| What I Can Learn From . . . , Part 7: David |
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| Written by David Lawrence |
| Monday, October 24 2005 00:00 |
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Mentioned more in Scripture than anyone except the Lord himself, David moves to center stage as a key player in God’s redemptive purposes and the history of His kingdom. As we saw from Saul, outward appearance is no determinant of success, of favor with God, or the likelihood of personal faithfulness. As Samuel told Jesse when he selected the youngest and least likely of his eight sons to be anointed king over Israel, “The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). David’s phenomenal success, not only in surviving the relentless attacks of Saul, capturing Jerusalem from the Jebusites as his new capital, but in extending Israel to control an inconceivable amount of territory stretching to the Euphrates River, showed clearly the providential hand of God in all that happened. His story, from the time he was a youth who brought down the Philistine giant Goliath with a single stone, to his time of death as the king of the most influential and powerful nation in the world at the time, is a clear testimony to the outworking of God’s eternal purpose rather than the cunning and prowess of David himself. We may learn from David, of course, how God’s covenant children may be caught in sin and suffer a grievous fall, for David deliberately violated three of God’s ten commandments and suffered due consequences. Yet David’s repentance and restoration are a clear example of how God takes the initiative in reclaiming His own when they have fallen into a deep pit of sin and cannot retrieve themselves. It was God who sent the prophet Nathan to awaken David to his sin. How comforting it is to us to realize that God will not allow any of his own little ones to perish or any of his sheep to stray too far; He will come after us. Contrary to the dismal, hopeless theology of those who claim that a true Christian can walk away from God and lose his salvation are the numerous examples of Scripture to the contrary, none more evident than God reaching out for his beloved David. |
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