Gad: A Prophet For Our Times
By Richard D. Kahoe, Minister and Psychologist
Woodward, OK
Who in the world was Gad? As a prophet he is so obscure that even book editors confuse him with God![iv]So, you need not feel biblically ignorant if you haven’t heard of David’s “house prophet,” Gad.
Gad is most frequently used in the Old Testament as a place name, and we have only two incidents referring to the prophet who served King David and his family. The first brief incident is in 1 Samuel 22:5, where Gad instructs David to leave the stronghold and go into the land of Judah. Though we know nothing about Gad’s background or his call as a prophet, his credentials are revealed in the second passage: “The Lord said to Gad, David’s prophet, ‘Go and tell David . . . .’” (2 Sam. 24:11).
The role of the prophet is one who receives a message from God and is told to take the message to others. Generally the message was to a broader part of the Jewish family, but some that I call “house prophets,” like God and Nathan, took their messages primarily to one person. The keys here, of course, are “The Lord said,” and the command, “go . . . tell.” Gad was certainly acting as a prophet, though an obscure one.
God’s Prophecies in Context
The First Prophecy. Context is always important; sometimes it is most of the story for prophets. Our first prophecy from Gad is in the context of several chapters in 1 Samuel. Here Saul was still king, but David had killed Goliath and was receiving more attention from the people. Look in your Bible at 1 Samuel 18 and you will see a caption, “Saul Becomes Jealous of David” (mine has a picture of Saul’s first attempt to kill David). Chapter 19 is captioned, “David is persecuted by Saul,” and Chapter 21, “David Flees from Saul.”
Though David escapes again, the seriousness of Saul’s wrath is indicated by the caption in Chapter 22: “The Slaughter of the Priests.” When Saul finds that David has escaped, he takes his anger out on the Lord’s priests in the house of Ahimelech and kills all but one of Ahimelech’s sons, who escaped to join David.
We learn (22:3) that David had gone to Moab, obviously to hide from Saul. While David was hiding in a cave, God apparently brought a personal message to David through the prophet God: “Don’t stay here; go at once to the land of Judah.” That’s all, but clearly this was a message that was intended to save David’s life—and, as you know the end of the story, it served the purpose, as David became king after Saul’s death. (Let’s hold our lesson from this first prophecy until we hear a more complicated story.)
The Second Prophecy. Our next word from Gad is in the last chapter of 2 Samuel. David has become a mighty warrior king, Notice in Chapter 23 there are lists of “David’s Famous Soldiers,” setting the stage for a military story. Chapter 24 begins, “On another occasion the Lord was angry with Israel and he made David bring trouble upon them”—specifically by taking a census. God gave directions for taking a census in Exodus (30:11-16), and in both Numbers 1 and 26, censuses were taken for God’s purposes.
However, David had no thought of God’s purposes in this census, for the king’s purpose is revealed in verse 9: “The total number of men capable of military service: 800,000 in Israel and 500,000 in Judah.” David had war in mind. Dr. Ganse Little in the Interpreter’s Bible comments, “What David had in mind could not but transgress against the individual freedom—and indeed the very life—of the populace so numbered.”
Do you remember God’s warning through Samuel, about what kings would do? They would conscript the people’s young men into their armies. Saul was considered a worse king, but here even the great King David was doing the very thing kings often do out of the power and pride that comes with the office.
To David’s credit, his conscience began to bother him, and he tried to repent. However, sin is like a pillow full of feathers scattered in the whirlwind, or like Styrofoam peanuts cast into a raging surf. The damage done cannot be undone.
So here we have Gad’s prophecy from God: “You have three choices: What is it to be? Three years of famine, three months of retreating from your enemies, or three days of plague?” Either David or God chose the latter, and 70,000 Israelites died.
So, God was saying to David: “Look at what you have done. You have planned a mighty war, and when you lose, in retreat, you would lose 70,000 men. That many could die from a three-year famine or a three-day plague, but that result would be under my control. You have acted as if you were God and planned to lead 70,000 Israelite soldiers into death in needless battle.”
Dr. Little concludes, “Herein is seen the fallacy of believing that the state is ultimately protected by . . . any kind of sheer weight of numbers, or wealth, or productive genius, or scientific advance.”
Gad’s prophecy and David’s sin occurred around 1000 B.C., about 3000 years ago. What lesson arises from these events? When I read these words, I could not help but hear the echoes of words from the current U.S.political leadership: “We have the strength to fight both al Quaeda and Iraq at the same time!” We have the strength; we have the numbers; we have the technology; we have the weapons. We are just as confident as David was in counting 1,300,000 Jewish fighting men to go into battle. But God’s answer was, take heed! In a bloody retreat you could lose 70,000 men. Don’t rely on your power.
On the day I began preparing this message, I was reading the latest edition of Christian Ethics Today (October, 2002), edited by my old college roommate. Hear the titles of the first three articles in the journal: “Iraq: Don’t Go There” by Dr. George Hunsinger of Princeton Seminary, “Ethics of the War on Terrorism,” by Dr. John Swomley of St. Paul School of Theology, and “Just Peacemaking Initiatives Can Prevent Terrorism” by Dr. Glen Stassen of Fuller Seminary. These writers range from more liberal Presbyterian thought to Methodism to more conservative evangelical. Are they all modern-day prophets, in the line of Gad and Isaiah, warning not to trust in military and political power, but to trust in God? None of these articles is pacifistic, but they each warn about mixed motives in America’s saber-rattling against Iraq.
