The Davidic Covenant
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m your host, Bryan Broome, and joining me today is Greg Uttinger. Emily Maxson is not with us today because she has just brought a new life into the world, so congratulations to her and David.
Today we’re talking about the Davidic covenant, so Greg, why don’t you start us off.
We’ve seen over the last several podcasts the Mosaic covenant unraveling. The ark is separated from the tabernacle. Israel’s bandage on the situation, a new king, has not worked so well. The priests are apostatized by and large, and most of the rest of them were slaughtered. Things have not been going well and it looks like God’s plans for Israel are going down the drain.
Then David comes along. God anoints David by his servant Samuel. David is on the run for many years fleeing Saul, who’s very jealous and vindictive. Saul dies and David comes to the throne of Judah, and then eventually to the throne of Israel.
We saw last time that he brings the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, to Mount Zion, with the idea of stabilizing and centralizing and combining God’s kingdom, God’s theocracy, and the monarchy. He knows he is not an absolute king, that he has some kind of relationship with God, in that God has anointed him. He’s a messiah of some sort, but God hasn’t specified exactly what that means yet, although David may have some suspicions.
Having defeated many of his enemies and having established some sort of peace, he thinks “The ark is in a tent. I’m in a palace. This is not the way things ought to be. I’m going to build God a palace.” He calls Nathan the prophet and says, “I’m going to build God a palace,” and Nathan says, “Thumbs up, good job, go for it.” And no sooner does Nathan get home than God says, “Whoa, red flag on the field. I didn’t say anything about that, so you go back and tell him, ‘Good intentions but you’re not the one.’” This is 2 Samuel 7. There’s a parallel passage in 1 Chronicles 17. Some of the language switches just a little bit.
God’s rationale for not letting David do it is, “You’re a man of blood. This is the task for a man of peace. It’s good that it was in your heart to do this, but it won’t be you who builds me a house. It will be your son.”
There’s some heavy typology going on here, so God just goes ahead and lays down his cards and says, “Look, let’s talk typology. Let’s talk covenant. You wanted to make me a house. Nice. No. I’m going to make you a house, a dynasty, a family that’s going to endure forever,” and that’s the key word in all of this.
First let’s look at what God actually says here. This is verse 11 of chapter 7 –
And as since the time that I commanded judges to be over my people Israel and have caused thee to rest from all thine enemies, also the Lord telleth thee that he will make thee an house. And when thy days be fulfilled and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels, and I will establish his kingdom.
He shall build an house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father and he shall be my son. If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men and with the stripes of the children of men. But my mercy shall not depart away from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away before thee. And thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee. Thy throne shall be established forever.
David is shocked, put into awe, taken aback, and goes back into the tabernacle that he’s established with the ark and sits down and praises God for all this. “How am I supposed to respond to this? This is just incredible. Your mercy is great,” and so on.
And now, O Lord God, thou art that God and thy words be true, and thou hast promised this goodness unto thy servant; therefore, now let it please thee to bless the house of thy servant, that it may continue forever before thee, for thou, O Lord God, hast spoken it and with thy blessing let the house of thy servant be blessed forever.
The things that are key here are, first of all, “your seed from your bowels.” We’ve seen seed before – seed of the woman, seed of Abraham, seed of Isaac and Jacob – so that immediately should stir up, “Wait, this is the same seed. This is the same promised deliverer, savior, hero that God’s been talking about.”
We knew he would come through the line of Judah. The fact that David’s anointed suggests that David will be the ancestor, but now we’re nailing it down. David indeed will be the ancestor of this messiah, this anointed king who’s coming.
Secondly, God adopts him as his son. “I will be his father and he shall be my son.” That can bear a couple meanings. Solomon will be God’s adopted son, but this points beyond that to someone else, and that will become clear as we go along.
Thine house and thy kingdom shall be established forever before thee. Thy throne shall be established forever…
It’s an everlasting kingdom, an everlasting reign. It’s an extension of what is begun here in David, but it’s going on forever. Then lastly and in connection with that –
This is where this started. Notice the one word we don’t get here is the word covenant. It doesn’t show up here. It will show up later, but that is in essence what we have here. God is swearing that he is going to do these things for David.
Let me pull back for a second and speak as a child of the 70s and cast this into what I think is a necessary light so that we can understand how important this is and how important the word forever really is.
