When we hear the word “Rage” we think something loud and obvious; we think red-hot anger and raised voices; we think clenched fists and things being slammed. And that’s right —in part. Sometimes Rage looks like these things.
Sometimes, however, Rage takes other forms —forms to which we are blind because we inhabit them every day. Sometimes Rage looks like cold calculation, naked power, slow violence, and systemic control.
Classically understood Rage names the sins that spring from a despair over our lack of control. We want everything ordered to our will. When things are not so ordered we, often, Rage. Rage rues the God who gives and takes away (Job 1:21). We want to exercise some measure of dominion over the hand of God. Rage oscillates between a laying a tight miser’s grasp and the careless emptying of the hand. Rage refuses the open upward-raised palm that can both receive and release. Rage, thus, takes many forms:
Most addictions and binges fit under the banner of Rage; quiet manipulation often is a kind of Rage (“he will not marry that Girl” and “she will go the best school” and “are you sure you want to do that”); all the YOLO moments are often spurts of Rage; even most instances of the sudden Fall, of the unexpected one-night-stand type of moment, are very rarely “Lust” or “Gluttony” in the truest sense, they are more frequently wrathful “damnitalltohell” moments where we demand that “this at least I will choose to do” or “if I can’t control x then why bother caring about y?”
David’s census can be read as such a moment, a moment of Rage. His heart grows hard like pharaoh, and he wants to make sure that he maintains control over the kingdom. He exerts this control by sending Joab, commander of his army, to count the number of the fighting men (2 Sam. 24:1-9; 1 Chron. 21:1-6). This breaks the commandment of God (Deut. 17:16), and incurs God’s judgement (2 Sam. 24:10-17; 1 Chron 21:7). Israel has become a “House of Bondage” like the Egypt they had left long before -ruled by numerical governance and statistical predictability.
This is quite different than the census the Lord had Moses make (Num. 1). Why? Because the goal of the Mosaic numberings, like other numberings in the Bible (e.g. Gen 46:8-27; Ezra 8:1-20), was not governance-by-number, but a show of God’s faithfulness. These others display a confidence in the faithfulness of God, that He is the One who has made His People fruitful and that he will be the Good Shepherd who knows the number of sheep in his fold, the number of hairs on your head, and the falling of each sparrow from the sky (Luke 12:6-7).
In an age run ever-increasingly by Rage in the form of algorithmic governance (in everything from social media, to the SOFA measures used to determine what kind of care COVID patients received), we must be the kind of people whose use of numberings is anchored in God’s faithfulness, not in our anxiety. For some trust in chariots or the number of fighting men or the probabilistic predictions about the behavior certain population groups, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God (Ps. 20:7; cf. Ps. 33:17, 147:10; Prov. 21:31).