Satan’s influences are always active towards us. All his energies are directed towards God’s people to destroy us and make us fall. The price for repentance we pay determines how are relationship with God is. Just saying I’m sorry is not sufficient in repentance we need to; like the proverbs says, forsake the sin for the repentance to count. David was confronted with a decision of whether to receive a gift and offer to God after he had sinned or to purchase that which was offered to him and offer it to the Lord. Araunah: a Jebusite whom David went to purchase his land for an offering to God, on the other hand was willing to give not only the land for the sacrifice but the wheat, bullocks, and the wood, because of his experience with the angel and the king. Our experiences with the Lord determines the what we are willing to offer to him whenever we are called too.
1 Chronicles 21:18-24
18 Then the angel of the Lord ordered Gad to tell David to go up and build an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. 19 So David went up in obedience to the word that Gad had spoken in the name of the Lord.20 While Araunah was threshing wheat, he turned and saw the angel; his four sons who were with him hid themselves. 21 Then David approached, and when Araunah looked and saw him, he left the threshing floor and bowed down before David with his face to the ground.22 David said to him, “Let me have the site of your threshing floor so I can build an altar to the Lord, that the plague on the people may be stopped. Sell it to me at the full price.”23 Araunah said to David, “Take it! Let my lord the king do whatever pleases him. Look, I will give the oxen for the burnt offerings, the threshing sledges for the wood, and the wheat for the grain offering. I will give all this.”24 But King David replied to Araunah, “No, I insist on paying the full price. I will not take for the Lord what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing.”
After David sinned and began his quest of repentance the angel of the Lord shows him a place to build an alter for the Lord’s sacrifice. It was a place where the wheat was being collected; a symbolic place for the harvest. The chosen man/women of God is considered the wheat in biblical terms (Mat. 3:12). Now, David had to decide if he was going to pay the price for the land or take it for free as it was being offered. He portrayed a symbolic action as that of Christ’s, that he (Christ) was willing to pay the price of life for our redemption and this we see when he said ” I will not take for the Lord what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing”(1Chr.21:24). Paul said that we were bought with a price (1Cor. 6:20). Now, Aranuah a Jebusite and an insignificant person who was about his daily chore and was not aware of the prophetic happenings that was going to transpire from God, encountered and experience with God. His experience changed his entire way of giving like the widow who gave all she had in Jesus’ time (Lk.21:3). His sons hid when they saw the angel as many of our children who have not had encounters with God. Aranuah’s wheat gathering was a symbolic time segment of the collection of God’s people (Mat. 9:37).