Mercy is Coming

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Don Filcek; 2 Samuel 24 Mercy is Coming

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak is preaching from his series,
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The Warrior Poet King, The Study of 2 Samuel. Let's listen in. We're going to be wrapping up 2
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Samuel this morning, and we've been following the twists and turns of the life of David, right? It's really impacted me personally to have the opportunity over this last year to go through the book of 2
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Samuel. It's real. It's raw. But the book shows us a man who was a sinner in a sinful world.
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That's the point of it. That's what it's doing. And he was a man who kept trusting God for mercy and grace.
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Now, you can't read the book of 2 Samuel and come to any notion that David was a perfect man.
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It's impossible. You can't follow his life and go, that's a guy you want to live like. No, but there is something about his life that is valuable because he's a man who keeps coming back to God in all circumstances.
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That's the beauty of his life. He demonstrates to us what it means to be a man after God's own heart because in all circumstances, he keeps coming back.
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Sorrow, he brings it to God. His own sin, he confesses it to God.
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Seasons of victory over his enemies, he praises God. Peace, times of peace, he rejoices in God.
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Seeing all of his life connected to the Almighty God. Have you seen that in the course of 2
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Samuel? Him connecting his life to God. I mean, we have to be honest.
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Raise your hand. I'm going to ask you to do something. This is the closest we're going to get to confession this morning.
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Raise your hand if you are a sinner. Okay, so how does that relate to God?
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Confession, repentance, and staying in close proximity to him.
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As you say, as he convicts you, and you go, I sinned against you today. I am sorry.
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Please hold me close. That's what we're looking at in the life of David.
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Our text this morning is going to end the entire book. It's going to end the entire book strumming a final chord that contains the notes of David's imperfection, notes of God's holiness, and most importantly, notes of future grace and future mercy that are still yet to come for God's people.
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It sets things up for what God is planning to do, what we know that he has already done for us in Jesus Christ.
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Far from being a random story as much as it might look like it in the flow of 2 Samuel, this account of David's sinful census that occurs here in our text at the end has
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God's wrathful judgment, David's explicit trust in God's mercy. And this story points to some epic sweeping realities that we all have to deal with in our lives.
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It's that we deserve punishment for our rebellion against God, but God is merciful, and he will accept a substitutionary atonement for the sacrifice,
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I'm sorry, for our sins, but the sacrifice has to be made, and we'll see that in this text.
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There is so much in this text that's future -looking, and that makes sense when we consider that the centerpiece of the entire book of 2
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Samuel is a promise that God made back in chapter 7 of 2 Samuel to David, that one from his royal line would be the chosen
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Messiah. He would be the king who would come to save his people, rescue them from their sins, and be the eternal king who would sit on the
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Davidic throne forever and ever and ever. So let's open our Bibles, if you're not already there, to 2 Samuel 24, and we probably won't get the reading on the mic, but I am going to step out on the front here and read this together.
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Church, this is God's holy and precious word to us, valuable in the reading of it, in the listening to it, and the going out and living according to it.
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Father, I thank you for your grace and your mercy to us. As we gather here in this place, there's a lot of different stresses and strains on our lives and in our hearts and on our minds.
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Some have had great weeks. Things seem to click for them personally.
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Others have had really rough weeks. There's been elections, there's been stress, there's been struggle nationally, within our state, in our locality, in our own hearts.
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So Father, I ask that you would speak your mercy, speak your grace, that David here reflects what
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I desire to be the reality for all of us, and that is that we have experienced your mercy to such a degree, and through your word experienced your mercy to such a degree, that with David, in the midst of all the ups and downs and twists and turns of his life, he was able to say, your mercy is great.
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I pray that that would be a reality and a result of our gathering together this morning and hearing from your word.
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We can get so confused between what we think we deserve and what we actually deserve, and what we think we receive from your hand and what we deserve from your hand.
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So Father, I pray that you would make clear to us both the depravity of our own hearts, how worthy we are of condemnation, how our death will be just in the end, and yet how you, in your mercy, have made a way for us to be rescued.
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I pray that that would be pressed in each and every heart here, that we would gain perspective as a result of gathering together with your people.
