2 Samuel Lesson 57
David’s Prayer
– 2 Samuel 7:18-29
Tonight we will finish 2 Samuel 7.
This is the chapter that concludes the first section of this book. All chapters in 2 Samuel between 2 and 7 have
to do with the base of David’s kingdom and for this reason teach us the
necessity of true healthy government.
We’re getting a lot of political doctrine in the book of 2 Samuel. And people who have studied the Word of God
for some time are about the only people left that have any standards or any
hope of sustaining any kind of a group, state, nation or community in a crisis
situation. Human viewpoint all around us
is falling apart; the idea that government is God and is going to solve everyone’s
problem, all the socialistic schemes, all the pro-communist schemes, and all
the rest of it is falling by the wayside; falling by the wayside because it is
grounded on man’s autonomy, not God’s sovereignty.
Now when we come to these chapters we find David is the ideal politician
of all time. If you want a model of a
Biblical politician, think David, and go to David; David will teach you. The Psalms, some of the greatest literature
the world has ever seen, was written by a politician, facing the situations
that only a politician can face. David
faced them and he was successful. Now
part of our training in 2 Samuel is to go over and over the basics as well as
go on with the doctrine of the book. And
my experience tells me that most of you don’t know where to find things in
God’s Word and many of you are very weak when it comes to telling somebody else
the content of Bible doctrine. This
comes as a surprise because I know many of you have listened to the teaching of
the Word over a long time period.
Let’s go back and look at the issue between human viewpoint and divine
viewpoint in chapter 7. Let’s contrast
them. You recall last time the whole
point of this chapter is to show that when David’s stability politically is at
stake, it depends upon God’s sovereignty, not upon David building a temple for
his God. I read quotations from the
Ugaritic literature where the gods of
Now the reason God vetoed the project is because God wants His testimony
clear in history that He is the sovereign Creator of the universe, and He is
not a process, and “it,” or some other fertility god. He does not need our help, He does not need
man’s cooperation, He is not building a kingdom with man, He is building a
kingdom for man. And there’s a whale of
a difference between those two concepts.
And to bring us into the background, we’ve devised a chart to explain
how divine viewpoint and human viewpoint differ at every point. Human viewpoint, basically is a hatred and
depression of God’s historic revelation.
That’s a fancy way of saying negative volition.
Man, autonomously and by nature since the fall, you do, I do, all of us,
in that unregenerate part of our heart, rejects God’s authority. It’s the basic issue of whether we accept our
authority or whether we accept God’s authority, and human viewpoint always
rejects God’s authority and replaces it with man’s authority. Divine viewpoint is always submissive to what
God has revealed. Coming out of this,
obviously certain doctrines occur. Human
viewpoint has doctrines; divine viewpoint has its doctrines. And your success in the Christian life is
directly proportional to distinguish between these two categories of
doctrine. At any given decision point in
your life you go one way or you go the other, I don’t care what it is, whether
it’s in your marriage, your business, on the campus, or wherever, you go one
way or you go the other way, and all details of life are involved.
If you go the human viewpoint way, eventually, although you may try to
postpone it, try to hope it doesn’t happen, but eventually if you start with
human viewpoint you are going to wind up with a god that is evil in himself,
who is impersonal, and is nothing more than an “it.” And you can call it god, you can call it
whatever you want to, but it’s an “it.”
And perhaps this might make evangelism a lot more sharp, and put a razor
edge on it if you would pin the unbeliever down that he worships an “it” and
you worship a person. There’s a
difference. The “it” is a result of
human viewpoint because ultimately man worships nature. God and nature are the same thing in human
viewpoint. No matter how sophisticated
you put it, you can be a believer in evolution and talk about the evolutionary
process, and your god is that, the evolutionary process. Again you have an “it”, you can dress it up
with mathematical equations, you can put a nice biological vocabulary, it still
theologically is an “it.” It’s a
process. Negative volition always winds
up with an “it.” You may have various
other gods in a pantheon, polytheism, but ultimately you have an “it,” just
nature and inside that nature you have various gods.
Then we come to man and on a human viewpoint basis with negative
volition man always winds up, since God and nature the same, man becomes part
of the same thing, he gets tied in and man basically is no different than a
rock. I don’t care what words you can
try to use, you can talk about the greatness of man and all the rest of it, if
you are a believer in evolution, then man is nothing more than a rock. Nature becomes a mystery and basically man
fears nature in a human viewpoint situation; and by nature, by the word
“nature” we can meet any situation you face in your life, any circumstance you
face in your life. You see how close
ultimately we are, daily, soaked with human viewpoint because every time you
let circumstances get the better of you, every time you get out of fellowship
with the Lord, because of circumstances, you have let nature dominate nature
you instead of you dominating nature.
God in Genesis 1 said man is to subdue nature, not be subdued by it so
every time circumstances intervene, bang, down we go. And this is an interesting point because one
of the questions in the adult quiz was, ultimately what role does the physical
environment play in man’s sin. And the
answer is: no role; physical environment doesn’t have a thing to do with
it. If it did, then you’d have to blame
the environment for Adam’s fall in the Garden.
