Good Question

Why doesn’t The Books of the Bible show the “seven sevens” in the book of Revelation?

Q. If The Books of the Bible is supposed to show the “natural literary outlines” of the biblical books, why doesn’t it highlight the “seven sevens” that structure the book of Revelation?

It’s true that many interpreters do see a pattern of seven sevens in the book of Revelation. While the details can differ, the basic outline is usually something like this:
• seven letters
• seven seals
• seven trumpets
• seven signs
• seven bowls
• seven great enemies defeated
• seven last things

It’s also true that the letters, seals, trumpets, and bowls organize the episodes in their specific parts of the book. For example, we don’t hear about John being told all at once to sit down and write seven letters. Rather, he’s told at the start of each one, “Write to this church,” and we hear the content of that letter before he’s told to write the next one. Similarly, the events following the opening of each seal are narrated before the next seal is opened. And so forth.

Albrecht Dürer (woodcut), Seven Angels are Given Seven Trumpets

It would certainly be elegant if we could show that a pattern like this structures every part of Revelation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

For one thing, only four of these “sevens” are actually named specifically in the text: the churches, seals, trumpets, and bowls. The other supposed series of “sevens” are not named or identified as such in the text, suggesting that no such further series are being used as intentional structuring devices.

And are they really even “sevens”? Of the so-called “seven signs,” for example, only five are introduced by vision formulas:
– “A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun.”
– “Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon.”
– “And I saw a beast coming out of the sea.”
– “Then I saw another beast.”
– “Then I looked, and there before me was the Lamb.”
Interpreters sometimes identify two other “mystical figures” as “signs” in this part of the book, the woman’s child and Michael the angel. But these are actually characters in the ongoing narrative who are not presented as the focus of a given vision the way the others are. (Remember, the question is whether the elements in a given “seven” structure a series of episodes.) Besides, if the child and the angel count as “signs,” then why not count similar characters in the narrative as well, such as the earth, which helps the child, or the 144,000 who follow the Lamb?

As for “seven great enemies defeated,” it is true that after the seven bowls, Revelation describes the defeat and destruction of several enemies. These are named, interestingly, in the reverse order of their original appearance in the book, suggesting some possible structural significance: Babylon, the beast, the false prophet, the dragon, death, and hell. But the depiction of the sequential destruction of these enemies does not supply the structural outline for this section in Revelation. Rather, almost all of the section is about the destruction of Babylon; the destruction of all the other enemies is narrated more briefly at the end.

And this would be only six enemies anyway. Gog and Magog need to be added to make seven, and they break up the general pattern. They are not mentioned earlier in the book, only briefly here, and they are introduced and destroyed in the middle of the reverse-order sequence, between the beast and the dragon. (For that matter, why do they count as only one enemy, when “death and hell,” which are always mentioned together, are counted as two?)

Finally, as for the “seven last things,” these are not listed or identified in the text, so interpreters need to pick and choose from among the many features of the closing visions to get a total of seven (for example: the new heaven, the new earth, the new Jerusalem; the river of life, the tree of life, the book of life; the throne of God). But even so, once again these elements do not structure the episodes in this part of the book.

So if we try to outline Revelation based on “sevens,” what we actually get are four explicit sevens and three other sections that cannot be organized consistently into a sevenfold arrangement. Besides, an outline of “seven sevens” is not able to encompass one of the key parts of the book: John’s vision (right after the letters) of the Lamb receiving honor from the creatures around the heavenly throne.

If, on the other hand, we take the phrase “in the Spirit” as our structural cue, as explained in the “Invitation to Revelation” in The Books of the Bible, and as developed in more detail in the Daniel-Revelation study guide, we find that this phrase appears explicitly at the start of four major sections, providing a comprehensive structure for the book and its contents.

Nevertheless, an outline based on “seven sevens” is to be commended in one regard: it reflects an attempt to recognize the literary-structural signals that the book of Revelation itself is sending, rather than to rely simply on traditional chapters and verses as guides. As a result, in several parts of the book such an outline yields a structural understanding very close to the one we have indicated in The Books of the Bible, at least in terms of the arrangement and progression of individual episodes.

