...of our hearts, be acceptable to you now, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer, in Jesus' name. Amen.
As we continue with our Samuel series — and if you're here for maybe the very first time visiting, welcome, by the way. It's good of you to come visit us. We are now in Second Samuel. We've just seen Saul as a king, and more than that, Saul's attempts to kill David himself, that he would try to bring the kingdom together.
In terms of this overall series in Samuel, you could think of it as more of an anthology of your favorite author, or maybe a best-of album by your favorite musician. I had a CCR — if you don't know what that is, Creedence Clearwater Revival, for the uninitiated — best-of album. We're not getting every last recorded song. We're not getting every last page that the author wrote, so to speak. But in this series, we're aiming for an accurate composite sketch. We're covering the most pivotal chapters to see the big picture of how God, you could put it this way, is sovereignly guiding even Israel's flawed demand for a king to bring about an office he himself will ultimately fulfill in Christ, the Son of David.
So leading up to our chapter today, if you read after chapter one — obviously, two, three, four, five — we would see the ripple effects of strife from Saul's kingship, with all kinds of back and forth and retribution and bloodshed, essentially civil war between those loyal to Saul and those who are coming under David's rule. By chapter five, then, more of the tribes have declared allegiance to David. There's been another blow struck against the Philistines, and now you have a relative peace.
At this point, going into chapter six, David is at a fascinating crossroads, especially when you think about typical ancient Near East kingships. What's David going to do? More bloody consolidation of power, maybe like an Assyrian ruler, a Mesopotamian ruler? Maybe he'll take a page from nearby Egyptian pharaohs and leverage the divine to give his reign some kind of cosmic legitimacy. What's he going to do?
For all David's brokenness, what he does here in chapter six is nonetheless remarkable, as his actions are done — this repeated phrase — before the Lord, before the Lord, before the Lord. It shows up four times in our passage. Today, we'll look at this heading under three points: reverent fear, ecstatic joy, and an audience of one. My hope is for us to rediscover, perhaps, or maybe discover for the first time, what it is to live our lives before the Lord. This transformative sense of living every moment, every breath, every day — in the Latin, coram Deo — that is, before the face of God.
So first, reverent fear. Culturally speaking, I think it's safe to say, and sadly even within the church, reverent fear for pretty much anything, especially God, is something we've mostly lost. All the way back in the 1960s, C. S. Lewis, in his work God in the Dock, writes this:
The ancient man approached God, or even the gods, as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man, the roles are quite reversed. He is the judge. God is in the dock. He is a quite kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to him. The trial may even end in God's acquittal.
And how much more true is this now, you know, sixty years later? But the important thing is that humanity is on the bench with the gavel, and God is the accused in the dock.
David himself rediscovers — I want to show us — a reverent fear of the Lord here in verses 1 to 11. But let's set the scene here. As I just said, he's at the beginning of his kingship, and we've already seen, if we've read Second Samuel, that David is far from perfect. Yet, different than Saul, he's pursuing the heart of God. And in this case, rather than deify himself — again, think of the ancient Near East kings — rather than deify himself or seek a regime that's going to exist for itself, he reaches all the way back three to four hundred years to Moses and Exodus 25, where the Lord first calls for the ark to be constructed.
Okay, but — whoa, whoa — what is the ark? I have forgotten what that is. I know it's important. But if we need a review, it would be the vessel God chose to reveal...