2 Samuel 24:9-12- Sin Has Consequences
While confessing our sin takes away guilt. It doesn’t take away the consequences of our sin in this life. And here David is going to have to face consequences for his sin.
Although actually while we talk about David’s sin here, the chapter starts with the explanation for all that follows, and that is that God is angry with Israel. And in his sovereignty, the way he decided to punish them was by inciting David to number them. Perhaps someone will say: ‘I thought James chapter 1 says: ‘Let no-one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no-one’. And that’s true. So when we read here that God incited David against them, that’s simply in the sense that God is sovereign over all things. And so when we have the same story in 1st Chronicles 21, we’re told that Satan incited David. That’s not a contradiction. It’s just filling in the details. God, in his anger against Israel, let Satan incite David to go and number them. And if we struggle to get our head around that, that’s ok. We are called to worship God even if we don’t understand. We can trust him. And perhaps it helps us do that when we realise that the one man at the centre of all this – the man who is forced to make an invidious choice as to which punishment will fall on his beloved people – trusted God in the midst of all this. And if David was there. And if it was his people who were killed. And his sin being punished. And if he could trust in the midst of it all that God was more merciful than man. If he could trust in the midst of all this that God was good, then we can too.
It’s not quite right to say that 70,000 people here die because of the sin of one man. 70,000 of the men of Israel die because God was angry with Israel. David’s sin was just the background against which God brought down his punishment on them. What had Israel done to make God angry? Again we’re not told. But back in chapter 15 we saw how they rejected God’s choice of king and went after Absalom. In chapter 20 we saw another rebellion, when we’re told that ‘all the men of Israel withdrew from David and followed Sheba the son of Bichri’. In whatever way, that rebellious spirit must have manifested itself again. And so 70,000 men of Israel don’t die because of David’s sin. But they die because of their own sin, and the sin of their nation.
Question
- Who has done wrong in this passage?
Prayer Points
- Pray that God would have mercy upon our nation.
- Use prayer points from your congregation.
- Pray for family matters.