Godmindfamily, Chapter 13
- May 6
- 17 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Chapter 13: The Davidic Covenant, the Son of David and the Prince of Israel
In The Old Testament prophets, David is described as ruling God’s future kingdom, and so is Jesus in the New Testament. ‘I, Yahweh, will be their God and my servant David prince among them.’ (Ezekiel 34:24). Commentators have come up with different interpretations of this verse. Some believe that Yahweh here could be the Lord Jesus, and a resurrected David could be ‘the prince’ under him, whose allotment or portion and ceremonial functions are described later in the Book of Ezekiel. The Bible repeatedly says that David and Jesus (e.g. Revelation 11:5) will rule the kingdom, there is one shepherd, not two, ‘over them’ (Ezekiel 34:23), and that one is identified as ‘David’, further corroborating the identity of David with Jesus, the shepherd boy (1 Samuel 16) and the Good Shepherd (John 10).
In Jeremiah 30:9, David was named as a leader in the future kingdom: ‘they will serve Yahweh their God and David their king, whom I will raise up to them’. Raise up – Hebrew qûm – may mean physically standing up as in resurrection, rising up against someone (attacking) or setting up something.[i] In Jeremiah 30:9 David was explicitly called the king (Hebrew malkam), and he himself was promised an eternal throne (2 Samuel 7:16): ‘your throne will be established forever’. In Revelation, Jesus rules God’s kingdom with the saints, but clearly he is in charge of that kingdom.
The whole picture becomes much simpler and clearer if we accept that Jesus was the reincarnation of King David, as well as the divine Word incarnate. After all, multiple senses of qûm or ‘raise up’ apply to Jesus, who is risen from the dead, was raised up above the ground during the Crucifixion, will attack the Antichrist and establish an earthly kingdom. He also rose into the sky during his ascension.
David prophetically experienced the Crucifixion from the Messiah’s perspective in Psalm 22, accurately describing a death by crucifixion centuries before crucifixion was even invented, and he wrote as Jesus on other occasions in the psalter. For example, in Psalm 2:7–8, David wrote: ‘Yahweh said to me, “You are my son. Today I have become your father. Ask of me, and I will give the nations for your inheritance”’. I think that passage speaks for itself, especially when you consider that in Luke 3:23, God said to Jesus, ‘you are my son’. Psalm 22 ends with a prophecy that God will rule the world (22:28), clearly establishing the Messianic context of this Crucifixion prophecy.
‘For you will not leave my soul in Sheol, neither will you allow your holy one to see corruption’ (Psalm 16:10), written by David, foretold the resurrection and glorification of himself and Jesus, as a single entity, by means of the ambiguous ‘holy one’. David’s body rotted, but Jesus’ never did, on account of his Resurrection.
David was anointed as king by Samuel (1 Samuel 16), making him the anointed one, and the Hebrew word Mashiach, from which we get Messiah, literally means the anointed one. Christ means the same thing. When he was anointed, God’s Spirit came to David (1 Samuel 16:13). This prefigured Jesus, who was later anointed by the Spirit of God following his baptism by John the Baptist. Micah (5) prophesied that a Messianic ruler would come from Bethlehem, who would rule to the ends of the earth, and David and Jesus were both born in Bethlehem, a relatively small town. Two such important figures coming from such a small town would be quite a coincidence, but it is not a coincidence.
When David defeated Goliath, it was with a stone hurled from his sling (1 Samuel 17:49). Jesus, the Messiah, is symbolised by the stone in Scripture (e.g. Daniel 2:32; Matthew 21:42; Psalm 118) and he was a craftsman (Mark 6:3), that is, a carpenter-stonemason. David’s harp playing had a soothing, healing effect on King Saul (1 Samuel 16), which foreshadowed the healing miracles performed by Jesus. Moreover, David was the archetypal underdog, underestimated by everyone, as demonstrated by his ability to kill Goliath, and Jesus was the stone the builder’s rejected (Matthew 21:42), the most terribly underestimated person ever to walk the earth.
Jesse was David’s father. In Isaiah 11, the Messiah is called a branch out of Jesse’s roots, not a branch of David, who was a much more famous figure than Jesse. Why do you think that is? Because both David and Jesus were descended from Jesse.
