I had a lot of "firsts" during these weeks on the road--first trip to Europe, first trip south of the equator, etc. Those experiences and ideas will no doubt percolate into future blog posts, if I can maintain a bit more discipline in posting. But first I want to do a post on an unusual passage in the history of Israel and an important statement King David makes in the midst of a stressful situation.
Today's post will be on two parts of the story which make this passage special and are worthy of closer attention, and the next post will cover a concept we seem to have all but lost in 2019.
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| I chose this picture of a statue of David because, somewhat poignantly, it no longer exists. |
1. Did God incite David to sin?
2 Samuel 24 describes an unusual episode in Israel's history.
In this passage, Israel has angered God, and God punishes them by inciting David to do a census. Or does He? This idea of God "inciting" David, as the ESV and some other translations put it, is a little confusing. James 1 is clear that God does not tempt people to sin:
1:13-15 Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.
In dealing with fallen humanity, God frequently chooses to allow people's own sinful nature and predilections to run their course, or as in the curious case of Job, allows Satan to bring great loss and suffering into someone's life for a higher purpose in keeping with His own will.
David is certainly no stranger to sinful predilections--13 chapters earlier is the story of Bathsheba and David's plunge into deeper and deeper sin which began with sending out the army and "the king's men" but not going with them, and ended in David's assassinating one of those king's men in order to hide his royally-forced affair with the man's wife, and dragging Joab into it as a kind of accomplice.
Of course Joab already had a habit of murdering his and David's rivals (Abner, Absalom, Amasa...), but I do wonder if he felt some lingering guilt over his acquiescence to David on the horrible Uriah/Bathsheba matter. Either way in chapter 24 we find him willing to speak out when David again decides to do something he knows is a bad idea, in this case numbering the troops.
Why was it a sin?
There is no divine prohibition against a census, but it was not something to be undertaken lightly. Exodus 30:11-16 records God's instructions to Moses about doing a census, which requires small ransom that everyone must pay in exchange for their life, the precious metal currency being gathered from everyone and brought as an offering into the temple "that it may bring the people of Israel into remembrance before the Lord, so as to make atonement for your lives." (Ex 30:16) The taking of a census would thus reinforce to everyone that their lives belong to God, and would be a spiritual undertaking as much as a civic one.
We don't know if there was a ransom payment collection involved in David's census (some indirect evidence suggests it was not), but we know that David's advisers and Joab were firmly against the idea as soon as they heard it. Their unified reaction and Joab's pushing back and asking why the King wants to do this suggests that David was observably acting from the wrong motives, not to mention the way he stubbornly overrules them and pushes it through.
(Note: The commands about census-taking also explicitly state in 30:12 that the punishment for neglecting the ransom collection would be a plague, which is exactly what ends up happening in 2 Samuel 24.)
Coming back to the dilemma at hand, if we know from James 1 that God does not tempt to sin, then what do we make of 2 Samuel 24:1?
As is always the case, comparing two seemingly antagonistic verses against each other without investigating the rest of scripture to see what else can help us understand them could lead us into serious error. Therefore we ought to be aware of a parallel passage of scripture, 1 Chronicles 21. The first verse of that chapter reads as follows:
"Then Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel."
At first glance this might appear to be even more problematic. We have exactly parallel passages, one saying that God incited David to sin, the other saying it was Satan. Which one is it? Could it be both without abandoning the logical principle of non-contradiction?
First let's consider the theological solution which probably most rapidly comes to mind when comparing these two statements. We know God does not tempt to sin, we know that Satan does. We also know that Satan is ultimately subservient to God and cannot defy Him. We could understand this to mean that while 1 Chronicles 21 is being more direct in saying that Satan was the one who incited David, 2 Samuel 24 is emphasizing God's sovereignty and that God allowed this to happen.
A little bit of grammatical ambiguity in 2 Samuel 24:1 helps unite the two passages as well. The Hebrew text of 24:1 does not directly say "God incited David," it has a verb with an unclear subject. God's anger burned and David was incited, and there aren't any other actors directly mentioned in the sentence, leading English translations to either supply the subject of the verb as "he" (God) or for the NASB "it," as in "God's anger incited David."
We certainly cannot interpret the grammar to say that God wasn't involved in David being incited, but putting the two passages together along with what we've seen in Exodus, we can construct a fuller picture of the situation, which would sound something like... "God's anger burned against Israel, and it (this anger) was expressed in allowing Satan to incite David against Israel by holding a census in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons, against the counsel of his advisers, thereby bringing guilt and divine punishment on the whole nation."
2. "The Lord said to... the angel of the Lord"
One might ask why Israel should be punished for David's sin. There is a sense in that in that era, and indeed in most eras, a king represented a nation to a much closer degree of association than our so-called representative democracy represents us. Even today we use the capital city/seat of government of a nation-state or global organization to stand for the whole thing (Washington, Brussels, Rome...). Both things are examples of synecdoche (using a part to refer to the whole) which is a very commonly used literary device in scripture.
