2 Samuel Chapter 24:1-10

Job's saying, why does my king have pleasure in this counting thing, which that starts to paint the picture that David is wanting to count the people to know how strong his army is, or perhaps since there was a temple tax to know how big his tax base was. God is saying, you know what, don't trust that, trust me. Even if God influenced this decision, David still is the one who makes the decision. Welcome to Cross the Bridge with David McGee, senior pastor of The Bridge in Kernersville, North Carolina. Today, David McGee is teaching through 2 Samuel chapter 24, verse by verse. One of David McGee's associate pastors is Pastor D.A.

Brown. Welcome to the program, D.A. Hey, Bob. We're excited about what God is doing through Cross the Bridge with Pastor David. We want to take a few minutes to pray for some cities in our listening audience.

In California, we have Chico, Clear Lake, Kalinga, Crescent City, Desert Hot Springs, Doris, and Eureka. Lord, we pray for people in these cities to tune in and listen. We pray that you would heal them if they're battling some physical ailments. We pray that today many people will put their hope and trust in you for their personal salvation.

God, we pray that people would be excited about following you in these cities. And God, we pray for the churches and pastors, that they would walk in unity, that they would stick to the vision that you've given them. Lord, that they would apply your word in every area of their life. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen.

Amen, brother. Thank you so much for praying for our audience. As we're turning to 2 Samuel 24, we're going to see a sin that David committed that most people don't think about, but it was obviously something that was very important to God. D.A., what are some of the lessons that we want to take away from King David's experience here? Bob, we want to be used by God. We want God to do great things through us to be a blessing to other people.

It's important that our motivation not be for others to give us attention, but our motivation to be for God's glory and for attention to be put on Him. And in this chapter, we'll see that brought to life in King David's life. So let's listen as David McGee shares verse by verse, starting in 2 Samuel 24. Tonight's an interesting chapter, and we talked before that these last few chapters of 2 Samuel are not in a chronological order. 23 is the exception of the last four chapters because it says that these are the last words of David. So we know that they happened towards the end of his life. Chapter 21, 22, 24 are exceptions.

We know that for a couple of reasons, one of which is when we go through the book of Chronicles, some of which is actually a repeat of what we've just gone through in 2 Samuel. There is a chronological order that you can see there's a pattern for these chapters. That being said, we go chapter by chapter, which means we finish up one chapter, we start the next chapter.

Why do I say that? Because you could be in a church for 20 years and probably not hear the chapter that I'm going to teach tonight. And here's why, and I'll be honest with you, this is a difficult chapter to teach. It's a difficult chapter to read. It's a difficult chapter to understand.

Now there's a couple of reasons for that. One of which is we're attempting at all times as we read the Bible, we're very dependent upon the Holy Spirit to reveal things to us. When you read the Bible, you can't in your own carnal mind understand what God is trying to communicate to you. So one of the things that's very good to do is pray before you read your Bible or get into a devotion or especially before Bible study, Lord please reveal your word to me. Send your Holy Spirit that I might see this clearly.

So we're trying to understand an infinite God with a finite mind and so that's one of the challenges. And so, you know, we're looking at this chapter and getting ready to jump in here and again, there's some difficult issues in here, but because we go verse by verse, chapter by chapter, we're going to jump into this chapter. You guys ready? All right, two of you are ready. Are you guys ready? All right.

All right. So 2 Samuel 24 verse 1. It says again, the anger of the Lord was aroused against Israel and he moved David against them to say, go number Israel and Judah. So right off the bat, we have just a verse that has a lot of things in it. It's a difficult passage of scripture. Again, this is actually just a difficult verse to be honest. There's some parallels of the account in the book of Chronicles, which is helpful to refer to because you know, as it's been said, the best commentary on the word of God is the word of God itself. And so when you get to something like this, you can go to other verses and kind of look at them. And I would encourage you to go to at another time, maybe in your home, on your personal site, go to 1 Chronicles chapter 21, which is a parallel passage to this.

Here's the problem. It says the anger of the Lord was aroused against Israel and he moved David to do something that was going, that God was against. And you have to sit back and go, well, why did God move him to do something that God was not in?

