2 Samuel Lesson 79
God Disciplines David – 2 Samuel 24
Turn to the last chapter of 2 Samuel; although this is the last chapter
of 2 Samuel it is not the last of the Samuel series because I want to continue
with David’s life until its end in 1 Kings 2.
So next time we’ll be covering portions of Kings and we will also touch
on some portions of Chronicles that add details to David’s life that we don’t
see here. The last four chapters of 2
Samuel are a closing divine viewpoint profile of this man’s life, and each of
these chapters points out a certain truth about David. Tonight in the last chapter we have a very
convenient ending note because chapter 24 will provide all of us with a good
basic review of how you get out of fellowship and how you get back in, the
perennial difficulty of every believer.
So although this will be review, and the doctrine you have heard time
and time and time again, just look at it again this time in another situation,
with another person, involving a situation of unusual dimensions, as the head
of a nation, and again use this as an illustration of how this doctrine works
in experience. So this will be a review
for many of you but we can all stand review.
Turn to 24:1, the first section of this chapter, verses 1-9. Verses 1-9 provide us with why we can get out
of fellowship. It provides us with an
outline of how God allows us to be tempted.
In fact, it goes into these mechanisms in such a detailed fashion that
critics have said that 2 Samuel 24 is in direct conflict with 1 Chronicles 21,
which is the parallel passage. We’re
going to touch on some of these supposed contradictions as we go through
Scripture, not because we want to entertain people on the details, but because
if we are serious about an inerrant Scripture, we ought not to see errors in
the Bible, except things that have crept in since the original writings.
Beginning in verse 1, it says: “And again the anger of the LORD was
kindled against
In verse 1 it says, “And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against
God, in His character is sovereign, righteous, just, loving, omniscient,
omnipotent, omniscient, immutable and eternal.
One of His attributes is God is sovereign; this means that not chance
but the God of the Bible has final say over each and every detail of life. There never are accidents in God’s plan;
everything is under His control. But
having said that everything is under His control does not mean we thereby
obliterate human responsibility. God’s
sovereignty is so big that he can move history from alpha to omega, from the
beginning to the end, without compromising volition and human
responsibility. Instead of a machine, a
great cosmic universe that kind of moves along like you’d program a computer,
God moves the universe through a massive series of free decisions by His
creatures. These decisions are the
expression of the responsible creature under the sovereign God. And therefore when you read here that God is
moving David, 2 Samuel is talking about this, God is sovereignly working in
history to bring about David’s fall.
Now before you become too upset, let’s remember that God sovereignly
worked in history to bring about Adam’s fall, but did so without Himself being
culpable. You see, sovereignty doesn’t
mean God removes responsibility for the decisions. The dilemma is how can God certainly cause
perfectly certain decisions, yet at the same time not be responsible for those
decisions. And we have to say as
Biblical Christians, He can do this because He is infinite. God sovereignly moves to cause David to fall,
as God has sovereignly moved in your life many times to cause you to fall. And as God has moved in all of our lives to
cause us to fall, as He moved in Adam’s life to cause Adam to fall, yet at the
same time through it all He never Himself partakes of the sin. You say: unfair! Not at all, it is only unfair because we
don’t understand the details and we tend to project how we would go about it if
we were in God’s place. But we’re not in
place and a sovereign God ultimately is a mystery to us in how He works. The Scriptures say that God is in total
control and the deduction is that obviously He has to be the final one behind
all history.
Now you can back up and say it much more mildly than I just said it and
it sounds like it relieves it you, but I deliberately said this harshly to
bring out the sovereignty point. Let me
say the same thing again and do it more gently and it sounds okay. God is sovereign, and God has a plan for
history, and that plan includes a series of free decisions; it included a free
decision of the volition of Adam and it includes, as we will see tonight, a
free decision in David’s soul. Said that
way it tends to remove the pressure and that’s fine, if you like to say it that
way, say it that way, we don’t want hyper Calvinism where we don’t have any
room for human responsibility. But nevertheless,
God is in the final charge, He is the one who chooses how to cause things to
come about.
Now 1 Chronicles 21:1 says “Satan stood up against Israel, and enticed
David,” and so now we have the chain of command; God who is sovereign, ordains
that David fall at this point, as king of the nation. David must fall because in falling then God
can damn the nation; God needs to damn the nation because at this point the
nation is damnable, the nation is in rebellion against him and so to get at the
nation, God will get at the nation through causing the king to stumble. And how He will cause the king to stumble
will be through the mediatorship of Satan.
Satan is trapped; Satan doesn’t do this for David’s good; Satan does it
for Satan’s good, but under the sovereignty principle, we always find that God
wins, that Satan winds up thinking, in his own mind when he starts, that he’s
doing it to his own harsh ends, that he wants to be cruel and mash David into
the ground, and he wants to be cruel and destroy Israel from the face of the
earth, and it looks like God has opened the cage to let the roaring lion
out. And so this is the way Satan
approaches the job; God has opened the door to my cage, now I’m free to move.
But God, in His sovereignty is grading up so that He can control Satan,
whether Satan is in the cage or outside of the cage. Two classic references in the Bible how God
controls Satan, whether he’s in the cage or outside of the cage. Turn to Job 1, all these mechanisms are
important because they’re happening in your life daily. You say Satan is maybe not directly involved
in your life but many demon powers are; you can’t be a Christian and walk
through this world and not bump into demonic powers and have them bump into
you, and moreover have them infiltrate the mentality of your soul with human
viewpoint. So when you see the word
“Satan” in Scripture, don’t confine that word to just Satan as an
individual. It means Satan plus all the
demonic powers under him.
In Job 1:6, “There was a day when the sons of God,” bena ha Elohim, that’s why we say in Genesis 6 “the sons of God”
are all angels, not the godly line of Seth.
