The Arithmetic of Faith vs. The Calculus of Presumption Text: 1 Chronicles 27:23-24
Introduction: Two Ways to Count
We live in an age of metrics. Everything must be measured, quantified, and charted. We have analytics for our websites, polls for our politics, and performance reviews for our jobs. The modern world is run by accountants and statisticians. And in one sense, this is not a bad thing. God is a God of order. He is the one who numbers the stars and calls them by name. He knows the number of hairs on your head. Measurement and order are divine attributes. But like any good thing, this impulse can be twisted into a grotesque idol when it is detached from its source.
The central conflict in all of human history is the conflict between faith and sight. It is the war between trusting God's promise and trusting our own resources. It is the choice between leaning on the everlasting arms and leaning on our own spreadsheets. This is not a new conflict. It is as old as the Garden. Adam and Eve chose to trust their own assessment of the fruit rather than God's clear word about it. And in our text today, we find this same ancient conflict playing out in the heart of King David, a man after God's own heart, but a man still very much in the flesh.
The book of Chronicles is, in many ways, a book about right worship and right rule under God. It is a theological commentary on the history of Israel's monarchy. And here, tucked away in a chapter that is largely administrative, a list of officers and divisions, the Chronicler pauses to insert a crucial parenthetical comment. It is a warning, a theological footnote that explains a disaster. It is a brief but potent sermon on the difference between godly accounting and arrogant presumption. David, the great king, starts a project he cannot finish, a project born of unbelief, and the Chronicler wants to make sure we understand why it was left undone and why it brought wrath upon the entire nation.
This is not just a historical detail. This is a perpetual temptation for the people of God. How do we measure the health of our families, our churches, our nations? Do we count heads, or do we trust the promise? Do we look at our bank accounts, or do we look to the God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills? This passage forces us to ask what kind of arithmetic we are using. Are we using the arithmetic of faith, which rests on God's infinite promises, or the calculus of presumption, which seeks to secure our own future by our own strength?
The Text
But David did not take up a count of those twenty years of age and under, because Yahweh had said He would multiply Israel as the stars of heaven. Joab the son of Zeruiah had begun to number them, but did not finish; and because of this, wrath came upon Israel, and this count was not included in the total count of the chronicles of King David.
(1 Chronicles 27:23-24 LSB)
The Promise vs. The Pegboard (v. 23)
We begin with the reason for the aborted census.
"But David did not take up a count of those twenty years of age and under, because Yahweh had said He would multiply Israel as the stars of heaven." (1 Chronicles 27:23)
Here the Chronicler reveals the spiritual principle that David, in this instance, violated. The census itself was not the sin. God commanded censuses at other times in Israel's history, for instance in the book of Numbers. The sin is always in the motive, in the heart-disposition behind the action. The issue here is one of faith versus presumption. God had made a covenant promise to Abraham, a promise that was the bedrock of Israel's entire existence. He promised to make his descendants as numerous as the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore, a number that is, for all practical purposes, uncountable by man.
This promise was not a mathematical prediction; it was a call to faith. It was God saying, "Stop trying to count. I am your security. I am your provision. My word is more solid than any census data you could ever collect." To number the people, particularly the fighting men, was an act of looking to the arm of the flesh. It was David beginning to think like a pagan king, whose strength is in the size of his army. He was exchanging the infinite, uncountable promise of God for a finite, tangible number that he could control and manage.
The Chronicler notes that David stopped short of numbering those twenty and under. Perhaps David's conscience, pricked by Joab's protest recorded in 2 Samuel 24, began to trouble him. He remembered the promise concerning future generations. To count the young men would be to put God's promise on a pegboard, to try and quantify the infinite. It was a direct contradiction of the covenant. It was like trying to measure the Pacific Ocean with a thimble. The act of counting was an act of unbelief. It was David saying, "Let me just double-check God's math. Let me see if He is really coming through on this promise." But faith does not need to double-check. Faith rests.
