Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3477
“This is the house of the Lord God, and this is the altar of the burnt offering for Israel.” 1 Chronicles 22:1.
IT Will be fresh in your recollection that David had committed a great sin against the Lord. In truth, all the people of Israel had, for some years, gone astray from God—and when He determined to punish them, He made the sin of their ruler an occasion for visiting their iniquities upon their head. David had determined to number the people. He carried out his purpose in the teeth of precept, precedent and protest. It would seem that thereby he trespassed on the prerogative of the priests and violated the Levitical Law. Thereupon Gad, the Prophet, came to him with the choice of three punishments. He selected, as the lesser evil, and preferable to famine or the sword of the foe, the pestilence, saying, “It is better to fall into the hands of God than into the hands of man.” Jerusalem was, therefore, for three days, ravaged by a terrible plague. The strong men fell down in the streets and the women died at the mill. The little children perished from the breast and the aged were smitten down with a stroke. For three days the fatal disease had proceeded with its ravages, when suddenly the angel of the Lord, who had caused this slaughter, appeared before David. David beheld the messenger of judgment standing in bodily form on the threshing floor of a man galled Araunah. David was summoned by God to attend upon this angel—and when he approached, he saw him with the sword drawn in his hand—as though he were about to smite even till the going down of the sun! David, moved by the Spirit of God, slays a bullock, piles up an altar, kindles a fire and, as the smoke of the bullock ascends to Heaven, the angel who was visible before their eyes, to the joy of every one of them, thrust back the sword into its scabbard, saying, “It is enough.”
Now, David seemed to have been moved by an inward impulse to consider that this spot, though nothing but a piece of ground beaten hard for the threshing of corn by the feet of bulls, must be, henceforth, a sacred place—and he said, “This is the house of the Lord God, and this is the altar of the burnt offering for Israel.” I scarcely need remind you of a coincidence which may probably have been known to David, that on this very spot Abraham had, many generations before, drawn the knife to slay his son, Isaac. The mountain was thus doubly typical of that Sacrifice of Christ which marks the place where God founds His Temple and where all sacrifice rendered by the saints of God to their God must be offered. At first the Lord only showed the fact that He would give His Son. Yon hoary Patriarch, with his only-begotten, dearly-beloved child of promise all bound and lying on the wood, unsheathing the knife to slay him, was a graphic picture of the Eternal Father who spared not His own Son, but freely delivered Him up for us all. Abraham taught the fact of the sacrifice, while to David the reason of that Sacrifice of Christ was explained. He was Sacrificed to stop the plague—the plague of sin, the punishment of our iniquities! Just as the bullock at Araunah’s threshing floor, when hewn in pieces and laid smoking upon the altar, stopped the pestilence, so Christ, bleeding upon Calvary, the Lamb of God’s Passover, the sacred First-Born of Jehovah’s choice and dedication, makes Atonement, and the plague is stopped. David then selected this spot as henceforward the place of the Temple, and the spot where the one altar should stand. To me this looks very significant. I hope, in a few words, to make you think it interesting and instructive. First, I shall try to explain the occurrence, itself, spiritually, and then to explain the consecration of the floor mystically.
I. The Occurrence, Itself, and the Varied Symbols It Unfolds
David sins and an angel smites—David offers sacrifice and the angel stops! Four lessons are suggested. First, there is such a thing as sin. Men fight hard to try and prove that there is not. In vain they strive, for as long as the Inspired Book is extant, and so long as there is one man on the face of the earth with a clear conscience, healthy and undrugged, to bear witness with that Book, sin will be discovered to be exceeding sinful! A breach of the Divine Law, though it is committed
by a man after God’s heart, is not overlooked or counted venial. Sin cannot be winked at by the Most High! Though it receives the sanction of the very best of men, it has as much virus as when committed by the most debased. The sin of ignorance is as disastrous as the sin of willfulness. The wrong act performed with a right motive would still be deadly. Sin is exceedingly sinful. When I see David and the elders of Israel with sackcloth on their loins and ashes on their heads, bowing before this angel, I discern that there is a something in sin which ought to make us hide our heads and weep, and wail, and humble ourselves before the Most High! Let us wake up to a sense of the dire reality of transgression—it is a frightful fact, not a foolish fancy. In the presence of the angel, this admits of no doubt.