This chapter has been a long time coming. Samuel anointed David in Bethlehem while he was still a boy with sheep to tend. The men of Judah anointed him again at Hebron, while Saul's house still held the rest of Israel. Now the elders of every tribe make the walk themselves and say what David has waited most of his adult life to hear: 1"We are your bone and flesh." This is his third anointing, and it comes after years of exile and betrayal and a war he never tried to win by force.
The elders' reason goes deeper. David was the strongest man in Israel and the giant-killer, but they reach past both facts to something older. They quote a word God had spoken years before: 2"You shall be shepherd of my people Israel." Their covenant at Hebron is a human ratification of a divine promise already given. God speaks first, and years later, sometimes long hard years later, the world comes around to what he said.
Then David does the unexpected. He goes after Jerusalem, a stronghold that has resisted Israel since Joshua, sitting on the seam between Judah and Benjamin. The Jebusites are so sure of their walls that they taunt him before the siege begins. 6"You will not come in here, but the blind and the lame will ward you off." They are wrong within the same chapter. A city no Israelite army had ever taken becomes 7"the city of David."
The narrator gives us tactics in a single verse and then reaches past them for the one sentence that explains everything: 10"the LORD, the God of hosts, was with him." David was cunning, and his men were brave, but the cause behind the palace, the alliance with Hiram, and the conquest is the LORD with him. David himself sees it. He 12"knew that the LORD had established him king over Israel," and that his kingdom was exalted 12"for the sake of his people Israel." The throne was given for other people's good.
But the chapter does not let anyone stay on the mountaintop. Almost without a pause the narrator moves from the conquest to the household. 13"David took more concubines and wives from Jerusalem," and more sons and daughters were born. No comment is attached, only a list of names. Yet Moses had already warned that a king "shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away" (Deuteronomy 17:17). The success that fills the chapter with triumph is quietly planting the seed of grief that will fill so many later chapters.
Greatness given by God does not make anyone immune to their own appetites. If anything, it gives them more room to grow. The growth of the household in this chapter is the first sign that David's kingdom will one day be threatened from inside.
Consider whatever recent success in your own life might be creating room for a weakness you have not yet seen. Give thanks that the LORD is with you, and then guard the one door that success tends to leave unlocked.
Prayer
Father, thank you for the patient years you gave David before you gave him a throne, and for choosing him long before the world agreed with you. Thank you that any advancement we have comes because you are with us. Guard us from letting the very gifts you give become the seedbed of our undoing. In Jesus' name, amen.