Message Information
- Key Scriptures: 2 Samuel 7:12-17, NASB
- Series: Jesus in the Old Testament (2024), no. 9
- Date: Sunday, December 8, 2024 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Enough to Recognize the King
I saw a video last week talking about how, when you have toddlers, you really cannot tell them what the plans are going to be too far ahead of time. If you tell them, “We’re going to Grandma’s house in two weeks,” they run to get their suitcase, and then they are mad that you are not getting in the car right then to go to Grandma’s house. They completely miss the “two weeks” part.
So far, it has not gotten much better as our children have gotten older and are 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. We let the kids know days in advance that we were going to the city for these Christmas activities, but we did not tell them exactly when.
We did not tell them all the details because they would have bugged us until then. We told them they were going to see their cousins, but we did not specify which cousins or when. And I even realized that I do this with myself. I withhold information from myself.
You may say, “How is that possible?” When you have a short memory, all things are possible. 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 am listening, it is just gone like the conversation never happened.
So even knowing, “All right, we’re going to my parents’ house, and we’re going to your mom’s house,” I still had to ask her Friday before she left because she went up early to help with some of the preparations. I asked her, “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 started to say, “Well, we’re doing such and such in the afternoon.” I said, “No, no, no. Where am I supposed to show up, and when? I just need the smallest little detail. If I don’t know the whole 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 is a little bit like what God had to do with the nation of Israel. He gave them hints. He gave them information about what He was doing. But in most cases, God did not 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. And those who really were paying attention did have enough information to recognize Jesus. But they did not need so much information that they started trying to help and make things happen.
Have you ever thought, “This is what God is doing in my situation. Let me try to help things along,” and then you make things worse? I have done that a few times, trying to help God. Israel did not need so much information that they would step in and try to help God make things happen.
This morning, we are going to look at a prophecy that deals with the coming of Christ, but it also deals with an Old Testament situation. God offers this prophecy that, in hindsight, we know merged two stories. He did not fully explain to Israel how it was going to happen the first time and how it was going to happen the second time. He did not specify to them that it would be two different events.
We can see that in hindsight, but God was giving Israel the information they needed, the bare minimum information they needed, to recognize what He was doing when He did it. As we have gone through this series on seeing Jesus in the Old Testament, this is really the first of the prophecies we are going to look at over the next few weeks. We have looked at pictures and how Old Testament events parallel the life of Jesus. Today we are looking at this prophecy in 2 Samuel 7.
This is God speaking to King David through the prophet Nathan. 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 lovingkindness 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.”
This was not the only promise God gave to King David, but it was a very good one. Here in this passage, God blessed David with promises that would benefit both his family and his nation.
God’s Promise to David
If you were a king in ancient times, you were not only concerned with your own rule. You also knew that you probably were not going to live forever, unless you were one of those random kings in ancient times who thought he could find a way to live forever. The first emperor of China probably poisoned himself with mercury while looking for an elixir that would lead to everlasting life. It did not work. You cannot ingest mercury and expect it to make you live forever.
Most kings recognized that they were not going to live forever. But the way they could continue to rule, continue to influence their country, and leave a legacy was for their dynasty to stay on the throne. You did not want just to rule. You wanted to make sure that you left behind offspring, descendants who would continue to follow your example and rule in your name.
That is why one of the punishments we see in the Old Testament with some of the wicked kings is that they are told, “I promised you that you would stay on the throne your entire life, but because you have done this thing that displeased God, your descendants will lose the throne.” For a king, that was almost as bad. That was his legacy. That was how he was going to be remembered.
If your family gets kicked off the throne, it can undo everything you spent your whole life doing. It can even erase your whole memory. In ancient Egypt, they would carve stories about themselves into stone with hieroglyphics. If a new dynasty came along that did not like the old dynasty, they might carve even deeper hieroglyphics over them so that you were completely written out of anybody’s memory and existence.
Here, this is the kind of promise a king would want. Not only are you on the throne, and not only will you remain on the throne, but when you are gone, your descendants are going to be on this throne forever.
For David, this was a very good promise. God promised to raise up a descendant of David to rule over his kingdom. He says that in verse 12. In verse 13, God also says this descendant would have the privilege of building a permanent temple for God.
One of the things I had hoped we would have time to look at in this series is the tabernacle and the fact that the tabernacle itself represents Jesus. It was a traveling symbol of the presence of God that went with the nation of Israel everywhere they went. Whenever they camped somewhere, they had to put up the tabernacle. Whenever they moved on, they had to take it down and take it with them.
When Israel settled in the land, they got the sense that if they were a real country now, they needed to quit wandering around in tents. And their God should not live in a tent. David was really convicted about the idea that God did not have a permanent temple, and he wanted to build God a temple.
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, and He was going to establish his throne forever. That means he would not just rule, but his rule would go on forever.
If you are David, it is hard to see how that is possible because of what we have already talked about. Kings do not 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 is also important because a new king would need guidance from an old king. But he does not become the new king until his father is dead, and his father is not there to lead him.