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But Father, you have granted us a perspective that is the gospel, and from that place of joy and gladness and grace and mercy and the cross,
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I pray that you would help us to lift our voices now in praise to you, that our praise would not flow out of some desire to sing some songs, or just, well, that's what's going on this morning, so that's what we're going to do.
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We're going to be asked to stand here in a minute and sing, but Father, that it would be so much more than that. It would be a recognition of who you are, how holy you are, how worthy you are, how much you have loved us, and that from that place, our voices will blend together as we worship to you in Jesus' name.
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Father, we thank you for this morning. We recognize that all of this is of you. It's not exactly the ideal and not exactly what we wanted for this morning, but it is what you have for us, and we just trusted you and rested you.
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Father, I do pray that you would help us to work all these kinks out. We thank you for the opportunity we've had to buy some new equipment. We look forward to that.
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Father, I pray that you would not allow anything that the evil one would desire to get between us and the truth, between us and you.
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Father, I pray that you would help us to bring back our focus into your word, back into what you have done for us in your great mercy and grace.
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Father, I pray that you would allow this word to get in us, so that it then, in turn, throughout the remainder of this week, comes out of us, that it actually is what pours out of us in terms of our relationship with you and our relationship with others, that as we see you as merciful, that that transforms the way that we live and move among others.
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We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Okay, so if you guys can reopen your
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Bibles or your devices, your apps, to 2 Samuel chapter 24, so that you've got that in front of you while we go through this.
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I say this every week, but I know we just took a break, but if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or donut holes, take advantage of that.
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If there's some left back there, you're not going to distract me if you need to get up and check that out. But our text this morning is going to cover what would appear at face value, if you didn't have all of this writing about it, it would appear as a catastrophe in the history of Israel during the reign of King David.
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That's what we're looking at here at the end. You kind of go like, wait a minute, when does this occur?
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It occurs at the very end of the life of David, and the author is using some license to take out one account of an event that happened in the middle.
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We don't know when it happened. We don't have the history. The text is not so concerned with context. And so we have an event that's pulled out of the life of David and planted here at the very end of a biography, so to speak, of his life.
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And without any special revelation of what was going on behind the scenes, we would be left with the impression that chapter 24 was an epidemic of some unknown illness that struck
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Israel and killed 70 ,000 men. And that's where we'd be. We'd just be like, okay, that happened.
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If it wasn't recorded for us, what occurred in this instance, we would be left with just a very natural explanation to it.
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But God sees fit here in the text to open our eyes to what's going on behind the scenes. And I suggest to you that the complexity of things that may be going on behind the scenes as revealed in the
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Holy Scriptures, the various reasons why things happen on this planet, and the vast variety of reasons given, lead me to conclude that we ought to keep our mouths shut as to the purpose and causes for any given catastrophe or tragedy.
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We should keep our mouths shut. Because we don't know. Because there's so many various ways that God works and moves in and among humanity that at any given point, we really don't know what he's doing.
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Unless God tells us. Unless he reveals to us. Unless he speaks directly to us about it like he does here through the pages of Scripture.
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So we know that this is the type of thing that God will do. Why? Because Scripture tells us it is. Let me say it in another way.
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You don't know why any given tragedy has happened unless God actually tells you. So that kind of helps us to know how we should respond to the world around us as Christians when we see all kinds of tragedies and difficulties.
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In this case, it tells us directly. God was angry at Israel. And so he then goes about using a trial of David to judge them.
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David failed the test that God gives to him, and God judged the people accordingly.
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And so much of this would have been lost on us if we lived during that time, if we lived these circumstances, if we were there in Israel at this time.
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So we think about the times that we live in. I can't explain why God allowed COVID, and I won't try.
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I cannot explain or begin to understand the purposes behind him allowing Proposal 3 to pass.
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I don't know what God is doing and why. But I know that God's hands were not tied on Election Day.
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And further, I know that God has allowed things, like in the Scriptures, he allowed
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Satan to strike Job's property. He allowed Satan to strike Job's family. He allowed
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Satan to strike Job's flesh, his skin, so that he broke out in boils and sores.