“Now there was a day when the sons of God to present themselves before
the LORD, and Satan came also among them.”
So you have the bena ha Elohim,
including both the angels on the left and the angels on the right. The angels on God’s right are the good
angels; the angels on God’s left are the bad angels, they are having a cosmic
meeting, and this should also show you that can God tolerate Satan’s
presence? He sure can. That’s what He’s doing here, He’s having a
meeting with him.
Verse 7, “And the LORD said unto Satan, Where do you come from?” This is not that God doesn’t know, it’s an
inspection report. “Then Satan answered
the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and
down in it. [8] And the LORD said unto Satan, Have you considered My servant,
Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man,
one that fears God and eschews evil. [9] Then Satan answered the LORD, and
said, Doth Job fear God for nothing?”
And you are familiar with the story of Job. But this portion of Job proves to you that
when God deals with believers it is often Satan standing between the believer
and God.
And oftentimes the believer becomes discouraged because in his sensation
of his experience and as he puts all the empirical data together and tries to
draw some conclusion about what God is doing in his life, all he sees is a big
black shadow; all he sees is a sign of Satan and he never can see God behind
Satan, and he becomes a Satan worshiper, he become like many people are today
who think that a certain group of people are behind history, that it’s a group
of international Jewish bankers that pull all the shots, or it’s the communists
that are able to decree each and every move that people make. There’s only one person qualified to control
each and every move of all the citizens of all the nations and that is the
sovereign God. Don’t be a Satan
worshiper, we are not called to worship him; we are called only to respect him
for what he is, the arch foe of Christ.
And so the believer sitting here entrapped with trouble, difficulty and
so on, often all he sees is the big black shadow of Satan. But these Scriptures are deliberately placed
into God’s Word so that when you see in that day only the big black shadow you
will have the assurance of the Word that behind the shadow, even though you
can’t see it, behind the shadow is your sovereign Savior, and that shadow is
there to your sense and at this point in your experience but if you trust the
Word, the Word says you can’t see it right now believer, but behind it is a
God’s sovereign plan.
Let’s go to another passage in Scripture, 1 Kings 22, the famous angelic
meeting there. These two passages, Job 1
and 1 Kings 22 you should put away in your memory or in your notes some place;
these are the two passages that show the mechanisms of how God operates against
believers. It shows how discipline is
effected. In 1 Kings 22:19 we have a
meeting, we’ve gone through this many times, I won’t spend time on it except to
review the mechanisms. “Hear thou,
therefore, the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all
the host of heaven standing by Him on His right hand and on His left.” The “all” means both the elect angels and the
fallen angels. The both “the left and
the right” in classic drama, the good characters are on the right, the bad ones
are on the left. And here you have the
same thing pictured in Scripture.
Verse 20, “And the LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up
and fall at Ramoth-gilead?” So again we
have, in this case, an apostate who apparently is an unbeliever but the
principle of mechanism holds true, God wants to make this man stumble and how
is God going to do it? God will permit
the angelic forces of evil to deliberately cause the man to fall. “…And one said on this manner, and another
said on that manner.” That’s they idiom
for they were discussing the issue. The
angelic powers assembled at this great assembly were talking about how various
things could occur.
And finally in verse 21, “And there came forth a spirit, and stood
before the LORD, and said, I will persuade him. [22] And the LORD said unto
him, Wherewith,” in other words, what will be your plan, what is your tactic?
“And he said, I will go forth,” and
notice the singular, one spirit, “I will
go forth, and I will be a lying
spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.”
And here we have one of the strange features of spirits, you have one
spirit who is able to break into four hundred pieces, and is able to influence
four hundred people simultaneously, hence is the power of these great spiritual
forces; it only took one, one demon force to actively influence four hundred
people, and therefore when you see maneuvers or you see strange things and so
forth happen in large groups, and you wonder, oh, it must be a working of the
Holy Spirit because obviously there’s such a unanimity of thought, there’s such
a unity in this group it has to be the Holy Spirit. Not at all… not at all; there’s a unity all
right, but it can be a demonic unity and here you have that principle, the
demonic unity; unity brought about by one spirit somehow fracturing
himself. The only way I can visualize it
in my own head is to think of an amoeba splitting apart and coming up with a
bunch of little amoebas. Well, this
apparently the spirits can operate, they can break up into pieces like this,
and they can function almost autonomously, each piece can function autonomously
on one person. So you can obviously see
that unity by itself is no proof of spirituality. So 1 Kings is the second illustration we
have.
Now to go to our classic reference, 1 Corinthians 10:13, if you are the
average believer you will have great use of 1 Corinthians 10:13 daily. “There has no temptation taken you but such
as is common to man” obviously meaning you are not facing some unique situation
that no other person in the body of Christ has ever faced before, only little
old me. It doesn’t say that in verse 13,
“But God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted above that which you
are able,” now that’s the clause part of this verse we want to tie into the
mechanism we just discovered. How does 1
Corinthians 10:13 work in your experience; I know that’s what it says, it says
that “I will never be tempted above that which I am able,” and that’s true and
that’s a promise and you can trust it, but if you’re a Christian, like many of
us who like to think, well how do you suppose God pulls this off all the time,
what is the mechanism involved. And the mechanism is simply again this three
step chain of command: God, Satan, and
you. Before Satan can touch you he has
to go through channels and has to get clearance from God, and the clearance is
always two-fold; the clearance that Satan must obtain in order to touch any one
of us who is a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, the clearance that he must
obtain is two-fold; first he has to obtain clearance to proceed at all against
a believer. That is one thing that he
must obtain. We know this by the way 1 Kings 22 is designed; we know this by
the way Job 1 is designed. We know this
by Luke 22, the passage on the intercessory ministry of Christ, how Satan has
desired to have Peter but he had to get clearance before he could do that. So Satan has to obtain clearance from the
sovereign God before he can touch you.
