Our dangerous and merciful God 2 Sam 24:1-25. Introduction

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1 1 This morning I want to meditate on the nature and character of our God. My title today is Our Dangerous and Merciful God. Our dangerous and merciful God 2 Sam 24:1-25 St Stephens Belrose Today we come to the end of our series in 2 Samuel and I hope to draw together some of the strands of both 1 and 2 Samuel as we conclude. In particular I hope to draw out what we learn about our God from these two great books of the OT. And in so doing I want us to do what Paul urges us to do in Romans 11: to consider the kindness and the severity of God (Rom 11:22 RSV). And so we are meditating this morning on the character of our God. But before I come to the danger and mercy of God I want to make sure we are standing on the same ground as we consider God. You see the God of the Bible is a God about whom you can tell a story. Words: 3300 Nov 26, 2017 Now if someone asked us to stand up and describe the attributes of God my guess is that most of us would respond with that well-known answer: God is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. He is all-powerful, all-knowing and ever-present. Introduction And of course each of these adjectives say something true and meaningful about God. And each can be supported by biblical proof-texts.

2 2 But there is a problem here. The problem is this: you can t tell a story about someone who is everywhere, who knows everything and who can do anything. Try to imagine a person who is everywhere all at once; who knows everything there is to know about the past, present and future; and who ultimately causes everything to happen. Now try to imagine telling a story about this person. It s pretty much impossible. To tell a story you need a character who lives in a particular place and time and sets out to do a particular thing. And the God of the Bible is such a character. The God of the Bible is a God about whom you can tell a story. In fact the whole Bible is the amazing story of God. Now that might sound heretical. Like I have just shrunk God down. It might sound heretical but it is not. It is biblical! The great God of the Bible is a God whose greatness is purposeful. He creates, he judges, he promises, he acts in fulfillment of his promises, he speaks, he sends, he heals, he restores, he renews and resurrects. This is the God I want to speak about today. When God acts on behalf of his people and in view of our needs we experience his mercy. He is our merciful God. I ll come to that in a few moments. But when God judges his people we experience his great power as a threat. On that day he is our dangerous God. 1. Our dangerous God (1-15) Explanation So here we are in 2 Sam 24 and the last chapter of 2 Samuel. We read here the tragic story of the census. At some point early in David s reign over Israel he decided to count the able-bodied men in his Kingdom; that is to count all the men who could be called up to serve as soldiers should the need arise. Not everyone thought this was a good idea. Even David s military commander Joab thought it was a bad idea. But David prevailed and the count was taken. It took nearly 10 months to travel through the nation. They found that there were 800,000 men in the north and 500,000 in the south; a total of 1.3m. But almost immediately David was deeply convicted that what he did was wrong. We are not told why it was wrong. Perhaps he was overreaching again as he did over Bathsheba and Uriah and as Samuel predicted the kings would. Perhaps this was a case of managerialism, of self-reliance rather than trusting God to provide when the need arose. We don t know. And of course the writer of 2 Sam thinks we don t need to know. It was wrong. That s all there is to it. And so David prays. Read 10.

3 3 And so Yahweh, Israel s God, sends his prophet Gad to David to declare his judgment against David and against Israel. David is given a choice: three years of famine, three months of defeat at the hands of encroaching armies. Or three days of pestilence, of plague in the land (13). This puts David in a terrible position. He tells Gad that he is in deep distress. He chooses the last option: three days of a terrible plague. He chooses this because he would rather be in the hands of God than in the hands of his enemies (14). And so we read v 15. This was yet another dark moment in Israel s history. A moment when they experienced the dangerous judgment of their God. But I have omitted the darkest part of this story. It s in v 1. Read. The LORD was already angry with his people even before the census. We don t know why. Apparently we don t need to know why. And because of this anger the LORD himself incited David to take this action. Again we don t know how the LORD did that. We don t need to know. What we need to know is that God is moving against his own people. And if we compare this narrative with the parallel telling of the story in 1 Chron 21 things get even worse. There we are told that it was the adversary or the Satan who incited David to take the census. And so the darkest aspect of this story is that at this point God has become Israel s adversary, her enemy, her opponent. This is our dangerous God. Illustration This is not the first time in Samuel we discover our God is dangerous. Samuel had this truth burned into his heart on the day when his temple/home in Shiloh was torn apart. That was the day when the ark of the covenant was captured by the Philistines. Eli s two corrupt sons Hophni and Phinehas died that day. When the message of their deaths and the loss of the ark came to Eli he too collapsed and died. And when Phinehas wife heard the news she went into labour and with her dying breath gave the child his name: Ichabod the glory has departed. All these events in fulfillment of the first prophetic word Samuel received as a young child that night when the Lord called his name three times in the dark (1 Sam 3). The Philistines learned how dangerous Israel s God could be when they took the ark into their towns. First in Ashdod where a terrible kind of bubonic plague broke out among the people. Then in Gath the same. When they sent the ark on to Ekron the

