After stating yesterday that sometimes God doesn’t seem easy to find, I’m going to add today that often he isn’t easy to understand.

Take that strange part of the Old Testament where King David takes a census, and apparently this is a bad thing:

Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.”

So the king said to Joab and the army commanders with him, “Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are.” But Joab replied to the king, “May the Lord your God multiply the troops a hundred times over, and may the eyes of my lord the king see it. But why does my lord the king want to do such a thing?”

The king’s word, however, overruled Joab and the army commanders; so they left the presence of the king to enroll the fighting men of Israel.

To cut a long story short, it ends badly. David confesses that this was sinful and selects one of the three options for punishment that God gives.

What makes the account even weirder is that in another part of the Old Testament, it says that Satan was doing the provoking:

Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel. So David said to Joab and the commanders of the troops, “Go and count the Israelites from Beersheba to Dan. Then report back to me so that I may know how many there are.”

Odd. Right?

Was it God or Satan? And why are they provoking David to do the same thing? Why are God and Satan seemingly on the same page about this one? Why does God make David do something that is sinful and what he shouldn’t do?

I ask questions but that doesn’t necessarily mean I have any answers. If we’re being honest, does anyone really understand this one? I don’t think so.

The word provoking actually just makes me think of my brothers and how we would do exactly that to each other to get a reaction out of each other when we were much younger. Much younger. 😉

I associate provoking with my brothers and childhood. But we do this as adults as well, I’m sure. We incite other people to do certain things. We just do it in more sophisticated ways, I guess.

So is provocation a good thing or a bad thing? How can a good God incite us to do something bad? Or was David just doing something on behalf of the nation which then led to God’s response? Maybe.

I’m still not sure why Satan was involved.

A question I’ll have to try to answer another day. Sometime, a long way away. 🙂

Yours cognitively provoked,

Alison