And let's understand something. There's the concept of the free will of people. You have a free will.

I have a free will. What that means in spiritual terms is that God can't literally make you in this life do things. He has a, sometimes a very strong way of convincing us to do something, but yet the decision ultimately is up to us. And so David here is making a decision that I believe God firms up in his mind. There's a passage that is, in case this passage wasn't difficult enough for you, let's throw another difficult passage in there. When it says that God hardened Pharaoh's heart to do some things that he did, not to let the Israelites go.

And you read the passage and you go, well, is that really fair? I mean, God hardened his heart to do something wrong. But the concept, let's understand, hardened his heart. God didn't make the decision. Pharaoh made the decision. God firmed up that decision in Pharaoh. In other words, Pharaoh first maybe he's like, yeah, I'm going to do this. And then firmly was in his rebellion against God.

Now I believe the same sort of thing happened here. I believe David wanted to count. And I think for the wrong reasons, as we'll bring out in this chapter, and God kind of sealed that reserve in him. Let's read verse two and I'll point out something. Verse two. So the king said to Joab, the commander of the army who was with him, now go throughout all the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and count the people that I may know the number of the people.

So this is where David is going to mess up. That lets us know something. Because there's other places in the Hebrew scriptures and Old Testament where they counted the people and it wasn't wrong. There's a couple of times where God had them count the people. And so obviously counting the people wasn't a wrong or bad thing.

So you have to say, okay, there's something more that's going on here. And I think number one, we got to look at what was the, what was the motivation? Why was David wanting to count the people? A lot of times you can do something that seems like the right thing, but your motivation is wrong. And you need to understand that God is not impressed by our false or fake works.

Like if you do something good just to, just to be seen by people, then God sees that you're not necessarily really doing is unto him. I remember years ago, and I've shared this before, I was on staff as an assistant pastor and worship leader. And you know, I've done a lot of musical things. And so, you know, I came to, came to the church and we sat around, had staff meeting and we were signing tasks and duties and stuff. And it came around to who was going to, we didn't, that church didn't have a sparkle team. And so it came around to who was going to clean the restrooms.

And they said, well, you know, you clean the men and women's restrooms. And I said, okay, today, they said, no, that'll be your role indefinitely. And I said, uh, I was, I was young in the ministry and I said, okay. But to be honest, I was a little tweaked about it. I said, okay, I'll do it.

I'll do it. You know, so I go and after a few days of cleaning the restroom every day, you know, I'm cleaning the restroom one day and I'm in there and I kind of got a bad attitude. And the Lord says, uh, what are you doing? I said, I'm cleaning the restrooms for you. And in that still small voice, God said, well, you can stop now.

I'm not real impressed. I got my attention. I said, uh, I said, well, I'm doing it. He said, but where's your heart? I said, yeah, but I'm doing it. He said, yeah, but where's your heart? I said, I'm doing it.

He said, but your heart's not in it. I said, Lord, I'm sorry. I don't deserve to be in this church, much less be working at the church, much less being cleaning the restrooms. I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be a gatekeeper at your house or anything else. I'm a, I'm a wretched sinner and Lord, forgive me. I'm sorry.

That was wrong of me. From that day on, I really enjoyed cleaning the restrooms and God had a way of purifying my heart in that. I enjoyed it so much so that, that, you know, a couple months later or something, you know, the church had another staff member and we're in a staff meeting and the pastor said, well, so-and-so will clean the restrooms. And I was like, oh, that's my job. He said, well, it was your job.

See, so you can do the right thing, but have the wrong heart about it. What's your, I'm glad you're here. Let me go ahead and say that. I'm glad you're here tonight. It could be somewhere else, but what's your heart in being here is your heart. Hey, I want to learn about God and worship God. Or is your heart in church again? Well, God sees your heart and sometimes, you know, you're going to have to just act outside of your emotions. You can't just follow your emotions, but if your heart is continually not in something that's a good thing, that's a pure thing that's under the Lord, you know what?

