By S.D. Davis for Apostioc Venn.
Some weeks ago, Pastor (Paul Cook) asked for a show of hands– how many had read Hosea, with about 3 responding. As a man who’d named his daughter Ruhama, I could not help but feel grieved.
When he asked if any wanted to bring a teaching– well this story had formed in my heart for many years beforehand. I will tell you that story today, in hope of admonishing you to read your Father’s tender, precious Words to you. You do not know what blessings He has already given, until you read them.
As a disclaimer, today’s sermon might be R-rated for thematic elements. I cry every time I read it or think about it. If I cry during this delivery, please bear with me– and it may completely overwhelm Beth. If all goes well, I will break your heart. Solomon said, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”
We are not prepared for this message, until we have checked the world’s glory paradigm at the door. That pattern which says, “As soon as the greeks start seeking Jesus, He’ll kill the Romans and give us the throne”– that thought process starts on the wrong foot. God’s path to glory is through shame, His path to heaven is through hell, His path to life everlasting is through death to self. If you can’t think about glory like this, nothing I’m about to say will make any sense.
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.”
“And David and all the house of Israel were celebrating before the Lord, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God. And David was angry because the Lord had broken out against Uzzah. And that place is called Perez-uzzah to this day. And David was afraid of the Lord that day, and he said, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?” So David was not willing to take the ark of the Lord into the city of David. But David took it aside to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite. And the ark of the Lord remained in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite three months, and the Lord blessed Obed-edom and all his household.”
Have you ever been rejoicing mightily before the LORD, praising HIm and recounting His glory… when out of nowhere something terrible sets you reeling? You suddenly feel guilty, without even knowing for certain what you did wrong. You thought you were in a devout moment– on a spiritual high…
What if that moment involved the death of a friend, a co-worker, a loved one? Such moments can test our faith at the most fundamental levels. How we respond in this moment and to this moment speaks volumes about our real relationship with God. What is your knee-jerk reaction:
Why is God so fickle, so capricious, like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass? … Or do you ask, What did I do?
Imagine you’re staring at the body of Uzzah, struck down in a clearly providential way for an equally unclear reason. Wasn’t he just trying to keep God’s very presence in the ark from the disgrace of touching the ground? Don’t we even show this much respect to our nation’s flag?
From David’s question and the suddenness of Uzzah’s death, we infer a cause-effect relationship between his touch and his death… but what if the real cause was in a slightly different place?
“David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, thirty thousand. And David arose and went with all the people who were with him from Baale-judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts who sits enthroned on the cherubim. And they carried the ark of God on a new cart and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. And Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart, with the ark of God, and Ahio went before the ark.”
Did you see it, the real precipitating cause of God’s anger? It requires some familiarity with the Mosaic law:
“And you shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark to carry the ark by them. The poles shall remain in the rings of the ark; they shall not be taken from it. and put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark to carry the ark. Numbers 4:15 tells us this carrying was the sacred duty of the sons of Kohath of the tribe of Levi.”
God had given instruction about how to carry His ark. The poles are so important the Bible mentions them no less than 9 times within the same verse as the ark. Carrying the ark of the Presence of the Holy and Living God was more perilous than carrying nitroglycerin. Therefore, God repeated the instructions for doing it properly. God is so holy, that He will “break out” as David put it, against the unclean and presumptuous.
Lest we feel aghast at this angry Old Testament God, remember we see His same eternal and ferocious holiness in Acts toward Ananias and Sapphira, then again in 1Corinthians 11 when some fell sick and died because they mishandled God’s presence at His Table.
All throughout, Old Testament and New, God has graciously, repeatedly given instruction about how we must behave in His presence. This revelation would have saved Uzzah’s life, if he’d read it… or if David had read it… or if the sons of Kohath had read it and claimed their birthright…
Deuteronomy 17:18-20 commanded David as king to write a copy of the law approved by the priests and read from it all the days of his life. Did he obey that command? Does his negligence there make him an accessory to Uzzah’s death?
