When the Means of God and the Devil Dovetail

"Hey, Dad," my son asked me earlier today, "what do you make of these two passages?" A buddy of Phil's, also planning on going to seminary, had run across a couple of passages of Scripture, dealing with the same event, but which gave it two totally different spins.

The passages are 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1. Readers of the Bible know that 1 Chronicles in the Old Testament reiterates, often with different details, the book of 2 Samuel. But the differences between the two passages Phil's buddy noted are pretty huge.

Read them:

Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go, count the people of Israel and Judah.” (2 Samuel 24:1)

Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to count the people of Israel. (1 Chronicles 21:1)

So, who was behind David's decision to count the members of his army, the Lord or Satan? And what was so wrong with David taking a census anyway?

Modern scholars of Scripture might not be terribly troubled by this seeming conflict. They posit that the Old Testament histories went through a number of iterations and were finally filtered through four "editors," not actual individual editors, but theological schools of thought that had their own slants and compiled the Biblical material in ways reflective of them.

According to this theory, the four major editorial schools that produced our current Old Testament, known by generations of seminarians as J, E, D, and P are Yahwistic, Elohistic, Deuteronomistic, and Priestly. Some scholars even claim to be able to discern paragraph seams reflecting the varied traditions throughout.

So, it's possible that the two seemingly conflicted passages represent different schools of ancient Israelite theological emphases.

This shouldn't threaten anyone's understanding of Scripture as the Word of God, though. Whatever the varied emphases of Biblical writers, editors, and translators, we trust that a praying people of faith, guided by the Holy Spirit, have handed down to us God's Word as God intended it to be given. The compilers of the Bible weren't dumb. They could see, for example, that Genesis 1:1-2:3 and 2:4-24, present us with two very different versions of creation. But each contain important truths about God's purposes that we need to know.

But I have a feeling that explaining the passages from 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles is, both simpler and more complicated than J, E, D, or P. In a nutshell: There are times when the means of God and the means of the devil are the same, although their ends may diverge.*

To show you how it's possible for the devil or a human being with bad purposes to use the same methods at the same time as God, Who's after good purposes, consider two other passages of Scripture.

First: The climactic passage in the account of Joseph and his brothers in the Old Testament book of Genesis. Joseph's brothers, you know, resented their father's love and attention for Joseph, as well as the early intimations that the boy would one day rule over them. So, they sold Joseph into slavery, convincing their father, Jacob, that Joseph was attacked and eaten by a wild animal. Over the course of years, Joseph becomes the prime minister of Egypt and his brothers fear that in his powerful position, he'll take revenge on them. But Joseph points out that their bad action resulted in his being in the position to save thousands of people, including all of fledgling Israel, from a famine then raging throughout the Middle East. So, he tells his brothers:

"Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today" (Genesis 50:20)

Second: The set of similar passages in the New Testament Gospels that bridge Jesus' baptism, when He's declared the Son of God--the very personification of the Deity--and His temptation in the wilderness. Luke recounts this abrupt movement from triumph to deadly challenge jarringly:
²

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. (Luke 4:1-2a)

In the case of Joseph's brothers, there can be no doubt that what they did was despicable, both to Joseph and to Jacob. They took money for their brother, getting rid of him. Then, they broke the heart of their old man, convincing him that his undeniably favorite son** was dead. And yet, Joseph later claimed to see that while their act was, really, evil, God's hand had been in it. Their malevolence put him, over two decades later, exactly where he needed to be to accomplish God's purposes.

The case of Jesus' temptation is particularly interesting. The word for tempt, in the original Greek of the New Testament, is peirasmo. It can mean both test and tempt. And it can mean both things simultaneously.

Notice that it was God the Holy Spirit who led Jesus in the wilderness "where for forty days he was tempted by the devil." Apparently, both God the Holy Spirit and the devil wanted Jesus in the wilderness, but for different reasons. One can surmise that the Spirit wanted to strengthen Jesus' commitment to and fortify Him for His mission of dying and rising for us, while the devil wanted to deter Jesus from that mission, enticing Him to take easier paths to power and rule.

So, what's all of this got to do with our passages from 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles?

That's where the census comes in. There's nothing inherently wrong with a census. There were even times in ancient Israel's history when God commanded the taking of censuses. A nose count can be a good planning tool. But that wasn't David's motive. As the editors of The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Revised Standard Version) noted years ago:

The reason [for God's anger with the census] must have been that taking [it] was deemed an infringement upon the prerogatives of their God, the sole arbiter of the destinies of the nation and its people.

In other words, David had fallen prey to the idea that the bigger your military, the more powerful you are, when in fact, ancient Israel's power was God and the nation's humble reliance on God. The editors of The Life Application Bible (New Revised Standard Version) explain:

David's sin was pride and ambition in counting the people so that he could glory in the size of his nation and army, its power and defenses. By doing this, he put his faith in the size of his army rather than God's ability to protect them regardless of their number.

So, was it the Lord or Satan who incited David to conduct the census?

Why couldn't it have been both of them?

Sometimes, God lets us "go our own ways," allowing us to stew in our own juices so that we can see the futility and stupidity of trying to live without God. Sometimes we need to be brought up short so that we will turn back to God for hope, peace, and life. God appears to have been doing this with David here.

And, of course, because Satan wants nothing more than to break God's heart and destroy God's rule by tearing us from the arms of God, he could have been simultaneously urging David to take his self-glorifying census.

Sometimes, it seems that the means of God and the devil really do dovetail. In every temptation there's a test. When temptation comes, we can pray, "Lead us not into temptation." Or, as a modern translation puts it, "Save us from the time of trial."

*I know. Nobody wants to take the notion of the devil seriously any longer. He's seen as a worn-out old superstition. And while the devil can't make you do anything and would clearly love for you to be unaware of the ways he tries to drive you away from the hope and peace of God, you can be sure that he's constantly trying break God's heart by turning yours cold to God or by leading you to despair. Earlier this week, I talked with a man fearful that he was too bad for God to love him. I explained that, while none of us is good enough for God to love, God loves us anyway. On top of that, I said, a totally bad person would never worry about whether he or she were good enough for God. People given over to badness simply figure that good and bad are outmoded concepts or that they're good enough. The closer we get to God, the more conscious we are of our need of God and of God's forgiveness. "The next time the devil tells you that you're not good enough," I said, "tell the devil that Jesus and His love are bigger than your lies and I belong to Jesus forever."

**I love it that the Bible shows us how God loves and uses dysfunctional people. Believers in the God disclosed to Israel and in Jesus Christ are not, as the old bumper sticker puts it, perfect but forgiven.