The second item of his clearance, and this it the part where 1
Corinthians 10:13 should come into your life and be a tremendous weapon and
tool, is that not only must he obtain clearance to hit you, he has to obtain
clearance on where he can hit you and how hard.
It is not just any blow that is tolerated; God will permit him only
certain blows with only certain intensities.
So therefore we have a clearance; we have as it were a shield around us
as believers, and when the going gets rough and you think you’re at the end of
your rope, you ought to have this verse memorized.
This is a memory verse for every believer. You say oh well, I know the concept; fine,
but you’re going to find some day you’re going to be in a mess where the
pressure is so great that you are not going to be able to think, and you can
sit around and say oh, I know the doctrine, I know the concept and that’s not
going to do you any good when you get in that kind of pressure. The only thing that believers down through
the centuries have found, when you’re in that bad shape, is you have to
mechanically sit there and open your mouth and repeat the Word of God to
yourself; that’s the only way you’re going to get through it. So don’t think because you’ve got the concept
or you’ve got the doctrine you’re in.
When you learn those basic doctrines try to memorize at least one verse
in every one of those areas.
When you get to this clause, “who will not suffer you to be tempted
above that which you are able” you should remember why that part of 1 Corinthians
10:13 works. As you go down through this
verse, just pause for a moment, meditate on it, think of Job 1, think of 1
Kings 22, think of the hierarchy of beings all around you; think of the
mechanisms that God has established to make this come true in your life. The fact that Satan comes at you so
ferociously he wants to intimidate you; one of his tactics of one of aggression
because he knows that nine times out of ten you’ll jump and start moving back
and that’s all he wants, get you on the defense. But if you’ve fortified your soul with 1
Corinthians 10:13 and you understand the mechanisms you can say yeah, who’d you
get permission from; while I don’t know what your permitted to do, but I know
they’ve been tailored for me personally and you’re guaranteed to lose. This is the kind of thought process you want
to develop. You can’t be successful the
first time you use this but if you habitually develop this attitude toward the
little trials in your life you gradually develop an aggressiveness. If you can just get yourself over the shock
of a trial or pressure and get off the defense and back onto the offense you’ve
won 90% of the trial, but if you stay in shock because of the suddenness or
ferocity of it, then you’re in spiritual trouble and that’s where you get out
of fellowship and start worrying, etc.
We’re going to see that in David now.
Back to 2 Samuel 24, “And the anger of the LORD was kindled against
Israel,” so in this case we have God, God is mad at Israel; God is mad at Israel for some reason we don’t
know, 2 Samuel 24 is taken out of historic context, we can only guess why God
is angry with Israel. I would suggest
that He is angry because of the Absalom rebellion; I would guess that He’s
angry because of the Shemei rebellion; those are only guesses, they’re not in
Scripture. But nevertheless, for some
reason God is legitimately angry with Israel.
Now He was angry once before in history and did a very similar thing. In Joshua, the battle of Ai, God was angry at
Israel and he caused Joshua to make a bad series of decisions. And now He’s going to do the same thing here,
He is angry at the nation so He attacks the leaders. And we are going to see that principle operate
in Proverbs. This is how God disciplines
a national entity. He gets to the nation
by disciplining its leaders. If you can
crush the leadership you crush the nation.
And as believers, therefore, when you see national leaders in high
places getting disciplined or in trouble it’s probably due to their own
personal sin, true, but ask yourself why are they getting it; am I as a citizen
partly to blame; is it because God is angry at me as a citizen too that He is
attacking the leaders and allowing Satan freehand.
We have God moving David, “against them,” against Israel, so He’s going
to set up a situation through Satan to cause David to sin in such a way he is
going to harm Israel, and that is how God administers discipline. Now look at that, that’s three steps to get
at Israel, and it’s a complicated exchange that no theological can sit down and
describe. We are at the end of our
finite resources to describe these linkages in this mechanism; there is no way
we can understand it, all we can say is that’s the linkage. Now let’s look at some of the details, here’s
what happens. “Go, number Israel and
Judah.” Now the thought, that’s a
thought, you might want to put it in quotes, but “Go, number Israel and Judah,”
is a thought that Satan injects into the soul of David; David is sitting there
one day on the throne, the throne room of his palace and he says hey, I’ve got
an idea, it just popped into my head, sure did, guess who was behind it, it
popped in all right, Satan popped it in.
It didn’t pop in by itself. That
thought got into David’s brain by satanic deposition.
So in verse 2, “For the king said to Joab the captain of the host, which
was with him, Go now through all the tribes of Israel, from Dan even to
Beer-sheba, and number ye the people, that I may know the number of the
people.” Now at this point we have to
pause and back off from the details of the story a minute, get a principle,
then we can come back and pick up the details of the story again, but the story
is going to end in a peculiar way and you’re going to wonder how do we go from
David over here numbering people and we wind up on a threshing floor north of
the old city of David. What’s the
linkage. Here’s the linkage between the
beginning of that chapter and the end.
The big theme behind 2 Samuel is that David is at that point in his
career where he wants to organize his kingdom.
Now it’s not wrong under some conditions to have a census, to have a
census and find out just who lives where and so forth. The book of Numbers is one big long
census. So a census by itself is not
necessarily wrong. So the census isn’t
the wrong thing, and that’s not what the sin.
The sin is the motive behind this particular census, and the motive is
that David wants to establish his kingdom.
Remember he is dying and he is going to give this kingdom over to his
son Solomon, and particularly we’ll see this in Chronicles, his last dying
thoughts are to organize his kingdom and give his son something that works. So
David, apparently, at this point says aha, the way I am going to begin to
organize my kingdom is to begin a complete enumeration of human resources, and
from that base I will build my organization.
