2nd Samuel chapter 24 Again, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and he incited David against them saying go number Israel and Judah So the king said to Joab the commander of the army who was with him go through all the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and number the people that I may know the number of the people and But Joab said to the king, may the Lord your God add to the people a hundred times as many as they are, while the eyes of my Lord the king still see it. But why does my Lord the king delight in this thing? But the king's word prevailed against Joab and the commanders of the army. So Joab and the commanders of the army went out from the presence of the king to number the people of Israel. They crossed the Jordan and began to Erewheir from the city that is in the middle of the valley toward Gad and on to Jazer. Then they came to Gilead and to Kadesh in the land of the Hittites, and they came to Dan. And from Dan they went around to Sidon. And when they came to the fortress of Tyre and to all the cities of the Hivites and Canaanites, they went out to the Negev of Judah at Beersheba. And when they had gone throughout all the land, they came to Jerusalem at the end of nine months and twenty days. And Joab gave the sum of the numbering of the people to the king. In Israel, there were 800,000 valiant men who drew the sword, and the men of Judah were 500,000. But David's heart struck him after he had numbered the people. And David said to the Lord, I have sinned greatly in what I have done. But now, O Lord, please take away the iniquity of your servant, for I have done very foolishly. And when David arose in the morning, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Gad, David's seer, saying, go and say to David, thus says the Lord, three things I offer you. Choose one of them that I may do it to you. So Gad came to David and told him and said to him, shall three years of famine come to you in your land? Or will you flee three months before your foes while they pursue you? Or shall there be three days of pestilence in your land? Now consider and decide what answer I shall return to him who sent me. Then David said to Gad, I am in great distress. Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is great. But let me not fall into the hand of man. So the Lord sent a pestilence on Israel from the morning until the appointed time. And there died of the people from Dan to Beersheba 70,000 men. And when the angel stretched out his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord relented from the calamity and said to the angel who was working destruction among the people, it is enough. Now stay your hand. And the angel of the Lord was by the threshing floor of Arunah, the Jebusite. Then David spoke to the Lord when he saw the angel who was striking the people and said, behold, I have sinned and I have done wickedly, but these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand be against me and against my father's house. And Gad came that day to David and said to him, go up, raise an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Arunah the Jebusite. So David went up at Gad's words as the Lord commanded. And when Aaronah looked down, he saw the king and his servants coming on toward him. And Aaronah went out and paid homage to the king with his face to the ground. And Aaronah said, why has my Lord the king come to his servant? David said, to buy the threshing floor from you in order to build an altar to the Lord that the plague may be averted from the people. Then Aaronah said to David, let my lord the king take and offer up what seems good to him. Here are the oxen for the burnt offering and the threshing sledges and the yokes of the oxen for the wood. All this, O king, Aaronah gives to the king. And Aaronah said to the king, may the lord your God accept you. But the king said to Aaronah, no, I will buy it from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing. So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for 50 shekels of silver, and David built there an altar to the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. So the Lord responded to the plea for the land, and the plague was averted from Israel. Amen. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God abides forever. You may be seated. When one thinks of monumental failures of leadership, when one thinks of bad decisions that yielded even worse results, the brainchild of Chairman Mao Zedong, the great leap forward has to be somewhere near the top. The Great Leap Forward was a communist Chinese attempt from 1958 to 1962 to take the country's agrarian economy. Children, agrarian means that they are based on agriculture, that is farming and food production. China tried to move from an agrarian society, an agrarian economy, to a industrial and communist society. Time doesn't permit us to go through all of the many pitfalls, all the missteps that went into the implementation of this grand plan, this movement from individualism and privatization to communal living, but suffice it to say that it was a disaster. The Great Leap Forward proved not to be a leap into economic expansion and prosperity, but rather a leap into the lap of famine. because the Great Leap Forward actually resulted in the Great Chinese Famine, a famine which cost the lives of, conservatively, 15 million Chinese. Now that's the government statistics. They would do well to not make it sound like the actual number probably died. Estimates are closer to 30 million. 