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We see God here in our text sending a pestilence, some kind of disease, to strike down his people in judgment.
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We see David trusting in God's mercy in the text. We see God relenting in the text.
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And we see David, the anointed king, being used to stand in the gap for his people in the text.
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So here's our outline this morning. If you're a note -taker, here is your outline in advance. David's sinful census is verses one through nine,
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David's sinful census. The second movement in the text is David's clear convictions, verses 10 through 14.
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And then God's initiated atonement, verses 15 through 18. And David's obedient offering in verses 19 through 25.
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So in this first part, David's sinful census, we might feel like there's a lot of unanswered questions, right off the bat.
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When we read the text, there's a lot of things that we could get hung up on, and we could, many times that I've read this, just to be honest,
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I read through the Bible usually every year in my quiet time personally. And many times when I've read this,
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I think I miss the main point. It took really focusing in on it, studying it intensely for this week to really get down to the main point, because I've been so caught off guard by some of the things that I don't know about the text.
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Why was God angry with Israel right away in verse one? The text begins with God upset about something, with him ready to express his wrath towards his people.
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What have they done? The text doesn't tell us. It just tells us that somehow they have sinned against him and invoked his righteous and just anger.
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And so in response to this anger, that is his holy wrath has already been stirred up by verse one, he employs a trial with King David.
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It's possible that his anger is somehow related to trust in the military might of the nation. We don't know exactly what it was, but speculation would kind of indicate that it's possible that somehow they've put their trust in their military might instead of God.
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But the text is unconcerned with letting us know any of those details. But there's another question that verse one presses on us.
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Why is God inciting, that's a strong word, inciting David against Israel? In English, that's a strong word, but in Hebrew, it's a strong word too.
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The Lord is using David, using him as a tool, an instrument of judgment for the people.
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You see, the Lord may use us even as instruments of judgment, much like he was able to use the Babylonians to judge his nation in the
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Old Testament. And here he's gonna use a failed trial of David to bring about judgment on his people.
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So David sends out his military men under Joab to number the military to determine their strength. And they come back with a substantial number.
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It's a huge number, 1 .3 million men capable of battle in verse nine. The census begins in the east at the three o 'clock on the clock as you're facing the map of Israel.
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It starts at three o 'clock, goes counterclockwise north to Tyre, down the west side of Israel to the southernmost reaches of Beersheba and the
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Negev, and then returns to Jerusalem after nine months and 20 days. So it's kind of a counterclockwise motion right north of the
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Dead Sea, heads all the way up to the north, then comes down the west coast, all the way down. You see the word
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Negev, Negev or Negev, clear at the bottom there. So basically a way of saying they covered all of Israel in nine months and 20 days.
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It took them a long time to get through there and count the people. Now we may struggle to see this as sin.
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We ought to kind of struggle with that. But there's been many wrong teachings on this passage. I've heard this passage preached before and it was preached that he sinned because he took accounting.
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He sinned because he counted the people and he wasn't supposed to. But I want to be emphatically clear that anytime you hear that, you're not hearing truth.
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It was not sinful to take a census. By no means was it sinful to take a census. As a matter of fact, it was done throughout
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Israel's history without any repercussions. It was even regulated by God's law. You could jot this down and look it up later.
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Exodus 30 verses 11 through 16 give the parameters and the method for taking a census. It tells you to.
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So have any of you ever heard that before? By the way, I don't want to be preaching to you. Have you heard that it was wrong for him to count the people? Nah, it's not.
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And I can give you a really clear, I even believed that when I was younger and then studying it this week,
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I was like, duh, why didn't I think of that? There is a book in the Bible. Okay, are you ready for it?
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The name of the book is, did somebody get it? Numbers. What is it?
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It's a counting of the people. And it's there in the scriptures. It was okay for them to count.
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There are three things that should help us to move past our questions though about how this census is sinful.
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Because it is. It's a sinful census. It's just that not all censuses are sinful. Oh gosh, that got messy.
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But the text tells us that Joab, Joab, contemporary, living in those days, saw this particular census as sin and warns his king about it.
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We're also told that David, the one performing the census, identifies this particular census, in his heart, as sin.
