| Home | Our Hope | |
| Bible Study |
|
January 30, 2026 |
| Dancing Before the Lord | ||
King David had a blowup with one of his wives over his dancing in public. The result was that she was, effectively, no longer his wife.
Dancing has been a problem for God's people for a very long time, and that has continued through to this day. The reason is obvious - men are men and women are women. When you mix them with music and motion, natural attraction can go in ungodly directions. So the problem is drawing that fine line through the center of dancing.
I mentioned King David dancing. Before examining those verses, we need some background. Just prior, David and a large crowd had followed God's instructions for moving the Ark of the Covenant, and it was about to enter the City of David, where David had set up a tent for it to reside.
David was overjoyed by the success because an earlier effort to move the Ark to the City of David had resulted in the death of someone and in the Ark being left in some guy's house for 3 months.
So David was happy about the success and happy that the Ark would be in the City of David, and just generally happy about God. David cares very deeply about God and the things of God. David has been jumping and dancing and has taken his shirt off because he was getting sweaty. Now the huge procession was about to enter the city.
Then it happened as the ark of Yahweh came into the city of David, that Michal the daughter of Saul looked out of the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before Yahweh; and she despised him in her heart.
20 But David returned to bless his household, and Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David and said, "How the king of Israel has glorified himself today! He uncovered himself today in the eyes of his servants’ maids as one of the worthless ones shamelessly uncovers himself!" 21 So David said to Michal, "It was before Yahweh, who chose me above your father and above all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of Yahweh, over Israel; therefore I will celebrate before Yahweh. (2 Samuel 6:16,20-21)
To fully understand these verses, we need to understand what Michal means by "worthless ones," and why the verses keep telling us that she is the daughter of Saul. Saul began his kingship as a humble man, but he changed. His daughters, who grew up in his house, grew up with that changed attitude. When she says "worthless ones," she shows that she is an elitist. She believes some of the ordinary people have no value and that she is better than they are. She is also acting as judge over the king.
David is a completely different kind of king. He is a man of the people.
She charges him with dancing without a shirt to showoff and to impress the ladies.
David declares his innocence, saying he wasn't dancing for them to see; he was dancing for Yahweh to see. But David also caught the elitism Micah expresses and her judgment of him.
When David says, "Yahweh […] chose me above your father and above all his house," he means that God took the kingship away from Saul and even from the line of Saul, and gave it to him, David. The point in that is that Yahweh was done with the ways of Saul, along with her snotty attitude.
When David says, "[Yahweh] appoint[ed] me ruler over the people of Yahweh, over Israel; therefore I will celebrate before Yahweh," he means that Yahweh made him king and he will do what he wants, including celebrating before Yahweh. The point is a rejection of her judgment of him. The king will be judged by Yahweh and not by anyone else, including her.
In addition to a difference in worldview - elitist versus man of the people - there is a difference in perspective on David's motivation. She sees him dancing without a shirt and assumes she knows his motivation. He says his motivation was to express the joy in his heart at what Yahweh had done for him.
This is the core problem with dancing. What is the motivation of the dancer? Also, if others with authority encouraged the dancer to dance, what was their motivation?
David was not the only godly person to dance in the Old Testament. In Exodus 15, Miriam prophesies and dances to celebrate the destruction of Egypt and the protection of Israel.
And Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took the tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. 21 And Miriam answered them,
The indentation here indicates that the text is in a poetic form. This is generally an indication of prophecy. "Sing to Yahweh, for He is highly exalted;
The horse and his rider He has hurled into the sea." (Exodus 15:20-21)
Protection is important to the women. You might ask, "Where are the men?" The Bible doesn't say, but we aren't complicated. The chins of the men are hanging down to their knees in awe. They've just seen the Egyptian army completely destroyed. That matters to the men.
Dancing was very normal in Judaism, even cultural. It remains that way. But it was different from what we understand as dancing today.
In my grandfather's generation, dancing was mostly ballroom dancing, which was done with learned steps, not the "shake your booty" dancing that we are more familiar with. Even then, it was commonly couples dancing, although sometimes the couples moved in synchronized ways. Jewish dancing was group dancing, with 20, 30, or more people executing the steps. In such a dance, your partner might be 15 people away from you, and you wouldn't meet again until after that dance was done. Your partner might even be dancing in another group.
With Christianity, things changed, though not because Jesus or the apostles had said anything. The word "dance" only appears 4 times in the New Testament and never in an instructional way.
In her article with the lengthy but clever title, "Why Christianity put away its dancing shoes — only to find them again centuries later," Kathryn Dickason discusses some of the history of dancing by Christians. I've removed her liberal viewpoint.
For the first five centuries of Christianity, the church opposed dancing. According to church leaders and early theologians such as Tertullian and Saint Augustine, dance incited idolatry, lust and damnation.
