Epidemics and pandemics have come and gone in this fallen world and will continue to do so until Christ gives us a new home, free from all pestilence. As terrible as pandemics may be, they only typify the greatest plague imaginable—to be without God in this world and the next. As the world rushes after vaccines, antiviral medications, and toilet paper, gifts of God in themselves and worthy pursuits, let us not take a census as David did, trusting in the resources of man. The Cross of Christ is the best antidote to Coronavirus.
Among the biblical descriptions of disease outbreaks, I am especially drawn to the account in 2 Samuel 24, also recorded in 1 Chronicles 21. In the former, the Lord was angry with Israel, and He incited King David to take a census of the military men in Israel. In the latter, Satan is described as the means of the Lord’s incitement of David. The juxtaposition teaches us that God ordains the ends as well as the means to those ends. Yet it is David who, in prideful reliance upon the number of fighting men for security, is morally culpable for the census, as well as for the failure to levy a poll tax to be offered to the Lord that was supposed to be collected in association with a census (Exodus 30:12; there a plague is threatened by the Lord for such a failure).
There is a lot of theology to be gleaned here, but my purpose is to draw your attention to the punishment of the sinful census. Given three forms of punishment, David chose three days of a plague, mediated by a mysterious destroying angel standing between earth and heaven, with a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem. By the time the plague reached Jerusalem, 70,000 fighting men throughout Israel had died from the plague, representing the very resource David idolized. The destroying angel was standing by the threshing floor of a Jebusite when David spoke to the Lord and confessed his sin. Having been directed by the Lord through the prophet Gad, David and his servants made their way up the hill from the City of David to the threshing floor.
My wife and I saw ancient threshing floors during our visit to Israel last year. Flat areas on high ground were ideal locations to pile harvested wheat stalks, where a farmer would thresh the crop by driving over it an animal-drawn wooden platform embedded with rock “teeth”, separating the kernels from the inedible stalks (chaff). The farmer would then winnow the wheat by pitching the mixture into the air, while the wind whipped the hilltop and carried away the chaff, the dense kernels falling to the ground. It was from this threshing floor of the Jebusite that the destroying angel was prepared to spread epidemic pestilence over Jerusalem until God commanded him, “It is enough. Now stay your hand.”
David’s party arrived at the summit where the owner and his sons were hiding from the angel. A typical near-Eastern bargain ensued in which David bought the site at great cost (600 shekels of gold in 1 Chronicles probably included the threshing floor for 50 silver shekels (in 2 Samuel) plus the surrounding land). David built an altar and there presented offerings to the Lord, who answered David with fire upon the altar. “So the LORD responded to the plea for the land, and the plague was averted from Israel. So significant was this event that David said, “Here shall be the house of the LORD God and here the altar of burnt offering for Israel.”
Solomon went on to build the Lord’s magnificent temple on this very spot. 2 Chronicles 3 identifies this site as Mount Moriah, where Abraham raised a knife to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice but was commanded to stay his hand, as the Lord provided an animal substitute for Isaac. A third of a mile to the west of the Mount is the most likely location where our Substitute, the Lamb of God, hung between earth and heaven, but there was no staying of the hand then, rather, the sword of God’s judgment penetrated with deadly force. At that point, finally, it was enough, and it still is now, for “It is finished” (John 19:30).
Epidemics and pandemics have come and gone in this fallen world and will continue to do so until Christ gives us a new home, free from all pestilence. As terrible as pandemics may be, they only typify the greatest plague imaginable—to be without God in this world and the next. As the world rushes after vaccines, antiviral medications, and toilet paper, gifts of God in themselves and worthy pursuits, let us not take a census as David did, trusting in the resources of man. The Cross of Christ is the best antidote to Coronavirus.
Dr. Paul S. Darby is a physician in Tacoma, WA and a Ruling Elder at Faith Presbyterian Church (PCA).