The Davidic Covenant was a series of unconditional promises God made to King David. It was revealed to the prophet Nathan and passed on to David. The text runs as follows (2 Samuel 7:4–17):‘It happened the same night, that the word of Yahweh came to Nathan, saying, "Go and tell my servant David, 'Thus says Yahweh, "Shall you build me a house for me to dwell in? For I have not lived in a house since the day that I brought up the children of Israel out of Egypt, even to this day, but have moved around in a tent and in a tabernacle. In all places in which I have walked with all the children of Israel, did I say a word to any of the tribes of Israel, whom I commanded to be shepherd of my people Israel, saying, 'Why have you not built me a house of cedar?'"' Now therefore you shall tell my servant David this, 'Thus says Yahweh of Armies, "I took you from the sheep pen, from following the sheep, that you should be prince over my people, over Israel. I have been with you wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you. I will make you a great name, like the name of the great ones who are in the earth. I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in their own place, and be moved no more; neither shall the children of wickedness afflict them any more, as at the first, and as from the day that I commanded judges to be over my people Israel. I will cause you to rest from all your enemies. Moreover Yahweh tells you that Yahweh will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled, and you shall sleep with your fathers, I will set up your seed after you, who shall proceed out of your bowels, 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. If he commits iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men; but my loving kindness shall not depart from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away before you. Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before you. Your throne shall be established forever."'" According to all these words, and according to all this vision, so Nathan spoke to David.’
The main takeaways from this covenant are that God promised King David that ‘Yahweh will build you a house’ (2 Samuel 7:11), that David’s ‘offspring’ would build a house for God, be God’s ‘son’ and receive the eternal throne of a kingdom (2 Samuel 7:12–16). God also said to David, ‘your house and your kingdom will be made sure forever before you. Your throne will be established forever.”’ (2 Samuel 7:16). The Hebrew bayit, correctly translated as ‘house’, can mean the family household or a physical home, like the English word.The Hebrew word ben used in 2 Samuel 7:14, the Davidic Covenant, can mean someone’s biological son or a descendant. So David and his Son have this eternal throne promised to them, because David in a sense was his own offspring, Jesus, due to David’s reincarnation as Jesus. Solomon, David’s biological son and heir, built the First Temple and sat on his father’s throne (1 Chronicles 29:23), but the kingdom he ruled – the United Kingdom of Israel – did not last forever. So while Solomon is encompassed by the covenant, the prophecy mainly refers to Jesus, the Son of God, who said he would rebuild the temple in John 2:19. Jesus was a descendant of David through his mother; his stepfather Joseph was also descended from David (Matthew 1; Luke 3). Jesus was thus called ‘the Son of David’ (Luke 18:38), a title of the Messiah, with son in this sense meaning descendant. An eternal kingdom of course entailed an eternal king, hence Jesus had to be God’s Son. The angel announced to Mary that her son will be given the throne of David (Luke 1:32), because Jesus was David.
God’s promise to David that ‘Yahweh will build you a house’ (2 Samuel 7:11) in the context of temple construction, means that Jesus (Yahweh) will build David a temple, which only makes sense if David is Christ, who will build himself a temple – as he said in John 2 – and govern from his throne in that temple, as is the case in Ezekiel. David’s life and reign were characterised by his humility, mercy (he had opportunity to kill his enemy Saul, but relented) and obedience to God. He was not as good and wise as the Messiah, but he was the best of Israel’s pre-Messianic kings and a precursor of the Messiah in the minds of the Jewish people.
As previously mentioned, in Psalm 22 David was anticipating his subsequent incarnation and death on the cross as Jesus, the Christ. The World English Bible translates Psalm 22:20 as: ‘Deliver my soul from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dog.’ But if we go back to the original Hebrew, we discover that ‘precious life’ is a translation of the Hebrew word ye-kee-dati yechidati, which means ‘only one’ or ‘unique one’.[ii] Yek-ee-dah (Yechidah) can mean only child[iii] and is used as such in The Book of Judges 11:34.[iv] The Septuagint translates it as Monogenays monogenēs, which means ‘one of a kind, one and only’ and can also signify an only child.[v] The ‘only-begotten’ and ‘only one’ in this context is taken by Christians as an allusion to Christ, the Son of God, but in Psalm 22 it is actually the crucified figure (Jesus) who is asking God to deliver his only begotten: Jesus’ only or unique child.
