Guess Who?

My favorite things about Living Water Church in Olympia are how they feed and care for the down-trodden, and the stuff that gets spoken from the middle of their big black stage that my husband lights so well. Yesterday Shane was teaching, and he had some awesome stuff to say about Obed-edom, that guy the Ark stayed with while David took three months to get un-offended after God killed Uzzah for touching It during David's happy parade. Apparently after It stayed with Obed-edom and his family and they got blessed, Obed-edom volunteered for most of the duties that had to do with the Ark for the next three chapters. Shane concludes this dude just couldn't get enough of the Presence of God.

Then this morning I started reading Joshua (which I should have done a week ago), and there's the Ark again, carried on the shoulders of four priests so that the 1,000,000+ Israelites can cross the riverbed of the Jordan on dry ground. Do you remember what was inside the Ark? The Law, a basket of manna, and Aaron's flowering staff. Apparently, then, the Presence of God "houses" His Word on every subject, the life-bread of our existence and.... well, fruitful power and authority. Remember when the wrong people (the Philistines) tried to keep it from its rightful owners? Their precious god Dagon lost his hands and his head and ended up face-down before the Ark, and then they were overrun with rats and tumors! Remember how the Glory hovered over the house of the Ark? A pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night? For Forty years? And then the same in Canaan? In fact I've never been able to tell when the Glory departed, only that it rushed in like a filling vacuum when Solomon dedicated his temple. Maybe it was always there and they got used to it!

My point is that if the Presence of God indefinitely preserved a basket of stuff prone to rot after 24 hours, preserved the blossoms of a dead stick, made rivers dry up, blessed those who lived near It and honored It, and brought deserved consequences on those who would thwart It, it might behoove us to remember that It is now housed....
in.......
us.

One of Shane's points was that nothing but mankind was ever meant to carry the Presence of God. (Hence the unfortunate ending to the oxen and cart episode.) I for one forget approximately 23 hours, 59 minutes and 58 seconds a day just what kind of God I serve. And that the full power of the Godhead has been downloaded into my 125-pound body. If I can remember the reaction of that river to the Presence of God in a gold box, I'm thinking there are some things in my life that might move if I remind them Who now lives in me.