As usual to start our time together I ask if the boys remember what we read yesterday. They search hard in their brains and remember Israelites coming out of Egypt. I ask who lead them out, and they finally remember Moses. Since their memory of the actual reading yesterday is not that great, I once again overzealously cover the history of Israel coming out of Egypt, all the way to the promised land the final time. I recap again what the message was about, and they half understand it. Good enough.
So moving on to today’s reading…
Again moving from Moses to David, I had to do a lot of talking about the history. After the Israelites finally get into the promised land and settle down, they do not live according to God’s commands. So we go through a whole lot of judges that God sends, but Israel still don’t live according to God’s commands. Then Israel sees other nations around them with kings, and asks for a king.
We briefly go through the short history of kings until David (there’s only Saul), and we get to King David. They boys know David for his great battle with Goliath. We read this story during our CM worship. In our children’s service we read directly from the Bible out loud, and this story was a powerful one full of drama that captivated most of the children. (I personally recommend all of you to read the story out loud with emotion – it is quite a powerful experience.)
Anyways, the children know David was a brave person with a lot of faith.
I reminded them that we also learned about how worship was so important to David. How he danced so hard that his clothes came off! They remember the Bible story of David and Michal that we also learned about during worship, and retell it as best as they can.
So with David’s heart for God and for worship in our minds, we start reading today’s passage.
This is the story of David wanting to build a temple for God, but God saying no, and actually in reverse giving him a great promise.
The promise is that David’s great great great …. great grand son will be a king that rules forever! God will establish his kingdom forever.
I ask if the boys know of any kingdom or nation that lasted forever. They try to think of kingdoms, even animal kingdoms, but no kingdom has lasted forever. (Even the dinosaur kingdom became extinct!)
Then I ask who they think is the promised king from David’s line. Evan answers King Solomon, which is a good guess. He is the son of David, but his kingdom did not last forever. I tell them after Solomon, Israel split into two- Northern Israel and Southern Judah. And unfortunately the boys don’t know any more kings in the Bible.
I tell them it is Jesus. Jesus is the great great great great…. great grand son of King David!
The great great grand son phrase clicked in Ian’s brain and he said, “Oh, so you mean David’s son got married and had a baby and then he grew up and got married… “ Yes, that is how David and Jesus are connected!
I try to bring the message to a close saying that God is giving a promise (covenant) that he will send the messiah, meaning the “Annointed One.” The people of Israel didn’t know anything about a messiah, and slowly God is revealing what that messiah is going to be like.
Tomorrow we will read more about those prophecies.
(For the short version read 2 Samuel 7:1-16.)