And that’s exactly what Adam tried to do. The first heresy of history was God, it’s my
circumstances; remember what Adam said: God, it was the woman that You gave me
that caused me to sin. Then God goes to
Eve and it’s the snake that You put in the Garden that caused me to sin, buck
passing. And God doesn’t buy it; circumstances do not make you sin! 1 Corinthians 10:13, no circumstances will
ever face you that are not the common things that all men at all times have had
to face, and God will not permit you to face a circumstance for which he has
not totally and adequately provided. Any
time you swallow the line that circumstances force you to do something sinful,
then you call God a liar; it’s as simple as that. Physical environment has nothing to do with
the issue.
Now on the divine viewpoint basis; here you have God, God is an infinite
God and He is personal. That is the
triune God of the Bible; man is made in God’s image. Nature is to be subdued; that’s the
difference between divine viewpoint and human viewpoint and that is the
difference between all of the kings of the Ancient East, you can go to
Ashurbanipal, the Syrian king, Sargon, the Assyrian king, you can go to
Hammurabi, you can go to the Pharaoh’s, you can go wherever you want in the
Ancient East and all the kings held to a human viewpoint dogma. And that dogma caused them, in the final
analysis, to say that we are saved and our kingdoms are saved by works, that
man cooperates with God and therefore my kingdom becomes secure by my conquest,
by my temple-building, by my administration, by my program.
Now it’s precisely this kind of thought that David drifted off to in 2
Samuel 7, and it was precisely to stop it that God sent Nathan this dream. Last time we discussed verses 4-17 and in
verse 17 we found, “According to all these words, and according to all this
vision, so did Nathan speak unto David.”
So you have Nathan, the prophet, he says now look David, I want you to
be grace oriented, I want you to understand one thing, that if stability comes
to your political administration it is going to come because of God’s sovereign
decree and it is not because of some temple-building program in which you’re
helping out God. God doesn’t need your
help. So we left off with verse 17, and
the testimony of verses 4-17 is that God gave David eternal security,
politically, that for all time David and his sons would have the title to the
throne. Now it’s a very, very, very
important passage.
The doctrine of eternal security is always cut down by very proud
people. People who deny eternal security
are very proud people; they are people who think they can commit some sin
greater than the grace of God. People
who attack eternal security are basically destructive of God Himself; people
who deny eternal security are worshiping at the god of Chance, they do not have
a sovereign God to worship, it is always the God of the Bible plus something
else that causes history. We are not
that; we believe that God is sovereign, there is no chance and there’s nothing
outside of the decree of God to compete with it; ALL is controlled by God.
So in verse 18 we have one of the most beautiful passages of God’s Word
that shows you how one all-time great believer responded to grace. It’s a model of response and I want you to be
thinking, as you go through verse 18 on through the end of this chapter,
comparing your own heart attitude toward what God gives you in the person of
Jesus Christ with how David responded to what God gave him through Nathan. This is a classic passage in all of God’s
Word on thanksgiving. There’s going to
be one of the greatest prayers ever prayed.
It’s neatly divided into petition, and before that praise; praise, verse
18-24, petition, verses 25-29. Both
these sections make up full orbed Biblical prayer. And notice that David doesn’t froth at the
mouth, he doesn’t wave hands, he doesn’t have an ecstatic experience; he comes
close in the middle of this prayer to an ecstatic experience and there it’s
very interesting to see how he handles himself.
He doesn’t blow his cork emotionally, he keeps it all together because
you can’t pray when you’re frothing at the mouth and all the rest of it; that
is not prayer.
Verse 18, “Then went King David in,” now where is David going in? David is going into the tabernacle; the
tabernacle is the place where Jesus Christ’s presence is made known. In the tabernacle you have a place called the
Holy of Holies and then you have the holy place, and in the Holy of Holies you
have the cherubs and the cherubs are sitting over an ark that speaks of Jesus
Christ. The ark is gold and it’s gold
over wood; the gold speaks of His deity, the wood speaks of His humanity. What does the Council of Chalcedon say about
the person of Jesus Christ? Undiminished
deity true humanity united without confusion in one person forever. And that clause should be music to your
ears. So we have various articles of
furniture in the tabernacle; all of these articles of furniture point to some
phase of the work of Jesus Christ. It’s
God’s divinely designed architecture, and therefore, since this was true and
now the ark of the presence is now in the tabernacle, it’s now functioning once
again, you’ll find that believers in the Old Testament, who had the most mature
heart attitude, always cherished to be close to the tabernacle.
Turn back to 1 Samuel 3:3 and recall Samuel’s attitude. This again, shows like with David, the passion
for God’s presence, the passion for God’s presence that these great believers had. Remember the boy Samuel, took his sleeping
bag and slept right close to the tabernacle, camped out all night, every night
he’d camp out. Why did this boy take his
sleeping bag and camp out by that tent?
One answer, because he was hoping that God would speak and he wanted to
be there to hear the voice of God when God spoke. So he endured the hardships just to be
there. To him that was the most
important thing in his life and that is the model for Biblical
sanctification. Sanctification in the
Bible is not getting rid of sin patterns, primarily, that is involved but
that’s not the goal. What is the goal is
making yourself fit to see God eyeball to eyeball; that’s the passion and
that’s the proper motive of sanctification.
That’s where many believers go astray; some believer comes in compound
carnality or with some hairy set of problems and they want solutions to these
problems on a Biblical basis. What
oftentimes happens is that these people do not have the motive for solving
those problems God’s way. Suppose they
have a problem here, this problem we’ll call X, and X is very embarrassing
socially to this person. So this
particular person sees problem X and they say I want to get rid of that, I
don’t want that in my life, I want to get rid of it. And of course there’s nothing wrong with that
except for the fact that it’s incomplete.