30 million men, women, boys, and girls starving to death because of this communistic move. It was colossal failure of leadership, one bad decision from above that resulted in irreparable damage below. Well tonight, we come to such a great leap in Israel, don't we? Because here's David, toward the end of his life, he's an old man, he has a little bit of snow on the roof. He's thinking about the future. and thinking about what's going to happen when I'm gone, and so he's taking stock, as it were, and concern for his son Solomon, to whom he's going to pass on the kingdom, he says, let me number the army. Let's see what my insurance policy looks like. How are we doing? And so, with this future in mind, David commands a census to be taken. It takes a head count, but it's to a damaging effect because it's not every day, it's not every head count that actually results in less heads, is it? Oh, 70,000 men lose their lives. What David thought was a great leap forward was, in fact, a great leap backward. And after all that David's done, after we've been tracking with him through the books of 1 and 2 Samuel, with all of his leadership gaps, with all of his missteps, you think back to his committing adultery with Bathsheba in chapter 11, you think of his refusing to discipline Amnon for his having committed incestuous rape with Tamar, or you think when he just goes limp-wristed, rolls over, and lets Absalom stage a coup, ousting him from the throne, you'd think that God would just throw his hands up and say, that's it, Way more than three strikes. Can we start over? That's how we would operate. But God doesn't operate that way. No, David's sin is indeed great. And his sin in taking this needless head count, this senseless census, as some people call it, was indeed a great sin. But that is not the note that we are left on. For indeed, David's sin is great, but as he says, earlier in this passage, he says, the mercy of God is indeed great. David's sin is great, but God's mercy is greater. We're left with a gospel note to conclude the two volumes of David's life. Sin is indeed great, but God's mercy is more. And so what I want you to see from this chapter this evening is that the God of grace makes a way for guilty sinners to escape his righteous judgment. that the God of grace makes a way for guilty sinners to escape his righteous judgment. And we'll consider two points. God's grace is the overarching theme of this chapter. And he acts in grace in two ways. There are two expressions of God's grace. First, the grace of conviction in verses one through 17. The grace of conviction. But then God follows up on that grace of conviction with the grace of provision, 18 to 25. So, two points, the grace of conviction and the grace of provision. Now, we see that God only convicts David because David commits sin, and the sin is described for us in verses one through two of the passage. Look back at your Bibles, verse one. Again, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah. So the king said to Joab, the commander of the army who was with him, Go throughout all the tribes of Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, and number the people, that I may know the number of the people. Now, in order to understand what's going on here, we do need to know a little bit of the backstory, some of all the different moving parts that are going into really the very dense verse one. So the sin we learn in verse one is permitted by God. The sin is permitted by God. What is the reason for taking the census? Verse one tells us, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel. Now why it was kindled against Israel, we're not exactly sure. Biblical scholars, I think the likeliest and the most common explanation is that God's anger was still against Israel because there had been no national repentance for their having turned first to Absalom and then to Sheba. Israel stood by and let these men rise to prominence, let them oust their family member, and with Sheba, he was a tribesman of He was a Benjamite, but you understand that Israel was complicit in the ousting of the Lord's anointed, Yahweh's chosen Mashiach, his Messiah. And so God's anger is kindled against Israel, and so he's coming to judge them. So we're not exactly clear why God is angry, but we know that he is. Perhaps ideas as to why he's angry, but we can't say definitively. But you see that the instrument of God's inflicting punishment, inflicting chastisement upon the chosen nation is their own king. That David is the one who goes and takes the census, and it's the consequence of his having taken the census, whereby the whole nation is judged. Proverbs 21, verse