Hope Springs Eternal

A sermon based on 2 Samuel 7: 1-14

Dr. Charles J. Tomlin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest:

The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.  

                                            ---From Essay of Man by Alexander Pope

I realize that poetry does not go over well these days.  Listening to a sermon is hard enough.  But this line from British poet Alexander Pope’s most famous poem expresses the core truth of today’s text from 2 Samuel 7, where God promises that David’s kingdom will endure forever.  

Notice in 2 Samuel 7: 16, how through the prophet Nathan, God promises King David: “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever” (NIV).  This is a very powerful and promising declaration, but it does not happen in any literal, historical way as we might think. The newer translations adjust the text a little saying that the promise stands “before me” (God) (NIV, NRSV), meaning it stands as God see it rather than “before thee” (KJV), as David or we might see it.   Thus, the King James Bible makes the promise even more difficult.  It translates: “Your house and your kingdom will endure before thee….”  This is exactly what does not happen.  David’s royal Kingdom or line does not stand in any earthly way, shape or form that David could see, if he were alive, or we can see today.    

If you research modern Israel today and the 1948 declaration of the Israel’s statehood (Israel still has no constitution) you will find no mention of the royal lineage of David.   To this day there are still no archeological findings that have yet to substantiate the ancient city of David.   While only a few historical scholars would doubt David’s dynasty was real, but even as we read the Bible’s internal history, David’s royal house came to an abrupt end when Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC.   Everything was destroyed with no trace left.  Since then, there has been no Davidic throne, no royal line that endures, and there have been no monarchs ruling over Israel.  If the Davidic throne still exists at all it must be “before God” as only memory.

HOPE IS NOT AUTOMATIC

This is troubling to people who try to make faith and hope as easy as 1, 2, 3 or as clear as “black and white”.   But in the real world of infinite numbers and multiple realities painted in “shades of gray”, most of us deal with life that hardly ever goes as planned.   Life is full of surprises and seldom turns out as we hope or expected.  A case in point is what happened to my dream of making a big splash when I finally got to speak in one of those large Lutheran churches in Germany.   If I made any splash at all, it was a “splashdown”.   It happened right after Christmas and we were having a special ecumenical religious service and the Lutheran pastor asked me to speak.  Of course this message was to be in German.  I was getting used to preaching in German, but this was my chance to speak in to a large group in a 700 year old church.  It was large, historical sanctuary which had been destroyed during WWII and was now reopened. 

I prepared my message and stood up at the appointed moment.   The feeling was exhilarating.  It was January and Christmas decorations were still hanging.   The pulpit was not yet finished, so I was standing behind a lectern beside of the Christmas tree.   I began my speech reading my well-rehearsed German with my American accent.   Then, suddenly, without warning, the lights go out.  I didn’t know if it was a power failure or something else.  But I knew what it meant.  I could no longer read my manuscript.  Fortunately, the Christmas tree was lit with real candles.  I was able to move closer to the tree and finish by reading read with candlelight.  But it was humbling and a great struggle for me and for those who listened.  I had to give up my dream of being a dynamic American Baptist missionary preacher making a great impression.

It some way or other, we’ve all had to give up a dream, a hope or an expectation of what might have been.  It’s never easy to let go of a dream.  It is especially hard when it comes to having to let go of someone we love, through death, divorce or some other tragic event.  If you’ve not had to give up a dream, a person, or give up on a promise, you will.  Dreams have a tendency to fly out the window and the saying has a ring of truth: “if you want to see God laugh, tell him your plans.”   The most stable, prepared life can suddenly become unpredictable when and “out of the blue” things fall apart.  

It is one thing for humans to deal with the unpredictable nature of life, but what it is much more challenging is to think about how God deals with it.  What does God do when the world does not go as God wills?  This is a truth from Scripture that most want to overlook or ignore.   We humans are “meaning makers”.   We tend to believe that there is a “reason for everything” and that God is always in absolute control.  Perhaps we can come to grips that we don’t have everything figured out, but we want to trust in a God who does.  We want to believe that no matter what happens, life goes just as God has planned.  Especially when life is pandemonium for us, or when tragedy happens, it is somehow sadistically comforting for some to believe that everything is already programmed from heaven and that life always goes as God has planned all along.     

