Read Time: 7 minutes2 Samuel 24
The book ends with a final story: with David’s numbering. Go, number Israel and Judah — and the chronicler tells us an adversary stood up and provoked him to it (1 Chr 21:1), while Samuel says the anger of Yahweh was kindled. Both are true at once: God acted as an adversary to the people by prompting the numbering.
Because of David’s admission of guilt, many see this as David’s sin. Nevertheless, Joab is actually the problem. Why doth my lord the king delight in this thing? Only once the numbers come back, eight hundred thousand and five hundred thousand, does David’s heart smote him. Numbering an army has never been wrong, but Joab did this incorrectly. Just as God said in Exodus 30, if the people didn’t pay their census tax, a plague would come.
Gad lays three choices before David, and David chooses to fall into the hand of Yahweh: let us fall now into the hand of Yahweh; for his mercies are great: and let me not fall into the hand of man. It is the truest word he speaks in the chapter — and the costliest, for of the three offered, pestilence alone gives him no cover: war would leave the king safe behind his men, famine safe in his wealth, but the plague falls without respect of persons, and the shepherd steps deliberately into the danger of his flock. Seventy thousand die — seventy, the number of the nations and of man’s full span, the flesh he had counted now cut down — and the angel of judgment stretches his hand toward Jerusalem.
The plague is stayed at one place, and the place is everything. The angel stands at the threshingfloor of Araunah the Jebusite — the floor where wheat is beaten from chaff, the very emblem of judgment that John will take up (he will throughly purge his floor, Matt 3:12). There David sees the angel and cries the shepherd’s cry: Lo, I have sinned… but these sheep, what have they done? let thine hand, I pray thee, be against me. In a mistaken desire to act as a substitute (like Moses in Exodus 32), the shepherd-king asks the stroke to fall on him and spare the flock. But God does not support substitution.
Gad sends him to build an altar on that floor, and David will not take it as a gift. I will surely buy it of thee at a price: neither will I offer burnt offerings unto Yahweh my God of that which doth cost me nothing. He pays, he builds, the offering goes up, and the plague is stayed. A true offering costs the offerer — the lesson the whole sacrificial system teaches and that Christ’s offering fulfills.
And the floor is the hinge of all that follows. This threshingfloor on Moriah — the mount where Abraham bound Isaac and named the place Yahweh-Yireh, Yahweh will see and provide — is the ground Solomon will buy with the temple (2 Chr 3:1). The place where judgment was stayed by a costly offering becomes the place where Israel will meet Yahweh for ever. Judgment stayed at the threshingfloor; the temple rises on the floor of mercy.
Jeremiah 27
Jeremiah is told to make himself a yoke of bands and bars and wear it on his neck, and to send word by the visiting ambassadors to Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, and Zidon. The message is one word: bend. Bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him and his people, and live. The prophet’s own neck under the wood is the oracle in flesh — the word made visible and carried. The word has a history worth tracing: the first yoke in Scripture is the one Esau is promised he will break from his neck (Gen 27:40), and the yoke Yahweh boasts of having broken is Egypt’s (Lev 26:13). To lay one on Judah’s neck now is to run the exodus backwards, and to say plainly whose hand the discipline is.
The hard thing the chapter asks Judah to swallow is that Babylon is Yahweh’s servant. Now have I given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant. The pagan conqueror is the rod in Yahweh’s hand; the discipline is appointed, not accidental; and the only safety is to submit to it rather than fight it. To resist the yoke Yahweh has set is to choose the sword and the famine instead.
So the chapter sets the true word against the cheap one. Hearken not to your prophets… which speak unto you, saying, Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon: for they prophesy a lie unto you. The dreamers promise that the discipline will lift soon and the holy vessels will come straight back; Jeremiah says the vessels go to Babylon, and there shall they be until the day that I visit them. The lie offers a short captivity and a painless peace; the truth offers a long yoke and a sure return.
There is a deeper note under the iron. The yoke Yahweh lays is heavy, but it is the yoke that leads to life — serve him, and live. It is the dark forerunner of another yoke: take my yoke upon you… for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matt 11:29–30). And that yoke is a teaching-harness — learn of me — not merely a load to bear but the gear that binds the learner beside his master to be taught his ways. The flesh always wants the yoke broken; the wise neck bends, and finds the bending is the way through. And the timing is no accident: Jeremiah the Ox of the prophets bends his neck to the literal yoke here, on the very day the Ox-Gospel opens — for the ox is the yoke-bearing servant-beast, and Mark sets out the Servant who bears the yoke to the end. The neck that bends to the appointed yoke lives; the neck that fights it meets the sword.
