The Cost

 DEVOTION

2^ND SAMUEL

THE COST

2 Sam 24:15-25

15 So the LORD sent a plague on Israel from that morning until the end of the time designated, and seventy thousand of the people from Dan to Beersheba died. 16 When the angel stretched out his hand to destroy Jerusalem, the LORD was grieved because of the calamity and said to the angel who was afflicting the people, "Enough! Withdraw your hand." The angel of the LORD was then at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. 17 When David saw the angel who was striking down the people, he said to the LORD, "I am the one who has sinned and done wrong. These are but sheep. What have they done? Let your hand fall upon me and my family." 18 On that day Gad went to David and said to him, "Go up and build an altar to the LORD on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite." 19 So David went up, as the LORD had commanded through Gad. 20 When Araunah looked and saw the king and his men coming toward him, he went out and bowed down before the king with his face to the ground. 21 Araunah said, "Why has my lord the king come to his servant?" "To buy your threshing floor," David answered, "so I can build an altar to the LORD, that the plague on the people may be stopped." 22 Araunah said to David, "Let my lord the king take whatever pleases him and offer it up. Here are oxen for the burnt offering, and here are threshing sledges and ox yokes for the wood. 23 O king, Araunah gives all this to the king." Araunah also said to him, "May the LORD your God accept you." 24 But the king replied to Araunah, "No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the LORD my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing." So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen and paid fifty shekels of silver for them. 25 David built an altar to the LORD there and sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings. Then the LORD answered prayer in behalf of the land, and the plague on Israel was stopped.

NIV

We have reached the final words of the book of Second Samuel with David doing a righteous act of obedience to the Lord. God had given David three choices of how the hand of God would act against Israel because of the foolishness of David having a census taken of all the fighting men of Israel. However, we saw that David would not choose, as he wanted to be subject to the hand of God. God could have put seven years of famine on the land, as in the Hebrew instead of three, it is seven. God could have put three months of David being overpowered by his enemies, or three days of a plague. I would have chosen the shortest of them,  and because of the compassion of the Lord, he chose the shortest, just three days of pestilence upon the land. Surely, far more people would have perished in a seven-year famine. He was also compassionate toward David, not making him flee for three months from the enemy.  Now David must go and worship the Lord, and it must be in a special place. We do not know why that threshing floor was a special place, but David would not accept it as a gift. It must cost him something to be able to build an altar to sacrifice before the Lord. That could be our story, our lesson we need to take to heart. How can we bring a sacrifice of praise or thanksgiving before the Lord, if it does not cost us something? But what could we pay? Jesus paid it all on that cross, setting us free from the penalty of death. David had three choices, and he left it in the hands of God. Today, we have only two choices: to accept or reject Jesus as Lord and Savior. However, this choice is not for a limited amount of years, months, or days, but it is for eternity. Yet, at the same time, we believe that for us to bring an acceptable offering of praise and thanksgiving, or a fellowship offering, it must still cost us something. But what could we give, what could we pay? We must offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to the Lord. That is our act of spiritual worship. The cost is “self”. We must give all of ourselves to the Lord. We cannot share Him with the things of the world. We cannot have part of our “self” chasing after, pursuing the things, the wealth, the materialist ideology of this world. We cannot have part of “self” partnering with the perverse concepts of the ideology of gender confusion. We cannot participate in the ways the world pursues obedience to the passions of the flesh. Our cost, to worship God in spirit and in truth, is our very “self”. Does that mean we should be void of all the material things of this world? No, the Lord was very specific about the fact that we must seek His kingdom and His righteousness first and foremost in our lives, that is, seek with our whole “self”. When we do that, He will give us, that is, He will provide for us all the material things the world chases after. They will continue to chase after those things, but we will simply be given those things. Of course, that is not why we seek the Lord first, but the point is that is what we are to do: seek the Lord first. The cost is “self”.