“When your days are over and you go
to be with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you.” 1 Chronicles 17: 11
This
promise of God made to King David and fulfilled in his son, Solomon, can be
applied to all God’s children. As a child of God, your history will not end
with you. You have a generation following you. David’s line continued to
Christ, the eternal King.
Your circumstances do not dictate to God what He is
to do with or for you. That is determined in His eternal sovereign will
concerning you. Consider David. He has had
six sons by six different women
before having Solomon by a seventh (2
Samuel 3: 2 – 5; 12: 24). Two of
these women were wives of other men (Nabal and Uriah) whose deaths David had a
hand in (1 Samuel 25: 2 – 42; 2 Samuel 11: 1 – 27). One of the women,
Maacah, Absalom’s mother, was a foreigner from Geshur in Syria, a marriage
relationship God has forbidden Israel to enter. It was with the knowledge of
this humanly repulsive and controversial family life of David that God sent the
prophet Nathan to him in his later years to tell him God would raise a
successor for him after his death. He would raise his son, whose kingdom God
would establish. God was going to use David’s son to build the first ever
temple of God in Israel. We know the rest of the story about David, Solomon and
Israel. David is reckoned the all time greatest king of Israel and a man after
God’s heart. Stephen puts it better as recorded in Acts 7. 45 – 46 “…. David found favour before God” (KJV)
or “….
David enjoyed God’s favour” (NIV).
Your future is determined by God, not by others. It is
because God chooses to favour a person that that person succeeds or excels. The
word is Favour, God’s favour, not human merit or ingenuity. The race is not for
the swift, neither the battle to the strong. Even if you do not have a child,
that does not close that chapter of your future. God has a way of establishing a
glorious future for you. Trust Him to do it.
However dirty you may look in your eyes or in the
eyes of others, you look different in God’s eyes – yes, different for the
better. Do not let your past haunt you, and don’t mess up the present either. God
does not encourage sinful living. He forgives it and makes the sinner as white
as snow (Isaiah 1: 18), cancelling
every debt or bad record. He washes the believing sinner in the blood of Jesus
Christ His Son to change an inglorious past and present to a glorious future (1 John 1: 7). That is how to have a
bright future. It is the way to having a secure generation that can be counted
for you after you may have rested with your fathers. David remains a central
person in Israel’s history, not just for being a king (Saul was too, but
nothing is heard of his generation), but of being reckoned in the Messianic
line, (Matthew 1: 6) and that through
the son of a woman whose husband he killed to marry. Favour, that is. Do not write off yourself. Reject being written
off by others. Nobody created you but God. It is only He who has your future in
His hand, and His grand design of that future is to make it bright for you. Don’t
settle for less.
Believe on Christ as your Saviour and Lord today and
experience what we are talking about here. May this New Year unveil for you the
brightness of heaven, and may the power of the living God establish a glorious
generation for you. God bless you.
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