Steve Conover: Thank you for joining us for The Friends of Israel Today. I'm Steve Conover, with me is Chris Katulka. We're currently in a series on the Davidic Covenant, so keep in mind that you can catch up on the other episodes in this series at foiradio.org. In fact, you can listen to nearly nine years worth of content that we have on the site featuring Chris Katulka's teaching and insightful interviews with a host of great guests. Again, that's foiradio.org.

Chris Katulka: Steve, we're continuing our series on King David. Specifically, we're looking at the promise that God made to King David and we're looking at it from a lens where God said that he would establish David's kingdom and really establish a dynasty for King David that would ultimately be fulfilled in the coming of his son, Jesus Christ, the son of David, as the Apostle Paul says. So we're going to continue to dive into this amazing biblical covenant that really grounds what's going on in the Old Testament when it comes to the kingship of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Steve Conover: We're looking forward to getting back into the Word, but first in the news, the Jerusalem Post reports that Hamas is returning to power in Northern Gaza, Israeli Defense Force Colonel Hesi Nachman explained in a radio interview, he added that 300,000 to 500,000 residents have returned to Northern Gaza, armed gunmen are roaming the streets and the Israeli military isn't doing enough to stop it.

Chris Katulka: Well, Steve, here's my take. This is the reason a ceasefire right now is a horrible idea. A ceasefire only gives Hamas the opportunity to re-arm, reload and regroup. Well, according to Colonel Nachman, this is already happening in Northern Gaza as the IDF continues to advance South. Again, another reason to be praying for Israel and the Jewish people.

Chris Katulka: We are continuing our series today on the amazing promise that God made to King David and I mentioned last week that as I was going through, there's nearly nine years of radio content that we've developed and man, I noticed right away that we've talked about the promise that God made to Abraham and we've talked about the Mosaic Covenant, we've even talked about the New Covenant. But in all the years of talking about these foundational biblical promises and covenants in the Old Testament, I've never spent time on the promise, the covenant that God made to King David, and it's a really important promise, the one that God made to King David. It's bedrock to understanding why Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the city of David, why he was called the “Son of David”, why He’s  to rule over God's kingdom forever. It's the reason that Jesus is called the King of kings, the King of Israel, the Messiah.

It's even the reason that he's called the Son of God and the Son of man. All of this roots back to a single promise that God made to King David. Now last week we looked into the history of the Davidic Covenant. We examined the events that were leading up to the moment that God made a promise to King David, the pure intentions that David had to build a house for the Lord, a temple, and how ultimately God would speak to David and say, "It's not your job, but I'm going to make a promise to you." So just listen to what God says to King David in 2 Samuel chapter seven, starting in verse eight, it says, 

“So now, say this to my servant David, ‘This is what the LORD of Heaven’s Armies has said: I took you from the pasture and from your work as a shepherd to make you leader of my people Israel. I was with you wherever you went, and I defeated all your enemies before you. Now I will make you as famous as the great men of the earth. I will establish a place for my people Israel and settle them there; they will live there and not be disturbed anymore. Violent men will not oppress them again, as they did in the beginning and during the time when I appointed judges to lead my people Israel. Instead, I will give you relief from all your enemies. The LORD declares to you that he himself will build a dynastic house for you. When the time comes for you to die, I will raise up your descendant, one of your own sons, to succeed you, and I will establish his kingdom. He will build a house for my name, and I will make his dynasty permanent. I will become his father and he will become my son. When he sins, I will correct him with the rod of men and with wounds inflicted by human beings. But my loyal love will not be removed from him as I removed it from Saul, whom I removed from before you. Your house and your kingdom will stand before me permanently; your dynasty will be permanent.’” Nathan told David all these words that were revealed to him.”

Now, I love reading the New English translation of the Bible here in 2 Samuel 7, because I actually think it translates to the Hebrew to fit the promise that God is making to King David. God is making a promise to King David of a dynasty, a kingly dynasty, a Davidic dynasty that will not be broken and God promises David a few things here. First, he promises David that one of his descendants, his dynasty, a son that will come from him, will establish his kingdom and build a temple. Well, we know when we look at what's going on right after the death of King David, that that would be King Solomon.

