HAVE YOU EVER owned a good luck charm? A number of cultures around the world have considered a rabbit’s foot to be such a charm, for example, and when I was young someone actually gave me one on a keychain. Lucky me. I never really thought about it, and it mostly stayed in a drawer. Every so often I would take it out and marvel at the softness of the fur. But to me, it was more of a novelty than a talisman of good fortune.

After all, the rabbit wasn’t so lucky.

If you look up the origins of the tradition, you’ll find it has some grisly associations. Some believed the rabbit had to be killed in a certain way or in a certain place. Some believed the foot had to be taken from a live rabbit. Some believed they were amputating the foot of a witch that had shapeshifted into a rabbit.

So tell me again why I want that dangling from my keychain?

But even if you don’t own any kind of good luck charm, you may have other superstitious practices or beliefs. My mother, for example, believed that Friday the 13th was an unlucky day. She would get nervous if anyone in the family had to travel on that day. And have you ever noticed that hotels don’t typically have a 13th floor? Superstitious fears about the number 13 aren’t as uncommon as you might think. A 2007 Gallup poll, for example, revealed that given a choice a significant number of people would avoid staying on the 13th floor of a hotel.

How many of the people responding to the Gallup poll said this? Thirteen percent.

Creepy, right?

But if you do find that even the least bit creepy, that’s the point. I say all this because I don’t want us to think that there had to be something incredibly twisted about the mindset of the ancient Israelites for them to continuously fall into idolatry. All of us are capable of falling into a superstitious way of thinking. Most of the time, it’s of little consequence. But sometimes, superstitious and magical ways of thinking get in the way of true worship.

REMEMBER THE 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark? Harrison Ford played Henry “Indiana” Jones, an archaeology professor who, unbeknownst to his students, was actually a globetrotting, bullwhip-wielding adventurer chasing lost relics. In the movie, Jones is racing against a group of Nazis to find the ark of the covenant that once accompanied the ancient Israelites. Obviously, the Nazis aren’t interested in worshiping the God of Israel. Rather, they want the ark because they believe it can be weaponized to make their army invincible. Spoiler alert: by the end of the film, they pay the price for their sacrilege.

Biblical spoiler alert: the Israelites made the same mistake, treating the ark as a talisman that would guarantee them victory in battle.

The story is told in 1 Samuel 4-7. The Israelites went out to do battle with the Philistines and lost. When the remaining soldiers returned to camp, the elders agonized over why God would let them suffer such a resounding defeat. Then someone got a bright idea: “Let’s get the ark from Shiloh and take it into battle with us. If we do that, we can’t lose!” Unfortunately, it seems no one bothered to consult God on this. Instead, they took for granted that the ark would magically grant them victory. They were, of course, badly mistaken and the second defeat was many times worse than the first.

Thus, the Philistines captured the ark and carted it away. It didn’t take long, however, for them to realize that this was a mistake, because God began to plague them with tumors and rats (yes, you read that correctly). They tried moving the ark from place to place, but nothing helped. Eventually, they were forced to send the ark back on an oxcart. For good measure, they included a gift of five golden tumors and five golden rats, representing their five afflicted city-states, to say, “Sorry. Our bad.” The Israelites in the town of Beth Shemesh rejoiced when they saw the ark coming down the road.

Happy ending? Not quite. Instead of treating the ark as holy and untouchable, some of the people tried to look inside it and paid with their lives. “Who can stand in the presence of the LORD, this holy God?” they wailed. “To whom will the ark go up from here?” (1 Sam 6:20, NIV). The ark was moved on to the city of Kiriath-Jearim, where it was placed in the house of a man named Abinadab and guarded by his son Eleazar.

And there it would remain for twenty years, until David became king over all of Israel, captured the fortified city of Jerusalem, and made it his capital.

Second Samuel chapter 6 tells how at first, there was great celebration as David and his men brought the ark from the house of Abinadab. When the oxen pulling the cart stumbled, however, Uzzah, one of the sons of Abinadab, took hold of the ark, presumably to steady it, and he too paid for that irreverence with his life. David, now afraid to bring the ark to Jerusalem, took it to the house of Obed-Edom and left. Three months later, when David saw how Obed-Edom’s household had been blessed, he finally brought the ark all the way Jerusalem, with great fanfare.

David commissioned Asaph to sing a song of praise for the occasion, the one I’m calling “David’s song” for convenience, though there’s no way to know for certain if David wrote it, or if the whole song or parts of it predated the celebration. The song is found in 1 Chronicles 16. The people are directed to praise God for everything he has done for his people, for all the ways he has been faithful to his covenant promise. Even creation itself is invited to join in the chorus of thanksgiving and praise.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the words of that song give both content and form to Psalms 105 and 106. Psalm 105 follows the same positive, praise-filled trajectory as David’s song of celebration, taking the story even further. But lest anyone be tempted to take God’s covenant faithfulness for granted, as the Israelites did when they treated the ark as a talisman, Psalm 106 tells the other and darker side of the story. We need both psalms, together, to remind us that our superstitious and idolatrous tendencies can contaminate true worship of the one true God.

Let’s do a deeper dive now into these two psalms, beginning with Psalm 105.