Sometimes God presents us with insurmountable difficulties which only He has power to move. This was the case with Job. He had truly committed no particular sin to warrant this extreme calamity, and God’s purpose was that Job should forbear in hope, “though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” At such times our faith grows through patience, seeing beyond this life’s tribulations to Him who was and is and shall ever be. Our faith grows through awaiting and then obtaining our deliverance by His hand. “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.”
At other times God sets us a challenge to which He has already given the answer, placing it in our very hands. How blessed are we to face these trials because the hour of our salvation, of our deliverance, is simply knowing and doing God’s word. But if we’re like David and we haven’t read, then we don’t know the one kind of test from the other. We think all life’s challenges are beyond us, and we cannot make any use of the grace God has already provided for this trial, this moment, this season, this unemployment, this sickness… If we don’t know His word, we can’t distinguish between these two kinds of troubles. We become like a man at the bottom of a pit bemoaning his misfortune, when there is a rope beside him all the while if he would only climb out.
…
This picture changed my life. When I am 10,000 years old and have been reunited with my dear daughter far longer than we were parted I still will not be the same man I was before. There is no “going back” from this. This is the story of the darkest day of my life. It’s the story of how my every sorrow has been deeper because of this moment, and my every hope driven further from this world and further into the next, because of this day. This is the story of a young couple, married just over 2 years, learning their unborn daughter is dead. And this is the story of the ever-present grace of Almighty God to carry us through the most extreme, bitter, unmitigated sorrow, while praising His name.
How many of you recognize Ruhama’s name? In Hosea chapter 1, God commanded Hosea to name his own daughter No-mercy because He intended to show His people what life without His mercy is like. “She conceived again and bore a daughter. And the Lord said to him, “Call her name No Mercy, for I will no more have mercy on the house of Israel, to forgive them at all.” What a dreadful prophecy, your own daughter to be an object-lesson, a byword, a public spectacle of God’s wrath… It would be dreadful if that was the end of the story.
As though God Himself could not endure this dreadful prospect any better than Hosea, He says just 4 verses later, “Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured or numbered. And in the place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” it shall be said to them, “Children of the living God.”
“And the children of Judah and the children of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head. And they shall go up from the land, for great shall be the day of Jezreel. Say to your brothers, “You are my people,” and to your sisters, “You have received mercy.” ”
I was so captivated with this story, with the burden upon Hosea to name his daughter this way, and with God’s apparent trepidation or retreating about the name He had commanded, as though He so loved this child, and His people, that He felt compelled to transmute the curse-name into a name of blessing, and He didn’t endure that tension longer than 4 verses!
From that time the name Ruhama owned me in a way. Needless to say I had a slight challenge selling my wife on the idea of naming our next daughter in an ancient, dead language which confuses tongues accustomed to English. “Couldn’t we name her Mercy?” — No, we could not. In a way I couldn’t explain, I belonged to that story and to the glimpse of passion I had seen in God toward His people. I wanted my daughter to proclaim that reckless, desperate, fierce love to all creation in her name. And so we settled the name of our next girl months before she was conceived.
Fast-forward to December 21st 2010. Within 24 hours we go from a routine prenatal check-up to the time-stopping, gut-wrenching, earth-shattering news that we would never meet our little girl in this life. We spend the next few hours driving half-way across the state to a facility whose staff wouldn’t persecute our midwife. After some consultation, the doctor administered drugs to induce labor, leaving us in the care of a remarkable Christian nurse named Katherine. Katherine was kind and attentive, she was all a good nurse should be, at the worst moment in our lives. Remember that you don’t always have to do great deeds to change the world. Sometimes small deeds, ordinary kindness, in dark days, in the hands of God– sometimes these things change the world, as when a Galilean carpenter turned rabbi died like a criminal and unraveled death itself.