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The third thing is that God confirms that this particular census undertaken by David was sinful.
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How many of you think that it's okay to say that this census was sinful? This one is.
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We just are not given the reason why in clarity. So we have consensus, are you ready?
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We have consensus that this census was sin. We can all conclude that some aspect of it was sin.
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And it may have been a transfer, I think that this is probably likely what was going on in David, a transfer in David's heart from delight in the
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Lord to delight in his military. There's some evidence for that, by the way, in verse three, where Joab is challenging the king, saying may he multiply the military a hundredfold in your lifetime, may your eyes see it, may it just be like all of a sudden you've got swords coming out your ears, there's just people everywhere carrying a sword on behalf of Israel, but why does my
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Lord the king delight in this? Why are you putting so much in it,
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David? Why is your heart in that? Why is your heart in the numbers? Why is your delight?
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I mean, delight throughout the Psalms of David are all towards God and all of a sudden Joab's identifying your delight is somewhere else, dude.
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Your delight is in the numbers, the strength of your military. But we see that God has been moved to wrath against his people.
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He sets a trial before David to see if he will engage in a sinful census and David jumps in with both feet.
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So the second movement of the text, we have the sinful census, this first movement. The second movement of the text is
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David's conviction in verses 10 through 14. Now I made the word convictions plural in my outline because we're going to see the word,
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I'm going to use the word two different ways. There's two different convictions of David here in the text. The first use is found in verse 10.
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He feels convicted of his sins. Like that kind of conviction. Like, oh, I feel like I've done wrong and I know that I've done wrong.
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His heart is struck within him, the text says, as he considers the way that he has sinned against God in this particular census.
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He knows he has done wrong and it would be silly for us to stand a few millennia removed from these events and disagree with him.
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No, David, it was fine that you took a census. It's all right. He knows that he has sinned and he feels convicted in his heart.
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I have done wrong. He knows what's going on in there and he knows he sinned against God and he sees that what's happened within him is, quote, in the text, great sin.
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Great sin. He doesn't see this as a minor slip up, what he's done. And he prays for God to take away his impurity, his iniquity, that's a word that means impurity.
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We see in this text a genuine sorrow and contrition over his sin. He recognizes that his delight has been in numbers instead of God or something to that effect.
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Remembering that he's a man after God's own heart, which doesn't mean he never sins. It doesn't mean that he never fails at trials, but it means he is contrite and sorry when he realizes that he has sinned or failed a trial.
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So here in this text, there's a good pattern of repentance for us, just simplicity here.
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We realize we have fallen short of God's ways and when it comes to our attention that we have sinned in any particular way, the first thing that David does here in the text is admit you've sinned against him, ask for God to cleanse us, and acknowledge that you have acted foolishly.
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Those are three good things. Admit you've sinned against him, ask for God to cleanse you, and then acknowledge that you have acted foolishly.
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But I want to be clear that it will only be on the basis of sacrifice for sins that God will accept that repentance.
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It's not as though we can come to God and say, I'm sorry, and he goes, yeah, that's all right. The rest of the text is going to set up the requirement of atonement.
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We don't just come to God, say sorry, and have him say he never, ever, ever says over sin no big deal.
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That is never God's response when somebody comes to him and says I've sinned. He never says no big deal.
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I'll just eat that one. I'll just get over it. He says throughout the remainder of this text something like I am a righteous judge who judges all sin.
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I am holy and I will overlook no sin or I would cease to be holy.
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Therefore, all sin will be punished because I am just and I am holy.
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And so I will overlook not a single small sin.
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I won't overlook it. Something has to be done about it. How many of you knew that something has to be done about it?
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When we sin, something has to be done. And for many of us, we recognize, praise
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God, something has been done. So David is convicted, and in sincerity he asks
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God to forgive him. Please forgive me. And so God sent a prophet to David and says no worries, your sins are forgiven, no big deal,
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I know you're weak, I know what you're made of, I mean you're just a frail human, and I get it, I get it,
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I understand. No, that's not what he says. Look at verses 12 through 13. To see the message
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God gives to his prophet Gad. He says pick your punishment, says God through Gad, because divine wrath against sin is real and must be communicated to us in no uncertain terms.
