Verse 12
There were two ways of answering this question: "How shall I bring the ark of God home to me?" There were two ways in which the work might be attempted: a wrong way and a right way. And it is so in other things. The great lesson from the text is that God may be sought and yet not be found, because the seeking is not in the way or "order" which He hath revealed as agreeable to Himself.
I. The right way of seeking God must be the way that God Himself has been pleased to reveal. But there is a twofold revelation: a revelation which God makes of Himself by and through conscience, and a revelation which is contained in the Bible. (1) If you would radically get quit of an evil habit, the "due order" of proceeding is to observe how that habit has been formed and to apply yourselves to the cultivation, by a similar process, of an opposite habit. This is the "due order" in labouring at the reformation which conscience demands. (2) The "due order" of the theology of the Gospel is not first repentance and then appeal to Christ. The "due order" is that, stirred by the remonstrances of conscience, by the pleadings of God's Spirit, we flee straightway to Christ and entreat of Him to make us penitent, and then to give us pardon.
II. He who has revelation in his hand, and either rejects or resists its sayings in regard of the alone mode of salvation, has nothing to expect but that, as it was with David and his people, the Lord God will break in in anger upon him, because in the matter of his endeavouring to "bring home to him the ark of the Lord" he has failed to proceed after the "due order."
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 2308.
References: 1 Chronicles 15:13 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi., No. 307. 1 Chronicles 16:4 . Ibid., vol. xxii., No. 1308.
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