by Standerinfamilycourt

When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away
Through my groaning all day long.
For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me;
My vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer. Selah.
 I acknowledged my sin to You,
And my iniquity I did not hide;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”;
And You forgave the guilt of my sin. Selah.
Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to You in a time when You may be found;
Surely in a flood of great waters they will not reach him.
You are my hiding place; You preserve me from trouble;
You surround me with songs of deliverance.   Selah.
Psalm 32

After He had removed [Saul], He raised up David to be their king, concerning whom He also testified and said, ‘I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after My heart, who will do all My will.’
Acts 13:22

After lecturing marriage-permanence warriors on “grace” and “legalism”  utterly fails, whenever divorced-and-remarried evangelicals want to justify remaining in civil-only remarriages that Jesus and Paul called adulterous, it’s not long before they retort, “You mean to tell me, David’s in hell because of his multiple wives??   Why then does the bible say that he was so blessed and was a ‘man after God’s own heart’ ?”

Response:  Yes David lived for many years in unrepentant adultery (as Jesus defined it, not as Hebrew tradition defined it), and no, he is not in hell because he observed the requirements of the Abrahamic Covenant.  You don’t have to be, either, but since we’re now under the Messianic Covenant, it’s not for the same reason.

No man who has ever lived, from Adam on, has been made one-flesh (per Matt. 19:5-6) by GOD with more than one living woman at a time, a bond that is dissolved and unjoined only by death.   This was just as true in David’s time as it is now — otherwise, Jesus would never have taken us all the way back to the Garden, rather than back to the days of Moses, when He was challenged by the Pharisees, who had become world-class serial polygamists.   What is one-flesh?   Genesis 2:18-23 gives us a strong clue – (noting that only 1 rib was taken out of Adam):

“So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”

We know that David had only one such wife when he married the 2nd, 3rd, 4th through 7th and Bathsheba.   According to the book of 2 Samuel, chapters 2 and 3, this was most likely  Ahinoam of Jezreel, the mother of his firstborn, Amnon.     Prior to that, he had a ketubah (betrothal contract) with Michal, daughter of King Saul,  but before the marriage was able to be consummated,  she was given to Paltiel, before she was later recovered and returned to David.   She and the rest were all basically concubines, and not joined by God as sarx mia, but only carnally as hen soma.   This is equivalent to today’s situation with remarriage after divorce, except that David’s arrangement was actually more moral because he never divorced or abandoned any of them, but supported all of them all of their lives.   All this said, however, he had to offer bloody animal sacrifices every day of his life because he didn’t have Christ’s atonement or Christ to obey out of gratitude.   The same Christ made it crystal clear that EVERYONE who marries a divorced person commits ongoing adultery for which the kingdom of God is forfeited.   Of course,  David never did this, though he did widow two of his carnal wives.   Since Christ has now come, animal sacrifices no longer accomplish the kind of atonement that David relied upon.

Even so, David paid a severe multigenerational price for his lustful, covetous life.   His children wound up raping and killing each other, and one son commited adultery with some of his consorts. The prophet Nathan told him the sword would never depart from his house. The nation of Israel was split and his progeny many generations on were mostly evil with the exception of a few — which resulted in the nation begin given over to Nebuchadnezzar (perhaps ISIS is our Nebuchadnezzar?), and Israel was only restored to national sovereignty following a purge of unlawful foreign polygamous marriages.  Many Hebrew experts believe this was the end of concurrent polygamy among the Hebrews (basically replaced with serial polygamy, which Jesus and John the Baptist also bluntly rebuked).

Finally, there is substantial evidence in some of his later psalms and in 1 Kings 1 that David repented and died celibate, despite all of his wives and concubines.

1 Kings 1:1-4  New American Standard Bible (NASB)
Now King David was old, advanced in age; and they covered him with clothes, but he could not keep warm. So his servants said to him, “Let them seek a young virgin for my lord the king, and let her attend the king and become his nurse; and let her lie in your bosom, that my lord the king may keep warm.” So they searched for a beautiful girl throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king. The girl was very beautiful; and she became the king’s nurse and served him, but the king did not cohabit with her.

In Deuteronomy 17,  God issues this harrowing warning, generations ahead of David’s birth:

When you enter the land which the Lord your God gives you, and you possess it and live in it, and you say, ‘I will set a king over me like all the nations who are around me,’ you shall surely set a king over you whom the Lord your God chooses, one from among your countrymen you shall set as king over yourselves; you may not put a foreigner over yourselves who is not your countryman. Moreover, he shall not multiply horses for himself, nor shall he cause the people to return to Egypt to multiply horses, since the Lord has said to you, ‘You shall never again return that way.’ HE SHALL NOT MULTIPLY WIVES UNTO HIMSELF OR ELSE HIS HEART WILL TURN AWAY; nor shall he greatly increase silver and gold for himself.

We immediately think of David’s noncovenant son, Solomon who did exactly all of that after his youthful years during which God prospered him.   Solomon’s one-flesh was evidently the Shulamite of the Song of Solomon, before he multiplied hundreds of foreign wives to himself.   The Proverbs and Ecclesiastes give strong evidence that he, too, repented and returned to putting God first in his old age.    His sons were wicked, that resulted in the kingdom being divided after Solomon’s death. 

We think this lays to rest the idea that God ever approved of polygamy, whether concurrent or serial.  That’s why Jesus said, “from the beginning IT WAS NOT SO.”

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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