Who was this one of a kind child of Jesus? John the Apostle, who was there at the cross, alongside Mary Magdalene and The Virgin Mary (John 19:26). In Psalm 22:20, Jesus prayed to the Father that his unique child be spared the martyrdom he was suffering. The prayer was granted: John was the only apostle not to be martyred. John was the only apostle who witnessed the Crucifixion because he was Christ’s biological son. Jesus died on the cross for all of humanity who would be saved; he also did it for his son.When Jesus was on the cross and saw the ‘disciple whom he loved’ (John 19:26), generally understood to be John, the Lord said to his mother ‘Woman, behold your son!’ (John 19:26) and to the disciple ‘behold, your mother!’ (John 19: 27). In the original Greek, the word is huios, which can mean son, descendant, a term of endearment, or one belonging to a certain kind.[vi] The Greek word for mother used in John 19:27 is meter, and this generally means mother, but can also metaphorically mean the origin of something or someone.The received understanding of these verses is that Jesus wanted John to be a kind of adoptive son to his mother, and look after her, and for Mary to take care of John, in Jesus’ absence. This is obviously true and is reinforced by the fact John took Mary into his own home afterwards (John 19:27). John’s biological mother was not the Virgin Mary, and nor was she Salome, but a different woman. Jesus’ phenomenal love (agape) was public, for all of his sheep, and private, developed and expressed through his family relationships. But there is an additional shade of meaning.
In ancient Judea, descendants, not only biological sons, were referred to as ‘sons’ of their ancestor, and their ancestors were frequently called ‘fathers’ (1 Kings 2:10), hence the Messiah was widely understood to be ‘the Son of David’, though he was many generations removed from King David. Therefore, ‘woman, behold your son’ also implies that John was Mary’s grandson, and she his grandmother. Remember that huios can mean descendant as well as son and meter can mean the origin of someone as well as ‘mother’.The identity of the Son of David must be clarified. ‘Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, “what do you think of the Christ? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “of David”. He said to them, “How then does David in the Spirit call him Lord, saying ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit on my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’ If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?’’ (Matthew 22:42–45). The meaning here is threefold. Jesus identifies the Son of David, the Messiah – himself – with the Lord. But in the quotation from Psalm 110:1, written by King David, the Lord talks to ‘my Lord’ – there are two Lords in dialogue, God the Father and God the Son. Jesus was also asking a legitimate question of the Pharisees. He asked them how is the Messiah David’s son, if David called him Lord? The answer is that God incarnated as one of David’s descendants, Jesus, ‘the root and offspring of David’ (Revelation 22:10). Jesus is The Son of David with the eternal throne of David, and John, though he is part of the same family, typology and covenant, is merely a son of David, not the Messiah. For obvious reasons, it’s better for there to be only one king in a kingdom.
Some people don’t believe that the disciple Jesus loved was John the Apostle, but the beloved disciple who was described as being present at the Crucifixion is identified in the text as he who wrote the Gospel of John (21:20–24). In the earliest manuscripts John’s gospel is not attributed to anyone else. The Church fathers Polycrates, Eusebius and Augustine also believed that John was the beloved disciple, and they were centuries closer to the events than we are now. And the beloved disciple’s presence at the Last Supper means he must have been an apostle.
John’s status as Jesus’ son helps us to understand why John was called the disciple Jesus loved in the gospel of John, and why John rested against Jesus during the Last Supper (John 13:23). It also explains why Jesus called John and James ‘Sons of Thunder’ (Mark 3:17); in addition to the fact he literally called John ‘son’, the true significance of which has escaped many, Yahweh is associated with thunder in the Bible (Psalm 29:3; Psalm 18; Exodus 19), and Jesus is Yahweh. The fiery tempers of John and James being used as justification for the nickname Boanerges concealed a deeper truth.
John’s true parentage was concealed and he was given to Salome and Zebedee to protect him; Jesus is the King of the Jews, the rightful heir to David, and after Jesus’ death and ascension, John may have been misconstrued as the legitimate heir to the throne (although there is no such thing as a successor to Jesus, because he is immortal). This would have painted a huge target on his back with the Roman authorities, an even bigger target than he had as one of the leaders of the fledgling Jesus movement.
Then there’s Psalm 72:1, which reads: ‘God, give the king your justice, your righteousness to the royal son.’ People have interpreted the king and his son as being King David and his son Solomon, since the psalms were attributed to David, king of the United Kingdom of Israel. But the context, established by subsequent verses, such as ‘in his days, the righteous shall flourish, and abundance of peace, until the moon is no more’ (Psalm 72:7), is undeniably that of the millennial kingdom. The descriptions are too paradisaical to fit David’s Israel or any historical monarchy, and they cannot be about the new earth, because there will be no moon in the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:23), which will follow the millennium.
