Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Be Careful What You Delight In | Historical Books | 2 Samuel 24:1-17

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

What do you delight in? Why is God frustrated by David's census? Are we sinners or saints? In today's episode, Jeff shares how 2 Samuel 24:1-17 encourages us to reorient our delight in the direction of God's heart. If you're listening on Spotify, tell us about yourself and where you're listening from! Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 2 Samuel 24:1-17

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrott. There are few things more powerful and yet more hidden than the potency of delight. In her wonderful book about the biblical theme of desire, teach us to want, Jen Pollock-Michel writes this. When we talk about desire, we undress our hearts. That's a powerful statement.

She's making the point that to explore delight, to explore desire in our lives, is to disclose our lives and become uniquely vulnerable. Vulnerable to ourselves, vulnerable to others, and ultimately vulnerable to God himself. In this way, desire discloses something about us that's often obscured, obscured and hidden by performative politeness or relational distancing. To discover and disclose our greatest sources of delight is to undress our hearts, showing the naked truth of our real selves. While this disclosure of our delights can be uncomfortable, it's also essential. That is, it's essential if we want our real selves to encounter the real God, who's really there and really loves us.

Our passage today comes near the very end of 2 Samuel, as the messiness and the depths of David's delight is exposed. And if we read this scene well, we'll not simply observe the theme of delight in David's heart. We'll open a window into our own hearts as well. And as always, as we get ready to approach God's word together, let's just pause in this moment and ask for His grace, His love, to move through our time. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of life and breath. And thank you for the gift of your word. We bring before you every part of our experience in this moment today, all of our joys and our sorrows, our anxiety and our excitement, our calendars, our calendars, and our contingencies. God, we ask you to meet us here in this time and place.

Jesus, help us abide and remain in you as we engage with your truth. Holy Spirit, we ask you to move in and through this time in Second Samuel. And as we read, we read, we read, we can be in and remain. We can't these words, let these words read us and restore us. God, we ask that your living word would bring us to life. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Now here at the outset, I want to recognize that we actually covered this same biblical scene through the lens of First Chronicles on a Friday last year in episode 891. Now, that episode last year is a bit more cerebral in its approach to this historical moment and addresses some of the apologetic and intellectual concerns that we might have with it. And since we've already approached this biblical scene, in that more cognitive manner,

we're going to use the lens of Second Samuel as a way to let this moment in David's life check on our hearts. Now, as we get into the text of Second Samuel 24, verse one hits us with a dramatic tension. It reads this way. Again, the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, go and take a census of Israel and Judah. All right, this probably strikes us as massively confusing. The Lord is angry against Israel because David took a census, even though God was somehow at work in the midst of it? Verse 1 generates at least two big questions for us. And we'll cover the first one really briefly since it's addressed more in depth in episode 891.

So you can go back and live. listen to that if you want a little bit of a different approach to the intellectual questions at play here. But this first question is related to God's action amidst David's sin, because the text is really clear that God incited David. So does that somehow make God complicit in this sinful moment? There's a much longer response to that question back in episode 891, but for the sake of clarity, we can confidently say no. This passage is not making God complicit or cultural. in David's sin. As this passage goes on, the blame for David's sin here is put solely on one person, on David. So that creates another question. Why even mention the Lord's involvement here? And the point

is to amplify and clarify the reality of God's sovereignty, even as the confusing and dark places of history are discovered. His sovereignty even as the confusing and dark places of our hearts, are disclosed. We're going to come back to this later at the end of this episode, but for now just put a pin in this truth from verse one. God is sovereign. He's always in control, even when our sense of delight is disoriented by sin.

Our second question from verse one is this. What's the big deal with David taking a census? I mean, it seems like such a harmless act. So why is the Lord so angry that in verse 15, he eventually sends a plague on his people? Now, some people perceive this moment as a complete overreaction on God's part, but here's a thing. It only seems like an overreaction if we think that the census here is somehow a small, harmless act. It turns out that this census that David undertakes is far from a minor attempt at doing some governmental calculations.

