About this sermon
Matthew calls Jesus the son of David. In 2 Samuel 7 the Lord promised David a son on his throne whose kingdom would never be taken away, as Saul’s was; Solomon was an immediate fulfillment. When David’s line seemed to fail, Psalm 89 asked where the Lord’s steadfast love to David had gone. Hebrews applies the promise “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son” to Jesus. The near fulfillment is eclipsed by the greater one: Christ, raised from the dead, reigns forever on David’s throne.
Sermon transcript
Reading from Matthew chapter 1, the genealogy. The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. Now verse 6, Jesse was the father of David the king. David was the father of Solomon by Bathsheba who had been the wife of Uriah. And then lastly, verse 17, so all the generations from Abraham to David are 14 generations. From David to the deportation to Babylon, 14 generations. And from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, 14 generations.
So ends the reading of God’s holy, inspired, inerrant word. May it be a blessing to us all here today. Amen. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for the beauty of this day. This day will not be beautiful unless you make good upon your promises to be with us by your Spirit and by your truth. And this, this practice, this activity, which is foolishness before the world, but which is mighty and powerful and glorious in heaven and glorious to your saints, to those who are believers in Christ.
We might even say to those who are knowers of Christ. For we know the Lord Jesus Christ. For to know Jesus Christ and to know you is to have eternal life. Bless us, O Father, in this, the preached word. In Jesus name we now pray. Amen. I would like to remind us of what we talked about last week because it is pertinent to what we’re going to talk about this week. But also it is the case that many people were gone last week and weren’t unable to be with us. Last week we read the entirety of Matthew’s genealogy and we looked very broadly at that. I pointed out to you last week the way that Matthew breaks this down.
He breaks down redemptive history or God’s story of redemption into 14 generations and then 14 generations and then 14 generations with each in between those 14 generations major portions or major eras of church history of the Old Testament, of redemptive history of the Old Testament. And what I put forward to you is that what Matthew is doing is proclaiming Jesus Christ to be the Sabbath and he is putting forward a literary week What he’s doing is taking 14-14-14, which comes to 7-7, 7-7, and 7-7. Six sevens. Six literary days, in a sense, before the Lord Jesus comes.
Well, while we looked at that last week and the way that Jesus is our Messiah and He’s the dawning of a new Sabbath day because Jesus in this literary week, He is the sinless one. We want to look not so broadly this week. We want to just focus in on what Matthew has to say. Some of the specifics of what he talks about.
You might look at the first verse where it says, the genealogy of Jesus, son of David, son of Abraham. Now last week, we wanted to look at this in the way that a first century Hebrew, a first century Jew would have read this gospel. equally so we want to do that today we want to see what it would mean for a first century jew to see jesus this messiah this christ this anointed one is son of david and so we look at that today David was a man who was in a covenant relationship with God.
Certainly all of us are in covenant relationship with God. We’re all either covenant breakers in Adam or we are covenant keepers in the Lord Jesus Christ. But within Old Testament redemptive history, certain people, God lays down covenants. Now a covenant is normally just an agreement between two people. They might shake hands or they might sign a paper to say that they are in covenant with one another. A married couple is in covenant with one another. They both agree to be so. But that’s not the way that biblical covenants work, at least in redemptive history. There’s no bartering or discussion. David’s not going to talk to God and talk about the stipulations and bargain. God comes and He lays down a covenant.
He says, this is the way it is going to be. Sometimes those covenants have burdens laid down upon the person, but there are rewards for obedience. And David must obey the Lord. But in this situation in which we find ourselves, 2 Samuel chapter 7, David has a little bit of peace. Understand, he is a man of blood. He is a man who has endured much war in his lifetime, but God gives him rest on all sides.
And he has some downtime, some free time. David is one who made good use of his free time, usually. When he was making good use of his free time, he’s praying and he’s writing Psalms to be used in the Old Covenant. So he’s thinking, what can I do? How can I serve the Lord? What can I do for him? He says, I’ve got a great idea. I want to build a house for the Lord. How can I live in a house or in a palace myself when the Lord lives in a tent? Now, how does the Lord live in a tent in the Old Covenant? The Lord lives in a tent in this way.
