The King Who Danced in the Street

Saul had died in a battle on Mount Gilboa, and the man who once crouched in a dark cave holding a corner of Saul's robe was king of all Israel now. David had a new city, Jerusalem. What he wanted next was the ark of God.

The ark was the gold-covered chest where God had promised Moses he would meet with his people. For years and years it had sat in a house on a hill, and all the time Saul was king, nobody had bothered about it.

"Let us bring the ark of our God back to us," David said.

So they set the ark on a brand-new cart pulled by oxen, and two brothers, Uzzah and Ahio, drove it. What a noise! Harps and lyres, tambourines and cymbals, and all Israel singing at the tops of their voices.

(God's law to Moses said the ark must be carried on poles, on the shoulders of the Levites, and that even they must never touch it. Nobody had looked that part up.)

At a threshing floor the oxen stumbled. The cart lurched. Uzzah reached out and grabbed the ark.

God's anger burned against Uzzah for treating his holy ark so carelessly. God struck him down, and Uzzah died there beside the ark.

The music stopped.

David was angry, and then he was afraid. "How can the ark of the LORD ever come to me?" he said. He left it at the house of a man named Obed-edom.

Three months later a messenger came to the palace. "The LORD has blessed Obed-edom's whole family because of the ark!"

God was holy, and he had to be welcomed his way. But he still wanted to come.

This time the Levites carried the ark on poles. When they had gone six steps, David stopped the parade and offered an ox and a fat calf to God. Then up the road they went, with shouting and the blast of rams' horns.

And David danced.

He wore a plain linen vest like a priest's. He leaped. He spun. He danced before the LORD with all his might, right down the middle of the street.

They set the ark inside the tent David had made for it, and every person in the crowd went home with bread, a piece of meat, and a raisin cake. (A parade that ends in cake is a very good parade.)

But Michal, Saul's daughter and David's wife, had watched from a window, and when she saw the king leaping and twirling, she despised him in her heart. She met him at the door.

"Well! How grand the king of Israel looked today," she said, "hopping about in front of the servant girls like a fool!"

"I was dancing for the LORD," David said. "He chose me instead of your father. I will celebrate before the LORD, and I will look even sillier than this!"

God had come to Jerusalem. Still, no one could hug a golden chest, and after the threshing floor, everyone kept their hands off it. Years later Solomon set the ark in the temple's deepest room behind a thick curtain. For hundreds of years, the curtain stayed shut.

Then God came near another way, as a baby in his mother's arms. Sick people reached out and touched the edge of his clothes, and nobody was struck down. They were made well. A crowd sang him into Jerusalem, and grumblers told him to make them stop. "If they are silent," he said, "the stones will shout." On the day he died, the temple curtain tore from top to bottom.

In Jesus, God had pitched his tent among his people, close enough to touch.