2 Samuel 24 - The Plague of Pride

Introduction

Over the past several weeks, it seems like our entire attention has been consumed with the developments over the coronavirus crisis—every news item, every TV show, every online outlet has provided wall-to-wall coverage of the impact of this pandemic on our healthcare system, our economy, our politics, and so on. And for good reason—the devastation that we have seen in our nation over the past month will affect us for years to come.

But all of this coverage of the coronavirus plague has almost completely shut out what was supposed to be one of the most important events in American life—not the election, which has also been eclipsed by the pandemic—but the fact that this is the year when the United States Census is taking place. According to the Constitution, the United States government must count every person living in the country every ten years. The data from the census is used to decide where billions of dollars in federal funding will go, as well as where lawmakers will draw the lines for their congressional districts, and determines how the 435 seats in the House of Representatives will be divided between all 50 states. But the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic has thrown the census process into chaos—the count is still going forward, but efforts have been hampered by all of the restrictions that have been put in place.

At first glance, it may seem like these two events—the coronavirus pandemic and the US Census—have come together just by happenstance. But we are Christians, and we know that God is the one who is in utter and complete control over the affairs of this world. Nothing happens apart from His sovereign will, and I believe that He is speaking to our nation through these things—far more clearly and urgently than any other time I can remember. This plague has come upon our nation during the year of this census because God is warning us of the consequences of our faithless pride.

And I say this because we have an example in the Scriptures of a time when a national census was followed immediately by the outbreak of a deadly plague—it’s found in two places. The passage we just read from 2 Samuel 24, and a parallel account in 1 Chronicles 21. And what I aim to show you from this passage today is that

Faithless pride will bring down the plague of God’s judgment on a people.

This is a message that our nation desperately needs to hear today—and we as believers need to hear it as well. Look with me at the first 9 verses of this account, so that we can see the signs of the faithless pride that had taken hold in King David’s life. Verses 1-9 describe

I. David’s offensive census (vv. 1-9)

Look at verses 1-3:

2 Samuel 24:1–3 ESV

Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go, number Israel and Judah.” So the king said to Joab, the commander of the army, who was with him, “Go through all the tribes of Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, and number the people, that I may know the number of the people.” But Joab said to the king, “May the Lord your God add to the people a hundred times as many as they are, while the eyes of my lord the king still see it, but why does my lord the king delight in this thing?”

The first thing to notice here is that David was not conducting this census because he wanted to honor God—he was conducting this census because he wanted to delight in himself! When you read down to verse 9 you see that his whole point was to count the number of soldiers he had in his army--

2 Samuel 24:9 ESV

And Joab gave the sum of the numbering of the people to the king: in Israel there were 800,000 valiant men who drew the sword, and the men of Judah were 500,000.

One of the first signs that we are beginning to slip into faithless pride is when we see

Gratitude to God replaced by delight in our accomplishments

That’s the way King David’s commander Joab put it to him— “why are you delighting in how big your army is??” When we start boasting about what we have accomplished instead of humble gratitude for the way God has blessed us, we are on a dangerous path. Like King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4, who was walking on the roof of his palace, saying

Daniel 4:30–31 ESV

and the king answered and said, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” While the words were still in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, “O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: The kingdom has departed from you,

Faithless pride will bring down the plague of God’s judgment on a people—when we hear our political leaders boasting and bragging about what a wonderful strong vibrant economy they have created, when they puff out their chests and crow about unemployment being the lowest it’s ever been in 50 years instead of humbly thanking God for the abundant blessings He has poured out on us, it is only a matter of time before the voice from heaven interrupts them in mid-boast: “That wonderful robust economy has departed from you!”

Faithless pride will bring down the plague of God’s judgment on a people when our gratitude towards God is replaced by delighting in our own accomplishments. And consider also how our pride leaves our

Trust in God’s promises replaced by trust in ourselves

Years before David became king, when he was a hunted fugitive hiding in caves from the wrath of King Saul, he wrote a psalm that he sang to celebrate God’s promises to protect him. It’s found in our Bibles in Psalm 18, and it says in verses 1-2:

Psalm 18:1–2 ESV

I love you, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

Those were the days when David trusted in God to protect him, and God never failed to deliver him out of the hand of his enemies. But by the end of David’s reign, here in 2 Samuel 24, where is David’s trust? Is he depending on God’s protection? No—he’s counting up how many soldiers he has in case there is an enemy attack. He’s looking to the strength of his arm to save him, and not looking to the strength of God’s arm!

