Still Searching For a King

Introduction

Video: David the Priestly King (Bible Project)

Good Morning Church...

That was one of the many videos from our friends at the Bible Project who do a great job explaining connections in the Bible in visually vivid ways. I thought we would open today with a summary video of David’s life because today is our final week in our series called “Kings and Kingdoms” where we have been looking at the first two Kings of Israel in order to both compare and contrast their rule and reign with that of our anointed King, our Messiah, Jesus the Christ.

Tension

And I don’t know about you, but I have enjoyed diving into the drama of the early monarchy of Israel and so as I began to prepare for this final message I dove into the last chapter anticipating a brilliant climactic ending. And I wasn’t sure what I would find there.

Would it be another story of the Ark of Covenant complete with a powerful display of God’s presence wielded against those who oppose Him?

Or would it be a description of a terrifying battle where the hope of the Kingdom was lost until God came through and won the victory?

Or maybe it be a finale chapter of friendships forged or loyalties lost in the dramatic descriptions of the many relationships throughout these pages?

I was open to just about anything, but if you followed through with our reading plan and read the last chapter of 2 Samuel this past week then maybe your initial response was similar to mine as I thought… Worst Ending Ever!

Right? How do you end a book of mighty battles, secret dealings and powerful prophets with God getting angry over an accounting error. I mean, what is this all about?

Thankfully, it is about much more than it looks like at first glance and just like the Bible Project video alluded to, there is a beautiful final connection here in the Kings of these stories that leads us to the story of our King Jesus.

It’s pretty cool when you uncover them, so let’s get after it this morning by opening up our Bibles to the last book of 2 Samuel, I’ll pray and we will dive it together.

Truth

So remember that here at the end of the books of Samuel we have something of an appendix that doesn’t really move the story forward but colors it in by offering a couple of summary ideas from past stories. These stories are given to us is this Chaistic order that goes C-B-A and then inverts to A-B-C.

We have been covering these topics from the inside out to arrive this morning at the final theme from the final chapter but it is connected back to the first chapter in this section, chapter 21, and there are some important things from this first account of the “People suffering because of the sin of the King” that we need to explore to understand the significance of the last one.

So chapter 21 opens up like this…

2 Samuel 21:1 (ESV)

Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year...

I feel like I need to stop here to adjust our response to this word “famine”. In a society that creates more food than it can afford to store it is very difficult to respond accurately to the devastation that is a “famine”. Just know that when the Bible says “famine” it does not mean a “Bummer, I had to buy creamy because they were out of crunchy” kind of experience, this is a “The bodies are piling up” kind of experience.

So with that in mind let’s read it again.

2 Samuel 21:1–2 (ESV)

Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year. And David sought the face of the Lord. And the Lord said, “There is bloodguilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.” So the king called the Gibeonites and spoke to them. Now the Gibeonites were not of the people of Israel but of the remnant of the Amorites.

Although the people of Israel had sworn to spare them, Saul had sought to strike them down in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah.

The author of Samuel gives us a bit of history lesson here because these events happened many years earlier. Way back in the days of Joshua, the people of Israel made a treaty with these Gibeonites, a binding covenant before God. King Saul decided to ignore this covenant and he led the people to kill the Gibeonites.

Since this broken covenant was made “in the Lord”, the Lord was now executing the terms of that broken covenant upon His own people. Our God is just and so He does not show favoritism, even to His own people. To brake His law is to suffer the consequences.

But King David goes to them to try and fix what was broken in the previous covenant.

2 Samuel 21:3 (ESV)

And David said to the Gibeonites, “What shall I do for you? And how shall I make atonement, that you may bless the heritage of the Lord?”

The word “atonement” is key here. The only answer to a broken covenant like this is for an “atonement” to be paid to put things right again. So David has come to see what it would cost to do this.

2 Samuel 21:4–6 (ESV)

The Gibeonites said to him, “It is not a matter of silver or gold between us and Saul or his house; neither is it for us to put any man to death in Israel.” And he said, “What do you say that I shall do for you?”

They said to the king, “The man who consumed us and planned to destroy us, so that we should have no place in all the territory of Israel, let seven of his sons be given to us, so that we may hang them before the Lord at Gibeah of Saul, the chosen of the Lord.” And the king said, “I will give them.”

Money cannot buy Israel’s way out of this bloodguilt and since the Gibeonites had no standing to take the life of one of God’s chosen people, God himself was executing the terms through the famine.

So the only way to make things right, to make atonement for breaking this covenant was through the shedding of blood. So David gives up 7 of the sons of Saul… probably grandsons at this point as Mephibosheth is said to have been spared among the others.

-----

And lets just stop for a second to recognize that this is some ugly stuff. It offends our modern sensibilities to think that David would just hand over 7 sons of Saul to be executed for sins they didn’t commit in a covenant they probably were not even alive for. And doesn’t the Old Testament Law say that children should not be put to death for the sins of their fathers and vice versa? (Deut 24:16)

It does, but this is not about Saul’s position as a Father, this is about his position as King. As the King, Saul’s actions represented not just himself but the people of Israel. As a representative of all of God’s people, Saul’s sin led to suffering for all of the people.