A good father would hopefully invest in his son and try to develop his leadership skills so that when he was gone, his son would have those lessons to carry with him. But you cannot prepare someone for every situation that will come about in life. You hope there will be somebody there to guide your children when you are gone.
Who better to guide your children than the God of Israel? God says, “I will be there for him like a father.” David was not perfect. David was not even a great parent at certain points in his life. But for David, you cannot ask for better promises than these.
God even says in verse 14 that He would correct this descendant when needed. You hope somebody will be there to correct your kids if they step out of line and you are not there. God would correct him, and He would correct him as forcefully as necessary to keep him on the straight and narrow. If he was acting up badly, God would do what was necessary to bring him back into line.
Verse 15 teaches us that God would show him a kind of favor most other kings did not get. God compares him to King Saul and how He had taken the kingdom away from Saul and from Saul’s descendants because Saul had been so disobedient toward God. God said to David, “I am not going to do to your descendants what I did to King Saul.”
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. This gave David peace as he came into his old age, recognizing that his legacy would continue. His sons and grandsons would continue to be on the throne, and the things he had worked for would be taken care of.
Unfortunately, this does not mean all of David’s descendants did the right thing. It does not mean God never had to punish them. But it does mean there is this promise God gave David because of David’s faithfulness. Not David’s perfection, but David’s faithfulness and 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 walked with God.
A Partial Fulfillment in Solomon
As we go on through the story in the Old Testament, we see that God partially fulfilled His promise to David through Solomon. When I say partially, we will get into why it is 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 Solomon.
As a matter of fact, at the point this promise was made through Nathan, Solomon had not even been born yet. When God says, “I will raise up one of your descendants,” He is literally saying that somebody who has not even been born yet is going to be the fulfillment of these promises.
God orchestrated things so that Solomon would be the king of Israel after David. There was a line of succession, and nobody expected Solomon to be the one to rule. But God stepped in to fulfill His promise and made sure Solomon would sit on the throne after David.
Just as God promised David, Solomon was given the task of building the temple. God told David that he could not build the temple because he had blood on his hands. God called David a man of war. David was a deeply flawed man, but he was repentant before God, and so he was called a man after God’s own heart.
Even when a person is forgiven, there are still some consequences that do not go away. David did not get to build the temple, but Solomon did. We see that story in 1 Chronicles 23.
We also see how God established Solomon as king the way He promised to do. Solomon did not just end up on the throne. God gave him the tools he needed to be the kind of king he needed to be, the kind of king Israel needed.
The famous story about Solomon is that God came to him and said, because of the promises He had made to David, “Ask Me for whatever you want, and I’ll give it to you.” Solomon could have asked for riches, power, or all sorts of things, but he asked for wisdom to be able to rule God’s people well. And God not only gave him the wisdom, but God also gave him the other things he could have asked for and did not.
The story of Solomon splitting the baby is an example of the wisdom God gave him. Two women came and said, “This is my baby.” “No, this is my baby.” They were fighting over the child. This was before DNA and CSI. Solomon had no way of knowing.
So God gave him the wisdom to say, “If I can’t decide, we’ll split the baby in half right down the middle, and each of you can get half. How about that?” One woman said, “That seems fair.” I wonder what was wrong with her. The Bible does not tell us a whole lot about her story.
But the other woman said, “No, no, no, don’t split the baby. Let her have it.” Solomon, in his God-given wisdom, knew that the real mother would be more concerned that no harm come to the baby than that she actually have the baby. When the woman said, “Don’t split the baby,” Solomon said, “That is the mother.”
God gave him that wisdom. God made him the kind of king Israel needed, at least starting out. God showed His love and care for Solomon in all these ways as He continued to use him as king.
But then, as you get deeper into Solomon’s rule and his time on the throne, he starts to go astray. He starts with a little compromise here and a little compromise there. It is like Solomon went off to Congress. He started off good, and then a little compromise here and a little compromise there, and he ended a lot worse than he started.
One of the things God said was that kings were not supposed to collect wives. A wise man knows one is enough. I love my wife, and I am good with just one of her, and she would say the same thing about me.
God said kings were not supposed to collect wives, but Solomon did. He engaged in polygamy. He married hundreds of women, and some of them were foreign. The problem with marrying foreign wives was not that they were from another country. The problem was that they were from another religion.
God was not saying, “They are from a different country, so they are not as good.” He was saying, “They worship other gods, and they are going to turn your heart away from Me to worship the things they worship.” Solomon probably thought like a lot of us think when God says, “No, here is what is going to happen.” We think, “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.
As his heart turned away from God, his heart toward the people grew harder and colder. He began to tax them mercilessly. He began to take what they had in order to enrich himself.
God looked at this, and God gave him opportunities to repent, but Solomon did not take them. He never took that off-ramp. He kept going right down the highway he was on until finally God said, “This is enough.”