We are in danger of slipping into faithless pride when we instinctively look to our own resources to protect us more than we look to God. Our government trusts in the fact that it can simply conjure up trillions of dollars out of thin air and hand it out by the fistful to everyone to protect our economy against the effects of the pandemic. We trust in the fact that we live in a sparsely populated rural area outside major urban centers, and the virus spreads slowly here.

The most shocking example of this kind of faithless pride came out of New York a few weeks ago when Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters about the number of people infected: “The number is down because we brought the number down… God did not do that. Faith did not do that...” (Prestigiacomo, A. (2020, April 15). Cuomo Boasts Of Low COVID Infections: ‘God Did Not Do That’ Retrieved April 17, 2020, from https://www.dailywire.com/news/cuomo-boasts-of-low-covid-infections-god-did-not-do-that)

Faithless pride will always cause us to delight in our own self-sufficiency apart from God—and He will judge a people who will not honor Him.

Centuries before David carried out this offensive census, when God gave instructions to Moses about how to carry out a census of the people, He said,

Exodus 30:11–13 ESV

The Lord said to Moses, “When you take the census of the people of Israel, then each shall give a ransom for his life to the Lord when you number them, that there be no plague among them when you number them. Each one who is numbered in the census shall give this: half a shekel according to the shekel of the sanctuary (the shekel is twenty gerahs), half a shekel as an offering to the Lord.

God wanted Moses (and everyone else who ever numbered the people of Israel) to remember that the lives they were numbering did not belong to them—they belonged to YAHWEH! David delighted himself to think that the soldiers he was numbering belonged to him—and so God sent a plague among them to remind him that their lives were in His hands alone!

Faithless pride will bring down the plague of God’s judgment on a people. We see that pride at work in David’s offensive census, and in verses 10-16 we see

II. God’s severe mercy (vv. 10-15)

No sooner was the census completed and the final numbers reported to David, that we read in verse 10

2 Samuel 24:10 ESV

But David’s heart struck him after he had numbered the people. And David said to the Lord, “I have sinned greatly in what I have done. But now, O Lord, please take away the iniquity of your servant, for I have done very foolishly.”

In the following verses we read that the prophet Gad came to him with a message from the LORD:

2 Samuel 24:12–13 ESV

“Go and say to David, ‘Thus says the Lord, Three things I offer you. Choose one of them, that I may do it to you.’ ” So Gad came to David and told him, and said to him, “Shall three years of famine come to you in your land? Or will you flee three months before your foes while they pursue you? Or shall there be three days’ pestilence in your land? Now consider, and decide what answer I shall return to him who sent me.”

And then in verse 14:

2 Samuel 24:14 ESV

Then David said to Gad, “I am in great distress. Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but let me not fall into the hand of man.”

Just as God had warned in Exodus, when the nation turned away from trusting in Him and began to delight in their own self-sufficiency, when David began to think that the great and impressive army he had numbered belonged to him—God sent a plague on the people.

2 Samuel 24:15 ESV

So the Lord sent a pestilence on Israel from the morning until the appointed time. And there died of the people from Dan to Beersheba 70,000 men.

Over the space of three days, seventy thousand men died—David had delighted himself with counting fighting men, and now God was causing him to count dead bodies. The text says that 70,000 men died, but surely it was not just men (not just soldiers) that died—there were also women and children who succumbed to this pestilence.

And as we look around us today we see thousands of people—men, women and children—dying in this pandemic. And it forcjes us to wonder why the proud and arrogant voices coming from our halls of power are safe in their mansions while so many people are dying every day. We wonder how God can be just to cause so many innocent people to suffer.

But we have to remember what God’s Word says about our condition before Him. When we stand before the perfect righteousness of God, we realize that

We are far more guilty than we think we are (Luke 13:4-5)

Jesus was asked this same question about the suffering of innocent people in Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 13. Apparently the Roman authorities had committed an atrocity against Galilean Jews, slaughtering them in the midst of their sacrifices. Jesus’ answer in verse 2 was shocking:

Luke 13:2–5 ESV

And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

The Scriptures are plain—we are far more guilty before God than we think we are. “Do you think that the people who are dying of COVID-19 are in any way worse offenders than you who are healthy? No, but I tell you that unless you repent, you will all likewise perish!”

