David: Zealot For God's House Series

INTRODUCTION

Earlier in today’s service I showed the video, ‘David the worshipper’ [Angel Studios]. I’ve really liked all the videos in this series but I especially liked this one.

Young David in the video loves to sing praise to God! He’s joyful, exuberant! His joy and exuberance are catching. Before long, loads of other people are singing too.

I think the video gives us a good picture of what David was like. Almost from the moment we meet David in the Bible, he’s playing a lyre and singing. David is THE person in the Bible we associate with praising God. He wrote about half of the Psalms – and the Psalms are full of mentions of praising God. There are more references to praising God in the Psalms than in the whole of the rest of the Bible.

Charlotte read a passage for us from Chronicles. David is about to bring the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem and he’s organized a praise event. He’s got cymbals, harps, lyres and trumpets. David wants the musicians to raise sounds of joy. It’s going to be loud. There’s going to be shouting. It’s the same as the video. David wants music, joy and exuberance as people praise God. It’s a great example for us!

DAVID, ZEALOT FOR GOD'S HOUSE

Today, we come to the last talk in our series, ‘Learning from David.’ I’ve called it, ‘David, zealot for God’s house.’

A zealot is someone who is really, really committed to a cause. Often, when we use the word today it’s quite negative. Rishi Sunak called protesters from Just Stop Oil ‘eco-zealots’. People might call the Taliban fundamentalist zealots. People in the United States talk about anti-gun zealots. It’s a dangerous thing to call someone a zealot. But David was one, and so was Jesus.

Let’s look where this comes.

David wrote Psalm 69. In it, he wrote this: ‘For zeal for your house has consumed me’ [Psalm 69:9].

‘Consumed me’ means that I feel so strongly about something that it completely dominates my life.

Here are a couple of examples. One writer wrote that he struggled for years with some question. ‘It CONSUMED ME, overwhelmed me, and made me crazy.’ Another writer wrote, ‘The possibility that the book would fail CONSUMED ME ... I felt as though the world were coming to an end.’

David said he was consumed with zeal for God’s house. His zeal, his passion for God’s house was eating him up. Someone who is consumed with zeal is a zealot. David was a zealot for God’s house.

Now let’s turn to Jesus. There was a time when Jesus went down to Jerusalem. He went into the temple and found people there selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and changing money. Jesus was so passionate for God’s house that he made a whip of cords and drove the traders out of the temple.

I think Jesus’ disciples must have been surprised! Then we read, ‘His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me”’ [John 2:17]. Jesus’ disciples saw Jesus’ zeal for God’s house and they remembered the words David had written.

As in so many of the talks in this series, here is another example of David being a type for Jesus.

But what did David’s zeal for God’s house look like? How do we see David consumed with zeal for God’s house?

The story of David’s life is mainly told in two books of the Bible: 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles. Broadly, 2 Samuel gives us the bad stuff and 1 Chronicles gives us the good stuff.

For example, 2 Samuel tells us about David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba. 1 Chronicles doesn’t. 2 Samuel tells us about the problems David had with his sons, Amnon and Absalom. 1 Chronicles hardly mentions them. But 1 Chronicles tells us about many good things David did – things which 1 Samuel doesn’t talk about.

You may wonder why the Bible would give us David’s life in two books and why one contains much more bad stuff and one contains much more good stuff. There are reasons for that and I think I understand them, but I don’t want to spend time on that now.

Here are three examples of David’s zeal for the house of God in 1 Chronicles.

My first example is David bringing the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem.

The Ark of the Covenant was a wooden box that the Israelites had constructed in the time of Moses. It was the most important symbol of the Jewish faith. It was probably about 400 years old in David’s time.

Before the time of the temple, the Ark would normally be in the tabernacle – a large tent. But before David became king, the Philistines had captured the Ark. Later, they sent it back. It came to someone’s house and after that, it had remained there. No one had bothered to collect it and put it back to the tabernacle.