Scripture Daily

Context No. 1735 of 4322 · 1 Chronicles

Context · Reflection

1 Chronicles 17:7-15: in context

7“Now therefore, you shall tell my servant David, ‘The LORD of Armies says, “I took you from the sheep pen, from following the sheep, to be prince over my people Israel. 8I have been with you wherever you have gone, and have cut off all your enemies from before you. I will make you a name like the name of the great ones who are on the earth. 9I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in their own place, and be moved no more. The children of wickedness will not waste them any more, as at the first, 10and from the day that I commanded judges to be over my people Israel. I will subdue all your enemies. Moreover I tell you that the LORD will build you a house. 11It will happen, when your days are fulfilled that you must go to be with your fathers, that I will set up your offspring after you, who will be of your sons; and I will establish his kingdom. 12He will build me a house, and I will establish his throne forever. 13I will be his father, and he will be my son. I will not take my loving kindness away from him, as I took it from him who was before you; 14but I will settle him in my house and in my kingdom forever. His throne will be established forever.”’” 15According to all these words, and according to all this vision, so Nathan spoke to David.

Through the prophet Nathan, God sends David a word about where he came from and where God will take him. I took you from the sheep pen, God says, from following the sheep, to be prince over my people Israel. I have been with you wherever you have gone. I will make your name great, and I will build you a house, establishing your offspring's throne forever; I will be his father, and he will be my son. The whole oracle is God's initiative, recalling David's lowly beginning and promising a future David did nothing to earn.

The first thing God says sets the tone for all the rest: I took you from following the sheep. David did not climb to the throne by his own ambition or merit; he was a shepherd boy, the youngest, overlooked even by his own family, tending sheep in the fields, when God reached down and took him. The kingship was not David's achievement but God's choosing; God took the lowly and made him prince. And everything that follows in the oracle continues in the same key: I have been with you, I will make your name great, I will build you a house, I will establish your throne. It is all God's doing, God's gift, from the taking out of the sheepfold to the everlasting throne. There is great encouragement in this for those who feel lowly, overlooked, unlikely candidates for anything great. God has a long habit of taking such people, the shepherd boy, the younger son, the one no one would have chosen, and lifting them into his purposes. The pasture is not too obscure a place for God to find someone; he took David from following the sheep. And it is all of grace, not merit. David's greatness began not with his own striving but with God's reaching down to take him; and the covenant that followed was pure gift, promised to one who had done nothing to deserve it. If God has taken us, from whatever lowly place, into his people and his purposes, it is the same grace at work: not our climbing to him, but his reaching down to us, taking us from the sheepfold to make us his own.

Do I think myself too lowly or overlooked for God to use, or can I take heart from how God took David from following the sheep, that God has a habit of reaching down to the obscure and the unlikely, and that his taking of us into his purposes is all of grace, his reaching down, not our climbing up?

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