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Andrew Leslie: Everyone come to the second of our arks this morning, last week, Teva, this week. Uh, Ron open to one Chronicle 16, please, and let's ask for the Lord's strength and help gracious father. Go before us now and strengthen our feeble minds and hearts to receive your word for our good and for your glory. Amen.

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Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles and the judgments he pronounced you, his servants, the descendants of Israel, his chosen ones, the children of Jacob Extolled King David. In a moment of wild jubilation, the celebratory occasion was of course the return of the ark of God to its earthly tabernacle. It's rightful home. Having been in captivity to the Philistines and rescued from the Philistines some 20 years prior.

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Remember, memory is a funny thing, isn't it? Consider for a moment the present, too late. Scott, what is the present?

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If not an unstoppable markh of infinitesimally. Tiny moments that appear and then vanish as quickly as they appear, leaving only memory, memory that expands, and then contracts and warps and disfigures in the wake of the present memory that affords some ongoing but sputtering and highly attenuated access to the past. Perhaps more significantly than what it remembers of the past forms our anticipation of the present in the shape of a kind of expectancy loss or of gain, or of more of the same. What is real in all this?

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The past, the present, or the future seems easy enough to set aside the future, the not yet real. If all that is real is the present, what am I? Who am I? When the present is as gone, as soon as it appears, which leaves only what is past a past that endures to us only in the form of memory.

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And that itself is a haunting thought, isn't it? Every person we've ever known, every place we've ever been, everything that has happened to us, it's all filed away there somewhere in our memory, and sometimes it doesn't take much to bring it back to the surface. Some song that we enjoyed as a teenager, some book we read as a child, stretch of road that we used to travel along an old photograph, a conversation with a friend. There's no telling what will trigger it, but when it comes, we are reminded of something that's so much part of us that it can hit us in the face as if it were right there in front of us.

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The smells and sounds of a house that was demolished long ago. The laughter of someone who died more years ago than we can remember of a friend with whom we've lost touch. Old failures, old hurts times. Too wonderful to tell and too terrible to tell Memories that come unbidden helter skelter sometimes so thick and fast that they flood and overwhelm us.

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And then sometimes so sparsely that we desperately want more. But then there are the things I've simply forgotten. Like a file that's got lost somewhere in my mind. And if any of you have seen the state of my desk, you'll appreciate why I've chosen that analogy.

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Forgetting that threatens to bar all access to the past. That is the reality of who I am. Frame that way, I think David's exhortation to remember takes on a particular significance. Memory is the mode through which God's people accessed the past.

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That is the reality of who they are or rather who God had made them to be. Remember the wonders he has done. His miracles and the judgments. He pronounced O descendants of Israel.

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O children of Jacob. Yes. Jacob, your father. Remember him?

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Old Jacob, the trickster who conned his brother out of his birthright. Remember Egypt, remember how you were slaves and the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and outstretched arm. Come on. You saw it with your own eyes, or at least your ancestors did, says Moses.

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The great trials, the signs and wonders, the mighty hand and the outstretched arm. Remember the wilderness? How the Lord your God, led you all the way for 40 years to humble and to test you, in order to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commands. Remember, it is the Lord your God, who gives you the ability to produce wealth and so confirms his covenant, which he swo to your ancestors as it is today.

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Remember, and forget not how you provoked the Lord your God in the wilderness. Remember Miriam? The Lord your God did to her. By the way, do you remember that when Miriam became jealous of Moses' authority?

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Do you remember what happened? Remember how the Lord struck her with leprosy? Remember the days of old, the generations long past. If you can't remember, ask your father.

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Moses says, remember, remember, remember, because this is who you are. Those conniving sheets. The ungrateful rat bags, the least of all peoples among the nations whom the Lord nonetheless chose for no other reason that it was upon you and not them, that he set his affections. So that when he lavish upon you flourishing cities that you did not build and houses with, all kinds of good things that you did not provide, wells, you did not dig vineyards and olive groves, you did not plant.

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When you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord. Remember, remember, remember. But what if I forget? They, our ancestors became arrogant and stiff necked, and they did not obey your commands lament the returning exiles.

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In Nehemiah chapter nine, they refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them and what was the price of their amnesia. Well, they lost touch with the reality of who they were and devolved instead into a stiff-necked parody, just like that ultimate stiff-necked parody, the lifeless calf that they confected out of all of their jangling trinkets and juries as, as if that was the God who brought them out of Egypt. What staggering amnesia. That's what happens when you forget the Lord.