Isn’t this what the defendant in Florida named George Zimmerman stated this week in his first national interview?   Even though he regretted what happened to Trayvon Martin, he said he is “not a racist” nor “ a murderer” and he adds, in very bold words that regarding the shooting of Trayvon Martin,  “I believe it was all part of God’s plan.”   As you might imagine, this statement of his faith in God’s plan didn’t go over well with Trayvon’s parents.  When Trayvon’s Father was asked how he felt about it he answered to the contrary, “We must worship a different God because there is no way that my God would have wanted George Zimmerman to kill my teenage son.” (From www.thesource.com)  And how do we think about the recent shootings at the movie theater in Colorado?  Do we say that God had this all this planned out too?   

All of us have our own personal views of what God knows, does or doesn’t do.   We can understand that humans often “make God in our own image” or the image we want to believe.  George Zimmerman will not be the last person trying to be rescued by the God he believes controls everything.  And the Trayvon Martin family will not be the last brokenhearted people confronting a terrible loss, wanting to believe that God did not do this to their child.  In these very up-to-date human dramas unfolding before us, and perhaps even unfolding in our own lives, we all can see our own struggles to keep hope alive.   If you really think about it, people who don’t believe in God have much less to deal with when they face the unpredictability of life.  People of faith have much more to think about.  We who believe that “God is love” have to not only deal with ‘what’ has happened, but we also must deal with “why?”  For the faithful life raises the same kind of question in us that it raised in Jesus when he cried out on the cross: “My God, why?”  When life turns tragic, hope is not easy nor automatic.  It can be much easier to become an unbeliever.   Many do.

HOPE IS SOMETHING WE HAVE TO WORK AT

If we want to keep our faith when life does not go as planned or hoped, our view of God and our view of hope must grow larger.  If we ask ourselves: Does life always turn out as God promises and plans?   When we are really honest, we have to answer, No!  Things do not always happen as God plans---things like murder, a tragic death, an accident, or an act of nature or even a terrible act of human nature---God permits or allows such things, we say, for the sake of freedom and for the sake of human responsibility and growth, but these things do not always happen “in the perfect will of God”.  In this text, the endurance of David’s kingdom is promised, but it does not endure as God promises, as God hopes nor as God plans; at least it doesn’t if we take this text literally.   The biblical word from this text reveals just how complicated and unpredictable life can get for us and for God.   So, what hope is there is this?

Before we take this further, there is another amazing passage of Scripture about how God deals with the unpredictable in Genesis 6:5, where God suddenly realizes just how bad the world had become.  It tells us: “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become…that every inclination of the thoughts of the heart was only evil all the time.”   This God who looks deep into the human heart seems very surprised, saddened, vulnerable, hurt and grieved that the world he has created is not working out like he had planned.  The King James Bible uses powerful language to say that God did not plan life to happen this way and it dramatically expresses how humans, not God, are responsible.  “The Lord was grieved that he made humans”, but then the KJV says, “And it repented the Lord that he made man on the earth.”  “Repented” is a very strong word to use for God.  But Scripture wants us to know that the evil going on in the world is not what God wanted nor planned.  It has surprised God so much that he had to change his mind about almost everything.  He must start almost everything all over again.

When you read a text like Genesis 6, you quickly realize that the God of the Bible is not the generic, comfortable, popular idol-god most carry around in their pockets or in mind.  Most people are more likely to imagine a god who floats around on a cloud controlling everything, who already has everything figured out, even before it happens.  But the biblical God is a very vulnerable God.  He is suffering love.  He gets jealous.  He hurts and feels pain.  Most of all, God grieves over how bad things are and because of how we get and how life gets, he has to make adjustments to his plans.  Bible scholars call this divine attribute found in Scripture, “changeable faithfulness.” To be faithful God will do things differently.  God is still the almighty, but he is also the God who brings strength through weakness.   God has plans for us, but he is the also the God who works his will through and not around human freedom.   God’s love is abiding and constant, but God will do “a new thing in Israel” to “take out the stony heart of flesh” and put in “a new heart and a new spirit”.       

Remember that text in Philippians which says, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”  (Phi 2:12-13 NRS).  The “fear and trembling” comes because God’s salvation depends at much on our work in God as it depends on God’s work in us.  We can’t earn salvation.  That was finished on the cross.  But we must receive and keep the faith, because God still at work and is not still finished with us yet.  God’s word and God’s promises can get complicated, but it is not because God does not want to keep his promise.  On the contrary, the great prophets of the Hebrew Bible revealed that things did not go as God promised because Israel broke their promise to God.  In the Bible, even the unconditional love of God has its conditions.