one says that the king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord. He turns it wherever he will. God is here using Israel's defender as their agent of chastisement, and God's sovereign over this. But you see, if you look elsewhere in your Bibles to the complementary perspective on this event, the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles recount the events of 1 and 2 Samuel, but from a different vantage point. But 1 Chronicles 21 verse one says that Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel. Now, which was it? Was it the Lord that had incited David against Israel, saying, go and number Israel, or was it Satan? Yes, it was both, right? The Lord uses means. The God of providence uses and establishes secondary causes that is agents of executing his holy will. And he's able to use even evil agents. You remember what God did with Job? When Satan is going to and fro about the earth, he loves to tempt people. He's been plucking them off left and right, and he says, I've been going to and fro about the world. Everybody's cursed you, Lord. Everybody is just easy work, and God says, have you considered my servant Job? So you see, what God meant for testing in the life of Job, Satan meant for tempting. God tempts no one. We have to believe what James says when he says that God tempts no one, but God tests his people. So you see that behind the scenes, there's this interplay between human will, between the providence of God, between evil and good purposes. If we were to break this down, I want to read you some excerpts from the Scotsman, whose name is slipping my mind right now, Thomas Manton, in talking about this passage. It's actually his commentary for the book of James where he refers back to this as an instance wherein we are faced with this difficult reality of God's permitting sin, though he is not the author of sin. Manton says this, it was not evil to punish the nation. He moved, that is, permitted Satan to move by withdrawing himself from David. God suffered, God suffered in the sense that God permitted, but Satan tempted. For God is often in Scripture said to do that which he doth but permit to be done. So God is not the active tempter, Satan is the tempter, and yet God has ordained that it would be so. He goes on to say, his providence is conversant about sin, but without sin. As a sunbeam lighteth upon a dunghill without being stained by it. So get that image, right? It's conversant with sin, or it's conversant about sin, but it is not committing sin. And then he finally concludes with this. The activeness of his providence in and about sin is this. He doth not barely permit it, but dispose circumstances and occasions, and limit and overrule it, so as it may be for good. I'll read that one more time. The activeness of his providence in and about sin is this. He doth not barely permit it, but dispose circumstances and occasions, and limit and overrule it, so as it may be for good. So you wonder the distinction there. It's the same one that the Westminster divines make, that God sovereignly ordains whatsoever comes to pass, but he does have a permissive will. There are things that God allows to happen, though he takes no delight in those things and the evil of the things themselves. But nor is he entirely passive, meaning he just throws his hands up and lets whatever happened happen. That's recklessness, that's bare permission. So there's two types of permission. There's an, sounds oxymoronic, there's an active permission, and then a bare permission. Bare permission is bad, active permission is good. Think of it this way. God does not throw his hands up and leave secondary causes to chance, that would be bare permission. But this image. Rather, like a man who's manning a floodgate. He opens the hatch and lets man's sin and the consequences, the painful consequences, pour forth, but only so much as it's all directed and diverted to a good end. That God lifts the hatch, He leaves us to ourselves, the consequences of sin pour forth, but only so that He might divert human sinfulness and evil and limit it for the good purpose that He intends, namely His glory and your good. But you ask the question, how is that fair? How is it fair that David and the people can be punished? Remember, it was not unjust to punish the nation. The Lord's anger was incited against them, and so they were begging for judgment. They were begging for chastisement. But how is it fair? How is it fair that David is made to be responsible for this when it's the Lord who had sent Satan and it incited David to this? Great question. And I do not have an answer for you. And no one ever will. Ultimately, you have to come back to this, fundamentally. If grace, remember that here God has withdrawn his grace from David. When the sun shines, it warms the earth. But when the sun withdraws, there is freezing and darkness. We've talked about this. But if grace were a debt, then it would be an injustice for God to withhold it from David. but because grace is free and unmerited, he is not unjust in withholding it. Do you understand? That if grace