Quick comment on that song, All
the Way My Savior Leads Me. Just that line alone. Every step in our salvation is
led by Christ. And it means like all the way. Every aspect of salvation for
a believer is carried out by Christ. and also all the way
in the fact that it goes all the way to finality. Like, every
step is His, and all the steps are His. All the way, my Savior
leads me, and what a rest that can bring us if we can grasp
that and hold on to it. Like I said, preaching about
David today. So there's a new show out, and
I'm not suggesting you guys go watch the show, but it's on one
of the streaming networks. It's called House of David. Just
came out, and it kind of chronicles his life. We watched the first
episode, and I'm not suggesting that it's a great thing to watch
by any means. It's interesting. I find it cool in the fact that
it brings these things, these events, that are dear to a believer, to a visual. I'm a visual person. I like to be able to see these
things. Now granted, they definitely take some liberties to make it
entertainment. So don't look at, look to the
show by any means for anything mind-blowing. But that's where
this began because I watched this and it really got me thinking
about David. I love David in a lot of ways. He is such a picture of Christ
in so many ways and I'm going to step through five of them
today and how he is a picture of Christ and once again showing
us that David, the greatest king Israel had, one of the most prominent
people in the Old Testament, was put in place specifically
to teach us about Christ. Because that's what this is about,
this entire book, is to point us to Christ. And David is one
big arrow to Christ. And there are a lot of ways in
his life, in his experiences, that point to Jesus. And there's
even a few where he points to us. And in turn, It points to
the gospel. It points to Christ and Him crucified.
Because everything does. And I just, I found it really
comforting for me, really interesting. I love going through the Old
Testament and finding pictures of Christ. So that's what we're
gonna do today. I'm gonna go through five different
points where David is a picture, kind of five and a half, pictures
of Christ in David. So I'm gonna start, we just read
through the first, we can actually go back to it if you want, 1
Samuel chapter 16, the first 13 verses. It talks about how
the Lord told Samuel to go to Jesse And he would point out
which one of Jesse's son would be the new king of Israel. At
this point, Saul was the king. Saul had become king because
Israel had demanded a king. And Saul was who God gave them. And Saul was falling apart. He was very, very much a man.
Very much flesh. He looked at himself as a god. Specifically, Israel had conquered
a lot of towns and gathering communities, and God specifically
told them, as you go through these communities and you conquer
them, do not take any spoils. Don't take any of their stuff.
Well, Saul started keeping things. And that was the beginning of
the end. The Lord had wanted nothing to do with Saul at that
point and told Samuel so much, and Samuel went and told Saul
that as well. And that's where we're at now. Saul's very angry. Samuel, who had been his guide,
the voice of God, God spoke directly to Saul through Samuel. And now
Samuel comes to him and basically says, you are no longer the king
of Israel, according to God. You are no longer favored in
the eyes of the Lord. Saul didn't like that. And that's
where we are in 1 Samuel 16. The Lord says to Samuel, how
long will you mourn for Saul since I have rejected him as
king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil. Don't
sit and mourn over Saul. Samuel loved Saul. I mean, they
were together for a lot of years. This is hard on Samuel. The Lord
says, how long will you mourn for him? Go to Jesse and I will
show you your new king. And when he gets there, talks
about how he sees the first son, who's obviously impressive to
see, because he talks about his height and his stature. And of
course, Samuel, being a man, thinks to himself, this must
be the king. This must be the future king. And God says, no. You look at things as man looks
at things. God looks at things in a completely
different way. And this is the first symbolism picture of David
as Christ. It talks about in the Bible that
Christ was nothing to behold physically. He came from Nazareth,
which in itself was a town that was scoffed at. It was thought
of very lowly. He was the son of a carpenter.
No one knew of him. He was unimpressive in worldly
standards. Same with David. Matter of fact,
to the point where Jesse didn't even have him there. They went
through all of the sons before finally Samuel's like, is this
it? I mean, God told me one of your sons is gonna be the new
king, but we've gone through them all. And he said, well,
I have one more, but he's not even here. We leave him out to
the sheep. Well, bring him in. And of course,
that was the anointed king. Just as Christ, the anointed
king of all things. unimpressive worldly standards,
but to God, the anointed king of the world. So that's the first one, unimpressive
as a man. Secondly, shepherd. He was a
shepherd. David, before coming king, was a shepherd, caring
for his father's flock with devotion. Matter of fact, you're probably
familiar with the story where he actually kills a lion with
his bare hands. And a bear. If you aren't, read
it. It talks about how he devotedly
took care of his father's sheep, risking his life to protect them
from lions and bears. And then later, he was anointed
King of Israel. If you go to 2 Samuel 5.3, Actually, you don't even have
to. We just talked about the fact that he was anointed. They
anointed him right there when he poured oil over his head.