As a child of the 70s I was reading theology books written in the 40s and 50s because they were relatively modern. One of the great arguments between Reformed Christians and broader evangelicals and fundamentalists was over the doctrines called dispensationalism, the idea that God deals with people in history in rather airtight compartments, where in each dispensation, economy, or whatever you want to call it, God is dealing with a different principle of obedience or different condition for blessing or something. The Jews were under law since Moses. With David we have this promise of kingdom. The Church is under grace, and so on.
One of the distinguishing marks of dispensationalism was the insistence that God had promised David a political kingdom over Israel, Canaan, and ultimately the whole world, and that this throne was a Jewish throne. It was the throne of David over Judah and Israel, and until Messiah came and sat on such a throne in Jerusalem, reigning over Israel in the land and ruling over the nations of the world from that particular throne, God’s promises weren’t fulfilled.
Reformed Presbyterian Christians pointedly said, “Matthew 28. Jesus ascends into heaven and says ‘All power is given to me in heaven and earth.’” Dispensationalists respond, “Yes, that’s all good and well, but that’s not in Jerusalem. That’s not David’s throne. Jesus is currently sitting with his Father in his throne, that is God’s throne, but he has not established his own throne, the throne of David. Until that happens – and it’s an earthly throne in a particular place geographically – the promises of the prophets about the great blessings that will come to the world can’t happen.”
Now, this is where this goes. “Because this is so, the kingship that the prophets speak of with regard to Messiah is a political kingship. It is an unfulfilled kingship. Jesus is not yet this king, so Jesus may be Lord of us spiritually, but he’s not king of anybody until he comes back.” Thus the expression that’s been common in evangelical circles, “Jesus our prophet, priest, and coming king.” Not everyone understands what that means. It’s a dispensational expression that means he’s not king yet. He will be king when he comes back. He can be Lord of your life but…
You can kind of still use that if you define it very carefully, because he does reign now, but clearly his kingdom has not been finalized on earth. But if you’re saying he doesn’t rule on earth at all, then you’ve rather missed the forest for the trees.
You want to say, “Our coming to victory king” or “Coming having conquered king”? Paul is very clear that Jesus reigns until he has put all his enemies under his feet, and the last enemy to be destroyed is death. He doesn’t qualify that as “He reigns until this, but then he switches thrones.”
You have to ask, how does stepping down from all power in heaven and earth to an earthly throne – how exactly is that a promotion? How is that not a humiliation, a step backward for him?
What is tied into all of this sort of tangentially but perhaps more strongly than is obvious is the whole doctrine of the pretribulation rapture. If God still has this thing he needs to do for Israel in the land with the throne of David, then God has two different plans. Jesus plays the lead role in both of them, but one has to do with the salvation of the Gentiles with the preaching of the gospel and a spiritual kingdom, which Jesus rules from heaven, if you can call it a kingdom. I think today probably most neo-dispensationalists would give you that. I don’t think they’re still stuck in the 40s, but at one time that was the doctrine.
Then God has another plan for Israel that is tied up with returning to the land, rebuilding the temple, reestablishing the throne of David and basically the Mosaic/Davidic economy, so that the prophecies of the prophets can be fulfilled.
For that to happen then – and here’s where it gets clever – if you turn to the more authoritative dispensational authors, whether it would be the top theological authors or the pop theological authors, they’ve now gotten to the point where they generally admit something. There is no text for pretribulation rapture. A rapture, catching up of the Church, to be sure. The last judgement, sure. Tribulation, at some point. But they will admit that there is not a specific text that you can point to that says, “Here’s where the pretribulation rapture is.”
They’ll give you a list of about 7-12 reasons that imply the need for a pretribulation rapture, and at the top of the list is God has two different plans, one for the Church and one for Israel. The only way that can be played out is to take the Church out of the equation, to remove her from the world so that the other plan can run its intended route to the end.
The dispensational system has always been very complicated, and it is a system. Everything is tied to everything.
Yeah, there are. I’ve occasionally opened books of them. They don’t do that much anymore, and we can be thankful for that, but there was a time in the 40s and 50s where there were just tons of diagrams. I remember seeing one of the statue in Daniel 2 that looked pretty good until you got to the toes, and the toes were stretched over 2,000 years because the Roman Empire had to come back.
So many things have to be revived in the dispensational system so they can literally take place. We need a literal Israel in a literal land with a literal temple, literal throne of David, literal Roman Empire to oppose it, and so on.
