Topic: The Path to Become King
In First Samuel God rejects Saul as king and sends the prophet Samuel to anoint a new king (1 Samuel 16:1, 12). This doesn’t mean that David immediately becomes king. Notice in First Samuel 16 that Samuel never tells David what the purpose of the anointing is. David is soon brought into Saul’s service, but there is no move to crown him. It is not until Second Samuel that we see David anointed king.
We are not told precisely how old David is when he is anointed by Samuel but our best guess is probably 12-15. He is young enough that he is not even brought before Samuel when he asks Jesse to put all his sons before him so we would tend to think of him as being seen as too young to matter in important things like that. I think 15 is a good guess. We know from Second Samuel 5:4 that David was 30 when he took over as king of Israel, so we’re looking at about 15 years. That is a long time, especially when you know that God could bring it all about in an instant. Of course, this is not an unusual occurrence in the Bible. The Patriarchs often find themselves dealing with lengthy waits.
- Abraham and Sarah waited on a promised son for 25 years.
- Noah took maybe 100 years to build the ark after God instructed him to do so.
- Moses was in exile for 40 years before God called him to lead Israel out of Egypt.
- There were 400 years between the Old Testament and New Testament.
For David to wait 15 years is comparatively not that long. This tells us God does not get in a
hurry the way that we do.
I think it can be said that David never presumed after being anointed by Samuel that “the next 15 years of my life are going to be one nightmare after another.” He would have thought good things were on the way. It’s difficult for us to accept that oftentimes being in the center of God’s will includes struggles and problems. We want God to make our lives easier. We want to live receiving abundant blessings. We want to see our problems vanquished.
David seems to have a near absolute trust that God would elevate him to kingship when He was ready. This is difficult for us to do. We try to “help God” move things along. Clearly, God needs our assistance because things aren’t progressing according to our schedule. We can see that the path to be king had many difficult steps. Even after becoming king David will go through trying times. One aspect we can learn from David is that there are no shortcuts in arriving at God’s purpose.
The glimmer of encouragement that one can take from David’s path to king, when I find myself struggling, I may be tempted to wonder, “Am I the only one who feels like this?” Or, “Am I the only one who wonders if God is ever going to show up?” Or, “I must have messed up something because surely God wouldn’t make me wait so long?” In those moments of struggle it is encouraging to know that I’m not the only one. This doesn’t take away the struggles, but it does help our minds to know that this is the way God works.
See you Sunday,
Dr. Scott Kallem