The Four-Point Davidic Relationship
I used this term “Four-Point David” or “Davidic Relationship” and I think it is important to clarify what this means.
If you examine the life and histories, but in particular the text of David in the psalms, you get a very interesting picture of precisely who he was, and why he is ‘beloved.’
His manner of leadership – even his manner of corruption – is entirely hands-off. David’s leadership is the ideal of what a person is called to be, because he assumes a cycle of four essential stances in two roles.
Role One: Servant
That’s right, David is a servant first – technically, a son, as kings were referred to as sons of God. This means that David is intimately connected to God as a Lord. Christ points this out in the psalms, where it states “The Lord said to my Lord,” but you get the idea – the king of a nation is a servant to God.
Role Two: Lord
The obvious, David is a Lord, which means he gets to walk around like he owns the place. This doesn’t mean he can do anything he wants – rather, it means he fulfills the primordial purpose of every human being – that of being a steward to all. In other words, he walks around the kingdom and keeps things tidy.
To understand these two roles best, it is necessary to look at the four stances that a perfect king takes:
Stance One: Supplicant to God
In the first stance, the David is a servant, bringing to God the needs that have been collected from across the nation, especially including his own. Does this involve sacrifices? Sure, but the stance itself is what is important. The negative alternative to this stance is to try to fill the needs or dangers of the kingdom on one’s own strength. This stance is all about yielding things to God and waiting for a response.
Stance Two: Recipient of Grace
In the second stance, the David has been heard by God, who in turn gives the David what is required – it could be wisdom, it could be rain, it could be a friendly neighbor. It is, effectively, whatever is required to fulfill the need as posited by the David. There is an alternative negative stance to this, although it is unusual – the ascribing of grace to a non-God source. For example, the king may think the grace came from some other lesser god, or from an angel, or from a manifestation of God, or another person. In other words, key to this stance is not only the reception of grace, but an acknowledgment that this grace came from God and nothing else.
Having been given the grace, it is time to act!
Stance Three: Distributor of Grace
This is the first of the two kingly stances, and it is the most important. It is basically taking all of the life that God has given you and distributing it to where you told God that it needed to go. The alternative is dreadful – saving it up for yourself, putting it where it is not needed, etc. This is the one that God’s wrath hinges upon most of all – if someone claims to be a king or lord and does NOT do this, God will cut them off.
Stance Four: Hearer of Needs
This is another critical stance and it is what truly makes a lord so human – the lord hears the needs of those who still do not have enough. The sick, the suffering, the oppressed. The orphan and the widow. The David hears these things and catalogs them – no matter what, the world comes at a cost. The order of life that God has established in the face of chaos costs life to keep in motion. God can do it, but it gets done faster and better if all the Davids of the world get with the program and do their part. The alternative is to do good, but not measure ones progress – which is a dangerous thing to do, from the prophetic point of view. The Lord God holds the plumb line and will judge the house that is built etc. etc.
This is a very complicated way of expressing what is basically a fire chain.
Imagine, if you will, a house that God built. Now imagine that God has an endless fountain of water. Now imagine that there are people who live in this house who like to start fires. Well, God can certainly smell the fire, grab a bucket, fill it with water, dump it on the fire, figure out if he needs more water, go back, get more water or else rest… but as I have said in other places, human being were created to be a part of this process. We were not created in the image and likeness of God just to look pretty.
So if you can imagine the fire line, the four stances become: 1) Looking upstream and saying, ‘Need more water’, 2) Getting the full pail of water without spilling it, 3) Giving the full pail to the next person without drinking it, 4) Taking back the empty pail and listening to see if the guy downstream says, “more water.”
So you see, it’s a simple coordinated process – this is the way the tree of life was designed to work – it’s how life gets from God to the cosmos.
Despite its simplicity, there are a lot of folks who have never heard of it or believed in it. At any time in history, anywhere. But every good king has done it, and every bad ruler has failed in some way. God loves everybody, he doesn’t want to see anyone fail, but if you step in the way of this process and become a nuisance, God has to either step around you, cut you off, etc. It’s not that you are not important – it’s that there are a lot of things going wrong in this world and if you aren’t helping God, you are getting in the way. God is not especially good with that.
This is why we have his Son, who is not only an heir of David by lineage, but is the perfect David in his activity – it is the secret to His success, and every step of the way Christ works to get people to buy into this way of doing things. For those who do participate in it – well think of it this way – if you always have a bucket of water in your hands, fire is not a threat.
Likewise, Christ is so confident in this way of life, that he tells people that if they participate in this way of doing things – effectively “walk with God” then they will not taste death – in other words, if you participate in the life-giving efforts of God regardless of whether death comes for you or not, you will not experience separation from the spiritual nourishment that God provides throughout creation.
That’s a pretty awesome promise!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
© 2006 Jacob Gorny