The next morning I began the terrible task of calling local cemeteries, pricing a plot. The bargain $2200 space wasn’t just difficult; it was impossible for me at the time. When the hospital staff came to inform me they would cremate Ruhama free of charge, I lost it. They were extending a kindness through their offer, which I do not want to undermine or downplay. Nevertheless, cremation is a pagan custom. We inter our dead in expectation of their resurrection at the return of our LORD Jesus Christ. With precisely this kind of faith did Joseph give direction concerning his bones, and Hebrews commends him for this deed.
Here was I, reeling from the sudden death of my daughter, too poor to bury her, and facing the reality of her cremation, whether I wanted it or not.
Zoning laws in our neighborhood prevented us from burying Ruhama on our land. I called our midwife [Amy], asking if she knew of anyone who might give me permission to lay my daughter to rest. In God’s providence, and Amy’s kindness, Ruhama’s body will rest beside Amy’s daughter, awaiting the coming of her LORD. Some of Amy’s Amish friends made a casket for my baby girl and the local funeral home donated the embalming service.
We were so deeply moved by the kindness of Amy (midwife) and Katherine (nurse) at this most horrible time, that we determined immediately to name our next daughter after these two women.
Greater still, in the beautiful, terrible, multi-faceted, providential poetry of our God, when He reached down to claim my little Ruhama [my little Mercy], I named my next daughter Amy [Ami, My People]. Sometimes God’s grace is hard, as it was here for me, as it was with Job. “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.”
“After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”
So we received a plot, a casket, and some dear friends from these terrible events, ending a tragic tale on the brightest note possible… Right? Perhaps, but it’s not that simple.
Between her grief and the heavy drugs the hospital administered, Beth spent the next week hallucinating that Ruhama was hiding from her. Beth needed to heal from a large internal wound left by the engorged and deformed placenta, and instead of resting she kept trying to get up and coax Ruhama out from hiding under the bed. In her lucid moments, she would wail and scream, with a sound that twists my soul even now as I recall it.
I held her and sang to her and read her the Word of God because I didn’t know what else to do.
December 21st had been full of long drives and horrible news. At the hospital I finally fell asleep about 1AM on the 22nd. Beth woke just before 3AM, in the process of delivering, and it took her several minutes to wake me. I always felt like I wasn’t there for her when she needed me. Between my sense of guilt, grief, and sleep deprivation watching over her ensuing hallucinations I developed a strange response to fatigue. From that time on, whenever I get really tired, I twitch and spasm violently, almost like an epileptic seizure. I don’t sleep much, the quality is poor, and the spasms are both painful and exhausting. I have since learned this phenomenon is called hypnic jerk.
“So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
All these things notwithstanding, I saw a daunting challenge before me. I had seen and heard the responses of other men to this kind of grief: addiction, apostasy, divorce, suicide. I knew that without a definite plan of action and immediate implementation– if we just let grief take its natural course, we could easily become bitter and unbelieving. We might harden our hearts and stiffen at the mention of Ruhama’s name. Wouldn’t that be to treat her name as a curse and a byword? I couldn’t endure the thought.
God gave me a vision which, to His credit and glory, has thus far kept my family on the straight and narrow way. I had to combat bitterness, by telling the story. God forbade me to be hard-hearted; He did not forbid me to be broken-hearted, and I only saw the two options. Every December 22nd the Davis family gathers to tell, to remember, to weep over the story of the short life of Ruhama Grace Davis. A woman who touched our hearts without ever speaking a word, who has engendered the love of people she has never met, who shaped the name of her younger sister, who accomplished God’s purpose for her life in 7 and one-half short months, a feat which I have perhaps just now managed after 30 years. In response to these things I can only exalt the great name of Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, Lord of the living and of the dead.
What if I had not read Hosea? What if God had not taken hold of me, through that story? Would I have been prepared for all the dark miles which lay ahead? I must answer resoundingly, NO.
“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
“Therefore, gird the loins of your minds, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
“Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.”
If I die now, then I think I have said the thing for which He made me; Great is the Name of Jesus Christ.
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