The One Year Bible - Day 156

We read of one of these confusing passages where the will and sovereignty of God interferes with the will of men. We know or at least assume we have free will, something which shows the providence of God but we also know that God has a will and purpose that is being carried out. The difficult wording is in 2 Samuel 24 and says that God was angry with Israel and caused David to harm them by taking a census. The census represents human boasting, a means to know that you have x thousand soldiers or people in your country. There are many things that represent the spirit of census in churches and are all based in the ego of man. It seems harsh that it reads that God made David do it and then blamed him but the text must simply reveal that God allowed David to do the thing that was on his heart, perhaps another reading would be, "God was angry and gave David an opportunity to do something evil that he had stored up in his heart". The fact that David is blamed must mean that it was fully David's choice, God is not going to punish him for something that God made him do but we do see this sense of God's sovereignty in the language, "He caused David to harm him".