There are two scenes in Scripture where a human hand reaches toward the holy, and they could not end more differently.
Holiness Beyond Reach
“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.”
2 Samuel 6:5-7
The story of Uzzah does not begin with the stumbling of the oxen. It begins much earlier, with a failure of diligence that set the catastrophe in motion before anyone reached for anything.
When David resolved to bring the Ark up to Jerusalem, he placed it upon a new cart, drawn by oxen, attended by men walking alongside. It was a grand procession, full of music and celebration and evident devotion. But it was wrong from the first step. God had not appointed a cart. He had appointed consecrated men, the sons of Kohath, to bear the Ark upon their shoulders by means of poles passed through rings on its sides, so that no hand and no common implement would ever contact the sacred vessel (Numbers 4:15; 7:9; Exodus 25:12-15). This was not an obscure regulation buried in forgotten law. It was the explicit, repeated, deliberate ordinance of God concerning the one object in all Israel most freighted with the weight of his presence.
David knew better. Israel knew better. And yet they borrowed the method of the Philistines, who had sent the Ark back to Israel on a cart pulled by cattle after their own gods had been broken before it (1 Samuel 6:7-12). What the Philistines did in ignorance, Israel repeated in presumption, dressing their disobedience in the garments of celebration and calling it worship. David himself would later confess the error plainly: “We did not seek the Lord our God as prescribed” (1 Chronicles 15:13, paraphrased).
So when the oxen stumbled and the Ark lurched, Uzzah’s hand was already the product of a long chain of accumulated carelessness. He reached out, perhaps instinctively, perhaps with genuine alarm for the honor of God. And God struck him dead (2 Samuel 6:7).
Mark well what the Ark was. It was the appointed symbol of the divine presence, the mercy seat overshadowed by cherubim, wherein the glory of the Most High condescended to dwell in representational form (Exodus 25:17-22; Leviticus 16:2). Yet that mercy seat was hedged about with ordinances of dread. None could touch it save those consecrated by blood and ceremony, and even then only upon terms of strictest obedience (Numbers 4:15; Leviticus 10:1-3). The holiness of God is no passive attribute. It is a consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:24; Hebrews 12:29), and the sinner who presumes upon it unreflectingly will find that even the mercy of God has a sword at its threshold.
Uzzah’s sin was not malice but presumption, and presumption compounded upon presumption. The cart was presumption. The negligence of preparation was presumption. And the outstretched hand was only the final and visible expression of what had been building all along. He reached forth in the flesh, and the flesh cannot endure the glory (Exodus 33:20; Isaiah 6:5).
This is the condition of every soul outside of Christ. God is holy (Isaiah 6:3; 1 Peter 1:16). His law is holy (Romans 7:12). His throne is holy (Psalm 47:8). And we, being by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3), can no more touch the things of God in our own righteousness than Uzzah could steady the Ark with impunity. Every approach to God upon the terms of our own devising is a cart where there should be consecrated shoulders, and a presuming hand where there should be trembling reverence (Hebrews 12:28-29).
A word must be said to those in this present age who speak freely of approaching God directly, on their own terms, without mediator or appointed means. The impulse may feel like sincerity, even like boldness of faith. But sincerity is not the same as safety. Uzzah was sincere. The question is never whether we feel sufficiently earnest in our approach, but whether God has appointed the way by which we may come (John 14:6; Acts 4:12). He has never left that question to our preferences. To approach the living God unmediated, as though the distance between his holiness and our sin were a trifle easily crossed by good intentions or warm feeling, is not spiritual courage. It is presumption dressed in the clothing of devotion, and it has been deadly from the beginning (Genesis 4:3-5; Leviticus 10:1-2).
Holiness Within Reach
“And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.” And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.”
Mark 5:25-29
Now consider a different scene entirely, and feel the weight of the contrast.
Jesus was on his way somewhere else. Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, a man of standing and public influence, had fallen at his feet in desperation, pleading for his dying daughter (Mark 5:22-23). And Jesus had agreed to come. The crowd pressed around him on every side, a mass of bodies moving through narrow streets, the noise and heat and urgency of a moment charged with expectation.
It was into this crowd that she came. We do not know her name. We know only her condition: twelve years of hemorrhage, twelve years of ritual uncleanness, twelve years during which the law of Moses had barred her from the temple, from the synagogue, from the touch of other people, from full participation in the community of Israel (Leviticus 15:25-27). Every person she touched became unclean. Every surface she sat upon became unclean. She was not merely sick. She was, by the terms of the covenant community, perpetually excluded. And she had spent everything she possessed seeking a cure that no physician could provide (Mark 5:26).