It really does feel like every distinguishing aspect of dispensationalism is – and I don’t mean this in the sense that it sounds like – but it’s very regressive in that it moves the clock backward on a lot. Not just on scriptural fulfillment, but also on history itself. Rome has to come back somehow in order for this to come into being. To me it doesn’t pass the smell test.
That’s just background to give our listeners an idea of why this is important, because what we’re going to talk about you can clearly establish from other parts of scripture without doubt. But I think it’s important to understand that it doesn’t just come out of nowhere in the New Testament, that it is very near the heart of the Old Testament, and that’s this forever-ness.
Here’s the thing. People don’t live forever. “All men die” – one of my favorite lines from the first Star Trek – but we do. So how can you have an eternal kingdom and an eternal king if everyone is dying? Who is this seed of David? Who is this son of David? Who is this messiah that he should be beyond death? It raises some serious questions.
You can say, “Well, God is the great king.” Yeah, but God in his own nature is not human so, no surprise, he can’t die but he also can’t do a lot of other things that are rather needful here. “Well, he’s just this really great human being like David.” David had his measure of sins and David died. 1 Kings tells us how David got decrepit and old and feeble and couldn’t get warm and he died.
It’s just further and further reconfirmation that even King David is beset by the curse.
And of course the great mystery of the Old Testament is who is this person? How can he be all he would need to be? And what exactly is he going to do to pull this off?
Yeah, which is of course the question Jesus raised to the Pharisees, and they had no answer because they assumed, “Well, we just need a great conqueror like Caesar, except it’s got to be Jewish, and that will fix everything.”
As long as the guy who is out conquering and pillaging is one of us, it’ll work out fine.
Yeah, that’ll fix everything, and they had never reckoned with the forever-ness, the non-death, the immortality that’s implied here. It can’t simply be that the king is immortal, although he must be for this to work. He must reign forever, but if his people are not also immortal he’s got a really shabby kingdom and it’s going to get very lonely.
That’s exactly what I was thinking of when you were talking about this earlier. What good is having an immortal king if his people are not also living forever? One of the things you see a lot in the medieval period and even the periods directly before it is that kings are somewhat judged according to the quality of their kingdom. If your kingdom is in disrepair, then what kind of king are you? So if your kingdom is consistently dying in every new generation, then what kind of immortal kingdom are you?
Your point about medieval thought forms is excellent and tracks through the mythologies and the legends, the Arthurian legend, for instance. The king is married to the people of the land. If the king fails, the land and the people suffer. If the king is doing what he’s supposed to do, then justice and peace and prosperity should prevail throughout the land.
That’s an echo of biblical thought forms, and as you read the Old Testament and particularly the prophets, it comes in really clear. The measure of the king is not simply that we have this great king and then die one by one and he lives on forever. That’s just not it.
Something you said at the start of this really started my brain working on this concept, which is for the Old Testament, for the citizen of national Israel, one of the things that brought you and your house glory was to have many children so that they could lay claim to the Promised Land. So the more kids you had, the more kids they could have, and the more land would be brought under your family name. Your name would echo down through the generations. So for David to be told, “Your son is going to sit on your throne forever and reign over the house of Jacob forever” is to essentially say, “Your name is going to continue forever.”
We’ve already mentioned our issues with dispensationalism, but one of the issues that dispensationalism takes is that regressive quality, where if Jesus is David’s son and David’s Lord at the same time, and he is reigning forever, and he’s reigning over everything – heaven and earth and the Promised Land included – then it really is a step backwards for him to relinquish any of that at all and to ignore the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecies about its culmination in the whole world.
Last week we talked about how the Davidic covenant was something that recognized the at least eventual enfolding of the Gentiles into the covenant of grace, into the covenant with God. For somebody to basically say, “Well, that’s kind of happening now, but it’s going to go back to the way it was after all the Gentiles and the believers have been taken away to heaven” is missing the plot quite literally, because the Bible is a story. And if we’re looking at it that way, it’s not a greater glory for you to lose a good chunk of your kingdom and call that victory.
Thank you, because that brings something to my mind in terms of all of this. The question becomes so why would this change take place, and there are only two answers because, as you say, God gave up and called it a day and went on to something else, or he actually expects to do better with a purely political kingdom backed by purely political and divine power. In other words, the gospel kind of failed. Yeah, there were these ideas of bringing in all the nations, “Go make disciples of all nations” and all that, but it didn’t really work.