Now this is a fallacy that is committed by many religious organizations;
it can be committed by you in your business, it can be committed by anyone
really, and it’s limiting what God can do in your life by the visible resources
there at this moment at this hour. So
David is going to establish his kingdom but it’s going to be by human
viewpoint; it’s going to be starting with the visible resources, nothing
else. Joab sees a flaw in this and he’s
going to point it out in a minute. But
David only sees the given, the given now, the visible, and that alone is going
to be the source of his kingdom.
And so he orders Joab out to go out on a national census, the soldiers
in this day and age took the census. In
verse 3, “And Joab said unto the king,” and here’s one of those passages that
parallels so many we’ve seen about Joab; as harsh and as cruel as this man was,
and as vicious as he could be, Joab amounts to a super patriot and when it came
to decide between God’s Word and David’s feelings, he always chose with God’s
Word. And here’s another case where he
did it. Joab was not a man who was
afraid to stand up to David. And Joab
said, “Now the LORD thy God can add” this is the ability, potentially, He “can
add unto the people, how many soever they be, an hundredfold;” in other words
he’s telling David, look, you don’t have to build your kingdom on what you’ve
got out there, I don’t care how many people are out there, God if He wants to
can multiply X, which is the number of people that you want to find out, He can
multiply that by a hundred. That’s your God David, now don’t start building
your kingdom on some limitation which you’re trying to do. “Now the LORD thy God can add unto the
people, how many soever they be, an hundred fold, and that the eyes of my lord
the king may see it,” that’s a little sarcastic jab, David you want to see it,
look pal, God can multiply it by a hundredfold and there’ll be babies born all
over this place and you’re going to notice it, you don’t have to worry, God’s
going to give you empirical proof of the blessings, “but why doth my lord the
king delight in this thing,” limiting God’s program in his life by the given
blessings of the moment.
Verse 4, “Notwithstanding the king’s word prevailed against Joab, and against
the captains of the host.” So in verse 4
we find Joab thwarted in the meeting.
Joab is the kind of person who understands the authority structure. Joab is an adult in his soul as well as in
his body. And notice what he does; even
though his counsel is thwarted, even though people don’t buy what he says, he
submits to authority and moves on.
That’s a picture of a relaxed believer.
“And Joab and the captains of the host went out from the presence of the
king, to number the people of Israel.” Now Joab had qualms of conscience about
this, true, but Joab is also an officer in David’s army. And when David gives an order he says “Yes
sir” and carries it out, period. No
excuses. And this is an illustration of
a man under authority because the order is David’s, not Joab’s, and if God’s
going to clobber David, fine, he’s not going to clobber Joab, He’s going to
clobber David, David is the author of the order.
Verse 5, “And they passed over Jordan, and pitched in Aroer, on the
right side of the city that lieth in the midst of the river of Gad, and toward
Jazer:” and the cities in verses 5, 6 and 7 are simply the cities of Israel,
it’s a tour of the land, and the tour goes this way; they come full circle, and
it’s very important you notice several cities on the tour because they’re going
to figure in how God handles the problem.
Notice in verse 6 they came to a place called Dan-jaan, and then they
came to Zidon. [6] “Then they came to Gilead,
and to the land of Tahtim-hodshi; and they came to Dan-jaan, and about to
Zidon, [7] And came to the strong hold of Tyre,” they’re coming back down the
coast now, they’ve gone up to the north, now they’re coming south, “and to all
the cities of the Hibites, and of the Canaanites: and they went out to the
south of Judah, even to Beer-sheba,” which is the southern most point down in
here in the south. So they’ve gone from
the northern most point to the southern most point to find out every human resource
David had available to him for his kingdom.
Verse 8, “So when they had gone through all the land, they came to
Jerusalem at the end of nine months and twenty days.” Since there are 30 days to the Israelite
calendar month, we can obviously compute this as 290 days. Now it took 290 days of army activity wasted
on this census. For 290 days David sits
in the palace waiting for the report.
And now in verse 9 the grand day comes; Joab as commander brings in the
report. “And Joab gave up the sum of the
number of the people unto the king: and there were in Israel eight hundred
thousand valiant men that drew the sword; and the men of Judah were five
hundred thousand men.” The total report,
1, 300,000 young men of draft age. The
census was not of everybody, the census in the ancient world was a census of
adult males. You were not considered a
citizen unless you were a trained killer, this is why it says “who drew the
sword,” it doesn’t mean they were all in the active army because we know the
active army in David’s time was 238,000 men from Chronicles, so this figure
doesn’t fit that and obviously 1,300,000 are all the young men in Israel at
this time of draft age. “And the men of
Judah,” notice the disparity between the north kingdom and the southern kingdom;
the northern kingdom, Israel, that includes the ten tribes, 800,000; Judah,
probably made up of Judah and Benjamin, you have 500,000. That’s the sin. David has been tempted by Satan and he has
sinned; it took him nine months to do it, a long process of time, David has
stumbled; the nation has stumbled with him
Now beginning at verse 10 we have the second step; first we have the
sin, now verse 20 the confession of sin, “And David’s heart smote him after
that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the LORD, I have sinned
greatly in that I have done: and now, I beseech thee, O LORD, take away the
iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly.” Now that is the confession of David. Now let’s review confession a moment. When you become a Christian you have a
position in the Lord Jesus Christ from which you cannot be removed; that is
called “in Christ” in the New Testament, that is your position, that is your
election, no one can touch that, that’s not the issue at this point. That is
your legal position before God and it was solved at one point when God the
Father justified you. There was a trial,
as it were, held in heaven, you have Christ’s righteousness credited to your
account, God the Father as the judge says this one is justified and there is no
further trial, the trial for your whole life has taken place at that
point. That is the doctrine of
justification by faith. That’s your
position.
