Still Searching for the King

This is, admittedly, a mind-boggling mystery. God takes our free decisions, even the most malicious intentions of humanity and demonic forces, and uses those decisions for a perfect plan. We cannot speculate how He does it. But we must confess that He does it. Remember: God’s wisdom is infinitely higher than ours. If we could understand all His ways, that would only prove His wisdom is nothing better than ours. If our God does not sometimes confuse and confound us, then we are not dealing with a God that is worthy of our worship. We are, instead, worshiping a version of ourselves. Let us examine our hearts and put a little less confidence in our own ability to understand, and let us stop trying to make God as facile and one-dimensional as we are.

When the prophet Gad comes to give David the word from God, it probably made David wish Nathan had gotten the assignment instead. The word is patently harsh, and while David is given a choice, the options before him are all horrific (v. 13). He chooses divine pestilence over military rout and famine, and in the course of three days, 70,000 men are dead (v. 15). David had been dreaming of numbers for nearly ten months—but not this one. What began as a show of strength ends in weakness, blood, and tears.

This segment of the narrative raises more uncomfortable questions for the contemporary reader. We are prone to view God’s response as an overreaction (at best) or as morally despicable (at worst). Let us take each of those possibilities in turn and show why God was neither overreacting nor exhibiting moral wickedness.

First, while the text certainly majors on David’s sin, that does not therefore exonerate the rest of Israel. God is not responding to one solitary person’s sin by doling out punishment on 70,000 other unsuspecting and otherwise unaware individuals. The judgment comes to the nation of Israel because David had led the nation of Israel to sin.

Throughout the Old Testament, when God brings judgment on a society, He does so because the society has grown violent and depraved. The flood in Noah’s day was precipitated because God knew that “every scheme [humanity’s] mind thought of was nothing but evil all the time” (Gen 6:5). Sodom and Gomorrah, two towns obliterated by God’s wrath, are condemned because they oppressed the poor (Ezek 16:49). When Jonah was sent to proclaim judgment to Nineveh, it was a result of Nineveh’s brutal violence toward surrounding nations.

God does not delight in pouring out His wrath. As He told Moses, He is “slow to anger” (Exod 34:6), meaning that while He does become angry, it is not His first response. Yet God’s patience is not endless, and when a society reaches a certain threshold, God steps in to say, “Enough.” He will not allow the poor, vulnerable, and weak to sit under the thumb of oppression forever.

How does this connect to Israel? The census was, we recall, patently military in its scope. Israel was beginning to become a nation like its neighbors, looking to dominate and conquer. They were on the road to becoming a nation that, if left unchecked, would become characterized by violence, one God would be forced to oppose. So God stretches out His arm—not completely, as in previous judgments, but just enough to stem the tide.

In one sense, then, this judgment is actually a show of mercy. Had God not interrupted Israel’s trajectory, a future judgment would have been must worse. Seventy thousand slain is extreme, but it saved them from a much more devastating judgment later.

God still works like this in our lives today. When He sees us ruining our lives with sin, He cares too much about us simply to let us follow that course. So periodically He sends pain our way to protect us from a much worse judgment later on. We think when a husband, for instance, is caught in the middle of an affair that he is experiencing God’s wrath. But it is more appropriate to see that as God’s severe mercy. Wrath would be allowing the man to get away with it, continuing down the trajectory of sin.

This individual example, however, raises the second half of our question. “For the sake of argument,” you say, “I’ll allow that God wasn’t overreacting. But wasn’t the punishment a bit erratic? What about the innocent who died during this plague?”

Human suffering has always made people ask questions like this. Whether the context is 2 Samuel 24 or a tragic current event, in a thousand different forms the question arises: Why do bad things happen to good people?

In this particular context, as we have argued, Israel does not exactly qualify. The nation as a whole was implicated not only in the military expansion represented by the census but in other rebellious acts. Many of them had rebelled against David—God’s anointed king—first under David’s son Absalom, then again under a rebel by the name of Sheba. These were not “good people.”

A similar principle applies when it comes to evil in our lives today. We generally find pain and tragedy foreign in our lives because we assume we are innocent and good. We think we deserve good things. But Scripture paints a different picture. The human race is not a helpless and hapless group standing under the wrath of a capricious god. We are a rebellious and crooked bunch who repeatedly spurn the goodness of our Maker. We are not good. We do not deserve good things. These are uncomfortable truths, but they are truths we must accept if life is to make any sense at all. Every one of us deserves judgment.