Mark 1
Mark opens his book like a new Genesis: the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. There is no infancy, no genealogy — just the beginning, as if creation were starting again. The missing genealogy has a second reason too: this is the Ox among the four faces — the Gospel of the Servant, where Matthew is the Lion and the King, and a servant needs no pedigree. It is why Mark drives forward on his restless ‘straightway’ and ‘immediately’, the laboring Ox always on duty, wholly bent to the work; and it is why Jeremiah the Ox-prophet has run beside him, the burden-bearer answering the burden-bearing Gospel — with Luke the Man and John the Eagle still to come. And the first voice heard is a voice in the wilderness. John comes as the promised forerunner — the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of Yahweh (Isa 40:3), and I send my messenger before thy face (Mal 3:1).
John is Elijah returned. The camel’s hair and the leather girdle are Elijah’s own dress (2 Kgs 1:8); the wilderness, the Jordan, the call to turn — this is the Tishbite’s mantle on a new man, the forerunner who readies a people. There cometh one mightier than I after me… he shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit. The water points past itself to the Spirit.
Then the heavens are torn open. Mark’s word is violent — schizō, rent — the same word he will use only once more, when the temple veil is torn from top to bottom at Christ’s death (Mark 15:38). The sky splits at the Jordan, the Spirit comes down as a dove brooding over the new creation’s waters, and the voice names him: Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. The heavens open at the beginning and the veil tears at the end; both are the same opening of the way.
The Spirit drives him at once into the wilderness, forty days, the second Adam among the wild beasts. Forty is the number of probation, Israel’s forty years compressed into one man’s testing; and where the first Adam fell among the beasts of Eden, this one is at peace with them, tested by the adversary and ministered to by angels. The probation passed, he comes out preaching the one thing the whole book is about: the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
The rest of the chapter is sheer authority. He calls fishermen to be fishers of men, and they leave the nets at a word. He speaks in the synagogue as one that had authority, and not as the scribes; the unclean cries out and is silenced and cast out; the fever leaves Peter’s mother-in-law at a touch; the leper is made clean by I will; be thou clean. Over the unclean, the diseased, the disordered flesh, the Word simply commands and is obeyed — the same voice that tore the heavens open. The way of Yahweh is prepared, the heavens are rent, and the Word that made the world speaks again over the unclean and is obeyed.
Synthesis and Exhortation
The day lays a floor and opens a heaven. At the threshingfloor of Araunah, a connection is made with God, and the ground of mercy becomes the ground of the temple — the place where Yahweh will be met. Centuries on, the heavens are torn open over the Jordan and the beloved Son is named, and the same tearing will open again at his death when the veil rips top to bottom. The threshingfloor, the temple, the torn heaven, the rent veil — one long opening of the way between Yahweh and his people, each step bought at a price, none of it offered of that which doth cost me nothing.
Between the floor and the heaven runs the yoke. Jeremiah wears the wood on his neck and tells the nations to bend to the appointed discipline and live; the dreamers promise a short captivity and a cheap peace, and they prophesy a lie. The flesh always wants the yoke broken and the heavens shut — wants its strength counted like David’s host, wants the discipline lifted before its work is done. But the wise neck bends. And the yoke that looks like death is the forerunner of the yoke Christ holds out, the easy yoke that is rest, the kingdom at hand for those who repent and believe the gospel.
So the three readings ask the same surrender in three keys. Do not count your strength like David and trust the host; fall into the hand of Yahweh, for his mercies are great. Do not break the yoke like the dreamers want; bend the neck to the discipline that leads through. And when the heavens open and the Son is named and the Word commands the unclean to be clean — repent, and believe, and follow when he says come after me. The floor of judgment is the floor of mercy; the offering that costs is the offering that saves; the yoke that bends the neck is the yoke that gives rest.
Fall into the hand of Yahweh and not of man; bend the neck to the yoke that leads through; and follow the Word that tears the heavens open and makes the unclean clean.