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We need to get this message loud and clear, church. That God's wrath is real toward all sin.
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And there's very little, I don't know if you experienced this when you were a kid, your parents ever offer you the opportunity to pick your own punishment?
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Anybody? Those are the worst. Isn't that the worst? You want to make it hard enough so your parents don't come over the top with their own sanctions, but you also don't want it to hurt too much, so there's like that point where you're kind of just trying to figure it out, like what could
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I say that wouldn't hurt too bad, but it's like, yeah. But the choice for David is tough, and he says this much.
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His heart is in anguish over this choice that's given to him by Gad, the prophet, from God. Three years of famine, three months of defeat by his enemies, or three days of pestilence.
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Which would you choose? Glad I don't have to pick that one for us.
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And that's where the second form of conviction comes into play, because he was convicted of his sin, but we also see a deep conviction that begins to process this decision.
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There's a conviction that David holds that leads him to an answer.
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It's found in verse 14. David expresses here in the midst of taking his stern discipline from the
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Lord that he, this is a conviction, he trusts in the mercy of God.
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He doesn't want to fall into the hands of sinful men, which rules out the defeat by the enemies thing in the middle.
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But he leaves it up to God to choose between famine and pestilence, saying the only thing I want is to make sure that you're in charge of whatever discipline happens.
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I don't want humanity. I don't want to fall into the hands of my enemies. David has the deep conviction that God's mercy, and he says it this way,
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God's mercy is great. Here is an Old Testament passage about the wrath of our holy and righteous
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God against all sin, and here in this text we see David rise up as the man after God's own heart.
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He gets it. God has been merciful to David. God has been merciful to Israel.
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David has sung many songs extolling God's great kindness and mercy to him all the days of his life, and here we see that it was more than just some songs that he sang, more than just some poetry that kept him busy late at night while he was a shepherd.
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It was in his heart. He believed it, and now he puts it into practice in his life.
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David's heart, he says, it's in great distress in making this consequential decision for his people.
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But consider this, church. Our deepest theology will show up in our darkest moments.
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Our deepest theology will show up in our darkest moments. What you believe about God is going to spill out of you when you're pushed, when you're squeezed, when the circumstances of your life are pressing you down.
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When you feel like there's no out, then what you believe about God truly, deeply will come out.
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It's in moments of loss, moments of grief, moments of discipline, moments of hard leadership, moments of coming face to face with our own sinfulness and the responses and reactions of that and the results of it.
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That's when what we truly believe about God will either sustain us or prove itself to be cheap and thin happy day theology.
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It was just convenient for the time. As long as things are going well, man, I love
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Jesus. As long as I can sing the happy songs and go right along with them and mean it, well,
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I'm good. You guys know what I'm talking about? When you're pressed, that's when your theology comes out.
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Either you believe he is good and just and merciful, and that comes when mom dies.
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That happens when there's a car accident. That happens when there's a loss of job. That happens in those dark times as well.
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Is he good and just and merciful in those times? Or you will turn against him at the first sign of adversity, the first sign of judgment.
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What do you believe to be true of God? Are you going to leave here trusting that he is merciful? So far in the text, we've seen
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David's sin in the census, and we've seen David come to conviction of his great sin while also expressing another form of conviction, and that is that God's mercy is great.
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He holds that conviction deeply, deeply enough that it oozes out of him in this moment when he's squeezed and pressed.
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And so now we turn to the third movement of the text. God will initiate atonement, verses 15 through 18.
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He's showing us something here at the end of 2 Samuel, a hope yet to come.
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David puts his trust. Think about what happens here. It's ironic, it's intentional, and it's jarring.
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David says, I trust you. I want to fall in the hands of the mercy of God because his mercy has always proven himself to be great.
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So God, I will throw myself on your mercy. What happens next? God struck down 70 ,000 people in Israel.
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Behold the mercy of your God, church, because it wasn't all of them. Behold the mercy of your
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God. He stays his hand so that we are left here breathing today.
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The reason you are breathing his air is because he has been merciful to us. That's it.