This illustrates that much about the structures of the biblical books can be recognized implicitly, so that even interpreters who are committed to different outlines can end up in broad agreement at many points.

Does God let us use deception for a good cause? (Part 3)

So far we’ve seen how biblical characters such as Rahab and Samuel used deception to protect themselves and others from oppressors who held a significant power advantage, so that God’s purposes could be advanced. Here’s one more example of God apparently using deception as a tool against his opponents.

Ahab is such a wicked and oppressive king that God has decided his reign must end. God asks the hosts in heaven around him, “Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?” A spirit volunteers to “go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouths of all his prophets.” “You will succeed in enticing him,” God replies. “Go and do it.”

A godly prophet named Micaiah sees all of this in a vision. When Ahab asks him for advice after all the prophets of Baal have promised victory, Micaiah goes along with the heavenly deception and answers, “Attack and be victorious, for the Lord will give the city into the king’s hand.”

Johann Christoph Wiegel, Micaiah’s Prophecy

Ahab isn’t buying it. Micaiah has never told him before that God will bless him. So why should he say so now? Ahab replies, “How many times must I make you swear to tell me nothing but the truth in the name of the Lord?” Micaiah may be prepared to use deception, but he’s not prepared to swear to it in the Lord’s name. So he admits to everything, describing the vision he saw and confessing that it’s all a ruse to lure Ahab to his death.

And no one believes it. One of Baal’s prophets slaps Micaiah in the face for lying. Ahab throws him in prison to await his triumphal return.

Then, even though Ahab goes into battle disguised as a common soldier, he’s killed by an arrow “drawn at random”—in other words, not aimed anywhere in particular. The deception accomplishes its purposed, aided by a little providential intervention.

If someone is so hardened against God that they don’t believe the truth even when they’ve exposed a deception, are they the kind of person God might strategically withhold the truth from? Is it possible for followers of Jesus to discern the extremely fine line between lying to benefit themselves and legitimately employing misinformation for God’s sake? The Scriptures invite us to ponder these questions and then live faithfully in light of the answers we find to them.

Does God let us use deception for a good cause? (Part 2)

We asked last time whether it’s all right to use deception to further God’s purposes when we are up against powerful oppressors. Here’s another example from the Bible in which God actually seems to command the use of deception.

God has rejected Saul as king of Israel. He tells Samuel to go to Bethlehem and anoint one of Jesse’s sons instead. Samuel, knowing that Saul has become a ruthless tyrant who will hold onto power by any means, protests, “How can I go? If Saul hears about it, he will kill me.” God says in response, “Take a heifer with you and say ‘I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.’”

Samuel isn’t really going to Bethlehem to offer a sacrifice, that is, to host a fellowship meal that the townspeople can share as an act of devotion and celebration. He’s there on a subversive mission to anoint a new king. Samuel’s cover story, the heifer he brings along, and the religious ceremony he conducts are all a pious fraud to keep Saul from discovering the real purpose of the trip. And God seems to command it all.

Is this the best we can do in a situation like this? Why couldn’t God keep Saul from finding out about Samuel’s trip? Why couldn’t God protect Samuel from Saul if he did find out about it? Sure, there’s a great power differential between Saul and his subjects, but isn’t God vastly more powerful than any earthly ruler?

When we read the whole story of the Bible, not just isolated verses here and there, we discover that in some places and times God does keep enemies from seeing or hearing things. He often delivers his people by his own great power. But in this and similar places, we also see God allowing or even authorizing the use of deception against opponents. This suggests that deception, under carefully controlled conditions, might be a valid means for followers of Jesus to use today against oppressors when there is a great power differential, like the Christians who sheltered Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust.

We’ll take one more look next time at how God apparently uses deception against His opponents.

Does God let us use deception for a good cause? (Part 1)

A friend of mine was taking a college ethics class. The professor told the class that there are some times when we don’t have to tell the truth. My friend is a follower of Jesus who’s read the Bible often, and he said a verse immediately came to his mind that suggested he should always tell the truth: “You must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor.”