But it’s a different story in your experience; that’s what fluctuates
from day to day. You may be in, you may
be out of fellowship, one or the other, you’re not halfway in or out, you’re
either in or out, and if you’re out the best way in is 1 John 1:9, “If we
confess our sins,” plus nothing, by the way, plus nothing, it is confession of
the sin that restores you to fellowship.
Now after you’re restored to fellowship there may be issues raised, but
don’t confuse the issue that are raised after you have used 1 John 1:9 with 1
John 1:9, we have Christians that want to use 1 John 1:9 plus something, and if
it’s a preacher that has a low budget it’s plus tithing, plus something
else. But God’s Word has only one thing,
1 John 1:9 over and out. That’s what restores you to fellowship.
Now David is restored to fellowship at this point, and that includes two
things; let’s see what had to have happened for David to confess his sin. David
had to overcome two problems; two problems you face every time you’re out of
fellowship. The first problem we always
face, it was faced back in the fall, and that’s what we will call cover-up,
operation fig leave; what did I do, I didn’t do anything, that’s cover-up, that
means denial that anything is wrong, a pretending that all is sweetness and
light when all is not sweetness and light, in fact, there’s a lot of dirty
linen in the closet. So cover-up has to
be dealt with before you can honestly confess your sin.
The second thing that we have to overcome before we can use 1 John 1:9,
these are usually mixed together, I’m just theoretically separating them, but we’ll
call it blame-shifting. After it’s come
to our attention that something happened that was wrong, well, it wasn’t my
fault; blame-shifting. That again is
explained in Genesis 3. [tape turns]
…and the woman said, it was the snake, my pet, remember God that little pet
snake You gave me, he was the one that caused all the problem, so
blame-shifting. Both of these steps had
to have been overcome by verse 10; verse 10 doesn’t tell us how long it took
David but both of those things had to be overcome.
You may have friends having psychiatric care, psychotherapy of some
sort; if the need for psychotherapy is not due to organic causes, and there are
organic causes of mental problems, low blood sugar is one, lack of sleep, all
sorts of things can happen in you; those are physically caused, but let’s
subtract those out of the way for a moment.
Everything else that is behind psychological difficulties is due to a
violated conscience according to God’s Word, and you can dress it up with all
the Freudian terms you want, it’s still a violated conscience. And that has got to be cleared and you will
always find people who need psychotherapy are experts at one or both of these
things; and this is why they are hurting, because somewhere along the line they
used to deal with sin. Like here,
“David’s heart smote him,” fine, take care of it. But somewhere along the line instead of
taking care of it they let it go and they started using cover-up, they started
using blame-shifting, they picked up –R learned behavior pattern one, learned
behavior pattern two, and these patterns of behavior have become habitual. So
now when they’re out of fellowship it is habitual to deny anything’s wrong or
knowing something’s wrong to deny that I’m responsible for it. It’s just automatic behavior. This is where parents have to watch it; don’t
let your children get in these patterns.
When you see your child in a pattern of cover-up or blame-shifting nail
them, you’re doing them a favor, you’re doing them the best favor that you can
ever do for a child because it’s those two patterns that are going to get them
in deep water as an adult. Bust that up
as a young child, well, he did it…. Nail him, you did it, period. You have to stop that behavior.
David had it nailed, so by the time he gets to “I have sinned greatly”
he has had to go through in his own soul the very painful process, and it
doesn’t get easier as you go on in the
Christian life, the very painful process of removing the fig leaves and saying
I did it, I’m responsible. That’s what
he’s done, and he said “I have sinned greatly in what I have done,” so there
he’s clearly stopped the cover-up, he’s clearly stopped the blame-shifting.
Now the third thing David does, after you use 1 John 1:9 you are not
necessarily all out of the woods. Here’s
why, not because you’re not back in fellowship, that’s fine. After you use 1 John 1:9 you’re immediately
back in fellowship. You are filled with
the Holy Spirit, that’s correct, but sanctification is a continuing process,
and if you can look at your own soul you have these kinks in there, these –R
learned behavior patterns. God does us a
favor; when we are out of fellowship, we confess our sin, we get back in
fellowship, then He says okay, now this time, since you are now filled with the
Spirit, since you are now in fellowship, I want to start breaking up that
pattern. Maybe we have a whole bunch of
things, but at least that one I want to start working on in your life; I want
that pattern to go so that you won’t turn around and be back in the sin
again. That’s how you get this chain
effect, sin/confess, sin/confess, sin/confess, sin/confess, broken record.
It’s like a car stuck in a rut, can’t seem to get out of it. The reason is that after you use 1 John 1:9
you’re not doing what David did; he is actively praying, see the “and now, I
beseech Thee, O LORD, take away the iniquity of thy servant,” now he’s not just
praying for forgiveness of sins, he’s praying that sanctification occur in his
soul, that God would eradicate this thing so tomorrow, faced with the same
situation, he won’t be in the same mess that he was in today. Now that’s what has to be done, particularly
if this sin is a recurring thing in your life, goes on and on and on and on and
on and it never seems like you can break loose from the thing. You are not going to break loose by tripping
down an aisle and having some emotional experience. You are not going to break loose by having
someone put their empty on your empty head and pray. None of these gimmicks are going to cut
it.
Now all those gimmicks are rampant in fundamental circles, our circles,
don’t blame liberals for that. Do you
know why? There’s one reason and it’s
not theological; people are lazy and they want a shortcut, and it’s a lot
shorter to come trotting down an aisle, sign a card and go through these
gimmicks than it is to do it the Biblical way.