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You lose touch with the reality of who you are and devolve into a lifeless parity. And so David says, as the ark returns to its tabernacle, remember lest you forget cold comfort. You might think for the parent or spouse with dementia or Alzheimer's. Cold comfort for the person whose injuries are too severe to remember anything at all.

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Cold comfort for the sinner who when faced with the daily conceit of temptation, forgets the goodness of the Lord and forgets who they are again and again and again. Just like David haunted by memories of failure as a husband, a father, as a king. Hypocrisy, betrayal, theft, murder, adultery, and goodness knows what else? If the bundle of contradictions that linger on in the haunted crevices of our minds as anything to go by, how can any of us be sure who we really are?

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Are we too just stiff-necked, lifeless parodies, lest we forget indeed. But then there is this ark and a whole lot of hullabaloo and wild singing and dancing as it returns to its rightful home. What's so special about the ark? It's just a fancy box, isn't it?

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Karen Beilharz: But of course, it's not just Andrew Leslie: any old box. So when God delivers his instructions for constructing the tabernacle, and Exodus 25, so important is the ark that that's where he starts. A box, a little over a metre long, half a metre wide and tall, overlaid with gold with this solid gold atonement cover, bookended by two golden cherin.

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The symbolism of all of this is highly charged. Of course, evoking the very throne of the living God. That's why when David goes to re in 1 Chronicles 13 to retrieve the ark where it had been for 20 years, it is described as the ark of the Lord enthone between the cheree, the ark that is called by the name, or as David calls it in chapter 28, the very tal of our God, a box then to be handled with very great care.

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Something that poor Zer learned the hard way, as you remember. But there are just a couple of things about this box that I want us to reflect on in the remainder of our time. The first concerns what's actually inside the box, which are of course, the two stone tablets. With the 10 Commandments given to Moses at Sinai, inscribed directly by the finger of God.

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Specifically, these tablets are called the testimony the witness. The legal proof of God's covenant with his people. That's why the ark was commonly called the ark of the testimony, and that I think is significant. As you hear David says, verse 15, that God remembers.

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He remembers his covenant forever. The promise he made for a thousand generations, the covenant he made with Abraham, the oath he swore to Isaac, and so on and so forth. God remembers all of this, and just as our memories are the mode through which we access the past, that is the reality of who we are. When God remembers he remembers the reality of who he is.

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Specifically in terms of what he has done in the past. He is the covenant making promise, keeping God, and he remembers that. See what is memory after all, but a kind of testimony. So a witness gets up in a courtroom because they remember something about the past.

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Something they've seen with their own eyes, something they did sometime in the past. And so in a sense then you might say that these stone tablets are the earthly deposit of God's settled covenant memory, a testimony, a witness to the God who remembers. And so it's no surprise then that God's presence. His name, the reality of who he is as the covenant making, God is uniquely tied up with that fancy little box.

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I think the ark makes me think of a time capsule, you know, uh, little box filled with little fragments of memory, testimonies or what we might call memorabilia. A receipt showing the grocery prices one year, or the cap of the football team that won the premier ship that year, or a photo of Andrew Leslie with brown hair. That of the society has 2005 or of Josh Apone with hair that would Beci 2004 or of Mark Thompson with Facial Hair Society. Sometime in the 1980s, an old dumb phone.

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Floppy disc and newspaper clipping. There's a whole past, a whole lost world that the time capsule, in a sense, makes present as an enduring reality. When I tell my children that I have brown hair, they just burst into laughter in disbelief, but there it is locked in the past in a little photograph. That's in a time capsule.

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The ark is a little bit like that, and so it's no surprise I think that David's song takes the shape that it does when the ark is finally rescued from the Philistines, there's rejoicing, there's exhortation, there's even anticipation. Verse 25, save us, God, our Saviour, gather us and deliver us from the nations. And all of that anticipation is clustered around memories of a God whose reality and posture. Towards his people is physically and tangibly made, present and encapsulated in that little box.

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So on the one hand, the ark encapsulates and makes present the covenantal memory of God. But the other thing about the ark is that it was specifically designed to be mobile. To be carted around. I mean, the thing must have weighed a tonne when you think of the stone tablets stuffed inside and covered in all of that bling.

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But unlike a time capsule that's designed to be sort of buried and forgotten for a long time, the ark was designed to travel with God's people. And so it did from the days of the wilderness, when each time the ark would set out, Moses would say, rise up Lord. Scattered your enemies, may your foes flee before you. And of course, if the ark didn't travel with the people, they were highly vulnerable and faced certain catastrophe because without it, they were bereft of God's presence.

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But the mobility of the ark meant that the ark itself was also vulnerable. It could be captured as it was by the Philistines, although they didn't go so well for them. If you might remember. Then much later during the reign of King Josiah, it seems like the Ark must have gone missing because it's listed as one of the things that Josiah brings back to the temple in his reforms.