But then he got to thinking about this a bit more. He realized there are several places in the Bible where God’s people don’t tell the truth, but even so, they aren’t criticized or punished. In fact, their actions sometimes seem to advance God’s purposes.

My friend thought of Rahab, for example, who lied about the spies to the men sent by the king of Jericho. She said they’d already left her house, when really she had hidden them on the roof. This saved their lives so they could report back to Joshua and he could plan the conquest of Canaan. Rahab is actually celebrated in the book of Hebrews as a hero of the faith because she sheltered the spies—but this involved not telling the truth.

So the issue really was more complicated than the “verse” that first occurred to my friend suggested. But he was well on his way to “understanding the books of the Bible,” because he was reflecting on important questions in light of the whole message of the Bible as told in its individual books and stories, not relying on simple answers based on proof texts.

But what about Rahab? What’s going on in cases like hers? As we talked over her story, we recognized that lying is one thing—not telling the truth in order to cover up wrongdoing or to get an unfair advantage over another person. Deception is quite another thing—using misinformation to protect people from violence and oppression in a situation where you don’t have the power to help them in any other way.

Unfortunately in the Bible we sometimes see even God’s people lying, and destructive consequences result. But we also see God’s people using the tool of deception or misinformation to further God’s purposes when powerful oppressors would otherwise thwart these purposes.

Is this sometimes the right thing to do? When there is a great power differential in favor of the oppressors, and God doesn’t step in miraculously to overcome that differential (as happens in other places in the Bible), is deception an acceptable tool for us to use? I’ll explore that question further in my next post.

How could Abram go to a place called Dan when the person it was named after hadn’t been born yet?

Q. It says in Genesis, “When Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he called out the 318 trained men born in his household and went in pursuit as far as Dan.” But I thought that Dan the tribe, descended from Dan the son of Jacob, came before the land known as Dan. So how could the land of Dan appear in Genesis before the tribe of Dan?

The biblical authors typically use contemporary place names within historical accounts, even when the places in those accounts didn’t have those names at the time of the action described.

The city of Dan was actually known as Laish at the time of the events described in the account you read. It would not be named Dan until several hundred years later, by descendants of Abram’s great-grandson. But the biblical author uses the name for this place that readers will recognize.

In a couple of places in this same account, the author uses the old name and then gives the contemporary one: he speaks of “the king of Bela (that is, Zoar)” and “the Valley of Siddim (that is, the Dead Sea Valley).” But as a rule, the biblical authors use contemporary names.

We see this most clearly in cases where an account actually describes how a place got its name. For example, we read this in the story of Gideon in the book of Judges: “They also captured two of the Midianite leaders, Oreb and Zeeb. They killed Oreb at the rock of Oreb, and Zeeb at the winepress of Zeeb.”

What the account obviously means is that during this battle, the Israelites caught up with the Midianite leader Oreb at a certain large rock, where he was killed, and ever since then, that rock has been known as the “rock of Oreb.” They overtook the leader Zeeb at a certain winepress, where he was killed, so it got the name “winepress of Zeeb.” But the story is told as if those places already had those names.

It would be just like somebody today talking about something that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did while playing basketball in college. At that time, his name was actually Lew Alcindor. But we use the name that our audience will recognize.

Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) coached by John Wooden at UCLA

Is there any biblical evidence that Jeremiah didn’t write Lamentations?

The only real concerns we’ve ever heard about the book introductions in The Books of the Bible have been about the few cases in which we’ve suggested that a book traditionally attributed to a known figure may have been written instead by one or more unknown authors.

Consider the case of Lamentations, traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah. Lamentations directly follows Jeremiah in most English Bibles. But in The Books of the Bible, it’s placed with Psalms and Song of Songs as another collection of lyric poetry potentially by a variety of authors. In the Invitation to Lamentations, we observe that “the authors’ names aren’t given” for any its five songs.

