1 Chronicles 22-25

These chapters are all about the Temple and the service of the Temple to be performed by the Levites, the descendants of Aaron. One can see why this would be important for the priests and the Levites trying to re-establish the Temple and its services after the return from exile. The author(s) of the Chronicles want to show the history of the Temple, how it started, and why the Levites are the only rightful people to preside over the services of the Temple.

We see here how David had the vision for building the Temple but God did not allow him to execute that vision himself, because he had shed much blood (1 Chronicles 22:8). Nonetheless, the Chronicler tells us (in a way different from the author of Samuel and Kings) that David puts everything together and prepares the way for his son Solomon to build the Temple.

However, the most interesting thing to me in these chapters is the location chosen for the Temple. The Chronicler adds a new detail in this regard that I do not believe is presented by the author of Samuel and Kings. In 1 Chronicles 22:1 David says, “Here shall be the house of the Lord God and here the altar of burnt offering for Israel.” “Here” refers back to 1 Chronicles 21 and the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.

If we go back to chapter 21, there we have the story of how David conducted a census of Israel. The Chronicler adds the detail that it was Satan who incited David to conduct this census. The Lord was not pleased with David for doing this, presumably because it displayed a lack of trust in the Lord, but the Chronicler actually never says why this act on David’s part displeased the Lord.

The Lord gives David a choice of what kind of punishment will be handed out for his sin: either three years of famine, three months of devastation by his foes, or three days of the sword of the Lord. David, wisely, chooses the shortest amount of time for punishment, and the one handed out directly from the hand of the Lord. David says, “Let me fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is very great; but let me not fall into human hands.” (1 Chronicles 21:13) What a beautiful prayer! This is a prayer that we can all pray and perhaps should pray at different times in our lives.

To be honest, I do not understand what happens next in this story. The Lord sends a pestilence on Israel and 70,000 people die. Then God sends an angel to Jerusalem to destroy it, but at the last minute, God changes his mind and stops the angel from destroying Jerusalem.

At this point, David prays and asks the Lord to punish him instead of the people of Israel as a whole since he is the one who sinned by conducting the census in the first place. This seems like the most reasonable thing. Why the Lord punished the people of Israel in the first place for David’s “sin,” that is what I really do not understand. God appears here more as an angry force than a loving parent. There is something truly sub-Christian and even sub-human about this picture of God.

I read recently the words of a Bible scholar who said that we really need to have three buckets with us whenever we read Scripture. One bucket is for the parts of Scripture that give us a universally true picture of God (like John 3:16 and the great commandments to love God and neighbor). The second bucket is for Scriptures that reveal what God’s will was for his people at one time but are no longer relevant to us today (like physical circumcision). The third bucket is for those Scriptures that have never represented a true picture of God. Into that bucket, I would be tempted to put Scriptures such as this one. I know some people will think what I have just outlined is a dangerous and wrong way to approach Scripture, but there you have it.

Getting back to 1 Chronicles, the fascinating thing to me is that the place where God stops the plague is the place where David chooses to place the altar for sacrifice and build the Temple. So without the horrible story of God sending a plague in response to David’s census we would not have this beautiful story of how the Temple is built in the place where the plague stopped. I think this story gives us a perfect picture of what sacrifice is all about. Through the sacrifices of the Old Testament, God was giving his people a way to be forgiven, for the plague to come to an end. In the final analysis, we serve a God of mercy, just as David said.

This picture of the Temple is also a true picture of what the cross of Christ is all about. The cross is the place where God brings the plague of sin to an end for all time. The cross is the place of mercy, and forgiveness, and love. It is the place where God voluntarily takes our punishment, our sins, our plague, upon himself, and puts it to an end in his own death. Darkness is swallowed up in God’s unquenchable light.

Perhaps in this whole sequence (census--plague--cessation) we have a purely pagan story of God as an angry force being turned into a story that conveys a completely different idea of God, the idea of God as a loving and forgiving parent who takes all of our pain upon himself.

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