We must understand the Lord fills heaven and earth. Nothing can contain him. But the furniture of the Old Testament, particularly the Ark of the Covenant, that major piece of furniture that the Hebrew people took around with them for 40 years in the wilderness, It lives in a tent. That is a sign of God. God is with his people when that particular piece of furniture, the Ark of the Covenant, is with the people. God is with them, and they are with God. So Nathan, he says, sure. Sounds like a great idea.
Do whatever is in your heart. But it’s not long after that, it’s just later that night, that the Lord reveals himself to Nathan the prophet and he says, you need to tell my servant David a few things. First of all, you tell him he does not need to build a house for me. Have I asked for this? It certainly is an important lesson to learn that we do what God commands and not do what he has not commanded. God said, have I asked for that? Have I asked for you to build a house for me? No, I have not. And really God pours it on a bit saying, have I lacked anything while I have been living in a tent? Obviously the Lord, he lacks nothing. So I didn’t ask for it, and I have not lacked. And so the Lord kindly turns down David’s offer, doing it through Nathan the prophet. But never fear, David.
It is not as if the house of the Lord is never going to be built. The Lord will have a house built for him. And the Lord is going to build up David’s house as well. You see the grace of God here. Here’s this one who maybe somewhat misled, but had the right motive, says, I want to serve God in this way. I want to build him a house. David’s not asking for a house for himself, But the Lord in his grace and kindness says, you don’t need to do it, but I’m going to build up your house. That is what I am going to do. God’s grace, God’s kindness. But how is the Lord going to build the house of David?
It is in verse 12 where it begins to explain this and ultimately it’s going to be a family and a kingdom and a person, though it does come with a literal house at first. But God says to David, I’m going to give you a son. and he is going to sit on your throne. You’ll always have a son that’s going to sit on the throne. And I will not take away the kingdom from this son.
Now this is very important language for David to hear. He says, if this son of mine sins, it won’t be the case that God takes away the kingdom from him like he did to Saul. It’s important as we read God’s word, we read it in context. What happens to Saul? He sins and then the kingdom is taken away from him. He’s no longer the king of Israel because of the sins that he committed. Now, four chapters later, four chapters after 2 Samuel 7, David is going to sin. And we have that psalm of repentance, Psalm 51, where he says there, after having sinned, do not take your Holy Spirit from me.
It’s very important that he asks this, David. Some people would look at that, where David says, do not take your Holy Spirit from me, and they read it as if David is saying, do not take salvation from me. Do not take eternal life from me. There are people who say, who think that you can lose your salvation, and that’s a proof of it. Now there are others that would say, he’s praying that, but he’s just praying it in a hypothetical sense. He knows that once he is saved, he cannot be unsaved. See, to read it either one of those ways is to read that amiss.
That passage where he says, do not take your Holy Spirit from me, He’s saying, do not take your Holy Spirit from me as you did to Saul. You took the kingdom away from him. You took the spirit away from him. And he was molested by many types of spirits after that. And so David is saying, yes, I have sinned.
Please don’t let me lose the kingdom. That is the importance of what God is promising to David, that when David has a son and that son sins, God is not going to take the kingdom away from that one either. God is going to be merciful and gracious to that son. Undeserving mercy and grace is going to be his. David’s house, David’s throne, and David’s kingdom is going to be built up. That is the promise. that God gives.
Now we must understand that in a very real sense the Lord does fulfill this prophecy in Solomon. For Solomon does all the things that are promised here in a very real sense. You might go look at first Kings 5 through 8 where we have very careful descriptions of what Solomon does. Solomon builds the house of the Lord, and he also builds a palace for himself. He makes a deal with Hiram, one of the fellow kings, to get some of the wood and he builds it, and it is glorious.
You can read about it. There must have been nothing like it in all of the ancient Near Eastern world. I can’t imagine anything comparing to it. Sure, the pyramids must have been grand, many other temples to other gods, but this must have been something to see. The Lord fulfills it. God has been kind. setting a son to sit on his throne, giving him peace, building up David’s house.