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And then by the time you get to the Babylonian exile, there's no mention of the ark at all. You know, all sorts of other bits and pieces and chattel from the temple as mentioned in the plunder, but not the ark. What are we to make of that? Did God then finally forget?

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Did he finally lose his mind? Did his covenantal memory vanish with the ark in the midst of time? I realise Indiana Jones never lost his faith, but the prophet Jeremiah has something quite different to say sometime during the reign of Josiah. Jeremiah predicts a day long in the future when.

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All peoples would gather to Jerusalem and the people of the north and the people of the south would stream in, and he says something very interesting about the Ark, chapter three, verse 16. In those days, people will no longer say the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. It will never enter their minds or be remembered. It will not be missed, nor will another one be made.

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As if to say God always intended for it to vanish. What are we to make of that? Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Paul writes, or do we need like some people letters of recommendation?

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You yourselves are our letter written on our hearts known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts perhaps. Then the human body is a little bit like an ark. Paul calls it a tent.

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A temporary abode designed to be mobile, to be folded up and then packed away, and then opened up again somewhere else. Portable and not permanent, but a real abode. Nonetheless, an ark that is chock-full of memories. Memories that tell the story of the reality of who we are.

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If that's the case, then. Given how fraught and fragile our memories really are. As I asked a little earlier, how can we be sure that when our memories finally falter and fail us, how can we be sure that all that is left is no more than an empty worthless box? A lifeless par.

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What hope is there that we will not even vanish from the memory of God himself, along with all other vain and worthless things. There are dark days aren't there? When it can feel like God has genuinely forgotten, how can I be sure that he won't forget me for good? Will you forget me forever?

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David cries. Are there any more terrifying words in scripture than depart from me? I never knew you. Hell is real, of course, and it's full of people, and it's not full of real people in the end, only lifeless parodies because to be truly real is to be remembered by God.

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You are a letter from Christ delivered by us. Paul says, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. Not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. Christ's letter, the earthly deposit of God's new covenant memory.

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A memory that has determined to forget our transgressions. To blot them out, remember them no more, and to remember instead, the sun and the infinite worth of his ransoming death and the everlasting cover of his atonement and the indestructibility of his resurrection life. A covenantal memory that is tethered. Not to the fading glory of our best moments and to the enduring shame of our worst, but to the history of that body given over to death, raised again to life.

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And if there was any glory in what was evolved, it has no glory. Now in comparison with the surpassing weight of this, you are Christ's letter Paul says. The earthly testament to that covenant memory. A time capsule, a jar of clay, a tent, an ark, concealing a treasure of the inestimable.

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Glory for reef. As we saw last week, Christ's body is like an ark that carries us. So it is the case that our earthly bodies are, in a sense, like an ark that carries Christ.

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So long as these bodies of ours are on the move, it's more wilderness than rest. It's more philistia than Jerusalem. And that pilgrim life involves a certain kind of witness to Christ. A certain kind of testimony doesn't, or perhaps in Paul's figure, a certain aroma to the Philistines.

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It was the aroma of death, wasn't it? And often that's the way it will be for us. But then as the ark travelled through the wilderness, there were a few hangers on, weren't there of Jethro Moses' father-in-law or jethro's descendants. The key knights, for whom you might say the ark was an aroma of life.

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And so by God's grace, may it sometimes be for us, but one day this bodily ark will arrive in Jerusalem, and when it does. It will give way to an enduring life that is tethered to the history of our risen and ascended Lord, say, brothers and sisters, when our memories flood us, when they deceive us, and when they finally fail us, God's memory will prevail for the word of the Lord. Stands firm in the heavens. On that day, people will no longer say the ark of the covenant of the Lord.

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It will never enter their minds or be remembered. It will not be missed, nor will another be made. Not so much vanishing in the midst of time, so much as being swallowed up by an all surpassing weight of glory for what is Mortal. Paul says Will have been swallowed up by life.

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What a great hullabaloo that will be. That's pray a great God and Father, we thank you so much that our identity, that our reality is tied up with the reality of your son of the infinite worth of his death on our behalf, the everlasting cover of his atonement. And of the indestructible glory of his risen life, as his life is hidden concealed within these mortal bodies. We long for the day when what is mortal will be swallowed up with that heavenly tabernacle not made with human hands, but enduring into eternity as we live in this world.

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May we bear testament to that covenantal memory in our lives. Strengthen us in these days in the wilderness as we long for the day when we will finally arrive and be in your presence. Amen.