She had no appointment with Jesus. She had no social standing to press a claim. She could not have called out to him as Jairus had, because to do so would have been to announce her uncleanness in a crowd and to implicate everyone around her (Leviticus 15:19-20). So she came quietly, from behind, and she touched the hem of his garment. Just the hem. The outermost fringe of his outer robe, the tzitzit that every Jewish man wore as a reminder of the commandments of God (Numbers 15:38-40).
Immediately the fountain of her blood was dried up (Mark 5:29).
Note the particulars with care. By every legal standard, her touch should have transferred her uncleanness outward to whatever she contacted. That was how defilement worked under the old economy. It spread. It contaminated. The clean became unclean by contact with the unclean (Leviticus 15:4-7; Haggai 2:13).
But something entirely different happened here. Instead of her uncleanness spreading outward to defile Christ, his holiness moved inward to purify her. The current ran the other direction. This is the miracle of the Incarnation pressing itself into the marrow of a single moment. The eternal Son, made flesh (John 1:14), is not subject to the old economy of contamination. He is the Holy One of God (Mark 1:24; Acts 3:14), and his holiness is no longer a barrier that destroys the sinner who draws near, but a fountain that heals all who come to him in faith (Zechariah 13:1; Revelation 22:1).
Nor is this woman’s approach unmediated in any true sense, though no priest stood between her and Christ. She came to the Mediator himself (1 Timothy 2:5; Hebrews 9:15). The difference between Uzzah and this woman is not that one approached through appointed means and the other bypassed them. It is that Uzzah reached past the Mediator toward the raw presence of God, while she reached toward the Mediator himself, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Colossians 1:19; 2:9), and through whom alone that fullness may be safely received (Hebrews 10:19-22). Direct access to God is not found by bypassing Christ. It is found exclusively in him (Ephesians 2:18; 3:12).
The Theology of the Contrast
John Owen, in his meditations upon the glory of Christ, observes that in the person of the Son, the divine nature is communicated to us not in raw, consuming majesty but through the veil of his humanity, made fit for our receiving. The Ark was a type and shadow. Christ is the substance (Colossians 2:17; Hebrews 10:1). The Ark contained the tables of the law (Hebrews 9:4). Christ fulfilled the law in his own person (Matthew 5:17; Romans 10:4). Where the Ark could only declare what righteousness demanded, Christ imparts what righteousness has accomplished (Romans 5:17-19; 2 Corinthians 5:21).
The contrast could not be sharper. The Ark on its illegitimate cart, surrounded by celebration that masked disobedience, attended by a man whose well-meaning hand brought him only death. And Christ in a dusty street, pressed by a crowd, approached by a nameless and excluded woman whose only credential was her need and her faith (Hebrews 11:6).
She came with nothing but her desperation. “If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole” (Mark 5:28). There was no priest to mediate her approach, no ceremony to render her fit, no sponsor to vouch for her standing. There was only the reach of faith toward the One in whom all fullness dwelt.
And what did Christ say? “Daughter, your faith has made you whole. Go in peace” (Mark 5:34). He called her daughter. He who might justly have said, as God once spoke from Sinai, “Touch not, lest you die” (Exodus 19:12-13), instead spoke the word of adoption and peace (Romans 8:15-16; Galatians 4:5-7). He did not merely heal her body. He restored her to the community, gave her back her name, and sent her away not merely cured but blessed.
Holiness Given
You are, in your own nature, no better fitted to approach God than that woman was to touch the Ark. Your sin is real, your uncleanness genuine (Isaiah 64:6; Romans 3:23), and the holiness of God is no less fearful for the fact that so many in this age have forgotten it (Hebrews 10:31). But Christ has interposed himself between the consuming fire and your soul. He bore in his own body the judgment that fell on Uzzah (Isaiah 53:4-6; 1 Peter 2:24), becoming the one Mediator who by his obedience and sacrifice made full and perfect satisfaction to divine justice (1689 Confession, 8.5; Romans 3:25-26).
Those who seek God on their own terms, through the sincerity of their feelings or the force of their spiritual ambition, have not found a shorter road to him. They have stepped off the road entirely. The enthusiasm of the moment is no guarantee that the manner of approach is acceptable to God (Matthew 7:21-23), and the history of presumption is long and sorrowful. Christ is the way, and the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through him. This is not a restriction imposed by a grudging God. It is the mercy of a God who, knowing we could not survive an unmediated encounter with his glory (1 Timothy 6:16), sent his Son to be the meeting place between heaven and earth (1 Timothy 2:5).
Faith in Christ costs you your pride, your self-sufficiency, your confidence in anything you bring (Philippians 3:7-9). But it wins what no merit could purchase: life, peace, healing, and the voice of the Son of God calling you his own (John 1:12; Romans 8:17).
Reach, then. Reach in your weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). Reach in your unworthiness. Reach as one who has tried everything else and found it wanting. The hem of his garment is near, and virtue yet goes out from him to all who come (Hebrews 7:25).