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David: Israel’s greatest king. But God gave him a promise far bigger than his throne—a dynasty that would endure forever! In this episode, Jimmy Akin dives into the Davidic Covenant, revealing how God reversed David’s plans, established an unbreakable royal line, and kept His word through centuries of kings, coups, and even exile.
Discover how this ancient promise shaped a thousand years of Jewish hope—and pointed straight to the ultimate Messiah! Don’t miss it!
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
David is remembered as Israel’s greatest king.
But God made him a promise that would outlast his entire dynasty—and shape Jewish hopes for a thousand years to come.
What was the Davidic Covenant?
Let’s get into it!
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Howdy, folks!
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
One Special King
In Episode 87 of the podcast, we saw that there were many anointed ones—many messiahs—in ancient Israel.
Priests were anointed, prophets were anointed, and kings were anointed, and at any given moment there could be quite a few of them.
You didn’t even have to be an Israelite, since God called the Persian king Cyrus the Great his anointed.
But now let’s focus on one particular king, because he had a special relationship with God.
That king was David.
How David Became King
Like Saul before him, David was first anointed as king by the prophet Samuel.
Saul had disobeyed the Lord, and even though he still held the office of king, he had been rejected by God on a spiritual level.
1 Samuel 16:1
The Lord said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul, seeing I have rejected him from being king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go; I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.”
Jesse had eight sons, and he made the oldest seven pass in front of Samuel, but the Lord hadn’t chosen any of them.
So Samuel asked whether Jesse had another son, and the answer was yes.
The youngest, David, was out tending the sheep, so they sent for him and brought him in:
1 Samuel 16:12-13
The Lord said, “Arise, anoint him; for this is he.” Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers; and the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.
David didn’t just get anointed once.
After Saul died, David was anointed king over the tribe of Judah, and a bit later he was anointed king over all the tribes of Israel.
So David was actually anointed several times.
David Wants to Build a House for God
Now, David wanted to do something for God.
He wanted to build him a temple in Jerusalem.
Up to this point, the Israelite sanctuary was a structure called the tabernacle.
It was basically a tent—one you could pack up and move from place to place, the way they had during the Exodus.
But Israel wasn’t wandering around anymore, and—to be honest—it’s nicer to live in a house than in a tent.
So David figured God deserved a house, too.
He mentioned the idea to the prophet Nathan, and at first it sounded great to the prophet.
But that night the word of God came to Nathan, and God said that David would not be the one to build the temple.
Instead, it would be built by David’s son—who would turn out to be Solomon.
God’s Covenant with David
However, God had something much bigger in mind for David and wanted to reward him for thinking of building him a house or temple.
Nathan went back to David and told him:
2 Samuel 7:11-16
The Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son. When he commits iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men; but I will not take my merciful love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me; your throne shall be established forever.
So here’s the reversal.
David wanted to build a house for God, but instead God promised to build a house for David.
Now, when God says he’ll build David a “house,” he doesn’t mean a building.
He means a dynasty—a royal house, a line of kings descended from David.
The job of building the actual temple would go to Solomon, but God himself would build David a family line of kings.
And this was understood as a solemn covenant that God made with David.
That’s exactly how Psalm 89 describes it:
Psalm 89:3-4
I have made a covenant with my chosen one,
I have sworn to David my servant:
“I will establish your descendants forever,
and build your throne for all generations.”
So God gave David a promise: he would have an enduring dynasty, and one of his descendants would always reign in Jerusalem.
A Promise You Can Watch Play Out
And here’s something striking: you can actually watch this promise play out in the history of the kingdoms.
After Solomon’s time, the kingdom split in two.
The house of David ruled over the southern kingdom, called Judah, and the ten northern tribes seceded to form the kingdom of Israel.
And look at what happened in each kingdom.
In the northern kingdom, from the time it seceded in 931 B.C. until the Assyrians conquered it in 722 B.C.—a little over 200 years—there were nineteen kings.
And they came from nine different dynasties, thanks to a whole series of coups and assassinations.
Some of those dynasties had exactly one member before somebody killed them off.
But in the southern kingdom of Judah, from that same split in 931 B.C. down to the Babylonian conquest in 586 B.C.—a span of 450 years—there were twenty kings.
And every single one of them, without exception, was a son of David.
That’s a remarkable track record for God’s promise.
But Then—the Exile
And then the Babylonian exile happened, and that raised a hard question.
What happened to the promise of a Davidic king when there was suddenly no kingdom and no king?
There are three ways people might answer that.
The first possibility is that the promise had simply ended.
Prophets sometimes use hyperbole—deliberate exaggeration to make a point.
So maybe when God said David’s throne would be established “forever” or “for all generations,” it just meant a really long time.
And the 500 years between David and the exile was a really long time, so maybe the promise had simply run its course.
The second possibility is that the promise didn’t just expire—it was ended by the sins of David’s descendants.
The original promise in 2 Samuel 7 said God wouldn’t take his love away from the son who would build the temple—that’s Solomon—but it didn’t make that guarantee about every later king.
And in fact, another psalm presents God adding a condition:
Psalm 132:12
If your sons keep my covenant
and my testimonies which I shall teach them,
their sons also forever
shall sit upon your throne.
That makes it sound like the promise could be conditional.
If David’s sons stopped keeping God’s covenant, then their sons wouldn’t inherit the throne—and the same sins that brought on the exile might also have ended the promise.
But there’s a third possibility, and this is the view that won out.
Maybe the promise didn’t expire, and maybe it wasn’t ended by sin—maybe it was just interrupted.
And we actually have a precedent for that.
Earlier in the history of Judah, the eighth Davidic king—a man named Ahaziah—died, and his mother seized power.
Her name was Athaliah, and she ruled as an illegitimate usurper queen for six years:
2 Kings 11:1-3
Now when Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the royal family. But Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram, sister of Ahaziah, took Joash the son of Ahaziah, and stole him away from among the king’s sons who were about to be slain, and she put him and his nurse in a bedchamber. Thus she hid him from Athaliah, so that he was not slain; and he remained with her six years, hid in the house of the Lord, while Athaliah reigned over the land.
The little boy Joash was only one year old when his grandmother took over, and they kept him safe by hiding him in the temple.
They hid him for six years, and in the seventh year they crowned him king and overthrew his grandmother.
So the Davidic line could be interrupted without the promise being ended.
There had already been a six-year interruption once before.
And the Babylonian exile was prophesied to last seventy years, so maybe this was just a longer interruption.
As long as Judah wasn’t a kingdom, it couldn’t have a king—but once the exile ended, maybe a future son of David would take the throne.
That hope was cherished by a great many people, and it’s the answer that became popular.
In future episodes, we’ll look at how the prophets began preaching about the coming of a future, Davidic monarch—one great Messiah to surpass them all.
Conclusion
So, to sum up, God made a covenant with David.
David wanted to build God a house, but instead God promised to build David a house—a dynasty of kings who would reign in Jerusalem.
For 450 years, every king of Judah was a son of David, just as God had promised.
Then the exile interrupted that line, and the people had to ask what had become of the promise.
The answer that took hold was that the promise hadn’t failed—it was waiting to be fulfilled by a coming son of David.
And that hope set the stage for something—and someone—much greater.
Because the prophets had already begun describing an ideal king who was still to come.
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By the way, everything we’re talking about in this series comes from my book Evidence for Christ: How We Know That Jesus Is the Messiah.
In it, I lay out a careful, step-by-step case that Jesus really is the Jewish Messiah—starting with what the Old Testament leads us to expect.
If you’d like to go deeper, I hope you’ll pick up a copy, and let me know in the comments what you think.
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We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years into the future—and can get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!