Son of David

Intro

we had Adam, and the fall: the loss of blessing; but not the loss of hope.

2,000 years pass and we have Abraham, and hope is rekindled and further explained. A child is promised that will bring land, people, and God’s presence.

between then and what we look at tonight, another 1,000 years have passed. Abraham did have a son named Isaac, and he had a son named Jacob, and he had 12 sons that would each become the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel. Israel would prosper and grow and experience a lot of good and a lot of bad. They don’t actually get their own land, but they end up becoming slaves in Egypt for 430 years. Then, they were wandering in the desert for 40 years. Then, they finally got into their land, but they still had to deal with war and disease, and they didn’t really have a leader other than the prophets God had sent to them.

So the people were in the place, but it was still filled with other groups of people that didn’t want them there.

They had the presence of God, but it was a temporary kind of presence.

They were the people of God, but they needed unification and direction.

Enter David: the man who God would choose to be the king of his people.

David: A King To Lead And Unify

People, place and presence all further solidified under David.

But David was going to die, and the nation of God would need another leader to keep the unity alive.

He was promised a son to make that promise permanent

Things are looking good!

Solomon the provisional son

The sin of Solomon.

Solomon receives basically three rules as king: don’t hoard money, don’t hoard wives, and don’t build a massive military. In just about no time at all, Solomon will break all three rules. He becomes the richest man in the known world, he has thousands of women, and he ammasses a huge military. His many wives will eventually lead him away from following God, and God responds by telling him that his actions will lead to the division of the Kingdom. God’s people were going to lose their place and be sent into exile, they were going to lose God’s presence when the temple was destroyed, and they were going to lose God’s people when they were split in half.

Things were no longer looking good.

Thats when we come to the realization that the son that was promised to David was only partially pointing to Solomon: in a much bigger way, it was pointing to the same person that God had pointed Adam and Abraham to. Adam, Abraham, and David were all men in this long family tree that was building up to the birth of this ultra-important son who would finally and permenantly restore God’s people in God’s place with God’s presence.

Jesus THE Son

Jesus: The Son of David, Promised King

Luke 1:26–33 ESV

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

When Mary was told that she was going to be pregnant with a child, the angel specifically told her that this child was going to sit on the throne of David, and this is significant for two reasons:

Nobody was currently sitting on David’s throne. The continuity of the throne had been broken.

Mary was told that this child would sit on the throne and not just have a long reign, but that he would have an eternal reign.

Here the angel is saying that this child was not just another son in a long family tree, but he was THE son that the whole lineage was building towards.

And gradually, over 33 years or so, the people listening to Jesus would come to this realization as well.

Thats why the triumphal entry went the way it did.

Luke 19:37–38 ESV

As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”

Matthew 21:9 ESV

And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

Why the excitement? Because these Jewish people had been holding onto a hope for thousands of years, and for the last thousand years they have been waiting for the Son of David to come and sit on the throne to restore God’s people to God’s place in the presence of God. And because they believed that this man Jesus was that Son.

Jesus was entering Jerusalem to become a King, but it wasn’t in the way that people might expect because the task of restoring the blessings of God to the people had to happen in an unexpected way. He wasn’t going to be clothed in royal robes and sit on a royal throne and be praised by all the people and ride off into the sunset.

Instead, he would be rejected by the people. He would be arrested by the people he came to save, stripped naked and humiliated, beaten and mocked, and the people were literally begging for the Romans to crucify him.

And thats exactly what would happened. The Son of David got hung up on a cross by the people of God, and their sin was showing as obviously as it ever had. They were repeating the same mistakes as Adam, as Abraham, as, David, as Solomon, and as all the people inbetween.

And the only reason Jesus allowed for all of this to happen was because he loved these people so deeply and he knew the only way to restore God’s blessings to them was to die the way that they deserved to die, to take the punihsment that all their nastiness deserved, to be judged for all of the gross sin that every single person had ever committed in all of the thousands of years of human history.

And when he resurrected from the dead after three days, he resurrected bringing victory for all those sinners who would place their faith in the man that they helped to crucify. This is the picture of love and redemption, and you are counted as one of those people.

Our King had finally come, and as our good king he put himself in harms way to protect us from ourselves. He died for the people he loved so dearly, and he has restored to us the status as the People of God, and he is bringing us back to the Place that God has prepared for us, and he has brought the presence of God back to us.

Thats what it means for Jesus to be THE Son of David, the forever King, who restored to us the joy of our salvation.