Moreover, early Christians were more likely hostile to dance because it reminded them of their pagan counterparts in the Roman Empire, as Augustine’s book "The City of God" made clear. For example, Augustine wrote: "the worshippers and admirers of these (pagan) gods delight in imitating their scandalous iniquities […] . Let there be heard everywhere the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theater; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement."
Not for the first time, the Church of Rome had failed to separate physical from spiritual. They wanted to avoid the appearance of doing the same things that the pagans did.
Despite centuries of dance prohibitions that came from church councils, ancient and medieval Christians would not stop dancing. [So the church had a change of attitude] Ritual manuals of the 13th century and beyond reveal how church authorities turned dance to the service of Christendom. Within the spaces of churches, cathedrals and shrines, dance could help generate collective worship.
By the 16th century, however, the cultural landscape of Christian dance [had] changed dramatically. There were many reasons. The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation began to critique dance and declare it idolatrous, much like the early church did. By the time the first […] ships set sail to [what would become America], Christian dance was largely lost to history.
Continuing from a different source.
The Catholic Church issued a significant decree in 1916, banning dances at Catholic entertainments, including church fundraisers and picnics, due to concerns about moral danger, especially from bodily contact between unmarried men and women. This ban was reaffirmed in 1917 and applied broadly, even to daytime or non-prolonged events. (Some AI)
When my father was a pastor, the church strongly discouraged all forms of dancing, as did the other churches. Some of the high school's athletic programs included dance lessons. Christians were allowed to opt out of these.
After he retired, he began spending time with other seniors, most of whom were not Christian, though mostly they were conservative. He saw spouses happily dancing together and wished he could do that. He realized that he had made a mistake.
How had that come to be? The church had made a mistake that it often makes, legislating beyond what the Bible says.
Another change has come. The Messianic movement, which is an effort to restore the church to its roots, has brought back group dancing by reintroducing Jewish group dances.
A young girl was encouraged to "dance before God" for the church. Her dance included a ribbon on a stick, in the style of Rhythmic Gymnastics. Some of the people in the church were horrified that someone was dancing in the church.
It is hard to judge the motivations here, but it appears both sides were wrong in this. The girl should not have been encouraged to do this, not because it was dancing, but because that can change the motivation. Is it still "before God" if you have to be pushed into it? It shouldn't have been held in a church building. The only imaginable reason for doing it there is to have an audience to play to. King David would have still danced if no one was watching; the parents wanted an audience. King David was expressing his joy to God; the little girl was putting on a performance. King David said it wasn't for those watching; this girl's performance was for those watching.
As a quick summary of that. The little girl shouldn't have done it for the church, but not because it was dancing.
Some churches and authorities within the church have tried to define what kinds of dancing are right and which are wrong. They are not authorized to do that. That is the job of the Holy Spirit. Anyway, that's the wrong approach.
I can always count on GotQuestions.org to mishandle any difficult topic. They are one of the groups that try to define good dancing and bad dancing, in the context of "all dancing is dangerous."
[Exodus 32:6,19-25] In the process of the idol worship, they began to dance. This ended up in "revelry" (v.6) and being "out of control" (v.25 says "naked" in some translations). In this case, dancing led to very sinful activity. (https://www.gotquestions.org/Christian-dance.html)
Because of the anti-dancing sentiment in the church, the translators are translating the words in unusual ways, and the commentators are spinning it the way they want. The word he refers to in verse 6 as "revelry" is "dancing." That word appears many times in the Old Testament, and it always refers to dancing. The word that he says is sometimes translated as "out of control" (with its connotations) or "naked," is "unrestrained." He also says dancing caused the "very sinful activity".
This is what is really going on. The people had built a god in the form of a golden calf, and they were dancing "before their god." They were joyfully celebrating their god in dance, just as David would do long after that. That's the sin. They have built an idol and are worshipping it, only days after God had said not to do that. Because Aaron was complicit in building the calf, he did nothing to "restrain" them from worshipping it.
The dancing isn't the problem. The problem is spiritual; they've turned back to a false god and are worshipping it.
If the church sets the standard, the one who follows that standard is a follower of the church, not a follower of God, even if the church says its standard comes from the word of God.
The Bible doesn't speak about dancing because it doesn't need to. The right and wrong of it is already specified in the commandments we already have and guided by the Holy Spirit.
The same commandments apply at the dance just as they do for people passing each other on the sidewalk.
Now that we have reached the end of the study, perhaps you've noticed that it wasn't really about dancing, or at least not only about dancing. It's really about walking in the spirit at all times. It's about not walking in the church and the rules that it makes up. It's about not being driven by your desires but about a constant sensitivity to the Holy Spirit. It's also about recognizing that you may not understand another Christian's motivation for what he is doing.
Christians may be joyful, but most don't usually express it through dance. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.