GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
1 CHRONICLES 21:18
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18 The angel of the LORD commanded Gad to tell David that David should go up and then set up an altar to the LORD on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.
The word “floor” can be misleading to the modern reader. A good threshing floor was not at the bottom of a place, but way up on top. This man Ornan had one of the best threshing floors around (he is also called Araunah, and you only need to say both names out loud to hear the similarity).
Ornan was a Jebusite, and his harvests were so large that he needed a big threshing floor. Threshing is the process of separating the husks of wheat from the edible kernels inside. This can be done in small quantities by hand, even while walking. “Jesus’ disciples were picking heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands, and eating them” (Luke 6:1). But with a harvest, something else had to be done. The wheat was chopped from the stalks (the stalks were burned) and then the wheat was piled onto the stone threshing floor. An outcrop of bedrock on a hillside was ideal. Then the grain could be flailed (beaten with sticks) or else an ox could just walk all over it, a process that meant leading the ox in a circle, around and around, while workers shoveled the grain into the animal’s path. If the ox happened to eat some of the grain while he was doing this work, he was welcome to it, for the Lord commanded: “Do not muzzle the ox when it is threshing” (Deuteronomy 25:4; 1 Timothy 5:18).
Then what? You have a big pile of grain mixed with hulls, shells, and dust. This is where the hillside comes in handy. Hillsides tend to be windy. So any breeze at all is useful. Using a winnowing fork (sort of a longer pitchfork with more tines or teeth), the workman begins to toss, toss, toss the stuff into the air. Right away the breeze plays its part. The heavier grain falls back down, but everything else is carried away downwind. That “everything else” is called chaff. John the Baptist used this process for one of his most vivid sermon illustrations about Judgment Day: “His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire!” (Luke 3:17).
Now, in our text, the angel of the LORD commands David through Gad the Seer to build an altar on Ornan’s threshing floor. Did folks remember that this was where another altar had been built, nine or ten centuries before? Were the stones still there, lying around in the weeds, that Abraham had once brought together in a pile, arranging the wood that his son Isaac had lugged up this very hill, so long ago? Abraham had taken Isaac, just as God had commanded him, and bound his hands and feet, and laid him, his own son, on the wood on top of the altar. But when Abraham reached for his knife and touched it, the angel of the LORD called out from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!” Moses tells us that he said: “Do not lay a hand on the boy. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld your son from me– your only son” (Genesis 22:12). And as Abraham untied Isaac and helped the boy to jump down off the wood, they saw a ram with its horns caught in a thicket nearby. They sacrificed the ram, and, Moses goes on to teach us: “To this day it is said, ‘On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided’” (Genesis 22:14).
This hill where Ornan the Jebusite did his threshing was the same one where Abraham offered Isaac, the one that the prophetic saying was talking about: “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.” Now David was commanded to build an altar there. And later, Solomon would build a temple there. But the sacrifices of David’s altar and Solomon’s temple only pointed ahead to the Great Sacrifice, the One Sacrifice, just as Abraham’s offering did. Neither the drama of David’s altar nor the vast numbers of offerings in Solomon’s temple could approach the meaning of the one offering on this same hill. For it was also here that in later times the Romans would erect their cruel crosses just outside the gates of David’s city (Luke 23:32-33). The Romans made the condemned men carry their own crosses, and then they nailed them up to die both as a punishment and as a warning to everyone who saw them (John 19:17-18), even posting notices about their crimes (John 19:19).
So at this place, where grain was threshed and winnowed, and where the chaff blew away from a heathen farmer’s harvest, the Lord God would offer, as Abraham had, his own son. And the Lord God would also provide a substitute– as he had for Abraham’s son Isaac– for all mankind. This plague brought about by David’s sin had been used by God to select the place of the altar, and Solomon would build his temple around that place, that threshing floor. Here the flesh of the Son of God would be threshed and winnowed by the Jews and by the Gentile Romans as well, as they spat on him, slapped him, hit him, whipped him, beat him, and crucified him. And with the pain of that act, the shedding of his blood, and his death and resurrection, the sins of the world were removed like chaff from a harvest. All of us who put our faith in him fall back down at his feet like good grain, a harvest of righteousness in his body and blood. And all of us who put our faith in him will be gathered together, not into a mere barn, but into his banquet hall for all eternity. You are invited to accompany the King to the banquet! Your faith is your outfit, your reply, your transportation– it is all you need.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – 1 Chronicles 21:18 The Threshing Floor