David’s Distress
Psalm 132 may not have been written by King David, but it is about King David and one of his struggles or distresses, a time of deep personal soul searching and God’s reply to his question of why.
Perhaps it would be helpful to remind ourselves that in Psalm 15 he asked who would be worthy to go up to the Lord’s hill. In it he carefully lines up all the qualifications but the one about keeping your promise even when it hurts and seems wrong to do so is exactly where we find David in Psalm 132.
In this psalm the occasion is after Saul had lost the battle with the Philistines and also had lost ownership of the sacred ark of the covenant, the symbol of God’s presence dwelling with Israel..When David realized the horror of this loss and the damage it did to God’s testimony he was very worked up and immediately promised with an oath in God’s name that he would himself not rest until that symbol of God’s presence was resting in its proper place, the city that God had chosen, in Jerusalem.
So day and night he planned first the building of the tabernacle that would house the ark and then all the wonderful celebrations that would accompany the event of moving the ark to its resting place. When the planned day arrived all the thanksgiving and fellowship sacrifices were ready and the road was lined with thousands of expectant Israelites
But the oxen stumbled and men died and everything came to a halt. Everybody except God who suddenly became the centre of attention as the Holy One who was not pleased with what was going on. David as the leader was deathly afraid even for his own life as were all the other people including those who had minutes before been shouting and cheering. The fear of God fell on all as they silently returned back to their homes. The text in 2 Samuel 6 also tells us that David was so dumfounded by this turn of events that he became angry with God. His plans had been cut short and stopped and he did not know why.
It is not hard to imagine that David’s anger was followed by arguments and prayer to God, questions of who among the priests or the crowd to blame or whether he himself was at fault in daring to think that he could or should return the ark to Jerusalem. It was very likely a sleepless night for him and for others whom he wanted to question. The last part of the psalm gives us the answer to one of his questions as to whether he should still keep his promise of bringing the ark up to the city of Zion or not, for here God rehearses His own unalterable promise that He had made to David about the Kingship of the Messiah which would be spurned and in distress and delayed but not never abrogated. In other words the Lord told David that he must keep his promise, distress or not, but do it My way, not yours.
After David had calmed down and learned from the Law of the Lord and from the Lord’s messengers where he had failed and what he should have done in the first place and was confident that now God would be pleased to return to Jerusalem along with His ark and abide with His people a new moving day was set and preparations were made for bringing up the ark. We have no idea how long the wait was but we know that the new celebration was to be even greater than the failed one. And it was.
I hope you can see the application of this psalm and its distresses to our own situation, for indeed the oxen have stumbled here too. And it might seem like a very opportune time to enumerate other applications about what we should do next, but that would not be as good as saying that you as leaders are just as responsible as David was for finding out why the oxen stumbled. Was it not better that David took time and effort to study what God had already said to find out why "you prosper, when you do it My way, and just as surely the oxen will again stumble if you do not do it My way."
And when they did it God’s way there was greater joy and celebration and gladness and God was glorified. Then He rested in the tabernacle in Jerusalem with the ark of His holiness.
As the jubilant attitude left our meeting on Tuesday night to be replaced by a quiet sense of the fear of God we all realized that we had done something to offend the holiness of our Lord just as David and the people of his day had done. Even David did not know what it was but he knew that he as leader was to find out. God would never take his excuse that someone else was to blame, not the Philistines nor the builders of the cart nor even absent Uzzo or Ahio who could never again speak a word of defense. Not his best intentioned well meaning worldly advisors, but back to Saul’s instructions to the king as leader, “This book of the law shall not depart . . . “ It does have the answer to this distress and you must find it, and you must find all the other answers and rules there, for there are consequences to all of God’s rules, Jesus created them for good and He upholds them with both positive and negative sanctions.