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David's Kingdom - A Proper View

2 Samuel 5

Opening Prayer and Introduction

In the precious name of your son Jesus, amen.

You want to take your Bibles and turn to 2 Samuel chapter 5? We're not going to try to cover three chapters today, we're just going to do one. 2 Samuel chapter 5.

What drives you to your knees in prayer? What sort of situations cause you to cry out, I need thee. Oh, I need thee. Every hour, I need thee.

If you're like me, there are particular rhythms in life which remind you to pray. For me, it's before a meal or during family devotions or before bed with the kids or before bed with Andy. Corporately, we gather on Sundays and we pray together, and Tuesday nights serve as kind of the same sort of family devotion times, family rhythm times, where we get together and pray.

But those things, even as frequent as they may feel, still leave an awful lot of time when I'm not praying. And it can be easy in those in-between times, even for me as a pastor, somebody whose job, literally my job, is ministry of the word and prayer.

But when you're praying, it doesn't feel like you're doing anything. And so it can seem unimportant, and I can just forget about prayer, which in the end is a symptom of simply forgetting God.

The Structure and Purpose of 2 Samuel 5

The chapter before us here in 2 Samuel 5 is about God establishing David's throne in Jerusalem. And as I wrestled with this text this week, what's the center of the text is this obviously important historical event. What does this event have to teach us today, David's throne being established?

I was struck by how the narrator frames each of these happenings. Now maybe the first thing to point out in 2 Samuel 5, for those of you that have an eye for detail, is that the narrative in chapter 5 is not in chronological order.

Dale Ralph Davis, probably my favorite commentator on the books of Samuel, he says, The chapter is orderly, but not sequential. It is a collage, a collection of fragments intending to give us a proper view of the kingdom.

That phrase, orderly but not sequential, is important. If you're interested in the chronology here, there's five mini-units that make up chapter 5. Verses 1 through 5 describe David being received as the king by the united tribes of Israel. And this probably was the first thing that happened chronologically in this chapter. It sets up everything else that happens in chapter 5.

But probably the story that takes place next are actually the two stories of verses 17 to 25, David's interactions with the Philistines there, two battles. In those verses, David heads for the stronghold, the same one probably that he had gone to when he was running away from Saul in 1 Samuel, when the Philistines come to attack him, which would be unnecessary if he already possessed the city of Jerusalem, which was itself a stronghold, but wasn't someplace he went down to. He went up to Jerusalem, so the language wouldn't fit.

So it's likely, after he deals with the Philistine issue, that he's able to shift his focus to Jerusalem and attack the Jebusites in verses 6 through 10. And then the story of Hiram sending messengers and materials in verses 11 through 12 likely takes place towards the end of David's reign, because from what we can tell in history, Hiram's reign likely only overlapped with David's for the last 10 years of David's life. And then finally, verses 13 through 16 are more of an overarching statement covering all of David's reign in Jerusalem.

And this is important because you'll occasionally hear people point out these chronological discrepancies, either here in the