He will go on to establish David's kingdom and build a house for the Lord, a temple. But God also promises that this one will have a permanent dynasty forever. God compares David to King Saul and he says, your kingdom will not be like Saul's, which I remove from him, thus fracturing the dynasty. Instead, David, your name will be connected to Israel and the Jewish people forever through your dynasty and ultimately your one son that will come in the future to establish your kingdom forever. There is both a nearsighted view of this promise and an eternal component to this promise, and here's what I mean by that. This dynastic promise to David will ultimately be fulfilled in Jesus, but we also cannot ignore the rest of Jesus's Davidic family, the dynasty that came before him. There is language in David's promise that says one of his sons will establish his kingdom forever. Yes, that's Jesus. And then there's another part of the promise that says, "God will punish David's sons with the rod of men when he sins." Well, you guess that's a promise to David's sons leading up to Jesus because we know Jesus never sinned. What's amazing about this promise is that it's an unconditional promise made to David, which means God made this promise unilaterally, it's efficaciousness, which means its success, the success of this covenant is not based on David or his dynasty's behavior. God will fulfill his promise to David because of his faithfulness. If the covenant was a bilateral one which required David or any of his sons to fulfill their end of the bargain in the Davidic promise, guess what? It would've never lasted. This promise is actually very similar to the promise that God made to Abraham in Genesis 12. There's a lot of similar language that's used.

Abraham's promise is unconditional, David's promise is unconditional. God tells Abraham, I brought you up from Ur of the Chaldees, God tells David, I brought you from the pasture and from your work as a shepherd to make you a leader of my people. God tells Abraham his name would be associated with blessing. Everyone would know Abraham's name. God says to David, now, I will make you as famous as the great men of the earth. God promises the land of Israel, a place for Abraham's descendants, the Jewish people, and God says to David, I will establish a place for my people Israel and settle them there. They will live there and not be disturbed anymore. Talking about the land of Israel. When God made the promise to Abraham, he made an unconditional promise concerning the land, the descendants, and really the multifaceted nature of this blessing. So land, which is the land of Israel, descendants, the Jewish people, and a multifaceted blessing to bless the whole world through his people.

Now, God narrows the covenant down, if you think about this from Abraham looking broadly at the land and the Jewish people and a blessing, now he narrows it down to the king who would rule the land, who would rule the Jewish people and who would be the blessing. God's faithfulness to fulfill David's promise is actually seen all throughout the Old Testament. Well, here's a test case for you to see the faithfulness of God to the promise that he made to David. David had a son who would carry on and build his kingdom and build God a temple, and it was King Solomon as we mentioned. And Solomon, listen, he did many great things, but he also did a lot of wrong things. He sinned against God by breaking several laws in the Old Testament, he had many wives, a king was not supposed to have many wives.

He accumulated a lot of wealth, kings were not to accumulate lots of wealth according to the biblical law, and he built up an army, which again, it says in Deuteronomy 17 that a king should not build up an army. And in doing that, Solomon actually, if you notice toward the end of his life, loses focus on the Lord God, just as the law had said in Deuteronomy 17. Solomon's sin did bring about God's punishment on David's dynasty. Not long after Solomon died, the kingdom of David that he ruled over, it split in two, the northern 10 tribes of Israel in the north was ruled from Samaria and the southern tribe, which became the kingdom of Judah. Remember what God said in 2 Samuel 7, “when he, my king, the one that I'm establishing when he sins, I will correct him with the rod of men and with wounds inflicted by human beings.” And you might be thinking, well, this doesn't sound like God's faithfulness. You just got to wait for a moment to see how it all plays out, so stick around.

Steve Conover: Chris, when you think of a people group who have been repeatedly threatened and attacked by an enemy whose purpose is to destroy them, who comes to mind?

Chris Katulka: Steve, without a doubt, it's the people of Israel. For millennia, the Jewish people have fought for their lives and somehow never completely lost their strength to keep going.

Steve Conover: I agree, and this has to be why when October 7th happened, while it rightfully crushed the souls of every Jewish person, it didn't wipe out their strength completely and for good reason.

Chris Katulka: And this good reason is laid out actually within God's Word and diving into that reason is why the Friends of Israel wants to spend the day with our listeners all throughout the United States for our popular one-day Prophecy Up Close conferences, where we're going to cover Israel's Resilience: The Struggle to Survive.

Steve Conover: Everyone is invited to go to foi.org/prophecy to find a one-day conference in their area and to learn more about what to expect. You can register for a day packed full of studying God's word together with Bible teachers who are passionate about the people of Israel.

Chris Katulka: We encourage you to come to learn the history, the future, and the ongoing struggle today for Israel's survival and from where that underlying strength comes. To find a Prophecy Up Close conference in your area, go to foi.org/prophecy. Again, that's foi.org/prophecy.