Another dispensationalist slogan is “No kingdom without a king.” So if we put Jesus here on earth where he can see what’s going on and exercise his divine power directly and compel people to obey, then he will subdue the whole earth to righteousness, because people will obey or else.
There’s been one or two writers in the last few decades who have said, “That’s not even the kingdom of God. All that is is proof that there is no kingdom of God. The kingdom of God will not come. All we’ve got is eternity because even Jesus personally reigning on earth is not going to change people’s hearts, change the world’s hearts. The world is a lost cause. It was nice that God loved it and tried to save it, but basically God is going to fail no matter how he tries. All of this is just proof that we are incorrigible, unredeemable, unsavable. God will save a few people as he can, but he will not certainly keep his promises, which are purely outward promises for the most part because political power and miracles? Striking at people with lightning bolts from Jerusalem isn’t going to save anybody, although he could establish order for a little while.”
What’s interesting too is that when you talk with not all dispensationalists…
There’s about as many different flavors of dispensationalism as there are dispensationalists.
The newer brand are far more sensitive to the continuity of the two covenants, but they’re still kind of hung up on this Jewish/Gentile thing, because I think many of them have not thought through it. They respect their teachers. They respect the books they had to read in seminary. They respect their denominations and their institutions, as we all do, so we’re not being vicious here or mean-spirited. We’re kind of saying, “You guys, you’ve got a problem. You really should think about this a little bit more.”
Some of the crazier ones – and I don’t mind calling these crazy because they’re folks like John Hagee – he’s really the only one I’m thinking of at this moment – the books that he’s published on supposed biblical prophecy and blood moons and what not. He said something once about the reason that we even have the Church now is because Jesus did not come to earth in his earthly ministry or in his resurrection as the Messiah, but he’s going to do that later. He’s going to do that for the nation of Israel in the future.
I feel like there’s a softer version of that in the less crazy dispensationalists, which is to say that the Church exists because the Jewish people rejected Christ as Messiah and now he’s kind of moved on with the Church instead for now, because his people actually rejected him, without recognizing that that completely undercuts the foundation of Romans, of Galatians, of scripture in general.
And Hebrews. I appreciate them trying to make the gospel central to all that God’s doing. I just don’t think they’re managing it. As long as you have a fixation on Israel returning to the land and a rebuilt temple, you can’t have the gospel central. Those are contradictory things, as Hebrews tells us.
A little clumsy. What they’re trying to do is essentially, “Well, we really think that this new way of looking at things is the right way,” and the best of them actually try to base it on things that show up in the New Testament. The irony too, of course, is that they’re sticking very hard to this brand new tradition - it is brand new – and then also calling people who disagree with them traditionalists.
There was a thing where it was like “How to be a dispensationalist,” and this is not charitable towards dispensationalists, so don’t think I affirm this wholeheartedly, but it’s “How to be a dispensationalist. Step 1: Replace the long-held view of God’s people that has been held by the Church throughout most of Church history. Call the other side replacement theologians and fail to see the irony.”
It’s a new thing. It’s novel. It came into being in a very specific period of history which produced a lot of other movements that were similar to it in its accidents, if you will. If you’re going to hold to it consistently you also have to say that every Spirit-filled teacher in the Church for 1800 years before this came into being was being actively and successfully misled by Satan. Who else would do that?
And what some people may not realize is that the best Church historians among the dispensationalists do freely admit that this is a new perspective – not new in the sense that it wasn’t in the Bible, but new in the sense that it was lost almost immediately after the apostles’ deaths and was not revived until the mid-1800s. They admit that for 1800 years the Church had forgotten this, and that at a particular time and place it was rekindled. They would argue, “It’s in scripture and always was, but the Church completely missed this.”
That’s not something I would want to say about much of anything, and it’s strange that they are comfortable saying that.
The age you’re describing was an age of contradictions. On the one hand it was the rise of irrationalism, romanticism, spiritualism, the whole mass of cults you talked about. On the other hand, it was an age of German rationalism as well, where everything was brought to the bar of reason, including and especially scripture, and began throwing out anything that didn’t meet its demands.
“Oh, we’ve found new manuscripts and therefore all the old manuscripts that we’ve used for 1800 years go out the window because this is more rational.” The other side was saying, “Here’s a tradition that’s not a tradition and we’re going to make it one because we should have seen it and we didn’t for 1800 years.” There’s a lot of trying to go back to the fountain without good and sufficient cause, and in the process just ignoring God’s providence and sovereignty. “God let these things get lost. He may thank us now that we’ve restored them.” It’s dangerous ground to walk on.
