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A Son to Me

How do you get on God's good side? That is probably the most important question that a human being can ask. How do you get on God's good side? How do you make sure that God likes you, is okay with you, will tolerate you, will be pleased with you? The late writer A.W. Tozer once said that whatever you think of when you think about God is the most important thing about you. And in response to that, C.S. Lewis quipped, actually, what comes into God's mind when he thinks about you is of far more importance. So how do you make sure that when God thinks of you, he thinks happy things, that he's happy and not upset, that he's going to bless you and not crush you? That's an important question for human beings to ask. And it's a question that's addressed by our text here in 2 Samuel today.

First three verses of 2 Samuel 7 read this way. Now when the king lived in his house, and the Lord had given him rest from all his surrounding enemies, the king said to Nathan the prophet, See now, I dwell in a house of cedar, the ark of God dwells in its hands. And Nathan said to the king, Go, do all that is in your heart, for the Lord is with you. And David, he's sitting here in this house. 2 Samuel 5 tells us that Hiram, king of Tyre, had sent men and materials to build David a house. And now David's house is built. He's living in this house of cedar. And he looks out and he sees something that's incongruous. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit together. That here he, a human king, is in this beautiful palace. And there, the Ark of God, the symbol of God's presence with his people, is in a tent made out of curtains. How does that make sense?

And David thinks of himself, and he thinks, you know, who am I? I am a man who was just a boy out in a field, and God has brought him from the field, and he took him to the battlefield where he gave him great success, such that the king himself became jealous of David. And then David was on the run, but God delivered him from that and has now made him king and set him up. And it seems, actually, that this story here in 2 Samuel 7 says, takes place after chapter 8, maybe even at chapter 10, which are retellings of David's wars with the Philistines and the Moabites and Hadad-Ezer, the king of Zobah, and then the Ammonites, and on and on. We hear stories of David's battles in later chapters of 2 Samuel. And it seems that what's about to happen here in 2 Samuel 7 is so important that the author has said, I need to tell this story first. Because here David sits and he's got peace on every side. His wars are over. He's already dwelling securely. God has given him rest. And he's like, I'm at rest here in this beautiful house. But God dwells in a tent.

And David has a very human thought process at this point. I think his desire is right. like we should want to honor god more than we honor ourselves right and and so he wants to build god a house that's at least equal to the house that he's in that would make sense there's there's nothing wrong with that desire but it's also incredibly human in his process of how do i make sure god likes me if we look at The history of the ancient Near East, a thousand years before David, the Sumerians had a king who perceived himself to be blessed by his God. And his response to that was to build a temple for the God so that the God would keep liking him, would keep blessing him. A few hundred years before David, two different instances we have of Egyptian pharaohs who felt that they were blessed by their gods, and so they built great temples in hopes that the gods would keep blessing their family, their line of kings. And then a couple hundred years after David, we see the same thing with the Assyrians, where they feel like their god is blessing them, and so they build a temple i