(Read 1 Chronicles 17.)
THE ultimate thought of God is His own glory as manifested in the person of His beloved Son. Just as this is kept before our minds in the reading of the Scriptures, as the person of the Lord Jesus, the brightness of divine glory, is kept distinctly before our view, we shall find light thrown upon the various subjects which God has set before us in the Scriptures of inspired truth.
Christ as the manifestation of God is the center sun which illuminates every hope, the substance of every shadow, the focus to which all the lines of divine truth converge, as well as the center whence they emanate and spread. Whether we look at persons or things as typical, in order to understand these types of God, we must connect them with the person of the Lord Jesus.
When reading about David or about Solomon, we may ask, Why were their histories written?
Why were they written as they are written?
Why were certain events taken from their history and given at length, whilst others are passed over almost in silence. The answer is, For the manifestation of God’s glory in the person of His beloved Son. A greater than David and a greater than Solomon is in this chapter, if we have eyes to see and hearts to respond.
David was a type of the Lord Jesus Christ, the meaning of his name is, “The Beloved”; and David as he stands in connection with this portion of God’s Word is the type of the Lord Jesus Christ in humiliation, in suffering, and in death here below.
David’s thought, as set before us in this chapter, was to build God an house. He sat in his own house, and while there the thought occurs to him that he was dwelling in a house of cedars, but the ark of the covenant of the Lord was under curtains. But David was not permitted to build a house for God. To understand what corresponds with that now, I feel it is far better to deal with facts connected with the Lord Jesus, and learn the meaning of types by those facts, than simply to attempt to find a spiritual significance from the types themselves. What is the fact in the history of the Lord Jesus? How does Christ by the Spirit of God Himself express it?
So far from building a house for God, Israel was not gathered. He Himself was rejected.
He was in the world, and the world knew Him not. He came to His own and His own received Him not.
But what did God say to David? He promised to establish and plant Israel, to subdue all David’s enemies, and then, as we read in the tenth verse, he says:
“Furthermore, I tell thee that the Lord will build thee an house.”
And that in point of fact has resulted as regards the Lord Jesus. The kingdom was not established when the beloved Son of the Father was here, as the result of all His labors. But God brought out the exact purpose and intention of His own heart, and accomplished it too. He has built a house for His beloved Son, as we find in the third of Hebrews, where Christ is seen as a Son over His own house.
This reminds us of several other types foreshadowing the same great precious truth. Moses thought that his brethren would have understood that God by him would have accomplished the redemption of Israel, but they understood it not―he was rejected; but in his rejection God built him an house, he had a wife and family. Joseph was rejected by his brethren, but in his rejection seated at the right hand of Pharaoh he has a house.
David hereupon goes in and sits before the Lord, responds to the divine thought, and lets go his own way, takes his place before God, saying as it were, Well, let it be so, let Him bless me to His heart’s content.
We pass on to 1 Chronicles 21 (read verses and 2, and 7 to 30). It may be asked―What was the harm in David’s numbering the people? One thing is, that it was done at the suggestion of Satan. We learn from the Epistle to the Hebrews that the types and shadows which set forth the Lord Jesus are to be looked at in contrast as well as in their similarity. There are similitudes and there are contrasts. If we take David as a type of Christ we see both. In some things we find most remarkable similitudes, in others as remarkable contrasts. I will just mention one instance. When the Lord Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, the devil tried hard to induce Him to act upon suggestions, but the Lord Jesus never did. After forty days’ hunger, the devil said, “Make these stones bread,” and he gave Him a plausible reason. He was to do it as a proof that He was the Son of God, but He would not act upon the suggestion of Satan―David did. There is another thought, and that is connected with the command of God on the subject of the people being numbered. I refer to Exodus 30:1111And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, (Exodus 30:11)
“The Lord spoke unto Moses, saying, When thou takest the sum of the children of Israel after their number, then shall they give every man a ransom for his soul unto the Lord when thou numberest them; that there be no plague among them when thou numberest them....”
“The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less, than half a shekel when they give an offering unto the Lord to make an atonement for your souls” (verse 15).
God’s people are to be numbered as a ransomed, a redeemed people.