This post is for the four friends who emailed me, asking why there were so many blog postings from the book of 1st Samuel and now none at all from the book of 2nd Samuel. Yes, those four people guessed correctly that I decided to continue my daily reading in the Old Testament history of Israel’s kings, and I’ve been reading in 2 Samuel for the past ten days or so.
One of the first things that stood out to me in this second book of Samuel is the importance that young David gives to discerning how to do things God’s way, and to making sure that he also does things in God’s timing. There are other stories in the Bible about people who had special promises from God, but then they blew it by rushing ahead of God’s timing; or perhaps they had a sense of God’s calling on their life, but they messed it up by trying to do God’s will in their own way. David didn’t make either of those mistakes.
You’ll remember that David was chosen and anointed to be the next king of Israel when he was just a young boy. But eighteen or twenty years went by, years when he was pursued and persecuted by King Saul, and it must have seemed to David that he had to wait a very long time for God’s promises to be fulfilled in his life. Perhaps few things are harder than getting a glimpse of your destiny and then having to live for years with the sense that it is always just out of reach. But now King Saul is dead, and the door seems wide open for David to become king at last.
David doesn’t jump at the first opportunity, however. What he does (see the first few verses of 2 Samuel chapter 2) is an indication that his dependence is on God and not on circumstances. He waited for a while after Saul’s death and then, “in the course of time,” he enquired of the Lord. Probably he waited patiently and respectfully (even though this might mean a risk that someone else would step up to fill Saul’s shoes) until he had a sense in his spirit that the timing might be right. Then He checked in with the Lord if he should make a move (go back to Judah) now, and God said yes. David now had the security of knowing that the timing was right. But he still didn’t move forward with his own understanding of what to do next. His next step was to ask God where he should go, and God told him to go to Hebron.
And so, confident that he now knew God’s way and God’s timing, David headed back to his own country again. But the end of this episode (verse 4) was that David became king of Judah. There was still even more waiting to be done, still some more battles ahead of him. It was to be another seven years before the rest of the tribes of Israel also welcomed him as their king. David was king of Judah for those seven years, and only later became king over the whole nation of Israel.
Sometimes God will give us a glimpse of our future, a little peek into the destiny that He has for our lives. It could be so easy to make the mistake of trying to grab hold of that destiny - especially if it involves some kind of role or positon - whenever a suitable opportunity comes along. But the principle we see at work here in David’s life is that sometimes the right thing to do is to step into a lesser or interim role, instead of immediately moving into the fullness of what God has promised us. That smaller role allows us to learn vital ministry skills while continuing to let God work on refining our character.
Some personality types will find this a difficult thing to do; they will feel as if they have fallen short of the things that God promised them. But if we cooperate with God’s way and also with His timing, we will be ready to enter into the fullness of our destiny and calling when the right time finally comes around. It’s God’s grace towards us that we have an interim period to “grow into” the role that He has called us to fulfill. That’s what happened with David, who continued to grow stronger for another seven years (2 Sam 3: 1) while others observed his progress from afar, and ultimately he was embraced as king over all Israel. (See the first few verses of 2 Samuel chapter 5.)
David was so young when he was chosen to be king, and he probably never expected that he would need to live through two and a half decades of waiting before things finally happened the way God had told him. But learning how to wait, and learning how to depend on God in the waiting time, were skills that served David for the rest of his life.
See the post below for another example of that.
