The Promised One: Advent Day 8

Read & Journal

Read 2 Samuel 7:1-17. As you read, consider these questions:

• What have you just read? Take a moment to outline what happened in this passage in your own words.

• What does this passage teach you about God and his character?

• How do these verses point to Jesus? What do they reveal about his mission and purpose?

• How is God’s promise that someone in David’s lineage would always sit on the throne ultimately fulfilled in Jesus?

• Why does that matter to you today?

Ponder

Moses led the people out of slavery in Egypt, but he couldn’t lead them out of slavery to sin. Even in the Promised Land, the people turned again and again to sin, despairing when something seemed impossible (even though God had led them across the Red Sea on dry land) and yearning after what the other nations’ had, including their gods.

Soon, the Israelites found themselves trapped in a cycle of sin and disobedience. (Sound familiar to your life? It does mine!) They would fall into sin and idolatry, cry out to God and God would rescue them and bring them back into right relationship with him only for the whole cycle to begin again. Prophets would speak out, calling the people back to the one true God. Judges attempted to rule the people, and, eventually, when the people clamored for a king so they could be like the other nations, God gave them one.

David was a man after God’s own heart, but even the people around him didn’t expect him to be a king. When Samuel came to Bethlehem to anoint Israel’s next king, David’s father, Jesse, didn’t even think to call his youngest son in from the pasture to be considered. Yet David was the king God had chosen for his people.

David was by no means perfect. He sinned with great, deadly consequences that rippled out to affect his family and his nation. But in the waning years of his reign, David longed to build a temple for the God he loved and worshiped—and God said no. But God also promised that one of David’s descendants would always sit upon the throne. It’s a promise God has kept—in Jesus.

For the prophets of the Old Testament, this promise to David became the foundation of their proclamations. As Robert Bergen writes: “To a people broken and humbled by invaders sent as agents of divine punishment, the Lord’s promise to David of a kingdom that “will endure forever” (v. 16) was the seed of hope that resurrected a nation. The Lord’s promise of an enduring house for David became Israel’s assurance that God would once again lift the nation up and cause it to flourish anew.”1 While none of David’s earthly descendants could have ever fulfilled this eternal promise, Jesus could and does. He shall reign forever and ever, King of kings and Lord of lords!

1.Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel, vol. 7, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 337.