At a Price

David Livingstone gave a lecture at Cambridge in 1857, after years in Africa, and said this about his life there: "Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice." The word he was throwing out was sacrifice. He had been mauled by a lion, he had buried people, and he had walked across most of a continent, yet he would not let any of it be called a price he had paid.

King David says the opposite about the same subject. He has counted the fighting men of Israel against the advice of Joab, his own general, and a plague has swept the land "from Dan even to Beersheba." When the LORD tells the destroying angel to stay his hand, the angel is standing by the threshingfloor of a man named Araunah at Jerusalem, and the prophet Gad tells David to build an altar there. Araunah sees the king coming and offers him everything for nothing: the floor, the oxen for the sacrifice, and the threshing tools and yokes for firewood. "All these things did Araunah, as a king, give unto the king." David had come to build the altar "that the plague may be stayed from the people," so here was all he needed, free and at once. Yet David answers, "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." He pays fifty shekels of silver, and the altar goes up on ground he has paid for. "So the LORD was intreated for the land, and the plague was stayed from Israel."

Chronicles records what was built on that hill later. Solomon built the house of the LORD there, "in the place that David had prepared in the threshingfloor of Ornan the Jebusite," and Ornan is another spelling of Araunah. So the temple, where a whole nation worshipped, stood on ground its king had refused to take as a gift. Put the two men side by side. David would not give God something that had cost him nothing, and Livingstone, whose work had cost him nearly everything, would not call it a sacrifice. Both knew that real giving costs something, and neither counted it a loss. The offering that costs nothing is always easy to find, and most of us bring it often. Yet the God who answered David's costly offering is the same God who receives what you bring Him at a price, and He still answers.

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