I’m sure none of these modern prophets claims to have the final word on the present challenge of international terrorism and so-called “rouge nations” bent on developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. But the prophetic word of Christian ethics has been a relatively unheard voice in the national and international debate.
Christianity is not obsolete in today’s world. It should be a major voice in the debate. I wonder if our President has discussed the international military issues with his Methodist pasor, or his bishop, or the ethics professors in any of the fine Methodist universities or seminaries. I think he has not.
Dr Hunsinger’s article cites a Pentagon study that projects an “acceptable death rate of 20,000-30,000 U.S. soldiers” in a war to conquer Iraq. Our experience in Vietnam and other wars suggest that our estimates often are low.
Application For Our Time
Although I have already made some applications of Gad’s prophetic voice to our time in relation to our present military situation, I also want to make a much broader purview. To begin, let us notice the different threats to David posed by Gad’s two prophecies.
In 1 Samuel 22, David’s obvious danger was an external one—namely, the jealous, angry, and vengeful King Saul. Sometimes prophets warn of external threats. Before September 11, 2001, some lone voices in the FBI and in the intelligence community had warned about the number of middle-eastern men in the U.S. that were studying to fly large airplanes, and even the possibility that crashing the airplanes could be a terrorist plan. Maybe these were “secular prophets” warning of an external threat. (I’m sure some people are convinced that the President is a prophet, warning us of external dangers.
In that same issue of Christian Ethics Today I previously quoted is a speech by the founding editor Foy Valentine, given in Fort Worth (Debby and I were there) titled, “Ethics East of Eden.” Dr. Valentine is also the former director of the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
When I lived in Nashville I was a member of a black Baptist church. Dr. Valentine and his wife visited our church one morning. He is considered a modern Southern Baptist prophet who ranks with Tony Campolo, the American Baptist sociologist, evangelist, and social activist. Dr. Valentine writes in his article, “Pray that the Lord of the harvest will call forth ethics laborers who will stand up and speak out like Tony Campolo”—the first in a list that included Millard Fuller of Habitat for Humanity and President Jimmy Carter.
In his address, Valentine virtually equated Christian ethics with prophecy. At one place he accuses, “Preaching from today’s pulpits mostly [avoids] ethics like the plague, pussyfoots around prophethood.” He then cites other ethicists of days gone by. The first is Walter Rauschenbusch, the German and American Baptist who helped laun ch the much-maligned “social gospel.” (At Green Lake American Baptist Assembly ground, where I was last Sunday, there is a Rauschenbusch hall.) About the prophet, Valentine said, “Walter Rauschenbusch flamed across the horizon with his detractors bellowing hot Irish epithets against him every step of the way, but without quenching his prophetic fire. Giants emerged to preach and teach and write in an explosion of commitment to doing the gospel.”
What did Rauschenbusch rail against so strenuously? Factory owners that exploited sweat labor of their day, that got rich without paying a living wage to their workers—against an economic system that robbed men of dignity, to say nothing of their health and lives. A true “prophet,” Rauschenbusch modeled the ministry of Gad in 1 Samuel 22, warning his parishioners in the Second German Baptist Church in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City of external threats.
As he preached comfort and strength to his own church members, he also rallied forces of justice and mercy in the industrial and urban areas of the country, confronting abn unjust economic system. In his preaching and writing he exposed the robber barons and the evil systems without that threatened the American society.
In his speech, Dr. Valentine also mentions Clarence Jordan, who started Koinonia Farm in South Georgia. This much-hated early experiment at interracial living in the American South was also the launching pad for Millard Fuller and his Habitat for Humanity ministry. No, there is not a Clarence Jordan Hall at Green Lake, but he was mentioned during the time I was there. The speaker was one who really knew Clarence Jordan, even though he didn’t pronounce his name as I do, and as my grandmother’s family and every other Jordan family I know pronounce it.
In that fine old South Georgia accent, the speaker referred to Clarence “Jurden.” So I will follow his lead and say, Clarence “Jurden” was a prophet, but one more like the Gad of 2 Samuel 24. Just as Gad’s message from God in that chapter was one of reproach to the King, so Clarence Jorden’s message to America was of our internal failing, the sin of racial prejudice. The sin of judging men, women, and children by their accents, by their appearance, and by the color of their skin.
Other voices followed—the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other ministers (black and white), and brave young civil rights workers who sometimes gave their own lives—all followed the example of Clarence Jordan in breaking down old artificial barriers.
That dream, of one long prophet in South Georgia, helped populate Green Lake Assembly grounds last week. I don’t believe there was an ethnic majority at that meeting of young seminarians and of pastors new to the American Baptist denomination. There were almost surely more whites than blacks, but the Hispanics and Asians probably kept the number of whites from reaching 50%.
I noticed at the Saturday evening banquet that at our table, without any design or intention, were seated alternatively white/black/white/black/white black. And one of the “whites” spoke in an accent that seemed to have been Spanish. To my left was a white woman in a wheelchair who wants to become an American Baptist Pastor. An d tomy right was a former university dean of education, a black women who is also finishing her seminary education to become a minister.
Dr. Valentine’s main theme was that Christian ethics and prophethood are fighting an uphill battle in today’s world. But as we look back to our spiritual forebearers, prophets like Rauschenbusch and Jordan and even Gad, we can appreciate today’s prophets and pray that God will continue to raise up women and men to speak for God in our world.