Anointed him as king immediately. So he was both a combination
of a humble servant in the fact that he was a shepherd of his
father's flock. But he was also anointed king.
A combination of the humble servant and the ultimate authority. Christ is also described as a
shepherd, we know that. Many, many times throughout the
scriptures he refers to himself as a shepherd of his flock, his
father's flock, just as David was a shepherd of his father's
flock. And how he would lose none of those flock and would
risk his own life, give his own life for that flock. So David is a picture of Christ
in his dual role as both a humble servant and a sovereign ruler. Secondly, another point, they
keep bringing up the word anointed. He's the anointed one. David
was anointed by the prophet Samuel with oil to be king, marking
him as God's chosen leader. First Samuel 16.13, it says,
we just read this. So Samuel took the horn of oil
and anointed him in the presence of his brothers. And from that
day on, the spirit of the Lord became powerfully upon David. The Hebrew word for anointed,
I'm gonna probably say this wrong, but it looks like mashach to
me. And it literally means to smear or to spread. spread a
liquid, but the root for that word is mashiach, which translates
to Messiah. So anointed translates to the
root word Messiah, the anointed one in Hebrew. Christ is the
true Messiah. In Greek, Christos means anointed
one. So as David is the anointed one,
there's another word for the Messiah, chosen by God to redeem
and rule. If you look at Luke 4.18, it
says, The spirit of the Lord is on
me because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the
poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and
recovery of sight for the blind and to set the oppressed free.
That is Christ speaking, saying God has anointed me to proclaim
the good news. Prisoners become free, recovery
of sight to the blind, and set the oppressed free. So another
really good picture of Christ in David is the fact that they
were both anointed. Root word, Messiah. So David's anointing points to
Jesus as the fulfillment of the promise of the coming Messiah,
the coming Savior, the eternal anointed King, the only one with
whom God has ever been pleased And because Christ has traded
the sins of his people for his righteousness, God is also well
pleased with them. The next point, number three,
David was a victorious warrior. Because God was with him, David
won many, many battles as the king of Israel, establishing
himself as a highly successful military leader. But David's
most well-known battle came when he defeated Goliath as a young
boy. A giant who defied God's people
with a single stone symbolizing God's providence through a savior
who seemed unlikely in the eyes of the world. First Samuel 17.33
says, you are not able to go out against this Philistine and
fight him. You are only a young man and he has been a warrior
from his youth. This is Saul speaking. But David
said to Saul, Your servant has been keeping his father's sheep.
When a lion or bear came, I carried off a sheep from the flock. I
went after it, struck it, and rescued the sheep from its mouth.
When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair and struck it
and killed it. Your servant has killed both the lion and the
bear. This uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them because
he has defied the armies of the living God. The Lord who rescued
me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue
me from the hand of this Philistine. Saul said to David, go and the
Lord be with you. David fastened his sword over
his tunic and tried walking around. Because he was not used to them,
he said, I cannot go in these. He said to Saul, because I'm
not used to them, he took them off. There's a picture here too. We can do nothing in this battle
against sin. We have no armor to offer. We can only go in whatever strength
the Lord provides. Such as this moment when David
is about to go fight Goliath, which in worldly standards was
pretty lopsided, obviously. A young boy with a slingshot
against the greatest warrior that time had seen. So he thinks, well, I better
put on some armor, this tunic. As a matter of fact, I'm going
to get it from the king himself. Well, it doesn't even fit. He can't
even walk around with it on. So there's a sign in the fact, a picture
in the fact that he had to take that off and go out there with
no physical armor put on by any human man, by the army or by
King Saul. He went out there as the Lord
wanted him to. He went out there by the power
of the Lord only. And that's the same for us. We
have no power. We have no power when it comes
to salvation, when it comes to our
souls being saved, when it comes to being seen in a positive light
by the Lord. We have no power. We have no
armor to put on. We have no sword to carry. We
can only cry to the Lord and look to Christ. And that's exactly
what David here did. Then he took his staff in his
hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in
the pouch of a shepherd's bag, and with this sling in hand,
approached the Philistine. Meanwhile, the Philistine, with
his shield bearer in front of him, kept coming closer to David.
