Hope From the Word

Host (Male): Pastor Bill Luebkemann points out a fundamental difference between Christianity and the religions of the world.

Bill Luebkemann: Every religion in the world says that you have to somehow earn God's keep. You look back at the old religions of the Greeks and Romans and the different gods that they worshipped. They were always offering sacrifices. "Oh, there's a lightning storm. We have to appease the god." Or, "There is not enough rain. We have to appease some other god."

"Let's make an offering to your god and to my god because maybe your god is stronger than our god is, so we better cover all the bases and make offerings to all of them. We don't want any god up there to be ticked off." Paul even pointed out when he was in the one town, "You guys even have a statue here, an altar to the unknown god." Just covering their bases. And the Lord here, He works different than that. He says, "No, you don't have to do for me, I do for you."

Host (Male): As Christians, we've offered requests to God, and some were rejected. Maybe you found it difficult to understand why. Maybe the request was birthed out of a pure motive and it was an honest attempt to bless and honor God. Yet, He still said no, leaving you perplexed.

Today on Hope From the Word, Pastor Bill Luebkemann resumes his study of 2 Samuel, and in chapter 7, David has a godly desire to bless God's heart and build a house in the Lord's name. It was a good thing, born out of a good motive, but God said no. We'll see why today on the broadcast, which will help when God says no to us. Here's Pastor Bill.

Bill Luebkemann: I was reading today a quote from E.M. Bounds. It says, "Men"—and he means mankind—"are the method that God uses." He said the church, and he wrote this in the 1800s, "The church is looking for a few new methods, but God is looking for a few good men." Men is the method. The point was the church is looking for a method, and the method is us. It's people. It's the church, the body of Christ, believers, men and women.

And God says that here, in effect, to David: "The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you. Hey, you want to build a house for me? Great, but never mind. No thanks. I don't need that right now, but I'm going to make you—I've got a better deal—I'm going to make you into a house. And then, when your days are over, I'm going to raise up your offspring, who will come from your own body, and I'm going to establish his kingdom, and he's going to build the house for me."

Now, David found out at some later point, it says in 2 Chronicles, David is quoted as saying he knew why the Lord didn't allow him to build the house was because he had so much blood on his hands. And the Lord said, "Your son is going to be a man of peace." And the Lord didn't want the guy like David, who had so much blood on his hands, to also be the one building the house. At some point, David came to know that. I'm not sure if he knew it here; it seems like maybe he found that out later.

Maybe God was gracious and not telling him exactly the reason why. But he's almost like, "It doesn't matter, because I've got a better offer for you. And I'm going to make you into a house, and I'm going to raise up your offspring. Furthermore, his kingdom is going to reign; his kingdom is going to last forever. He's going to build a house for me. And I'll be his father, and he'll be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men, but my love will never be taken away from him."

That's a unique promise. There are a lot of people in the Bible that got off the beaten track with God, and it seems like they left him and he left them. If you look through the descendants of David, many of them got really messed up. But not Solomon, David's son who took the throne after him. Not that he didn't get messed up; Solomon got really messed up. He had 300 wives and 700 concubines, it is said.

His wives and concubines kept him very busy and tired, but besides that, also, they worshipped other gods. He married anyone he saw that he liked from anywhere that he saw. And they distracted him. He built, Solomon, David's son, actually built altars to false gods—gods of the Moabites, gods of the Ammonites. He built altars so that his wives could burn incense and worship their gods. They led him astray.

And God told Solomon, "Because you did this, I'm going to have to take the kingdom away from you. But because I made this promise to your old man, I'm not going to take it away from you, but your son is going to lose it." And Solomon's son, the kingdom was divided—Israel and Judah became separate kingdoms. God's extending a gracious promise here to David and also to his son. "When your son does wrong, I'm going to punish him, but my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you."

Also, see there, just a little confirmation that it was God that removed Saul because David kept saying, "I don't need to kill him. I don't need to do it. The Lord will take care of it." And the Lord did take care of it. And the Lord will take care of whatever our problems are also. "Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me. Your throne will be established forever." See, the Lord just took this whole thing around and said, "You want to do something for me? Never mind. I'm going to do something for you."

And it's kind of like when you look around today at different religions of the world, how all of them involve doing something to please God, except Christianity, where God does something for you. Every other religion in the world, you have to earn your keep. The Jehovah's Witnesses have to knock on enough doors because only 144,000 of the best Jehovah's Witnesses, they believe, are going to make it into the top heaven. So they have to keep working to get enough converts so they can be among the 144,000 of the best ones so they could get into the top heaven.