were a debt that God owed to you or me, it would be an injustice for him to withhold it, but because grace is not deserved, God is just in withholding it as he pleases. But why? I don't know. And ultimately, that's because I'm a creature and God is God. His thoughts are higher than my thoughts. His ways are higher than my ways. Where does this leave us, friends? It leaves us with these two conclusions, that God is higher and we are lower, and that's where we must stay. Verse one. Now, that's the sin permitted, verse one. Now, the sin committed in verses two through nine. The sin committed, go and number Israel and Judah. So the king said to Joab, the commander of the army who was with him, go throughout all the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and number the people that I may know the number of the people. Where's the sin in this? The question is one that commentators and exegetes and interpreters wrestle with. Was it the fact that he didn't collect the census tax that you had to collect when you did it? It was coming from somewhere in one of the earlier books, I believe it's the book of Exodus. Or maybe it was the motive. That's probably the most common interpretation of what was sinful about David's taking the census. Coming in, this was my own understanding because it agrees very well with Psalm 33, verses 16 and 17. The king is not saved by his great army. A warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might, it cannot rescue. Case closed. That feels nice and neat. David is trusting in numbers. He's taking the head count, taking security, and in carnal securities, and man in the size of his army, and that really resonates. But at the end of the day, does the Bible tell us why the census was wrong? It doesn't. It doesn't tell us why it was wrong, and so rather than assuming, just as with the same posture of humility that we need to assume when we look at this interplay between the doctrine of divine sovereignty, providence, human sin, concurrence, evil, we have to be content with Scripture's silence, that uncomfortable, awkward silence. Now, what should we do? Dale Ralph Davis and the biblical commentator de Graff, they're content to remain here. They are content to remain in the uncomfortable territory of the unknown. Why was it sinful? Davis writes this. Does this bother us? Do we perhaps assume that God must always explain himself and justify his ways? If we cannot be content to accept the mystery of this text, that is pretty revealing of ourselves. If we are upset over a text that tells us Yahweh is angry but does not tell us why, are we not saying that we really don't trust him to be just? Is there not a strain within us that insists there be no mysteries in God? Don't we sometimes subtly assume that God owes us an explanation? Can we live, can we worship, with mystery, that's the question. Can we be content with the mysteries of the scriptures? We must. If God's doing it, it's right. That's our foundation. That's what undergirds our belief in the entire Bible, it's faith. And we want answers to all of our questions, all of our inquiries. But God is not obligated to answer to you and me. That's not faith. Faith is not having all the answers. Faith is believing when you don't have the answers. Faith is this, I'll define faith for you. Faith is not exhaustive knowledge. Faith is entire trust. Faith is not exhaustive knowledge. Faith is entire trust. I love what John Calvin says in book three, chapter 23 of his Institutes. He says, believing ignorance is better than presumptuous knowledge. Believing ignorance is better than presumptuous knowledge. My friends, you need to be okay with being believingly ignorant. Because God is higher than you. There are mysteries beyond fathoming. And that's okay. Our God has all the details worked out. So, the sin committed. by David is we don't know, and yet we know that God was right to be angry, that it was a violation of his law. But we also see in verse three that Joab, yeah, Joab is acting as a roadblock, which is surprising. But Joab said to the king, may the Lord your God add to the people a hundred times as many as they are, while the eyes of my lord the king still see it, but why does my lord the king delight in this thing? Now here's Joab, the least likely fellow that you would look to for leadership advice. Joab, the rash one who has a happy trigger finger, the one who, when he gets angry, you best look out because you probably have a scope on your back. Joab's coming for you. But here is Joab having his Balaam's donkey kind of moment where God uses the last person that you would expect to speak forth some truth. Here he is, but not only is he this, Joab is acting as a roadblock. He's evidencing that promise that God makes in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 13, where it says that you've not been tempted in any way that is uncommon to man, but God always provides a way of escape. God's providing a way of escape for David, and with the least likely character, Joab's saying, my lord, the king, why are you doing this? Don't you know that the