Second Samuel 24: states that God incited David to number the people, while 1 Chronicles 21: names Satan as the culprit. Both are true: God permitted Satan to tempt David in order to accomplish the purposes He had in mind. Satan certainly opposed God’s people throughout all of Old Testament history, but this is one of four instances in the Old Testament where Satan is named specifically and seen openly at work. The other three are when he tempted Eve (Gen. 3), when he attacked Job (Job 1—2), and when he accused Joshua the high priest (Zech. 3).
A proud king (vv. 1–9; 1 Chron. 21:1–6). There was nothing illegal about a national census, if it was done according to the rules laid down in Exodus 30:11–16 (and see Num. 3:40–51). The half shekel received at the census was used to pay the bills for the sanctuary of God (Ex. 38:25–28). As a good Jewish citizen, Jesus paid his temple tax (Matt. 17:24–27), even though He knew that much of the ministry at the temple in that day was corrupt and had been rejected by His Father (Matt. 23:37–24:1). The phrase “the people” used in 2 Samuel 24:2, 4, 9, 10 refers to the Jewish military forces and is used this way in the Authorized Version of 1 Samuel 4:3, 4, 17. But the census that David ordered wasn’t to collect the annual temple tax; it was a military census to see how big his army was, as verse 9 makes clear. But there had been military censuses in Israel in the past and the Lord hadn’t judged the nation (Num. 1 and 26). What was there about this census that was wrong?
Joab and his captains were against the project (v. 4) and Joab’s speech in verse 3 suggests that David’s command was motivated by pride. The king wanted to magnify his own achievements rather than glorify the Lord. David may have rationalized this desire by arguing that his son Solomon was a man of peace who had no military experience. David wanted to be certain that, after his death, Israel would have the forces needed to preserve the peace. Another factor may have been David’s plan to organize the army, the government, and the priests and Levites so that Solomon could manage things more easily and be able to build the temple (1 Chron. 22—27).
Whatever the cause, the Lord was displeased (1 Chron. 21:7), but He permitted Joab and his captains to spend the next nine months and twenty days counting the Israelites twenty years old and upward who were fit for military service. Sometimes God’s greatest judgment is simply to let us have our own way. The census takers left Jerusalem, traveled east across the Jordan, and started counting at Aroer in the vicinity of the Dead Sea. Then they moved north through Gad and Gilead to Israel’s northernmost border, where David had conquered the territory and expanded his kingdom (2 Sam. 8). The men then went west to Tyre and Sidon and then south to Beersheba in Judah, Israel’s farthest border city.
From Beersheba, they returned to Jerusalem, but they didn’t count the Levites (who were exempted from military duty, Num. 1:49; 2:33) and the men of Benjamin. The tabernacle was located at Gibeon in Benjamin (1 Chron. 16:39–40; 21:29) and Joab may have thought it unwise to invade holy territory on such a sinful mission. Anyway, Saul had come from Benjamin and there may still have been pockets of resistance in the tribe. Benjamin was too close to home and Joab didn’t want to take any chances. The incomplete total was 1,300,000 men.
A convicted king (24:10–14; 1 Chron. 21:7–13). Realizing that he had been foolish in pursuing the project, David confessed his sin and sought the Lord’s face. At least six times in Scripture we find David confessing “I have sinned” (2 Sam. 12:13; 24:10, 17; Ps. 41: and 51:4; 1 Chron. 21:8). When he confessed his sins of adultery and murder, David said, “I have sinned”; but when he confessed his sin of numbering the people, he said, “I have sinned greatly” (italics mine). Most of us would consider his sins relating to Bathsheba far worse than the sin of numbering the people, and far more foolish, but David saw the enormity of what he had done. David’s sins with Bathsheba took the lives of four of David’s sons (the baby, Amnon, Absalom, and Adonijah) plus the life of Uriah, but after the census, God sent a plague that took the lives of seventy thousand people. The Lord must have agreed with David that he had indeed sinned greatly.
David’s sin with Bathsheba was a sin of the flesh, a yielding to lust after an afternoon of laziness (11:2; Gal. 5:19), but the census was a sin of the spirit (see 2 Cor. 7:1), a willful act of rebellion against God. It was motivated by pride, and pride is number one on the list of the sins that God hates (Prov. 6:16–17). “Pride is the ground in which all the other sins grow,” wrote William Barclay, “and the parent from which all the other sins come.” Both Scripture and civil law make a distinction between sudden sins of passion and willful sins of rebellion and treat the guilty parties differently (Deut. 19:1–13; Ex. 21:12–14). The census was willful rebellion, and David sinned against a flood of light. Furthermore, God gave David over nine months’ time to repent, but he refused to yield. In the various scenes in David’s history, Joab doesn’t come across as a godly man, but even Joab was opposed to this project, and so were his officers. David should have heeded their counsel, but he was determined to have a census.
