Word of Salvation – Vol.42 No.24 – June 1997

 

An Eternal Kingdom

 

A Sermon by Rev J Haverland

on 1 Chronicles 17:1-15

Scripture Readings: Psalm 89:1-4, 19-52

Suggested Hymns: PsH 277; 372; 399

 

Congregation,

One of the great themes that runs right through the whole of the Bible is the theme of the covenant – the relationship that God establishes with his people.  Now when you hear that word you will probably think of the covenant that God made with Abraham – to be his God and the God of his descendants after him.  And that’s natural that we should think of that because that is the one that runs right through the Scriptures, and that perhaps is the most central of all of the covenants.

But, in fact, there are a number of others: there was a covenant made with that righteous man Noah; and one made with the Priest Phineas; and the covenant made with Moses and the people of Israel as they were camped around Mt Sinai.

And then there is this covenant made with David.  Certainly the word covenant isn’t mentioned in this chapter, but Psalm 89 clearly refers to God’s promises in these terms.  This covenant with David is central to the whole book of Chronicles.  It is also often quoted in the New Testament where it is applied to the Lord Jesus Christ and to His eternal and glorious kingdom.

But let’s not jump ahead there too quickly.  First of all, we need to look at what this had to say to David and his son Solomon; then we need to look at what it had to say to the restored community that the author of Chronicles was writing to; and then we have to look at what it has to say to us living as New Testament believers today.

The previous chapters tell us how David had taken the Ark of the Covenant and brought it down to Jerusalem.  But then he reflected on the fact that the Ark of the Covenant was only in a tent while he lived in a palace of cedar – it seemed inappropriate to him.  So he spoke to Nathan about the plans he had for building a proper dwelling place for the ark.

Nathan initially encouraged him – it seemed the right thing to do.  But then he soon came back with a response from the Lord: “You want to build a house for the Lord but in fact the Lord wants to build a house for you.”  Now the Lord wasn’t thinking of a physical house.  David had quite a flashy palace already.  No, God was going to build a Kingdom for David.  The promises given to David relate to him and his Kingdom – the kingdom that God would establish for him.

This kingdom would have three characteristics: the first is that David’s kingdom was going to be Secure; secondly, it was going to be Spiritual; and thirdly, is was going to be Eternal.

1.  A SECURE KINGDOM (vss 9-10)

Let’s first consider the promise of a secure kingdom.  As we look at this we need to recognise that the kingdom of Israel had not always been secure.  You think back over the history of Israel up to this point.  Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had wandered around in the land of Canaan, living in tents, moving from place to place.  The only bit of land they owned was a small plot Abraham had bought as a burial place for his wife Sarah.  So they didn’t enjoy much security.

Then Jacob had gone down into Egypt where they stayed for 400 years – but they had been oppressed there.  When they moved back into the land of Canaan under Joshua and the judges, they were constantly harassed by the nations around them.  This continued during the reign of Saul who was always fighting off the Philistines.  But now, after all these years of insecurity, God promised David a secure Land.  Vs.9: “And I will provide a place for my people Israel and will plant them so they can have a home of their own and no longer be disturbed.  Wicked people will no longer oppress them as they did at the beginning.”

The image of planting suggests stability and security.  If you plant trees around your property you are thinking of long term.  Trees don’t come up in a year or two; no it takes 10, 15, 50 years for trees to be thoroughly established and to really mature.  When God spoke to David He was thinking long term, of the generations to come.  He was going to plant Israel in their land so that they would be firm and secure and safe from their enemies.

The image also suggests a settled condition.  God promised them “a home of their own.”  That’s a desire that most of us have, especially if you have been travelling around a lot.  Maybe you’ve gone away for two or three months on holidays and you’ve always been moving and you’ve been living out of a suitcase.  By the end of that time you long to get back home again with your own things around you – you long to settle down properly.  This is the situation God promised His people Israel.  To give them a home, a land that they could call their own, a settled condition.  These promises were fulfilled in the solid kingdom God gave to David and Solomon

New Testament Christians are also promised security, but not in the same way as God promised it to David and to Israel, because New Testament believers are not identified with a particular geographical place.  We don’t have one country that we say is our country.  Nor do we identify the kingdom or even the Church of God with a building of bricks and mortar, even though a building is useful and helpful for the worship of God’s people.  We are a pilgrim people; so our security is not political, or geographical, or physical.

