XXXVIII
DO IT RIGHT
Say, fellows, down-town the other day a man tried to save a boy who was caught near some wires, and got killed himself for his trouble. Hard luck, wasn't it? Yet he had nobody to blame for it but himself. He took hold of a wire which carried the electric current for the street cars. He broke a law of nature and got punished. There was a way he could have gotten the wire away from the boy. A Boy Scout did it later with a pole.
Just the difference between touching with the hand or touching with a stick—very little, perhaps, but the law of electricity made the difference important, so that the one meant death—the other, life!
Now here comes along King David trying twice to move the ark of the Lord up to Jerusalem, where it ought to be, the first attempt proving fatal because he was foolish enough to try to handle it as the Philistines did, instead of doing it strictly by the rules God had made—rules which David should have known very well, because they were in his Bible (Num. 4:4-6, 15; also 1 Chron. 15:11-15). The rules required that the ark should be carried on poles resting on the shoulders of certain men set apart for that service, but David permitted them to put it on an ox cart, attended by Ahio and Uzzah, two well-meaning fellows, no doubt, but not according to the rules. One of the oxen stumbled, the ark jostled, and Uzzah put his hand on it to steady it. Presto! Uzzah a dead man on the side of the road!
They called David from where he was marching at the front of the procession, and when he got back there and saw what had happened, it gave him an awful shock, for he knew he was just as guilty as Uzzah—and perhaps more so. He ordered the men to take the ark into Obed-edom's house beside the road and be careful to pick it up by the poles. Then he went on back to Jerusalem without it. He got out the Book of Numbers and went over the rules about the ark very carefully. For three months he studied the matter. Then he went after the ark again—this time in God's way. He called for the priests and the men appointed to carry the ark; he organized a band and a great choir of singers, and went to Obed-edom's house. There they picked up the ark by the poles and started. Still David was scared, and when they had moved forward only ten yards ("six paces") he made them stop, while a sacrifice of oxen and rams was made to the Lord.
David was overjoyed when he saw everything going well, and he began to dance and to sing. All the way to Jerusalem he danced and shouted for joy.
David thought a lot of the ark, because it meant the presence of God, and that meant in this case the blessing of God. As he grew older and wiser he had greater reverence for God's house and all the holy things which were tokens of God's presence. In one of the psalms he wrote:
The least a boy can do for God's honour is to keep quiet in church.