The Kingdom
II Samuel
David’s reign, his triumphs, and his fall
This is the account of David’s reign. Read it and see how God kept His word to David in the face of all opposition.
David becomes king
1:1–27 The death of Saul
2:1–4:12 David and Ish-bosheth
5:1–25 Victory over the Philistines
6:1–7:29 The Ark and the covenant
The bringing of the Ark to Jerusalem marks the historical beginning of Mount Zion being the place of God’s dwelling and manifestation. The prophets are going to use this in their prophecies as a symbol describing the day under Christ when men will live in God’s immediate presence.
Mount Zion — worth a pause
Zion was the stronghold David took from the Jebusites, and it was not much: a small, steep hill. He took it and lived in it, and then he brought the ark up and set it inside a tent he had pitched for it.
Notice what that tent was not. The tabernacle Moses built was still standing — at Gibeon, with its bronze altar and its priesthood and its curtain (1 Chronicles 16:39–40; 21:29). But the ark was not in it. For the length of David’s reign there were two places: a tabernacle at Gibeon with a curtain and no ark, and a plain tent on Zion with the ark and — so far as Scripture ever says — nothing hung in front of it. What it does describe there is singers appointed to minister before the ark continually (1 Chronicles 16:4–6, 37).
This is the one stretch of the Old Testament where the presence of God sat in the open. Not behind a veil. Not through a priest once a year. On a hill, in a tent, with the door of it toward whoever came.
And people came. Psalm 48 has kings gathering to look at this hill — and they look, and they are shaken, and they leave in a hurry, gripped like a woman in labour. They were not Israelites. They came, they saw, and it undid them. That is what an open door to God looked like from outside.
Then hold that beside the letter to the Hebrews, which sets Sinai and Zion side by side. Sinai was the mountain you could touch and must not — fenced, burning, and fatal to an animal that wandered onto it. Zion is the other thing entirely:
You have not come to something that you can feel, to a blazing fire, to darkness, to gloom, to a storm, to a trumpet’s blast, and to a voice… Instead, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to tens of thousands of angels joyfully gathered together and to the assembly of God’s firstborn children.
Read that slowly, because of what it does with the name. Hebrews calls the gathered people of God “Mount Zion”. The hill has become the assembly. Whatever David put in that tent, the New Testament says you have already come to it — the presence of God, immediately available and open, with nothing hanging in front of it.
The prophets take this up and never let it go; when they speak of Zion they are reaching for that open hill, not for a building. It is worth watching for as you read them.
Here too God makes the covenant with David, promising to bring about a descendant who will rule for ever. This was Jesus, who now rules on the throne of David in the heavens.
8:1–18 The victories of David
The court and family of David
9:1–13 The working out of the blood covenant — Mephibosheth
This is one of the most remarkable stories in the Old Testament, and it shadows God’s love toward us so closely that it is worth slowing right down.
Years before, when David was still a fugitive, he and Jonathan had cut a blood covenant. Part of that covenant was a promise that when David came to the throne he would show kindness to Jonathan’s family. 1 Samuel 20:14–17 · 20:42
Now David is king, and he asks the question the whole chapter turns on: is there anyone left of the house of Saul, that I may show him kindness for Jonathan’s sake?
There was one. Jonathan had a son named Mephibosheth, and he was crippled in both feet. On the day the news came that Saul and Jonathan had been killed, his nurse snatched him up to run, and in her hurry she dropped him. He was five years old. 4:4
He was living in a place called Lo-debar, which means something like no pasture — a nowhere on the far side of the Jordan. Out of sight, and no doubt intending to stay that way.
Think about what the summons to the palace must have felt like. When a new dynasty took a throne in that world, the surviving heirs of the old one were killed — every one of them, and as a matter of routine. Mephibosheth was the last claimant of Saul’s line. He had every reason to believe he was being sent for to die, and when he comes in he falls on his face and calls himself a dead dog.
And David gives him everything. All the land of Saul restored, servants to farm it, and a place at the king’s table — not as a guest, but continually, as one of the king’s own sons. The chapter ends by saying it twice, because it matters: he ate at the king’s table, and he was lame in both feet. 9:7 · 9:11–13
Now see yourself in it. Mephibosheth had no claim on David of his own. He had nothing to offer, he could not walk to the palace under his own power, and by every rule of the age he should have been executed rather than seated. His entire standing rested on a covenant made before he was born, between the king and a son the king loved.
That is our position exactly. We are not at the table because of anything in us. We are there because of a promise made between the Father and the Son — and when we are seated, the lameness does not disqualify us. It simply goes under the table.
10:1–12:31 War with Ammon
Ammon is in this portion of David’s life when he falls to his lowest, taking Bathsheba and having her husband Uriah murdered. At the end of this period he writes Psalms Psalm 51 and Psalm 32.
13:1–18:33 David and his sons
This contains the rebellion of Absalom. David is here reaping his loose upbringing of his family, which could explain the way in which he feels God is punishing him. Leaving the city of Jerusalem he wrote Psalm 3, from what was to be called the Garden of Gethsemane.
19:1–20:25 David’s return to Jerusalem
21:1–24:25 The appendix
The book does not end with the return. Six pieces are gathered at the close, out of chronological order, and they read like an editor setting down what he did not want lost: the three-year famine and the Gibeonites, four short accounts of Philistine giants, David’s song of deliverance, his last words, the roll of his mighty men — and the census he insists on taking against Joab’s advice, which costs seventy thousand lives and ends with David refusing to take the threshing floor of Araunah as a gift: “I won’t offer the Lord my God burnt sacrifices that cost me nothing” (24:24). That threshing floor is where the temple would be built.