There's a problem and you need to do a heart check. So there's something in David about this counting that's just all wrong. We're going to throw some theories out there as we move along, but going back to verse one, if you're looking at it in the new King James, it says, again, the anger of the Lord was aroused against Israel and he, and there's a capital H there, moved David against them to say. It's kind of an unfortunate translation when you go into the Hebrew. The reason is HE, the capital H, would seem to indicate that it was God who moved David to do this. But when you go into the Hebrew, the only time that God's name appears is when it says the anger of the Lord.

Now talked about using the Bible as the commentary. Here's what Chronicles adds to this. First Chronicles 21, one said, now Satan stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel.

So now you're beginning to understand. I see why you didn't want to go in this chapter. See, it's a difficult thing, but here's what I believe. God gave his permission to Satan who came and tempted David in this way. When David started going down that way, God then firmed David's heart in his decision. Friend, a lot of times in your life, you've gone to do the wrong thing. And instead of God kind of turning you around, God said, okay, if that's what you want to do, go for it. And friend, that's one of the worst things that can happen to you is if you get so headstrong that you win in a tug of war with God and God goes, okay, go ahead, do it.

I'll be here to catch you when you get through. And that has happened in my life. And those have been some of the most painful times in my life when God let me have my way. See, a lot of times we think the worst thing that could happen is that God completely gets away with it. It gets his way in our lives. That's the best thing that can happen, friend.

The worst thing that can happen is for you to have your own way in your life. Remember that next time you're in that little tug of war with God, not that anybody else here does that, but I used to, so I wanted to share that, right? Yeah, that's for the church down the road, not for this one, but I thought I'd go ahead and share that with you. So here we have this, and again, since counting is not bad, the census is not illegal. We can know there's something more going on.

And actually when you read the account in 1 Chronicles 21, Joab seems to indicate, and I think verse three or four of that chapter, seems to indicate that what David is asking to do is illegal. So you go, okay, well, there was something going on more than the counting. And again, we'll get to that in just a second. You're listening to Pastor David McGee on Cross the Bridge.

He'll be back with more in just a moment. But first, if you haven't been to our website at crossthebridge.com yet, what are you waiting for? Go to crossthebridge.com to learn more about how listeners like you are helping get the life-changing truth of God's word to more people through the radio, internet, and mobile technologies. At crossthebridge.com, you can also check out our broadcast schedule, listen to more teaching from Pastor David, and sign up for Pastor David's free daily devotional. And there's more there too.

So visit crossthebridge.com today. Now, here's Pastor David as he continues sharing verse by verse. Verse three, and Joab said to the king, now may the Lord your God add to the people a hundred times more than there are, and may the eyes of my Lord the king see it. But why does my Lord the king desire this thing? Desire in the new King James. Actually, the King James has delight, and the Hebrew word is have pleasure in, literally.

So Joab is saying, why does my king have pleasure in this counting thing, which that starts to paint the picture that David is wanting to count the people to know how strong his army is, or perhaps since there was a temple tax to know how big his tax base was. Which are two reasons that God is saying, you know what, don't trust that, trust me. Even if God influenced this decision, David still is the one who makes the decision.

David is responsible for his decision. I know sometimes, boy, that just stinks to know that we're responsible for our decisions, but that's the reality. That's a big part of biblical counseling.

Why? Because a lot of non-biblical counseling rotates around who you can blame, that it's not your fault, however messed up you are now, however sin-stained or whatever you did last week, a lot of counseling, a lot of psychiatric and psychological counseling is let's figure out who we can blame. And so then after a few weeks, after a few months, or after you're a lot more broker than when you went in, you figure out that your mother didn't hold you enough as a baby, and your father didn't wave to you every time he left, and that's why you are where you are today. And that's why, you know, if you don't believe me, I mean, if you've been to counseling, you know I'm telling the truth, and even if you've never been to counseling, just pick up the newspaper, because people are always doing crazy things, and then, you know, they kill like 12 people and say, well, you know, my mom didn't hold me enough as a baby, that's why I killed a dozen people.

And the world goes, oh, okay. I know it's hard to take responsibility for our decisions, and I know when we mess up that we like to blame other people, but our healing often comes when we're willing to say, you know what, that was me. I made that decision. I did the wrong thing.

I caused all this to go haywire. I'm not going to stand back and just sit at other people and try to blame other people, because here's the thing. While you're blaming other people for something you did wrong, you're not repentant. You're not in a place to ask God for forgiveness.