That, by itself, isn’t going to carry you through the process of
sanctification. What is going to carry
you through the hardships is the severe training and discipline of
sanctification is not the desire to get rid of something. What is going to carry you through
sanctification is the desire to see God.
That’s the desire. And then,
incidentally to see God we’ve got to get rid of all the excess baggage, because
Adam before the fall had to be sanctified; Jesus Christ had to be sanctified,
and if you’re going to argue that sanctification is getting rid of sin what are
you going to do about the statement that says Christ was sanctified. What was He sanctified from? It couldn’t be from sin, Christ was sinless,
He couldn’t qualify as the Savior unless He was. So if Jesus Christ had to be sanctified, yet
Jesus Christ had no sin, then sanctification can’t fundamentally involve
sin. What it fundamentally involves is
spiritual strengthening to be able to see the presence of God, spiritual
maturity.
Now that being the case, David, like Samuel, had this passion, so we
read, “Then went King David in, and sat before the LORD,” now that’s the most
amazing statement, and I just again point out something here. What has just happened in David’s life. Nathan has brought him the Word of God. Now instead of just putting it in a notebook
and saying well, that’s pretty good, we’ve got a Davidic Covenant going now, and closing his notebook and trotting
off, David didn’t do that. David didn’t
just say well, you know what, that’s really great for Scripture memory, go to
memorize all the words that Nathan taught to me, and then every day when I
shave I’ll say it five times, and that makes me feel good as a king. Now David didn’t treat the Word of God that
way; nothing wrong with memorizing, it’s just that he wasn’t satisfied with
just that. What David did was he acted
on what he heard. And how did he express
his action? He wanted to get alone with
God.
Now notice the order of this thing.
The first thing that happened is they took in the Word of God, then he
spent time alone with God. Notice that;
first he took in the Word of God, then he spent time alone, not the other way
around. God is not going to give you an
illuminated portion of the Word of God in your closet, because you crawl in
there and have a five hour session hypnotizing yourself. Spending time with God can only be done after
you have taken in the Word; not before!
And you can fool yourself, and go to all these prayer groups where they
hold hands and everything else and that is not going to give you the presence
of God. All that does is stimulate your
emotion, and you can get high on it. But
you first get the Word, then you apply it.
And that means coming and spending time alone with God. This is what David does.
And now in verse 18 we have the first part of his prayer, he’s talking
to God. I want you to notice the relaxed
way he talks to God. He doesn’t say oh, YahwehYahwehYahwehYahwehYahweh Yahweh,
he relaxes and he talks to God in a normal tone of voice, just like you talk to
a man. If you were to portray this time
in a film you’d have David just there, speaking to God, probably looking at the
place where the ark was, he wasn’t in the Holy of Holies, but looking there and
talking to God. And God was not talking
back because God talked to him through Nathan; see, God doesn’t talk to David
directly. He talks to David only through
the prophet, only through the Word.
David was talking back to God, and the first thing he said, remember the
first part of this is verses 18-24, deal with David’s praise and when he starts
to praise, since praise means acknowledging God’s works and Words in my life
and history, acknowledging these things, the first thing we notice that’s very
significant is that David immediately sees the issue.
The issue in the Davidic Covenant is whether David’s kingdom will be
stabilized by David or whether David’s kingdom will be stabilized by God;
whether it will be stabilized by works or whether it will be stabilized by
grace. And what does David say in verse
18, “Who am I, O Lord God?” Now that
immediately tells you that David is amazed; now this is a little tip to tell
your spirituality, and only you can answer it, nobody else can answer it for
you; no exams, you can’t pass or flunk this, you go in the quiet of your heart
and ask yourself something: does God’s grace hold any amazement for you? And that’s one of the signs of a real in
depth thanksgiving, that the grace of God toward you is really something
amazing. There’s a sense of honest awe
about what God has done for you, and that comes when you perceive grace. And that is opposite to this attitude, oh
God, why have you allowed this to happen to me.
Completely different. There’s an
amazement; David says, “Who am I, O Lord God?
And what is my house, that You
have brought me thus far.”
Now the first thing in David’s acknowledgement of grace is a direct
denial of that archeological Egyptian painting that I showed you last week;
remember in Egyptian art the height of the figure denotes the importance of the
figure. The fact that the artist has drawn
Ramsses the same height as the gods shows the doctrine of the Pharaoh, that is
that Pharaoh was one with the gods. Now
contrast that with what you see in David in verse 18. Does David have that Pharaoh attitude—I walk
with the gods? Not at all. He says, O Lord, who am I? There’s an absolute difference. Pharaoh’s in pride, David in humility.
“Who am I, O Lord God? And what is my house,” the word “house” as it’s
used in verse 18 means dynasty. And the
Pharaoh’s were very, very proud of their dynasty, and David says but what is my
dynasty; what is my family background, “that You have brought me here.” The word “has brought” is a perfect tense and
it means that all the time from the sheepcote on up to the present moment of
his coronation David looks on as grace.
God has brought him in the sense that Samuel came to his house and
anointed him; God has brought him in the sense that God protected him against
seven assassination attempts, God has brought him in that he has arranged for
Saul’s death and for David to take the crown.
