HelpFinder Bible - Flipbook - Page 642
2 Samuel
W O U L D Y O U D A R E catalog all your failures? What if you were
required to hang a list of them on a wall? Could you sleep tonight if
you let them parade before your eyes, one by one, in graphic detail?
What if you had to publish all your sins on the Internet?
In the depths of your most recent failure, what
What you will be
reading about
were you thinking? Were you wallowing in selfpity? Were you nursing your wounds with the
1:1– 5:25
David becomes king over
balm of discouragement? Were you convincall Israel
ing yourself that you were not merely failing at
something but that you were a failure?
6:1-23
David brings the Ark of the
And can a person who has become a failure
Covenant to Jerusalem
ever succeed again?
7:1-29
The book of 2 Samuel is a biography of a man
God’s promise to David
who failed . . . many times. More important, it is
8:1–10:19
about a spiritual giant who failed many times.
David’s victories
This man was David, the greatest king of the
11:1–12:31
golden era of Israel’s history, the pivotal figure
David and Bathsheba
in the lineage of the Messiah. A man who failed
13:1– 21:22
many times, but a man we would never label as
Absalom rebels against
a failure. Why not?
David
The answer is that David had a heart for God.
22:1– 23:39
In fact, God said David was a man after his own
David’s song of praise
heart (Acts 13:22). David sincerely tried to serve
and last words
God and do what was right. Did he fail at times?
24:1-25
Yes, he was a murderer and an adulterer. Those
A great plague strikes
are terrible failures. But David was truly repenIsrael
tant. He was truly sorry for his sins. His heart got
back in tune with God’s.
The portrait of David as presented in this book is the portrait of a man who
practiced the presence of God. In his humanness, he slipped and fell at times—
in fact, many times. But his life’s mission was to love God and honor him. Read
the psalms that David wrote (in the book of Psalms) and hear the rhythms of
his heart toward God.
David would not have wanted to sleep with a catalog of his failures. He would
have gone to God and made things right with him, then rested in the assurance
that he had been forgiven and that he was in the midst of a lifetime commitment to the Lord God of heaven.
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