Since you never know how well everyone else is doing, or how many are going to come after you, you don't really have any choice but to keep working. Then what happens if you're one of the top 144,000 and you get into the top heaven, but then some other guy who lives after you gets more people converted? Can you lose your spot later? Every religion in the world says that you have to somehow earn God's keep. You look back at the old religions of the Greeks and Romans and the different gods that they worshipped. They were always offering sacrifices.

"Oh, there's a lightning storm. We have to appease the god." Or, "There is not enough rain. We have to appease some other god." "Let's make an offering to your god and to my god because maybe your god is stronger than our god is, so we better cover all the bases and make offerings to all of them. We don't want any god up there to be ticked off." Paul even pointed out when he was in the one town, "You guys even have a statue here, an altar to the unknown god." Just covering their bases.

So they have every base covered. "We even have an unknown god here, so just in case we missed someone, we got him covered too, so no god should be unhappy with us." And the Lord here, we can see from this conversation He's having with Nathan here, this message that He's giving to Nathan that's to be given to David, He works different than that. He says, "No, you don't have to do for me, I do for you. You don't need to earn your keep. I'm going to earn it for you. I'm going to pay the debt, pay the bill. I'm going to give all this stuff for you."

It's very nice that David wanted to build this house. You've got to give him credit. In his heart, he wanted to do something for God. Nothing wrong with that; that's a good thing. It just wasn't God's plan at this particular time for him to have a temple. It was God's plan that David's son would do it. But in the meantime, David was going to get to cash in on all these other promises. These were long-term promises. These were not things he was going to get that day.

"I'm going to raise up your son to take over." Hey, raising up a son, that's a long-term promise. "And after you die, he's going to get to build a house." That's a long-term promise. "And I'm never going to take away my love." All these promises were long-term promises. God didn't say, "You won the lottery. Where do you want me to deliver the armored car? It's on the way. Where should it park?" These promises were long-term promises that you're going to become well-known, that God was going to work through him, that his son would become great, that his son would get to cash in on this promise, and the Lord's love would never be taken away from his son either.

And his house and his kingdom would endure forever. Part of that was fulfilled through the son, Solomon, but part of it was fulfilled through Christ. Christ was descended from the line of David through Solomon also. And Solomon fulfilled part of it. Solomon did build the house, but it didn't last very long. Eventually, the Jews got carried away to Babylon, the house got destroyed. It got built again, then it got destroyed again, then it got built again. They're probably going to build it again someday over there.

They're talking about it. I don't know how close it is, but it's probably going to get built again someday. It seems to play a role in end-times prophecy. So it's not standing right now. Somebody's going to have to get their act together over there and put it together at some point. But Jesus was the long-term fulfillment of this. Actually, God is telling David here, "The Savior is going to come from your loins through Abraham, now through David." Abraham had lots of other children besides Isaac, and Isaac had more besides Jacob, and Jacob had 12 at least.

Here you have David, this descendant of Abraham, have spread out, broken out. If you look at the family tree, all different branches, and now the Lord is saying, "The one that Jesus is going to come out of, the Savior of the world, from Abraham is going to be through you." Quite a promise here. Quite the opposite of what David was asking for or wanting to do. Verse 18: "Then King David went in and sat before the Lord, and he said, 'Who am I?'" So David got this message, and I think the phrase we would say today is he was blown away by this.

Then King David went in and sat before the Lord, and he said, "Who am I, O Sovereign Lord, and what is my family that you have brought me this far? And as if this were not enough in your sight, O Sovereign Lord, you have also spoken about the future of the house of your servant. Is this your usual way of dealing with man, O Sovereign Lord? What more can David say to you? For you know your servant, O Sovereign Lord. For the sake of your word and according to your will, you have done this great thing and made it known to your servant."

So we see here, David just comes in and sits down in the Lord's presence, and he prays this prayer starting out with—he just lays it all on the line—"Who am I, and what is my family?" In other words, you see a guy here, he's not saying, "Well, it's about time you realize what a great guy I am, God. And I've been sitting around for a long time expecting to cash in on your promises, and I can't believe it took you this long." You see here humility. You see that he knows who he is. When he says, "Who am I, and what is my family?" he knows. He's a shepherd.

He was the youngest. He was from a family that basically had no name. They were nobodies. They were average people. "And why do I get to be treated in this way?" seems to be what he's asking here. "What have I done to deserve this?" Humility here. He doesn't for a minute assume that he deserves anything. It's amazing today because so many people assume that they deserve everything from God. Very common to believe we're all going to go to heaven as long as we vote and pay our taxes.