So David has many, many things to give thanks for. And so he looks with divine viewpoint on his
own situation; God I know, I know that it was You who have brought me up to
this point, “Who am I” that you devote that much attention to me.
Verse 19, “And this was yet a small thing in Thy sight, O Lord God; but
You have spoken also of thy servant’s house for a great while to come. And this the manner of man, O Lord God?” The last part of this verse is very
difficult, but at least the first part is clear, “this was a small thing,” in
other words, David says look, I understand enough of divine viewpoint to know
from the doctrine of creation, from the doctrine of the fall, from the flood
and from the covenant, I know certain things about my God. I know that He is sovereign, I know that He
is righteous, just, that He is love, He is omniscient, omnipotent, omniscient,
immutable, and eternal. I know those
things about my God and I know that it is a small thing for Him to, as far as
power, to do what He’s done in my life.
But he says it’s more amazing to me that He would take His love and show
it not only in changing my life but He would also use His love to show me the
future, show me what was going to happen in the future.
But it’s not just showing David what’s going to happen in the future, in
verse 19 where it says “you have spoken also of thy servant’s house for a great
while to come,” the “great while” is his rendition of the “forever” clauses
that we studied last time and I proved to you why thou holem in the Hebrew often means long time, in the Davidic Covenant
it means eternity. And so when he says
“for a great while to come” he’s referring to eternity. And here’s what David is really giving thanks
for, he’s saying now look God, I can just barely conceive how you work with one
person’s life, but what you have just done is promise political success for a
whole series of people for eternity. In
other words, what God has had to do, here’s God, He is sovereign, here’s the
creation; God has had to announce a decree in which God is 100% in control of
the situation, yet not destroy human responsibility and volition. And what God assures David is that in history
from David on down in his line, there will always be a man on the throne. Or, there will always be a man ready to sit
on the throne. So what you say; so
what! The man that sits on the throne
has to have positive volition if he’s going to fulfill the model of David. So there’s always going to be a believer,
qualified and sanctified enough to move in and take over as King of
Israel.
Now this is what astounds David, how can God promise me, without messing
up volition, how can he promise that kind of thing, and the only answer the
Bible ever gives to this question is that God, the God of the Bible is big
enough; He’s simply big enough to do it.
“And this, the manner of men,” this is where David is amazed that God
condescends to let him in on the promise.
He says you know, if you were a man God, I could understand why you’d
share something with me; if you had something that meant a lot to you you’d
share it because that’s the way people do, but he says what overpowers me God,
is that You act like a man toward me. In
other words, what David is amazed at is the tremendous personal relationship
that he has with Jehovah, absolutely astounds him that God treats him like a
person, tells him things, talks to him.
Now why David is amazed at this is because to him, he is not the Pharaoh,
he is not like this, he does not see himself as one of the gods. And not seeing himself like this, he wonders,
well then, if God is infinite, how come he handles me just like another man
would, so personal that He talks to me, He goes out of His way to show His
mercy toward me. David truly is
responding to the infinite personal God of grace.
Then in verse 20, at this point David reaches almost a height of
ecstasy, when he says, “And what can David say more unto Thee? For Thou, Lord God, knows Your servant.” In
other words, at the point of verse 20, when he says “What can David say,” David
has run out of vocabulary. At this point
David literally cannot give thanks any more; he’s just amazed, he’s
overpowered, he’s speechless, he’s rendered speechless. Now if there is ever a time to have a
sanctified version of ecstasy it would have been right here, but isn’t it
amazing that God’s Word doesn’t have a thing here; he doesn’t have anything to
say to God, he shuts his mouth and moves on.
Now David’s emotions are high, he’s not a passion-less man here; his
emotions are high. But he always, ALWAYS
maintains control of his emotions.
That’s the mark of a great mature believer. He just turns it over to God and says God, I
can’t thank you enough, you know my heart so let’s go on.
Verse 21, here, verses 21-24, the last part of this praise that David
does, shows you a very important element you ought to learn how to do in your
life. Too often you look upon your life
as something independent of God’s historical program. Here you are, and we all have this tendency,
to be preoccupied with all our problems, got a pile of them over here. And that’s all we see, is the problems, the
problems, the problems, this decision, that decision, all these decisions, and then
we call “help,” we call God in, I’ve got a problem here God, number 1,230 and I
need help on that one; I need help. And
so he’s concentrating on this particular problem, over and over he’s
concentrating on this particular problem.
He doesn’t see anything else, and he doesn’t see that if God solves
problem 1,230 God’s kingdom is advanced.
Now watch what he does.
Verse 21, here shows again, this guy really thinks, he really responds
under pressure, and when he gets blessed, this is something that just knocks
him off his feet, and yet even in this
kind of a thing where he is so graced out that he can’t believe it himself, he
responds with doctrine. “For Thy word’s
sake, and according to thine own heart, have You done…” and we’ll stop there
for a moment, “For Thy word’s sake,” refers to the historic plan of God. “Thy word’s sake” refers to the Abrahamic
Covenant; the Abrahamic Covenant promised three things, it promised a seed, a
worldwide blessing, and land. Now, the
Abrahamic Covenant defined what God was going to do beginning in 2000 BC and
culminating in the person of Jesus Christ.
