Repentance is the Difference - 8/16/2026

Love that last line from the ashes, redemption rises.

Like Rin said, I get the privilege this morning.

We're closing out the life of David.

11 months and 55 chapters ago.

We we start fourscore and seven years.

We uh we've been in this for a while, but it's it's a really amazing story, and maybe even feeling, I think a lot of us have been feeling like, how do we land it with David?

Because is David a saint?

Like he wrote the Psalms, he's the underdog, like the ultimate underdog story that God picked, man after God's own heart.

Is he the sufferer?

Like he's unjustly chased by King Saul.

A man he like loved like a father, tried to take David's life for years and years.

Or is he a sinner?

Saint, sufferer, sinner, like he committed some of the most unthinkable things that we read in the pages of scripture.

So which one is he?

Yes.

All of the above.

And I think this chapter today kind of shows that more than anything.

Um, in these final chapters, we we've talked about we're in an epilogue.

We have we have two lists, two psalms, and two stories.

It's very artfully done.

And this last story, kind of like the first story, which I won't rehash for you, but these are taken out of chronological order and they are meant to like give us the point.

What is the point of David's life?

What is the lesson?

Who is he?

What are we to take away?

And I'm just gonna give you a little bit of a trigger warning on this one because this is another one of these Old Testament stories where I can tell you you will be perplexed, uh, possibly troubled, maybe even offended.

Like there's some stuff in here that we just we scratch our heads at.

And God is gonna show us some important things, but it's not easy to get there.

I mean, have you ever been offended as you read the Bible sometimes?

Are we allowed to say that?

We're like, God, what are you doing?

What is this?

Culturally, theologically, we just don't get it.

And I was thinking about that this week.

You know, sometimes the stories trouble us, and I was reminded of that classic work of art that I go to so often that speaks so much to my life.

Uh, it's the Princess Pride.

Uh, I know it's the most often quoted movie ever.

I'm not gonna talk about marriage or anything like that.

There's actually a subplot in the movie that I love, right?

The the grandson keeps interrupting his grandfather and he says, No, grandpa, that's not how the story goes.

Because he doesn't like the story as it's being told.

And grandpa, just in like a grandpa way, it's so perfect.

He just looks at him and he says, Am I telling the story or are you telling the story?

And I think it's good for us to kind of ask that question as we go into hearing God's word.

Why did God choose this story as the final story?

Why did the authors of scripture choose this story as the final story?

And I think the answer to that question will be very instructive for us.

We're in chapter 24 of 2 Samuel.

It starts like this the Lord's anger burned against Israel again, and he stirred up David against them to say, Go count the people of Israel and Judah.

Okay, some big questions that come out of just this opening verse.

Why is God angry again?

Question one.

Question two, how are we supposed to understand this phrase?

The Lord stirred up David against Israel?

Like, is God causing David to sin here?

And lastly, if he is sinning, what's the problem with taking a census?

Okay, easy questions, all of them.

Uh, they're actually very difficult.

And I want to try to tackle them because I don't want you to be totally distracted with some of the weirdness.

And it's important for us to understand the story.

So I'm just gonna tackle those questions kind of in order.

What is this sin?

We just don't know.

He doesn't tell us.

He doesn't tell us what the sin is.

I mean, it's unusual because God usually is pretty quick to say, I'm not okay with this, but we aren't told here.

Now, I'm gonna give you my best guess.

I know preachers aren't supposed to get up and say they're giving you their best guess, but I want to tell you something quite shocking.

I read a whole bunch of commentaries on this, and I know this might blow your mind, but people don't agree.

So, you know, it appears, as best as I can tell, that in the face of their military uh victories, their growing national security and superiority, the people of Israel are beginning to trust in themselves over God.

And David is seemingly doing the same thing.

Um I think that's what's going on, and I think as we go through the chapter, you'll see some hints as to why that might be the case.

But the the bigger, maybe more disturbing question to us is is God causing?

I mean, some some versions say God incited David to, is God causing David to sin?

Well, let's start with what we absolutely clearly know from the pages of scripture, a passage that might be familiar to you from the book of James, chapter one.

James says, Remember when you're being tempted, do not say God is tempting me.

God is never tempted to do wrong, and he never tempts anyone else.

God didn't make David sin.

I think my my guess is what's going on here is David was very much ready to take the census, and we'll come to the census in a minute.

But David was already leaning that way.

And there's an interesting phrase that shows up in both Old and New Testaments.

One of God's most common judgments to sin is letting us sin.

