uzzah was doing damage control on someone else’s decision. That judgment lands on the one at the point of contact says the touch itself was the offence. Samuel names it as his: God smote him there for his error. Chronicles keeps the same focus — because he put his hand to the ark.

The estimate is visible in the reflex. A hand put out to steady the ark assumes the ark needs steadying — that holiness is endangered by dirt and preserved by flesh. The ground would not have defiled the ark; the hand defiled the man. And the law guarded that one thing most explicitly: even the Kohathites appointed to bear it were told they shall not touch any holy thing, lest they die. The touch was not a technicality stumbled into unawares. It was the boundary the whole arrangement existed to keep. The men of Bethshemesh were smitten for looking into the ark; Uzzah is the next link in a chain of judgments that all fall at the same place — presumption at the point of contact with the presence.

There is a further thing behind it. The ark had stood in his father’s house since the day the men of Kirjath-jearim fetched it up — two decades of household nearness. The presence had become furniture. Familiarity is what puts out a casual hand, and long proximity to holy things is no substitute for reverence toward them; it is more often what erodes it.

Yet the order and the attitude are not rivals, and David holds them together in the one verse: Yahweh our God made a breach upon us, for that we sought him not after the due order. The breach is upon us — corporate — while the stroke was on one man. Both are true, because the wrong method manufactured the moment. On shoulders there are no oxen, no stumble, no reflex, and Uzzah’s estimate of the ark is never put to the test. Disorder created the occasion; disposition filled it. And the cart was not merely Philistine borrowing: when the wagons were distributed, unto the sons of Kohath he gave none: because the service of the sanctuary belonging unto them was that they should bear upon their shoulders. The cart was the one conveyance expressly withheld.

The failure went back further than the cart. Before the first attempt David consulted with the captains of thousands and hundreds, and with every leader — he canvassed his contemporaries, and the one voice he never sought was Yahweh’s. Set that beside what he does when the Philistines come up against him a chapter later: he enquired of God, and enquired again when they spread themselves a second time, and was told to wait for the sound of the going in the mulberry trees. The man who asks Yahweh about a battle had not asked him about the ark. Uzzah died at the end of a decision taken by consensus rather than by counsel; the due order is not merely a rule about shoulders but a habit of enquiry.

There is a larger shape to it: this is the second attempt, and the two together read as the two advents. The first ended in death at the threshingfloor, as Israel met the presence in his first coming and the nation stumbled at the stone laid for them; the second brings the ark up in glory and ordered joy, as the King will be received at his return. The tragedy of Uzzah did not make David doubt that the ark should come to Zion. It taught him only that it must come in the due order. The delay is real, but the throne enters the city in the end.

And the interval has its own figure. For three months the ark lodged in the house of Obed-edom, and Yahweh blessed the house of Obed-edom, and all that he had — a blessing that never fell on the house of Abinadab, from which the ark had come out. Same ark, same nearness, opposite outcome: one house smitten at the contact, another blessed in the keeping. The difference is not the object but the posture of the household that has it. The presence rests outside the city while the throne waits — the saints in the absence of the Master, given the treasure to hold through the delay, and blessed in holding it. And the man who kept it reverently turns up in this very chapter enrolled among the porters and the singers. He who kept the ark is made a keeper of it.

David then sanctifies the Levites and sets the bearing-staves on their shoulders, as Moses commanded according to the word of Yahweh. The ark moves only on consecrated shoulders. This is the gospel pattern in shadow — the presence of Yahweh comes to dwell among men, but it travels by a mediator he has chosen, and every later detail of priest and offering is an unfolding of this single rule of access.

The chapter then fills with song. Chenaniah is set over the singing because he was skilful; Heman, Asaph, and Ethan sound the cymbals; the trumpets go before the ark. The bringing-up of the presence is not a silent procession but a flood of ordered praise — the throne of Yahweh entering the city with music, the way the King enters his inheritance in the Psalms David is even now composing.

And David dances. Stripped to a linen ephod, the king leaps before the ark, and Michal despises him in her heart as she watches from the window. In despising David she despised what David stood for — the fervor that put a king in a linen ephod before the presence of Yahweh. Saul’s daughter at the window is the old order looking down on the new: royal dignity offended by a man who will abase himself. The window is where the watching, unloving heart sits; the dance is where the man after Yahweh’s own heart belongs.

So the chapter is framed at both ends by a disposition toward the presence — the hand that presumes at the threshingfloor, the eye that despises from the window — and between them stand the consecrated shoulders and the king who will not stand on his dignity. The presence comes on appointed shoulders, to a man who enquires before he acts and is lowly when he arrives.

Do not put out a hand to steady what Yahweh is carrying. Ask him first, bear what he gives you to bear on the shoulder he appointed, and be willing to look foolish when the ark goes up.

Ezekiel 27

The chapter is a lamentation — a qinah, the funeral dirge sung over the dead, the same word used of the wailing over Josiah (2 Chr 35:25) and the form the daughters of Jerusalem take up over the Lord on the road to the tree (Lk 23:27–31). Ezekiel is told to sing a dirge over a city still standing at the height of her wealth. The corpse is not yet cold because the corpse is not yet dead; the prophet sings her funeral over her living body.

The dirge is built on a single sustained figure: Tyre (Hebrew Tzor, the rock) is a magnificent ship. Her planks are fir of Senir, her mast a cedar of Lebanon, her oars the oaks of Bashan, her sail fine embroidered linen of Egypt. Every nation contributes a timber. Her borders are in the midst of the seas, and the entry of the sea names what made her — the harbors, the northern and the southern, the two mouths through which the traffic of the world came in. She is, in Ezekiel’s word, perfect in beauty — the same phrase that will be turned against her king in the next chapter.