The Abrahamic Covenant is an outline of history, and any history course
that doesn’t teach Genesis 12, 15 and 17 is not a history course, it’s a
chronicle course, that is you just learn names, dates and vomit them up at the
nearest exam. But if you’re interested
in learning history the way it should be taught, and thanks to the Supreme
Court can’t be taught, the way history should be taught is that you should
teach it within the framework of the Abrahamic Covenant, period. And that’s the only framework we’ve got for
history. Here is the Abrahamic Covenant
and that is God’s plan.
So David immediately sees something; it’s not just that Jehovah is
blessing him, the one lone little king; it’s not that at all. This is one more step on the line of
progressive revelation of God’s plan. So that’s why he says “for the sake of
Thy word.” God, centuries ago, see with
David about a 1000 BC, we’re talking about 1000 years have elapsed, ten
centuries since the Abrahamic Covenant was given. For ten centuries God’s Word stood; people
laughed, people mocked, all the rest of it, it stood. And now David says You promised something
God, and when You promise something it always has to come true. So for the sake
of Your Word You have done this to me.
See what he does? He plugs in to
the big picture. Do you ever plug
yourself and sufferings into the big picture?
Ever think of yourself as a member of the body of Christ, the scars on
your soul that you bear, that you’re struggling with, the sins that only you
think you have, these kinds of things, do you ever stop and think that plug
yourself into the big picture, get into the body of Christ and see that you are
an absolute necessity for the body of Christ, and that the struggles that you
go through is part of the overall struggle that the body of Christ goes
through. Get plugged in to seeing the
big thing. This is always… these great
men of the Bible see this; they never see their lives in isolation.
“For Thy word’s sake,” for Thy plan’s sake, “and according to thine own
heart,” that is a testimony to God’s sovereignty; that’s why Paul says in
Ephesians 1 out of His counsel proceeds all things for His pleasure, “according
to thine own heart,” is just the Old Testament way of saying this. You “have done all this great thing,” now in
the King James translation that is plural and it shouldn’t be, it’s singular,
“all the great,” that’s it, it’s an adjective, it’s operating as a noun here,
“all the great.” All the great
what? What is it “all the great?” “All the great” refers to the Davidic
Covenant, and so he says, “For the sake of Your Word, according to Your own
heart,” that is because of sovereignty, “You have done this great thing.” You have given me an eternal everlasting
kingdom. “…to make Thy servant know,”
that’s the revelation of the Word of God through Nathan.
Verse 22, “Wherefore,” now the “wherefore” means that there’s going to
be a conclusion that’s coming up, this is a translator’s provision to show the
logical conclusion of this thing. What
is the ultimate purpose for every act of history? Let’s go back and look at the big picture so
we don’t lose the forest for the trees.
Why did God design history the way He designed it. Now we don’t know all the answers here,
except we do know this; the furthest back we can go, in all the reasons that
you can give, the furthest one back is this: God has designed all history to
glorify Himself… to glorify Himself, to make Himself known to you and to me as
fully as possible, as fully as it is for a creature to know. And so God, then, designing history this way
always will be glorified when we do it by grace. And that’s why David makes the conclusion in
verse 22, why of course, God has done this great thing, in other words, He’s
cut me off from getting into a human viewpoint building program, He’s going to
build any building that’s going on and He’s done it because He wants to show
Himself. That’s why He says, “Thou art
great, O LORD God; for there is none like Thee.”
Now how does he know that? Look
at what we saw last week, what did Baal want?
He wanted a house built for himself.
He’d go to the gods in Sumer, the gods of Akad, the gods of Mesopotamia,
all of them wanted houses built for themselves.
This guy doesn’t, He builds houses, you don’t build houses for him. “…neither is there any God beside Thee,”
there’s a statement of monotheism, so next time you open your child’s textbook
and you see the statement that monotheism slowly evolved in the nation Israel
after the time of Solomon, you’ll know that that’s apostasy, and you’ll know
that your tax money went to pay, to finance the undermining of your religious
faith and the faith of your child.
“…neither is there any God beside Thee, according to all that we have
heard with our ears.” Now this phrase,
“heard with our ears” refers to the fact that God’s revelation is always
historical.
Now beginning in verses 23-24 he recites what they have heard with their
ears. Why does he say ears, not eyes? People were not literate; how did people get
the Word. They didn’t have overhead
projectors, I don’t know how Isaiah ever made it. People got the Word of God by memory of all
sermons. It will flabbergast you to
realize that the epistle to the Hebrews, the most difficult epistle in the New
Testament was given in a synagogue for a sermon. You just read it through, take a watch, time
it, see how long it takes you to read at a comfortable pace the book of Hebrews. And that’s how long that sermon was. And if you want another sermon in the Bible,
the book of Deuteronomy was one sermon.
You read that one, take a whole afternoon.
Verse 23 is what God has done historically, “And what one nation in the
earth is like Your people,” now you see right here, watch what David is doing
in verse 23 because Christians don’t do this and we should. He goes back to historic fact, he doesn’t
just say I believe God’s like this. Who
cares what you believe God is like, it doesn’t matter what you believe God is
like; what matters is what He is like, not what you think. And here it says a historic fact, “one nation
in the earth is like Thy people, like Israel, whom God went to redeem for a
people to Himself, and to make Him a name, and to greatness [to do for you
great things], and terrible [awe-inspiring] things,” plural, “terrible things
would be the miracles of the Exodus and the conquest, “for Thy land,” He’s
talking now… back to Israel, “before Thy people, which You have redeemed to
Thee from Egypt, from the nations and their gods?” So David refers then for greatness to
what? To his own self, something he
cranked out of here? No, to history.
