An Everlasting Kingdom

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I saw a video last week talking about how when you have toddlers, you really can’t tell them what the plans are going to be ahead of time. Because if you tell them we’re going to Grandma’s house in two weeks, they run to get their suitcase, and then they’re mad we’re not getting in the car and going to grandma’s house. They completely missed that two-week thing.

And so far, it hadn’t gotten any better as they’ve gotten older and no longer toddlers. Yesterday, we went up to Oklahoma City for the first couple of many family Christmases that are going to take place this year. And, you know, we kind of let the kids know days in advance that we’re going to be going to the city for these Christmas activities, but we didn’t tell them exactly when.

We didn’t tell them all the details because they just would have bugged us until then. We said, you know, you’re going to see your cousins, but we didn’t specify which cousins and when. And I even realized that I do this with myself.

I withhold information from myself. Now, you may say, how is that possible? When you have a short memory, all things are possible, okay?

And so I know that Charla and I have discussed all the plans, all the things that are going to take place each day, but no matter how intently I’m listening, it’s just gone like the conversation never happened. And so even knowing, all right, we’re going to be going to my parents’ house, we’re going to be going to your mom’s house, I had to ask her Friday before she left because she went up early to help with some of the preparations. I asked her Friday, I said, now which kids do I have with me and which kids are you taking?

I need to make sure I’ve got a head count for tonight. And when we leave Saturday morning, where am I supposed to show up and when? She said, well, we’re doing such and such in the afternoon.

So in the morning, no, no, no, where am I supposed to show up and when? Just I just need the smallest little detail. If I don’t know all the schedule, then I can’t get confused.

Just tell me when to show up and where. And she did, and I showed up in all the right places at all the right times, I think, and it worked out well. That’s a little bit like what God had to do with the nation of Israel.

I’m going to give you some hints. I’m going to give you some information about what I’m doing. But God did not, in most cases, give Israel a tremendous amount of detail about how He was going to do things.

They needed to have enough information to recognize Jesus when He came, which those who really were paying attention had enough information to recognize Jesus. But they didn’t need so much information that they started trying to help and make things happen. Have you ever thought, this is what God’s doing in my situation.

Let me try to help things along, and then you make things worse. I’ve done that a few times, try to help God. Israel didn’t need so much information that they would step in and try to help God make things happen.

This morning, we’re going to look at a prophecy that deals with the coming of Christ, but it also deals with an Old Testament situation. And so God offers this prophecy that we know in hindsight, He was merging these two stories and not really explaining to Israel how it was going to happen the first time and how it was going to happen the second time, not really specifying to them that it was going to be two different events. We can see that in hindsight, but just giving Israel the information they needed, the bare minimum information they needed to be able to recognize what God was doing when He did it.

As we’ve been going through this series on seeing Jesus in the Old Testament, this is really the first of the prophecies, I think, that we’re going to look at over the next few weeks, we’ve looked at some pictures and how some Old Testament events parallel the life of Jesus. We’re going to look at this prophecy in 2 Samuel chapter 7, if you’ll go ahead and turn there with me this morning. 2 Samuel chapter 7.

And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. And if you can’t find 2 Samuel or you don’t have your Bible this morning, it’s all right. It’ll be on the screen for you so that we can read along together about what God told Israel that He was going to do.

We’re going to start in 2 Samuel chapter 7 verse 12. This is God speaking to King David through the prophet Nathan. And He says, When your days are complete and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your descendant after you who will come forth from you, and I will establish his kingdom.

He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he will be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will correct him with the rod of men and the strokes of the sons of men.

But my loving kindness shall not depart from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you. Your house and your kingdom shall endure before me forever. Your throne shall be established forever.

In accordance with all these words and all this vision, so Nathan spoke to David. And you may be seated. This was not the only promise that God gave to King David, but it’s a pretty good one.

And here in just this passage, God blessed David with promises that were going to benefit his country and his nation. Now, if you were a king in ancient times, you were not only concerned with your rule, but because you knew you probably weren’t going to live forever, unless you’re, there were some random kings in ancient times who thought that they could find a way to live forever. The first emperor of China probably poisoned himself with mercury looking for an elixir that was going to lead to everlasting life.