And the Biblical way you’re about to see. What was the solution? The solution is he’s going to have to submit
to a little boot camp training. Now
unfortunately God’s boot camp training is sometimes rather harsh but the
benefits are well worth it, so when you find yourself in one of these things
where it’s sin/confess, sin/confess, sin/confess, sin/confess, sin/confess and
it seems you never can break it, what you have to do is dare to trust God with
a training program based on Scripture that can lead you out of that problem
area, and it can be done; that’s what bona
fide counseling is for; if you need help in that situation I or someone
else can give advice on it, for what it’s worth, but there are available
Scripture that can help you and guide you in getting out of those things. You’re not doomed to that mess the rest of
your Christian life, God doesn’t want you in that rut, other believers don’t
want you in that rut.
Let’s see what happened; David prayed that the basic behavior pattern
change; now what was David’s basic behavior pattern. There’s a verse in Scripture that summarizes
it; turn to Jeremiah 17:5. If Jeremiah
had lived in David’s day this would have been his diagnosis verse: David, here
is my diagnosis of your problem. If you
can spot the problem you’ve got it licked, practically; you can see where it
is, and oftentimes that’s a very difficult thing and I encourage some of you
who may be involved in this process of trying to find out why it is it seems
like every time you fall, you trip at this same point, again and again and
again and again and again. It takes time
to find out why, so just because you pray tonight, hey God, show me, and
nothing happens, don’t get discouraged; there’s a process of time involved.
Jeremiah 17:5, “Cursed be the man that trusts in man, and makes flesh
his arm, and whose heart departs from Jehovah.”
That’s David’s problem; he is trusting in human resources and the very
great threat to his soul is that the more he is allowed to trust in human
resources the more easily he will depart from God. See, here’s God’s love, when you get to see
what God does to David it doesn’t sound like love. But from God’s point of view here’s the
problem. He looks down and He sees
David; David’s goofed, David sinned, David violated His Law, God loves
David. So God sits there, He looks at
David and says hmmm, what can I do to get this believer out of this because
he’s got something in his soul that’s like the Trojan Horse, the next time he
turns around it’s going to become easier and easier and easier for him to get
on human viewpoint, so I really love David, I’m not going to sit and say well,
that’s just David’s problem. Rather, if
I love David I’m going to reach down, I’m going to do something in his
life. Now God does this, not other
believers so don’t reach into somebody else’s life and try to straighten them
out; God does the reaching. But God is
in heaven and He loves David and He wants to change his life. So he’s going to root something out of his
soul and it’s going to be this heresy that He’s going to root out of his
soul.
So Jeremiah 17:5 diagnoses the problem, now watch the neat way God has
of removing that problem. David, I am
sure, when he prayed the prayer, “O LORD, remove the iniquity of thy servant”
I’m sure he didn’t have in mind exactly what follows, and I’m sure if he had
known what was going to follow he’d probably would have been less likely to
pray that particular prayer. But he
prayed it.
Verse 11, “For when David was up in the morning, the word of the LORD
came unto the prophet Gad, David’s seer, saying,” so at morning report guess
who knocks on his door? Gad, we have a
morning letter for you David. And this
letter gives you a choice, God is a democratic God, he allows you to vote and
He’s going to give David three possible things to vote for. Verse 12, “Go and say unto David, Thus saith
the LORD, I offer thee three things; choose thee one of them, that I may do it
unto thee.” Sounds like the fable, ask
anything and I’ll give it to you; this is the reverse, ask three ways to be spanked and I’ll give it
to you.
In verse 13, “So Gad came to David, and told him, and said unto him,
Shall seven years of famine come unto thee in thy land? or wilt thou flee three
months before thine enemies, while they pursue thee? or that there be three
days’ pestilence in thy land? now advise, and see what answer I shall return to
him that sent me.” Now there are several
neat things about this verse. If many of
you have the problem of visualizing a God who interacts with history, if you’ll
think of this there’s a titanic message here for you. If you stop and think that laid out in front
of David is history and God is saying David, history comes to a fork in the
road at this point, there’s three paths in this fork; David, your choice
determines history here. One man, one
decision changes history; that’s the kind of God that we have that interacts
with us. We’re not trapped in a machine.
God gives David a choice.
But there’s another thing to notice about those trials in verse 13,
let’s look at them a little more carefully: trial #1, #2, #3. One is the famine; that’s seven years and
David has gone through that thing once before, and I think he’s kind of tired
of getting hit that way. The next trial
is “flee three months before your enemies.”
Well, he had that too, that’s when he wrote all the Psalms, when Saul
was chasing him all over the place and he went through that, so that’s kind of
old, fleeing. So at least God offers an
option that sounds like it’s something new, this is variety in discipline. And the new one is there will be a pestilence
in the land. That sounds like… at least
it won’t be boring this time, so let’s try that one. And besides, that only lasts three days, the
other ones are longer. David had his own
reason for choosing number 3, but now the irony; how did this chapter begins in
verse 1? With whom was God first
mad? David or Israel? God was first mad with Israel, wasn’t
he. Now isn’t it interesting, through
three choices damnation comes upon the nation.
The famine would have been bad on the nation; maybe the civil commotion
described by the fleeing would be bad, but certainly a pestilence, that would
be the worst on the nation, and sure enough, the mystery of sovereignty and
responsibility weaving together the perfect plan of history, we have God
accomplishing perfectly discipline upon the nation that needed through a king
that makes a free decision as to what kind of discipline he is going to
get. And that works out God’s plan for
the nation, it’s just amazing how God’s sovereignty spills over here.
Verse 14, “And David said unto Gad, I am in a great strait,” that’s a
good way of putting it, “let us fall now into the hand of the LORD;” now here’s
where we have the amazing thing that was on his mind; not only was David
thinking in terms of variety but he was also thinking of something else and the
something else is directly in collision with what’s wrong in his soul. Remember what was wrong in his soul? “Cursed be the man who trusts in man,” and so
what does he have to do? The very way
God establishes the three ways of discipline forces him to choose against that
propensity deep in his heart; the propensity is to trust in man. And so God engineers the discipline so at the
end of verse 14 David, not God, David says, “let us fall now into the hand of
the LORD; for his mercies are great: and let me not fall into the hand of
man.” How ironic that this discipline
works this way; the mastermind is behind it, it works out perfectly.