Now we haven’t done it in a while and it’s time we refresh our memories,
so if you turn back to Deuteronomy 4 we’ll take a little swing through
Scripture before we finish up 2 Samuel 7 because I want to remind you of the
mentality of faith in the Bible, that it is always rooted in historic
fact. Turn to Deuteronomy 4:32, every
4-5 months it’s necessary to refresh our memory and drill in what true faith is
in the Bible. For those of you who have
been exposed to the fact that faith is some sort of a spooky feeling that you
work up in your heart, I’ve got news for you.
That’s not at all Scriptural.
Look at Deuteronomy 4, here is a recitation of faith. Look at the content… content, content! Here’s Moses trying to get the people to
believe, “For ask now of the days that are past, which were before thee, since
the day that God created man upon the earth, and ask from the one side of
heaven unto the other, whether there has been any such thing as this great
thing is, or has been heard like it? [33] Did ever a people hear the voice of
God speaking out of the middle of the fire, as you have heard, and live.” Now that’s talking about a historical
event. [34] “Or has God assayed
[ventured] to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, by
testing, by signs, and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by an
outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God
did for you in Egypt before your eyes.”
Then in verse 35, “Unto thee it was shown, that though might know that
the LORD, he is God; there is none else beside Him. [36] Our of heaven He made
you hear His voice, that He might instruct you; and upon earth He showed you
His great fire, and you heard His words out of the midst of the fire.” History, their faith was rooted in history.
Joshua 24:1, Joshua’s farewell address, the last words that he wants the
people to remember and what does he do in Joshua 24? He gives them a history lesson. Of all the things for a funeral sermon, a
history lesson. That’s what he did, he
recites history. We won’t look at the
whole thing but we’ll look at a few verses.
Verse 3, it talks about, “Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the
river of old time,” that’s the other side of the Tigris-Euphrates, “Terah, the
father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor; and they served other gods, [3] And
I took your father, Abraham, from the other side of the river and led him
throughout all the land of Canaan, and multiplied his seed, and gave him
Isaac. [4] And I gave unto Isaac, Jacob
and Esau. And I gave unto Esau…” etc.
Verse 5, “I sent Moses also, and Aaron, and I plagued Egypt, according
to that which I did among them; and afterward I brought you out. [6] And I
brought your fathers out of Egypt, and ye came unto the sea, and the Egyptians
pursued after your fathers with chariots and horsemen unto the Red Sea. [7] And
when they cried unto the LORD, He put darkness between you and the Egyptians,
and brought the sea upon them, and covered them, and your eyes have seen what I
have done in Egypt; and ye dwelt in the wilderness a long season” and so on and
so on. See all the history. Then in verse 9 he’s relating more up to date
history.
Nehemiah 9, again what does God tell the people to do? Where is God’s testimony? In how you feel, or in objective historic
fact. Verse 6, “Thou, even Thou, are
LORD alone; Thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host,”
see, he starts with creation, he says God “has made heaven, the heaven of
heavens, all their host, the earth, and all things that are in it, the seas,
and all that is in them, and Thou preserved them all; and the host of heaven
worships Thee.” Verse 7 he goes to the
next thing, “Thou art the LORD, the God who did choose Abram, and brought him
forth out of Ur of the Chaldeans, and gave him the name of Abraham. [8] And
found his heart faithful before Thee, and made a covenant with him to give the
land ….” And it goes on and on and on
and on. Verse 22 it’s talking about the conquest of the land. So what happened? Nehemiah asked the people to believe on the
basis of not how they feel but on the basis of objective history.
Turn to Luke; Luke may have been a Jew but if he wasn’t at least he was
imbued with the Jewish mentality, and what does he say in the first four verses
of his Gospel? “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a
declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, [2] Even
as they delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and
ministers of the word; [3] It seemed good to me also, having had perfect
understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order,
most excellent Theophilus, [4] That you might know the certainty of those
things, wherein thou has been instructed.”
That you might know what? “the
certainty of those things.” And what is
the Gospel of Luke? History, one historic act after another.
Turn to Acts, also written by Luke.
Again, trying to have people believe not on the basis of how they feel,
but on the basis of what is truth.
There’s a reason for this. Your
emotions aren’t the same each day, they go up or they go down. If your faith is going to be grounded on your
emotions your faith is going to go up and down each day. What are you going to do when you hit a bad
trial and if your faith is built on your emotions your emotions are way down,
how are you going to meet it, if your faith is a product of your emotion. You’re never going to meet it; the only way
you can meet the pressures of life is to have your faith ground on something
that’s not going to be down tomorrow.
Acts 1:3, how did Jesus give evidences for faith so people might
believe? “To whom also He showed Himself
alive after His passion by many infallible proofs, being seen by them forty
days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” What did
Jesus Christ provide? Evidence!
Evidence!!!
Acts 7:2, Stephen, trying to get the people to believe, and what does he
do to try to get the people to believe: he gives them a history lesson on
historic evidences. “And he said, Men,
brethren, and fathers, hearken: The God of glory appeared unto our father,
Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran, [3] And said
unto him, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the
land which I shall show thee,” and he goes all over the history again. Why is this so? To get us to put our faith on what happened
in history, not on what happens in here.
