Waiting for the King
Notes
Transcript
Good morning, and welcome to our celebration of the first week of Advent.
This is now my seventh year leading the Advent celebration at Liberty Spring Christian Church. And I’m very excited that we’re participating in this liturgical observance that so many churches around the world are observing right along with us.
It was not always so for me. Some of you may remember I resisted this tradition during the Christmas after I’d been called the be your interim pastor.
You see, I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church. Southern Baptists certainly celebrate the birth of Jesus, but Advent is just a little too ceremonial for their tastes.
In fact, the whole idea of a liturgy, a “formal, communal public worship, consisting of prescribed rituals, prayers, hymns, and readings,” is contrary to much of that denomination’s idea of what it looks like to “do church.”
Southern Baptists are fiercely independent. If a Southern Baptist preacher wants to preach through the Book of Revelation during the Christmas season, there’s no bishop to tell him otherwise. If he wants to preach about Adam and Eve on Christmas morning, there’s nobody to tell him he can’t do that.
And since Liberty Spring parted ways with the “Christian” church as a denomination 25 years ago, I saw no good reason for us to continue to participate in the liturgies — and particularly in the rituals — that we’d held as part of that denomination.
But somebody convinced me back then that I shouldn’t rock the boat too much so soon after I’d started pastoring here.
So, the truth is, I went along with Advent grudgingly that first year. But in my time here since then, I’ve come to embrace this celebration.
We don’t celebrate it in the high-church way. We don’t do all the readings from the liturgy each week. I don’t wear the robes — the vestments — that you’d see in most Advent-celebrating churches.
But I DO pick from the readings that are part of the liturgical church calendar for each week of Advent. We DO light the candles in the right order. And we DO acknowledge the particular themes for each week of Advent.
This week’s theme is hope. And hope is central to Advent. Hope is at the very core of what Advent is about. And when I began to understand that, Advent took on a special new meaning to me.
This four-week celebration recalls the period in Israel’s history when the Jews were waiting for the coming of the promised Messiah. In fact, that’s what the word “advent” means in a general sense. It’s the arrival of a notable person, thing, or event.
So, as we celebrate Advent, we transport ourselves back in time, more than 2,000 years into the past. We remember that God’s chosen people, Israel, lived on one side of a timeline that changed completely with the birth of a son to a young Jewish virgin named Mary among the barnyard animals in a little town called Bethlehem.
And by stretching our celebration of the birth of God’s Son in human flesh to four weeks, we acknowledge the anticipation so many of the Jews must’ve felt at the time.
That’s because, on the Old Testament side of that timeline, there was a long period of waiting. Waiting for God to fulfill His promise.
Advent recalls God’s promise — first articulated in the Garden of Eden and then repeated and expanded throughout the Old Testament — that He would send a savior, a Messiah, to redeem His people and to restore what what was broken by sin.
It is the promise of sins forgiven, of slaves set free, of prisoners released, of God’s perfect peace and contentment restored to this world that has become twisted by our sins.
And for thousands of years, His people waited. They waited with anticipation. They waited with hope. They waited with the confident assurance that God would do what He’d said He would do.
For about 400 of those years, they waited in silence, without a word from God between the prophet Malachi and the events of the Gospels.
But for centuries before that, God had spoken to them through prophets and poets and the other writers of the Old Testament, giving them more and more information about the Messiah, the Savior, He would send.
And one of the ways he fleshed out their understanding of the Messiah to come was through typology.
Remember that in our short study of typology, we’ve said that certain people, places, objects, or events in the Old Testament serve, in part, to point us to their perfect fulfillment in Christ Jesus.
The Old Testament thing is the imperfect or incomplete TYPE that finds its fulfillment — its completion, its perfection — in Jesus as the antitype.
Adam was the type for mankind, which finds its fulfillment in the perfection of the God-MAN, Jesus.
Moses was the type for prophets of God, which finds its fulfillment in Jesus, who perfectly and faithfully gave us God’s word and showed us God’s heart.
The High Priests of the Old Testament were types for those who represented God to His people and God’s people to Him. They find their fulfillment in Jesus, our Great High Priest, the perfect representative of God to us and of us to God.
The judges as Old Testament types were deliverers, the ones God had called to deliver His people from oppression by their enemies.
Jesus is the deliverer antitype. He completely and perfectly delivers all who turn to Him in faith both from their oppression under sin and from the just wrath of God against sinners.