Then comes the catalogue of trade, verse after verse of it — Tarshish, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, Dedan, Sheba, silver, iron, horses, ivory, slaves and the souls of men. The sheer accumulation is the point. Tyre is the world-system organised around buying and selling, the glory of man gathered from every coast into one hull, the mistress of the sea whose merchants are princes. Read it beside Revelation 18 and the same cargo-list reappears almost item for item, ending in slaves, and souls of men — the merchants of the earth weeping over fallen Babylon. Ezekiel’s Tyre is the seed from which John’s harlot-city grows, and the standing reading of the tradition finds her successor in the maritime commercial power that rules the seas in the present day — the Tarshish-and-her-merchants of the latter days, trading in everything the earth produces and finally protesting the spoiler’s advance with nothing but a question.

The ship, for all her splendor, founders. Thy rowers have brought thee into great waters: the east wind hath broken thee in the midst of the seas. The riches, the fairs, the mariners, the caulkers all sink together; the merchants of the people hiss at her. The east wind — always in the prophets the breath of judgment from Yahweh — drives the proud hull under. The flesh at its most prosperous imagines itself past reproach, and the fall is deeper for the height.

The judgment came, and history is still holding the receipt. Nebuchadnezzar broke the land-city; the survivors withdrew to the island fortress and rose again, and Alexander could not take it until he scraped the ruins of the old city into the sea to build a causeway to her walls — they shall lay thy stones and thy timber and thy dust in the midst of the water (26:12). She rose a third time under the Seleucids, was made the Roman capital of Phoenicia, appears as a working town in the gospels and Acts (Matt 15:21; Acts 21:7), and was finally pulled down by the Saracens. What is left is a harbor choked with sand and the rubble of her own palaces, worked by small boats: thou shalt be built no more (26:14).

Here the maritime figure witnesses by contrast. The whole canon knows the ship on the storm-tossed sea: the disciples toiling in rowing, Christ asleep in the stern, Paul’s vessel breaking up on the rocks of Melita. Tyre is the counterfeit ark — a ship built of the cedars of human glory, freighted with the souls of men, and she goes down. The true Ark rides out the waters of judgment and brings her cargo through alive.

Everything man gathers into one proud hull for himself, the east wind takes down into the sea; only what is carried in the appointed Ark comes through.

Luke 24

The chapter opens at first light with the women at the empty tomb and the question that turns the age: Why seek ye the living among the dead? he is not here, but is risen. The grave has become the wrong address. The firstfruits has been raised, and from this morning forward the hope of every saint is fixed not in the tomb but in the awakening that Christ has now begun. The dead in him still sleep; but the head has risen, and the body will follow at his appearing. It is the women who believe first — the bride who knows the character of the Bridegroom before the others do, while natural Israel stays at the tomb in unbelief.

The collapse of the disciples is worth measuring, because it was not mere grief. They believed not, and neither believed they them, and he upbraids them because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen — three refusals in a single record. What broke them was the curse of the tree. The law had said he that is hanged is accursed of God (Deut 21:23), and the elders knew it: by demanding crucifixion rather than stoning they meant to hang a verdict on the prophet of Nazareth that the whole nation could read. Yahweh himself had cursed this man; therefore he was not the Christ. The disciples walked away under the weight of that argument — we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.

And the argument was the purpose. The elders got exactly what they wanted and served precisely what they meant to destroy: Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree (Gal 3:13). The curse the law pronounced over the family was borne by one of the family, in the very nature under it, and ended when he rose. Three days and nights had been the shape of it from the beginning — Isaac received back as from the dead on the third day (Gen 22), Jonah in the fish, Hezekiah told on the third day thou shalt go up unto the house of Yahweh (2 Kgs 20:5). Paul says the death and the rising were according to the scriptures (1 Cor 15:3–4); the men on the road had the scriptures and could not see the shape.

So the centre of the chapter is the Emmaus road. The risen Lord falls in beside two disciples walking away from Jerusalem, unrecognised, and he does not first prove the resurrection. He opens the Scriptures: beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. The whole of Moses and the prophets is one testimony, and its subject is the Christ who suffers and enters his glory. This is the key that unlocks every reading — the law, the prophets, and the psalms are not three libraries but one book. The burning heart comes not from the miracle but from the exposition: did not our heart burn within us, while he opened to us the scriptures?

He is known in the breaking of bread. The stranger takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, gives it — the four motions of the upper room — and their eyes open in the instant the bread is broken. The Lord is recognised in the broken loaf; the figure of his offering is the place where sight is given back. Then he vanishes, and they run the seven miles back to Jerusalem in the dark.

To the gathered eleven he shows hands and feet and eats the broiled fish before them. There is an echo to catch in a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have — it is Adam’s word over Eve, bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh — a possible reading that the risen Lord, shown to be real flesh and bone, is the last Adam owning the bride taken from his side (Eph 5:30–32). And the fish he eats in front of them is the first meal of the new order, the pledge of the table he had refused at the supper until he should drink it new in the kingdom. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures, and the chapter closes at Bethany with hands lifted in blessing as he is parted from them — the High Priest going in, leaving his people worshipping with great joy and waiting for the promise of the Father.

The risen Lord teaches us how to read before he leaves: the whole of Scripture is about him, and the heart that sees it burns.