It doesn’t matter what happens in your heart, the issue is what happens
in history.
1 Corinthians 15, dealing with grief, and where does the Bible put the
emphasis. Greeks are different than
Jewish people in their thinking, so does the base of the faith change just
because you are the Greeks? What does he
say? Verse 3, “For I delivered unto you
first of all that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins
according to the scriptures, [4] And that He was buried, and that He rose again
the third day according to the scriptures; [5] And that he was seen of Cephas,
then of the twelve. [6] After that, he was seen of about five hundred brethren
at once,” now why did he go through all that?
To give evidences so you can believe.
Your faith cannot be grounded on all this mishmash of emotionalism that
trots around in the name of fundamentalism.
It is not fundamentalism.
Back to David now, that’s the faith we’re talking about. So when David says, [22] “O LORD God; there
is none beside You,” he is thinking just like a Jew, he’s thinking on the basis
of what God has demonstrated historically to me. On that basis, I make the conclusion that God
is the kind of God He is. That’s why he
says in verse 24, at the end of his praise section, “For You have confirmed” or
“set up for Thyself Your people, Israel, to be a people unto You forever; and
Thou, LORD, have become their God.” What
David has done is he has taken the Abrahamic Covenant as the words of God. He’s, as it were, drawn a triangle, and he’s
saying it all started with Abraham, but inside the Abrahamic Covenant here I
am, and now we have the Davidic Covenant, the Davidic Covenant operating inside
the framework of the Abrahamic Covenant.
Here are the words, and all of these things are the works; the words and
the works, that is how the Christian faith ought always to be presented. Don’t walk up to somebody and testify that
you accepted Jesus and He changed your life.
It’s an insufficient statement; people do lots of things to change their
lives, they take pills and they change their lives, all sorts of things. Don’t do that, go back to the doctrines of
the Word and tell them; you’ve got to clarify with any person you’re talking to
about the Lord Jesus Christ at least four areas and it may take months on a
personal basis, don’t think in terms of quick decisions. You have got to teach them who and what God
is; that means you have got to know the doctrine of divine essence, God’s
attributes, what God is and what God is not.
And make sure the person understands first what God we’re talking about
it, and to do that what event are you going to use to deal with showing most
clearly who God is? Doctrine of
creation; only if you have a literal creation do you have God separate from the
universe. Are you going to go to some
sort of theistic evolutionary mishmash, you’ve got an “it,” and its don’t save
people. So you’ve got to have the God of
the Bible. So that means you’ve got to
start with creation. I was always taught
stay away from Genesis because somebody might ask a question and you’d get sidetracked in a discussion. Well
if someone has a question about Genesis you’re not going to lead them to Christ
unless they’re straightened out, unless they can trust and relax with it.
Second thing that you’re going to have to make straight to someone; not
only are you going to have to make straight what God is but you’re going to
have to make straight what the problem is: sin.
And here you’d better major on something that you don’t leave the
impression that sin is some sort of guilt feeling, that it’s some sort of
phychological illness that is going around.
Sin may never even be sensed by the person you’re talking to, they may be
so tubed out that their conscience is about that big, they have no sense of
sin. But you ought to clarify that this
is a legal problem between them and God, it doesn’t matter how they feel.
The third thing you have got to show them is the solution for sin by not
Jesus, by the Lord Jesus Christ who died outside the walls of Jerusalem 19
centuries ago on a wooden cross put there by Roman soldiers. And if necessary go into all the little
details. Get away from just talking
about Jesus because that word has lost its content. You can talk about Jesus and it means one
thing to you and 8 things to the other person.
It doesn’t mean a thing because somebody talks about Jesus. Jesus was a common name in the ancient world,
just as common as John and lots of people were named Jesus. So Jesus doesn’t tell anything, it’s the Lord
Jesus Christ and then you point out the matter of appropriation by faith. But you’ve got to clarify these things and I
would hope that more of you personally witness.
I want you to witness, I’m not trying to quell personal evangelism in
this congregation, I just don’t’ want you to do a sloppy job.
So let’s turn back to verse 25 and see how David ended this marvelous
prayer. First he praised God for what
God gave him. And you have seen how
David is very acute and all of this comes to mind over and over and over
again. The first year I came here people
said because I knocked emotions therefore… and they’d people are naturally
emotional, go to football games, the football players themselves get
excited. That’s true but there’s one man
on the field that can’t get excited and that’s the quarterback; his hormones
are going like everybody else’s but the quarterback has to think; a quarterback
that’s doing his job is emotional, he’s keyed up, he’s tense, but all the time
he’s thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking.
That’s the kind of mentality we have to have as Christians in our
spiritual combat. You can become
emotional, there’s nothing wrong with that, but when you allow your emotions to
fog your reason, you are out of it.
Notice all during this, David is very emotional, verse 22 is the height
of his emotion, but all during the intense emotion of being totally overwhelmed
by God, David is thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, he’s got his
categories, he never lets go of them, even under that kind of a situation.
Now verse 25, and this is an amazing section, because most Christians
would stop at verse 25, oh thank you God, that’s really great, and move
on. And yet if you remember the Psalm
series we learned a very interesting principle in God’s Word. Things that God sovereignly promises always
still are appropriated by individual choice.