Today, as we conclude this short series, we’re going to see that the kings of Israel — and especially King David — were types that point us to Jesus as the antitype, the eternal King who will perfectly and completely fulfill God’s intentions for kings.
We’ll see God’s promises to King David and how they connect to His promises to Abraham. We’ll see that this promised King would ALSO be the Messiah God’s people have awaited since that first act of rebellion in the Garden of Eden.
And we’ll see that, just as the Jews awaited the first Advent with hope, we who, through faith, are subjects of this King now await His second Advent with similar hope.
Our main text this morning will be from 2 Samuel, chapter 7. You should go ahead and turn there now.
To give you some context, King David by this time had conquered most of Israel’s enemies. Samuel records in verse 1 of this chapter that “the Lord had given him rest on every side from all his enemies.”
David was feeling especially thankful that God had delivered Israel, so he wanted to build a temple for the Lord to replace the tent where worship took place in Jerusalem.
Initially, the prophet Nathan told David to go ahead and do whatever he thought right. But God intervened and gave Nathan a message for David.
We’ll pick up the account in verse 8.
8 “Now therefore, thus you shall say to My servant David, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, “I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep, to be ruler over My people Israel.
9 “I have been with you wherever you have gone and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make you a great name, like the names of the great men who are on the earth.
10 “I will also appoint a place for My people Israel and will plant them, that they may live in their own place and not be disturbed again, nor will the wicked afflict them any more as formerly,
11 even from the day that I commanded judges to be over My people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. The Lord also declares to you that the Lord will make a house for you.
12 “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.
13 “He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
14 “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,
15 but My lovingkindness shall not depart from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you.
16 “Your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever; your throne shall be established forever.” ’ ”
17 In accordance with all these words and all this vision, so Nathan spoke to David.
I love how this chapter starts with David wanting to do something to honor God and ends with God turning it all around and honoring DAVID.
That’s the experience we had this week! We put together our Thanksgiving dinner giveaway as a way of honoring God by serving those who might otherwise not have had a hot meal that day. And then, God turned it all around.
He blessed us with donations of food, and finances, and people’s time. He blessed us with new friendships and new connections in our community. He blessed us with the joy that comes from serving others and coming together as the Body of Christ.
It didn’t come together exactly the way any of us had envisioned it. But it came out better than any of us could have imagined.
And that’s what happens here with David. God says David can’t build the temple — his hands are stained with the blood of many wars. But then, God turns around and makes things better than David could have imagined.
He makes four promises to David in this passage. In verse 9, He promises to make David’s name great, to give him a great reputation. In verse 10, He promises to make a homeland for the nation of Israel. In verses 10 and 11, He promises to give Israel an undisturbed rest from its enemies. And in verses 11 through 16, He promises to give David an everlasting royal dynasty and kingdom.
Now, these promises sound a lot like the promises God had made to Abraham, back in Genesis, chapter 12. Listen to what He said there:
1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you;
2 And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing;
3 And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”
Do you hear the similarities? A great name. A nation. A blessing.
The only thing missing from Abraham’s promised blessings was the explicit mention of a royal dynasty. So, we can see this Davidic covenant as a part of God’s covenant with Abraham.
This new covenant God was making with David — a covenant marked over and over again by God’s words, “I will” — is His commitment to fulfill through David’s royal line His promise to bless the families of the earth in Abraham.
But none of the kings of Israel or Judah fulfill the promise of verse 13, that God will “establish the throne of his kingdom forever.” All the kings of those nations died, and now there is no king in Israel at all.
The key to understanding how God will fulfill this promise is in verse 14, where He says He will be a father to this king and this king will be a son to Him.
Psalm 2 echoes this language. Listen to what God says through the psalmist:
7 “I will surely tell of the decree of the Lord: He said to Me, ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.
8 ‘Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance, And the very ends of the earth as Your possession.
What I want you to see is that way back in 2 Samuel, way back in the psalms, God was revealing that this eternal king He’d promised would come from David’s line would be GOD’S Son.
But what about that part in verse 14, where God says, “when he commits iniquity, I will correct him with the rod of men and the strokes of the sons of men”? How does that connect to Jesus, who NEVER sinned?
There are at least two ways of looking at this. The first way, which most folks agree is correct, is that God was talking there about Solomon or the other kings of David’s line.And that makes a lot of sense. Prophecy often includes pieces that look ahead to different periods of coming history. So, maybe God was talking about Jesus in the first part of that verse, but He was talking about the OTHER kings in the second part.
