He of Whom All the Girls Sang: An Excerpt from Hitchhiking with Prophets
He of Whom All the Girls Sang: An Excerpt from Hitchhiking with Prophets
This is an excerpt from the Chapter 12 of Hitchhiking with the Prophets: A Ride Through the Salvation Story of the Old Testament written by Chad Bird (1517 Publishing, 2024). Now available!
Have you ever been around someone whom God seems to have spent a little extra time on? I mean they have check marks by all the boxes. Good looks? Yes. Athletic? Yes. Musically talented? Yes. Precocious courage, confidence, and intelligence? Yes. And, as if all these gifts were not enough, they are good leaders, likable, and always seem to get their own way with people. Take all those qualities, and add to them some acting skills, street smarts, and a way with the ladies, and you have the portrait of the young man David.
A solid argument can be made that, besides Moses, David is the most impactful person in the Old Testament story of salvation. Jerusalem, one of the most important cities in world history, became important only because David captured it to make it the capital city of Israel. He is the paradigmatic king of Israel, against whom all other kings are compared or contrasted. The Psalms are incredibly influential on the worship and beliefs of God’s people; almost half of them were written by David. The Lord promised him that one of his descendants would be the Messiah and sit on his throne. Indeed, so closely aligned is David with the Messiah that the Savior is even nicknamed “David” by some of the prophets.
When we consider all of this, we might suppose that David, like, say, Alexander the Great, was the son of a renowned leader, under the tutelage of famous scholars from boyhood. He was the kind of kid whom onlookers would point to and say, “See that boy? There goes the future of our nation.” But no, that wasn’t David at all. Gifted though he was, David was an unknown country boy, tucked away in a backwater village in the Judean hill country, the youngest of eight boys fathered by a man named Jesse. His dad raised sheep, of which the teenager David was the shepherd. Presumably, his life would have been no different than the lives of tens of thousands of others in Israel whose names historians had no reason to record. But one day, the prophet Samuel showed up in his village of Bethlehem. From that moment, David’s life, and our lives still today, were forever changed.
The Lord’s choice of David is a crucial lesson in his divinely backward way of doing things.
You will recall, from the last chapter, that Samuel had informed a disobedient Saul that his days as king were numbered. Saul’s subsequent paranoia necessitated that Samuel be sneaky about his anointing of Saul’s replacement. Directed by God, he surreptitiously journeyed to Bethlehem, met with Jesse, and had him parade all of his sons before him. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, all of them walked before the prophet. Though some of them looked like regal material to Samuel, to each of them God shook his head. He reminded Samuel that he “looks at the heart,” that is, the whole interior disposition of a person. None of them had what the Lord was looking for. Then, in a comical moment, when Samuel asks Jesse if he has any more sons, it’s like the father slaps his forehead and says, “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot! There is the youngest boy, but he’s out taking care of the sheep.” David is fetched from the field. When he appears, the Lord says to the prophet, “Arise, anoint him, for this is he” (1 Sam. 16:12). A horn of olive oil was poured on the boy’s head and the Spirit of God came upon him. David became a little “m” messiah, which in Hebrew means “anointed one.”
The Lord’s choice of David is a crucial lesson in his divinely backward way of doing things. In story after story, the Lord passes over the obvious candidates. He will use old, infertile women to bear promised sons, not newlywed twenty-year-olds. Frequently, it will be non-Israelites like Ruth or Rahab who exhibit a fidelity to God that outshines the Israelites. The Lord repeatedly bypasses firstborn sons to choose the younger or, as in David’s case, the youngest in the family.
God does this not just to keep us on our toes, but to show us that his ways are not our ways, that he tends to hide himself beneath his opposite. This upside-down way of God finds its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus, who also is born in Bethlehem, who is raised in the rural village of Nazareth, who looked no different outwardly than other people, and who was publicly executed by the Roman state in a manner purposefully designed to be shameful and horrific. Yet who is Jesus? He is God in the flesh, the extraordinary concealed in the ordinary, even in the shame and seeming foolishness of the cross.