Why? You're still saying it's somebody else's fault. How can you ask God to forgive? God just forgives that person over there.

They influenced me to do the wrong thing. So you can't literally ask God for forgiveness for another person, only for you. So God doesn't violate our free will. The life lesson here is God looks at our motivation for doing the things we do.

Now, that can be scary. Some of you read that and go, oh, my gosh, he sees that my motivation's not pure. You know, let's be honest. Very few things that we do in life, our motivation is completely pure, but as long as it's leaning towards that way, we're in a good place.

If our motivations are completely impure, then what happens? Well, we're really being a hypocrite. We're being a hypocrite if we're completely not doing, you know, not into what we're doing. Now, God wants to influence our decisions. At times in your life, God will seek to strongly influence your decisions, but it's still your decision.

And I'll tell you, friends, sometimes when you get in that tug of war with God and you go, God, no, I really want to go do this, and God goes, no, no, no, you shouldn't do that. I really want to do this. No, you shouldn't do that. Oh, God, I really want to do this.

Okay, do it. That's the worst thing that can happen. You know, our public schools played a tug of war 45 years ago with God. They played a tug of war and they came out and they said, you know what, we don't want prayer in the school anymore.

We're going to make it illegal. They won and they lost because now they're spending millions and millions of dollars to figure out why children want to kill other children, why children want to kill themselves, why premarital pregnancies are on the rise, teenage pregnancies are on the rise, all these things. Well, we've asked God to take his hands off our public education system and God said, okay, if that's what you want. So David has this weird motivation and God's going to allow him to go forward with it.

And again, when this happens, when God says, okay, boy, trouble and pain are ahead. Verse four, nevertheless, the king's word prevailed against Joab and against the captains of the army. Therefore, Joab and the captains of the army went out from the presence of the king to count the people of Israel. Again, another indicator that something is wrong is it says the king's word prevailed not only against Joab, but against the captains of the army. If it was a simple census, Joab and these captains would not have been against it.

There had to be something else going on. We're going to read a few more verses and I'm going to throw out a couple of things that it may have been. Verse five, and they crossed over the Jordan and camped in Aurora on the right side of the town, which is in the midst of the ravine of Gad and towards Hizer. Then they came to Gilead and to the land of Tatim, Hodesh, Hochai. They came to Danon and around to Sidon and they came to the stronghold of Tyre and to all the cities of the Hivites and the Canaanites. Then they went out to south Judah as far as Beersheba. So when they had gone through all the land, they came to Jerusalem at the end of nine months and 20 days. That's how long it took to count all these people. Then Joab gave the sum of the number of the people to the king and there were in Israel 800,000 valiant men who drew the sword and the men of Judah were 500,000 men.

Hmm. It's interesting then in the census in verse nine, when it, when it talks about the numbers, it talks about the soldiers. It doesn't mention the women. It doesn't mention the children.

Why would that be? Well, the only reason to count all your soldiers is to calculate your strength. Why would God be against David calculating his strength by counting the army?

Where was David's strength? Was it in the army? Where was the army when David was staring at this huge man, Goliath? Was it in the army? No, the army wasn't there. Was it in the sling? I've heard interesting teachings talking about how good David was with the sling and the rocks and he probably was, but was that where his power was?

No, it was in God. Somehow David momentarily forgot that, that his power was from God and he wanted to measure his power by the number of soldiers that he had. Now again, he could have been doing this for tax reasons, to tax the soldiers or to tax the people perhaps. Probably what he was doing was trying to calculate his strength, measure his strength by the number of people that were in the army.

He had gotten into some bad thinking. Now let me be honest about something. There's people here in this fellowship that on Sunday morning, they do it on Thursday night too, that actually count people. We count people and here's why we do it. Simply administratively to know, you know, when to add another service, how many chairs, when we might need chairs, that sort of thing.

That's a legitimate thing. Now, because we didn't count for a long time, but then we thought, you know, this is really poor planning and God convicted me as I was reading the Bible and he said, know your flocks and herds well and I thought, wow, because you know, people are always going, how many people come to your church? I don't know, you know, and I thought that was a really spiritual answer until God showed me that scripture, know your flocks and herds well and then it was like, I don't know, didn't sound too good anymore. So I thought, you know what, we should, this is something we should know, we should measure.