We are far more guilty before God than we think we are. We need to wake up to “the sinfulness of sin”—the sin which produces our pride is far more deadly than any plague. Coronavirus has a 3.4 percent mortality rate according to the World Health Organization. The sinful heart that produces faithless pride in us has a one hundred percent mortality rate! It was well-said in our Bible study a couple of weeks ago that if people were as worried about their sin as they were about catching coronavirus, the world would be a very different place! We are far more guilty before God than we think.

But at the same time, beloved,

God is far more merciful than we know (v. 14)

That’s what David was banking on in verse 14, wasn’t it?

2 Samuel 24:14 ESV

Then David said to Gad, “I am in great distress. Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but let me not fall into the hand of man.”

God is more merciful than we can possibly know—even in the midst of a plague. We see His mercy in the fact that this virus is stoppable at all. After all, could not God send a plague so devastating that it simply wiped out humanity without any chance for us to protect ourselves? To this date over a half million people have recovered from COVID-19, and a large percentage of people who contract the virus never show any symptoms at all—surely this is part of God’s mercy to us!

And is it possible that we see in this crisis a merciful wake-up call from God? Is it possible that He has sent this pestilence upon us as a way of getting the attention of a rebellious and sinful people, to stop us in our tracks before we offend Him further? What if this is God’s way of shaking us as a nation out of our faithless pride to cause us to realize our need for Him? To turn to Him and cry out to Him for deliverance? A national poll conducted a few weeks ago revealed that 44 percent of Americans now sat that this virus is God’s way of calling our nation back to Him.

Make no mistake—this virus is the judgment of the hand of God against our nation. But in that severity is God’s mercy—God’s merciful stroke to stop us in our tracks before we fall even deeper into rebellion and self-destruction. And just maybe this is God’s way of answering the church’s decades-long plea for revival in this nation? Perhaps this pandemic will mark the beginning of the time when our nation was finally driven to its knees, having everything we ever trusted in—our economy, our medicine, our political structure, our science and technology—laid low in the dust so that we have nothing and no one else to turn to but God?

But make no mistake—the mercy of the LORD is great, but only if we come on His terms. Only then will we find

III. Our refuge from destruction (vv. 16-25)

The story continues in verses 16-17:

2 Samuel 24:16–17 ESV

And when the angel stretched out his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord relented from the calamity and said to the angel who was working destruction among the people, “It is enough; now stay your hand.” And the angel of the Lord was by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. Then David spoke to the Lord when he saw the angel who was striking the people, and said, “Behold, I have sinned, and I have done wickedly. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand be against me and against my father’s house.”

Our refuge from the destruction we deserve for our faithless pride begins in

A place of humble repentance (v. 17)

See how David confessed his sin— “I have sinned, I have done wickedly...” We will never find any refuge from this destruction until we repent as a nation for our pride and our wickedness. We need to pray—and continue to pray now like never before—that God will grant our nation repentance, that God will cause us as a people to fall to our knees and cry out to Him. God is demonstrating in this coronavirus how quickly He can bring our nation to its knees, how quickly He can take away everything that we have taken such boastful pride in—God can bring it all to nothing with a single stroke. And we must plead with God to grant our nation repentance so that we may call on Him for deliverance.

It was pointed out by another preacher some time ago that at the end of World War II, when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima—with all the horrific death and destruction that it caused—that the Japanese people did not surrender. And it wasn’t until a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki that they finally dropped their hostilities and sued for peace.

Beloved, we need to pray for our nation now like never before that the United States of America will not force God to drop a second bomb before we sign the surrender documents! Pray that God’s severe mercy in sending this coronavirus on us will be sufficient to bring us to our knees as a nation so that something worse will not have to happen to us before we come to a place of humble repentance before Him. But whatever it takes, let us pray that God does get our attention. As one writer put it, he would rather live in a poor and broken country that protects unborn children in the womb than in a rich and prosperous country that murders unborn children in the womb.

And for ourselves, beloved—this is the time for us to search our hearts for signs of that faithless pride that delights in our own self-sufficiency instead of humble gratitude to God for His protection. Perhaps you have a lot of reasons to feel confident and secure during this crisis—maybe you are considered an “essential worker” and your income is secure. Maybe you look around and realize that you live in a rural part of the state where infection is less likely to spread? Maybe you consider the fact that you are healthy and strong, and you have no underlying conditions that put you at a greater risk for serious complications from COVID-19.

