Note: I developed a simple set of homemade PowerPoint slides that I used in presenting this sermon. If you're interested in having the PowerPoint file I will send it by Email. Just send an Email message to me at sam@srmccormick.net with the word "slides" in the title and "The Census Plague" in the body of the message. It would also be appreciated if you will include a few words about your ministry and where you are located (there will be no solicitation or unwanted contact from me). Allow a few days for me to respond.
THE CENSUS PLAGUE
2 Samuel 24:1-25 1 Chronicles 21:1-22:1
I suggest you open your bible to 2 Samuel 24 and use the ribbon to hold 1 Chronicles 21. They’re two accounts of the same story, and we will refer to both accounts.
Although I won’t read the passages in their entirety, you might find it useful to refer to the stories as we go along.
I. The story begins this way:
2 Samuel 24:1 Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go, number Israel and Judah.”
1 Chronicles 21:1 Then Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel.
God was angry with Israel. The cause is not stated. Why? We don’t need to know.
However that lies, David was instructed by God and incited by Satan to take a census of Israel and Judah.
So a census was taken.
In the account in 2 Samuel, Israel had 800,000 swordsmen, and Judah had 500,000.
By the account in Chronicles, there were 1,100,000 in Israel and 470,000 in Judah who drew the sword.
I’m not worried about the discrepancy in the numbers. 1 Chron 27:24 says:
Joab the son of Zeruiah began to count, but did not finish. Yet wrath came upon Israel for this, and the number was not entered in the chronicles of King David.
Since Israel and Judah were accounted separately, the two reports can easily be the numbers at different stages in the progress of the counts.
In the account in Chronicles, Joab - who didn’t want to take the census in the first place – didn’t count the people in Levi’s and Benjamin’s tribes (1 Chronicles 21:6).
1 Chron 27:23 tells us David didn’t count those aged 20 and under.
It’s going to be a contaminated census.
The account in Samuel tells us David was convicted by his own heart that he had sinned, and he begged God to take away his sin.
The Chronicles account says God was displeased and struck Israel – we’re not told how at this point, or if it’s just a brief reference of what is to come later in the story.
David was given a choice of punishment (note that the punishment would fall on Israel, not just David):
• 3 years of famine
• 3 months of fleeing before enemies (meaning they have the upper hand on the battlefield)
• 3 days of pestilence
Pestilence is practically an obsolete word, meaning what today we might call a fatal infectious disease.
Which of these three do you like best, David?
None of them! They’re all terrible!
How much damage could God do with 3 days of a fatal disease?
The same as he could do in 3000 years.
But David – knowing there was no good choice – chose 3 days of pestilence, administered by the angel of the Lord (an expression that usually refers to Christ).
When the pestilence came to a certain place in Jerusalem, David pleaded:
“Was it not I who gave command to number the people? It is I who have sinned and done great evil. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand, O Lord my God, be against me and against my father's house. But do not let the plague be on your people.” (1 Chron 21:17)
The place was the threshing floor of Araunah, or Ornan.
The angel of the Lord told David to build an altar on the threshing floor.
When David sought to purchase the site on which to build the altar, Ornan tried to donate the site and the oxen and the yoke for the sacrifice.
But David would not have it.
I will not take for the Lord what is yours, nor offer burnt offerings that cost me nothing.
So David built an altar on site of Ornan’s threshing floor offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.
The Lord answered with fire from heaven, signifying acceptance of the sacrifice.
And there, the plague stopped.
Read 1 Chronicles 22:1
Then David said, “Here shall be the house of the Lord God and here the altar of burnt offering for Israel.”
II. What are we intended to take away from the story?
• That it’s wrong for a country to take a census? No – other factors in the story overtake the simple fact that a census was taken. There's no prohibition against censuses.
• That God sets a trap for people intending to make them fall…and that he works hand-in-hand with Satan in springing the trap?
…and then says “Gotcha!” No – that’s inconsistent with everything we know about God and his plan of redemption.
• That there’s no forgiveness but only some kind of plague for transgressors? No, the Bible’s main theme is the way to forgiveness.
III. The real take-aways
A. What was wrong with counting the number of people?
Notice that the execution of the commandment to take a census was handed off to Joab, David’s military commander – not his minister of the treasury or the director of the Bureau of the Census.
You don’t need a military man to count noses unless you’re just counting military noses.
Gideon amassed a large fighting force, which God made him reduce to 300 men, and the Midianites were easily defeated (Judges 6 & 7, Hebrews 11:32)
The strength did not lie in the size of Gideon’s attack force, but the one on whose side they fought.
There are ways of complying unacceptably with an instruction.
Malicious or self-serving, self-elevating compliance ("it’s about me and my stature").
Although obedient to instruction in a manner of speaking, self-serving compliance displeases God and deserves severe punishment.
B. Another take-away is that we can’t always tell whether suffering is the result of the offender’s sin.
The consequences of self-serving compliance, or obedience in form but not substance may fall on others, and not only on the obvious offender.
On the surface, that may seem unfair.
But God does not act haphazardly.
In this case, other offenses had a part in the lead-up to the story – God’s anger at Israel.
David considered himself to be the primary offender by taking a census for a self-serving or self-satisfying purpose.
But God’s business wasn’t only with David.
Apart from David’s sin, God had a score to settle with Israel before he instructed David to number the tribes.
2 Sam 24:1 says God’s anger was kindled against Israel. It was Israel who was the object of God’s wrath, not only David personally, although David found himself to be sinful in the execution of God’s instruction.
