Bonus Content from December 26th, 2021

2 Samuel 24 Bonus Content

One question was texted in after Sunday’s service:

How can we say that “God tempts no one” in light of “God incited…”?

This crucial question comes back to the all-important distinction that God is not the author of evil and is not the immediate cause of David’s temptation. 1 Chronicles 21:1 makes it clear that Satan was the one who directly did the inciting, which means that 2 Samuel 24:1 must be speaking in broader theological terms – i.e. if God permits Satan to incite David, there’s a sense in which God is inciting David.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that still makes me uncomfortable! But I have found this clarification helpful when wrestling with an issue like this one in which we see God in some way standing behind what seems to be evil:

When God permits Satan to do evil, God and Satan don’t stand behind that evil in the same way.

Satan is relishing it, savoring the opportunity, working with all his might to derail God’s ultimate purposes. Meanwhile, God is grieving it, not delighting in it, allowing his narrow-lens purposes to be violated in the short term in order to achieve his ultimate, broad-lens purposes.

Jonathan Edwards provides an analogy on this that’s been helpful for me. I’m paraphrasing here, but Edwards points out that the sun doesn’t produce light and warmth in the same way that it produces dark and cold. The sun is the fountain of light and warmth; those are exuded by the sun. But the sun only produces dark and cold not as the fountain of those things, but by dropping below the horizon. It’s like that with sin: God doesn’t positively produce or influence sin, but He does sometimes withhold his action and energy in such a way that sin will follow.

And that’s what he does here. He doesn’t restrain Satan from inciting David, and so there’s a sense in which God’s the one ultimately doing the inciting. This is just like when Satan afflicted Job, and Job attributes the work of Satan to God – “should we receive good from the Lord and not evil?” Yet the author says, “In all this, Job did not sin with his mouth.”

The Bible doesn’t present God and Satan as equal adversaries. Instead, it presents an all-powerful God who is carrying out his purposes, and a Satan who often ends up unwittingly carrying out God’s ultimate purposes despite his best attempts to thwart those same purposes.

I also had to cut one more reflection on what this may have been like for the people of Israel:

So because David forgets that he’s just a steward, because he forgets that he’s supposed to be reliant on God’s promises, the generals go out from town to town executing David’s order.

You can picture the scene in these small towns all over Israel: it probably was a pretty terrifying moment as you feel the ground shaking under your feet and see the stomping of horse hooves coming your way with soldiers and royal flags in hand.

They say something like, “We’ve come to get a count of all the fighting men ready to be conscripted into the king’s service to fight and lose their lives if needed for the sake of David’s kingdom.”

This is exactly what Samuel warned Israel about 1 Samuel 8! This is the way kings become: they start to treat the people as cogs in the machine, an individual’s life becomes subsumed to the king’s wishes. And David falls right into that pattern, just like the kings of the nations around them.