And so in verse 15, “So the LORD sent a pestilence upon Israel from the
morning even to the time appointed:” those are the three days, “and there died
of the people from Dan even to Beer-sheba seventy thousand men.” Now that may sound like a small figure until
you realize that 70,000 is greater than all of our casualties in the Vietnam
War over a six or seven year period. All
that happened to the nation within a period of 72 hours; that’s about a
thousand people dying every hour, death, death, death, death, death, death,
death in this nation. Think of it, a
thousand people an hour are dying, all over the place, death! And notice the place where the deaths occur;
do those place name ring a bell, “and there died of the people from Dan even to
Beer-sheba seventy thousand.” In other
words, what God is saying, you sent your census around David for 290 days they
took a careful census. Guess what David,
I’m making your census out of date, I’m changing the figures. So in exactly the area where the army ran the
census God subtracts 70,000. You think
you can number resources? I change the
resources, don’t start with human resources, I am the one David, not the people,
that is the source of your resources.
And so God adjusts in a very cruel and very vicious way, operating
through Satan of course, God is not directly to blame, He kills seventy
thousand people.
Now there’s a very vivid picture here which we have to turn to the
parallel passage in 1 Chronicles 21 you’ll see what happens. Verse 15, “And God sent an angel unto
Jerusalem to destroy it;” now the angel, we don’t know what it was, it was a
destroying type angel, the kind the book of Revelation has, and by the way,
this gives you a clue as to what the book of Revelation means when those four
horsemen start marching through history and one is labeled famine, and the
other pestilence, but pestilence, famine, earthquake, angelic forces operate on
the geophysical environment, they are always detectable by this kind of
physical phenomena; don’t think of an angel, strangely enough, it sounds funny
to say this, but though an angel is spirit, don’t ever think of an angel
spiritually. Think of an angel
physically and you’ll be more biblically correct. Angels when they show up,
show up physically, and so this angel in some ways is showing up physically.
In fact, in verse 15 it says,
“And God sent an angel to Jerusalem to destroy it; see, he’s destroyed all the
rest of the area, and he comes to Jerusalem, “and as he was destroying, the
LORD beheld, and He repented of the evil, and said to the angel who destroyed,
It is enough, stay now thine hand.” So
the idea is that angel literally and physically is walking through the land
destroying. Now how he’s destroying we…
apparently through some disease either viruses are being multiplied in a
miraculous rate, bacteria of some sort, in some sort of medical way this angel
has a way of speeding these processes up almost infinitely the rate of them and
people suddenly die; it’s like crib death or something like this where you have
a rapid virus and the child dies almost instantly. This is the same kind of thing, the angel walks
through and he’s literally walking and the picture is apparently David or
someone must have seen the angel walking; the angel was walking in the midair,
this is a very interesting picture.
Here’s Jerusalem from the south, the city of David here and Mount Zion
is here, and this angel is walking in midair, and David sees him as he’s
walking through the atmosphere he becomes visible in some way, at least he’s
visible to David. And he has a sword in
his hand and apparently the picture is that he points his sword and everywhere
he points his sword people die by the hundreds, and he gets ready to lower his
hand with the sword to point at Jerusalem, and it’s translated “as he was
destroying the LORD beheld,” and the picture is as the angel takes his sword and
begins to lower it on Jerusalem, God says “it’s enough, stay your hand.” And so the angel stopped just like God
stopped Abraham’s hand when he was going to slice Isaac’s throat, instantly the
hand stops.
[1 Chronicles 21:15] “…And the angel of the LORD stood by the threshing
floor of Ornan, the Jebusite.” This is
Mount Zion, so the angel after he has the sword in his hand and it’s frozen, he
comes down, he lands, and he’s standing there at this place. Now that piece of geography is going to be
very important, one of God’s great blessings to David. But we can’t get there just ye. [16] “And David lifted up his eyes, and saw
the angel of the LORD stand between the earth and heaven, having a drawn sword
in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem,” this recapitulates the action of
verse 15, “Then David and the elders of Israel, who were clothed in sackcloth,
fell upon their faces. [17] And David said unto God, Is it not I who commanded
the people to be numbered? Even I it is
who has sinned and done evil indeed; but as for these sheep, what have they
done? Let thine hand, I pray thee, O
LORD my God, be on me, and on my father’s house, but not on Thy people, that
they should not be plagued.” David’s
come a long way from blame-shifting.
David has not only confessed his sin but David is ignoring the evil that
his own people did at this point; he’s acting as their intercessor, he is
standing between them and is willing to call the angel of wrath down upon him,
and let the Davidic Covenant that was eternally promised be smashed, but don’t
let these people be destroyed any more.
Let’s turn back to 2 Samuel 24, verse 16 recapitulates 1 Chronicles,
“And when the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it, the
LORD repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people,
It is enough: stay now thine hand. And the angel of the LORD was by the
threshing place of Araunah the Jebusite. [17] And David spoke unto the LORD
when he saw the angel that smote the people, and said, Lo, I have sinned, and I
have done wickedly: but these sheep, what have they done? let thine hand, I
pray thee, be against me, and against my father’s house. Again a rehash of what we just saw.