God does not automatically, irrespective of your response, give you what
He’s sovereignly decreed. Now because He
sovereignly decrees it, He’s certainly going to give it to you, I’m not saying
that. But when it comes to you it will
always be by means of a free decision on your part. Think of the virgin Mary, a classic
illustration of this; that girl did absolutely nothing to have that baby, could
do nothing, absolutely helpless, and God says you are going to become pregnant.
There’s nothing that she could do, physically or any other way, that Jewish
girl, but she did do one thing and that’s recorded in the Gospels, she said
“let it be according to Thy will, O God.”
That was Mary saying yes Lord, You have said this is going to happen and
I respond to it. There has to always be
an individual response.
Now watch this, verse 25, “And now, O LORD God, the word that Thou hast spoken
concerning they servant, and concerning his house, establish it forever, and do
as Thou hast said.” See, it looks like
it’s automatic, up to verse 24, it looks like yeah, that’s great God, You’re
going to bless me, You’re going to make my kingdom stable, but when God
promises you something there always has to be a “Yes Lord.” That’s true of salvation. God in eternity knew the elect, but when the
salvation came to you, you may not remember exactly what it was or what the
circumstances were, there must have been a “yes Lord” in your heart; there must
have been a subjective response because that’s always the way God moves you; He
doesn’t program you like a machine, you’re not a computer that He whips out one
IBM card and shoves another one it. He
always approaches you face to face and says I’m going to do this for you, and
then He sits and He waits, waits for you to respond. Some of you are facing a lot of pressure in
various situations; some of you are in deep water, now God says and He promises
you an answer to every problem. That’s 1
Corinthians 10:13, Romans 8:28; 1 Peter 5:7.
Now God says that is yours, just like up to verse 24 He says David, this
is yours. But often the reason we don’t
actually experience what God promises us, we never go on to verse 25 and do
what David does. “Yes Lord, I want
it.” Now it sounds like the most obvious
thing to do, but I know it’s not obvious because of certain things that always
come up. Like, for example, the first
time I taught this was in the Psalm series, somebody came up and I can
understand how they felt because I felt that way before I studied this portion
of Psalms and that was, well I don’t understand what you’re teaching because
here, if you say God is going to do something, I just believe God is
omniscient, God is sovereign, so I let Him do it. No, you are made in the image of God and His
volition, and God expects you to act like a man, and part of acting like a man
is to receive it. He extends the gift
but He doesn’t put it in your hand. You have to reach out and get it in your
hand.
You can’t come to God with fists, you have to come to God with open
hands. And the reason He has us…, why do
we always go through the same thing, it seems like over and over He requires
this of us. Why does He send us to the
same school, same grade, same lesson over and over and over and over and
over? Having done this over and over and
over and over you wonder well, what is God’s purpose in it all? And suddenly it hit me, why God is repeating
it is He wants to get across the fact that grace can’t be received with
pride. And what forces us to turn over
the hands and open is humility, and you have to, before you open your fist and
turn them over, you have to admit that you need it and you want it. See, if God gave it to you automatically you
could say well, that’s real nice, You put it on there God, thank You, and move
on. But by forcing us to come to a line
of [not sure of word, may be: faith], turn your hands up and receive it, that
is an act on our part that announces we need grace. And that’s why verse 25 and following is
David’s acknowledgement, yes Lord, let it happen.
Then in verse 26, “And let Thy name be magnified forever,” and that’s
the attitude of receiving grace; you never receive grace just to get over your
difficulties; this is not just a psychological panacea. God wants you to
receive grace for His motives also. And
a lot of people scoff at this; they want Christ to come in and kind of fix the
plumbing in the house but they don’t want to come in and totally remodel. And so we have Christians that come to God
with closed fists, wanting God to just lay it on them; God doesn’t lay it on—open them, open them
and let Me give it to you on My terms, not yours, My terms. The size of the
package, the wrappings on the package are all Mine; you may not like it but
that’s the only time that you get this gift, I’ll give it to you but it’s My
gift completely to you. And you have no right
to take it back to the store and exchange it for another gift. [26, “And let
Thy name be magnified forever, saying, The LORD of hosts is God over Israel;
and let the house of thy servant, David, be established before Thee. [27] For
thou, O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, hast revealed to Thy servant, saying, I
will guild thee an house; therefore hath Thy servant found in his heart to pray
this prayer unto Thee.”
Let’s see how David winds up, verse 28, “And now, O Lord God, Thou art
that God, and Thy words are true, and Thou hast promised this goodness unto Thy
servant,” that’s the Davidic Covenant.
[29] “Therefore, now, let it please You,” that is the height of this
point that I’m making, the last verse that David prays, because the word
“please” is the Hebrew word to will, now isn’t this amazing. What David says is
“Lord, You give it to me, I turn my hands over, I open them to receive what You
have given, now be willing.” The
implication of verse 29 is God is not willing to give, even when He offers in
grace, as long as the fists are closed.
That’s the teaching of verse 29; God is not willing, He’s willing in a
large sense, yeah, He’s going to give it, but He’s not going to force it, He’s
going to sit there until the fists are opened, and we relax and we just accept
what He’s giving us.
[29, “Therefore, now, let it please Thee to bless the house of Thy
servant, that it may continue forever before Thee; for Thou, O Lord God, hast
spoken it; and with Thy blessing let the house of Thy servant be blessed
forever.”]
Next week we’ll deal with a new section of the book of Samuel.