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That's the only answer to why we are living today. I'm guessing that it might strike us immediately at some level with a sense of unfairness of his judgment in the text.
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David says, I know you're merciful, so I want you to be in charge of this discipline. I know I deserve it.
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I know that our nation deserves it. I know that we have sinned against you, and so as the leader of my people,
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I throw myself on your mercy. 70 ,000 struck down. But do you ever stop to consider that 100 % of people will die due to their sin?
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It might be fair for us to say, when we think of the unfairness of God in circumstances, say, well, there's that.
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There's the 100 % death rate. Right? There's that. Let the mortality of humanity after the fall into sin temper your understanding of any and all judgment from the
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Almighty. Where do you think this ends for you? Where's it going? Where's this body going to go?
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How many of you are already experiencing some of the effects of it aging? It's on the way somewhere. All have sinned, and all have fallen short of the glory of God.
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And further, all therefore have come under the wages of sin.
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What is it? Go ahead and say it. We don't want to say it. We're Americans, right? It's death.
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And Paul says that in the book of Romans, and he doesn't even appear to blush about it. The wages of sin is death, and by the way, we're all sinners.
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What does that mean for all of us? We already know it. We just don't like to talk about it. So ask yourself another question of this text.
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Why do we somehow feel better if the deaths are spread out so as not to be too conspicuous?
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Why does the death of 70 ,000 in three days jar us? But if they died over the course of 80 years, we're all right with that.
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What is that about? It feels a little more fair when the deaths are spread out, but when they all happen in one tragic event, suddenly we're like, whoa, what's that?
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We're given a rare insight behind the scenes here. We don't often know why anything happens, but we know why these 70 ,000 died in this text.
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But knowing why these 70 ,000 people died does not change the fact that all 70 ,000 of these people were mortal and destined to die anyway.
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Is any given death, you can think of people that you've lost, you can think of tragedy, you can think of the loss of loved ones, you can think of maybe epic, large -scale catastrophes, you can think of 9 -11, you can think of Katrina, you can think of tsunamis on Christmas Day, you can think of whatever you want to think of in this moment.
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But I want to ask you a question over whatever comes to your mind when you think about tragic death.
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Is a death merciful? Is a death judgment? Is a death tragic?
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How would we who are so limited and finite even know the difference between those categories?
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What is mercy? What is judgment? What is grace? What is kindness? What is deserved? We have no category for that.
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We look as finite people judging the Almighty. But what
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I can tell you, this I know for sure, church. This I know for sure.
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I can tell this to you about every single mortal sinner who has ever lived here on planet Earth.
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Barring, again, there's only one who was not a sinner. But about all the rest of us, we have lived every single day of our lives on the good graces of a benevolent and merciful
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God who has allowed us to eat His food, drink His water, and be blessed by His sunrises and sunsets.
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I know He has been merciful to every single one of us because I've lived here. I know what
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I deserve and I know what He's given. God has been so kind to me.
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God has been so merciful to me. Can you say it too? He has only ever given me what
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I do not deserve. I know two things to be equally true.
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In God's sovereign plan, I will indeed die one day. That's my full expectation. I love how
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Christians always love to give the caveat, unless Jesus returns, all right, that's right.
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I'm probably gonna die. I'm just gonna give that out to you guys. It's probably the likely end and I'm okay with that.
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I'm gonna die. That is real. Second, God has been so unreasonably kind to me in this journey.
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And David testifies to the same reality here in this text. 70 ,000 was just a start.
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And were God to allow the angel appointed to bring this calamity to strike Jerusalem, he obviously mediates this discipline, this pestilence, whatever form it took, be it boils or some kind of infection or something that was striking people quickly.
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The word pestilence implies just people just dying. And in the use of this angel, he's about to strike
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Jerusalem. And who knows how many would have died. 70 ,000 is just the start. But look at verse 16 with me.
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God relented from the calamity, calling the death, enough, and commanding the angel to stay his hand.
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The stay of execution over Jerusalem is a temporary reprieve while arrangements are made. Note that there is still more to the text that needs to be accomplished.
