Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - David in 22 stories – introducing our next series of devotions | David in 22 Stories | 1 Samuel – 2 Samuel

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Right now we're working through the story of David's life found in First and Second Samuel. So we're excited because today we're starting a new series on the life of David and First and Second Samuel. So let's just start here. Why should people be excited to learn about David? My wife's taking these classes from Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, so she had the opportunity to go to

Starting point is 00:00:34 Israel with some professors and other students a few months ago. And one of the cool things she told me concerned this one archaeological dig that people were working on, kind of going through all the layers of civilization trying to find archaeological evidence or how these civilizations were put together. And you've got to understand that for a long time, critical scholars, kind of unbelieving scholars, have said that David was not a real person. And to be frank, there wasn't a lot of archaeological evidence, pretty much none that supported him as being real. But they're getting ready to close this one site down. And one of the last things the guys does is he turns over one more rock. And underneath that rock, he finds an inscription that says, House of David. And you can

Starting point is 00:01:18 imagine that everything changed then. They weren't closing anything down, but digging further. And since that time, there has been all kinds of historical and archaeological evidence to show that David was a real person, that what we read in the Bible actually happened in history. And so it kind of helps to get some historical context of what was happening in the life of David. Yeah, so David lived about 1,000 years before the time of Jesus. He grew up in Bethlehem, a town that most of us are familiar with from the Christmas stories, Jesus's birth, but he's living in a time period around 1,050 BC. And it's at that time that a guy named Saul becomes the first king in Israel. And we're going to talk more about Saul and the podcast,

Starting point is 00:02:03 but he's a very mixed bag. And in the end, he turns out to be just a pretty terrible king. And that's why God decides I need to choose someone after my own heart. I need to choose David. Now, when we think about David, we tend to lionize him. We tend to think about some guy who was a powerful king of a powerful nation and the ancient world. And really none of those things are true at all. David grew up in Bethlehem, which was a no-name backwater town. No one cared about Bethlehem. And he grew up as the youngest son in a no-name clan. I mean, his dad wasn't even important enough to be an elder in the town. And so David is the last person you would expect God to pick as his king. But that's exactly what God does. And so when we imagine him, we need to be careful. We can't imagine some superpower king. I mean,

Starting point is 00:02:51 again, Israel, it's not a super important country. It's not even that big. Why Israel matters is because it sits between two important nations. Up to the north, you have Assyria, and to the south you have Egypt. And so Israel is just a land bridge, a way of getting from one place to another. It's kind of like, you know, a pit stop on the highway. No one cares about Israel, but you need it to get from one place to the next. And so when you think about David, you need to think about him ruling in that area in a region which is about the size of New Jersey. It's pretty small. That takes maybe an hour to two hours to get from northernmost point to southernmost point if you're in a fast car

Starting point is 00:03:31 on a good highway. So that's the kind of historical and cultural context of David. Let's talk for a second about how this story of David fits into the story of Israel. Because why David matters, if it's not clear already, wasn't because he was a super important leader in the ancient world. Why David matters is because he was the chosen one of God. Why David matters, is because he's a part of this tremendous world-changing story that comes from God to us. That's why David matters. So if we really want to understand who he is, we need to put him inside of that bigger story, which the Old Testament is telling. Let's start all the way back in the first pages of the Bible with Adam and Eve.

Starting point is 00:04:14 God created them in his image. And what that means is that God created them to rule or to subdue the earth. He created them to partner with God in cultivating the world. that God had created. Now, let's be clear, they were underneath God's authority. They were vice regions. They were to rule, but in a way that submitted to God and his authority in their life and in the world. But of course they failed. They sought to redefine good and evil on their own. They rebelled against God. And with that sin, then there was disruption, disruption between them and God, them and each other, them and the world they lived in. And therefore, this experiment with Adam and Eve, it turned into a big failure. At that point, we might expect God to just give up, you know, wipe the

Starting point is 00:05:00 slate clean and start over, but that's not what he does. Instead, God commits himself to humanity and to the rest of creation. And he comes up with what actually seems like a really crazy rescue plan, because he chooses two elderly people who have not been able to have children their whole lives. And he says, hey, through you guys, I'm going to create a nation. And through that nation, I'm going to bless all of the nations. I'm going to do what I always in. intended to do with this world. I'm going to fill it with my love, justice, and mercy, and I'm going to do it through your family. And so the story goes on, and Abraham's descendants, they end up in the land of Egypt. And eventually they become slaves. But God, he's not okay with this. They cry out, and he