God whom you serve can add to you a hundred times more men than what you see right now? Just trust in him. Don't trust in the numbers. You can't quantify faith. It doesn't work on a spreadsheet. You have to believe in God. Well, David, if Joab is the roadblock, then David is the battering ram because he's stubborn. He denies him. Notice what the text says, verse four. But the king's word prevailed against Joab and the commanders of the army. We don't know how many commanders there were, but at the very least, David is obstinate. He is digging in his heels. He rejects Joab's counsel and the counsel of all the different commanders of the army. What is it that the writer of Proverbs said? There is wisdom in a multitude of counselors. And here, David will say later, I was foolish. He denied the wisdom of these men. So he's stubborn because he rejects and rebuts against Joab and a large group of men, but he's also stubborn, you see in verse eight. So when they had gone throughout all the land, they came to Jerusalem at the end of nine months and 20 days. This was not a moment of rash sin. This was a period of nine months, nine months of digging in your heels, where David said, yep, let it go on. Let it go on. David had been obstinate like this before, do you remember? He committed the sin with Bathsheba, and it wasn't until she had conceived and given birth to the child that David finally confessed his sin. Woman's in gestation for nine months. And so here he is in nine months of backsliding, refusing to trust God, trusting in men instead, trusting in chariots, and perhaps if that's what's going on. But at the very least, what you see here is that you need to confess and repent of your sins right now. God doesn't count to three and he certainly doesn't count to nine months. When you sin, stop and repent right now. David continues, he's stubborn. So the sin's committed, but then in verses 10 through 17, you see that the conscience is convicted. The conscience is convicted. Look at verse 10, read it. But David's heart struck him after he had numbered the people. His heart smote him. And David said to the Lord, I have sinned greatly in what I have done, but now, O Lord, please take away the iniquity of your servant, for I have done very Foolishly, there was wisdom in that multitude of counselors, but here David has made himself a fool. Verse 17. Then David spoke to the Lord when he saw the angel who was striking the people. Behold, I've sinned and I've done wickedly, but these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand be against me and against my father's house. David confesses his sin and he makes no ifs, ands, or buts about it. When you confess sin, you make no qualifications. You don't say, I'm really sorry, but you did this thing. That's not an apology, that's a rationalization. Confession is having a true sense of the heinousness of your sin, and confessing it, saying, you need to forgive me, friend, for I have a debt that I owe you, and I need you to forgive the debt. And David here says, I've sinned greatly in what I've done, I have iniquity, and I've done very foolishly. Now, application. You know that a sensitive conscience is a good thing. Your conscience should not be bound in things beyond scripture, don't mistake me. but your conscience should be bound by the things of Scripture. It should be. And so if you have a sensitive conscience, a sensitive conscience is a sign that you have a living conscience. It's a good thing. It's been put there inside your chest by God. It's a good thing that you feel sin. We talked about it in chapter 11, how pain receptors in your hand, what's the purpose of them? That when you put your hand on that hot stove, you withdraw your hand. Because if you leave it on there, you'll die. The conscience is like the pain receptors of the soul. It's God's way of letting you know, go no further. If you have a conscience, if when you sin you have regret, you have remorse, praise be to God that he has not left you to yourself, that he hasn't left you with the hardened, cauterized heart that has become callous because you've sinned so much. Praise God for a soft conscience. And when God convicts you, you need to repent. God convicts you so as to restore you. God doesn't convict you to leave you there, bloodied on the side of the road. No, he convicts you so as the process of restoration can take place. He's done so before in the life of David. That was really the theme of chapter 11, that God convicted David of the sin against Bathsheba in order that he might restore David. And so here he is doing it again. But the second application that this should really be, the fact that he sinned in this manner for nine months should be a tremendous encouragement to you. You're looking at me funny. What do you mean that I should sin for a period of nine months? No. But he had so continued in obstinate opposition against the Lord, and yet he brought him back. For nine months, for 18 months of David's life, he buried and ignored sin. But God restored him. It's an encouragement to you that even if right now you are