In the story of Israel’s royal history we know how it happened.  David’s Son Solomon overtaxed the people for his building programs and perhaps, even to keep up his harem.  Solomon was indeed a wise man in some ways, but he was very unwise in other ways.   After Solomon’s death, his son’s split the kingdom into two kingdoms and it never recovered its former glory.  Wicked and corrupt king after king are the rule with only a couple of exceptions.  Finally the kingdom and house of David crumbles.  The Hebrew prophets even declare that the end came about at the hand of God himself.   The kingdom fell, not because God broke his promise, but because people broke their promise with God.  Because of Israel’s unfaithfulness, God changed his mind about the kingdom, just as he once changed his mind about the human race.  God does not give up on his people, but has had to start over.  When Jerusalem burned it was fourth down and God punted.  God could not keep the promises which Israel had broken. 

This reminds us again that hope does not just happen.  Hope is not automatic.  Hope takes work—hard work.   It takes hard work on our part just and it takes hard work on God’s part.  God’s does his work through us and not around us.  This is why God has to deal with all kinds of stuff too, just as we do.   When life is both promising and unpredictable, we need a bigger understanding of God.  And if we are going to have hope in a world like ours, we going to have even work even harder for it.   

HOPE MEANS BELIEVING GOD NO MATTER WHAT

When God gave up on humanity the first time; he saved Noah to save the world.  When God gave up on Israel and David’s kingdom, he gave his savior Jesus, who came preaching the everlasting kingdom of God.   Just because God could not keep his promise to David does not mean, that God gave up on the promise altogether.   

Perhaps even more enlightening is that the people of Israel did not give up on the promise either.   When  the book of Samuel was put in final form it was already after the exile, after Israel and David’s throne was long gone.  But why didn’t the editor of 2 Samuel just cut all this unrealized promise out and move on?   Why didn’t he just simplify matters by saying that God’s promise was too big, too grand and didn’t work out?  Why not throw it out like a bad check?

No one knows exactly why the people of God held on to this promise.  No one knows why they kept reading and singing about it in worship, or why they kept on celebrating and reading Psalms, like the 89^th Psalm, which declares: “I will declare that your love stands firm forever, that you have established your faithfulness in heaven itself.  You said, "I have made a covenant with my chosen one, I have sworn to David my servant,  'I will establish your line forever and make your throne firm through all generations.'"(Psa 89:2-4 NIV).   

Why didn’t they just drop the whole thing?  Even today, Biblical scholars are perplexed by Israel’s persistent faith.   It was a faith that, in spite of everything, kept on hoping for a King that would make God’s rule just as real “on earth as it is in heaven?”  Israel centered her worship and her hopes, not on how things were, but in how things would be, when God’s new “David” would come.   They called this new David the ‘anointed one’, interpreted by us as Messiah or the Christ.   Today, we know all these hopes as Messianic prophecies, but they once Israel’s stubborn and resilient faith and her hopes that God’s promise would somehow come true, in spite of everything.   As Isaiah wrote, “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land (Isa. 23:3).   Israel did not know for sure “how” or “who” this new King would be, but Israel knew that they had to keep believing God and that they had to keep hope alive.   Even when there were bad kings, good kings, puppet kings and pretender kings, Israel kept God’s promise close to heart, and Israel never stopped hoping, never stopped believing, and never stopped remembering or believing the promise, no matter what.

In the movie, Secondhand Lions, an irresponsible woman can’t be troubled by raising her own son, so she drops him off with her two eccentric uncles played by Michael Cain and Robert Duvall.  They don’t want the boy, and the boy doesn’t want to be there, but these things have a way of working out.  Hub, the Duvall character, teaches the boy some wisdom needed to be human and hopeful.  He tells the boy, “Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in most.  That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love…true love never dies.  You remember that, boy….. 

“A boy should believe in those things,” Hub says, because, as Patrick Wilson has rightly said, “human beings are constructed by the things we believe in, not the simple, shallow thin things easily measured and calculated and subject to verification without any cost or risk, but the deep, weighty things that cannot be checked or determined but whose truth is known only by the diving into the deep and surrendering your life to it.    

Did the promise come true as Israel hoped?  No, and I’m glad it didn’t.  It is exactly because the promise God made to David did not come true like David, or everyone in Israel expected that we now have Jesus.   In Jesus Christ, the crucified and resurrected, God brings the promise of David’s kingdom to a whole new level, not just as a hope for Israel, but as a hope for the whole world.   Aren’t you glad that when God can’t keep his promise, when has to change his plans, that he is able to make us and even bigger and better ones?   When you understand Jesus, it’s almost seems as if God had it all planned all along.   And maybe he did, if you will always remember that the man with the plan is unfailing love.   Amen.