He gives us over to, the Bible says.

In other words, if you're leaning and you're already there at some point, by the way, one of the Holy Spirit's jobs in the world today, the scripture says, is restraining sin.

If you think this is as bad as it could be, you're very wrong.

And sometimes God says, You want to Okay, here you go.

Our sin becomes uh the punishment for our sin.

Taking a census?

What what what's going on here?

Uh, especially since reading like the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, we know that God two times told the children of Israel to take a census.

So that seems weird.

Now, those two times, he commanded it, but there is no standing command, take a census.

They were they were essentially one-offs.

And they came at a time when the children of Israel were very weak, very vulnerable, going into the promised land, vastly outnumbered, and God says, I want you to take stock in who you are and what I've given you.

But here's something really interesting, and I think this is the point.

A lot of people want to live a life built around the law, the rules.

God said to do this, so I do this.

God didn't say to do that, or said don't do that, I don't do that.

That's the world for me.

I'm gonna obey the rules.

Those that don't obey the rules are out of out of bounds, right?

That's not what God wants.

It's about trust.

So God commanded a census way back when.

At this point in time, it would be pretty clear to us, I think, that the census is actually David trying to flex his muscles and say, hey, look, I'm pretty strong right now.

It's about trust, and he's not trusting God.

Years ago, I um I was teaching this very passage in the little classroom right over there to a Sunday school class, and we were talking about ways that we we um kind of expose our lack of trust in God.

And people were sharing some pretty vulnerable stuff, you know, some kind of deep dark sins.

And then one gal spoke up.

I will never forget this.

She goes, Yeah, and like looking at your bank account, and we all go, uh, I look at my bank account a lot.

Is that a sin?

And she said, No, like when I first like when we got married, we could barely make the, you know, pay the bills, I would look at my account just to make sure I wasn't overdrafting or something.

But she's like, now we're doing fine.

And I look at my bank account five times a day.

And it's just a way to make me feel like I'm in control.

I've got what I need.

I don't really need God.

I will never forget that.

What are you looking at?

What is the thing that you go to and keep looking at instead of looking to God?

I think that's what we're seeing here in this passage.

Now, if I haven't convinced you yet that taking a census could be a sin, the passage actually gives us kind of a funny clue that I want to point out too.

Um there we're gonna meet Joab again.

You might remember Joab, he's kind of David's right-hand man, and he's not exactly noted for being like the paragon of moral rectitude.

Like he killed his cousin one time because his cousin was like a threat to his position.

He was the one who carried out David's order to murder a good man, Uriah, Bathsheba's husband, without any qualms whatsoever.

And so here's what happens next when David wants to take the census.

So the king said to Joab, the commander of his army, go through all the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba, and register the troops so I can know their number.

Joab replied to the king, May the Lord your God multiply the troops a hundred times more than they are, while my lord the king looks on.

But why does my lord the king want to do this?

And Darth Vader said to Luke, I have a problem with your moral compass.

Okay?

Do you see what's going on here?

Like if Joab thinks it's wrong, everybody thinks it's wrong.

Okay, so just in case you're thinking I'm reading into it here, the the text is is pretty clear.

And and I mentioned that there's two kind of parallel bracketed stories in this epilogue, and I won't go into it, but there's a theme in these stories, and it's very much a theme in this story.

And as we're looking at David's story and asking ourselves what it tells us about our story, I want to make my first point about David's story.

The whole survey of David's story, it is about sin and suffering.

I thought it was about killing Goliath or writing the Psalms or being the underdog.

Yeah, it's about all those things, but more than anything, this epilogue reminds us David lives in a world of sin and suffering.

Some of the sin is his, some of the sin comes from other people.

Some of the suffering is a consequence of his own sin, some of it is a consequence of somebody else's sin.

And that is the world you and I live in, correct?

Sin and suffering marks our lives.

And we are called to trust God in and through that.

And David is going to show us some important lessons about how we do that.

The census gets carried out.

When they had gone through the whole land, they returned to Jerusalem at the end of nine months and 20 days.

Joab gave the king the total of the registration of the troops.

There were 800,000 valiant armed men from Israel and 500,000 men from Judah.

I mean, you see the fixation on the fighting men?

Like David doesn't appear to care about all the other people, women, children, foreigners, whoever.

They don't matter.

David has turned names into numbers.

David has turned people into his own personal power and agenda.

So that's kind of where I'm getting this notion.

