Editor's Note: Found this on Reddit...thought the meat of the post would be a good post for discussion here as well.
Consider the three choices God forced upon David for taking a census. These three choices were forced on King David, Not for murdering people, not for raping women, not for lying, stealing, or any crime we can think of in our modern world that is repugnant, but simply for taking a census or in other words, counting people.
For counting people, Jehovah forced a decision on David that involved the lives of thousands upon thousands of innocent people.
The choices all dealt with the “Way” Jehovah would kill thousands of unsuspecting loyal worshipers.
1 Chronicles 21
“These are the choices the Lord has given you. You may choose three years of famine
Imagine what that meant. Famine was going to be a three year project for Jehovah or YHWH. God would cause the crops to fail somehow. Either send a swarm of insects to damage the crops, or cause a disease to damage them.
Then slowly the storehouses would start draining. People would start panicking. After about a year or so, many would start feeling the effects of what Jehovah was doing to them.
Panic would finally rear its head on the face of the parents as they started seeing the hunger pains on the faces of their innocent children. Eventually when food started becoming really scarce, the children would start getting sick. Slowly but surely the lack of food would invite all kinds of sickness and maladies. The infants being the weakest would be the first to die a painful death as a result of famine. Next would be the elderly, and many would start seeing their parents and grandparents go through a horrifying painful death because of the lack of basic food supplies.
Finally, the foundation of the family structure in the nation of Israel was in danger of being exterminated as Husbands started losing wives and wives started losing husbands, leaving thousands of widowed people feeling the pains of the famine all by themselves as they slowly starve to death. How horrific!
The second choice was three months of destruction by the sword. God would send some army to invade the country and start slaughtering children, ripping pregnant women in their homes, killing all the fathers, raping all the young female children, and leaving thousands of children orphans. How wicked is this choice!
The third choice was three days of some type of severe plague. It was going to be worse than any chemical or viral outbreak in human history. Worse than the Black death.
Imagine these three choices forced on you. Imagine you having to choose which killing method would be imposed on thousands upon thousands of unsuspecting children, mothers, fathers, infants. All these people trying their best to do the right thing in raising a God-fearing family, and yet had no idea that the God they worshiped was about to murder them horrifically.
You probably would have calculated the same way David did. Three days is better than three years of famine or three months of the sword. So David picks three days of a plague.
David felt that it was better to fall into the hands of a merciful God. Did David not get it? This was not the character of a “Merciful God”
In three days God slaughters 70,000 people. Around 972 people were dying every hour for the next 72 hours. Imagine if that happened in the area you live. That means that there wasn’t even enough time to figure out what the hell is going on. There wasn’t enough time to bury the dead or even mourn them. 972 people were dying every hour for 72 hours until the total came to 70,000 dead in just three days.
And remember, these were Jehovah’s loyal, faithful worshipers.
King David tried to reason with Jehovah by explaining the situation in such simple terms that a five-year-old child would understand.
Bible quote;
And David said to Jehovah, “I am the one who called for the census! I am the one who has sinned and done wrong! But these people are as innocent as sheep—what have they done?
It did not matter to Jehovah aka YHWH. He forced David to choose the method of killing all these unsuspecting people whose only crime was being part of the Theocratic Nation of Israel.
This is wicked. This is worse than Demonic. This is the an example of a true Psychopath.
Forget 607, forget overlapping generation.
The real question is; why would anyone want to worship this kind of God?