The Covenant with David
What happens after Moses? Moses dies at the end of the Book of Deuteronomy and his successor, Joshua, leads the people of Israel into the land. They enjoy peace under Joshua and Joshua’s immediate successors. After that, when we get into the Book of Judges, the people of Israel fall into a cycle, a cycle that scholars sometimes call the sin, suffering, supplication, salvation, and then sin once more cycle. What does that mean? The people of Israel would depart from following God’s law. They’d fall into sin. As a result of this sin, they become weakened and become the prey of their enemies and experience suffering.
In that situation of suffering, they would call out to their God, the God of Israel. That’s supplication, they’d make supplication to God. God would send them salvation through a judge, usually that’s why it’s called the Book of Judges, and that judge would be a savior figure who would restore them to peace and to prosperity. Once they were comfortable, the people of Israel would fall back into sin. That’s the cycle that we see going on for really multiple centuries in the Book of Judges. That cycle of the people of Israel is not really broken until we come to David.
David is introduced to us in 1 Samuel 16. It’s a very pivotal moment in salvation history where the prophet Samuel, who is the last of the judges sent by God to save the people of Israel, is told now to go and look for a king. He goes to Bethlehem, to the sons of a certain Jesse and goes through all 8 of Jesse’s sons. Finally, the last son, the youngest son, is the one marked out by God and the prophet Samuel anoints David with the horn of oil and we read there that the Spirit of God rushed upon David from that point forward.
That really makes David out as a very unique person in all the Old Testament. He’s the only Old Testament figure who has the permanent possession of the Holy Spirit. That is quite unique because, again, no other figure in the Old Testament had that and that’s something that we associate with the new covenant. We believe that through baptism, the Holy Spirit is given to us on a permanent basis and doesn’t leave us unless we drive it out by mortal sin. David was, almost as it were, living in the new covenant in advance. He’s a very special figure. The Scriptures call him a “man after God’s own heart.” He’s this man filled with God’s Spirit.
God arranges this Spirit-filled man to become king over all the people and David finally conquers the capital city of Jerusalem, makes it his capital in 2 Samuel 5, establishes himself securely as king over all of Israel. The plan of God at this point is that the people of Israel, who, as a whole, have not shown themselves willing to live as children of God, will now, at least, experience indirect benefits through their king who does live as a child of God because he’s filled with God’s Spirit, just as Adam was filled with the Spirit of God back when God breathed into him the breath of life in Genesis 2. We could even see David as a kind of new Adam figure, a new spirit-filled leader of God’s people who will bring a period of blessing to the nation of Israel.
In 2 Samuel 7, God makes a covenant with David, we call it the Davidic Covenant, where God welcomes David as His own son and promises that all of David’s heirs will also be the sons of God. God promises that He’s going to establish David’s dynasty forever and also that David’s dynasty will build and maintain a house for God, a temple for God’s presence. That sounds wonderful. The king of Israel is established forever, and he’s going to be a son of God, sounds like everything’s going to be happy thereafter and the kingdom of David is going to spread over the whole earth. David’s heirs are going to lead all the nations back to God. That begins to happen under David and Solomon, but then, sadly, it goes awry in the later years of Solomon’s life.
After Solomon, David’s son, death, the rest of David’s descendants who rule on the throne, are largely a bunch of rascals, to be frank with you. As a result, the kingdom of David enters into a long period of decline, which ultimately ends after about 400 years in the people of Israel being led out into exile just as Adam and Eve were forced to leave the Garden when they sinned. After a long period of sin after unrighteous kinds, the people of Israel are forced to leave their land and they’re taken out into what we call the “Babylonian Exile” in the territory of Babylon. That’s the Davidic Covenant and Davidic Kingdom. It had great potential, but sadly, it ended in a very imperfect and indeed suffering state for the people of Israel.
Let’s talk about the relevance of the Davidic Covenant for evangelism. The Davidic covenant is really the whole background for this idea of Jesus Christ as being King. You’ll notice that the New Testament begins with a royal genealogy of Jesus, and we’ll talk about that in greater depth when we come to the New Testament. The point is that Jesus, in His human nature, is the Son of David. Jesus’ kingdom is the kingdom of David. You might say it’s the kingdom of God, yes, that’s true because Jesus is the son of God, therefore His kingdom is the kingdom of God, but Jesus is also the kingdom of David and thus necessarily, Jesus’ kingdom is the restoration of the kingdom of David. That’s why there’s a hierarchical structure of the Church. That’s why our Bishops wear crowns. You may not realize this, but a miter is really an ancient form of a crown and that represents the Bishop’s role as a kind of prince in the kingdom of David, which Jesus has restored and made into a spiritual empire which fills the whole earth.
When we evangelize, we are really spreading David’s kingdom, the kingdom of the son of David, we are inviting people to become subjects of Jesus Christ the King. It’s really the background of the Great Commission. We talk about Matthew 28 a great deal in evangelism, that wonderful statement of Our Lord, “All authority in heaven and hearth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations, etc.” When Jesus said “all authority has been given to me,” He’s really claiming His right as the heir of the covenant of David. We read in Psalm 2 that God promises kingship over the whole earth to David and to his heirs. That is realized in Jesus Christ and so the Great Commission is really a royal commission where Jesus claims His rights as King and sends us out as His royal ministers and royal heralds to announce to the world that it’s time to be subject to the true King, the son of David, and that kingdom is manifested in the Holy Catholic Church.