Uzzah

[JohnMichaels]

Been trying to come to grips with 1 Chronicles 13 and why that guy Uzzah died. Looked around a little and found this.

gotquestions.org/Uzzah.html

Read that & the related scripture and I’m still not getting it. Is this guy’s view off? Maybe someone can offer something else?

I had a conversation with a friend of mine a couple weeks back on it. I settled on an answer of ‘I can’t begin to imagine how God’s mind works.’ While that doesn’t make sense, it does in a strange way. Still, perhaps someone more knowledgeable on the subject can begin to imagine

 

[seagal]

I read the article on gotquestions.com and it seems to me to be on the mark. In Numbers 4 God gave specific instructions on how the ark should be moved and told his Moses and Aaron that if anyone touched the ark they would die. I think the comment the writer made about familiarity breeding contempt was insightful. Uzzah had been in the presence of the ark for so long he had probably forgotten that it was holy and so didn’t give it the reverence he should have.

To my mind this is similar to the tree in the Garden of Eden. God gave Adam and Eve instructions not to eat the fruit of one specific tree in the garden or they would die. You might think what’s the big deal about this one tree, it probably looked like every other tree. But the point is God told them (in both cases) “don’t touch or there will be consequences”. They disobeyed and so they suffered the consequences. It sounds pretty arbitrary and vengeful but I tend to think of it more like parental discipline. A parent telling a curious or careless child “don’t play with the matches or you’ll get burned”. If the child disobeys she gets burned, not as punishment but because that’s what happens when you play with dangerous things when you don’t know what you’re doing.

Hope this helps .

 

[JohnMichaels]

I read the article on gotquestions.com and it seems to me to be on the mark. In Numbers 4 God gave specific instructions on how the ark should be moved and told his Moses and Aaron that if anyone touched the ark they would die.
Hope this helps .

Moses said any Kohathites “must not touch the holy things or they will die. The Kohathites are to carry those things that are in the tent of meeting”

Which makes sense but gotquestions guy says “carried by Levites only” yet when he begins this article he says “As the ark was being transported, the oxen pulling the cart stumbled, and a Levite named Uzzah took hold of the ark”

That’s the first thing getting caught in my mental loop.
The guy explains by saying “never to have been put upon a cart, old or new” so even if I’m to assume “alright, once they used a cart to move the Ark all bets are off”

I still end up with asking myself if anyone bothered to tell Uzzah. At start of this journey David says

• “If it seems good to you and if it is the will of the Lord our God, let us send word far and wide to the rest of our people throughout the territories of Israel, and also to the priests and Levites who are with them in their towns and pasturelands, to come and join us. Let us bring the ark of our God back to us, for we did not inquire of[a] it** during the reign of Saul.”**

To my eyes Uzzah was blissfully unaware, then died.

And worst of all, with this article. Is the writers comments

Uzzah, for a moment, felt it was his responsibility to save the integrity of God, and that our almighty God somehow needed Uzzah’s assistance.

At what point did doing things in service of the Lord become something a historical bible figure can be scored for? Was that not a little harsh? Seemed harsh to me.

Anyway, those are more problems with the article itself not the scripture.*