Back in Exodus 30, there was a command for the King of Israel to make an offering, a special offering, when taking a census. Now, the offering was important because it was a way to remember that the source of Israel's strength was not in themselves or in their numerical headcount. Their strength was in God, their ultimate king. But here in 2nd Samuel 24, David takes a census without an offering. And in doing so, he's essentially saying that he and his nation can do just fine without God as their ultimate king. David is attempting to bypass dependence on God and instead trust in his own wisdom and his own power. So here in this passage, this census is not a minor misstep. It's actually an act of covenant betrayal.

And it's a betrayal that runs deeper than David's behavior. Notice what David's commander, Joab, says in response to the census command in verse 3. Joab asks a simple yet convicting question. Why does the king delight in this thing? Why is the king delight in this thing? Now that word delight is a big clue for us. The Hebrew word behind that conveys a sense of pleasure. There's something going on at the level of David's heart.

There's something distorted in David's life at the level of his affections. Because his covenant betrayal isn't simply existing on the level of his behavior. It's happening at the level of his heart. David, the man after God's own heart, is also the man whose heart disowns God. And he knows it. Verse 10 outlines David's response after his self-reliant sin is brought to light. We read this in verse 10. David was conscious stricken after he had counted the fighting men.

And he said to the Lord, I have sinned greatly in what I've done. Now, Lord, I beg you, take away the guilt of your servant. I have done a very foolish thing. So David is painfully aware that he alone is the guilty one in this scenario. And now, as the representative of God's people, the nation of Israel is going to be wrapped up in the consequences of his sin through a plague. To borrow Jen Pollock-Michel's verbiage, this moment when David's sin is addressed is also the moment when his heart is undressed. Now, we don't get a full resolution to this incident until the end of 2nd Samuel 24. But for now, we're left with a big point.

The heart of humanity is messy, really messy. We can be walking, talking, praying, worshiping, contradictions. David, the man after God's own heart, can say in Psalm 374, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. He can say that, but at the same time, his heart is struck, his conscious is struck when his disoriented rebellious delight in self-dependence is unveiled. This messy contradiction of David's heart reminds me of Martin Luther's statement that all followers of Jesus, all of God's people, are simultaneously sinners and saints.

This whole story, the entire story of the Bible, is addressed to people like David and you and me, people who are simultaneously sinners, and yet, through Jesus we're saints. people whose hearts can delight in God, yet also have our disoriented delight, exposed in ways that are often painful. We, like David, feel conscious-stricken when this exposure happens. It seems like one of the main purposes of this passage is to equip God's people to honestly acknowledge their disoriented delight, to take our contradicting delights to God so that he can disclose them to us more,

fully, and so he can let his grace revive our hearts and slowly reorient our delight in his direction. So in that spirit, perhaps Joab's question to David is also a question for you and I to wrestle with. Job asked, why does the king delight in this thing? What if that question was pointed at you? Why are you delighting in this thing? Why are you delighting in your own wisdom for making life choices? with your time, your money, or your body. Why are you delighting in your own power to work hard, to be savvy, to make other people approve of you? If Joab was pointing his question at you, what deepest delight of your heart would be disclosed? Now this disclosure of David's disoriented delight is not the end of the story.

This messy, imperfect, contradictory person is the same person who prayed this in Psalm 5110. Create in me a pure heart, O God. David knows that his disoriented delight isn't the only thing to be disclosed. He can also disclose and discover the unrelenting, life-creating love of God for people with twisted, self-centered hearts. And that prayer of David takes us back to the significance of God's sovereignty back in verse one. David can pray for God to create a pure heart within him because God is, is greater than his heart. When our hearts are undressed and put into the care of the one who made

them to begin with, they're revived. God's grace, through his grace, our undressed hearts are covered in love. Our desires are slowly and messily reoriented into his purposes, by his power, by his love. And that gives us the freedom to be a kind of people who disclose the depths of our hearts, disclose the depths of our delights while also delighting in the one who puts our hearts back together. Father, as we finish this time, would you help us disclose,

perhaps even share with other people, the disoriented delight of our hearts? Jesus, we need your sovereign saving power to revive our hearts and slowly reorient our delight in the direction of your heart, in the direction of your kingdom. Spirit, would you bind us to, together to live with whole hearts by your grace for your glory and your bigger story.

We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.