It is an affecting and solemn truth presented to us by Scripture, to which we desire that our thoughts may ever be fully subject, that our God has, through our transgression, been separated from His due place, as over the work of His own hands-that this world, which is all His handiwork, has acknowledged another god and prince (John 14:30 Cor. 4:4). Since the day when the Lord God walked with Adam in paradise, He has had no abiding place among us. He has visited the earth in divers manners, to bring mercies to His chosen in the midst of it; but when His errand of love has been finished, He has, as is said, gone "His way" again (Gen. 18:33). He would, it is true, have found a place among His chosen Israel; but He was even by them too speedily disowned, and His tarrying there proved to be but that of a wayfaring man that turns aside to tarry for a night (Jer. 14:8). "The ox knoweth his owner," said the God of Israel by His prophet, "and the ass his master's crib: but Israel doth not know, My people doth not consider" (Isa. 1:3).
But the Lord's title to the earth of course stands unimpeachable; "the cattle on a thousand hills" are His, "the earth, and the fullness thereof"; and accordingly in one way or another, He has been making continual claim to it in the face of the usurper, so as to express His purpose of finally taking it into full possession again. This indeed was so clearly intimated by the first promise, that the whole creation is represented as hoping and waiting for it. (Gen. 3:15; Rom. 8:19-21.) And so in the day of the kingdom of our God, these hopes of the creation shall not be ashamed, for the heavens shall rejoice, and the earth be glad, the sea and the fullness thereof; the field shall then be joyful and all that is therein; the floods, and the hills, and the trees of the wood shall rejoice before the Lord (Psalm 96:11-13).
By tracing for a while the dealings of the Lord with this world of ours, we may discern the ways in which He has been pleased, since the day when man sold himself and his inheritance into the hands of a strange lord, thus to claim the earth as His. When the giants of old had finished the antediluvian apostasy, corrupting the earth and filling it with violence, doing with it as if it were their own, the Lord asserted His right by judging that generation as oppressors and wrongdoers (Gen. 6:1-13).
Then in the new world He witnessed His title to the earth by making man the tenant of it under Himself, delivering it into the hand of Noah, under express condition imposed according to His own good pleasure (Gen. 9:1-7). And again, when these children of men, doing the deeds of their fathers, affected independency of God their rightful Lord, as they did in the matter of Babel, He again asserted His right in the way of judgment, scattering the confederates over the face of the earth (Gen. 11:1-9).
But the Lord in His fruitful sovereign wisdom had now another mode of continuing His claim to the earth. This scattering of the nations from Babel, He so orders as to have respect to His setting up one of them as the future witness of His name and rights (Deut. 32:8, 9). And in the meantime He separates the father of this nation to Himself (Gen. 12:1), making him also personally the witness of the same truth- that let the peoples imagine what vain things they might, Jehovah, and He alone, was "possessor of heaven and earth" (Gen. 14:18-22).
Accordingly then, when in due course of providence Abraham's nation was manifested, the Lord who had chosen them to be His witnesses, puts them into possession of a portion of the earth, to hold it under Him their Lord, thus showing that He, who took what portion He pleased, had title to the whole, as He says, "Ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people: for all the earth is Mine." Exod. 19:5. And Israel thus established as God's people should have continued in the midst of, but separated formally from, the nations, reflecting the light of God's glory as King of all the earth. But again and again they revolted, and rejected Jehovah Christ from being King over them. The nation first (1 Sam. 8:7), then the house of David (Isa. 8:13; Jer. 21:12), give up their testimony to God; and at length the wicked husbandmen cast the heir himself out of the vineyard, and slew him (Matt. 21:39).
Abraham's seed thus refused to do the works of Abraham, and then Abraham's God abandoned their land, leaving the boar out of the wood to waste it, and the wild beast of the field to devour it. But the Lord has had pity for His holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the heathen, and has called forth another witness to the glory of it. By the voice of heralds He is publishing Jesus and the resurrection, opening the heavenly places and the Father's house to all believers, and letting all men know that the kingdoms of the world are to become His, and that all things are to be put under His feet again (Heb. 2:8; Rev. 11:15).
But how is the kingdom of the world to become the Lord's? And how is His presence to be preserved among us? We can prepare Him no habitation or dominion, for we have been found unable even to retain that which in His love He once committed to us. The Lord then must, and so He will, prepare Himself a place over and among the children of men, so as to secure His presence and authority (0 blessed expectation) from ever being clouded or denied again.
When the Lord took Israel of old, as we have seen, to be His peculiar people, of course He prepared Himself a place among them-the tabernacle first, and then the temple. The tabernacle was but a movable pavilion; there Jehovah dwelt as between curtains, and walked as in a tent, refusing with infinite grace to enter into His rest while His Israel sojourned from one nation to another people (2 Sam. 7:5-8). But the temple was fixed, for when Israel was brought into the land of their covenant, and all their enemies had been reduced, then the Lord would enter into rest among them. In their affliction having been afflicted, He would now rejoice in their joy (Isa. 63:9); and He, whom the heaven cannot contain, seated Himself in the midst of His chosen nation.
But where was the honored spot? Who of us that clings with all desire (as, if we be saints, we at least should) to the hope of God's restored presence and kingdom in this world, that would not but know something of it? I speak not of what travelers have told us of it, but how the oracles of God mark it out. And from them we learn this simple story of it, that it had been the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite; and it was the place where the angel of God stayed his destructive course through the city of Jerusalem, whither he had been summoned by the sin of the king and the people. It was this spot which became the place of the temple, and most fitly so, as we shall see, if we can a little more narrowly survey the ground, as it is spread out before us by the Spirit of God in 1 Chronicles 21.