All of this Kings and Kingdoms stuff seems far off, but our governing structure does share some similarities with this concept of one person representing the entire nation. Because the President of the United States makes a grave mistake in his private life then the world holds him individually accountable for that error, just like we would with anyone else.

But if in his official capacity as “Commander and Chief” he wrongly orders an attack on another nation... then it was not just him, but The United States of America that is held responsible for that attack. We all then would suffer for the decision made by one man… our representative.

(That is why the character of the person who holds that office should be of great importance to us.)

So the people are suffering as a result of Saul’s sin, and the only way to “atone” for that sin is for David to surrender these men...

2 Samuel 21:9 (ESV)

and he gave them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the mountain before the Lord, and the seven of them perished together. They were put to death in the first days of harvest, at the beginning of barley harvest.

And it may seem of little consequence to us, after such a tragically ugly event, but David then showed compassion to the house of Saul by gathering together the remains of these dishonored men, along with the remains of King Saul and his son Jonathan and he gave all of them an honorable burial together in their family plot back home. And this part of the story ends with…

2 Samuel 21:14 (ESV)

And they buried the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan in the land of Benjamin in Zela, in the tomb of Kish his father. And they did all that the king commanded. And after that God responded to the plea for the land.

These representatives paid the ultimate price for the atonement of the people, and so the famine ended and along with it the people’s suffering.

So with those principles of representation and atonement firm in our thinking, we now turn to the final chapter of the books of Samuel where we find both of these things play out in telling fashion. Only this time it was not some previous sin that David was dealing with, but a present one. Because...

David sins in selfish ambition and pride

2 Samuel 24:1 (ESV)

Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go, number Israel and Judah.”

This is one of the trickiest verses in all of Samuel as because it seems to imply that God was somehow complicit in causing David to do something that David later confesses to be sin… but we know that God cannot do this. James tells us that God is not tempted and does not tempt anyone to sin. So what is going on here.

Well the first thing to take note of is that Israel is already standing in opposition to God so that his righteous anger is in play. So everything in the rest of the story will be colored by this reality.

Also, in the parallel telling of these same events from the book of 1 Chronicles it says…

1 Chronicles 21:1 (ESV)

Then Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel.

So this makes us wonder if the “he” from 2 Samuel has to be God or could it be someone else. Satan perhaps.

We do know from other Bible stories that at times God will pull back and allow Satan room to just “do what he does” in order to get the attention of those who have walked away from him. We see this is in the story of Job, Judas, Peter, Paul and others throughout Scripture.

Theologians also disagree on what it was that made this choice to count the people such a grievous sin. Exodus tells of a time when God commands a census like this, but he couples it with a tax on the people which is said to avoid a “plague”. So that is a consideration, but elsewhere we read of different Kings and commanders counting their troops in order to make strategic decisions.

So a lot of ink has been spent on going back and forth on this, but what I see as most important is that the people were already standing in God’s anger and in the midst of this David decided to do something that missed the mark.

So even against the advice of his commanders, David sent out his troops to do what ought not to be done and count the people...

2 Samuel 24:8-9

So when they had gone through all the land, they came to Jerusalem at the end of nine months and twenty days. And Joab gave the sum of the numbering of the people to the king: in Israel there were 800,000 valiant men who drew the sword, and the men of Judah were 500,000.

So the deed was done and the numbers came in, but whatever David had expected to gain from this new information apparently did not happen. For the very next verse says:

2 Samuel 24:10 (ESV)

But David’s heart struck him after he had numbered the people.

This is telling moment. This is the make it or brake it kind of moment. This is where David has to respond to the fact that this thing that he fought so hard for the right to do… ended up being the wrong thing to do.

And many of us can testify of times in our lives when we have pushed so hard for the right to have, be or do something only to finally get it and realize that it was wasted ambition at best and sinful pride at worst.

And it is in our response to these kinds of realizations that we find our true character. And it is in David’s response that we see how he showed himself to be the ideal earthly King of Israel. For...

David cries out to God in humble repentance and submission (2 Samuel 24:10-17)

2 Samuel 24:10 (ESV)

But David’s heart struck him after he had numbered the people. And David said to the Lord, “I have sinned greatly in what I have done. But now, O Lord, please take away the iniquity of your servant, for I have done very foolishly.”

There are many things in David’s story that are not worth emulating, but his pattern of humble repentance and submission after being confronted with his sin is what causes him to be called “A man after God’s own heart”.

David declared that he has “sinned greatly” and the appropriate consequence for such a sin would need to be equally great. For some reason, God chose this particular time to give David a choice between three different consequences.

1. Behind door number one is three years of famine in the land… where “the bodies would pile up” as we said before and the people would be dependant on foreign nations for aid if they were to survive.

2. Behind door number two was three months of their enemies pursuing them unrestrained by God’s supernatural protection. This door probably was to remind David how feeble any number of warriors could be if God was not on their side.

