SEPTEMBER 7, 2014 DIMENSIONS Dimensions: How High? Scripture Lesson: 2 Samuel 6 Dr. Victor D. Pentz Senior Pastor Worship is our response to the majesty of God who is high and lifted up. If you were to get in touch with a sense of awe, wonder and astonishment before God, what would that look like? This morning we bring down the curtain on our series, Dimensions. Over recent weeks we ve gone deep into a string of words the Apostle Paul puts together in his prayer for the Ephesians, praying that you may have power, together with all the Lord s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. What s fun here is that Paul is praying for the impossible that we will grasp the ungraspable, that we will wrap our minds around what is unwraparoundable the vast infinity of God s love. But we ve tried and we ve discovered that wide and long and high and deep are the dimensions in which we experience God. When we speak of how wide is God s love it s about his grace and mercy so nothing you ve ever done in your life will ever put you outside the reach of God s grace. How long is God s love? So long that you and I are secure in time and eternity and beyond; nothing will ever separate us from the love of God. How deep is God s love? So deep that Jesus left the glory of heaven and plunged to earth, then even deeper to death on a cross so that he might share the intimate depths of our souls. So deep is God s love.
2 How High DIMENSIONS Only one dimension is left: how high? How high is God s love? When the Bible speaks of how high God is, the flipside is always how low we are. The prophet Isaiah in the temple looked and saw God high and lifted up and he cried, Woe is me. Later Isaiah saw God even higher as He who sits above the circle of the earth... who stretches out the heavens like a curtain... Isaiah says God is so high up he measures the oceans in the hollow of his hand not hands, hand. All the oceans Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic in one hand. With the other hand he s twirling the stars and answering the prayers of five-year-olds. Our God is high and lifted up! So we don t just look at God and say Your Wideness or Your Longness or Your Deepness. We look up and say Your Highness. And it s that feeling that brings us into worship: Big God and Little Me. Big God and Little Me Where do you get that feeling? For me, it s often in nature. For me, growing up on the West Coast, the top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park was the tippy top of the world. This sheer granite face more than a kilometer high shoots up more than a mile above the valley floor. As a boy my dream was some day to stand up there on that spot. Decades later when our daughters were in teenagers I said, Okay. It s time. Let s go! After a steep, uphill five-hour climb, we arrived on the backside of Half Dome, where there is a hundred-yard steel cable up to the peak. I think it says a lot that it was only my younger two daughters who were foolish enough to join me on this final leg. Hand over hand we went up that cable. One slip and the next stop was a mile down. Up on the summit I said, Girls, stand back. I d been waiting my whole life for this. I slipped off my boots and then two layers of socks. I scrunched gingerly to the edge with my heart pounding in my throat, and swung my legs over the edge. There I sat peering more than a mile straight down between my legs, my bare toes dangling over Yosemite Valley. It was like a box seat at the creation of the world. Some of you are thinking, My pastor s crazy. But there is this primal feeling we humans have that leads people to do extreme sports like mountaineering, skydiving, bungee-jumping, and big wave surfing where you are in a place of such awe and wonder and terror and even reverence that if you can speak at all it s only in a whisper. We humans have an odd yearning for what can only be described as the opposite of self-esteem. We long to be an infinitesimal dot in the presence of majesty to be dwarfed by a grandeur infinitely greater than ourselves. Theologians call it the mysterium tremendum. Author Rudolph Otto wrote a book on how that feeling the children of Israel felt at the foot of Mt. Sinai began Biblical faith. You may have had your own mysterium tremendum moment in nature or as you witnessed the birth of a child or on a night you threw your head back and let your mind be boggled by the vastness of the Milky Way. Sometimes we see God most clearly when we turn the binoculars around and look at him from a distance. And that is what is missing from religion today. Instead of that scary high and lifted up God of the Bible, people are saying, I want a God I can feel comfortable with. To me God s a nice supportive therapist. God is there to make me feel better about myself. I m going to show you a clip from one of America s megachurches. Just this past week it s been on the internet and received a lot of