Verse 18, “And Gad came that day to David, and said unto him, Go up, rear
an altar unto the LORD in the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite,” same
man as reported in Chronicles. [1
Chronicles 22:18, “And the angel of the LORD commanded Gad to say to David,
that David should go up and set up an altar unto the LORD in the threshing
floor of Ornan, the Jebusite.”] Now here
is where the complexities of this chapter start to weave together the finished
product. Remember how the chapter
started? It started with the sin of
Israel; it became the sin of David. What was David’s sin? David’s sin is that he wanted to build his
kingdom on human resources. Now guess
how the chapter ends? God gives David
the location for the Solomonic temple; that’s the conclusion of this book. The threshing floor of this man on which the
angel stands become the exact piece of real estate that will be used to build
the Solomonic temple. That’s the place where today you see photographs of the
city of Jerusalem, the Mosque of Omar is sitting near that spot, the exact spot
of this threshing floor.
So verse 19, “And David, according to the saying of Gad, went up as the
LORD commanded. [20] And Araunah looked, and saw the king and his servants
coming on toward him: and Araunah went out, and bowed himself before the king
on his face upon the ground. [[21] And
Araunah said, Wherefore is my lord the king come to his servant? And David
said, To buy the threshing floor of thee, to build an altar unto the LORD, that
the plague may be stayed from the people.”
So now we’ve come full circle.
David sinned by wanting to build his kingdom on human resources alone;
God says David, you sinned, I’m going to wipe that human viewpoint out of your
soul, I’m going to replace the –R learned behavior patterns, that was one thing
that was wrong with David, I’m going to get rid of that, I’m going to replace
it with a positive one. And that is, now
David, the start of your kingdom isn’t a census; the start of your kingdom is
the building of the temple for My presence.
That’s how the kingdom begins.
And this, by the way, is how the kingdom began with the Church Age. You see the final ultimate kingdom didn’t
begin with Christ conquering the world.
It became Christ building His temple; do you know who the temple
is? If you’re a Christian you’re part of
the temple. The Church Age is the
building of the temple; the temple first, then the kingdom. And so here in the Old Testament, the temple
first. “And David said, I want to buy
the threshing floor of thee, to build an altar unto the LORD,” now here we have
a very interesting illustration of law and the law of eminent domain. Biblically there was no such thing as eminent
domain in Israel; under the Israelite system Yahweh had ownership. There was eminent domain, but it was
God’s. God gave families pieces of
ranchland and farmland and that title was loaned to them. The government, the fourth divine
institution, could not appropriate property.
We have that Naboth vineyard incident in Kings proves that the Bible is
against eminent domain in the Israelite economy. There was no such thing as the government
saying we’re going to put a freeway through your backyard, we’ll give you fair
price for your property but it’s going to happen. Now it’s true, that’s the way we’ve built our
society so we’ve got to live with it, but that wasn’t true in Biblical times,
and here David offers to buy it. You can
say what happens if the guy refuses. We
don’t know but it was a free offer and the proof of the free offer is the very
next statement.
Verse 22, “And Araunah said unto David, Let my lord the king take and
offer up what seems good unto him: behold, here be oxen for burnt sacrifice,
and threshing instruments and other instruments of the oxen for wood.” In other words, David, you can have the
threshing floor, take it, all the furniture, here’s some cows you can use them
for the offering and here’s some wood, it’s all yours. He offers them graciously. [23] “All these things did Araunah, as a
king, give unto the king. And Araunah said unto the king, The LORD thy God
accept thee. [24] And the king said unto Araunah, Nay,” see, David is
sensitive, no “but I will surely buy it of thee at a price: neither will I
offer burnt offerings unto the LORD my God of that which doth cost me
nothing.” In other words, David is going
to respond from his own resources; this is not works at this point, David wants
it to be genuine. David realizes it’s
his problem, he has to do it, so he buys it.
“So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of
silver. [25] And David built there an altar unto the LORD,” there was the base
for his kingdom, “and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. So the LORD
was intreated for the land, and the plague was stayed from Israel.”
See how efficient the Lord’s disciplinary process was in his life. Suppose he’d gone to psychiatrist and said
well, your problem is David, you’re hypersensitive to guilt. What you’ve got to do is just forget about
it, if you’ve carried out a sentence that’s fine, but you know David, you must
by psychologically ill to become mentally imbalanced over the guilt of the
census. You’ve just got to forget that
kind of a sin, just roll with it and move on.
David would still have his soul kink; David got rid of the soul kink
because God loved him enough to make changes.
So let’s just review the steps and get firmly in mind the steps. Often times you will sin and the sin will be
actually brought into your life, you’re going to sin, it’s going to be your
responsibility, my responsibility, we can’t blame the sin on God, but under His
fantastic sovereignty He will cause us to sin in precisely the area we need
sanctifying in most. So the very pattern
of the sin starts which leads us to confession.
So we confess that sin and it’s a sin that bothers us and we realize
it’s a sin we’re going commit 85,000,000 times again, unless something changes
in our life, so along with the confession we pray God, we need some
sanctification here and some changes made. And so we begin to have these
sanctifying changes. You saw how God did
it in this chapter; first He removed the –R learned behavior patterns, David’s
trust in men. Remember how He did
it? Offered him three ways, He literally
forced David to his knees so the lips of David would speak the words, I’m not
going to trust in man, I’m going to trust in God because His mercies are
greater. And then God added +R learned
behavior patterns, He never leaves you with a vacuum, He always replaces what
He takes out; so He takes out one thing and He replaces something else, and
what it is that He replaces is He fortifies David’s trust that the resources of
his kingdom come from Jehovah, and the proof is physical and material. The physical material proof is that now
before David dies, even though David will never be permitted to construct the
temple, David before he dies he can walk up to Mount Zion with his own feet and
walk across the land, I know that my son will build a temple here. This is the base of my kingdom, my kingdom
wasn’t the people, it’s the temple God builds.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that in the New Testament the temple is the people,
and they are won on their own volition through the cross of the Lord Jesus
Christ.
Father we thank You….