Moving on, there are two other passages I want to read. One I mostly just want to read because, as I said, 2 Samuel doesn’t make use of the word covenant, but Psalm 89, which was written sometime later, does. It’s a time when Judah is in great tribulation and great distress, and the appeal is to God’s covenant with David. This is what it says. This is Psalm 89, beginning with verse 18 –
For the Lord is our defence; and the Holy One of Israel is our king. Then thou spakest in vision to thy holy one and saidst, I have laid help upon one that is mighty. I have exalted one chosen out of the people. I have found David my servant; with my holy oil have I anointed him, with whom my hand shall be established: mine arm also shall strengthen him.
The enemy shall not exact upon him; nor the son of wickedness afflict him. And I will beat down his foes before his face, and plague them that hate him. But my faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him: and in my name shall his horn be exalted.
I will set his hand also in the sea, and his right hand in the rivers. He shall cry unto me, Thou art my father, my God, and the rock of my salvation. Also I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth. My mercy will I keep for him for evermore, and my covenant shall stand fast with him.
His seed also will I make to endure forever, and his throne as the days of heaven. If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments; if they break my statutes, and keep not my commandments, then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes.
Nevertheless, my lovingkindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail. My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips. Once have I sworn by my holiness that I will not lie unto David. His seed shall endure forever, and his throne as the sun before me. It shall be established for ever as the moon, and as a faithful witness in heaven. Selah.
Then the psalmist goes off to try to contrast those great promises with the distress they’re going through at the moment. Like so many believers, “If Jesus is king, if God’s covenant is good, why are we in this mess?” Of course, that’s also a familiar dispensational argument. “If Jesus is king, then where is his kingdom?”
And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
So we’re getting clarity. The promise is to David, but it goes beyond David to his seed and seems to include sons who will not be all that obedient all the time, but it keeps going and going, and as we come to Gabriel here it seems pretty clear. “Yeah, all that was about this. This is the one. This is the one who will reign forever.”
The sons of David were adopted kings who had a special relationship of one sort or another with God. Some he chastened, some he blessed. Then the kingdom was lost during the captivity and hasn’t been restored, but now the one, the one who will reign forever has come. He’s about to be in your womb, Mary, and he’s going to reign forever. So we’re still left with, “Okay, what does that look like and how does this work?”
Now I’d like to go to Acts 2 because this one of the texts that Peter uses on the day of Pentecost to explain to Israel exactly what’s going on. It starts with, of course, the descent of the Spirit, the 120 disciples speaking in other languages and everyone hears them. Some are mocking saying they’re drunk and Peter says, “No, it’s too early in the morning. Good Jews don’t get drunk this early.”
But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel, and it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh.
And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
So those two things – “I’ll pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,” not just Israel, and whoever, not just Israel, who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. So what you’re seeing is the outpouring of the Spirit that the prophets spoke of, Joel being one of them, and wrapped up in that is God reaching out to the whole world, Gentiles as well as Jews, with his offer of salvation. Anyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. So we’re here. It’s happening.
But of course, and any good Jew would understand this, the fact that the Spirit has been poured out means Messiah has come. “Wait, you’re saying Messiah has come. Who? Where? What? Did we miss him?”
Ye men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain. Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.
So now we’re falling back on the ideas. We’re seeing the Davidic covenant here. He died. He really, really died. But God raised him because it was not possible for death to hold him. The question has to be, “What do you mean it’s not possible? All men die. He’s a man. He died. He died prematurely, was murdered, we get that, but he’s dead. And yes, we know that God has raised people up from the dead before, but they died again, so why are you saying it’s impossible for death to hold onto this Jesus? What’s going on here?”
For David speaketh concerning him, I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is on my right hand, that I should not be moved. Therefore did my heart rejoice, and my tongue was glad; moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope, because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.
His body will not begin to degenerate. So he’s going to die, but he’s not going to be dead very long, and he’s going to get better.
Thou hast made known to me the ways of life. Thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance.
David said that, but you know what? David is still dead, and that’s where Peter goes.
Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day.