Starting point is 00:05:42 rescues them from Pharaoh. And there's all kinds of crazy stories of plagues and seas parting and God's glory coming onto a mountain. But here's the main point. God takes them out of Egypt so that he can become their king. And he says, hey, I'm not the only king here, by the way. You guys are going to become a kingdom of priests, a kingdom of servants. And so in some ways, Israel now is kind of like a reboot on Adam and Eve, just like Adam and Eve were called to be rulers and servants in the Garden of Eden. So it goes with Israel. But also just like with Adam and Eve, things don't go so hot. That leads us into the book of judges, which is one of my favorite books, because it shows us what life is like when you reject God. And what life is like for Israel is a lot of moral darkness and depravity. There's this cycle that

Starting point is 00:06:30 happens over and over in the book of judges where the people rebel against God and God in kind of judgment against them, discipline against them, sells them off into slavery into their international enemies. So here they are. They find themselves in captivity under the oppression of these other nations and they cry out to God. They repent of their sin. God hears them. He has mercy on them. He raises up a judge. that judge delivers them, they get back into the land, back following God, and then the same cycle repeats, because the people fall away from God, they fall back into sin, they go back into captivity into other nations. And so the nations around them are kicking their butt. Israel is supposed to be a light to the nations?

Starting point is 00:07:13 It turns out that the other nations keep taking them captive, and we're told that all of this is done because this is God's discipline and judgment against sin. And so Israel, they cry out for a king. They want a king. But unfortunately, they want a king like the other nations have. They want a king that will make them prosperous and defend them and keep them out of slavery and captivity. They don't want the kind of king that God wants for them. Yeah, exactly. And so when they cry out for this king that they want, it's a really sad point in the story for two reasons. One, because God was already their king. You know, they didn't just have any king. They had the living God as their king. They say, sorry, you're not doing a great job of this. We'd like someone else. But the other reason why it's sad is because God had an idea of what their king could be. In the book of Deuteronomy, we read God's ideal vision of a king. And rather than reading it here, let me try to summarize it. The ideal king

Starting point is 00:08:13 was on the one hand supposed to be the ideal Israelite. He was obedient to God. He worshipped God. but he was also supposed to be someone who could represent God's rule to the nations. He's supposed to be a kind of living image of God. So when people looked at Israel's king, they're going to say, wow, if he's like that, what's his God like? Instead, though, again, Israel, they say, no, we want a king who's like the nations. And so they get King Saul. And what we read about is Saul is the king like the other nations.

Starting point is 00:08:41 He's the first king of Israel. He's the king they asked for. He is tall and full of bravado. and he is the king that the other nations have. But unfortunately, he's a king that violates all the things that Patrick just said. God laid out in Deuteronomy 17. He starts accumulating power. He accumulates wealth.

Starting point is 00:09:03 He accumulates wives. His heart turns away from God. And that's why God ends up rejecting him as king. And so once God's rejected Saul, what's he going to do? Is he going to say, hey, no more kingship. kingship's over, I'm going to be the ruler again? Well, the answer is no. God says, okay, you guys want a king, and I have a plan for a king, but it's going to be a king who's after my own heart, a king who's actually living in my image, someone who can be a ruler and a servant. And the person he picks,

Starting point is 00:09:34 of course, is David. And that's where our story picks up. But that's not where the Bible story ends. If we keep reading through the Bible, what we're going to see is that David, and it's always kind of an idealized version of David. It's not the real David, but David becomes a type of a king to come, right? People look back to David and they say, man, we want someone who's like David, but even better than David. And maybe if we had someone like that, we could be freed from our sins. We could be freed from external oppression. We could be freed from all the things that make life the way it's not supposed to be. And that, of course, takes us to Jesus. Jesus is, to quote a famous hymn, great David's greater son. He is the one who is the true king, the one who is the true image of God,

Starting point is 00:10:20 the one who is not just a ruler, but who is the true servant who weighs down his life for those who love him. And so when we read about David, we're going to see he's a mixed bag, he's a mixed character, but at his best, he points us forward to Jesus. He shows us who Jesus is going to be. And at his worst, he also points us to Jesus because he shows us the kind of king that we need. As we go through the story of the Bible, I hope you see grace everywhere. I hope you see that when Adam and Eve failed against God, he was gracious to them. And he raises up Abraham. And when the people of Israel fail there, God is gracious to them.

Starting point is 00:10:59 And he gives them a king. When we fail, God responds with grace. And so that's one of the things we're going to see in this life of David. One of the things I'm excited about seeing in his life is that we see David, sin against God, repent, experience God's grace. That's your life. That's my life. So he's going to speak to us. It's not about history.

Starting point is 00:11:24 It's about what is God saying to us through these stories. We're excited about this. Hope you join us. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share? this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them

Starting point is 00:11:50 grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.

Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - David in 22 stories – introducing our next series of devotions | David in 22 Stories | 1 Samuel – 2 Samuel

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