But it’s not long after that that the kingdom is going to be divided. After Solomon passes, his son Rehoboam takes over, and he makes some very terrible youthful mistakes that end up splitting the whole kingdom. So we might explain just in broad strokes what goes on in our Bible. All of the Israelite nation, it is split up with Rehoboam, the literal son of Solomon. He’s in the south, and he rules in the southern kingdom. But above him is Jeroboam, Jeroboam was a wicked man who brought idolatry and worshiping false gods into the community.
And it is a split kingdom after that. All of the northern tribes, all of the kings are wicked. None of them is commended. but some, but not all, of the southern kings are commended for their righteousness and for their works and for their trust in the God of heaven and of earth. But what happens after that? The sinfulness of the northern kingdom spiraling out of control, the Assyrians come and take them away. The southern kingdom lasts a good while longer, but the righteousness of its kings, the righteousness of its sons of David, are not righteous enough. And eventually, generations later, the Babylonians come and take the southern kingdom away.
And so, what does that do to the prophecy? The prophecy is that a son is going to sit on the throne, fulfilled in Solomon, but there seems to be a continuation of it, or there should be a continuation of it forever, that always and forever God is going to have a son of David, maybe generation after generation after generation, but the sons have been unfaithful. God never took the kingdom away from Solomon, but he does take it away many generations from those who come after him. So what are we to do with this sort of conundrum? God says a son’s going to sit forever, and a son is not sitting on that throne during the time of the exporting the exile to Babylon.
It was right in the Old Testament for the covenant people to complain to the Lord, not against Him, but to complain to Him on the basis of things that He has promised but has not yet fulfilled. To pray and to pour yourself out and say, Lord, You promised this, this, and this, and You have not brought it about. If you were to look and meditate upon Psalm 89, you see just such a one. The psalmist there, his name is Ethan the Ezraite.
And he complains to the Lord, he says, Lord, don’t you remember what you said? Don’t you remember what you promised? Psalm 89, 49 says, Lord, where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David? Remember, O Lord, how your servants are mocked and how I bear in my heart the insults of all the many nations with which your enemies mock, O Lord, with which they mock the footsteps of your anointed. You think, don’t you remember? Aren’t you going to be faithful to what you said?
He is reminding the Lord even before that, before verse 49 of Psalm 89 in 89 29 he recites the words back to God he recites the the promises that God gave he says I will establish his offspring that is David’s offspring forever and his throne as the days of the heavens God promised it and the psalmist says please Lord I I’m being mocked. Your people are being made fun of because you won’t make good upon your covenant promises.
Now the Psalm 89 has a heading, as I said, Ethan the Ezraite. Who is Ethan the Ezraite? You might think with the way that this psalm reads, Psalm 89, you might think that this is a psalm that was composed during the time of the Babylonian exile. But what are we to do with the headline that says, Ethan the Ezraite? Ethan the Ezraite is named one time in our Bible.
He’s named in 1 Kings chapter 4, right at the end. I believe it’s 31. You might be thinking, I know what happens in the early parts of 1 Kings. That does not sound like a Babylonian exile. Ethan the Ezraite is compared with Solomon because Solomon’s wisdom is being spoken of. And the writer of 1 Kings is saying Solomon was wise. He was even wiser than Ethan the Ezraite. What are we to do with that? Exile’s not coming until generations later when they’re taken off to Babylon.
Is it possible that Ethan the Ezraite is not a Babylonian exile? Is it possible that the writer of Psalm 89, Ethan the Ezraite, is the same Ethan the Ezraite who is compared with Solomon? That is to say, Ethan the Ezraite is a wise man, but oh Solomon, that is a wise man. Is it possible that Ethan the Ezraite was there compared to Solomon, continued to live, saw Solomon’s death, saw the rising of Rehoboam, his son, and then saw the splitting of the kingdom And then from that he writes this psalm.
As if the people are already in exile. Already in exile because the kingdom is split. It does not look like the promises that God gave to Solomon. It’s very possible. In fact, I believe it to be so. That this one, Ethan the Ezraite, lived that long so that he was able to see the splitting of the kingdom and the torments that must have come upon him when he saw this. God was under no covenant obligation to answer Ethan the Ezraite’s prayer right away. But God promises, therefore, it is going to happen. And so, it does happen.