So does scripture have a mistake? No, no. David is a prophet, and prophets – like poets and writers in general – can speak for someone else. They can become the voice of someone else. Here, David is speaking as the Messiah, as his greater son. It’s not just that the Holy Spirit overwhelmed him and put words in his mouth that came blurting out. There is a rational process here with David. David knows that God has sworn with an oath, which makes it a covenant. Peter says this –
Therefore, being a prophet and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne.
So David knew this. He took what God had sworn as being a covenant oath, so it was absolutely sure that of the fruit of his loins, out of his own genetic material, God was going to raise up the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One to sit on his throne – there’s the throne of David. So what is this and how is this?
He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.
So when David rationally contemplated this promise and meditated on it and thought through it as to what it would mean, he came to the conclusion, which he expressed in this psalm, that his greater son, this Messiah, this son of David, would not be held by death. He would die, but he would come back to life in such a way that he would sit on the throne of David and so fulfill the scripture that the Messiah will reign forever. He will taste of death and yet he’ll beat death. He will beat death by tasting death, and he will come back with some kind of resurrection life that’s not like anything the world had ever seen.
This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore, being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost…
So he fulfilled what the Father had of him and now he’s ascended to heaven. He’s at the Father’s right hand, so the throne of David must be the throne at the Father’s right hand. He’s poured out the Holy Spirit.
For David is not ascended into the heavens but he saith himself, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand until I make thy foes thy footstool. Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made the same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.
So there’s Peter’s interpretation of the throne of David. Why was it impossible for death to hold him? Because he’s righteous and he’s God. He’s going to submit to death, and the implication that Peter does not work out here but Paul works out in Romans is that, because he is righteous, death will not hold him. He comes back to life, having satisfied for our sins, having none of his own to worry about, and therefore he has a righteousness which he can give to us by outpouring his Spirit and bringing us to faith, and then sanctifying us and working grace in us.
Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.
“Repent of your sins and believe in Jesus and you’ll be forgiven, justified by faith. You’ll receive the indwelling Holy Spirit.”
For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off [there’s the whole world again], even as many as the Lord our God shall call.
What Peter is pulling together here is what our dispensationalist friends have tried to divide. The kingdom of David that lasts forever, with Jesus at the Father’s right hand saving the world. These are not two different things. This is the same thing. This is the plan. This is the way.
Exactly. Something that I was thinking of during this is that if you take the dispensationalists’ scheme, not their plot but their schema, if you will, you have here Peter explicitly drawing our attention to the throne that Christ is currently sitting on and the throne of David. They are one in the same. If the son of David is going to reign forever, there is not a gap. There’s no gap here. Christ has ascended into heaven and he is reigning now. He sits on the throne of David.
If you think that he’s not sitting on the throne of David, first Peter is directly contradicting that, and secondly you’re unable to say that Christ is reigning forever because you’ve introduced a stop in the middle. Right at the start he goes up and he sits down and then he apparently stands up again and goes, “Well actually, hang on. We’ve got to do some other stuff first and then we’ll get back to the real thing.”
That does leave a question as to what exactly happens in the dispensationalist scheme at the end of the millennium. Jesus comes and sits on the throne of David for 1,000 years…
And then goes where? Does he continue on the throne of David? Or does he ascend to heaven again? Or do the two merge? Whatever happens, you’re not going to find an explicit biblical text that tells you, because there isn’t one. You’re already out wandering in the darkness and just making things up as you go. It really is a problem. What is the nature of Jesus’ reign? What is the nature of this eternal life he has in himself?
Here is the syllogism, I suppose, although it’s not exactly syllogism. Death is the penalty for sin. If you want to beat death you have to beat sin. If someone has beat death it’s because he has beat sin. That is, he has atoned for it. He is a propitiation against God’s wrath. He’s reconciled sinners to God. He has done that which is necessary to ensure eternal life for his people, which is going to mean dying in their place. So to have an eternal kingdom, it has to have its foundation in shed blood, in atoning blood, in death, in the cross.
Slaying sin by the Messiah’s own death, and then he has to get over that. He has to come back to life or you don’t have a reigning king. But having come back to life, with a glory beyond what he manifested before then, and with the gift of the Spirit to pour out, now he can grant eternal life not just to a remnant in Israel but to the whole world. And that’s been the focus – he will reign forever and he will reign over the whole world.
That’s what this passage in Acts is about. “Pour out the Spirit among all flesh. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. The promise is to you and your children and to all that are afar off,” because Jesus is reigning in resurrection life and he has the sovereign Spirit who can give people life. He’s not going to fail. He’s not limited to external coercion. He’s not limited to political power and armies. He can do what no other king has ever been able to do. He can reach out and touch your heart and make you a new person.