It did not work. You cannot ingest mercury and expect that it’s going to make you live forever. Most kings recognized that they weren’t going to live forever, but the way that they could continue to rule the way they could continue to influence their country and leave a legacy was for their dynasty to stay on the throne.

You didn’t want to just rule. You wanted to make sure that you left behind offspring, descendants who were going to continue to follow your example and rule in your name. That’s why one of the punishments that we see in the Old Testament with some of the wicked kings is that they’re told, I promised you that you’d stay on the throne your entire life, But because you’ve done this thing that displeased God, your descendants will lose the throne.

And that was, for a king, that was almost as bad. That’s your legacy. That’s how you’re going to be remembered.

If your family gets kicked off the throne, it could undo everything you’ve spent your whole life doing. It could even erase your whole memory. If you look at ancient Egypt, they would carve the stories about themselves into stone with the hieroglyphics.

And if a new dynasty came about that did not like the old dynasty, they’d carve even deeper hieroglyphics over them so that you are completely written out of anybody’s memory and existence. And here, this is the kind of promise that a king would want, that not only are you on the throne and you’re going to remain on the throne, but when you are gone, your descendants are going to be on this throne forever. Now, for David, this was a pretty good deal. God promised to raise up a descendant of David to rule over his kingdom.

He said in verse 12 that he was going to do that. He said in verse 13 that he was going to give David’s descendant also this privilege of building a permanent temple for God. One of the things I had hoped we’d have time in this series to look at is the tabernacle.

And the fact that the tabernacle itself even represents Jesus. It was a traveling symbol of the presence of God that went with the nation of Israel everywhere they went. But whenever they encamped someplace, they would have to put up the tabernacle.

And whenever they moved on, they’d have to take it down and take it with them. And when they settled in the land of Israel, they kind of got the sense, you know, if we’re a real country now, we need to quit wandering around in tents. And our God shouldn’t live in a tent.

And David was really convicted about this idea that God didn’t have a permanent temple and wanted to build God a temple. And God had said no. But God said, your descendant is going to build a permanent temple for me. And God was going to take this descendant of King David in verse 13, and he was going to establish his throne forever.

That means he wouldn’t just rule, but his rule would go on forever. Now, if you’re David, it’s hard to see how that’s possible because of what we already talked about. kings don’t live forever, but God always has a plan.

In verse 14, God said, I will love him and I will care for him the way that a father does to a son. That’s also important because a new king would need that guidance from an old king, but he doesn’t become the new king until his father is dead and his father’s not there to lead him. And so the father would, if he was a good father, would hopefully invest in his son and try to develop his leadership skills so that when he’s gone, he would have those lessons to carry with him.

But still, you can’t prepare somebody for every situation that’s going to come about in life. And so you hope there’s somebody there to guide your children when you’re gone. And who better to guide your children than the God of Israel?

He says, I will be there for him like a father. I mean, for David, David was not perfect. David was not even a great parent at some points of his life.

But for David, you can’t ask for better promises than these. God even says in verse 14 that he would correct him when needed. And you kind of hope somebody will be there to correct your kids if they step out of line and you’re not there.

God would correct him, and he would correct him as forcefully as necessary to keep him on the straight and narrow. That if he’s acting up real bad, God is going to do what’s necessary to bring bring him back into line. Verse 15 teaches us that God was going to show him a kind of favor that most other kings did not get.

He compares him to King Saul and how he had taken the kingdom away from not only King Saul, but from King Saul’s descendants, because Saul had been so disobedient toward God. And God said to David, I’m not going to do to your descendants what I did to King Saul. And the result of this was going to be eternal blessing for David’s dynasty and for Israel itself.

David’s family would continue to rule. As they continued to walk with God, it would hopefully work out well for the nation of Israel. And it’s something that gives David some peace as he comes into his old age of recognizing that his legacy will continue.

