Author name: David Richards

Hello beautiful souls! What I’m about to share isn’t really covered in my next book, Resurrection: Breathing with God.  At least, not to the depth it should be.  While there is a part of me that is itching to reach out to my interior designer and ask her to accept “one more revision,” I’m content to let the manuscript stand as is!  The book launches on November 17th. So, think of this as something of a special insight you’re receiving before the launch.  To be sure, what I’m sharing here will make its way into the accompanying course, Resurrection: Crowned with Christ. To properly orient you with what I’m about to share, we journey to the end of the Bible.  On the last page of the Book of Revelation, Jesus states that He is the “Root and the Offspring of David” (Revelation 22:16).  For the longest time, this was something of a head-scratcher for me; what did this mean?   God promises David a dynasty, a seed from David’s own body, and a throne set to stand forever, far past the horizon of any single human life (2 Samuel 7).  That is the seed planted, and everything that follows in biblical history grows from this soil.  This is the foundation of the Davidic Covenant.  To fully understand the biological significance here, we turn to the lineage of David. King David was, to put it mildly, a busy man when it came to having kids. According to the Bible, there are at least 20 named children by David, including 19 sons and 1 daughter.  There are also an unspecified number of unnamed children he had with his concubines.  Some of his children were born in Hebron, where he ruled as King of Judah for seven and a half years after the death of King Saul.  He then united the tribes of Israel and moved his seat of power to Jerusalem, where he had more children.  The six named sons born in Hebron came from six different mothers; in Jerusalem, Bathsheba bore David four sons.  Of these four sons, two stand out. Solomon would become king after David, carrying the royal bloodline of the throne.  As history unfolds, however, the human soil of this line proves remarkably poor. It runs through Bathsheba, whom David had an affair with before having her husband Uriah murdered.  It runs through Tamar, his daughter, who was raped by her half-brother Amnon, David’s oldest son.  It runs through kings who burned their own children in fire.  Eventually, it descends to Jeconiah.  He was an awful king and, in response, God issues a devastating curse: “Write this man down as childless… for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting on the throne of David” (Jeremiah 22:30). Read plainly, the covenant seems to have cut its own throat.  How can an unconditional, everlasting throne survive a direct divine curse against the natural seed carrying the lineage? Psalm 89 addresses this open wound directly.  Ethan, the psalmist, rehearses the original Davidic promise in full – recalling God’s steadfast love and a throne like the sun – and then the tone shifts to one of immediate ruin: “You have renounced the covenant; you have flung his crown to the ground.”  The oath looks like a broken thing in the dust.  Although he is deposed as a king, Jeconiah has a son, Shealtiel, who is born near the time of the Babylonian exile. This is where things get interesting. As we have established, the Line of the Throne (addressed crisply in Matthew 1) runs through Solomon and Jeconiah down to Joseph.  This preserves the legal title to David’s seat – carried through the royal blood.  This entitles Joseph to name Jesus and confer the legal crown.  Significantly, there is no biological descent from Joseph to Jesus.  This leads to the Virgin Birth and Line of the Seed. Luke 3 highlights this line, which runs through David’s other notable son by Bathsheba, Nathan.  The Virgin Mary is a descendant of Nathan.  This line carries the actual flesh and blood of David’s body through a branch the curse never touched. Joseph gives the throne without the blood; Mary gives the blood without the throne. Jesus receives both.  The curse holds to the letter while the covenant is preserved through the line of Nathan.  As Paul writes in Romans 1:3, Christ is “of the seed of David according to the flesh” – a physical reality drawn whole from Mary.  Jesus is a biological descendant of King David. Setting Mary at the end of this line sharpens her singular role.  She is the final maternal node of a genealogy that spent a thousand years concentrating the fall, and the exact point where the covenant seed becomes incarnate flesh.  Luke fuses this moment in  Luke 1:32, when the angel Gabriel informs Mary her Son will be given “the throne of his father David” and again in Luke 1:35 and the “overshadowing” of the Spirit.  The word overshadow recalls the glory-cloud that filled the tabernacle, when Moses finishes setting up and anointing the structure (Exodus 40:17-35).  Mary herself becomes the Ark where the covenant and incarnation converge in one body. This leads us back to Revelation 22:16, with a brief detour through Isaiah 11:1.  Isaiah watched a felled tree and saw a shoot rising up from a dead stump: “A branch from the roots of Jesse shall stand as a banner.”  Jesse is David’s father; the cut-down stump symbolizes the seemingly dead and fallen royal line of King David. The Offspring is the seed – the son coming from David’s body as fruit at the top of the tree. The Root is the source – the origin from which David himself grows. Jesus posed this exact riddle to the Pharisees in the temple: David calls the Messiah Lord; how then is the Messiah David’s son?  (Matthew 22:45).  He is both the fruit of the family tree and the original root the whole tree draws life from.

Imagine if I tried to explain to you Star Wars without explaining the relationship between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.  It wouldn’t make much sense, would it?  Their relationship is central to the story.  In fact, its absence would leave a galactic size hole in the plot. In effect, that is what Christianity has done with the relationship between King David and Jesus. On the surface, this oversight makes sense.  David and Jesus are separated by a thousand years.  Jesus is known by many titles and, of them, “Son of David” is mentioned only seventeen times, fewest of any. But then, why does their relationship exist at all, and why does it perpetuate across the entire biblical narrative? For context, David is Israel’s second king.  He is promised an everlasting kingdom and an eternal throne.  Both these things, he is told, will be established by his offspring, after David is sleeping with his ancestors. As king, David fails miserably.  Some might know the stories of his defeating Goliath, or overcoming bears and lions on his way to becoming king, but there is also the David who commits adultery and murder. This is the king who divides his house, one who knows only the sword. And yet, after his death, David keeps appearing repeatedly.  The covenant made to him is democratized in Isaiah – anyone seeking the promise of an everlasting kingdom and eternal throne can have it. In the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, there is talk of David being raised up.  In the New Testament Jesus poses the question to the Pharisees; if David calls the Messiah “Lord” how can the Messiah be his son?  They don’t have an answer. In his sermon at Pentecost, Peter goes to some length to explain that David did not ascend to heaven.  Fittingly, on the last page of the Bible, Jesus defines their relationship.  Why does David’s story persist across the entire narrative? Because you cannot fully explain who Jesus is without understanding His relationship with David. In my next book, Resurrection: Breathing with God, I explore their relationship, why it matters, and what it means for you. The book launches this Fall.  You can stay informed here.