Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Chronicles 20-23.

Today’s passage tells us that David relayed to Solomon what had happened when he first thought to build a temple for God.  He tells his son that God told him not to build the temple because he had shed much blood, but that Solomon would be a man of peace and so would be an appropriate person to build the temple.  Many people look at this and conclude that this was the reason God told David not to build a temple.  However, the passage does not say that God told David that.  It says that David said that God told him that.  It seems to me that the writer is being very careful in how he words this.  In fact, considering that just a couple of chapters earlier the writer had told us the message which God gave David when He told David not to build Him a temple, it is quite clear that the writer is telling us that what David said here was David’s interpretation of why he was not to build a temple.  However, the writer does draw a line from David sinning by conducting a census to finding the location to build the temple to organizing the priests and Levites to manage the temple worship.  David’s sin led to him buying Aruanah’s threshing floor and building an altar there, where the temple was later built.  And building the altar there in Jerusalem led David to organizing the priests and Levites to manage the worship at that site and later at the temple.  David took the negative consequences of his mistake and used it to bring glory to God.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.