MY WAY OR THE HIGH (HIS) WAY
MY WAY OR THE HIGH (HIS) WAYBy Larry Hodges
I Chronicles 15:13 For because ye did it not at the first, the Lord our God made a breach upon us, for that we sought Him not after the due order.
We often do not realize the damage we are causing simply from not following God's due order. And please do not misunderstand the term "due order," as I use it. I do not mean that we have simply to find some divine formula and we are thereby guaranteed to obligate the Lord to move and bless. No such possibility exists so long as His sovereignty remains intact. I simply mean it in the sense that we are to be led by the Spirit; by the mind of Christ rather than by any other agenda.When David sought to return the Ark of God's presence to its rightful place, he made the now obvious mistake of seeking to do it in the same manner in which the Philistines had returned it. It was not as though David simply used the Philistine's ox-cart. Instead, he departed from the ordinance of God and built a new one, ("And they carried the Ark of God in a new cart out of the house of Abinadab. . ." I Chronicles 13:7) with certain improvements over the old one, I'm sure. But it was still the product of an uncircumcised mind. I can just imagine that David thought to himself, "Well, it seems to have worked alright thus far and if it ain't broke, don't fix it." (I actually doubt if David thought exactly that because it sounds so American, but I believe he thought something close to it.)So David did what so many of us have done. He sought to preserve and use in the service of God that which was the product of an uncircumcised mind. The Philistines did not practice circumcision. The Israelites practiced it as a sign of covenant relationship with God. It represents the circumcised heart which the Christian receives in the putting off of the flesh of the old Adamic nature.The ox-cart represented something God hates: that is, man's methods, man's intellectual inventiveness, man's thoughts and ways, which are always anti-God and anti-Christ. It represented the reason king Saul had spared Amalek (flesh); so that he could offer it to the Lord. It was man seeking to serve God according to his own self-prescribed manner, with his own natural gifts and talents, in direct violation of His designated due order.God had delivered to His people the precise manner in which this Ark, which represented His very Presence, was to be transported (Num. 4:5-15 & Deut. 10:8). It was not to be dragged along the dusty earth by dumb beasts, even though those beasts chewed the cud and split the hoof. Just because men know the Bible and can quote it does not mean they have been set apart as priests unto God and His people. It was to be placed upon the shoulders of a sanctified priesthood that was set apart for this purpose, a priesthood that had been anointed and was alive unto God.But we're speaking of man's natural propensity toward ox-carts. That is, toward his own ways and methods; toward the work of his own hands, rather than God's. Just as it was in the ancient days when each of the judges passed away, the people did evil again in the sight of the Lord, so when the apostles moved off stage, things very quickly began to descend into a spiritual decline of formalism and ceremony of such gross proportions that its darkness was to last nearly 1300 years and would be universally characterized as the Dark Ages. It seems there really is nothing new under the sun.