"We're going to go to heaven, and God's going to give us—and God better give us everything we want and we ask for because, we're good people. We deserve it. We earned it. We're entitled to it," etc. And here we see a real good handle on this: David saying to the Lord, "Who am I? I'm a nobody." And you know what? We can say the same thing today. Who are we that we deserve what Jesus did for us?

"And as if this were not enough in your sight, O Sovereign Lord, you have also spoken about the future of the house of your servant. Is this your usual way of dealing with man, O Sovereign Lord?" In other words, if it wasn't enough, if what you did already wasn't enough—you've done so much to bring me to this point—you're even telling me about the future. It's more than I can almost stand, is what you see David saying here. "Is this your usual way of dealing with man?" In other words, you do this all the time, because I haven't heard of it happening to anyone else.

"What more can David say to you? For you know your servant." Look, again, you see humility here. He calls himself God's servant. "For the sake of your word and according to your will, you have done this great thing and made it known to your servant." In other words, he doesn't say because I earned it, because I deserved it. He doesn't say, "I'm really glad that you noticed how hard I've been working, and for the sake of my hard work, I've really worked hard to be deserving and to be entitled to this position."

Whenever you hear somebody today who thinks they're going to spend eternity in heaven with the Lord because they worked hard, because they deserved it, because they were good. "We're good people. I'm a good person. I pay my taxes—well, most of them anyway. I don't steal—well, not too much. Maybe a pencil from work or something." But God here does it all for us, not because of what we've done, but in spite of it. And because of His word and according to His will. And that's what this whole book is all about. It's about a God who made a promise and kept it.

It's about a God who put Adam in the garden and Eve and said, "Don't eat the fruit of the forbidden tree because if you do it, you'll die." And they did it, and they died spiritually. And now the whole rest of it's about God's plan to redeem them. And He could have just said, "That was a great experiment. I knew we shouldn't have done that. Let's just forget it." And He told Abraham way back when, "Through you, all the nations of the world will be blessed." He's telling David here, essentially, the Messiah, the Savior of the world, is going to come through his descendants.

And He's done everything, and He does everything simply because He said He would. He felt like it. He promised that He would. He gave His word, and He does it, and He carries through with it, unlike us. Unlike mankind, humankind, people, men and women, boys and girls, who oftentimes promise one thing and do another, don't carry through with their commitments or what have you. Make a promise with your fingers crossed and behind your back. "Oh, it doesn't count." God is so totally the opposite of that. He keeps His word.

And David recognizing that here and saying, "For the sake of your word and according to your will, you have done this great thing and made it known to your servant." Not for any other reason. You don't see anything at all here except humility. "How great you are, O Sovereign Lord. There is no one like you, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears." I just love that verse. There is no one like Him, and there is no God but Him.

I mean, who could be like God who gives so freely, so generously, so completely, and so totally of Himself to us? Everlasting life, and died on the cross for us, took the sin for all of mankind. There is no one like Him, and there is no God but Him. Every other god is a fake with a lowercase 'g' and an uppercase 'F'—fake, not real, pretend. "And who is like your people Israel, the one nation on earth that God went out to redeem as a people for himself and to make a name for himself and to perform great and awesome wonders by driving out nations and their gods from before your people, whom you redeemed from Egypt?"

"You have established your people Israel as your very own forever, and you, O Lord, have become their God." He says, "There's no other God but you. There's no one like you. And there's no other group of people so blessed than your chosen people, the nation of Israel, the one nation God set out to redeem for himself." Of course, it was through that nation that salvation came to all of mankind, and that today anyone who calls on the name of the Lord would be saved. Salvation, though, is from the Jews.

So in the Old Testament times, they had a lock on it. They were God's chosen people. They still are His chosen people, by the way. These promises here, God said "forever," and forever did not end yet. Some people say, "The Jews are no longer God's chosen people. He's done with them. They lost their chance. The church is really now the chosen people of God. Anywhere in the Bible where it says 'Jew' in a future tense, any of the unfulfilled promises where it talks about Israel," some people say you should cross that out and write "the church" in there, that it really is talking about the church, that the church is now spiritually Israel.

Well, I don't see how anybody can say that when God tells David here, "Your descendants forever." And I checked; forever hasn't ended yet. It's still going on. We're still within the time frame. We're not at the end of forever yet, and we never will be. Nowadays, the rest of us are blessed and we're redeemed, and we're able to go to heaven and spend eternity with God because Jesus came through the Jews. Because the Jews were the ones that were given what we're reading now, this Old Testament. It was given to them. They wrote it down.

