(Read 2 Chron. 26)
THE history of king Uzziah is a very sad one. The Lord had been very good to him, and had “helped him” against all his enemies, so that he had become a very great king. He was only sixteen when he began to be king, and it appears that while he was a young man he really lived to please the Lord, and “God made him to prosper.” His fame was heard down in Egypt, and “his name spread far abroad.” Of course, it was the Lord who enabled him to succeed so well, and the greater king he was the better chance he had of showing to all the world what high respect and deep reverence he had for that God who had given him all his glory. But, instead of that, we read that he became proud: “his heart was lifted up.” When he was weak he trusted in God, and was “helped;” but “when he was strong,” he “transgressed against” the One who had helped him, by going into the temple of the Lord to burn incense, which only “the priests” had any right to do. They were the people whom God Himself had chosen to serve Him at His altar, and it was wickedness in the king to attempt to draw near to God in that way. If he had been both priest and king it would have been different, but it was not so; and if he had really respected the word and authority of the God who had given him his power he would not have dared to act as if God had not perfect right to choose one family of His people to serve at the altar and another family to sit on the throne. Uzziah might have said that he, too, was a servant of the Lord, and that it was to the Lord that he desired to offer the fragrant incense; but it would not have been the least excuse. God’s high priest was there to burn the incense, and for Uzziah to come to do it instead was an insult to God, and God was displeased with Uzziah. He had been warned by the priests that what he was doing was out of place, but instead of turning back and confessing his sin, he was “wroth” with them! But he had to do with God, and if he would not hear them, God made him feel His hand in judgment upon him. He was struck with leprosy, which both they saw and he felt, so that he did not wait to be put out from the holy place; he “himself hasted to I go out, because the Lord had smitten him.” How solemn! Uzziah was His servant, and had in his younger days served the Lord; but God could not, and would not, pass over this willful transgression. He had helped him before, but that only made it so much the worse that he should so far forget what was due to God as to force himself into His presence in such a manner. So Uzziah had to be as a leper in a separate house as long as he lived, and someone else had to look after the affairs of his kingdom. He had thought to go into the Lord’s house, where he had no right, and the end of it was that had to give up and leave his own house, where he had a right to be. A lonely man, “in a several house,” he had to learn that he not only could not go into the house of the Lord, but people would be afraid to come to his house lest they should catch his leprosy.
Of course, in many ways it is very different now. There is now no place upon earth which God looks upon as more holy than any other place (John 4:2121Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. (John 4:21).), except, indeed, that His Spirit dwells in the bodies of His people; the body of every true believer in the Lord Jesus being a “temple of the Holy Ghost,” as we learn from 1 Cor. 6:1919What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? (1 Corinthians 6:19) and other passages. And then, as to the priests, it is not now Azariah who is the “chief priest,” but it is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself who is the great High Priest over the house of God (Heb. 4:14; 10:2114Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. (Hebrews 4:14)
21And having an high priest over the house of God; (Hebrews 10:21)). Then it is not in the temple of Solomon on Mount Moriah that He appears in the presence of God for us, but in “heaven itself” (Heb. 8:1; 9:241Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens; (Hebrews 8:1)
24For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us: (Hebrews 9:24)).
“In heaven itself He stands,
A heavenly priesthood His.”
Again, it is not now the case that any of God’s servants are priests more than every other servant of His. All those who have learned that the Lord Jesus has loved them and washed them from their sins in His blood, are made both “kings and priests unto God,” and every one of them has an equal right to draw near to God. Such passages as 1 Peter 2:5, 95Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 2:5)
9But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light: (1 Peter 2:9); Revelation 1:66And hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen. (Revelation 1:6); Hebrews 7:19,19For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto God. (Hebrews 7:19) and 10:22, make this very plain, and show us what a great mistake it is for people to call any one christian man in an assembly now “the priest,” and all the rest “the people.” Now that the Lord Jesus has shed His blood, and the veil has been rent by God, there is “a new and living way” opened into the very presence of God, and all true believers have the same “boldness” or liberty to “draw near” (Heb. 10:19,19Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, (Hebrews 10:19) &c.). But, while this is all true, we must never forget that it is God Himself we have to do with, as much as in the case of Uzziah, and His holiness and majesty are the same now as then. He could no more have sin or stubborn self-will in His presence now than He could then. And as we know that we are in ourselves only guilty sinners before God, we feel that it is only through what the Lord Jesus Christ has done on the cross for us, and what He is now doing at the right hand of God for us, as our great High Priest, that we can approach God at all. It is “through Him we both (Jew and Gentile) have access by one Spirit unto the Father” (Eph. 2:1818For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. (Ephesians 2:18)). If we should pass by Him, and dare to come before God as if we had any right of ourselves to come, God could not accept us. We might be as “great” as Uzziah, or as “wise” as Solomon, and we might say it was God we came to worship, as this king wanted to burn incense at God’s altar; but in coming to Him, who is “of purer eyes “than to look upon sin, we have first to take our place as lost sinners, confessing our sins, and believing in the Lord Jesus, or God could not welcome us. It would be putting ourselves forward, as if we were fit for God, and would be slighting God’s Son; but the Word of God says “He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which sent Him” (John 5:2323That all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. He that honoreth not the Son honoreth not the Father which hath sent him. (John 5:23)). As sinners having to do with God, we have to learn that it is only “by the blood of Jesus” that we can draw near; and if, as children of God, we desire to know more of the Father, we know who has said “No man cometh unto the Father but by Me” (John 14:66Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. (John 14:6)). The same blessed One who takes away our sin also brings us to God (1 Peter 3:1818For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: (1 Peter 3:18)), and reveals to us the Father, and we cannot do without Him for one thing any more than for another. Now, my dear reader, if you slight God’s High Priest, and think, like Uzziah, to rush into His holy place, as if you had in yourself any fitness for it, you must be prepared for God’s displeasure to show itself in a far more terrible manner than in the matter of this king of whom we have been thinking. With him the punishment was only “until the day of his death; “but if you turn away from Christ and do not own Him as God sets Him before you (Rom. 3:2525Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; (Romans 3:25)), death itself, in all its bitterness and terror, will be but as it were the dark passage to that “eternal judgment,” of which the Word of God says “after death, the judgment.”
W. TY.