Angel on My Threshing Floor

Sometimes destiny is just waiting for time, place, and circumstance to collide. Only later do we discover our threshing floor was prepared long ago.

Take, for example, the case of the threshing floor in 1 Chronicles 21.

David had just angered the Lord by calling for an unauthorized census of the people. 70,000 Israelites would die before God’s messenger sheathed his sword. David saw an angel standing on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite. He and his men immediately fell flat on their faces and David begged the Lord for mercy.

That’s what David did, but how did the owner of that flat slab of rock respond? “Ornan turned and saw the angel; and his four sons who were with him hid themselves, but Ornan continued threshing wheat” (21:20). (I don’t know about you, but that seems a strange reaction to me. Personally, I’d be quaking in the bushes with his sons. But old Ornan was apparently a man totally engrossed in his work!)

At any rate, the angel commanded David to build an altar on the spot, so he bought the plot from Ornan and did so. (You can read the whole account in Chronicles 21:1-27, if you need a refresher.)

The Threshing Floor Before

Here’s where we need to run a time-lapse video in our minds because God had been preparing this place for David’s encounter long before he was even born.

Rewind the tape back to Abraham’s time when this plot of land was called Mount Moriah. Abe’s lifting the knife to kill Isaac when a voice cries out for him to stop. A ram struggling in the bushes becomes the substitutionary sacrifice and father and son walk back down the hill together.

Nothing happens at the spot for a long time. Wind blows over the barren rock. Dead leaves skitter. Tumbleweeds roll by. (Are tumbleweeds native to Israel? Oh, well. Never mind.) The video fast-forwards until civilization creeps near. Farmers move in, notice the flat, rocky space, and put it to use as a threshing floor. At last, Ornan’s family takes possession of it.

By the time David appears, Ornan has long been doing what has become a mundane and uneventful job on a bit of rock that has itself become ordinary and unremarkable. When the angel makes his entrance, salvation happens again. This time it wasn’t a single individual being delivered, but a whole nation.

Not as Ordinary as They Seem

To Ornan and David, the angel’s appearance may have seemed like a singular event. In fact, the groundwork for what happened on the threshing floor was laid in Abraham’s day. But God still wasn’t done with the threshing floor. If we fast-forward our tape a bit more, we’d see David’s son eventually build a temple on spot. The rock where Ornan pounded out his grain eventually became the hub of worship for the entire nation.

As we think about laboring on our own inconsequential threshing floor, does the work seem ordinary? Mundane? Take heart. This obscure place where we labor that seems inhabited with nothing more exciting than dead leaves, tumbleweeds, and the sweat of our brow, may well be a place where God plans something wonderful to happen.

So, let’s keep working–keep focusing on the job at hand. There may well be a history to the plot we labor on that we aren’t aware of. The day may come when we too look up and see an angel on our threshing floor.

“Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin”
(Zechariah 4:10 NLT). 

(Post originally appeared on TMurphyWrites.com on January 16, 2017)

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