So who is this king’s child, this royal son? Well, Jesus is the king of the millennial kingdom in Psalm 72:1 and in Revelation, and I have already identified his ‘only-begotten’ son as John the Apostle. After Peter was told he must ‘follow’ (John 21:19) Jesus to Crucifixion and heaven, he asked about John’s fate, and the Lord said, ‘if I desire that he stay until I come, what is that to you?’ (John 21:22). The disciples believed this meant that John would not die (John 21:23), but Jesus did not say the beloved disciple would not die (John 21:22); in fact, John died in the reign of Trajan (98–117 AD).[vii] The Lord was saying that, in contrast to the martyred Peter, John will remain alive on the earth until the Second Coming, an event that did not happen during John’s lifetime in the Roman era, that therefore lies in the future and could only happen through his reincarnation in the latter days. Edgar Cayce also predicted that the return of John the Evangelist would signal that the Second Coming is nigh, and that he would be a vehicle through which the physical, mental and spiritual are united.[viii]
John’s reincarnation in the last days explains why he was chosen to receive the Revelation of those times; he was, to some extent, seeing visions from his own future incarnation, the purpose of which is to help pave the way for the Second Coming, yes, but also to serve under King Jesus in the subsequent millennial kingdom.
The text of the Davidic Covenant literally states that David’s offspring would be God’s ‘son’ (2 Samuel 7:14), and that this son would build a temple and be given an eternal kingdom. After David/Jesus, the primary figure of the Davidic Covenant, this secondarily applies to David’s biological son Solomon, who built the First Temple. Solomon was a previous incarnation of John the Apostle, the Son of Christ – which explains why in one sense, Solomon was prophesied to be God’s son: because this was to occur in a future incarnation, and because his father David became God in his Jesus incarnation. This same individual is Ezekiel’s (46) future prince of God’s Kingdom under King Jesus; the Davidic Covenant applies to Solomon across two or more incarnations, as well as to David/Jesus, the Son of David. Of course, even in this interpretation, the kingdom and authority will be Christ’s, with John in a subordinate position, as one of the saints who rule with Christ in Revelation 20:6.Solomon and John were both fascinated with the knowledge and wisdom of God, which was reflected in their work. John’s gospel begins with: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:10). Proverbs 8:22–23, written by Solomon, is about wisdom: ‘Yahweh possessed me in the beginning of his work, before his deeds of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before the earth existed.’
Zechariah 6:11-14, written centuries before Jesus’ birth, goes as follows: ‘take silver and gold, and make crowns, and set them on the head of Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest; and speak to him, saying, ‘Yahweh of Armies says, “Behold, the man whose name is the Branch! He will grow up out of his place; and he will build Yahweh’s temple. He will build Yahweh’s temple. He will bear the glory, and will sit and rule on his throne. He will be a priest on his throne. The counsel of peace will be between them both.’
Now, here’s where things get even more interesting. The World English Bible has ‘He will be a priest on his throne. The counsel of peace will be between them both’ (Zechariah 6:13). The common interpretation of this passage is that it’s a prophecy that the Joshua-ruler will be king and high priest. Joshua is the anglicisation of Yeshua, Jesus’ Hebrew name, so this is a prophecy that Jesus will be the king and have a throne and build a temple, as he said he would do in three days in John’s gospel.
Jesus is currently the head of the church (Ephesians 1:22; Colossians 1:18), our ‘great high priest’ (Hebrews 4:14) in heaven, since he has given an eternal and ultimate sin offering, making Joshua the high priest an apt sign of things to come. But there are other ways of translating that passage, which reveal an additional meaning. An alternative translation reads: ‘And there shall be a priest by his throne.’[ix] But the Hebrew word translated ‘by’ is usually translated ‘upon’. This also means that Zechariah was writing about the priest being a priest (a separate individual from Joshua) on his own lesser throne, and therefore stating the existence of two separate thrones.[x] The ‘priest’ is not described by Zechariah as a high priest, because that honour belongs to Jesus (Hebrews 4:14), further implying that the priest is another person. Reading Zechariah 6:13, one is reminded of Revelation 3:21: ‘to he who overcomes, I will give him to sit on my throne, as I sat on my father’s throne’, which refers to one individual in particular who will be this ‘priest’. Likening the way this person sits on Jesus’ throne to the way Jesus sat on his Father’s throne implies that this individual will be Jesus’ son and that his throne-sitting is in heaven only, since the Father’s throne is not on the earth. To sit on Jesus’ throne on the earth during the millennium would be a temptation too far and because of the ambiguity of 2 Samuel 7, the scripture still holds with only one king sitting on the throne of David, and the prince on his own lesser throne, a throne belonging to the same kingdom.