The 70,000 who fell during this plague were not any different—cosmically speaking—than the millions who survived. If we understand the depth and the breadth of our depravity, what will surprise us is not God’s judgment but His mercy. After all, even on the eve of God’s judgment, David does not accuse God of injustice. Instead, he says, “Please, let us fall into the Lord’s hands because His mercies are great” (v. 14). Faced with the imminent death of tens of thousands, David was not frustrated with God’s wrath. He was confident in God’s mercy.

If we react against the idea of God’s wrath generally, it may be because we feel that we ourselves are not worthy of it specifically. The more we are persuaded of our own righteousness, the more the question of God’s justice troubles us. However, the more we sense the noose of God’s judgment rightly around our own necks, the more we will grow amazed at the greatness of God’s mercy and not the severity of His justice.

There is a pernicious idea present in the church today that the Old Testament God is full of wrath and judgment but that by the time of the New Testament, He had matured. So instead of fire and brimstone, we get Jesus, meek and mild. Not only does this severely truncate the ministry of Jesus, but it also distorts the Old Testament image of God. As David learned at the threshing floor of Araunah, the Old Testament God was more merciful than we could ever hope.

Note the verb used of God in verse 16—relented. Some translations say that God “changed His mind” or “regretted” what He was about to do. We must be careful here. When we humans experience regret or change our minds, it is nearly always a result of having made some mistake. But as Numbers reminds us, “God is not a man who lies, or a son of man who changes His mind” (Num 23:19). Whatever else this word means, it cannot mean that God suddenly realized He had taken a wrong turn. His relenting was not a course correction. Instead, it was the overflow of His great pity on His people.

God had every right to flex His arm and demolish Jerusalem. But as so often happens throughout Scripture—as so often happens in our lives—God relents. His heart is grieved not because He has made a mistake but because His compassion for us is boundless. And so, on a day that could have been marked solely by death and disaster, God draws back His hand. At the spot God’s wrath subsided, God commands David to buy the field and build an altar there (v. 18).

What we do not see in 2 Samuel is that the threshing floor was atop Mount Moriah (2 Chr 3:1). This was the same place Abraham had offered the attempted sacrifice of Isaac, where God had stopped him and told him to offer a lamb instead. This threshing floor would later be the place where David’s son Solomon would build the temple, where Israel would come to offer sacrifices for their sins. All three of these scenes, occurring years apart at the same place, point to the same reality: one day there would come a sacrifice who would satisfy God’s wrath and take away sin forever—Jesus, the ultimate Lamb of God.

Jesus would accomplish what no previous sacrifice, no previous king could have accomplished. When Isaac’s spot on the altar was replaced by a ram, it meant the deliverance of Isaac—for a time. But Isaac would still one day die. When the lambs were sacrificed in Solomon’s temple, it meant the deliverance of Israel—for a time. But the sacrifices had to be made every day, every week, every year. And when David cried out to God, “I am the one who has done wrong. But these sheep, what have they done? Please, let Your hand be against me and my father’s family” (v. 17), he was offering himself as a sacrifice. David could never be that sacrifice. Yet David looked down at that field, and through history, and saw the Shepherd who really would be smitten for His wayward sheep.

Throughout 1–2 Samuel, as with most books in the Old Testament, we are left with a sense of disappointment. David was Israel’s great hope, but he was not the king Israel needed. Nor is this unique to 1–2 Samuel. Moses, the lawgiver, cannot go into the promised land because he broke the law. David, Israel’s greatest king, is a sinner who cannot save his people. He wishes he could die for them, but he cannot. Nehemiah, the rebuilder of Jerusalem, constructs a city that makes people weep in shame when compared to its former glory.

What we need is a Lawgiver who can both keep the law and redeem us when we break it, a Builder of a glorious kingdom that can never be shaken, a Shepherd who will not abuse His sheep but will die for them, a Father who will not neglect His children but will pursue them to the point of death and lay down His life for them, a King who will not sin against His people but will die in their place. That role could never be filled by Moses or David or Nehemiah. It was filled, once and for all, by Jesus Christ, God’s Son.

From first to last, David’s life is meant to point us to Christ. In Christ we find not only an example but a Savior, someone who both humbles us in times of strength and gives us hope in times of weakness. Jesus Christ is the only King who, if we receive Him, will satisfy us and, if we fail Him, will die for us. This is our King, and there is none like Him.