“Wherefore David said unto the Gibeonites, What
shall I do for you? and wherewith shall I make the atonement, that ye may bless
the inheritance of the LORD? (2 Samuel 21:3).
Last
Sunday morning at CRBC I preached from 2 Samuel 21. It is an unsettling chapter. A famine strikes the land for three years due
to King Saul’s sinful treatment of the Gibeonites. When David approaches them, they demand that seven
of Saul’s descendants be killed and their bodies hung or impaled. David complies. “And after that God was intreated for the
land” (2 Samuel 21:14).
Old
Testament commentator Dale Ralph Davis says of 2 Samuel 21: “No one can evade the raw horror of this
scene. We can only try to understand (up
to a point) what is happening” (see p. 223).
These seven men “become, as it were covenant-breakers who stand in the
place of Saul.”
Davis
adds that if you feel horror at this passage that is a good thing. That is what you should be feeling. He states:
“Readers should be aghast. The
text says atonement is horrible; it is gory.
Atonement is never nice but gruesome.”
He
recalls all the Biblical sacrifices:
It was all mess and gore. From the slicing the bull’s throat in
Leviticus 1 all the way to Calvary God has always said that atonement is nasty
and repulsive. Christians must beware of
becoming too refined, longing for a kinder, gentler faith. If we’ve grown too used to Golgotha perhaps
Gibeah (v. 6) can shock us back into truth:
atonement is a drippy, bloody, smelly business. The stench of death hangs heavy wherever the
wrath of God has been quenched.
The
atoning sacrifice of these seven men was an imperfect sacrifice. The Lord for his own sovereign purposes ended
the famine and brought rain. Yet this
was just one broken covenant. What
atonement would be made for countless others, for myriads upon myriads of
broken vows? These were imperfect
victims. These were mere sinful
men. What type of perfect sacrifice would
have to be offered to atone for the sins of the whole world? This sacrifice only brought momentary relief
to a time of famine. What sacrifice
could bring about not only temporal relief but eternal justification for
sinners?
There
is only one verse where the English word “atonement” is used in the AV of the
NT:
Romans 5:11 And not only so,
but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now
received the atonement.
If you
read the context, it is clear that Paul that this atonement has been brought
about by the death of Christ on the cross. Compare:
Romans 5:8 But God commendeth
his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
What 2
Samuel 21 points us toward is the mystery and the scandal of the cross. This is a hard truth and even an impossible
truth for unregenerate man to fathom.
The old liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick called it a
“slaughterhouse religion.” I recently
saw the atheistic scientist Richard Dawkins in a video railing against any
notion that God had to kill his son in order to offer forgiveness. He said
something like, “If he is God why can’t he just offer forgiveness without any
sacrifice.” But Dawkins misses the
point. This is not a natural truth. It is not a human truth. It is a divine truth and a revealed truth.
NT
scholar Leon Morris in his classic work The
Apostolic Preaching of the Cross observes:
He is a righteous God, even in
justifying the ungodly; and the propitiation which he set forth in Christ
Jesus, dying in His sinlessness the death of the sinful is the key to the
mystery (p. 278).
David
asked the Gibeonites: “What shall I do
for you and wherewith shall I make the atonement….?”
And
the ultimate answer comes back: It has
been made in Christ.
Grace and peace, Pastor Jeffrey T. Riddle
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