It's not explicitly spelled out, but David seems to be looking at his bank account or as it were the ledger of his census to bolster his sense of confidence.

Now, here's where the story takes a very dramatic turn.

Unexpected turn.

Right after the census, David's conscience troubled him after he had taken a census of the troops.

He said to the Lord, I have sinned greatly in what I've done.

Now, Lord, because I've been very foolish, please take away your servant's guilt.

But David is cut to the heart.

He didn't have to get called out by the prophet Nathan like he did with Bathsheba.

He is just his conscience, the Holy Spirit, he says, I have sinned greatly.

Lord, forgive me.

And I want to suggest to you that this, not David slaying Goliath, not David's repentance with Bathsheba.

This is the defining moment of David's life.

This last episode is the defining moment of David's life.

I am really fascinated by memory and memories.

The fact that God gives us the ability to remember things that have happened and how and why certain things stand out to us.

I don't know if you've ever had the privilege of talking to an older person, reflecting back on their lives.

I'll never forget my grandpa was 96 years old.

He passed away that year.

And about six months before he died, I got to sit down with him and just hear him recount stories of his life.

And the story that stood out most to him, he was five years old growing up in the hills of Tennessee with nothing.

They had nothing.

And his father had passed at a very early age.

And grandpa had to go out with a shotgun and fend off the foxes from their precious chickens.

At age five, he had to do that.

You imagine that?

And for him, that was kind of a defining story of his life because he was always facing impossible odds, always feeling like he was asked to do things that were beyond him, and always longing for a dad to be there.

And thankfully, my grandpa came to Christ in his 30s and God was so very near and dear to him, but that defined him.

I mean, I'm I'm fascinated.

I read an article recently about um men in their late 50s.

Not not that I know any, but I thought it looked kind of interesting.

And what they uh what they remember as significant moments in their lives.

And it was fascinating because you'd think, you know, at that moment maybe they would look back on their career and when they got the big raise or close the big deal or whatever.

But they remembered things, and they're things you can't take pictures of, these intangibles.

One guy said, I remember the weight of my daughter's head as she would fall asleep on my neck at night.

Or I remember the sound of the breathing of my kids as I would read them a good night story.

Or I remember the day my wife looked at me and just said, I'm glad I married you.

Like these moments that are defining moments.

This repentant moment for David is, I would suggest, the defining moment of his life.

One of the questions we've asked along the way, Pastor Keith brought it up again last week, is how and why does God like cancel King Saul altogether?

That was in 1 Samuel we went through several months back, and he like removes Saul altogether from the kingship and his family from ever getting the kingship.

And yet David, who committed the most atrocious sins, is called the greatest king of Israel.

Why?

How in the world is that?

And I think part of it is how and that David repents.

I put together a little table that just kind of a comparison of David and Saul, right?

They both sinned, but where David was contrite and humble, Saul was defensive.

Where David feared God first, Saul always feared the consequences.

Just don't tell the men, he would say.

Where David seeks God's mercy, Saul seeks to protect himself.

I mean, there's just a difference in how they repent.

And apparently in God's mind and in God's heart, that is everything.

The New Testament talks about repentance that leads to death and repentance that leads to life.

There's godly repentance and false repentance.

And false repentance often looks like protesting, being defensive.

Sometimes it also looks like penance.

Oh, I can pay this back.

I can do enough.

I know, okay, I know I did, I'll take care of it.

Neither of those is repentance.

Repentance is falling flat on your face before God and praying the truest prayer anyone can ever pray in life.

Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.

And that's what David did.

And that's what David and God call each one of us to: owning and recognizing our need for a savior.

Now, David's repentance doesn't automatically mean everything's hunky-dory, everything's okay.

There are going to be consequences as there always are.

This is a biblical truth.

This is the truth we see in our own lives every day.

Here's what happens next.

When David got up in the morning, the word of the Lord had come to the prophet Gad, David's seer.

Go and say to David, This is what the Lord says.

I'm offering you three choices.

Choose one of them, and I will do it to you.

So Gad went to David, told him the choices, and asked him, Do you want three years of famine to come on your land, to flee from your foes three months while they pursue you, or to have a plague in your land three days?

Now consider carefully what answer I should take back to the one who sent me.

This is like the the genie like reversed, right?

He has three choices, but none of them are good.

They're all excruciatingly painful.

David, what do you choose?

Do you want to watch your people starve for three years?

Do you want to run for your life for three months?

Or do you want a deadly three-day plague?

And I mean, do you feel there's a sense in this almost like David choose carefully?