3 How High DIMENSIONS attention. Here is much of what religion is today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00-6oyx- VA0M I had to throw that last part in. This is everywhere today. Here s the thing, we are so into having a god we feel close to we ve lost the God we look up to. That s the missing tingle in worship these days the loss of the majesty and holiness and otherness of a God who is high and lifted up. Without him worship falls flat. That nice supportive therapist God is frankly not worth getting up for on Sunday morning, let alone giving your whole life to. So where do we go today to get our God back? Of course, we go to the Scriptures. This morning we go to the Old Testament. Maintaining a Sacred Distance Believe it or not, Israel had our very same problem. Instead of that high and lifted-up God they were always trying to pull God down and turn him into their national mascot. God had graciously promised to dwell among the people of Israel inside the Ark of the Covenant. Think of it: the holy presence of the living God with his Shekinah glory lived amidst them inside the ark. So what did they do? They turned the ark into their national lucky charm. Going into battle against the Philistines they thought, Why not cart God along with us into battle? With Him we can t lose! Well, they did. When the dust settled at day s end 30,000 Israelites lay dead and the precious Ark of the Covenant had fallen into the hands of the Philistines. There s a poignant scene where word reaches a wife whose husband has been killed in battle just as she s giving birth to a baby boy. In her heartbreak she names the baby, I-chabod which means no glory. For glory is gone from Israel. And with that word on her lips she dies. You d think Israel would have learned a lesson. But later they recovered the ark, and King David, having made Jerusalem his new capital, wanted to move the Ark of the Covenant to its new home in the tabernacle in Jerusalem. Thirty thousand people showed up for this momentous event which we re going to look at now in II Samuel 6, beginning with verse 1. We read: David again brought together all the able young men of Israel thirty thousand. 2 He and all his men went to Baalah in Judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the Name, the name of the LORD Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim on the ark. So far so good. Can t you feel the reverence in this scene? The ark is called by the Name (capital N), the name of the Lord almighty. The Name was a circumlocution they used to avoid saying the actual name of the most high God, which was thought to be too holy for human lips. For after all, says verse 2, God is enthroned between the cherubim on the ark. So this procession with the ark began slowly and reverently. The feeling was as if today you were transporting several tons of highly enriched radioactive materials: Go slow. This is serious. There s a healthy tingle of terror. The daunting task of carrying the ark up Mt. Zion was given to two brothers, Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab. Now here s the problem. King David cut a few corners. The parallel text is in I Chronicles 13. It says David conferred with each of his officers (13:1) on how to transport the ark. Now what s interesting is that with every other decision made by David recorded in Scripture, David only confers with God alone. If he had done that here, he would have been reminded that the law laid out precisely the one and only way the Ark was to be transported: on poles that were resting on the shoulders of the Levitical priests who were the only ones allowed
4 How High DIMENSIONS to touch the sacred Ark of God. But David s officers advised him that the old poles over the shoulders routine was now obsolete. A new technology had come on line that would do a better job of transporting the ark than the old way mandated in the law: in a wagon drawn by oxen. The military loves new technology always have. So his generals said, David, increase our defense budget just a little bit and we ll send you out in style on your big day with the latest state-of-the-art ox cart. Of course, you ll have to ignore those out-of-date instructions in the law. That was then; this is now. Poles are so 2000 B.C. We re in 1000 B.C, the age of the ox cart. So let s keep reading. Verse3: They set the ark of God on a new cart They broke the law ah, the new technology! and brought it from the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab, were guiding the new cart 4 with the ark of God on it, and Ahio was walking in front of it. Oh, yes, and one more thing David did. He turned it all into a big carnival party, an Israelite Mardi Gras. Verse 5: David and all Israel were celebrating with all their might before the LORD, with castanets, harps, lyres, timbrels, sistrums and cymbals. Do you sense something wrong in this scene? Hey, forget what it says in the law. Let s boogie around the Ark. There is a disturbing casualness in the presence of God. If you sense disaster about to strike, you might want to dive for cover. Verse 6: When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out and took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. 