II Samuel 6:2 And David arose, and went with all the people that were with him from Baale of Judah, to bring up from thence the ark of God, whose name is called by the name of the LORD of hosts that dwelleth between the cherubims.
I’d like to highlight three elements that are crucial to your relationship with God: zeal, knowledge, and obedience. None of them are all they should be without the others. Suppose you are in 10th grade, and every day the person who sits next to you comes in and just scrapes his fingernails down the face of the chalkboard. You may be cringing just thinking about this. Finally, you say to this person, “Would you please stop that? It drives me crazy!”
The next day this person comes in and says nice things to you. He tells you what a nice shirt you are wearing, how lovely your family is, and what a nice, engaging person you are. Then he gets up and proceeds to scratch the chalkboard again, driving you crazy. The fact of the matter is you don’t care how much this person flatters you. You don’t want him to scratch the chalkboard!
There are three elements here: zeal, knowledge, and obedience. Zeal would be the drive a classmate has to make you happy. Knowledge would be the ability to know how to do that. Obedience, in this case, would be taking action on what he knows to be hurting the friendship between the two of you.
Sometimes when it comes to our relationship with God, not merely a classmate, we think that if we know a lot of things, then we are right with God, whether we have a heart for God or not. Other times we think, “If we just love Jesus, it doesn’t matter what we know or what we do. We are okay.” Both of those are perhaps a caricature of positions people actually take, but they are indications of the extremes in which we can find ourselves.
David was a man who had been established in his kingdom. He loved God, and was a man after God’s own heart. Thus, as his kingdom was established, he wished to bring back the Ark of God from Abinadab, with whom it had been staying for some time. You may recall that long before this the Ark had been taken by the Philistines. The Philistines had been judged for their treatment of the Ark, and so it came back to Israel where even Israel was judged for their flippant attitude toward the Ark. Now, long after, David is bringing it back.
Well, something interesting happened. As the procession with the Ark returned, there was great joy and zeal. They played before the Lord with all manner of instruments and David was just exuberant. Now God did not condemn his zeal, although Michal, David’s wife, scorned how David had been acting, his zeal with all the common people. But David said, “I am doing this before the Lord.” So, zeal is important. God will never scorn you for you zeal, your love of Him. But, even if you have all the zeal in the world, you are still not going to be where you ought to be if you don’t know how to honor God.
That is why after Uzzah touched the Ark of God to steady it, verse 7 says, “And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God.” Now when it comes to knowledge, Uzzah was not a Philistine or a common Israelite. He was a Levite. He knew that such irreverence was serious. Uzzah knew that what he had done was wrong. Zeal will not make up for knowledge, just like knowledge will not make up for zeal alone.
The Bible says in verse 9, “And David was afraid of the LORD that day, and said, How shall the ark of the LORD come to me?” So, David’s ignorance did not excuse him from his obligation to know what he needed to know, and Uzzah’s zeal did not protect him from acting contrary to the knowledge that he had.
The bottom line is that our zeal and knowledge are no better than the obedience they produce in our lives. On one hand, there are people who seem to think, “If I just do these certain things, if I read my Bible every day, if I pray for twenty-five minutes, and if I go to church three times a week, then I am a good Christian.” Some people have been so burned out by this thinking that they have swung the pendulum. They adopt the attitude, “I love Jesus. That is all that matters.” Well, loving Jesus is ultimately what matters, but Jesus said, “If you love me, keep my commandments.”
Sometimes, we fain ignorance of things merely because we don’t want to be obligated to live in light of what we know. I don’t want to have zeal without knowledge. I don’t want to have knowledge without zeal, and I don’t want either zeal or knowledge that doesn’t result in loving the Lord by my actions and obedience.
Where are you today? Do you have a love for God? David was a man after God’s own heart, a man of great zeal, but that did not excuse him from disobedience. Are you a person who has a lot of knowledge but has lost your fire and heart for God? Knowledge is good but we need to have a love for God.
Are your zeal and knowledge of God producing obedience? I have known young Christians who did not have the standards that they should, but had a love for God and they were learning all the time. I observed that as they came to the truth, they just “went for broke.” They had a willingness to change when God showed them. It wasn’t something someone imposed on them, but something they saw from the Word of God. They had a willingness to acknowledge what it was they knew.
So, zeal and knowledge are important, and both are no better than the obedience they produce in one’s life.