What are we going to eat? What are we going to wear? What’s going to protect us from the elements? Where do we belong? These four important questions are behind the census of ancient Israel described in Torah reading בְּמִדְבַּר Bamidbar (“in the wilderness,” Num. 1:1–4:20).

Through this object lesson, we learn how Messiah Yeshua (Christ Jesus) is Israel’s ultimate inheritance, and we discover why bringing Israel and all nations into what the Land represents leads us to true rest for our restless hearts.

““Take a census of all the congregation of the sons of Israel, by their families, by their fathers’ households, according to the number of names, every male, head by head from twenty years old and upward, whoever is able to go out to war in Israel, you and Aaron shall number them by their armies.” (Numbers 1:2–3 NAS95)

This book starts off with a census of all the tribes of Israel as well as the mixed multitude in the second year after the Exodus. At the time of the Exodus, the children of Israel had been scattered throughout the land of in Egypt, even thought they were concentrated in Goshen. Now they are congregated all in one place.

The men in this count include men 20+ years old not counting invalids, people who are terminally ill, or children. They only counted the men who were able to hold a sword in case of conscription into battle. There were 603,550 men counted of all the tribes of Israel, excluding the tribe of Levi. The Levites were counted as well but the parameters of that census were different.

God and Moses spoke on a regular basis, every time you see the phrase “The Lord spoke to Moses…” that is when God came to speak with Moses directly. God would come down in the cloud and cover the tabernacle. When the people saw that happen, they knew that God and Moses were meeting together and that seems to have happened quite often.

The count of the Levites were different. Rather than merely counting the adult male Levites , they counted all the Levite males who were one month old and older. They also counted all the first born sons of Israel with a similarly broad brush. This census was not for the purpose of ascertaining how many could serve in battle, as Levites did not serve in the army but in God’s tabernacle.

If you look at Ex. 30, there was an earlier census but they didn’t count heads, they counted the coinage they those being counted were required to bring with them, which was a half-shekel per person.

The children of Israel belong to God, not the king

When David did his census, as recorded in 2 Samuel 24:1-17 and 1 Chronicles 21, he didn’t do it properly. David counted heads without collecting the half-shekel.

God wasn’t pleased. Yoab, David’s top commander told him “Don’t do this. This is wrong.” But David didn’t listen. But why would God send the plague if the Israelites weren’t counted in the right way? I know He’s the Almighty God, and He can do whatever he wants. But is there a rhyme to the reason?

“But Joab said to the king, “Now may the LORD your God add to the people a hundred times as many as they are, while the eyes of my lord the king still see; but why does my lord the king delight in this thing?”” (2 Samuel 24:3 NAS95)

Yoab said David would have 100 x more men available to him in time of a real need if he doesn’t do the census but David ignored the warning.

As a direct consequence, God enacted a plague on the people of Israel to killing enough of them that David’s census was no longer an accurate reflection of the country’s military or tax base. You don’t want to be on the receiving end of the shrinking, do you?

At the time of this census, there were about 1.3 million “valiant men who drew the sword.” The plague that God struck on the land of Israel killed 70,000 of them.

Why did God bring the plague? Why was God so upset that David performed this censu...