God in His grace forgives our sins when we confess them (1 John 1:9), but in His righteous government, He allows us to reap the consequences. In this case, the Lord even gave David the privilege of choosing the consequences. Why? Because David’s disobedience was a sin of the will, a deliberate choice on David’s part, so God allowed him to make another choice and name the punishment. Gad gave the king three choices and told him to consider them, make a decision, and give his answer when the prophet returned.
Between the first and second visits, David must have sought the face of the Lord, for God lowered the famine period from seven years to three years, which explains the seeming discrepancy between 2 Samuel 24: and 1 Chronicles 21:12. In His mercy, God shortened the days of the suffering for His chosen people (Matt. 24:22). The three punishments are named in God’s covenant with Israel (Deut. 28), so David shouldn’t have been surprised: famine—28:23–24, 38–40; military defeat—28:25–26, 41–48; pestilence—28:21–22, 27–28, 35, 60–61. In Jewish law, the unintentional sin of the high priest was equivalent to the sin of the entire congregation (Lev. 4:1–3, 13–14), so how much more would the penalties apply to a king who had sinned intentionally! Knowing the mercy of the Lord, David wisely chose pestilence for his punishment.
A repentant king (24:15–25; 1 Chron. 21:14–30). The plague started the next day at morning and continued for the appointed three days, with the judgment angel ending his work at Jerusalem, just as Joab and his men had done (v. 8). David’s shepherd’s heart was broken because of this judgment and he pleaded with the Lord to punish him instead. Why would God kill seventy thousand men and yet keep David alive? We must note that 24: says that God was angry with Israel and not with David, so He must have been punishing the people for some sin they had committed. It’s been suggested that this plague took the lives of the Israelites who had followed Absalom in his rebellion and didn’t want David as their king. This may be so, but the text doesn’t tell us.
God permitted David to see the judgment angel hovering over Jerusalem near the threshing floor of Araunah (Ornan), a Jebusite. The Jebusites were the original inhabitants of Jerusalem, so Ornan had submitted to David’s rule and become a reputable citizen of Jerusalem. We aren’t told that David heard God’s command to the angel to cease plaguing the people, but David knew that God was merciful and gracious, so he begged for mercy for “the sheep of his pasture” (Ps. 100:3). The elders of Israel were with David (1 Chron. 21:16) and with him fell to the ground in humble contrition and worship. It was David’s sin that precipitated the crisis, but perhaps they realized that the nation had also sinned and deserved to feel God’s rod of discipline.
Once again, the prophet Gad appeared on the scene, this time with a message of hope. David was to build an altar on Ornan’s threshing floor and there offer sacrifices to the Lord, and the plague would cease. As king, David could have appropriated the property (1 Sam. 8:14) or even borrowed it, but he insisted on purchasing it. David knew the high cost of sinning, and he refused to give the Lord something that had cost him nothing. For fifty shekels of silver he purchased the oxen for sacrifices and the wooden yokes for fuel, and for six hundred shekels of gold, he purchased the entire threshing floor (24:24; 1 Chron. 21:25). When the priest offered the sacrifices, God sent fire from heaven to consume them as a token of His acceptance (1 Chron. 21:26; Lev. 9:24).
Knowing that the king was well able to purchase his property, why was Ornan so anxious to give it to David absolutely free? Or was his offer just another instance of traditional Eastern courtesy in the art of bargaining? (See Gen. 23.) Perhaps Ornan remembered what happened to Saul’s descendants because of what Saul did to the Gibeonites (21:1–14) and he didn’t want the lives of his sons threatened (1 Chron. 21:20). The King James translation of verse 23 is a bit awkward and gives the idea that Ornan himself was a king, so the NIV or NASB should be consulted.
The land that David purchased was no ordinary piece of property, for it was the place where Abraham had put his son Isaac on the altar (Gen. 22) and where Solomon would build the temple (1 Chron. 22:1; 2 Chron. 3:1). After the plague had ceased, David consecrated the site to the Lord (Lev. 27:20–21) and used it as a place of sacrifice and worship. The altar and tabernacle were at Gibeon, but David was permitted to worship at Jerusalem. The land was sanctified and would one day be the site of God’s temple. David announced, “This is the house of the Lord God, and this is the altar of the burnt offering for Israel” (1 Chron. 22:1), and from that time began to get everything ready for Solomon to build the temple.
If you were asked to name David’s two greatest sins, you would probably reply, “His adultery with Bathsheba and his numbering of the people,” and you would be right. But out of those two great sins, God built a temple! Bathsheba gave birth to Solomon and God chose him to succeed David on the throne. On the property David purchased and on which he erected an altar, Solomon built the temple and dedicated it to the glory of God. What God did for David is certainly not an excuse for sin (Rom. 6:1–2), because David paid dearly for committing those sins. However, knowing what God did for David does encourage us to seek His face and trust His grace when we have disobeyed Him. “But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more” (Rom. 5:20). What a merciful God we serve!