Like David is supposed to pick the right one, the right answer.

And under that kind of pressure, it's not surprising to see how David responds.

He says to Gad, I have great anxiety.

Please let us fall into the Lord's hands because his mercies are great.

But don't let me fall into human hands.

David says, It's too much.

It is more than I can possibly handle.

The guilt, the consequences, the price, they are more than I can pay.

And so David does the only reasonable thing that he can do, and the only reasonable thing that we can do.

He throws himself on the mercy of God.

He says, I can't even choose.

Lord, you you choose.

I humble myself and I trust you to do what's right.

And again, I ask, what are you looking to today?

Are you looking at your bank account or your job or your spouse or how many likes you get or followers or next year's vacation?

Or I don't know.

Or ultimately, are you putting your trust and your hope in the mercy of God?

Repentance is the difference.

It's the difference in David's life, it's the difference in our lives.

I want to say just a few things about repentance.

I didn't prepare a slide for this, but just a couple things that stand out to me as we think about what repentance is and what true repentance, repentance that leads to life, looks like.

And the first thing I would say is it is specific.

You notice David says he's repenting of the sin of the census.

He doesn't just say, Lord, I repent of my sins.

He doesn't say what most of us said when we gave our lives to Jesus for the 14th time at high school camp.

You know, maybe that was not your story, but that was mine.

And you know, it was just that kind of blanket, Lord, I'm sorry for my sins.

But God wants us to tell him what they are.

Most of us don't want to because we don't have enough time.

It would take a while.

It's specific, it's personal.

Notice he says, to God, God, I have sinned against you.

Repentance often means we need to go tell other people we're sorry, we need to repent with them, but it always starts with God and it's personal with God.

Real repentance, genuine repentance, I think also points to something else.

And I and I'm a little cautious here because anytime we judge repentance, even in ourselves, we're on a little bit of thin ice, right?

And certainly judging other people's repentance, whether it's genuine or not, that's beyond our pay grade.

That's God's job.

But I think there's a clue about what makes for genuine repentance, what makes it genuine.

And you see it here in this passage.

David leans on God's mercy.

Like some people, when they repent, when they protest or they want to do penance, they are just overwhelmed by God's holiness and their great guilt and God's wrath.

And all of that is true.

But you know what the New Testament says in the book of Romans?

Paul says, God's kindness leads us to repentance.

No amount of groveling makes you truly repentant.

God's mercy is what matters.

It's not what I can do, it's what God does and who God is.

True repentance always looks to God's kindness and God's Mercy first.

And lastly, I would point this out.

I would say, and I know it's an odd adjective, but I would say true repentance is psychological.

Did you hear David's phrase?

I am filled with great anxiety.

When you recognize your sin against a perfect and holy and loving God, it will wreck you inside.

You know, I read a book years ago by a woman named Becky Pippert, and she did something fascinating.

She went and she audited psychology classes at Harvard University.

And she tells the story of one day in class they were doing like psychodynamic therapy, and the professor unpacked how they helped this young man who was very troubled, and they got to the root of all his problems.

And it turned out that he was carrying all this submerged anger at his at his mother from years of growing up under her and just all these things she had done to him.

But he at the same time was struggling with a huge burden of guilt because he felt very guilty that he was angry at his mother.

And the professor kind of presents this as if, wow, look what we unraveled.

And Becky Pippert, who, as far as she knew, was the only person in the class, kind of raised her hands sheepishly and she's like, did anyone help him find forgiveness?

And the professor says, Good luck with that.

And the rest of the class kind of thinks about it and they get behind her a little bit.

They're like, Yeah, like it seems kind of odd.

If you're just showing people what's wrong with him, but not how to get better, it seems like that's not quite the full picture.

So they start pressing the professor too.

And he finally says this.

He looks at them all and he says, If you are looking to find forgiveness, you are in the wrong class.

And I just want to suggest that, like, I I've told you before, I'm getting a counseling degree right now.

I think psychology has a lot to offer us.

But ultimately, and in fact, a very well-known psychologist about 10 years ago said, if I could promise everyone forgiveness, I would lose 70% of my clients.

Forgiveness for what others have done to us and what we have done to them before a holy God is the problem and is the issue.

And this story reminds us of that.

The consequences do come.

Verse 15 tells us.

So the Lord sent a plague on Israel from that morning until the appointed time, and from Dan to Beersheba, 70,000 men died.

Then the angel extended his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it, but the Lord relented, the Lord felt compassion concerning the destruction and said to the angel who was destroying the people, Enough, withdraw your hand now.