That his sons and his grandsons will continue to be on the throne. all of the things that he has worked for are going to be taken care of. Now, this unfortunately doesn’t mean that all of David’s descendants did the right thing.

And it doesn’t mean that God never had to punish them. But it means there is this promise that God has given David because of David’s faithfulness. Not David’s perfection, but because of David’s faithfulness, the love of David’s heart toward God.

God gave him these promises to take care of his family and to take care of the nation. It was going to be for their good as they all walked with God. Now, as we go on through the story in the Old Testament, we see that God partially fulfilled His promise to David through Solomon.

And when I say partially, we’ll get into in just a moment why it’s a partial fulfillment. But Solomon was not originally supposed to be the one who inherited the kingdom. There were other sons who were older than David.

As a matter of fact, at the point this promise was made through Nathan, Solomon hadn’t even been born yet. And so when God says, I will raise up one of your descendants, he’s literally saying somebody who’s not even been born yet is going to be the fulfillment of these promises. And it worked out that God orchestrated things that, you know, you’ve got this line of succession, and nobody expected Solomon to be the one to rule.

But God stepped in to fulfill his promise and made it so that Solomon would be the king of Israel after David. And just like God promised to David, Solomon was given the task of building the temple. Now, God told David that he could not build the temple because he had blood on his hands.

David was a man of war, is what God called him. David was a deeply flawed man, but he was a man who was repentant before God, and so he was said to be a man after God’s own heart. But there were certain things that God said, even if you’ve been forgiven, there are still some consequences that do not go away.

And so David did not get to build the temple, but Solomon did. And we see that story in 1 Chronicles 23. And then we see how God established him as king the way he promised to do.

He didn’t just end up on the throne, but God gave him the tools and everything that he needed in order to be the kind of king that he needed to be. In order to be the kind of king that Israel needed. God gave him those tools.

And the famous story about Solomon is that God came to him and said, because of the promises I’ve made to your father David, you ask me for whatever you want, and I’ll give it to you. And Solomon could have asked for riches, he could have asked for power, he could have asked for all these things, and he asked for wisdom to be able to rule God’s people well. And God not only gave him the wisdom, but God gave him the other things that he could have asked for and did not.

And there’s the story of King Solomon splitting the baby. That’s an example of his wisdom, that God had given him this wisdom. The two women come and say, this is my baby.

No, this is my baby. They’re fighting over it. It’s before DNA and CSI.

He had no way of knowing. And so God gave him the wisdom to say, you know what? If I can’t decide, we’ll just split the baby in half right down the middle, and each of you get half.

How about that? And the one woman says, well, that seems fair. I wonder what’s wrong with her.

The Bible doesn’t tell us a whole lot about her story. But the other one says, no, no, no, don’t split the baby. Let her have it.

Because Solomon, in his God-given wisdom, knew that the real mother would be more concerned that no harm come to the baby than she actually have the baby. And so when the woman said, don’t split the baby, Solomon said, that’s the mom right there. God gave him that wisdom.

God made him to be the kind of king that Israel needed. at least starting out. And God showed his love and his care for Solomon in all these ways as he continued to use him as a king.

But then as you get deeper into Solomon’s rule, his time on the throne, he starts to go astray. He starts a little compromise here, a little compromise there. It’s like Solomon went off to Congress.

Started off good, and a little compromise here, and a little compromise there, and he ended off a lot worse than he started. And so Solomon, one of the things that God said was that kings were not supposed to collect wives. You know, a wise man knows one’s enough, right?

I love my wife, and I’m good with just one of her, and she’d say the same thing about me. God said kings weren’t supposed to just collect wives, but Solomon did. He engaged in polygamy.

he married hundreds of women, and some of them were foreign. Now, the problem with marrying foreign wives was not that they were from another country. It’s that they were from another religion.

God’s not saying, oh, they’re from a different country. They’re not as good. He’s saying they are worshiping other gods, and they are going to turn your heart away from me to worship these things that they worship.

And Solomon probably thought like a lot of us think with things when God says, no, no, here’s what’s going to happen. We think, oh, I can handle it. It won’t get me.