C. There’s a lesson in the choices of punishment offered. To David, there was clearly a best choice among the bad.
All bad choices – it reminds me of a night when we lived on Shavano Road.
At about 1:30 AM our doorbell rang.
I thought, “This is not necessarily good.”
No one has ever brought good news to my door at 1:30 AM.
I turned on the floodlights from our upstairs bedroom, flooding the front of the house with light, but looking down, I couldn’t see anyone.
I went downstairs and through the decorative glass panel in the front door, by the light of the floodlights, I could see people (more than one) moving around on the porch.
There was nothing to be done but open the door.
There stood 3 boys who appeared to be in their mid-teens. The one at the door had his arm and hand wrapped in a jacket. I wondered what was in his concealed hand.
I would have preferred that his hand – and whatever was in it - not be concealed.
He said they had taken a curve too fast a quarter mile down the road and rolled the car. The jacket was wrapped around his arm because of some lacerations suffered in the accident.
At this point Robin, who had been behind me observing the happenings, took over and hustled all the boys through to the laundry room and the laundry tub, gave them washcloths and towels and applied hydrogen peroxide to the wounds.
With things settled down, the boys were in a quandary. “What are we going to do? My Dad is going to be so mad.”
Robin, who has a way of cutting to the chase, said “Well you’ve got to call someone.”
The injured boy said, “I’ll call my Dad.”
The boy had a good father. His first concern was for the well-being of his son and his friends, and gratitude that they were being well cared for.
I took the phone and gave the father instructions on how to get to our house, and in short order the boys were on their way back to town.
The next day the boys parents came to our house with a beautiful fruit basket – a gift of thanks for taking good care of their son and his friends.
I’m sure there were some things said to the boys that we didn’t hear, but…
For the boy to call on Dad wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
Better a loving father than the sheriff whose job was to apply the terms of the law.
David made a wise choice.
Let me fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is very great, but do not let me fall into the hand of man.
What stopped the plague on Israel?
Mercy (God’s tender heart)
The plague was stopped at a certain place in Jerusalem because the Lord said to the angel who was wreaking destruction and death...
“It is enough.” (2 Sam 24:16).
1 Chron 21:15 says,
The Lord relented from the calamity.
“It is enough” is a revealing statement.
“Enough” does not mean the same as “all that justice allows.”
“Enough” means sufficient to serve the intended purpose. His purpose was not to destroy the nation. His purpose and plan was for the nation to bring the Messiah.
We may have taken messages from Nadab and Abihu, Uzzah, and Ananias and Sapphira that is different than the lesson intended.
All of them were struck dead for sinning. We must conclude that God’s action was appropriate for their circumstances.
But we may have thought those grim stories were illustrations of the entire sum and substance of God’s relationship with his created beings.
If it were, what are we to do with Jesus turning away the accusers from a woman taken in the act of adultery, or the soldiers in the act of crucifying him, and the same for the religious leaders at whose hands Stephen died.
If the lesson in this story is “step over the line in any way whatsoever and you’ll be reduced to ashes in an instant” there is no hope for anyone.
We don’t have to take sin lightly to see that God is not only a God of wrath and punishment.
He is a compassionate, merciful God who abundantly pardons.
All of our hopes for salvation rest on the full person of God – not just his wrath.
If he punished to the full extent justice allowed, David would not have survived this story, nor would the nation.
The message is carried in the song, “Grace is greater than sin.”
If God’s grace is not greater than our sin, his grace is not a factor at all.
D. It is worth noticing that the plague was stopped at the threshing floor of Araunah, or Ornan.
1 Chron 22:1 tells us that exact spot was the very place where the temple was to be built in the time of Solomon.
There would be an enormous brazen altar before the temple, and inside the temple in the Most Holy Place (Holy of Holies), the ark of the covenant, upon which the blood of the sacrificial goat would be sprinkled, and beneath that…
…the Foundation Stone, where every year the blood of atonement was spilt.
In the time of Jesus, the ark of the covenant did not occupy the Most Holy Place. The Most Holy Place was quite empty, but the floor consisted of the Foundation Stone – a large stone that (as far as I know) was placed there in the creation and remains in that spot today.
In the time of Jesus – in fact, from the time of Zerubbabel and Ezra, the blood of the scapegoat - symbolizing the atoning blood of Jesus - was sprinkled on the Foundation Stone. There was nothing else in the room.
That’s where the pestilence was stopped. The place where justice meets mercy.
David’s and Israel’s sin found mercy in the blood of Jesus.
Mercy – We are made in God’s image. We are human beings, and God is a divine being.
We have many of the same attributes, among them the capability and sometimes the desire, to show mercy.
God is not a machine, or a computer program whose only effect is to discharge output determined solely by the input.
If that were the nature of God, we wouldn’t really need God – just a law and an enforcement mechanism.
Sin has consequences, but God tempers the ill effect of sin – not randomly and mindlessly, but with a divine eye to his grand design and purpose – to redeem the race, not kill it.
IV. Does that sort of thing still happen? Is COVID19 the outworking of God’s displeasure with a sinful world?
I don’t know.
Who knows the mind of God? Who can fathom his ways? …unsearchable…, cannot be evaluated by man.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
Psalms 139:3-6 (David) You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.
Romans 11:33-34 KJV O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor?
If we can’t know what God is doing and why, what good is this story?
It shows that:
• Wrongdoing comes with a cost,
• Contrition for wrongdoing is recognized, and
• it shows that we have a merciful God who – while just – is merciful.
And therein lies our only hope of being welcomed into the heavenly portal when we have completed our time on earth.
