Text: 2 Samuel 24
This
story of David's census and the resulting plague is one that I find very
troubling. The God it presents us with
seems so utterly unlike God as he has revealed himself to us in, through and as
Jesus Christ. Jesus, through his words
and his actions reveals to us that God is gracious and forgiving and loves us
so much as to go through even death for our healing/salvation when we certainly
cannot say we deserve it. God--the
loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--is gracious. He wants us in his presence so that he can
extend his favour to us and do everything to the nth extreme for our ultimate
good. Thus as the Apostle John wrote,
God is love - agape love which in Greek is the highest form of love based in
choice rather than hormones and feelings and unselfish action for others rather
than benefit of self. Agape love isn't
just one of God's characteristics or attributes. God is agape love. So, how can God be so capricious, angry, and
vengeful, and act out with death-dealing as he does in this story? How is that love? Isn’t that what President Assad is doing in Syria. We cannot say he loves his people when it is
so obvious that his love is power.
This
story and the challenge it presents us with, the challenge of having to deal
with God behaving like all the other gods, is easily mishandled. We should not wave accounts of God's wrath
around as the smoking gun of Puritanical Revivalism and use it and the fear of
judgement to wor conversions out of people or to make people toe our line. Nor should we commit the classic blunder of
dismissing it outright because it does not concur with our post-Enlightenment
or Liberal sentiments of how a loving God ought to be. That's as big a blunder as getting involved
in a land war in Asia
or going against a Sicilian when death is on the line. We must not judge the story or the culture
from which it arose or the actions of the God it presents us according to
today's blatantly un-Enlightened standards and rather simply deal with the text
on its own terms and the God who is agape love will have his say about who he
is. What we find at the heart of this
story is a righteous God having to deal with his people becoming “like the
nations” and David heading down the road of being a king that is Assad-like
rather than Christ-like. Unfortunately,
God gets his hands dirty and people die.
Yet in the process, the means of God's higher purpose of grace
grows.
So
the story, 1 Samuel 24 is out of place.
Whoever compiled 1 and 2 Samuel as we have it appears to have had in
hand this story of how David acquired the threshing floor of Araunah the
Jebusite and he didn't know where to put it in the story of David's life
attested in 1 and 2 Samuel. So he tacks
it on at the end because it's important.
The threshing floor in it and the place where David offers his
sacrifices on it are important because it became the very spot where the Ark of
the Covenant would be placed once Solomon built the Temple.
The lid of the Ark
was the Mercy Seat, God's throne on earth, the place where Israel's sins
would be forgiven. It is the place where
the LORD and Israel
would be united in the blood of sacrifice sprinkled on the Day of
Atonement. This is what I meant by the
means of God's grace growing. If all
these events had never happened, David may not have been able to secure the
location of the Jerusalem
temple from the Jebusites without having to shed both Israelite and Jebusite
blood in battle. One other thing to note
about this spot, it is Mt.
Moriah
where Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac.
So,
why was this census such a thing as to warrant the LORD's anger and a
plague? The Bible says “Again (or
increasingly) Yahweh's nostrils flared against Israel so he
incited David against them saying 'Go count Israel and Judah’.” The first thing to notice hear is that there
is culpability on the part of the people.
They are not innocents. They are doing something that is making the LORD
quite angry. His nostrils are
flaring. (Hebrew does not have a word
for anger. They just say the nostrils
flare.) We don't know what they were
doing. I suspect it had something to do
with in the wake God's establishing them to be a nation as he promised to
Abraham they were starting to do the things that nations do—exploit their
neighbours and the weak among themselves and find themselves a national god to
bless them while they go about it. So,
in order to rein them in the LORD ordered a census instead of having one of
their enemies like the Philistines yet again displace them.
A
census was a dangerous thing. Back in
those days, whenever a king counted his people it was to find out how powerful
he was by finding out how many people he had at his disposal to tax, to
conscript into forced labour, or to raise an army. In this case, since David gets his main
general Joab to do the counting, it appears David the warrior-king, wants to
know how big of an army he can raise.
But, there was a catch. In the
ancient Near East (and there is some biblical precedence too) they believed
that soldiers must be ritually pure for war.
There were purity rituals and rules regarding fasting and abstinence
that men must observe before they are even counted to be an army ready to go to
war in the name of a god. If they were
not “right with god”, then they their god would plague them. This was the case in Israel and Judah. This is why Joab protested the census. He knew the men of Israel and Judah were not
ritually pure and to count them in that state was an invitation to plague
regardless of whether it was at the LORD's command or not.
So,
the LORD used a military census that he knew would result in the consequence of
plague for Israel
and Judah
as a means of judgement. They were not
in the rights with the LORD and this was his way of letting them know that
being an exploitative military power in the region wasn't what he had in mind
when he promised Abraham that he would make his descendents to be a great
nation through whom he would bless the nations.
Being
God's people has costly consequences when we do not act like the blessing God
is making us to be. In a real world
where sin and death are dreadful realities God is not above getting his hands
dirty and dealing in death to get us to the point where we beat our swords into
ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks.
God gets his hands dirty. Jesus
shows us this. Instead of calling down
legions of angels to prevent his crucifixion which would had resulted in the
deaths of thousands he more or less falls on his sword and lets himself be
crucified. Judas wasn’t the only one to
commit suicide that day.
The
LORD has a lesson here for David as well.
As king, David is responsible for the well-being of his people which
included looking after their relationship to the LORD who made them to be a
great nation. Apparently, he had not
been doing this. It is astonishing how
easy it was for David to think the reason the LORD wanted a census was for
David to know how great a military he had.
If David were truly the righteous leader that he claimed to be, he would
have done as Moses did centuries before when the LORD wanted to destroy Israel over the
Golden Calf incident. He should have
mediated on behalf of the people. Joab
tried to get David to see what was going on.
He knew the people were not ready.
David was apparently blinded by pride and power. So God gets his hands dirty to teach the
leader of his people that the lives of his people have value and are not
expendable at the king's whim to find out how great he is.
So
to close, we still have a question as to how we balance a God who gets his
hands dirty with a God who is agape love?
Though it appears that God is dealing dirty here, he is simply using our
sin to show us our sin. The consequence
of sin is having to live with the consequences of sin and they are costly. There are real consequences to our actions
that can be as brutal as death itself.
When it comes to what is best for everybody, God does not step back and
say, “I’m a God of love and I won’t get my hands dirty because some peacenik
somewhere says its immoral.” If that
were the case there would be no such thing as justice and justice is a core
component of God’s love. God gets his
hands dirty. In this case 70,000
Israelites died. Yet, in this messed up
world how many more would have died if the LORD would have let Israel and David
continue on in their way of becoming just like the other nations, exploitative
powers exploiting in the LORD’s name and calling themselves blessed? The true question here is why God continues
to let us get away it. Amen.
