Lecture 10: David's Covenant, Solomon's Temple, and the Long Way Down

The lecture, section by section

1. Goliath and Jonathan

   David fells Goliath, who taunts Israel with the serpent's own voice, and then the book gives us Jonathan, one of its most remarkable figures. Everything in Jonathan's character says he would have made a fantastic king, and he is the one man in Israel with a claim to the throne. Instead he sides with David against his own father and his own future: you will be king, he tells him, and I will be second to you. He is the Old Testament's John the Baptist: he must increase, and I must decrease. Meanwhile Saul hunts David daily, and God does not give David into his hand: those who belong to God finally triumph.

2. The king in waiting: mercy and humility

   David shows what kind of king he will be before he wears a crown. Twice he spares Saul when Saul's life is in his hand. And riding with four hundred men to slaughter Nabal's house, he stops, listens humbly to a woman, and blesses God for Abigail, who kept him from evil, and who tells him the LORD will make him a sure house. Hannah's song is unfolding in real time: Saul brought low, David lifted up.

3. Jerusalem and the ark

   As king, David chooses Jerusalem, a capital bridging north and south and bound to no tribe, and his love for the LORD shows in bringing up the ark and in his longing to build the LORD a house.

4. The covenant with David

   Second Samuel 7 is the mountain: David's offspring will endure forever, the promise Psalm 89 sings at length. And Schreiner, following Hamilton's careful reading, hears Genesis 3:15 underneath: David and his sons crush their enemies to dust beneath their feet; in Psalm 72 the king's foes lick the dust, which is what serpents do; Psalm 8 puts all things under the feet of man, and Hebrews 2 reads it of Jesus; Psalm 110 seats David's son and Lord at God's right hand until every enemy is a footstool. In a sense, always in a sense, for he is a sinner, David is a new Adam and a new Abraham.

5. The land becomes the world

   Through the king, the covenant with Abraham comes to fulfillment. Psalm 2: ask of me, and I will give the nations as your inheritance, the ends of the earth as your possession. Psalm 72: rule from sea to sea, kings of Tarshish and Sheba bringing tribute, and the Magi will one day do exactly that, all kings bowing, all nations serving him. Notice what has happened to the land: in the messianic psalms the promised land has stretched to the whole world. The kingdom under the king is creation-wide.

6. An eternal dynasty, no presuming kings

   The heart of the covenant is dynasty. Saul kept his throne for life, but no son of his succeeded him; to David God swears that his house, kingdom, and throne will stand forever, and that oath is now kept in Jesus Christ, reigning at the Father's right hand, with more still to come. Yet the covenant disciplines as it endures: when your son does wrong, I will discipline him with the rod of men, but my hesed, my covenant love, will not depart from him as it departed from Saul. Ultimately unconditional, conditional for every individual king: no king may sin and presume on grace, and the discipline ran so deep that for centuries no Davidic king reigned at all, while the prophets, Hosea to Zechariah, kept promising a new David, even from exile.

7. David is not the one

   For all his greatness, David murders Uriah and takes Bathsheba: he is not the promised one. Why then is the kingdom not torn from him as from Saul? Because when Nathan says you are the man, David answers with three words and no excuses: I have sinned. God forgives; the consequences still tear through his family for the rest of the book; and the book's closing altar points beyond itself, to the temple's future site and, canonically, to a better sacrifice. Who then is the new Adam the story keeps auditioning? Not Abraham, not Saul, not David, not Israel: every candidate is flawed. It is Jesus, the last Adam. And why does God tell the story through so many failures? So that we see it is our story: apart from grace, human beings cannot bring in the kingdom; over and over, our weakness and his strength.

8. A question of sovereignty

   Asked about the census, where Samuel says the LORD incited David and Chronicles names Satan, Schreiner answers: both. God is sovereign over all that Satan does, and Scripture's naming of intermediary causes helps with the problem of evil, distancing God from the doing of the evil he sovereignly governs, exactly as in Job. He commends Paul Helm on providence and D. A. Carson on suffering for those who want to go deeper.

9. Kings: history from above

   First and Second Kings weave theology and history, and their method is the opposite of modern history-from-below: we learn almost nothing of common life, because the story is told entirely through the kings. That is the theology: as the kings go, so go the people, and no merely human king can lead God's people. Two refrains govern the whole: the LORD alone is God, and the word of the LORD is always fulfilled.

10. Solomon: Eden at the door

    Solomon's early reign reads like the promises arriving. Judah and Israel as many as the sand by the sea, eating, drinking, and rejoicing; dominion from the Euphrates to Egypt's border, Abraham's own map; every man under his vine and fig tree; the Queen of Sheba coming to hear wisdom. Then the temple: seven years to build, as creation took seven days, and at its heart an inner sanctuary that is a perfect cube overlaid with gold, God dwelling among a happy people. A thousand years from Abraham, and paradise seems at the door.

11. The unraveling

    Then down again. Solomon loves many foreign women, and they turn his heart to foreign gods, the very thing Deuteronomy 17 warned a king against and the first commandment forbids. The kingdom is torn, one tribe left to David's house for the covenant's sake, and Jeroboam plants golden calves at Dan and Bethel. Everything on the cusp of blessing, and then the fall, again.

12. The man of God and the lion

    First Kings 13 tells the strangest and most instructive of stories. A man of God cries against Jeroboam's altar, naming Josiah centuries in advance, and is commanded to eat nothing and return another way. An old prophet lies him into dinner, and on the road home a lion kills him, then stands beside the donkey and the body, eating neither. The lion was not hungry; the lion was obedient. The point of the story is the point of the whole book: the word of the LORD always comes true, and the word of God, not the word of any man, however venerable, is the authority. Even a godly prophet who sets aside the word he received bears the consequence.

13. Baal versus the LORD

    From Elijah onward the great contest runs: Baal, the storm and fertility god, against the LORD who actually rules the rain. Carmel settles the question in fire, and then Elijah, fresh from victory, collapses under Jezebel's threat, despairing that nothing has changed. At Sinai the LORD answers him in a whisper: not by earthquake and not today, but surely and quietly, Baal worship will be rooted out of Israel, and Elijah is commissioned toward that end. And so it happens: the word is fulfilled.

14. Exile, a glimmer, and the laboratory

    As the kings go, so goes the nation: every northern king does evil, and the north falls in 722 BC; Judah follows in 586. Yet Kings ends with Jehoiachin, David's heir, released from prison, fed at the king of Babylon's table: out of prison, reigning over nothing, a glimmer that the promise is not revoked. Step back and count: nearly fifteen hundred years from Abraham, and the offspring are not even in the land; the story is running backwards under the covenant curses. Why is it told this way? Because Israel is God's laboratory. Choose any people you like and the story ends the same, for the evil in us is radical and we are gullible about our own goodness. The kingdom cannot come from below. Redemption is coming through Israel, but not at all in the way anyone thought.

1. Jonathan gave away a throne with both hands and called it right. Where is God asking you to decrease so that his purposes increase, and what makes Jonathan's kind of gladness possible?

2. David's plain I have sinned stands against Saul's catalogue of excuses. Which do the people in your house hear from you when you are confronted, and what would change if confession came first?

3. Solomon had wisdom, wealth, and the temple, and his heart still turned. What guards a heart that circumstances cannot, and how is that different from what you are currently relying on?