Rather, it is a security that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ.  We belong to Him; and Jesus assures us that no one can snatch His sheep out of His hand.  We have security because we are looking, as the writer of Hebrews said, “To a city that has foundations, whose builder and architect is God” (11:10).  So, even as New Testament believers, we have a secure Kingdom.

Also on this point of a stable kingdom we should notice that David would be used to achieve this security for Israel.  God came to him through Nathan and said, “You’re not going to be the one that is going to build this temple.  That will be a job for your son Solomon.”  That was going to be a task that was most appropriate for a time of peace, a time where the kingdom had been established already, when Solomon could concentrate on great building projects without being distracted by wars.

David’s task was to secure the kingdom, to establish the borders, to make it the nation it was going to be by the time Solomon took the throne, David was a great soldier, a master of war.  That was his particular job, his special calling.  He wanted to build a temple, but God said, “No, you stick to the task I have given you.”

Now there is a lesson here for us as well.  We, too, are part of the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Kingdom of Christ there are different jobs and various tasks.  God has assigned to each one of us a particular place in His Kingdom.  You have yours and I have mine, Sometimes we might think we would like to be doing something else in the Kingdom; and maybe there are some possibilities for that at times.  But it may also be that God wants you to stick to the place that he has put you, to work in your calling with the gifts He has given you, in the time and the position and the place He has put you.  Serve God with all your might, as David did.  Serve Him to the best of your ability and to his Glory.

God promised Israel a secure Kingdom and he used David to set the borders of His kingdom.  Today, he promises us a secure place in the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, a place secured by Jesus Himself, a place in which you can serve the Lord.

2.  A SPIRITUAL KINGDOM

The second characteristic of this kingdom is that it is Spiritual.  In telling us this story, the Chronicler is interested in more than just the physical temple that Solomon was going to build.  He was interested in something that was going to be more enduring and more lasting that the temple.  In fact, by the time that the Chronicler wrote this book, the temple that Solomon had built had long been destroyed, burned to the ground by the Babylonian armies.  The temple that had been built in its place was only a poor replica of that original one.

But the Chronicler wasn’t primarily concerned with a temple of stone and silver and gold.  He wanted Israel to realise that God’s promises were not about a physical building or an earthly kingdom, but rather about a spiritual building and kingdom.

God wanted to enlarge David’s perspective, to broaden his vision, to stretch out his mind; God wanted to take him from the temporal to the eternal, from the physical to the spiritual; God wanted him to look past the material temple he wanted to build to the spiritual temple.  This temple would culminate in the Kingdom of Christ, a kingdom which Jesus said, as he was talking to Pilate, was a kingdom “not of this world”.  In other words, it was a kingdom that came from heaven and was planted into the hearts and minds of believers.  A spiritual kingdom.

This is a good reminder for us.  The kingdom of Christ today is not about bricks and mortar, not about plans and programmes, not about religious amusement parks and entertainment centres, it is about the rule of Christ in the hearts and minds and lives of His people, a reign that we seek to extend over every area and aspect of life in this world.

God Promised David, and us, a Secure kingdom, a Spiritual kingdom, and thirdly…  an Eternal Kingdom.

3.  AN ETERNAL KINGDOM

God promised David that He would place a descendant on his throne, one of his own sons, and that he was going to establish his Son’s throne forever.  The word “forever” is repeated again and again through this chapter.  This promise was fulfilled in David’s son Solomon; it was continued on in the United Kingdom; and then in the Southern Kingdom through the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, a kingdom that continued on for hundreds of years.

But then it came to a sudden end.  After years of warnings from the prophets the mighty Babylonian armies came across the sands and destroyed Jerusalem and razed the temple to the ground and carried the people of Judah away into exile.

That terrible conquest raised a question in the minds of the people of Judah: What has happened to the promises made to David?  God said to him; “I will establish His throne forever.”  Had God forgotten his promise?  Had He broken his covenant?  That was the agonising question in the mind of the writer of Psalm 89 in vss 38-39:

“But you have rejected, you have spumed, you have been very angry with your anointed one.  You have renounced the covenant with your servant and have defiled his crown in the dust.”