He looked David over and saw that he was little more than
a boy, glowing with health and handsome, and he despised him. He said to David, am I a dog
that you come to me with sticks? and the Philistine cursed David
by his gods. When Christ came to save his
people, it was not what we expected. Especially those men, those people
of that time. They were expecting a Messiah.
They were expecting a leader, a warrior. They weren't expecting
a Messiah like Christ who would come and be victorious through
sacrifice. Just as this Philistine looks at him
and says, you think I'm a dog? You come to me with sticks? Christ came in a way that no
one expected, but he came in a perfect way, in the way that
God had predestined, God had planned, and in the only way
that God's people could be saved. David said to the Philistine,
You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I
come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God
of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the
Lord will deliver you into my hands. I will strike you down
and cut off your head. This very day I will give the
carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals.
And the whole world will know that there is God, there is a
God in Israel. All those gathered here will
know that this is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves.
For the battle is the Lord's. He will give all of you into
our hands." As the Philistine moved closer to attack him, David
ran quickly toward the battle line to meet him. Reaching into
his bag and taking out a stone, he slung it and struck the Philistine
in the forehead. The stone sank into his forehead
and he fell face down onto the ground. So just as David is victorious,
Christ triumphed over sin and death with his crucifixion and
resurrection. Colossians 2 15 verse 13 or 15
it says, now starting in 13 through 15, when you were dead in your
sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive
with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having
canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against
us and condemned us. He has taken it away, nailing
it to the cross, and having disarmed the powers and authorities, had
made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross."
Triumphing by the cross. So just as David was a victorious,
warrior, Christ was victorious in the cross. If you look at 1 Corinthians
15, 55, it says, where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death,
is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and
the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, he gives
us victory through our Lord, Jesus Christ. A victory won not
with weapons, but with the ultimate sacrifice. the blood of Christ. Christ is shown as the ultimate
conqueror later on in Revelation. In Revelation 19, 11, it says,
I saw heaven standing open, and there before me was a white horse
whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice, he judges
and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire,
and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him
that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped
in blood and his name is the word of God. The armies of heaven
were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine
linen, white and clean. Coming out of his mouth is a
sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule
them all with an iron scepter. He treads the winepress of the
wrath of God Almighty, and on his robe and on his thigh is
the name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the ultimate
victor. David's physical victories foreshadowed
Christ's spiritual triumph over death, both achieving through
God's strength and God's will. In 1 Samuel 17, 47, it says,
all those gathered here will know that it is not by sword
or spear that the Lord saves. For the battle is the Lord's.
He will give all of you into our hands. It's not by the sword
or the spear. It's by the blood of Christ. Point number four, David also
suffered and was rejected as king. Before his reign, David
faced rejection and persecutions. King Saul actually hunted him
for a long time. In 1 Samuel 23, 14, David stayed
in the wilderness strongholds and in the hills of the desert
of Ziph. Day after day, Saul searched for him, but God did
not give David into his hands. This forced David to live as
a fugitive, in hiding, even though he had already been anointed
as king. David endured betrayal and hardship. And you can see
this in all of his Psalms. The one you read this morning
talks about, my enemies surround me, my hardships, He was constantly
dealing with difficulties, some of them brought on by himself,
which we'll get to in just a moment. Christ was also rejected by his
own people. It says in John 1.11, excuse
me, 1.10, he was in the world, and though the world was made
through him, the world did not recognize him. He was rejected
by his own people. He came to that which was his
own, but his own did not receive him. In Isaiah 53.2, it says, he grew
up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground,
he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in
his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and
rejected by mankind. a man of suffering and familiar
with pain. Like one whom people hide their
faces, he was despised and we held him in low esteem." So that's
another picture of how David is a picture of Christ. He was
rejected and persecuted, as was Christ. David mirrors Christ's path of
suffering before exaltation. David, point number five, was
an establisher of a kingdom. He unified Israel. He established,
reestablished Jerusalem as its capital and received God's covenant
that his throne would endure forever. It says in 1 Samuel
7, 12, when your days are over and you rest with your ancestors,
I will raise up your offspring to secede you. your own flesh
and blood I will establish in his kingdom. He is the one who
