Don’t Hide from the Presence

 

God’s presence came with the ark of God. I don’t know how that all worked, but the passage speaks of God sitting enthroned on the cherubim. A man named Uzzah reacts when the cart is wobbled and puts his hand on the ark to make sure it is steady.

God doesn’t need our help. We need to fear God, not think we can do one better somehow. The man is killed for not fearing God. He could not touch God’s presence without invitation and cleansing.

David is afraid of the ark after the incident and doesn’t want to be in the city of David. This is the man who wrote the song we know as Psalms 27 about how the one thing he desired was to be in God’s tabernacle and gaze upon His beauty. The fear of the Lord isn’t supposed to make us hide from God.

While I have taught that we start with the fear of the Lord and obey out of fear of a holy God and then move into loving God and obeying out of love and joy, we can never lose our fear of the Lord. Think of Moses, friend of God, who lacked the fear of the Lord to speak to the rock and struck it instead.

God, in His loving care for us, speaks in Jeremiah 32:40 saying that He will cause us to fear Him so that we won’t depart from Him. The fear of the Lord isn’t supposed to cause us to hide from God. Anything causing you to run from God instead of to Him means there’s something wrong in your thinking.

The right fear of the Lord draws us close to Him so that we will never depart.

The right fear of the Lord causes us to cling to Him, afraid that we might stray.

The right fear of the Lord causes us to keep our eyes on Him because we know He’s the only good we know.

The right fear of the Lord causes us to rely on Him for everything because we know we need Him for everything from our ministry to our next breath.

The ark was left with a family who received the blessing of God’s presence and was blessed because they received His presence.

Psalm 16 tells us that in His presence is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. That’s what we should want. Run into His presence. Never hide from the blessing of His presence!