This was also the question of the restored community after the exile: What had happened to the promises of God?!  Remember that this book was written to them; it was addressed to the people of God struggling to survive in their land in the centuries following the exile.  As he wrote, the Chronicler had their turmoil in mind.  He wrote to answer their questions, to resolve their doubts, to instil some hope.

He had to explain to them that the promise God made was in part a conditional promise.  This point is not made explicit in this chapter.  But it’s there in the whole book of Chronicles and it is certainly there in the parallel promise which is recorded in 2 Samuel 7, and it is also there in Psalm 89.  In fact, all the promises God makes are conditional – conditional on faith and on the obedience of God’s people.  Every covenant has two sides, two parties.  Every covenant involves mutual responsibilities.  God makes promises to us and we have obligations to him.

God made promises to Solomon, but he did not fulfil the obligations he owed to God.  He was half hearted in his devotion to the Lord, unlike his father David who was wholehearted in his service.  The kings who followed Solomon were even less devoted to the Lord.

The post-exilic people knew that what had happened to Jerusalem and to the temple was part of the just judgment of God.  They knew that they deserved God’s judgment.  They knew exactly why things were the way they were.  The writer of Chronicles sums it all up for us at the end of his second book and gives us an analysis of why things happened: It happened because “all the leaders of the priests and the people became more and more unfaithful, following all the detestable practices of the nations and defiling the temple of the Lord.”

There is a warning for us here: We are reminded that the covenant involves obligations – no church or individual can assume that things are just going to go along smoothly forever regardless of what we do.  We cannot be complacent and just rest in the promises of God, because God’s promises involve responsibilities on our part.  We are called to faith and to obedience, and to perseverance.  Yet we must also realise that God’s covenant is unconditional, because from God’s side the covenant was absolute, his promises were going to be forever, his kingdom was going to be one that would continue on and on until eternity.

Those who failed to fulfil their obligations were judged, but the covenant continued; God still maintained His promise.  He never forsakes the works of his hands, and nothing, not even human sin, can undermine the promises and purposes of God.  The writer of Chronicles urged them not to forget this truth.  They were living in a day and age where it seemed to them that God had forgotten them, where the promises of God had lapsed.  There was no king on the throne of Israel in those post-exilic days, Israel did not have a secure place in the land; they were threatened by the nations and they were feeble and they were weak.

But, despite all this, they needed to take God at his word.  They were called to faith and to believe without actually seeing the fulfilment of God’s word.  They were called to believe that they were still the covenant people of God; that God was still the ruler of the nations; that God one day would give them another son of David who would sit on the throne of David forever.

From our New Testament perspective we know that all these promises were fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ.  It is the consistent witness of the New Testament that Jesus was the fulfilment of the covenant with David, that He was the heir of these promises and that he was the ultimate King of this kingdom.

In writing about this, the chronicler has a message for us living in these New Testament times.  As we have noted, our situation today is much like the situation of the Old Testament people of Israel in these postexilic times.  The application that he had for those people is the application that we need to draw out of this for ourselves.  For we too, need to live by faith in the promises of God.

That should be easier for us than it was for the people of Israel, because we have seen Jesus; seen Him with the eyes of faith through the testimony of the New Testament witnesses of the Lord Jesus Christ.  We have seen all these promises of the Old Testament come to fulfilment and come to expression in God’s Son, in the Messiah who came.  We have seen the fulfilment of the promise;

“I will be His father and he will be my Son;”
“I will set Him over my house and over my kingdom forever,
  His throne will be established forever.”

The New Testament writers see Jesus as the fulfilment of everything God had promised to David.  Again and again they go back to these promises because the New Testament affirms that Jesus has come, that He has risen and ascended; that he is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, seated on David’s throne.  He is the King of kings, the Lord of lords!  The King of all Glory!  The One who has been given the throne of David and his Kingdom forever!

As we look around us today we have to confess with the writer of Hebrews that we do not yet see everything subject to him.  But we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honour.

He has a kingdom that is secure, that you can be part of, working faithfully at your post of duty.  A kingdom that is spiritual.  A kingdom that is eternal.

You need to hold on to God’s great promises.

You need to believe that Jesus is indeed the Lord of his Kingdom.

You need to look with the eyes of faith at a kingdom that is growing and spreading through this world.  You need to hold on to the promise of God that the Kingdom of Christ will triumph and that the Lord Jesus will reign, because God has established His throne forever.

Amen.