"And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel. And David said to Joab and to the rulers of the people, Go, number Israel from Beer-sheba even to Dan; and bring the number of them to me, that I may know it. And Joab answered, The LORD make His people a hundred times so many more as they be: but, my lord the king, are they not all my lord's servants? why then doth my lord require this thing? why will he be a cause of trespass to Israel? Nevertheless the king's word prevailed against Joab. Wherefore Joab departed, and went throughout all Israel, and came to Jerusalem. And Joab gave the sum of the number of the people unto David. And all they of Israel were a thousand thousand and a hundred thousand men that drew sword: and Judah was four hundred threescore and ten thousand men that drew sword. But Levi and Benjamin counted he not among them: for the king's word was abominable to Joab" (vss. 1-6).
At the time when this scene opens, the sword of David and of Israel had been victorious over all their enemies. The Philistines had been subdued-Moab had brought gifts-garrisons were put in Damascus-and the Syrians, as also the Edomites, had become David's servants. With all promised blessings the house of God's servant had been blessed, and naught of the goodness of which the Lord had spoken to him had failed. "The fame of David went out into all lands; and the LORD brought the fear of him upon all nations." 1 Chron. 14:17.
But Satan, we here read, too soon serves himself of all this; and Israel proves again that man, utterly without strength, is unable even to hold a blessing. The gifts with which their gracious Lord had thus endowed Israel, and which had been ordained for their comfort and His praise, became, through the craft and subtlety of the devil, an occasion to them of self-congratulation and pride, as to Adam of old (Gen. 3:1-8). For David's heart in all this was moved by the old lie-"ye shall be as gods." Anything for poor fallen man but the living God! "Nay; but we will have a king over us," said Israel to Samuel of old, rejecting Jehovah Christ, "that we also may be like all the nations" (1 Sam. 8:19, 20). But the Lord will not give His glory to another; none have ever forsaken Him and prospered, as it is written: "Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many; and in horsemen, because they are very strong; but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek the LORD!" Isa. 31:1. "The Egyptians shall help in vain, and to no purpose" (Isa. 30:7). David here, like Hezekiah afterward, in the pride of his heart, would exhibit his magnificence, would survey his resources.
The infatuation in which David was sunk is marked by the fact of Joab expostulating with him; for (though a man of blood and evidently one of the children of this world, as all his policy bespeaks him, yet wiser far in his generation, looking not to the ungodliness so much as to the impolicy of this purposed wickedness of the king) Joab at once discovers that which his master refuses to see.
The whole system of Israel, by this national transgression, was now defiled and tainted, and ripe for severity or judgment. This pride was the giving up of God, and God would have been dealing righteously had He at once laid Israel aside, as He did Adam in such a case-"dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."
"And God was displeased with this thing; therefore He smote Israel. And David said unto God, I have sinned greatly, because I have done this thing: but now, I beseech Thee, do away the iniquity of Thy servant; for I have done very foolishly. And the LORD spake unto Gad, David's seer, saying, Go and tell David, saying, Thus saith the LORD, I offer thee three things: choose thee one of them, that I may do it unto thee. So Gad came to David, and said unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Choose thee either three years' famine; or three months to be destroyed before thy foes, while that the sword of thine enemies overtaketh thee; or else three days the sword of the LORD, even the pestilence, in the land, and the angel of the LORD destroying throughout all the coasts of Israel. Now therefore advise thyself what word I shall bring again to Him that sent me. And David said unto Gad, I am in a great strait: let me fall now into the hand of the LORD; for very great are His mercies: but let me not fall into the hand of man. So the LORD sent pestilence upon Israel: and there fell of Israel seventy thousand men" (vss. 7-14).
For nine long months the pride of the king's heart deceived him (2 Sam. 24:8), as, alas! lust had before dimmed his eye for the same time. He had too long walked in the ways of his heart and in the sight of his eyes; but after his hardness and impenitency was but treasuring up unto himself wrath against the day of the righteous judgment of God now about to be revealed. Sinners should be stopped in their course by the remembrance that God, though He suffers long, "hath appointed a day, in the which He will judge the world in righteousness" (Acts 17:31).
But David, as a child of God, might be tempted, overtaken in a fault, and thus brought to shame and grief, but could not be left impenitent (Luke 22:32). And so Israel as God's nation could not be consumed, because God's gifts and calling are without repentance (Rom. 11:29), because His compassions toward them could not fail (Lam. 3:22). Their transgressions were to be visited with a rod, and their iniquity with stripes; but the divine loving-kindness was not to be utterly taken from David and his nation (Psalm 89:33). Correction is ever in covenant love. "You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities." Amos 3:2. To walk comfortably and without interruption in an even path, we must walk watchfully as with the Lord. Had David walked in his integrity, and humbly with his God, he would have been spared this discipline; but now he must bear the "rod." And he is required to choose the rod; by this, much grace might be exercised in his soul; he would by this be brought to consider well the fruit of his transgressions, and thus be more humbled and broken in spirit, and he would also have occasion to encourage himself afresh in the Lord who was slaying him, as we find he did.
But corrected he must be, and that too, just in the place of his transgression; having boasted of his thousands, his thousands must be diminished. God would now number to the sword whom David had numbered to his pride. And so the day of the Lord is to be upon every one that is proud and lifted up
(Isa. 2:12).