You Cannot Come to Him on Your Own Terms

Two nations. Two chapters. One truth.

The Philistines thought they could own God. They put the ark in Dagon's temple like a trophy and went to sleep assuming their god had won. By morning, Dagon was face-down on the floor. They picked him up and put him back. The next morning he was face-down again, this time in pieces. They never asked what it meant. They just kept stepping over the evidence and calling it fine.

Then they tried to contain him. Seven months of routing the ark from city to city, looking for somewhere it would stop causing problems. There was no such place. You can pass the problem along. You cannot pass God along.

Then the Israelites tried to approach him on their own terms. The ark came home, the people rejoiced, and then seventy men looked into it and were dead before the wheat harvest was over. These were not pagans. These were Levites. People who knew exactly what the law required. Presumption cost them everything.

Both nations ended up at the same question. Who is able to stand before the LORD, this holy God?

Here is what I want you to sit with this week.

That question is not just a line in an ancient text. It is the most honest question any of us can ask. And most of us spend a significant portion of our lives trying to avoid answering it directly.

We own him. We put him on the shelf beside everything else we have decided to keep and expect a peaceful arrangement. We contain him. We stay religious enough to feel okay without being submitted enough to have actually changed. We approach him on our own terms. We assume that familiarity with holy things is the same as standing rightly before a holy God.

The text says otherwise.

But here is what the text also says, if you follow it all the way to Christ. Romans 3:25 puts forward Jesus as the mercy seat. The lid of the ark. The one place in the world where the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man were addressed together, through blood, once for all.

The ark killed people who mishandled it. Christ died for those people.

Standing before God on your own terms is impossible. Standing before him through Christ is the whole gospel.

So this week, ask the question. And this time, stay for the answer.