Memory Text: “Offer to God thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High. Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me” (Psalm 50:14, 15, NKJV).
Toward the close of Jehoshaphat’s reign, Judah was invaded by an allied army from Moab, Ammon, and other nations. Jehoshaphat was one of the rare good kings. He had been responsibly strengthening his armies and his fortified cities, and was prepared to meet any enemy. Yet when the crisis inevitably came, he did not trust in his own strength or in any human preparations or fortifications.
He put his entire confidence in God. He proclaimed a fast throughout the land and gathered the people at the court of Solomon’s Temple:
“O Lord God of our fathers, are You not God in heaven, and do You not rule over all the kingdoms of the nations, and in Your hand is there not power and might, so that no one is able to withstand You? Are You not our God, who drove out the inhabitants of this land before Your people Israel, and gave it to the descendants of Abraham Your friend forever? And they dwell in it, and have built You a sanctuary in it for Your name, saying, ‘If disaster comes upon us—sword, judgment, pestilence, or famine—we will stand before this temple and in Your presence (for Your name is in this temple), and cry out to You in our affliction, and You will hear and save.’ And now, here are the people of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir—whom You would not let Israel invade when they came out of the land of Egypt, but they turned from them and did not destroy them—here they are, rewarding us by coming to throw us out of Your possession which You have given us to inherit. O our God, will You not judge them? For we have no power against this great multitude that is coming against us; nor do we know what to do, but our eyes are upon You.”
Jehoshapat was a careful student of his national history. He knew, and in his public prayer he acknowledged, some important aspects of that history, including that the land on which they were settled was given to them by God, and He gave it to them by driving out the Canaanites before the Israelites. God fought that battle and He will fight this one. God is the one with the omnipotent power; it makes sense that we should let Him fight the battles.
Another piece of history Jehoshaphat mentioned was that when Israel was invading Canaan, they were forbidden to attack Moab and Ammon (Deut. 2:9,19) because these nations were descended from Lot, Moab from Lot’s first daughter, and Ammon from his second (Gen. 19:30-38), so they were relatives of the Israelites. Jehoshaphat now says to God, “You told us not to destroy Moab and Ammon, and we didn’t. So this is Your problem, God. Take ownership of it.”
Jehoshaphat got his answer quickly. The Holy Spirit came over a man named Jahaziel, a Levite, who said:
“Listen, all you of Judah and you inhabitants of Jerusalem, and you, King Jehoshaphat! Thus says the Lord to you: ‘Do not be afraid nor dismayed because of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours, but God’s. Tomorrow go down against them. They will surely come up by the Ascent of Ziz, and you will find them at the end of the brook before the Wilderness of Jeruel. You will not need to fight in this battle. Position yourselves, stand still and see the salvation of the Lord, who is with you, O Judah and Jerusalem!’ Do not fear or be dismayed; tomorrow go out against them, for the Lord is with you.”
And it happened just as Jahaziel prophesied: The next morning Jehoshaphat put the choir out front, and told the people, “Believe in the LORD your God, and you shall be established; believe His prophets, and you shall prosper.” As the choir marched out of the city, they began singing, “Praise the Lord, for His mercy endures forever.” God took over from there; He “set ambushes” against the forces of Moab and Ammon. The men of Judah spent the next three days collecting the spoils of the destroyed army, and on the fourth day they returned to Jerusalem, singing as they went.
Do Not Rely on Your Own Strength
Next we come to the sad story of David choosing to take a census of Israel, presumably in order to know the number of fighting-age men he could muster in case of war.
Interestingly, God had ordered His own census when Israel crossed into the promised land, and this was specifically done to count the men of military age. (Num. 1:2, 20; 26:2) A census was fine when God ordered it, but not okay when David ordered it.
I think the problem here was the lack of a poll tax, or capitation tax, accompanying the census. When God ordered that Israel be numbered upon entering the promised land, He directed that each person 20 years of age and older pay a half-shekel poll tax. (Ex. 30:13; 38:26) God had not forbidden future censuses, but He had decreed that any such counting had to be combined with the poll tax as a ransom for each life, and there was an implication that anyone who did not pay it was subject to death by plague:
“When you take the census of the people of Israel, then each shall give a ransom for his life to the Lord when you number them, that there be no plague among them when you number them.” Exodus 30:12
So it seems that David’s sin was not simply in taking the census, which the Lord had provided for, but in failing to collect the head tax when he counted the people, which God had clearly specified must be done.