They're the ones that took care of it for thousands of years before there even was such a thing as a church. Because of them, what an honor and a privilege they had to be looking after and tending to God's word for all those centuries. "There's no one like you," he says, "and there's no one like your people Israel. There's no other God but you, and you haven't blessed anyone else like you've blessed our nation," he says here. "And you perform great and awesome wonders. You drive out the nations."

And it didn't require great military strategy; it required God's strategy. And it was oftentimes unique and very different. March around Jericho once a day for six days, and on the seventh day march around seven times, blow the trumpet, and then the wall is going to fall down. What military commander would have ever planned it that way? And that is an awesome and great wonder. "You have established your people Israel as your very own forever"—we already milked that one to death—"and you, O Lord, have become their God. And now, Lord God, keep forever the promise you have made concerning your servant and his house. Do as you promised, so that your name will be great forever."

"Then men will say, 'The Lord Almighty is God over Israel.' And the house of your servant David will be established before you. O Lord Almighty, God of Israel, you have revealed this to your servant, saying, 'I will build a house for you.' So your servant has found courage to offer you this prayer. O Sovereign Lord, you are God. Your words are trustworthy, and you have promised these good things to your servant. Now be pleased to bless the house of your servant that it may continue forever in your sight. For you, O Sovereign Lord, have spoken, and with your blessing, the house of your servant will be blessed forever."

David concludes here by asking God to keep this promise. "Do what you promised to do," he said, "so that your name will be great forever, and so that the testimony will go out." He's asking God to keep His word. And he knows that if that happens, if God keeps His word—and of course He will—then the men are going to say, "Look at Israel. The Lord God, He's their God." And the testimony will be great—testimony to the Lord, testimony to the land of Israel. And he said here, "You revealed this to your servant."

Again, you see him just acknowledging over and over again his role as a servant, saying, "I will build a house for you." David wanting to build a house for Him. God's saying, "No. Tell you what, let me build you a house. I've already done all these other things. I'm going to build you a house now also." And David recognizing, "Your words are trustworthy, and you have promised these good things to your servant. Now be pleased to bless the house of your servant that it may continue forever in your sight. For you, O Sovereign Lord, have spoken, and with your blessing, the house of your servant will be blessed forever."

What a prayer here. We see here the intention of his heart. God is blessing the intention of his heart. He didn't actually do anything with this particular intention of building the house. He never built the house. It wasn't God's plan, but the Lord blessing David anyway because of his intention. Kind of like what happened with Solomon. When Solomon prayed for wisdom, and God said, "You know what? I'm going to give you the wisdom. And you know what? Since you didn't ask for material things, but instead you asked for wisdom, I'm going to give you the wisdom, and I'm going to throw the material things in at no extra charge, absolutely free."

And God said, "I'm going to give it all to you." Well, always giving more, and it seems like always honoring the intent. The intent there of Solomon was, "I want to be able to rule the people well, and I need wisdom to do it. So please give me wisdom." He got himself pretty messed up with 300 wives and 700 concubines. I don't know how that's even possible. But God kept His word, and God kept the word here to David. And David, just blown away. "Who am I? Why have I deserved what you've done for me?"

"But I'll take it." David's saying, in effect here, "I'll take it. No problem. You said it. I know you're good for it. I'm going to pray that you would continue to keep your word." And you know, that's another thing that we should keep in mind: always a good thing to pray in accordance with God's word. Because God wants us—look, you can have a defeated attitude and say, "You know what? God's going to do what He's going to do. There's no point in praying. He's either going to do it or He's not going to do it, and it doesn't matter whether I pray for it or not."

But He wants to do what He wants to do, and He wants us to pray to bring it about. He wants our involvement in it. He has a will. He's decided in this case what He's going to do. And yes, He likes it when you pray and ask Him to fulfill the promise that He made. And you can rest assured He'll do that, and you'll be a part of His plan.

Host (Male): You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in Pastor Bill Luebkemann's study of 2 Samuel. If you'd like to hear this message again, you have several options. Visit our website at ccmarlton.org and download the Hope FM app to your smartphone or tablet, or look for us wherever you find podcasts.

If you're thinking about visiting Calvary Chapel of Marlton, where Bill serves as pastor, we'd love to have you. Our service times are on Sunday mornings at 10:00. We also meet midweek on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM. You can also livestream from home when you visit our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton. For more information, go to ccmarlton.org. We hope to see you soon.

Before the day is done, we'd like to connect with you, share a praise report, prayer request, or what you're learning from this series. You can easily email us from our website, ccmarlton.org, or just call us at 856-983-1662. There's more to come from Bill's study of 2 Samuel, and we'll have that for you next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel of Marlton.