Chris Katulka: Welcome back everyone. We're taking a deep dive into the promise made to King David, an eternal unconditional promise that can never be broken, much like the promise that God made to Abraham. In fact, the two play off of one another. We were just discussing what God's faithfulness to David looked like throughout the Old Testament, and we turned to the fall of King Solomon. David's son who carried that Davidic dynasty forward just one generation, but in the end, his sin brought ruin on his father's kingdom David, it split it in two. But in the midst of the darkness of this moment when it seemed like this promise was all but gone after just two kings, God will remain faithful. It just goes to show the holiness of our God and the folly of man that this amazing promise which promised a perpetual dynasty to David already feels like it's crashing and burning just one generation after King David.

Look, the kingdom does split in two, but God says this to King David in his promise in 2 Samuel 7, "But my loyal love will not be removed from him as I removed it from Saul, whom I removed from before you, your house and your kingdom, David, will stand before me permanently. Your dynasty will be permanent." What God is saying here is he's telling King David, your household will never be removed from the throne of Israel. There will always be a son of yours that rules Israel. It won't be like King Saul who I removed from before you, and remember what happened to King Saul? He sinned and God removed him from the throne cutting off his family from ruling. Saul was not from the tribe of Judah. He was from the tribe of Benjamin. His son, Jonathan, who should have taken the throne after his father, actually preferred David over his own father.

Saul's dynasty ended with Saul. Look, the same could be said for the northern tribes of Israel after the kingdom split in 922 BC, David's dynasty continued to rule in Judah, but in the northern 10 tribes, it was a rollercoaster ride of dynasties. There was a dynasty of Jeroboam, there was a dynasty of Baasha, there was a dynasty of Zimri, there was a dynasty of Tibni, there was a dynasty of Omri, there was a dynasty of Jehu, there was a dynasty of Shallum, there was a dynasty of Menahem, there was a dynasty of Pekah and there was a dynasty of Hoshea, then the kingdom was ravaged and exiled by the Assyrians in 722 BC. In just 200 years of time, the northern 10 tribes of Israel were overwhelmed by power, influence, murder, as the kingdom shifted from one dynasty to another. But in the South, God remained faithful to King David because of the promise that he made to him.

Now, it wasn't pretty in the kingdom of Judah, I'm not saying that. There were your fair share of bad kings that led the people of Judah astray, but God remained faithful to the dynasty of David and to the promise of David. Listen, when Jehoram became king of Judah, he was in the dynasty of David, but he was leading his people astray. This is one of David's great-great- great-great-great-great-grandsons who's leading the people of Judah astray. He's actually acting like Ahab, the king of Israel, and the writer of 2 Chronicles chapter 21 says this starting in verse seven. He says, "Nevertheless, because the covenant the Lord has made with David, the Lord was not willing to destroy the house of David, he had promised to maintain a lamp for him and his descendants forever." Even though, God is saying, even though David's dynasty deserved its end, its completion because of Jehoram's sin, he's saying, “no, I can't do that. My faithfulness will continue this dynasty that I had promised to King David.”

Listen, there were so many moments in the Davidic dynasty that roots back to the unconditional promise that David's descendants did not deserve to rule, they were evil, but God in his faithfulness to David would not destroy them. Why? Because the fulfillment of this dynasty is not just important to Israel, but it's important to the entire world. It's important to the story of God's redemption.

Look, sometimes when we think about God's faithfulness, we think everything that happens in life will be perfect. There'll be no bumps in the road if God's faithful. Look at the promise that God made to King David. There were lots of bumps in this road. There were lots of bumps for David's family. They made a lot of mistakes. They sinned against God over and over and over, but think about this, God remained faithful to them preserving their dynasty even when they didn't deserve it. Why? Because God was not being faithful just to King David, he was being faithful to the promise that he made, the covenant that he made with King David actually has his name on the dotted line. It's the reason this becomes incredibly important as it drives us forward to the coming of the ultimate king of David, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Steve Conover: Israel, on the verge of becoming a state, a teenaged Holocaust survivor arrives on her shores alone. His name is Zvi Kalisher. Little did he know his search for a new life in the Holy Land would lead him to the Messiah. Zvi, enthusiastic to share his faith, engaged others in spiritual conversations, many of which can be found in our magazine, Israel My Glory. While Zvi is now in the presence of his Savior, his collected writings from well over 50 years of ministry continue to encourage believers worldwide. Now Apples of Gold, a dramatic reading from the life of Zvi.

