Lessons

The rest of David’s life from II Samuel 22 onward is another incredibly rich portion of Scripture. David extolled his Master and King in Psalm 18—how to overcome feelings of loneliness in the last days before death. 

•    Psalm 18 To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David the servant of the LORD, who spoke to the LORD the words of this song on the day that the LORD delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. And he said:

1.    This Psalm could be entitled: Embracing God—A Long Obedience in Seeking the Lord. 

2.    The words of this Psalm are recorded in God’s Word twice. Once at David’s coronation (probably Psalm 18) and then again at the close of his life (II Samuel 22:2-51)—it was like a way of saying that he wanted to start his career right and end it well for the Lord!  

To arrive at whatever destination you are headed, you just need to stay on course. David spent his life aimed at the Lord, and he ended well. Today, you can check on how you are doing at intentionally pointing your life God’s Way. This Psalm explains a checklist for a life that pleases God. Stay with me and see what God desires from your life and mine!

So, we can say that David ended well because his whole life was built around heading towards his eternal home. Each of us needs to soberly ask ourselves: what direction are we intentionally aiming our life?

Psalm 30 is titled that it is for a dedication. The NKJV, KJV, and NAS all translate it as a dedication of the “House of David”. But the ESV and NIV clarify what house is being referred to, by translating this superscript as the: “Dedication of the Temple”.

The Temple was on David’s heart and mind as a boy in Psalm 132, and as a man when he was told that his son would build the Temple, because of all the bloodshed David had experienced. So rather than being crushed to not build the House of the Lord, David prepared for that event with all his might.

As we open to Psalm 71, we have already seen how the whole Psalm is a portrait about how David looked at life through the lens of Scripture.

As we come to the ending of David’s life we are looking at another aspect of His life reflected in this Psalm.

David declares that he is going to speak out about the goodness of God to the end.

David Decided to Talk About God’s Goodness

David has learned to never stop talking about the goodness of God.

As we open to Psalm 18, we are entering the last days of David. No one else in Scripture has more space devoted to their life other than the Lord Himself. David is God’s object lesson to each of us on: how hard life can be, how much we can struggle, how greatly we can fail-and how incredibly God can use us.

As we will see in these 50 verses of David’s longest Psalm, David extolled the Lord as his Master and King.Psalm 18 shows us so clearly how David made it through a very long and difficult life, and then how he went on to overcome feelings of loneliness and uselessness in the waning years of life.

As we open to the inspired postscript to the life of David, we find that the Holy Spirit directed Paul to say amazing truths.

First, in Acts 13:22 Paul writes that David served God’s purpose in his own generation; then in v. 36 of the same chapter, Paul notes that David was the man after God’s own heart. That phrase is perhaps the best know New Testament description for David.

Being after God’s own heart is deep within all of our hopes for this life, but so often we wonder how. The combination of those two truths about David give us an inspired clue of what it takes to be after God’s own heart: to serve God’s purpose = to be after God’s own heart!

The 71st Psalm deals with some of the troubles common to living on planet Earth. For troubles are always with us-as Job said almost 5,000 years ago. Either we are just getting through some, in the middle of some, or headed into some.

Life is hard, as Job 5:7 says: (NKJV) “Yet man is born to trouble, As the sparks fly upward”. Those words come from what may be the oldest book of the Bible, written by Job, who lived just after the Flood at the end of the Ice Age.

Consequently, every day is an opportunity to either focus on ourselves-our troubles, problems, misfortunes, woes (and there will always be some)-or to focus on God and His plans, promises, purposes and faithfulness to guide our lives to the very end.

As we open to Psalm 3, we are seeing David’s response when bad things happen to him, especially when he is doing nothing wrong. The lesson is that when bad things happened in David’s life he looked for God for understanding.

For us the lesson is that when bad things happen to good people, they are to look to God for understanding.

We start at the last word of the superscript that appears just before the first verse.  That one word sets the tone for this period of David’s life we are examining. That one word in Psalm 3 that weighed heaviest on David appears at the end of the attribution line: A Psalm of David when he fled from Absalom his son.

When God describes a person’s life, He usually does so very succinctly and measures whether or not they served Him well. As we open to Acts 13, we are opening to God’s assessment that David lived life deliberately for what pleased God. David sought and followed what God wanted done in life, not what David wanted done. There are only two choices on the shelf of life: doing what pleases me, or what pleases God.

David’s life was summed up by the only One who can look at every moment of our life, from start to finish in one glance, and reduce us down to a statement. For David, that summary statement in mentioned by Paul in his sermon in Acts 13.

Lessons learned in the furnace of affliction often get etched deeply into our hearts and lives.

David learned a lesson in his hard times. That lesson was that life must be lived on purpose for God. Coasting, going along with the flow and living carelessly always leads to wasted life. David wanted to place and keep his trust in the Lord.

Don’t Waste Precious Life; Live Life Deliberately

We have come to the closing years of David’s life. David – whom we know more about than any other human recorded in God’s Word. Because God spends so much time capturing David’s life, seen through the lens of Scripture, we have more truth explained about each era of life we face, than in any other place.

There are four concluding eras, or stages through which David passes on his way to Heaven. Those are what we’ll walk though in the days ahead. First, let’s survey some of the nuggets of truth for each stage. These are:

Truths that Can Anchor our Lives

Life Lesson 1: As we open to Psalm 71, we will see God show us through David’s life: How to get ready for growing old in a godly way.  God has truths to anchor us in godliness through the closing days of our lives.

As we open to II Samuel 5, we are continuing our journey through the Life of David. David is one of the monumental personages in the Bible; only God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are discussed more than David in the Word of God. David wrote many words. If you count both his own writing of Psalms, and all of the others writing about his life, David’s mark is on 141 of the 1189 chapters; and on about 3,000 of the 31,103 verses in God’s Word. So among the myriads of words by and about David, one verse seems to capture his lifelong pursuit of God. Listen to Psalm 63:1:

        O God, You are my God;
         Early will I seek You; 
         My soul thirsts for You; 
         My flesh longs for You 
         In a dry and thirsty land 
         Where there is no water. 

As you open to the 132nd Psalm you are opening to God’s record of the life of David. We are not sure if David wrote this Psalm or if it was written about him, but we do see the powerful message it contains. 

This Psalm is one of a set of 15 called the Psalms of Ascents. These were Psalms for pilgrims walking up to Jerusalem for the three feats each year that God asked for them to celebrate: Passover/Unleavened Bread, First Fruits and Tabernacles (Exodus 23). There are also 15 broad steps leading up into the Temple Herod built, which also may have been the place that they Psalms were sung as they ascended into the House of the Lord. Whether both or either of these are the 15 steps or stops used, these Psalms are very much a part of the worship of the Lord. 

We are starting a look through the Scriptures at the most written about person in the Bible. Other than God the father, Son, and Spirit, there are more chapters recorded about David’s life than any other Biblical figure.

We know more about David than the New Testament church planting missionary Paul; and more than on the chief apostle Peter; and more than about father Abraham, or Daniel. God has chosen to give us David: examined from more directions, recorded in more situations, and captured in more passages than anyone else.

There are almost three thousand biographical portraits in the Bible. In fact, the Bible is the single greatest source of biographical information from antiquity. There are more different individual from a wider scope of history recorded in God’s Word than any other single source in the world.

Most of the lives recorded in the Bible are only mentioned by name, but some are very clearly examined and analyzed by God. Those deeply explained lives give us great reasons to pause and listen to what God may have to say about them. After all He took the time and went to all the effort to capture these portraits for us and then delivered them to us in a forever settled in Heaven book-the Bible.