Jesus and Solomon were promised thrones, because both were David’s offspring. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, translates by his throne in Zechariah 6 as ‘at his right hand’, i.e. the priest is at the right hand of King Joshua (Jesus).[xi] In Matthew 20:21, Salome asked that her sons John and James should sit at Jesus’ right and left hand in the kingdom. The early church father and historian Eusebius wrote that John was a priest[xii] and John described himself as a priest and a king (Revelation 1:6). This is further evidence for John as the son of Christ, since it makes sense for the king’s son to sit at his father’s right hand. Jesus’ response to Salome on that occasion was oblique, but not definitively negative: he just said that honour is not mine to give; it’s up to my Father (Matthew 20:23). John will sit at his father’s right hand in the millennial kingdom, as he sat next to Jesus during the Last Supper (John 21:20).
Regardless of your position on John’s status, the king and the priest are clearly implied to be two separate figures. This is further borne out by ‘and the counsel of peace shall be between them both’, in which the existence of two distinct figures working together in harmony is more linguistically obvious. Their relations will be amicable presumably because the priest will simply do as he is told by King Jesus! In Ezekiel 43 and 45, Yahweh is also prophesied to take the form of a glorified man, with a figure serving him called ‘the prince’. The prince is the individual with the greatest access to Yahweh in Ezekiel’s temple, since he is described as entering and leaving via the porch of the east gate that Jesus himself will enter by (Ezekiel 46:8), presenting the sacrifices and offerings to King Jesus (Ezekiel 46), and giving voluntary sacrifices (Ezekiel 46:12). The prince plays a mediating role between Yahweh and the people of the kingdom. To draw an analogy with the British monarchy, the prince has a similar role to the Prince of Wales and the prime minister, with Jesus as king. Because of this unique position in relation to Jesus, he is the most likely candidate in those temple ordinances to be permitted to sit beside Jesus’ throne, on his own princely throne. Therefore, Ezekiel’s (44) prince is Zechariah’s priest, and that individual is the reincarnation of John The Apostle and King Solomon. The prince of Israel is however clearly under Yahweh/King Jesus, as demonstrated by the fact he makes sin offerings to Yahweh for himself and for his people Israel (Ezekiel 45:22).
It is written in Ezekiel (46:16) that the prince’s sons are to be given land from the prince’s portion of the millennial kingdom if he wants to give them land. The upshot of this verse is that as the prince of the Promised Land, the returned John is prophesied to have at least two sons, and by implication, a wife. This must happen before the rapture, because after the last trumpet there will be no more sexual intercourse for the glorified. This is in fulfilment of the promise from the Davidic Covenant, ‘your house and your kingdom shall be made sure before you forever.’ (2 Samuel 7:17). John and his descendants are the house of David (and indeed the house of Jesus), in addition to David’s other, more distant descendants among the Jews. Having more people with Jesus’ biological blood in them will be good for the world during the millennium, because they will inherit some of his good qualities.
We know that the Book of Ezekiel chapters 40 to 48, which describes the ordinances and dimensions of the temple, pertains to the fourth temple in the millennial kingdom, because the dimensions and ordinances do not fit the historical first or second temples, it cannot be the temple in which the abomination of desolation will occur because ‘Yahweh’ in the form of a glorified ‘man’ resides within the temple, and he will never let anything like that happen while he is resident in the temple, and in the New Jerusalem, there will be no temple (Revelation 21:22).
In the kingdom, the family as the core unit of society will be restored in the millennium.
[iv]Rabbi Reuven Klein. 2020. The Chayah and Yechidah, https://ohr.edu/8914#:~:text=Although%20the%20word%20Yechidah%20in,that%20is%20unique%20and%20unparalleled.
[vi] https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/huios#:~:text=Definition:,who%20participates%20in%20the%20resurrection.
[vii] Saint Irenaeus. Against Heresies.
[viii] Kirkpatrick, Sidney. 2001. Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet. Penguin Publishing Group; Reissue edition.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Eusebius. 2019. History of the Church. Beginning and End Press. Read the next chapter here: https://www.robertensor.com/post/godmindfamily-chapter-14
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