Today’s reading: 1 Chronicles 20-21; James 1
The omission and inclusion of content in today’s chapters is what first drew my attention, reading through Chronicles in the past, to something being “off” about these books.
In chapter 20, specifically, the author is drawing our attention to the fact that he is purposely omitting important content. He starts the chapter with a very familiar (and damning) formulation, “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle…” If you are very familiar with the Old Testament, this is exactly how the story of David and Bathsheba starts. The author opens the chapter this way, setting up the expectation that he is going to tell the story of David’s great moral failing in taking the wife of one of his mighty men and then murdering that man to cover it up, but then he instead presents only a positive/victorious picture. Rather than David committing adultery and murder, he conquers a city and his men defeat the remaining descendants of the giant clans. Starting the chapter like he does tells us that the author is not unaware of David’s sin, or trying to hide it, but is, instead, focusing on the positive and not the negative.
But then, in chapter 21, we do get a story of David’s sin and failure in conducting a census, so what’s going on??
This gets to what I have mentioned previously in this book, that I believe the author’s intent in Chronicles is to track the promise of the eternal king Messiah coming from the line of David.
In this regard David’s sin against other people isn’t nearly as important as his sin against God. If anything is going to derail God’s promise to bring the Messiah through David’s line, it would be David’s overt sin against God, and in choosing to conduct the census despite Joab begging him to reconsider doing this, David really couldn’t be making any more overt choice to disregard the Lord’s commands. This story tracks both David’s repentance and the fact that God, despite David’s direct actions against His instructions, doesn’t revoke his promise to David.
This is why I think the author leaves out the story of David and Bathsheba (despite pointing directly to it with the opening of chapter 20), but includes the story of David performing the census.
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