3. David chose door number three, which was the angel of the LORD spreading a pestilence or plague throughout the land.

Of these three bad options, which one would you choose? I think I would choose door number three because it was the shortest time frame, but David gave another explanation for choosing that option...

2 Samuel 24:14 (ESV)

Then David said to Gad, “I am in great distress. Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but let me not fall into the hand of man.”

Door numbers 1 & 2 involved Israel being dependent on the decisions of men for survival, but they would have only God to cry out to in midst of a pestilence. And so door number 3 was opened…

2 Samuel 24:15 (ESV)

So the Lord sent a pestilence on Israel from the morning until the appointed time. And there died of the people from Dan to Beersheba 70,000 men.

If this was the end of the story then it truly would be the “Worst ending ever”…

but in a surprising twist we are invited into this supernatural scene that connects the significance of these events with so much that has happened among God’s people in the past and foreshadows what will happen for God’s people in the future.

2 Samuel 24:16 (ESV)

And when the angel stretched out his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord relented from the calamity and said to the angel who was working destruction among the people, “It is enough; now stay your hand.” And the angel of the Lord was by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.

2 Samuel 24:17 (ESV)

Then David spoke to the Lord when he saw the angel who was striking the people, and said, “Behold, I have sinned, and I have done wickedly. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand be against me and against my father’s house.”

Do you see what David is doing? He is asking to make atonement here. Like the sons of Saul, David is pleading with God to make him the representative of atonement.

Little did he know that about a thousand years later… God will take him up on this offer… but in the meantime…

God provides the way of atonement through sacrifice (2 Samuel 24:18-25)

2 Samuel 24:18–19 (ESV)

And Gad came that day to David and said to him, “Go up, raise an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.” So David went up at Gad’s word, as the Lord commanded.

Now I don’t know about you, but if someone asked me what happened here in this verse I would say that God sent David to build an altar in “some place that belonged to some guy”. And sometimes that is enough, but not this time.

Especially when we turn over to 2 Chronicles chapter 3 where it references this event with these added details....

2 Chronicles 3:1 (ESV)

Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to David his father, at the place that David had appointed, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.

So this was not just some place that belonged to some guy… this man’s threshing floor was on on Mount Moriah, the place where generations ago Abraham was sent to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Not only that, but this became the place where David told his son Solomon to build the Temple of God, so this spot will be used for the sacrifices of God’s people for generations after.

This is how this seemingly insignificant story about an accounting error ...that led David to see some guy in some place... is actually this beautiful point of connection that draws together the entire story of the Old Testament and drives us toward the New!

So to finish it off… when David told his Jebusite man why he was there, the man offered to just give David all he needed for the sacrifice...

2 Samuel 24:24–25 (ESV)

But the king said to Araunah, “No, but I will buy it from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing.” So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar to the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. So the Lord responded to the plea for the land, and the plague was averted from Israel.

David sinned, David repented, God provided a sacrificial way to make atonement.

Application

Thus ends the books of Samuel and our series on Kings and Kingdoms. But the reality is that this is not really and ending, so much as it is a bridge connecting the history of man through Adam to Abraham, to David and ultimately unto Jesus Christ.

Because each one of us have been effected by the sin of our first parents Adam and Eve. When they ate of the forbidden fruit, they were representatives for all mankind and so we all suffer from the broken condition that this has left our world. And we may say “That isn’t fair, I mean I wasn’t there why should I have to suffer for their choice?”.

And you are free to ask such questions, but I would be careful with them. Because what is it in your life that convinces you that if you had the same choice you would choose differently? What in your track record of obeying God’s commands proves you would do better?

More than that, if we reject the idea that the suffering in this life was introduced by a single representative like this, then we would also have to reject the idea that salvation could come by a single representative.

But as sure as the one man “Adam” is our representative in bringing sin and death to us, the God man Jesus came to be our representative in bringing life and salvation to us.

Romans 5:17–19 (NLT)

For the sin of this one man, Adam, caused death to rule over many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of righteousness, for all who receive it will live in triumph over sin and death through this one man, Jesus Christ.

Yes, Adam’s one sin brings condemnation for everyone, but Christ’s one act of righteousness brings a right relationship with God and new life for everyone. Because one person disobeyed God, many became sinners. But because one other person obeyed God, many will be made righteous.

Landing

King David wasn’t a man after God’s own heart because he never sinned, we know he did. David was a man after God’s own heart because he repented of his sin and submitted himself to God’s way for atonement. For David that way was to build an alter on that threshing floor in Jerusalem, the place where countless sacrifices would eventually be made through the temple system. But all those sacrifices were just place holders until something better would come along.

And many years later, something better came. Just outside of Jerusalem but on the same mountain range a descendant of David was hung on a cross to make atonement for the sins of not just the Israelite people, but for all who would trust in Him.

He who was called “The Son of David” was also the son of God. His body was broken and his blood was spilled for us on the same mountain range where David offered his sacrifice in the final chapter of the books of Samuel.

It is this sacrifice that we trust in for our salvation, and it this sacrifice that we celebrate through the act of Communion.