II Samuel 24: A Senseless Census

Just when you thought David might be in line for a happy ending, we have one more tale of woe concerning an occasion when he chose his own will rather than the Lord's.
The king was motivated to take a census of the people at a time when God had not commanded the people to be numbered. It seems that this census was evidence of David's vanity or lack of faith in the Lord. He wanted to know how many fighting men were able to be called upon in his kingdom.  Even Joab, who had significant blood on his hands, knew that what David had in mind was not right and tried to talk the king out of it. But David insisted.

After nine months and twenty days, the army commanders returned with a total - there were 800,000 soldiers among the tribes of Israel with an additional 500,000 soldiers in Judah.

However, these numbers would not remain accurate for long.

The Lord was displeased that David had numbered the people. He sent the seer Gad to offer David a choice of consequences as a punishment.  Either the kingdom could endure three years of famine, or David could be dealt three months of fleeing his enemies, or the people could face three days of pestilence.

 How would you like to face a choice like that? David, expressing hope in God's mercy, chose the third option of a plague, feeling that it would be better to fall into the Lord's hand. (This choice could also be read more cynically, however, in that David also chose the option that threatened him personally the least.)

The pestilence is terrible and wipes out 70,000 of the people. When the destroying angel sets his sights on Jerusalem, however, the Lord relents and spares the people even more punishing results. The angel is stopped by the threshing floor of a man named Araunah the Jebusite, and David saw it. Gad came to David with the message to erect an altar to the Lord at that site.

 II Chronicles 3:1 tells us that this spot became the location of the Temple that David's son Solomon would build.  It is also referred to in this verse as Mount Moriah - which appeared earlier in scripture in Genesis 22:2 as the location for where Abraham nearly offered Isaac.