7 The LORD s anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act; therefore God struck him down and he died there beside the ark of God. The ark is teetering and tottering as it goes up Mt. Zion, and Uzzah, trying to be helpful, doesn t want the flag to touch the ground so he sticks out his hand and, bam, down he goes. So Uzzah became a wazzuh cuzzah his casualness in the presence of God. In the Bible sacredness meant distance and if you trespassed on that distance without permission it was fatal. Besides, how disrespectful for Uzzah was it to think that the God of the universe could not keep himself from falling out of the back of an ox cart? Beware the God Eugene Peterson says churches ought to be required to put out a sign out front that says, Beware the God. At the edge of the property, Beware the God. On our website should have to appear a warning, Beware the God. Here outside these doors before you come in you should have to sign a release to do something as crazy, reckless, and foolish as sinners entering the presence of a holy, high and lifted-up God. Once while visiting Jerusalem we spent the Sabbath in the home of some dear friends who are orthodox Jews. The man brought me into his study where we looked at his impressive library, his Torah, Mishnah, and Talmud. Up above over everything there was a sign in Hebrew. I asked, What does that say? He looked to me and said, That sign says, Remember before whom you stand. If only Uzzah had remembered before whom he stood. It was the very first airplane trip for our three-yearold daughter Sarah. For weeks leading up to the trip I would take our little daughter into the back yard and point at those little specks in the sky and say, Honey, before long we ll be flying on one of those. The big day came, and we sat down in our seats and buckled Sarah in. The plane shot down the runway and nosed up from the earth. There was not a peep from Sarah not a word from this otherwise very loquacious little girl. Finally several minutes later, Sarah looked up with her eyes
5 How High DIMENSIONS glistening and said, Daddy, are we small yet? That s the question we should ask in every worship service: Am I small yet? Remember before whom you stand. Now note this: David exploded in anger against God over what happened to Uzzah, but nothing happened to David. So let me get this straight: a nice man dies trying to be helpful, while David shakes his fist at God and he goes down in history as a man after God s own heart? Apparently you can get furious at God and it won t upset him a bit. But don t you ever discount God as being less than the holy, omniscient, omnipotent Creator he is. David called off the procession. Everybody went home. It was back to the drawing board. Three months later they all came back, this time with the ark on poles over the shoulders of the Levitical priests, according to code. We read in verse 14: 14 David, wearing a linen ephod, danced before the Lord with all his might, 15 while he and the entire house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets. Losing Yourself to God David had a way of getting caught up in the moment. With his dream at last coming true, in one of the most famous scenes of his life, David tore off his robe and stripped down to his skivvies that s literally what it says and he electrified his nation as he twirled and spun and danced before the Lord. He showed us what real worship is like. C.S. Lewis said, in the presence of God you will feel one of two ways: either feel like a small dirty object or you will lose thought of yourself all together. The latter is by far preferable. Nearly naked and totally undignified, David danced before his God. So, no we don t come here on Sundays to cringe in terror before God. We come to lose ourselves in wonder, love, and praise of his glory. To do that you must never forget before whom you stand, and that you are alive and on this planet for only one purpose and that is to love him with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. He does not exist to serve you. You exist to serve him with every fiber of your being, every moment of every day because it s not about you. It s all about him. When you grasp how high God s love for you is, you re going to feel teensy and microscopic and you re going to feel hushed and wide-eyed that you are in the presence of so great a God. You will know it s not about you and your happiness. It s all about him and his glory.
6 How High DIMENSIONS Prayer: Oh, holy, holy, holy God, let us never forget that the one before whom we stand is worthy of the obedience that you demand of us. May we grasp how high up you are, and like David, lose ourselves in wonder, love and praise through your son Jesus. Amen.
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