struggling with the habitual pattern of sin, some sort of secret sin that nobody else knows about, you might have been struggling with it for nine days, nine weeks, nine years, nine decades, it doesn't matter. that however long you've been clinging to your sin, if you would let go of it and cling to the cross, Christ will have you. You should be encouraged because when you see how great David's sin is, you're reminded that God's love is that much greater. So the conscience is convicted. But then you do see in verses 11 through 16, very briefly, that the correction is administered. Now, It seems that David leaves the option ultimately up to the Lord. He says, let me not fall into the hand of man, which rules out option two, that he would be on the run for three months against a Philistine or some sort of other contingent. So he says, Lord, I'd rather be at your mercy than at the mercy of wicked men. You choose. And I think God, out of an instance of his mercy, chooses not to give a three-year famine across the land, but chooses instead three days of pestilence. But you do see that it took a very big toll. That which David had put all of his confidence in, the numbers of the men, went down 70,000 in 72 hours. God is saying that you can't trust in this three-legged stool, you need to trust in me. He kicks the legs out, as it were. And so the nation has been judged, David has been chastised, but you see that God, yes, has given him the grace of conviction. He made David to feel that he'd done wrong, in verse 10. But God is also gracious in that he is the God of provision, verses 18 through 25, our second point. You see the first thing that he provides. He provides three things. The first is a prophet, verses 18 through 19. He provides the little known Gad. And Gad came that day to David and said to him, go up, raise an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Aranah the Jebusite. So David went up at Gad's word as the Lord commanded. David is aimless. You know, right now, the CDC, all the different medical agencies, we don't know how to contain the coronavirus. We're scratching our heads. We can't make heads or tails of how to even overcome the common flu. So yeah, we're aimless in the sense that we have ideas, but we don't know how to really take care of some of the world's problems, and how much worse off do you think David would have been in this situation? There's no center for disease control. So David here is just watching his people, his kinsmen, drop like flies left and right, and he says, Lord, what do I do? And the Lord sends him a prophet. He sends him Gad. He sends him special revelation. We talked about special revelation in my study during the Sunday school hour with two young men. Talking about special revelation. What is special revelation? It's God's will for our salvation. Natural revelation lets you know there is a God. Salvation lets you know how to be, special revelation lets you know how to be reconciled to that God. Okay, so with special revelation, we have God's word. And so here, God, in much the way that he did in the Old Testament, he's speaking through the ministry of his prophets. He spoke in the New Testament at the times of the apostles, and now he speaks through this written instruction that's been handed down to you and me, telling us how we might make our way back to God. how God has made a way for us, if you will. What you see Gad doing here in micro, this prophetic ministry of revealing the will of God for the salvation of Israel, is what you see in macro in the ministry of the Lord Jesus. He executes three offices, prophet, priest, and king. How does Christ execute the office of a prophet? By revealing unto us the will of God for our salvation. He comes as a herald. telling us what we must do to be saved. He was the successor to that last and greatest Old Testament prophet, John the Baptist, who is mirroring his message. What did he say? Repent and believe, for the kingdom of God is at hand. Gad is giving us a foretaste of the prophet who is greater than Moses, letting us know that there is going to come one who reveals the way of full and final salvation. You can think of a prophet this way, as a crossing guard. They're the crossing guards with the bright orange vest that tell you where to go, they direct traffic, telling you how to be safe. That's what the prophet does. So God provides a prophet because he knows that David needs one. He doesn't know where to go by himself. But then God also provides a place. Notice that he provides the threshing floor of Aranah, the Jebusite. You'll see in some other First and Second Chronicles, it's Oranan, the Jebusite. It's a different way of saying his name. Same person. This place is a place of tremendous significance in scripture. Tremendous significance. It's Mount Moriah. Mount Moriah. This is the place, the same hilltop, where Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. He was willing to plunge a knife into the chest of his only son, Genesis 22, to take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you. It's significant for another reason, because when you flip forward to 1 Chronicles 22 and 2 Chronicles 3, then David said, here, this is on the threshing floor of Ornon, here shall be the house of the Lord God, and here the altar of burnt offering for Israel. Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to David his father at the place that David had appointed on the threshing floor of Ornon the Jebusite. This location would have such eternal significance in the life of Israel because this would be the place where the foundations of the temple in Jerusalem would be laid. And that temple is significant for this one reason, my friends, because the sacrifice of those many bulls and goats points you forward to the greater sacrifice of the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the earth. He points you forward to the Lord Jesus. This earthly temple was just a type of that temple into which Jesus Christ will enter as our high priest, that he's made a way through the veil that is not made by human hands, but it's His own body, it's His flesh and blood. He has made a way for us to come back into the presence of the Father. We would rightly fall under the just condemnation, the justice of God, and yet He substitutes Himself and atones for our sins. This is what we call substitutionary atonement. The substitute atones for the sin of the one whom He replaces. And you know that's what's happened here before, because There was a ram caught in a thicket. God provided a sacrifice so that Isaac would be spared. God here provides a replacement. He replaces these oxen that are sacrificed on the threshing floor. so that the people of Israel would not die. And God, one day, on another top, on another mount, on Mount Calvary, would provide a lamb whereby your sins and mine are atoned for. He is our replacement. God of grace has made a way for sinners to be free of his righteous judgment, but not only that, to be restored to his fatherly affection. God has provided. The Old Testament whispered it, but the New Testament shouts it, proclaims it, that this Jesus Christ is the one to whom this event to close 2 Samuel was pointing to. God has provided. God is gracious. He's the God who provided conviction to David. He's the God who brought about repentance and restoration. He's the God who provided the place. He's the God who provided the substitute. He's the God who provides the greatest substitute that sinners could ever ask for, the Lord Jesus Christ. The God of grace makes a way for guilty sinners to escape his righteous judgment. As I said, it's amazing, time does fly. I didn't think that, I hoped that I would be here to close the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel with you, and I praise the Lord that I am. We've got a lot of work ahead of us. But as we close these books of 1st and 2nd Samuel, I wanna summarize roughly the two years that we've spent in this book with a simple summary statement, or with some sort of takeaway for you. And it actually comes to us from the New Testament. The Apostle John wrote, my little children, I write these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, he has an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins. That's what I want you to see from the books of 1 and 2 Samuel. I want you to see that no matter how disastrous your life may be, no matter how great the leap backward that you have taken, no matter how bad a train wreck your life is, God can put you back on track if you have faith in Jesus Christ, that He is the propitiation for your sins, that when you do sin, and indeed, we sin every day in thought, word, and deed, what is your hope that you might be restored to God's presence? Christ, He is the propitiation for your sins. Little children, these books were inspired by the Holy Spirit, they were preserved by the Holy Spirit, and they've been received by you and by me in order that we might not sin. David's life tells you in many ways and more than once, don't sin like this. And yet when you do, you have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. 2 Samuel ends on a note of propitiation. And if you have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, your life will end on that very same note. You'll have an advocate with the Father. He's Jesus Christ, the righteous. Amen. Let's pray. Father indeed, how amazing your grace that you, the God who would have every reason to punish us according to our sins, have made a way by the blood of your only begotten Son. You have provided the way, the truth, and the life that we might come back and have fellowship with you. Father, we do pray that you would convict us of sin. We pray that you would prick our hearts, that we might turn from sin and turn to Christ, and that we would not drag our feet in doing so, but that we would come to you readily, knowing that you will receive us. And when we come to you, we pray that we would have our eyes fixed not upon deeds done by our hands, but only by those hands of the Lord Jesus Christ that were pierced through for our sins. He is the propitiation. He is our savior. To him be glory, now and forever. Amen.