But I think there’s more going on here. The Hebrew word translated as “commits iniquity” here has the sense of being perverted, being bent or twisted or distorted.
And that surely describes what the sinless Son of God experienced as He hung upon the cross at Calvary, where God placed upon Him all the sins of mankind and poured out his righteous wrath over those sins upon Him.
Jesus was bent as He carried His cross to Calvary. He was twisted in agony as they nailed His hands and feet to it. As He took upon Himself OUR sins and their just punishment, Jesus was perverted. The Bible says that He who knew no sin BECAME sin itself on that cross.
This was something no other king of Israel could ever have done: to save his people by suffering the punishment they deserved for their sins.
In fact, that’s what this covenant with David was all about. It was about establishing the king as the embodiment of God’s covenant people before Him. He would now be their representative before God.
At various times throughout His reign over Israel, David served ALL the roles of the types we’ve looked at in the past few weeks.
As a man who, at various times, performed the roles of prophet, judge or deliverer, priest, and king, David becomes the Old Testament type that points us to Jesus — the true man, the true prophet, the true judge, the true priest, and the true king.
But as we know, the Old Testament types were imperfect. They all — including David — failed to fulfill what God had intended for those roles.
And so, more than a thousand years after His covenant with David, God sent His own Son — the one He’d promised in verse 14 and in Psalm 2 — the very one the Magi called “King of the Jews.”
And then, on what we call Palm Sunday, 33 years after He was born, the people lined up outside the gates of Jerusalem and laid their coats and palm fronds along the road and called out “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.”
This was what Israel had always done when coronating a new king. And the significance of that is that the people were acknowledging that this “Son of David” was the rightful king of Israel.
They were glad to acknowledge Him as King, and they were glad to acknowledge Him as a son of David. But they rejected Him as the Son of God. And in less than a week, they’d crucify Him for that claim.
The King promised to David and to the people — the one who would bring salvation and justice and peace and reconciliation to God — was not the king they wanted. They’d rejected Him.
But what they meant for evil, God used for good, for the greatest good. Hanging upon that cross, with a placard reading “King of the Jews” above His head, God’s Son became the sacrificial lamb whose blood would cleanse from their sins all who turn to Him in faith.
His last moments on that cross were marked by people mocking Him as King, mocking Him as the Son of God, mocking Him as Messiah, mocking him as a deliverer, mocking Him as a man.
But God wasn’t done.
On the third day, He raised Jesus from the dead, and a few weeks later He brought Jesus back to heaven.
We see him there in Acts, chapter 7, where Stephen is being stoned to death for preaching the gospel in Jesus’ name. Listen to what Luke says about Stephen there:
55 But being full of the Holy Spirit, he gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God;
56 and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”
Standing at God’s right hand denotes power and authority. Jesus lost NONE of that in His death. He is STILL the one whom God pledged to “give the nations as Your inheritance, and the very ends of the earth as Your possession.”
And so, that’s where we find ourselves today. Much like the people of Israel, we’re waiting for God to fulfill His promise. We’re waiting for the second Advent.
We’re waiting for the heavens to open and the one who is called “Faithful and True” to come down on His white horse, His eyes aflame and his head covered in crowns, to vanquish the evil on earth in His righteousness.
We’re waiting for Him to come and take what is His.
We’re waiting for the day when He creates a renewed heaven and earth that will be a place of peace and contentment in the presence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We’re waiting for what God promised us through the Apostle John in Revelation, chapter 22:
1 Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb,
2 in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
3 There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him;
4 they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads.
5 And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.
As we celebrate Advent, we look back to that first appearance of God With Us, that day when God wrapped Himself in human flesh and came to live among us.
But we also look forward. We look ahead to the day when WE will live with HIM, the day when we will worship at the eternal throne promised so long ago to King David.
We look ahead to the day when we will stand before the King of kings and Lord of lords, no longer covered in the shame of our sins but in robes washed white in the blood of HIS righteousness.
THIS is our hope, friends. This is our confident assurance. And THIS is what makes the season of Advent so special. It’s a reminder that God ALWAYS keeps His promises.
It’s a reminder that one day, we will wait no longer. It’s a reminder that one day, the waiting will be over and the Kingdom of God WILL be on earth, just as it is in Heaven.
Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed be the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