4 4 people were in a terrible panic and cried out They have brought the ark of the god of Israel to kill us (1 Sam 5:1-12). After seven months they sent the ark back to Israel. The God of Israel and his ark was too dangerous for the Philistines. The men of Beth Shemesh discovered this too when 70 were killed on the day they opened the ark and looked into it. Who can stand in the presence of the LORD, this holy God? they asked (1 Sam 6:19). David and all Israel learned it on the day when they tried to move the ark from the house of Abinabad into Jerusalem. On that day the anger of the LORD broke out against Uzzah because he put out his hand to stop the ark from falling and he was struck dead. David was angry that day. And afraid. He asked how can the ark of the LORD ever come to me? (2 Sam 6:9). It was too dangerous to bring it into Jerusalem. The God of 1 and 2 Samuel is a dangerous God. He is our dangerous God. Application How should we apply this to our lives? Here s a short thought experiment. What if God is angry with the Australian Church? What if he decided to judge us for our failure to obey him? What if he decided to withdraw his saving power from us? That would explain why the Australian church is shrinking rapidly. Why church attendance is halving every 50 years. It would explain why we experience so little power in our prayer and evangelism. It would explain why Christians and Christian leaders in this country are being called to account for appalling moral failures inside the Church. That in turn might explain why at critical moments in Australia s history the Church has had little or no moral authority. It would explain why aspects of the Christian worldview which was shared even by unbelieving Australians is now widely ridiculed and dismissed. What if the great God of the scriptures has become our adversary? What if our dangerous God has decided against us? What if the greatest problem of the modern Australian church is the problem of an angry and dangerous God? You see the God of the Bible is a God about whom you can tell a story. He creates. He judges. He speaks. He decides. He acts. That is scary. Take it seriously and it is terrifying. But it is not hopeless. Far from it.

5 5 The turning point here in 2 Sam 24 was the moment when David s heart was struck. The NIV has conscience-stricken but the Hebrew is more concrete than that. David took a blow to the heart. Something crashed into David s heart. What was it? It was the awareness of his sin. And so he prays I have sinned greatly (10). And then take away the guilt of your servant. In the same way the contemporary Australian Church may need to go through its own heartattack. Its own near-death experience. Its own heart-rending acknowledgment of sin. And its own heart-felt plea for God to forgive. Other options will present themselves of course. A self-righteous refusal to believe that God could treat us this way. Or a political strategy to take back the power we think is rightfully ours. Or we could just roll over and go back to sleep. And where do you think those choices will get us? They won t get us to the place we need to be: heart-broken before the LORD pleading for mercy. I have preached along these lines many times over the years and in many Churches. I can only remember two people taking me seriously enough to talk to me about it. And they were both here at St Stephens. I m glad of that. It s a start. But I do wonder what would have to happen for a conviction like this to take hold across the great breadth of the Australian Church? So, we have meditated on our dangerous God. Now let s turn our attention to our merciful God. 2. Our merciful God (16-25) Explanation We pick up the story in v14 where David explains to Gad his decision to choose the third terrible option of 3 days of plague in the land: Let us fall into the hands of the LORD, for his mercy is great. Yes our God is dangerous. But he is also a God of mercy. His mercy is great. The mercy of God is evident here in two ways. It seems that this terrible plague affected the entire nation from Dan to Beersheba, from north to south. But there was one exception: the city of Jerusalem. This was because as we read in v 16 the LORD was grieved because of the calamity. When the angel who was afflicting the people approached Jerusalem the LORD saw it and called out to the angel Enough! Withdraw your hand. And so Jerusalem was spared the suffering of the rest of the nation because of the LORD s compassion on that city.