God bless some guys. When we first started, they were like, oh, this is bad. It's just not good counting people.

Our motivation for doing it was pure. I've never looked at how many people came and looked at it and gone, oh, what did I say? How did I, how did I teach that? Oh, I need to do that again. I've never thought, oh, well, you know, I drove off a bunch in the last couple of weeks.

I need to lighten up a little bit. I've never done that, but I think it's, you know, in, in, in being an organization, there's some validity in that. As long as your motivation is a good one, we don't go, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Okay. Now we're doing, you know, God's blessed now because no, no, no, no, you can't do that. So, you know, David wanted to count the soldiers and there was something wrong. We can sit here and we can go on and on and theorize about it, but let's just say something was wrong. Something was amiss and the reason he wanted to count. There was a problem.

Maybe it was a trust issue where he wasn't trusting God. Verse 10, David's heart condemned him after he had numbered the people. So David said to the Lord, I've sinned greatly in what I have done, but now I pray, O Lord, take away the iniquity of your servant for I've done very foolishly.

Let me point out a couple of things. David's heart condemned him after he had numbered the people. How long did it take for David to get convicted? Well, go back to verse eight. So when they had gone through all the land, they came to Jerusalem at the end of nine months and 20 days. It at least took David that long to be convicted about this, but praise God, he was convicted.

Sometimes it takes a while to get convicted about something. You ever notice that you can do something wrong and then sometimes hours, sometimes minutes, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, sometimes years later, you look back at a situation and go, wow, I didn't handle that one very well. You know, you go to a family reunion or a family gathering and you're trying to figure out why somebody is angry at you.

You can't figure it out until the Holy Spirit goes, come here. Do you remember saying that? Oh yeah, gee.

Now I know why they're mad at me. David's convicted, convinced. We use convicted. Convinced is a similar word. Convinced of wrongdoing.

What do you do with that? Well, you know, as long as David felt bad, right? That's the important part.

No, that's not the important part. Somehow we've twisted Christianity, even thinking that you measure a service by how bad you feel during the service. Occasionally you're going to feel bad about some things you've done or you're doing or going to do, and that's the Holy Spirit. But you shouldn't measure church service by how bad you get beat up. A lot of services here, you'll get a little beat up.

A lot of services here, probably majority of them, you'll be encouraged. Why? Because that's what we need. We need encouragement. And it's not enough to feel bad, friend. Do you know for sure that your sins have been forgiven?

You can know right now. I want to lead you in a short, simple prayer, simply telling God you're sorry and asking Him to help you to live for Him. Please pray this prayer with me out loud right now. Dear Jesus, I believe you died for me, that I could be forgiven. And I believe you were raised from the dead, that I could have a new life. And I've done wrong things. I have sinned.

And I'm sorry. Please forgive me of all those things. Please give me the power to live for you all of my days. In Jesus' name.

Amen. Friend, if you prayed that prayer, according to the Bible, you've been forgiven. You've been born again. So congratulations, friend.

You just made the greatest decision that you will ever make. God bless you. If you prayed that prayer with David for the first time, we'd love to hear from you. You can visit crossthebridge.com to receive our First Steps package with helpful resources to help you begin your walk with Christ.

Or you can write to Cross the Bridge at P.O. Box 12515, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27117 and share how God is working in your life. Well, DA, before we go, what are some ways that we can bless our listeners? Each day you can wake up with encouragement from Pastor David through the Word of God with his email devotional, life lessons to consider, a daily reading plan, and a thought to meditate on throughout your day from the heart of David McGee. That sounds good, Pastor DA.

And again, it's been great to have you with us on the program today. But tell us, what else can our listeners find on crossthebridge.com? If you're not able to make it to your home church this Sunday, why not join us for our live stream at 10 a.m. Eastern Time?

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Those are terrific. And it's easy and it's free. So folks, sign up today at crossthebridge.com. And thank you for listening. We hope you'll join us again next time as we continue studying verse by verse through 2 Samuel.