If that’s so for you today, here’s the question to ask yourself: Are you delighting in those things because they represent your ability to protect yourself, or are you delighting in them because they represent God’s gracious gifts for you? Do you watch the news about this virus ravaging New York City and quietly think to yourself, “Well, that’s why I would never choose to live in a city!” Or do you look at the death toll there and say, “God, thank you that you have “determined the times and boundaries of my dwelling” so that when this catastrophe struck our nation I was in a safer place! Thank you, Father, that the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, and you have caused me to dwell secure!”

Christian you must sing the way David did in Psalm 18, that it is GOD who is your rock and your fortress and your deliverer, that it isn’t ultimately your “social distancing” or your N95 masks or your hoard of hand sanitizer but GOD who is your refuge, your shield, the horn of your salvation, your stronghold!

Our only refuge from destruction comes first from a place of humble repentance. And our refuge from destruction comes from

A place of costly sacrifice (vv. 21-15)

In verse 21 King David comes to the owner of the threshing floor where God called the angel to cease striking the people, and he tells Arunah that he is going to buy the threshing floor “in order to build an altar to the LORD, that the plague may be averted from the people.” When Arunah offered to donate the land instead, David replied,

2 Samuel 24:24 ESV

But the king said to Araunah, “No, but I will buy it from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing.” So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver.

This was a place of costly sacrifice—David did not want to offer a sacrifice that cost him nothing. In fact, it would cost him more than he would ever realize.

There’s another detail about this threshing floor that we read in 2 Chronicles Chapter 3, where it talks about Solomon building the Temple. In the first verse of the chapter, we read

2 Chronicles 3:1 ESV

Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to David his father, at the place that David had appointed, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.

Think of this! Solomon built the temple on the very spot where David pleaded for the life of Israel and offered burnt sacrifices and peace offerings to the LORD—this was the very same place where we read in Genesis 22 where Abraham went up to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to the LORD!

This mountain where David offered sacrifices to turn the wrath of God away from the people because of his selfish pride, this mountain where Abraham was declared to be righteous by God because of his faith in God’s promise to make him a great nation through Isaac, this mountain where Solomon built the Temple, where the Ark of the Covenant sat shrouded in thick terror and darkness in the Holy of Holies, splashed with the blood of innocent bulls and goats for the covering of the sins of God’s people—all of these things pointed forward to the day when David’s own Son, the Lamb of God Himself, Jesus Christ would be “stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; the chastisement that brought us peace was upon Him, the Faithful One struck with the plague of God’s wrath because of our faithless pride, so that we could be made whole in Him!

Jesus Christ is the only refuge we have from the plague of pride that threatens to destroy us. And we need to pray for our nation, that we may repent of the faithless, arrogant pride that we have flaunted for so long, that we will fall to our knees as a nation and cry out for salvation—there is no salvation without a Savior, and there is no other Savior for our nation than Jesus Christ!

And if you are listening to this sermon apart from Jesus Christ today, let me plead with you: You are far more guilty than you realize—and God is far more merciful than you know! Turn away from delighting in your own accomplishments and trusting in your own ability to protect yourself. The only refuge you have from the consequences of your sinful pride and arrogance, your only refuge you have from the devastation of this pandemic, your only refuge from the economic ruin—your only refuge from any of it—is when you come to that place of humble repentance, call out to Him in faith and cling to that costly sacrifice that turns the plague of the righteous wrath of an infinitely holy God away from you—don’t wait another moment—come, and welcome!—to Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Hebrews 13:20–21 ESV

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

What things are you most grateful for in your life during this present crisis? How can you guard your heart against slipping into the kind of self-centered satisfaction that King David displayed in this passage?

Read Jesus’ words in Luke 13:4-5 again. How does Jesus describe the people who are victims of a disaster? How about the people who escape the disaster? Is one group more sinful than the other (or more righteous than the other?) What warning does Jesus give about repentance here?

Read Genesis 22:10-14, the story of Abraham preparing to offer Isaac as a sacrifice to the LORD. How did God provide a sacrifice in place of Isaac? How does this point ahead to Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross?

Think of the reasons you have to be confident in the midst of this crisis. Write them down one by one, and take time this week to pray through Psalm 18:1-2, thanking Him that He has provided these good things for you because He is your rock and fortress and deliverer!