In this particular case, though, we need not delve too deeply into why and how a king could spiritually represent his nation, because the beginning of the chapter states that the reason for the entire incident was that God was angry with Israel and punished them in this particular way.
A real mystery we can only speculate on, based on previous chapters, is what kind of sin Israel had fallen into which brought this punishment upon them via the fallout from David's sinful obstinacy. It's a reminder that with great authority comes great responsibility--as the anointed leader of all Israel, David's sinful proclivities have the potential to hurt not only himself but the entire nation. As the divinely-appointed king, he can function in obedience as a sort of avatar for divine guidance, but also in sin as an instrument of divine punishment.
David immediately regrets his sinful decision, and in his repentance he seeks another function performed by kings in many cultures; that of mediator between God and man. Again unusually, God offers David the choice of 3 punishments. David does not quite choose, but wisely says direct punishment from God, who is merciful, will be better than punishment via Israel's enemies, who are not. David knows God's character, and indeed God relents from the full punishment as the angel of judgment approaches Jerusalem.
What kind of angel was it?
We get some interesting indirect information about the relationship between God and angels scattered around the Old Testament -- Satan's appearance before God along with the other "sons of God" (Job 1); the lying spirit given permission by God to deceive the prophets in Ahab's time (1 Kings 22); the mysterious divine council and condemnation of the "gods"/sons of God (Psalm 82).
Now we have an angel in this passage (verses 15-16) whom God commands to cease and David apparently glimpses (v17), though it's not clear if he saw the angel itself in some form or the effects of it as the plague progresses through Israel. The way the passage reads immediately reminds one of the angel of death in the final plague of Egypt, which has been represented in Hollywood media in precisely that vague and ominous way, as a lethal and sepulchral fog or cloud. Yet the phrasing of the passage suggests the angel's location can be observed and it is at least somewhat anthropomorphic; if it were some kind of otherworldly poison cloud blowing through Israel or a personification of a viral contagion, one could hardly speak of it standing beside the threshing floor of Araunah. As usual, we shouldn't trust pop culture depictions when the Bible gives us a window into the unseen world.
To make matters more confusing, in verse 16 this angel is called "the angel of the Lord," a title which when preceded by the definite article ("the angel of the Lord," not just "an angel of the Lord") seems to indicate a theophany is taking place: an appearance not only of a messenger angel but of God himself in visible form. Many believe these are Old Testament appearances of the Son (Christ), since seeing the Father in His full glory meant death for fallen humans.
We are rapidly getting into detailed trinitarian theological territory here which is beyond the scope of this blog, but a careful exegesis here means that it is at least possible that it is the Son executing judgment on Israel. The One whom David prophetically sees ruling Israel and smashing His enemies with a rod of iron, David literally sees executing righteous punishment on Israel. If our interpretation is correct, it's an astonishing scene: the mortal king of Israel sees the divine king of Israel, his own descendant in the flesh and the One who will sit on his throne forever.
The Lord said to my Lord...
It may seem somehow "insufficiently monotheistic" to have the Son carrying out just judgment on Israel and the Father relenting and telling Him to stop. Yet this passage is not at all a divergence from how scripture describes the Trinity, and indeed how the Father and the Son speak. As we think of the possibility of a Christophany in this passage, let us consider a connected thought expressed by David himself in Psalm 110 verse 1, one later referenced by Jesus himself and confirmed as being about Himself:
The LORD said to my Lord, "Sit at My right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool."
Later in the New Testament we have passages like John 5:19-23, where Jesus says the Father judges no one but has entrusted that to the Son, and that the Son "can do nothing of Himself unless it is something He sees the Father doing." So many passages lead us back to the divine mystery of God's Trinitarian nature; my personal conviction is not to use my fallen imagination to construct pictures or conceptions that are certainly false and almost inevitably heretical, but to let scripture speak correctly for itself, just as basically all the science book diagrams of what an atom looks like are wrong or at least misleading in different ways, but the equations that describe it are correct.
At very least, let us think deeply on Jesus' words and on Psalm 110 and this passage in 2 Samuel. Bringing these passages together, and understanding how "the Angel of the Lord" may be interpreted, I can only conclude that this indeed may have been an Old Testament glimpse of God in a more complete Trinitarian sense than we often see in the Old Testament, one that King David mentions prophetically in the Psalms and perhaps witnesses personally in the midst of his sorrow at the judgment of Israel.
What do you think? Have you heard other takes on this passage? Let me know.
Whether what David saw was a special kind of angel or a Christophany, he heeds the words of the prophet Gad and builds an altar in that place where he saw Him. That altar, and the exchange between David and the owner of the threshing floor, will be the subject of Part II.