That’s the kind of confidence we need if we’re going to go preach the gospel, because anything else is going to degenerate into manipulation real fast. “How can we get you to walk down the aisle and raise your hand?” After we try that for a few generations we give up and say, “Well, you know, it just didn’t work, did it.”
It’s in light of this that David writes some of his more triumphant psalms. I’m just going to read from a few of them, because to read all of them would take way too long.
Psalm 2 - I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.
Psalm 22 - All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the LORD and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee. For the kingdom is the LORD'S and he is the governor among the nations.
Psalm 72 - The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents. The kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. Yea, all kings shall fall down before him. All nations shall serve him.
Psalm 110 - The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool. The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion. Rule thou in the midst of thine enemies. Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power,
There’s the great promise of the gospel. It’s what God promised to Abraham. “In thee shall all nations be blessed.” So we get to end on a positive note.
The good news of the gospel is the victory over sin, and it isn’t limited to just your sin has been expunged and you have a clean slate. It is also that you are united to Christ. You are brought into his kingdom as a citizen, and if that kingdom isn’t in substance now then we’re sort of left in a weird limbo. We need the kingdom to be now if we’re going to have hope. It’s one of our many pieces of evidence that God has in fact defeated sin.
So with that, let’s move on to recommendations. I actually have two. You know what, I’m just going to say all three because the odds of me remembering the third one by our next session is low.
I have a food item tool/recommendation/appreciation, and that is we recently purchased a new pressure cooker, which has been phenomenal. We cook a whole chicken in it one day, we shred the chicken meat, and then we take those bones and ends of vegetables and water and we make stock from that, which then we use in a different soup recipe that we also make in the Instant Pot. The thing has been used just about every day since we got it.
It's really great for curries and stew. We’ve been making a lot of lentil things, because lentils are in vogue, but they’re also very good and good for you. So the Instant Pot is the first one.
Next is when we were talking about the Davidic covenant and what God tells David, you mentioned that just about everything is used here from older covenant establishment ceremonies, if you want to call them ceremonies, except for the word covenant.
Recently I’ve been looking more into the bifurcation of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, federal headship under Adam and federal headship under Christ. One of the things that opponents of this view that there’s a covenant of works, which for people listening who are not aware is the idea that when God created Adam and Eve he gave to them a command, and if they had followed through on the command it would have been meritorious for them. Their works would have been considered a good work on their own merit. Obviously Adam and Eve – and Adam specifically as the federal head – failed that and doomed the human race to misery and sin.
One of the things people say against this idea is, “Well, when God creates Adam and gives him the command, he never uses the word covenant, so we can’t call it a covenant.” I feel like this particular passage from David’s life is an excellent rebuttal because everyone recognizes that this is a covenant with David, and the word covenant never shows up there in that particular passage.
Not in that passage. It does show up in the Psalms, but it’s a later psalmist that uses it. This is the thing. I have been frustrated in the last week by certain persons who are beloved brothers in Christ, but who use similar arguments in certain other related areas and basically say, “If the word’s not there, it doesn’t count, and even if the word is there it doesn’t count because God’s not bound to using the same word the same way all the time.” That’s technically true, but the burden of proof is on you to show that God showed his usage.
Especially when the usage of the term covenant is very consistent throughout scripture.
And that’s the thing. The word covenant is what we’re bickering about because they say, “Yeah, throughout the whole Old Testament it meant one thing, more or less, but then when we get a new covenant it’s brand new so God can change it radically. It doesn’t have to be like all the old covenants because they’re old.”
It’s a nice way to kind of halt covenant theology, keep it in the Old Testament and not let it get into the New, because I think they have a sneaking suspicion. Well, they know what’s going to happen if they let it in. They’re just convinced that that’s somehow heretical and you shouldn’t do that.
Anyway, my recommendation is just to reaffirm the necessity of a view that includes the covenant of works. It is actually quite foundational to the Reformed confessions, to being Reformed. Obviously, as a Reformed person I would say that means it’s an integral part of being scripture.
