At a Price

Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought. It is emphatically no sacrifice. David Livingstone said that in a lecture at Cambridge in 1857, after years in Africa, and the word he was throwing out was sacrifice. He had been mauled by a lion, buried people, and walked most of a continent, and he would not have any of it called a payment.

King David says the opposite sentence about the same subject. He has numbered Israel against his own general's advice, a plague has run from Dan even to Beersheba, and the angel is standing at a threshingfloor above Jerusalem when it stops. Gad tells him to build an altar there. Araunah, who owns the place, sees the king coming and offers him the lot for nothing: the floor, the oxen, the threshing instruments and the yokes for firewood. All these things did Araunah, as a king, give unto the king. The timing makes it more generous still, since the plague is the thing they are trying to stop and here is everything needed, at once, free. Nay; but I will surely buy it of thee at a price: neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the LORD my God of that which doth cost me nothing. Fifty shekels of silver, and the altar goes up on ground he has paid for.

Chronicles records what was built on that hill afterwards, in the place that David had prepared in the threshingfloor of Ornan the Jebusite. The temple. The public worship of a whole nation stood on a patch of ground its king had refused to take as a gift. Hold the two sentences together. David would not hand God something that came to him for nothing, and Livingstone, out of a life that had cost him everything, would not let the word sacrifice near it. The offering that costs nothing is always in stock. It is what most of us bring most weeks. In this story it is the one thing nobody wanted on the altar.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 302 is Perfected After Suffering (1 Peter 5:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two