The angel of the Lord was then at the threshing floor of Aranah the Jebusite.

We'll come back to the threshing floor of Arana the Jebusite in a minute.

But again, this is one of those kind of weird passages, you know, there's like an angel going around with a sword, people falling and dying.

And here's the point.

The point is in some supernatural way, God was allowing David to visually take in the consequences, the devastating, deadly consequences of his sin.

We've already seen that David was overwhelmed and undone with choosing a punishment, but now he's overcome with the weight and the guilt of what he has caused in the lives of those around him.

And by the way, sin always has a price beyond us.

That's one of the reasons it's so serious in the eyes of God.

Here's what we see next, verse 17.

When David saw the angel striking the people, he said to the Lord, Look, I am the one who has sinned.

I'm the one who has done wrong.

But these sheep, what have they done?

Please let your hand be against me and my father's family.

David sees it's on him.

The price still has to be paid, and it is more than he could possibly pay, more than he could ever answer for.

But the story ends in the most beautiful of ways.

And this is what I want us to leave with.

We're back at the threshing floor of Arana.

By the way, David's been instructed by Gad the prophet, go buy the threshing floor and offer sacrifices there.

So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for 20 ounces of silver.

He built an altar to the Lord there and offered burnt offerings and fellowship offerings.

Then the Lord was receptive to prayer for the land, and the plague on Israel ended.

Seen this a hundred times in the Old Testament.

An animal sacrifice is offered.

But we know clearly, we know it in our hearts and our head.

The New Testament tells us clearly, animal sacrifices never really paid the price either.

And so, what is the odd significance of the threshing floor of Arana the Jebusite?

Well, the book of 2 Chronicles, which gives a parallel account, tells us something that's utterly fascinating and in fact life-changing.

A thousand years earlier, on this very spot, it's called Mount Moriah, a man you might remember named Abraham was called by God to sacrifice his only son, to pay the ultimate price.

And if you know the story, it's mind-blowing on so many levels.

God had promised Abraham and his wife Sarah a son through whom the Messiah would ultimately come.

And they wait 25 years and God finally gives them the longing of their heart.

What kind of God would take that away from them, much less by asking them to sacrifice a human being?

But I want to suggest something to you, just like our story here, it is often in these dark, puzzling moments where God shows himself most clearly.

And how does he do that?

Well, when Abraham was about to plunge the knife into his son, his son's heart, the unthinkable, out of the shadows, God provided a substitute there on Mount Moriah.

A ram emerged from the thicket, and God said, No, don't touch your precious son.

I'll provide the sacrifice.

It was a thousand years earlier.

A thousand years forward.

Just a stone's throwaway.

It's visible on a hill called Golgotha that was outside the city.

God provided another sacrifice.

His own son, Jesus Christ, the son of David, who paid the price for David's sins, for Israel's sins, for your sins, for my sins.

And that's David's story.

And I would ask all of us as we wrap things up: how are you viewing your life today?

Are you telling the story, or is God telling the story?

Is the story ultimately about you, or is the story about the only one who deserves all our love, worship, and adoration, Jesus Christ, the Son of David?

Years before this, we looked at this passage.

David had come to God at one point and said, God, I want to build you a temple.

I'm going to make a great name for you, God.

And the Steve Brooks paraphrase is that God says, Am I telling the story or are you telling the story?

And God says, No, you're not going to build me a temple.

You're not going to make my name great, David.

In fact, I am going to make your name great.

And how did he do that?

By making David a perfect person?

Far from it.

By using David in the ultimate story to bring us the true Son of David, Jesus himself.

Are you telling the story or is God telling the story?

If God's telling the story, I want to assure you it's a much better story.

And it points us to the true Son of David, the one who walks within us in our suffering, the one who paid the price for our sins, and the one who makes us sons and daughters of God himself.

We have an opportunity now as we close the service to worship the Son of David.

And I want to invite you to pray with me as we prepare our hearts to thank God for this goodness.

Lord, David's life is impressive.

It's also deeply sad.

He's a broken man.

He's also a man who inspires us to love you more.

But ultimately, he points us to the one who is perfect, the one about whom you say this whole life, this whole story, all of human history, all of creation points us to.

Jesus, the Son of God, who paid the price for our sins and walks with us and cleanses us and forgives us and leads us today.

And Jesus, you are in this room calling some to repentance, calling all of us to rejoice in the fact that forgiveness is available.