God had made David a promise that He would not take the kingdom away from him and his descendants. So He had to leave Solomon a kingdom. But God was not pleased with the way Solomon was acting, so He removed some tribes from the kingdom.
When Solomon died, his son Rehoboam was just like him, and the kingdom split. 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 and some of the people who worked for Solomon started getting rebellious.
God allowed these people to become what He had described as “the rod of men” and “the strokes of the sons of men.” They were wounds inflicted by people to get Solomon’s attention. But we need to recognize that despite Solomon’s shortcomings, God did not abandon Solomon. He could have, but God had made a promise. He did not turn away from Solomon the way He did Saul.
Another thing we need to recognize, and the reason we know this promise was not completely fulfilled in Solomon, is because this arrangement did not last forever. In verses 12 and 13, God talks about this kingdom lasting forever and these descendants being on the throne forever. Well, after about 500 B.C., give or take a few years, there was no more throne, and David’s descendants were not sitting on the throne that did not exist.
Was it that God failed in His promise? Was it that God had His fingers crossed and said, “No, I didn’t really mean that”? No, that is not God. 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 was a picture of.
The Promise Fulfilled in Jesus
God keeps His promises, and He ultimately brings them to fulfillment. God ultimately fulfilled His promise to David through Jesus. It is sort of like what you tell your kids. You tell them the whole plan for all the things you are doing while running around that day, but when you go to the first house and all the things have not been accomplished yet, it is not because the parents lied. It is because there is more to come.
God was the same way. He ultimately fulfilled His promise to David through Jesus. Look at the things He promised David He would do. He said one of David’s descendants was going to be raised up to sit on the throne. Jesus was born a descendant of David.
I will be honest. The competing genealogies of Jesus are the biggest head-scratcher to me in all the Gospels. I have heard four or five different explanations of how they fit together, and each of those explanations has strengths and weaknesses.
When I come to something in Scripture that looks like a contradiction, I do not assume it is a contradiction. I assume there is something I do not understand, and that is where I am with this. There is something I do not understand. But both of those genealogies, whether one is Mary’s family and one is Joseph’s family, so that one is biological and one is legal, or whether there is another explanation, both tell us that Jesus is descended from David in every conceivable way.
I kind of like the explanation that one gives Jesus’ biological genealogy through Mary, and the other gives His legal claim through Joseph. Either way, it does not matter how you look at it. He is a descendant of David.
Jesus was called a king from the very beginning. The wise men showed up and asked, “Where is 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. With everything He tells us about Himself, it is very easy for Him to fit into that role God is talking about in 2 Samuel 7, of being a descendant of David raised up to be seated on the throne.
But God also says this descendant was going to be the one who would build the temple. People debate whether there will be a third temple in the millennium. I do not know. But I can tell you there are places in the New Testament that describe Jesus building the temple.
First, 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”? He was talking about His body. 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 is clear that when He returns, He will reign on the throne forever.
There is not going to be an interruption. There is not going to be a Babylonian invasion that overthrows the kingdom. There is not going to be a period of time waiting for restoration. Once Jesus comes and is seated on that throne, He is there forever.
Even when Satan is loosed, Satan will still be beaten, and Jesus remains on the throne. When we get to heaven, we will be gathered around His throne to worship Him, and He will be on that throne for all eternity.
If God’s promise was to establish a kingdom that had no end, it is ultimately fulfilled in Jesus in a way that could not be fulfilled by any normal mortal king. God promised to love the descendant of David 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 talk about the love the Father has for the Son and about the Father and the Son being one. There is no greater example of this promise than Jesus. He has been favored in ways no other king has been favored, just like the promise not to reject this king the way Saul was rejected.
The one sticking point for us might be the line where God says that when this descendant commits iniquity, he will be disciplined. I think there He is talking about Solomon. 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. Jesus did take sin on Himself. Not that He had committed sin, but He took my sin and your sin on Himself.
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 was punished in our place. Human hands inflicted this punishment. Instead of needing to be corrected because of anything He had done wrong, He was corrected for us.
The end result of this is the fulfillment of the promises God made to David. Because of Jesus Christ, there is eternal blessing for Israel. And that includes those who have 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 He made to David.
The King Who Brings Us to God
How do we come into that covenant relationship with God? It is very simple. The reason we are not in it to begin with is that we have sinned against a holy God.
Sin is anything we think, say, do, or do not do that displeases God. People say, “What is the big deal?” Here is the big deal: 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. A lot of times, it is simply the idol of self.
We go to worship something else, and that is offensive to God. It separates us from Him. God could have looked at us and said, “If you like your sin that much, you can have it. Be gone. I do not want anything else to do with you.” 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 never sinned. When He went to the cross, after telling us numerous times that He would go to the cross, He bore responsibility not for anything He had done, but for what you and I had done.
The punishment that was required 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.
There was no longer anything you or I had to do to earn God’s forgiveness. It had been paid for. What you and I must do is acknowledge that our sin separates us from God. We must 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.
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.