will build a house for my name. I will establish the throne in
his kingdom forever. I will be his father and he will
be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish
him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human
hands. but my love will never be taken
away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from
before you. Your house and your kingdom will
endure forever before me. Your throne will be established
forever." This is known as the Davidic covenant. And Christ
is the direct descendant of David, and is the true fulfillment of
this covenant. As a worldly kingdom was established
in David, the true eternal kingdom has been established in Christ. It says in Luke 1, 32, he will
be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord
God will give him the throne of his father David. And he will
reign over Jacob's descendants forever. His kingdom will never
end. Christ's reign is over all things,
earthly and heavenly, and it's everlasting. His kingdom will
never end. In Revelation 11, 15, it says,
the seventh angel sounding his trumpet, and there were loud
voices in heaven which said, the kingdom of the world has
become the kingdom of the Lord, and of his Messiah, he will reign
forever and ever. And then David, not only a picture
of Christ in multiple ways, he also had his failures, which
is where he becomes a picture of God's people. We've all been through hard times
in our lives. Multiple times, I've felt like a real good connection
with David. David did some awful things. adultery, orchestrated murder. And there's a reason why God
had him, David, a man after God's own heart, says in the Bible,
guilty of some of the worst sins that to human eyes can be imagined. Now we know, we've heard Joe,
we've heard Henry say there's no small sin because there's
no small God. but he's guilty of sins that to us as man seem
extreme. There's a reason for that. It
shows us that no one is beyond, first of all, no one is above
anything. If God lets us to ourselves,
we are capable of anything. There is no depth we won't sink
to. And the only reason we don't
sink to those depths immediately is by the grace of God. But then
also it shows us that those depths don't stop the grace of God. God's grace and mercy are so
much more powerful and strong and the murder Adultery, these awful things
in our minds, nothing is beyond the reach of God's grace. Nothing
you can do can prevent you from being saved. God will never say,
oop, you went too far. If you turn to Christ as your
only hope, he will never say, I would've. But man, back in
2007, you did that thing. And it doesn't matter what that
thing is. God will never reject one of his people when they come
to him. Never. And that's why it shows us the
depths that David sunk to. David's failures, adultery with
Bathsheba, having her husband killed, shows us that even David
was beyond hope on his own. Without God, David was just a
man, a sinful man. In worldly eyes, a very sinful
man. As with God's providence, nothing
is by chance. God had David fall into some
of those worst sins in our eyes to show us that we are all dead
in our sins. We are all covered in leprosy.
We are all unclean and fall short of the glory of God. We all need
Christ. Even David, who is a picture
of Christ over and over in his life, who wrote some of the most beautiful
Psalms that we look to all the time, like this morning. who is called a man after God's
own heart. Christ is called son of David.
That David, when left to himself, immediately falls. David needed Christ as his savior
just as much as anyone else. So do you. So do I. So when you compare the pictures,
and this is where I just find it so comforting and so interesting,
when you compare the pictures that David is of Christ with the picture that David reflects
in man, it becomes a beautiful picture of the gospel of Christ
and Him crucified and what it means to His people. In David,
Christ is pictured as a king, a shepherd and savior of his
sheep, the anointed Messiah of God, the sufferer of the wrath
of God, the victorious warrior, the establisher of the eternal
kingdom. And in David, we are pictured
as sinners. This is the gospel. All of man
is guilty and deserving of the wrath of God. And we need a king,
a shepherd, a Messiah, a savior that suffered the wrath of God,
who has risen victoriously over death and has established an
eternal kingdom. and prepared a place for every
single one of his people. And when a place is prepared
by the King, by the Savior, by the Anointed One of God, that
place is guaranteed. There's no greater comfort when
you get lost in the depths of who you are than to remember
that. We have a king. We have a shepherd who will never
lose a sheep. We have a perfect savior, the
anointed Messiah of God, has stood in front of God on our
behalf. and guaranteed a place for us
forever. All of David's life, from a little
boy to the king of Israel, was pointing us to that fact, that
we all need Christ, and Christ is all we need. Our Father, we thank you, Lord.
We thank you for Jesus. We thank you for showing us Christ
through David. We thank you for showing us Christ
through this entire word. We ask, Lord, that you'll never
stop showing us Christ over and over and over. We need it. We
need to see Christ brand new every day. We know, Lord, that you will
take care of your people and you have prepared a place for
us. Comfort us until we get there.
Strengthen us until we get there. Help us to look to you for comfort
and strength and everything we need as we continue this walk
to Zion. We know, Lord, you will take
care of us, and we know, Lord, that someday we will get to be
with you, and we thank you so much for that. We pray this,
and thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen. Take out
your chorus books, and we'll turn them to number 19, My Heart
and Voice I Raise. Number 19 in the chorus books,
and we'll stand as we sing.