I will tweak your definition just a little bit, because I’m very familiar with the attacks on that doctrine, and just kind of forestall it. When we say meritorious we mean God said, “If you do this, I will do this.” That’s the nature of the merit. God didn’t owe us anything. God gave us something. God graciously, mercifully, out of his overflowing abundant love and goodness gave us something with an instruction manual that basically said, “And don’t push this button.” All we had to do was not push the button, so in that sense God promised us something.
And if we do what he said, then it’s not a natural merit like we gave something to God he needed, but it is the fulfilling of what God has told us, something that is good and happy for us that should have made sense, that should have been perfectly good. But yes, our eternal destiny is conditioned upon doing or not doing that, and that’s the point.
If people want to argue over the word merit, let’s define our terms. I’m sure we can come up with a definition that will suit you. What bothers me far more is when they move to Jesus and say, “Yeah, and Jesus didn’t merit anything, either.”
No, he’s God. He is intrinsically meritorious. The Father loves him infinitely. That’s not up for argument. In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead. God looks at him and is well-pleased. God does consider him good, not a neutral quality that we can work with somehow. He overwhelmingly rejoices in his Son. So with regard to what he did for us, we absolutely must affirm the merits of Christ.
Yes, infinite goodness. So I’m affirming the covenant of works particularly because I’m under the impression that the covenant of works and covenant of grace dichotomy is sort of the Reformed grammar of the law/gospel distinction, which is more well-known as a Lutheran distinctive, or at least falsely stated to be a Lutheran exclusive. It’s not. It is also in the Reformed confessions.
And finally, the recommendation that is relevant to part of our discussion today is Vern Poythress’s excellent book called Understanding Dispensationalists, which I need to re-read 47 times because I get very confused, and I grew up dispensational.
Growing up dispensational doesn’t mean you understand it. My experience with dispensationalists is that they’re full of questions. “So is this the rapture? Okay, where do the killer bees come in? Is this before or after the tribulation?”
Yeah. They’ve been exposed to the sensationalism of it all, and unfortunately I think even when people have tried to diagram it for them, that doesn’t help because it’s so complicated.
No, it doesn’t because there’s 47 different items in the key to understand the chart. It’s sort of like looking at an IFB chart of church history and denominational history, and now it finally gets down to them and “We’re the right ones.”
Along those lines, I will recommend two older books, since you got a more recent one. They are both about covenant, but they both touch on eschatology and biblical prophecy as well. One is Israel and the New Covenant by a Canadian layman named Roderick Campbell. It was published at one point by Presbyterian Reformed publishing companies, and has been published by other people since. It’s a good introduction to biblical theology.
I think it is a little lacking in getting down to brass tacks and specifics at points, but it does address general concepts and general ideas about how to interpret scripture and covenant language and biblical imagery and typology. I think it will clear a lot of ground for people who are interested.
The second book is O. Palmer Robertson’s wonderful book Christ of the Covenants, which is more scholarly and more concrete in its language and deals with the mechanics of the covenants and how they interrelate with one another.
I think to understand eschatology you have to understand the covenants. I mean you can understand Jesus wins, okay, good. But if you want to understand how that is integrated with the rest of scripture, a good understanding of the covenants I think is essential.
At this point, I think this is probably the best introduction to covenant theology there is. There’s some older books, but I think this is recent enough and it deals explicitly with dispensationalism. It deals with some of the things that people were saying at least 20 years ago. There’s a constant change of vocabulary and issues, but if you want to get serious about understanding Reformed theology and particularly Reformed understanding of prophecy, this is a good place to start.
He's not going to tell you when the killer bees show up, but he will tell you about what the covenant with David was all about and how the new covenant wraps everything together and is the perfection of fulfillment and all that we need is Jesus. He preaches the gospel.
That book has been on my shelf for I don’t know how many years. I think I started it at one point and got distracted by something going on in my life, but I’ve heard at least a dozen different people that I’m loosely connected to recommend it and speak very highly of it. So based on that second-hand knowledge, I can also recommend that.
And we have a visitor, I think. Unfortunately for the rest of you, you did not get to see when Gretchen came and went, but she was here briefly and we smiled at her and she smiled back. Emily, do you want to say anything, or are you even hooked up? No, she’s not. But she’s smiling at you all and is basking in the joys of motherhood and recovery. Good to see you, Emily.
Thank you so much for this discussion. Thank you to our listeners for joining us. If you would like to follow us you can do so on YouTube or Rumble. You can follow our Facebook page, which is not super active at the moment. Also if you want to subscribe to us, you can do so through any of the podcast catchers that are out there.
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