Every good intention in the first half of this chapter still ends in a death. David wants the ark, the visible sign of God's throne among his people, in the city he has just secured. Then it falls apart at a threshing floor. The ark is riding on a new cart when the law had always required the Levites to carry it on their shoulders. When the oxen stumble, Uzzah reaches out to steady it, the one thing no unconsecrated hand was permitted to do, and he dies beside the ark he was only trying to protect.
David's reaction is the most honest moment in the chapter. He is angry, and then he is afraid. 9"How can the ark of the LORD come to me?" David stops. He leaves the ark at Obed-edom's house and waits three months to see what God will do. Obed-edom's household is blessed the whole time the ark sits under its roof, and that blessing, not any new insight David worked out alone, gives him the courage to try again.
The second attempt answers the first. The ark is carried properly, and every six steps David stops the procession to offer a sacrifice, as if he cannot quite believe he is being allowed to go on and wants to keep saying thank you the whole way. By the time it reaches Jerusalem he has taken off his royal robes down to a linen ephod, and 14"David danced before the LORD with all his might," a king whirling in the street in front of everyone, nothing like the dignified wave from a chariot that anyone would have expected.
Michal watches from a window, and 16"she despised him in her heart." Her contempt sounds so reasonable. A king should carry himself with more dignity, and should protect the office even if he cannot protect his reputation. She meets him with sarcasm about how the king 20"honored himself today." David answers: 22"I will make myself yet more contemptible than this." He knows exactly how this looks to her, and he says that he would go lower still if that is what worship before this God requires.
The narrator says Michal 23"had no child to the day of her death." Three times in this chapter she is called Saul's daughter and never simply David's wife, and the repetition says what the narrator wants us to see. She has inherited her father's eye for appearances and missed the God those appearances were supposed to serve. Uzzah died for handling the ark carelessly. Michal is quietly written out of the family line for despising the devotion that brought it home.
Humility and joy are one posture worn two ways. David is not buying God's favor with what he builds here. The favor, the rest, and the decision to dwell among these people were already God's doing before David picked up a single loaf to hand out.
Ask what image you are protecting when you hold back in worship, and whose eyes you are watching. Then be ready to look foolish before the LORD, and to be glad about it.
Prayer
Father, thank you for the patience you showed David between Uzzah's death and Obed-edom's blessing, three months of waiting instead of presuming. Teach us the same willingness to stop, to fear rightly, and to try again on your terms. Give us David's freedom from caring what it costs to be found wholly given over to you, even when the watching world calls it contemptible. In Jesus' name, amen.