ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 4 · 2 Samuel 7; 2 Samuel 12:1-14
God promises David a house and a throne for ever. Five chapters later David takes another man's wife, and a prophet tells him a story about a lamb.
Samuel goes to Bethlehem to anoint Saul's replacement from among the sons of Jesse, and when he sees the eldest he is sure he has found the man. God corrects him: for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). Seven sons pass in front of him. The eighth is out with the sheep, and nobody had thought to send for him. That is David.
The chapters that follow are the David most people know: Goliath, the harp in Saul's court, the years in the wilderness with Saul hunting him, the two nights he could have killed Saul and did not. He will not take the throne by force. He waits for God to give it.
When David is king and settled in Jerusalem, it bothers him that he lives in a house of cedar while the ark of God sits under curtains, and he proposes to build God a house. God's reply, through Nathan, turns the offer round. David will not build a house for God. God will build a house for David: thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee: thy throne shall be established for ever (2 Samuel 7:16).
This promise (the Davidic covenant) carries the rest of the Bible. It is why the prophets, even in exile, keep looking for a son of David; why Matthew opens his Gospel with the son of David, the son of Abraham (Matthew 1:1); why the angel tells Mary that the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David (Luke 1:32). The house God promised David has outlasted every building that ever stood in Jerusalem.
God also says what will happen when David's sons sin. He will chasten them with the rod of men, but his mercy will not depart from the house as it departed from Saul (2 Samuel 7:14-15). The covenant does not rest on the kings behaving. David himself is about to find out what that mercy is worth.
In the spring, when kings go out to war, David stays in Jerusalem. From his roof he sees Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of his own soldiers. He sends for her, she conceives, and he sets about covering it up. When Uriah, home on leave, refuses to sleep in his own bed while the army is in the field, David sends him back to the front carrying sealed orders for his own death.
Nearly a year goes by. Then Nathan comes to David with a story about a rich man with great flocks who took a poor man's one ewe lamb to feed a guest. David is furious and swears the man will pay. Nathan says, Thou art the man (2 Samuel 12:7).
Here is the difference between David and Saul. Saul, confronted, explained himself. David says, I have sinned against the LORD (2 Samuel 12:13), and Psalm 51 is the confession he wrote: Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me (Psalm 51:10). He is forgiven on the spot. The consequences still arrive. The child dies, the sword never leaves his house, and his own sons rise against him.
The phrase (1 Samuel 13:14, Acts 13:22) does not mean David was a better man than Saul. Measured by his deeds, he was worse. It means his heart was turned toward God, so that when he was found out he broke instead of hardening. A man after God's own heart can hear thou art the man and answer, I have sinned.
David needed a clean heart as badly as anyone in Israel, and he knew it. He could not be the king 2 Samuel 7 promised. His greater Son is: Christ lived without sin, carried the sins of men like David to the cross, and rose to sit on the throne God had sworn would stand for ever.