Mike Kellogg: Over the years the Lord has taught my wife and me to have an open-door policy in our home. People are always coming and going, and some even sleep here. Once each year an elderly Christian gentleman from Germany visits Israel and usually sleeps at our home. When he visited this year, he said, "Zvi, I'm 80 years old now. Before I die, I want you and your wife to visit me in Germany. I want to repay some of the kindness you have shown me over the years." And so off we went to Germany, and when we arrived, he surprised me with an invitation to speak at an assembly of 400 people filled with mostly Russian immigrants. It was a wonderful opportunity to speak about Christ. And while many of those present were believers, there were some unbelieving Jews in the crowd. They were just like their brethren in Israel.

I knew exactly what they were going to ask. "Did you come here to make us Christians?" One asked. I replied, "I have come here to make you good Jews. I want you to turn back to the Bible and then you will know what he expects of us, because you do not know what the Bible says and do not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. I am not surprised you asked such questions. But now that you've heard the truth, you are responsible Before God." This was the first time someone from Israel had spoken to them about Christ. My hosts had another surprise for me during our visit. One day, two of the leaders from the Assembly where I preached visited us and I recognized them immediately, they had stayed in our home a few years ago. It was a great blessing for me. I encouraged them to continue reading the Bible and trusting in the Lord.

I told them, you would be surprised how many believe in him as their savior among our own people, the Jews, the apostles, and the first believers were all Jews, and they believe what is written in Deuteronomy 18:15, "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me, from your midst, from your brethren, him you shall hear." When we trust in the Lord and his Word, we always move ahead spiritually, never backwards.

Just as Jews in Jerusalem always want to see for themselves what I'm reading from the Bible, so the Jews in Germany wanted to see my Hebrew Bible. When German believers spoke with them about Christ, they didn't believe them because they were Gentiles and were using what Jewish people called the Gentile Bible. I was glad to show them my Bible so they could see for themselves, I was speaking from the Word of God. There is a Yiddish saying, “how can a cat cross the sea?” Likewise, how can a Jew from Jerusalem go to another country and preach the gospel of Christ? It seems impossible, and I was thrilled the Lord gave me that special privilege of preaching to so many people. Truly as it is written in Isaiah 2, verse 3, "Out of Zion shall go for the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. The Lord brought forth much fruit for which we sincerely thank him."

Chris Katulka: The impact of Zvi's life in ministry in Israel, it didn't end when he went home to be with the Lord. In fact, Zvi's legacy lives on, our Friends of Israel ministry representatives continue to share the gospel in Jerusalem, Israel, and really all throughout the world. We also serve Holocaust survivors and their families. We provide free food, medicine and clothing, and we even promote the safety and security of the state of Israel and the Jewish people everywhere. So when you give to the Friends of Israel, your donation actually allows us to advance the gospel of our Messiah Jesus. You can give online by visiting foiradio.org. Again, that's foiradio.org. You can click right there on our donate link. Also, be sure to let us know where you listen when you contact us.

Steve Conover: Thank you for joining us for today's episode of The Friends of Israel Today, we have more to say on the Davidic Covenant, but not next week. Chris, where are we headed?

Chris Katulka: That's right. Next week we're going to be looking at our ministries at the Friends of Israel. I always have to remind people, the Friends of Israel Today isn't the only ministry that we have at the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry. We have representatives that are serving all around the world, that are doing amazing work, investing in the Jewish community and teaching in their local church, and so we're very excited to be able to share some of these great ministries of our representatives around the world.

Steve Conover: We hope you join us then. Our host and teacher is Chris Katulka. Today's program was produced by Tom Gallione, engineered by Bob Beebe, edited by Jeremy Strong, who also composed and performs our theme music. Mike Kellogg read Apples of Gold, and I'm Steve Conover, executive producer. Our mailing address is FOI Radio PO box 914 Bellmawr, New Jersey 08099. Again, that's FOI Radio PO box 914 Bellmawr, New Jersey 08099. Our web address is foiradio.org. Again, that's foiradio.org. Or you can call our listener line at 888-343-6940. Again, that's 888-343-6940. The Friends of Israel Today is a production of The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry. We are a worldwide evangelical ministry, proclaiming biblical truth about Israel and the Messiah, while bringing physical and spiritual comfort to the Jewish people.