6 6 At the same time, it seems, David was praying. There in Jerusalem he was watching the plague spread out across the nation and then approach his city. He prays v 17. It s a compassionate prayer in which he takes responsibility for the wrong-doing and pleads on behalf of his flock. And so both the LORD and the king were grieved at this terrible ordeal and were seeking ways to stop it; to temper judgment with mercy. And so the LORD moves the prophet Gad to instruct David to build an altar there in Jerusalem. The angel of death paused at the threshing floor of Araunah. Now threshing floors were patches of cleared land on the crest of a hill to catch the wind and so assist in the winnowing of grain. And so the LORD instructs David to build an altar on the top of this hill belonging to Araunah. And so the final verses of 2 Sam read like this: vv 24b,25. The LORD answers David s prayer and the plague on Israel was stopped. The final word of 2 Sam is a word of mercy. Judgment has been restrained. Overall the rate of death across the country was about 1.5%. When the black death afflicted Europe in the 14 th century the rate was about 60%. Terrible though this plague was, it was a limited phenomenon. Limited geographically (not Jerusalem), in duration (3 days), and in its impact on Israel population. Judgment tempered by mercy. But there is a second level of mercy here. Because this event points to the mercy which is at the heart of our God. This is the story which explains why David came to own the threshing floor of Araunah. And from 1 Chron 21 we learn that this was the site David chose for the Temple and on which Solomon built it. Here we begin to see how David s occupation of Jerusalem and his instinct to bring the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem fit in God s greater purpose. Jerusalem and the Temple mount will become the place where God deals with his people. There they will offer sacrifices to their God for the forgiveness of sin. The threshing floor of Araunah will be the place where God s judgment is tempered by his compassion and his mercy. Not only that but this mountain is Mt Moriah. It is the mountain Abraham climbed in Gen 22 to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is the place where the LORD stopped Abraham s hand at the last moment and supplied a substitute, a ram, for Abraham to sacrifice in place of his son. Where God s dangerous demand was tempered by his mercy. And David too is caught up into the spirit of this place when he offers his family as a substitute. Let

7 7 your hand he prays fall upon me and my family (17). And so in time Jerusalem will become the place where Jesus, the descendant of David, the Son of God himself, will become an offering for the sins of the whole world. This then is the place where the merciful heart of God is demonstrated to the world. As David declared in a moment of very great anguish: Let us fall into the hands of the LORD for his mercy is great. (14). Here then is our merciful God. Merciful to Israel at the time of this terrible plague. Merciful to the whole world in the provision of a city and a hill and a substitute to bear the sins of the world and so provide forgiveness and escape from the terrible judgment of God. This mercy to the world comes from the very heart of our God. Our dangerous God is our merciful God. Application So what of our thought experiment? What if God is angry with the Australian Church? What if that is the main issue for us? What if the main problem of the contemporary church is an angry and dangerous God? And what if the Church began to understand its situation? And began to call out to God for mercy? Not for blessing and prosperity. Not for healing and for growth. Not for power and respect. Not for relevance and influence. But for mercy. What do you think? What would God do, do you think? I think we have good reason to believe that he would respond with mercy on his Church. And that he would return to us and show his face amongst us. But if there is one thing 1 and 2 Samuel teaches us it is this: not to presume upon God. That s what David learned from the death of Uzzah. It s the lesson here in ch 24 too about the census. Which is why the prayer for mercy must be accompanied by a genuine heart-searching selfexamination. There must be the punch to the heart. The recognition of the sin, the failing which gave rise to God s angry and dangerous judgment in the first place. Do you think the Australian church is capable of that kind of self-examination? The last time I preached on this chapter was some time in the 90 s when I was pastor of MBC. My theme that day was Leading without counting. I argued then that spiritual leadership is quite different to managerialism. Managers count things so that they can better control them. But spiritual leaders ask the foundational questions. They ask

8 8 the God-questions. They wrestle with a God they cannot control. Managers live in a world where there are no surprises; where every contingency has been anticipated. Spiritual leaders live in a world in full of surprises; where even God does completely unpredictable things. The God of the Bible is a God about whom you can tell a story. It is a story full of surprises. And the story of the relationship between God and the Australian church is playing itself out in and through our lives. And in my view the question of our time is this: why is God withdrawing from us? We have sinned against the LORD and in his anger he is afflicting us. Our dangerous God is moving against us. And unless we are willing to examine ourselves and to root out our offence there is no hope for us. We will continue on this decline until we are a mere remnant. But there is another possibility. We abandon our prideful, boastful self-confidence and seek the LORD. We pray that God would raise up prophets to speak to our failings and that he would punch us in the heart. We pray our way to David s prayer here in v 10. And so we find our way to the mercy of God. Our dangerous God is our merciful God. His mercy is our only hope. Conclusion So we have been meditating on the kindness and the severity of our God. Does the severity of our God scare you? It scares me. Our God is a dangerous God. But the final word here in 2 Sam 24 and indeed the whole story of 1 and 2 Samuel is a word of mercy: the LORD answered prayer on behalf of the land and the plague on Israel was stopped (25). Ah, I hear you say. Yes the final word is mercy. I can put his dangerous severity out of my mind. But as someone once said Unless you know God as your enemy you cannot know him as your friend. Paul urges us to meditate on both the kindness and the severity of God. The God we read about in the books of Samuel is a merciful and a dangerous God. As Hannah prayed in 1 Sam 1: He brings death and makes alive; he brings down to the grave and raises up. He sends poverty and wealth; he humbles and he exalts. (6-7) This is our God, merciful and dangerous.

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