We could say that Matthew answers Ethan the Ezraite’s prayer. He answers it in Matthew chapter one. Jesus, the genealogy of Jesus, son of David, son of Abraham. What are we to make of this? How are we to understand our Bible? The way that we ought to understand any prophecy is that God gives an immediate fulfillment And then he gives a long-term fulfillment. This is not all of his prophecies, but especially the covenantal ones. So what is the immediate fulfillment of 2 Samuel chapter 7?
It is Solomon in a very, very real way. But there is also that long-term fulfillment. We could say the eschatological fulfillment. Fancy word just means the end of days. And when Jesus comes, that is the beginning of the end of days. It is the dawning of the end, the eschaton, which is what that means.
We see this as we’ll see it next week with Abraham. Abraham has a promise that a son’s going to come. Immediate fulfillment, Isaac. Long-term fulfillment, the Lord Jesus Christ. Immediate fulfillment here, Solomon and his glorious kingdom and building up the house of David in that way. But the long-term fulfillment is that the Lord Jesus Christ is going to be that king Listen to what the writer to the Hebrews says. To prove that Jesus is great, to prove that Jesus is divine, that he’s superior to angels and eventually to the Old Testament law.
Hebrews 1.5. Just listen very carefully. You’ve heard this recently. For to which of the angels did God ever say, I will to be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.” Where have we read that? We read that in 2 Samuel chapter 7. The apostle who wrote Hebrews understands that ultimately the prophecies that are made in 2 Samuel chapter 7 are about the Lord Jesus Christ. What we have when we have Old Testament covenant prophecies with our immediate and long-term fulfillment, something I like to call the total eclipse of the sun.
But it’s different than a solar eclipse. You think of a solar eclipse, you see, the sun gets covered up by something else. The sun is there, but you can’t see it anymore. But what I want to say about Old Testament prophecies and the way that they’re fulfilled in Christ is it is a total eclipse of the sun in the sense that Solomon is there as the legitimate and true fulfillment until the Lord Jesus comes and he eclipses Solomon in all of his glory. The apostles understand that the glory of Solomon has been surpassed. The Lord Jesus Christ has come so that they wouldn’t even talk of Solomon. In Acts chapter 2 verse 30, Peter’s preaching, he says, David, being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of Christ.
Isn’t that significant? In Peter’s mind, in the Hebrew, the writer to the Hebrews mind, all of the Old Testament prophecies are about Jesus. They don’t even speak of the things that come before. It is about Christ. So what is the burden that is laid down upon the first century Jew who reads this, reads this genealogy of Matthew, which as I said last week, would be very offensive in many ways to a first century Jew.
Son of David. They know what that means. This one, Jesus the Christ, is God’s Son, the Messiah. If you read through the book of Matthew, it talks about the Son of David a lot. Many people call Jesus, Son of David. In closing, I’ll just mention a few of them to you. In Matthew chapter 12, a demon possessed man is healed by Jesus and the crowd wonders, is this the son of David? In Matthew chapter 15, a Canaanite woman says, son of David.
In Matthew chapter 20, two blind men call Jesus son of David. It doesn’t mean as much to us, but it meant a lot to a first century Jew. So if any first century Jew who is reading Matthew’s gospel from beginning to end, sees, son of David, son of David. It’s almost like these would be in bold and in 18 point font, son of David, every time he would read it. The crowds on the way to Jesus’ crucifixion before they knew he was going to be crucified, called him son of David. Hosanna to the son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. So who calls him son of David?
A blind woman, a dirty pig and lobster eating Gentile. Crowds of people. Matthew is an evangelist. hoping that people would come to believe that Jesus is the Christ. A Gentile woman knows Jesus is Son of David. A blind man knows. If a Gentile woman knows, and if a blind man or two blind men are able to see that this is the Son of David, Why do you not see that this is the son of David and David’s greater son?
That would be the implication of Matthew’s gospel. You have no excuse. Clearly this is the son that God has exalted. This clearly is the son who died for his people and was raised from the dead, as the Old Testament scriptures clearly foretold and clearly proclaimed. First century Hebrew would have no excuse And neither do we. May He be exalted in our hearts, because He is exalted outside of them. He is exalted in heaven, and His name is praised upon the earth. Let us pray.
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