Uzzah, Ananias, and Sapphira: they were not punished

In 2 Sam. 6, we have the famous story of Uzzah, who in doing what any of us would have done, died after touching the ark as it was about to fall while being transported, under David’s direction, to Jerusalem. In Acts 5 we have a similar although less sympathetic account of the sudden deaths of Ananias and Sapphira after they, in another “could have been any of us” slip, selfishly withheld money from the nascent church. 

In neither of these stories should we, in my opinion, conclude that the dead were summarily executed as punishment for their crimes. If capital punishment were meted out for crimes such as these, the planet would have no human inhabitants. Instead what we have here is a reminder that God is an awesome God and that especially at critical moments in redemptive history (in these cases the initiations of the Davidic Kingdom and the New Testament church, respectively) he demonstrated that while he is a deeply personal God,  his patience should not be abused to erroneously narrow the gap between creature and creator. He will remind us at opportune times that the moral gulf between God and mankind cannot be overestimated. Uzzah, Ananias, and Sapphira were not punished by death for their crimes; they died as a warning, and to remind us of our crimes, and specifically the crime of adopting a cavalier approach to the holiness and “otherness” of God.

 

I also think we diminish God when, through misplaced intellectual arrogance, we believe we can understand him more than has actually been revealed in scripture. Instead of humbly accepting that the true doctrine of God is one that our finiteness demands will necessarily contain deep mystery, we assume that our superior brains permit us to extrapolate from scripture and arrive at a highly detailed model of God for which there is no textual support. In doing so we are reducing God by declaring that he cannot be so great and so unfathomable that our philosophies cannot comprehend the nuances of his nature. We simply refuse to accept that there are mysteries beyond our intellectual reach.

 

Thus we take things that we know about God from scripture: that he is unchanging, that he is slow to anger, that there is a mysterious trinity, that there was a union between a true human and a true God, that Christ was truly tempted yet sinless, that the atonement for sin requires blood, that the death of Christ achieved salvation for the elect, that there are unilaterally decreed covenants between God and man, we take these and arrogantly extrapolate them into a multifaceted and totally unwarranted “Doctrine of God” that is doomed to be both incorrect and to err in the wrong direction. Because in arriving at a god that we "fully understand," we are arriving at a fictional represntation that is far less than the true God.