There is among Bible believers this tendency to do whatever God has forbidden, and if he sets down reverence in worship and a way of doing things, people say, ‘I don't want that. I want to be a songwriter; I want to be applauded; I want to worship God in a kind of showbiz environment, and be clapped and admired. I want to do it this way, that way.’ The message of the passage is that you must have reverence, and you must have exclusive worship: the avoidance of worldliness. The Christian life is the war against worldliness, and reverence for God. Informality and lack of reverence is just a licence and liberty for human pride. I know I am a child coming to a Father in prayer, and he loves me and I cannot return that love, but I must also be reverent and wonder at him and be humbled by him, and grasp his holiness and his majesty. I mustn't start just singing about his kindness to me and my salvation, how fortunate I am. I start with him, and reverence and godly fear. If you don't have that, you can't be humble before him. It is human pride that wants the informality and the easy-to-approach God.
Then of course worship is shallow and superficial, if it only consists of informal, flippant, and lightweight comments. Some of the central London churches, even those that are claiming to be evangelical, if they put something online, a live stream service, it’s got to be preceded by two people imitating two worldliness on a television chat show, laughing and giggling at each other for ten minutes before the service starts. How does that foster depth and thinking of God, thought and appreciation? That is what this trivialisation of worldliness does. It deprives us of real communion with God. I sing some jollied-up hymns, in which I gave myself lightly to God, but I'm not putting anything on the table. It's easy to say, ‘Lord, I give you my life, I pledge myself to thee’, and nothing is on the table. Reverence puts something on the table. That is to say, I give the Lord specific things. I give up my involvement in this and in that. I repent of certain things, and I want to leave them behind. If there is anything unclean in my thoughts and practice, I am ashamed of it. I put this on the table to be destroyed and surrendered. But informality and jollifying everything, and no seriousness; you say the words but you don't bring anything and lay down before the Lord. It's not sincere. It is not realistic. If you come to a service that has been jollied up, you are not taking away food for the soul that will go on speaking to you, challenging you, uplifting you. It reminds you seriously of the promises, showing you how to lead a better life, how to improve. When you take a meal physically, that nutrition empowers your body physically for so many hours. So too we should take away from a service things that live with us. But no, the jollified services of today: you go away with no higher feeling than you have leaving a concert or performance. It is soon gone. Separation from the world and reverence bring real joy and advance and humility, and closeness to God.
There is a certain class and kind of sin or wrongdoing, which is dealt with here in First Samuel chapter 6 and also chapter 7. We learn that there was a certain class of sin that could not be forgiven, and that was sins of presumption. In 1 Timothy 1:12 we read about somebody who sinned greatly against God as a persecutor, and a prosecutor of Christians in the early church, Saul of Tarsus. But he said, ‘I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.’ He was a persecutor, and an unbeliever, and those sins had to be forgiven, and in order for him to be saved, the punishment for those sins had to be borne by Christ on Calvary's cross. But they were not presumptuous sins. Now in the New Testament presumptuous sins also, clearly, come under the redemption that is in Christ, but the point is there more serious. They are more serious than sins of ignorance. In John 9:39-41 we read this: ‘And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind. 40 And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words, and said unto him, Are we blind also? 41 Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth’. It is presumptuous sin. David prays, ‘Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression’ (Psalm 19:13). What is this presumptuous sin? The Hebrew uses a word which means proud sin. It’s a wilful sin and it’s a proud sin. You 'presume you can get away with it. You presume that God, after all, will not mind – if you are a Christian and you believe in him. Supposing, for example, a man who was a pastor, a minister, should have an adulterous affair, and let us suppose this goes on for years, and he carries on expounding the word, exhorting the people. It is a presumptuous sin. He thinks either he is so special, or so smart, or God will not mind in his case and he can do something terrible and hypocritical, and he can betray his wife, and he presses on. It’s a sin, which involves many other sins. He has probably got to engage in many lies, but it's also a sin of rebellion; it’s the sin of unbelief; it’s a sin of pride and arrogance to think you can do this; it’s a sin against clear light, and against clear knowledge, and that's what carries it up into the category of presumptuous sins.
In verse 15: ‘The Levites’ – it’s unclear where the Levites come from, because it wasn’t a Levite city, and it does seem that in the Book of Judges and in the First Book of Samuel sometimes Levite and priest is almost interchangeable. Levites or priests: they took down the ark of the Lord and the coffer that was with it, which the lords to the Philistines return.