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God still has not spent his wrath in this instance and yet he's going to show us something here at the end of this book of David that shows his future plans, what he's plotting and scheming for all of humanity.
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But nestled in the middle of God's enacting a method of atonement, in verse 17, David expresses deep sorrow over his role in this.
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He says, this is consequences of my sin. And he seeks to stand in as a substitute for the people in verse 17.
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He wants to be punished. He says, take it out on me, God. Take it out on me. Take it out on my royal line. And what we have here is a noble wish on David's part to be the sacrifice, to stand in the gap for his people.
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We have in this even the seeds of thought about one standing in the place of the many.
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And as noble as this is, the sacrifice will not be David. Were he to die, he would have to die for his own sins.
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But we have the greater David who did not die for his own sins, but died for ours.
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So we ought to be reminded in verse 17 that a sinless one will indeed be sent from heaven to be the once for all sacrifice to appease the wrath of God toward us.
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God gave the prophet Gad instructions to go tell David how he was to make atonement for the remaining wrath of God.
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He was to go raise up an altar on the threshing floor of Araunah. Here he initiates atonement for the people.
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The angel is there milling about waiting for further orders. He's hanging out on Mount Moriah at the threshing floor just on the edge of Jerusalem.
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There's a man named Araunah there. He's the Jebusite. And I think, you know, threshing floors, I love this picture because it's kind of similar to what
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I pictured. It's always in a higher point, so he looks down the hill to see David coming up. It says that threshing floors were on a high location.
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Threshing is the process of removing a kernel of grain from the hard husk of wheat or whatever. Most grains have a hard husk on the outside that is not edible.
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And so often oxen were yoked to a central pole. You see it right there. And then their hooves and whatever they drug behind them was used to crush the wheat.
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And once the farmer was fairly confident that the chaff was separated from the grain, he would winnow the wheat.
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You see some people down here at the bottom winnowing it. They've got these instruments that are similar to like a leaf rake, throwing it up in the air.
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The lighter husk would blow away in the wind. That's why you wanted a high place where it was a little bit more windy. You'd throw everything up off the pavement and the stuff that was inedible would blow away in the breeze and the grain would fall straight to the ground and then you could harvest that.
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So that's what's going on in the threshing floor of Araunah is a place similar to this where there's agriculture going on.
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And so God took the initiative to bring about rescue from his own holy wrath by sending David to make atonement.
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Now we see David's obedient offering in verses 19 through 25 to conclude this text. David's obedient offering.
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So David scurries the short distance from his palace to Araunah's threshing floor. Now this is close. This is probably measured in yards, not in miles.
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So in yards from where David's palace is to where Araunah is threshing is not very far. This is now within the walls of ancient
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Jerusalem. It wasn't during David's time, but it was during Solomon's. To put it in perspective, like this is now today, it's the center of old
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Jerusalem. So David's palace was in old Jerusalem. Where Araunah's place was is there as well.
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So he just scampers that little distance and he's there and he makes a transaction to pay full price for the threshing floor so he can set up an altar and make sacrifices.
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He buys Araunah's property. He buys his oxen to make a sacrifice. He buys his farm implements for wood so that he can burn the sacrifice on behalf of the people and God accepts the sacrifice in verse 25.
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That's the end of the text. And I've summarized here a lot of back and forth between David and Araunah.
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I read that earlier and you could see there was back and forth and kind of bartering and stuff and Araunah offered everything to the king for free hoping that the sacrifice would appease
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God's wrath. But there is, of course, a noble application in all of this for us to consider because David refused to offer
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God something that cost him nothing here at the end of our text. That's kind of a cool application, right?
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Like the idea, will you sacrifice? Will you offer something to God that cost you nothing? And I think we've got to take that on seriously.
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But there's something so epic and huge going on in this text that that has to be where we land. I want to skip over some of the tertiary applications and get right to the heart of it.
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The location of the threshing floor of Araunah is extremely crazy significant.
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You don't see it in the text. It's a little unclear, but it points to the future. It points to the past and it is a glorious location.
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Why? This is on, Araunah's place is on Mount Moriah. It has historical and future significance for our faith.
