Thoughts on 2 Samuel 15

Today’s reading: 2 Samuel 15; Galatians 4

I feel like David’s treatment of the Ark of the Covenant here in 2 Samuel 15 gives us a glimpse into his maturing understanding of, and respect toward, the God who chose him to be king.

If we go back about a week or so in our reading plan to 2 Samuel 6, that was where we talked about David first attempting to bring the ark up to Jerusalem. At the time, David was treating the ark more like an idol of another god or like a talisman or good luck charm. He attempted to bring it up to Jerusalem with no regard whatsoever for God’s own rules for how it should be transported, and then got angry when his own flagrant disobedience resulted in Uzzah’s death. At that point he left the ark at the house of Obed-edom rather than taking it the rest of the way to Jerusalem (which, as a side-note, has to make you feel great when the king says, “Nope, too dangerous, I’m not taking it with me. Here, I’m just going to leave this at your house…”). But then, what makes David decide to give it another go and bring it up to Jerusalem is hearing that “the Lord has blessed the household of Obed-edom and all that belongs to him, because of the ark of God.”

So in 2 Samuel 6 David seems to want to help establish Jerusalem as the seat of power by establishing it as the center of Israelite worship as well, but then gives up on that when Uzzah dies until he realizes how much the ark could benefit him. If God is blessing Obed-edom because of the ark, then that means if David brings the ark to Jerusalem then he will be the one to be blessed, which is obviously better!

But then look at what happens with the ark in 2 Samuel 15. The Levites bring the ark out as David is fleeing the city, prepared to take it out of the city with him, but then David himself is the one who sends it back. He is not seeing it as the good-luck charm he used to see it as, and he is not seeing God’s arm as being so short He can only bless those in possession of the ark. Instead, David recognizes the importance of Israel maintaining faithful worship of the Lord, regardless of who is on the throne, and so he sends the ark back to the tabernacle. And when he does, he makes the statement that if he has found favor with the Lord, the Lord will bring him back. It is not a matter of needing to be near the ark for the Lord to be able to work on his behalf, but Yahweh, unbound by physical location, will work for whoever He desires to work for.

David maturing in his understanding of the Lord brings up an important point that I think a lot of people miss, and that is that the biblical authors, and characters, aren't omniscient themselves. There is this sense that someone like David, celebrated as a man after God's own heart, must certainly have had an accurate understanding of the God he was dealing with. The same would go for people like Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, etc. but this is not the case. These were real people who had to learn and grow in their understanding. I don't know a single Christian whose understanding of the Lord and theology hasn't changed since they first came to know the Lord, and how much more so for people in the Old Testament before believers were indwelt by the Holy Spirit?? Just because they wrote part of the Bible, or are featured prominently in it, does not mean that God gave them some supernaturally perfect understanding of who He is.

This is different from the theological evolution view you hear floating around today that Biblical monotheism is just a natural progression from ancient animism, through polytheism, eventually ending up in monotheism before we all actually realize there is no god and we should be atheists. This is the infinite creator revealing Himself increasingly over time, both to humanity and to individuals. I say to humanity because Abraham did not have as much about God revealed to Him as was revealed through Moses, and with that foundation, God continued to reveal more of Himself through the prophets, and eventually even more by taking on flesh. But God revealing more of Himself to humanity is different from humanity making up new "truths" and does not mean God was previously deceiving people, it is simply a matter of what God, in His infinite wisdom and understanding, has chosen to reveal and when He has chosen to reveal it. And I say to individuals because, just as we have to learn and grow in our understanding of God as we walk with Him, despite having the Bible so readily available to us to learn from, so too did the men and women of the Bible, only with much less available to them to learn from.

All that to say, we shouldn't be surprised to see someone like David treating Yahweh like a good-luck charm at one point and then later treating Him with proper respect and theological understanding at another. This is also important for us to realize if we want to understand and interpret the Bible well. God did not reveal everything there is to know about Himself to Moses. That doesn't make what we learn from Moses inaccurate, but it does make some of it incomplete, and we need the full counsel of God, reading and learning all the Scriptures, if we are going to have an increasingly accurate understanding of God ourselves.