When We Took The Census
In the next four verses, we see Joab questioning David’s request and after pleading his case, David’s word prevailed and Joab went out and performed the task except for counting Levi and Benjamin. The scriptures tell us that Joab knew that this was an abomination but he obeyed the leader.
What we have here is David questioning the promises of God where might and numbers would have replaced Power and Glory. The same thing is taking place in the seeker-sensitive church of today where might, numbers, money, influence, and affluence has taken the place of power, glory, dominion, sovereignity, omnipotence, and providence. Why? because we took the census to establish feeling and force instead of walking out the will of God in faith and fidelity.
In verses seven and eight, we see God striking Israel, David realizing his mistake, and David confessing his mistake. It was after these sequence of events that God sent Gad to give David a choice between three punishments of
three years of famine.
three months to be defeated by your foes with the sword of your enemies overtaking you.
three days the sword of the LORD—the plague in the land, with the angel of the LORD destroying throughout all the territory of Israel.
David chose the third option for not wanting to be handed over to his enemies and lost 70,000 people. However, the church growth and the seeker sensitive pioneers do not have this choice. Instead, we are seeing the combined wrath of all famime, defeat, and plagues in the church of today and we are about to lose alot more than 70,000 people. We are about to lose the presence of God in our midst.
We are seeing a very long term famine of spiritually hungry but malnourished believers whose hungers and appetites have not been filled. What was supposed to address the heart instead fed the monster of the flesh and the monster of the flesh is crying out for more and more ‘food’ but there is none being prepared in the church because there is no bread of life in many churches today. The pep rallies of worship, the milky preaching, the generic non-offensive wording replaced the defined meat of God. It temporarly appeased the flesh when the meat of the Word would permanently edify the church and the body.
We are seeing the Christians still in a state of defeatism even after the victory rally ends at 12:30 every Sunday afternoon. As the Sunday morning’ sermonette failed to influence the actions of Monday-Saturday, the feeling of victory was overshadowed by the battle of self-control, temperment, and addiction.
We are seeing the plagues permeate throughout the church. Plagues of bad and uncorrected teachings, plagues of ‘if this works, then this IS God’, plagues of success equates to anointing, plagues of pride, arrogance, conceit, plages of subcontracting the Great Commission to the government, etc. What has happened? We are seeing people in our churches die as they leave the church for aberrant doctrine. We are seeing people mistake something working as God’s hand and the results are disastrous when the sandy foundation collapses under it’s own weight. We are seeing people who think that their money, power, prestigue, influence, etc. buys them special favor with God and those without it are deemed as being cursed. We see adults treated as children signing covenant contracts instead of treating them as responsible adults capabable of reading, interpreting, obeying, and fulfilling scriptures on their own.
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Thank you for an excellent post.
>Where was God in this?
And what happens when what people want changes yet again. Nothing gets old faster than over-relevance.
Example: What would Hybel’s church look like now if he started it during the heyday of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In? “Sock it to me, Lord!”