David was warned by his nephew, Joab, not to do “this thing:”
And Joab answered, “May the Lord make His people a hundred times more than they are. But, my lord the king, are they not all my lord’s servants? Why then does my lord require this thing? Why should he be a cause of guilt in Israel?”
Joab was not the most godly, consecrated figure in the Hebrew Scriptures, so if even Joab knew better than to do this, we can be certain that David knew better as well. And yet he did it anyway. The man could be very willful on occasion, and on this occasion his willfulness cost 70,000 lives. God wanted David to rely on God, not on the number of his fighting-age men. The battle is always the Lord’s, and He has unnumbered angels under His command.
But we cannot move on from this story without noting that between the time Second Samuel was written and the later writing of First Chronicles, the Spirit behind David’s wrong action changed:
“Again the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and He incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.” 2 Sam. 24:1
“Now Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel.” 1 Chron. 21:1
Oh, my. Here is Scripture apparently contradicting Scripture. In 2 Samuel, it was God’s anger against Israel that caused David to number Israel, but in 1 Chronicles, it was Satan that moved David to do it. Which Bible writer was correct? Who tempted David, God or Satan?
The truth is that David did this on his own. True, Satan tempted the king to number Israel, and God allowed it to happen—God could have prevented David from doing this, but He is committed to allowing us our free will, our freedom of choice. The choice was David’s and he made a wrong choice.
We are also told this: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone.” James 1:13. We cannot blame God for our temptations, or when we succumb to them. Israel could not blame God for allowing David to sin by numbering Israel.
There’s something here that makes conservative Adventists uncomfortable but I see no way to avoid it: the concept of the adversary, Satan, who began as Lucifer, the highest being God created but then mysteriously “iniquity was found in him,” does not come into Scripture full blown at the beginning. The concept of the adversary comes in later on—obviously some time between 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles. In Genesis, the serpent is just a talking animal; it isn’t until Revelation, at the whole other end of the Bible, written well over a thousand years later, that we are told that the serpent was the devil, Satan. (Rev. 12:9). A lesson here is that we have to use all of Scripture to properly interpret any of Scripture, but we should know that already.
Armed with the knowledge that, in the early books of the Bible the concept of the Adversary is not yet available, hence Yahweh is the only deus ex machina, pressed into service as both hero and villain, we are better equipped to make sense of some problematic passages.
One of those problematic stories is the plagues of Egypt, with God hardening Pharaoh’s heart after each plague, then punishing him for having a hard heart and not releasing Israel from bondage. This culminates with God, after hardening Pharaoh’s heart one last time, killing all the first born males in the country. But did God really do this, first hardening Pharaoh’s heart, then punishing him and his people for it? Ellen White has a different take:
God had declared concerning Pharaoh, “I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.” Exodus 4:21. There was no exercise of supernatural power to harden the heart of the king. God gave to Pharaoh the most striking evidence of divine power, but the monarch stubbornly refused to heed the light. Every display of infinite power rejected by him, rendered him the more determined in his rebellion. The seeds of rebellion that he sowed when he rejected the first miracle, produced their harvest. As he continued to venture on in his own course, going from one degree of stubbornness to another, his heart became more and more hardened, until he was called to look upon the cold, dead faces of the first-born. Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 268 (emphasis aded).
So, no, God did not harden Pharaoh’s heart. To the contrary, God did everything He could reasonably have done to break through to Pharaoh, to draw him to repentance, to help him see that his atheism and rebellion would lead to ruin. God patiently gave him miraculous sign after miraculous sign, because God does not want anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance and be saved. (2 Peter 3:9) But the Egyptian king, like David later on, made his own decisions, his own choices, as kings usually do.
A final lesson is this: when kings sin, their people suffer the consequences, and the consequences are usually far more severe and widespread than they are when a lowly private citizen sins.