Well, it got him. He was lying to himself. These foreign wives led him to worship false gods.

He even built temples and altars to some of these false gods, and it began to turn his heart away from God. And as his heart turned away from God, his heart toward the people grew harder and colder, and he He began to tax them mercilessly. He began to take what they had in order to enrich himself.

And God’s looking at this, and God gives him opportunities to repent, but he doesn’t take them. He never takes that off-ramp. He just keeps going right down the highway he’s on until finally God says, you know, this is enough.

I made David a promise that I would never take the kingdom away from him and his descendants. so I have to leave you a kingdom, but I’m not real happy with the way you’re acting, so I’m going to remove some tribes from your kingdom. And then when Solomon died, his son Rehoboam was just like him, and the kingdom split.

And the ten northern tribes ran off under Jeroboam, and the two southern tribes stayed as part of the kingdom under David’s dynasty. But even during Solomon’s time on earth, 1 Kings 11 tells us that some of the tribes started getting a little rebellious. Some of the people that worked for Solomon started getting a little rebellious.

And God allowed these people. What he described is the rod of man. The rod of men and the strokes of the sons of men.

These wounds inflicted by people to get Solomon’s attention. But the thing we need to recognize here is that despite his shortcomings, God did not abandon Solomon. He could have, but God had made a promise.

And so he did not turn away from Solomon the way he did Saul. Another thing that we need to recognize here, and the reason why we know this was not completely fulfilled, is because this arrangement didn’t last forever. If you look in the early part of what we read, in verses 12 and 13, he talks about this kingdom lasting forever, and he talks about these descendants being on the throne forever.

Well, after about 500 B. C. , give or take a few years, after about that time, there was no more throne, and the descendants of David were not sitting on that throne that did not exist. Is it that God failed in His promise?

Is it that God had His fingers crossed and said, no, I didn’t really mean that? No, that’s not God. It’s that Solomon was a partial fulfillment.

While this passage is talking about Solomon in the short term, God had another longer term plan in mind that Solomon’s a picture of. And so we recognize that God keeps his promises and he ultimately brings them to fulfillment. And God ultimately fulfilled his promise to David through Jesus.

The things that God waited on, it’s sort of like what you tell your kids. You tell them the whole plan for all the things you’re doing running around that day. But when you go to the first house and all the things hadn’t been accomplished is not because the parents lied, it’s because there’s more to come.

And God was the same way. He ultimately fulfilled his promise to David through Jesus. Look at the things that he promised David he would do.

He said, one of your descendants is going to be raised up to sit on the throne. Jesus was born a descendant of David. And I’ll be honest, the competing genealogies of Jesus are the biggest head-scratcher to me in all the Gospels.

I’ve heard about four or five different explanations of how they fit together, and each of those explanations have strengths and weaknesses. Now, when I come to something in Scripture that looks like a contradiction, I don’t assume it’s a contradiction. I assume there’s something I don’t understand, and that’s where I am with this.

There’s something I don’t understand, but they both, both of those genealogies, whether we’re talking about one of them is Mary’s family and one of them is Joseph’s family, so that one’s biological and one’s legal, Whether you’re talking about there are two different branches of Mary’s. . .

I don’t know. I’ve heard different explanations, but they all tell us that Jesus is descended from David in every conceivable way. And I kind of like that explanation that I think it’s Luke.

I may have them backwards, but one of them gives Jesus’ biological genealogy through Mary. One gives his legal claim through Joseph. Either way, it doesn’t matter how you look at it.

He’s a descendant of David. And he was called a king from the very beginning. The three wise men showed up and they said, where’s the one who is to be born king of the Jews?

When he was taken and presented in the temple as an infant, the people there recognized that he was the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. Even when Jesus was crucified, that was the charge, the king of the Jews. Jesus was a descendant of David.

The scriptures make that very clear. And so with everything he tells us about himself, it’s very easy for him to slip into that role that God is talking about in 1 Samuel chapter 7, of being a descendant of David raised up to be seated on the throne. But he also says this descendant was going to be the one who would build the temple.