This is a profound lesson for us. When we begin to measure our spiritual security by the numbers, whether it's the number of people in our pews, the number of dollars in our budget, or the number of likes on our social media, we are doing the same thing. We are exchanging the boundless promise of God for a cheap, human metric. We are trying to count the stars instead of simply looking up at them in wonder and trusting the one who put them there.
An Unfinished Sin and Its Corporate Consequences (v. 24)
Verse 24 gives us the historical outcome and the theological reason for it.
"Joab the son of Zeruiah had begun to number them, but did not finish; and because of this, wrath came upon Israel, and this count was not included in the total count of the chronicles of King David." (1 Chronicles 27:24 LSB)
Joab, a man who was no moral paragon himself, knew this was a bad idea from the start. He saw the pride and presumption in David's command. He started the work, but it was never completed. This unfinished census stands as a monument to a sin that was conceived, initiated, but then judged before it could be brought to full term. The project was so tainted by its motive that it was aborted by divine wrath.
And notice where the wrath fell: "wrath came upon Israel." This is a crucial principle that our individualistic age despises. We believe in private sins and individual consequences. But the Bible knows nothing of such a thing. We are covenantally bound together. The sin of a king brings judgment on his people. The sin of a father brings trouble on his household. The sin of Achan brought defeat upon all of Israel. We are not autonomous individuals; we are a corporate body. When the head aches, the whole body suffers.
David was the covenant head of Israel. His act of unbelief was not a private spiritual failure. It was a public, official act that represented the nation before God. By trusting in numbers, he was leading the entire nation away from trust in Yahweh. Therefore, the judgment was corporate. A plague swept through the land, and 70,000 men died. This was not God being unfair. This was God demonstrating the reality of covenant headship and the devastating, corporate nature of sin. Authority and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. David had the authority to lead, and therefore he had the responsibility for the consequences of that leadership.
Finally, the Chronicler tells us that this tainted data was not even allowed into the official records. "This count was not included in the total count of the chronicles of King David." God would not permit this monument to unbelief to be enshrined in the royal archives. It was an illegitimate project from the start, and so its results were expunged. It was null and void. God was saying, "This is not how My kingdom is measured. This is not how strength is calculated. This number is meaningless to me." The only numbers that matter are the ones God keeps, and He had already given His number: "as the stars of heaven."
Conclusion: Counting the Right Way
So what is the lesson for us? This passage is a stark reminder that God's kingdom operates on a different economy. The world counts its armies, its wealth, and its influence. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and the weak things to shame the strong. Our strength is not in our numbers, but in the name of the Lord.
This story of David's census finds its ultimate fulfillment and reversal in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. David, the first covenant head, sinned, and wrath came upon his people. But Jesus, the ultimate covenant Head, was perfectly righteous, and He took the wrath for His people's sin upon Himself. On the cross, God was not counting our sins against us; He was counting them against His own Son. "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Because of this great exchange, we are now part of a kingdom that truly cannot be numbered. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that we have come to "an innumerable company of angels" and to "the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven" (Hebrews 12:22-23). Our names are not written in the chronicles of earthly kings, but in the Lamb's Book of Life.
Therefore, we must learn to count the right way. We are to "count it all joy" when we face trials (James 1:2). We are to count ourselves "dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11). We are to count all our own achievements as loss "for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord" (Philippians 3:8). This is the arithmetic of faith. It is not about measuring our resources. It is about resting in His. It is not about counting our soldiers. It is about trusting our King, the one who conquered sin and death not with a great army, but by the foolishness of a cross.
Let us therefore repent of our own proud census-taking. Let us repent of trusting in our own strength, our own wisdom, our own numbers. And let us look away from ourselves to the promise of God, a promise as vast and uncountable as the stars of heaven, a promise secured for us by the blood of His Son. For in His kingdom, our weakness is our strength, and our security is not in what we can count, but in the One who is altogether worthy of our trust.