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This is the piece of property purchased by David and it's the very location where Abraham was said to go to sacrifice his own son,
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Isaac, when God stayed his hand and provided a ram as a substitute for his son.
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That's this place. In this account of Abraham and Isaac, we see an image of our great substitute,
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Jesus Christ, in this location. Now in our text here in 2 Samuel 24, we see this as a location of great sacrifice and assuaging the wrath of God against the people of God.
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Again, a significant place of sacrifice and yet in the future, this is the very location where Solomon will build the
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Temple of Israel. This is the Temple Mount. That's where this is happening.
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This is where the Temple will be, where the sacrifices will be made for generations and generations and generations.
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This is the very location where the Dome of the Rock sits today in modern day Jerusalem. This is that place, a place of significance.
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What is God doing here at the end of the accounting of David's imperfect life? He's setting forth the hope for sacrificial substitutionary atonement, a method by which we will be saved.
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We have sinned. We deserve wrath. More than merely 70 ,000 of us deserve to die and yet God has initiated images of atonement that culminate in the final sacrifice of Jesus right within sight of Mount Moriah where our
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Lord sacrificed himself for us. Applications from this text are less about going and doing something this week and more about going out and believing something this week, church.
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I'm calling us all into believing something so profound that it will change the way you live your entire life if you actually grasp it, if you actually believe it, if it becomes part of you like it was for David and that is simply this, church.
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Here it is. Believe that God is merciful. Believe that what he has given you has always been mercy.
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It's always been less punishment than you deserve, less pain than you deserve, less than you deserve.
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In his holiness, he is just and in his holiness, he will judge all sin.
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But in his deep, deep, deep mercy, he desires to set us free.
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He has made the pathway of atonement so that he can relent from calamity and say to the angel of destruction, stay your hand, it's enough, it's enough.
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Do you trust that God's mercy is great recast? That belief, if you really believe it, it will change everything.
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It changes everything. It changes the way you view hardship. It changes the way you view pain.
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It changes the way you view glory. It changes the way you view elections. It changes the way that you view everything that you either think you deserve or know you don't.
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It changes everything. And so as I invite all of us who trust in Christ to participate in communion together this morning,
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I encourage you to consider both the great wrath of God towards sin as expressed in this text. It's expressed also though in the gruesome sacrifice of Jesus Christ that we remember at communion every week, his atonement for our sins.
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And I want you to equally consider his great, great, great, great mercy given to us there at the cross.
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Let that great cost and great mercy wash over you this morning as we remember his sacrifice together. Now, there's a room back there by the cafe if anybody wants prayer after communion.
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There's gonna be some people back there that would love to pray with you, talk with you about the message, and then talk to God with you if there's anything that you, so there are some times where we just need someone to pray with.
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And if that's you, take advantage of that back there. But let's close our time together in prayer. Father, I pray that you would help us to alter in any way that our perspective is different than yours from this text.
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We look at it and we go, 70 ,000 dead, are you real? Like, for real, you would do that?
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And that betrays that we don't understand what we deserve. And your great mercy that it was just that.
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It wasn't the whole nation. It wasn't everyone. You have stayed your hand from judging us so many times.
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And Father, I pray that for everyone here who knows you as Lord and Savior that has put their faith and trust in Jesus Christ that you would allow that freedom of recognizing what we have been saved from and what we have been saved to, that that would lighten our steps and produce within us joy and gladness.
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That the heaviness is removed from us because we have won the spiritual lottery in the righteousness credited to our account by Jesus Christ.
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I pray that there would be celebration as we get up during this next song and take the cup to remember his blood shed for us and the cracker to remember his body broken for us.
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Father, if there's anybody here who does not know you as Lord and Savior, who has not yet put their life over into your hands and said,
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I trust your mercy to forgive me of my sins. And I trust you to take me to everlasting glory in the end.
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Father, I pray that today might be a day of salvation. That you would infuse boldness in anyone like that here.
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To come and talk with myself or Dave or the people back in the prayer room. And that today might be a day of salvation.
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Thank you for your mercy. We thank you for your grace. We thank you that we get to live here in this place and to be used by you, to be filled by you, to experience you.