Now people debate whether there’ll be a third temple in the millennium. I don’t know. But I can tell you right off the bat, there’s two places in the New Testament where it describes three places, two ideas in the New Testament that describe Jesus building the temple.

First of all, in the resurrection. How many times in the Gospels did Jesus say, if you all tear down this temple in three days, I’ll build it again. And he’s talking about his body.

But on top of that, in 1 Corinthians 3 and Ephesians 2, the church that Jesus built is called the temple of God. Jesus raised a permanent temple when he raised himself from the dead, and Jesus raised a permanent temple when he assembled us together as the body of Christ, as the church. And the Bible’s pretty clear that when he returns, he will reign on the throne forever.

There’s not going to be an interruption. There’s not going to be a Babylonian invasion that overthrows the kingdom. There’s not going to be a period of time waiting for a restoration.

once he comes and is seated on that throne, he’s there forever. Even when Satan is loosed, he’s still going to be beaten, and Jesus remains on the throne. When we get to heaven, we’ll be gathered around his throne to worship him, and he’ll be on that throne for all of eternity.

If God’s promise was to establish a kingdom that had no end, it’s ultimately going to be fulfilled in Jesus in a way that it could not be fulfilled by any normal mortal. He promised to love the descendant of David in a way, in a father-son relationship, there is no better example of the father-son relationship than the relationship between God the Father and God the Son in the Trinity. Numerous places in the New Testament, it talks about the love that the Father has for the Son, where they talk about being one. There’s no greater example of that than Jesus.

He’s been favored in ways that no other king has been favored, just like the promise not to reject this king the way Saul was rejected. Now, the one sticking point for us might be, excuse me, the one sticking point for us might be, and I think here he’s talking about Solomon, that when he commits iniquity, he’ll be disciplined. Jesus never committed iniquity.

Jesus never committed any sin. The Bible says, though, that he who knew no sin was made to become sin for us. And Jesus did take sin on himself.

Not that he had committed, but he took my sin and he took your sin on himself. And when he did, he was disciplined with the rod of men and the strokes of the sons of men. He bore responsibility for my sin and yours, and he went up to that cross, and he was punished in our place.

And it was human hands that inflicted this punishment. Instead of needing to be corrected because of anything he’d done wrong, he was corrected for us. And the end result of this is the fulfillment of the promises that God made to David.

That because of Jesus Christ, there is eternal blessing for Israel. And that includes those who’ve been grafted into Israel, as Paul talks about in Romans. All of us who come into a covenant relationship with God through Jesus Christ, benefit from the promise that he made to David.

Now, how do we come into that covenant relationship with God? It’s very simple. The reason we’re not in it to begin with is that we’ve sinned against a holy God.

And sin is anything we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God. And people say, well, what’s the big deal? All sin, here’s the big deal about it, all sin has idolatry at its root.

Instead of worshiping God and doing what He tells us to do, we want to worship something else. And a lot of times it’s just the idol of self. And so we go to worship something else.

This is offensive to God and it separates us from Him. And God could have looked at us and said, you know what, if you like your sin that much, you can have it, be gone, I don’t want anything else to do with you. And He would have been completely justified in doing that.

But God loved us enough, in spite of our sin, that God the Son, Jesus Christ, came to earth. He was born as a little baby and He walked the earth as a man who who never sinned. And so when he went to the cross, after telling us numerous times that he would go to the cross, he went to that cross and bore responsibility, not for anything that he had done, but for what you and I had done.

And that punishment that was required, it was poured out on him instead of on us. He received every bit of the punishment. He made every bit of the payment that was due so that when he cried out from the cross, it is finished.

He was telling us it was paid in full for us. That there was no longer anything you or I had to do to try to earn God’s forgiveness. It had been paid for.

And what you and I have to do is acknowledge that our sin separates us from God. Believe that Jesus died in our place to pay for our sins in full and rose again to prove it and then ask for that forgiveness. And we have the opportunity to do that and not just experience peace with God here on earth, but also experience fellowship with Him in eternity when Jesus Christ comes again to reign and to rule.