These three books—Psalms, Lamentations, and Song of Songs—are also treated together in my study guide to lyric poetry in the Understanding the Books of the Bible series. In that guide I say similarly that “we don’t know for certain who wrote” the songs in Lamentations.

But if we don’t know for certain, why not attribute them to Jeremiah, in keeping with long-standing Jewish and Christian tradition? If the Bible itself doesn’t tell us, why not trust this tradition, rather than offering some other explanation?

Actually, the Bible does present two compelling pieces of evidence that Jeremiah did not write Lamentations.

First, the songs in Lamentations show that their author(s) had first-hand, eyewitness knowledge of the conditions in the ruined city of Jerusalem in the days and weeks following its destruction by the Babylonians. The songs are written from the viewpoint of someone within the city who sees what is happening there and is calling out to others to respond with grief and compassion.

But according to the Bible, Jeremiah was never in the city of Jerusalem after it was destroyed. The historical narrative about this event in the book of Jeremiah explains that the Babylonians removed him from Jerusalem and brought him to his home town of Anathoth before they destroyed the city. Later he was mistakenly rounded up for deportation to Babylon and taken to Ramah, but he was recognized and sent back to Mizpah. And from there, the surviving Israelites took him with them to Egypt.

The Babylonians destroy Jerusalem and carry the surviving Judeans into exile (from L’Histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament, 1670, illustrator unknown)

The only way we can place Jeremiah in Jerusalem after its destruction, where he could have written Lamentations from an eyewitness perspective, is to suppose that he made a visit to the city that isn’t recorded in the Bible. But then we would be pitting something the Bible doesn’t say against what it actually says: that Jeremiah went to Anathoth, Ramah, Mizpah, and Egypt, but never back to Jerusalem.

The other piece of evidence that Jeremiah didn’t write Lamentations is found within the book itself. The first four songs are acrostics, poems whose successive lines begin with the consecutive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The second, third, and fourth poems evidence a variation in the letter sequence: the letter pe precedes the letter ‘ayin.

It’s not understood exactly how this variation originated (it’s found in some other biblical acrostics as well), but it seems that two slightly different alphabetical sequences were in circulation in ancient Israel. A person might be familiar with one sequence or another, but it’s highly unlikely that a single poet composing acrostics for a specific occasion would start with one understanding of alphabetical order and then change to a different one. It’s much more likely that the songs in Lamentations are the work of more than one author, precisely because they reflect two different understandings of alphabetical order.

Taken together, these two pieces of biblical evidence suggest that the songs in Lamentations were not written by Jeremiah, but rather by two or more unknown poets who were, as we say in our Invitation to Lamentations, “people of faith putting into words their struggle to understand how God could allow such suffering and devastation.” We may not know their names, but we can still appreciate how God inspired them to speak to a question that believers have struggled with throughout the centuries.

Are the stories of genocide in the Bible actually made-up?

Q. I saw this review and it made me think of many of the difficult questions you’ve been untangling on your Understanding the Books of the Bible blog. Perhaps you’ll find in it a few more.

The friend who sent me this note was referring to a review by Patrick Allitt of Philip Jenkins’ book Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses. I should specify that I haven’t read the book itself, only this review. But it does indeed raise difficult questions.

According to Allitt, Jenkins insists that “the Bible contains incitements not just to violence but also to genocide.” He argues that “Christians and Jews should struggle to make sense of these violent texts as a central element of their tradition.” This, he says, would be much better than past approaches, which have included:

• Taking the passages about merciless warfare literally and imitating them when the occasion seems to justify, as the Crusaders and conquistadors did.

• Ignoring the passages, as the Revised Common Lectionary and most preachers do today. This is equivalent to taking them out of the Bible, as Marcion wanted to do in the second century.

• Allegorizing them as metaphorical descriptions of the individual believer’s struggle against sin, as Origen and Augustine did.

• Arguing that they discredit the God of the Bible, as some Enlightenment figures did and as today’s “new atheists” are doing.

Instead of taking any of these approaches, Jenkins argues, we need to recognize that the biblical stories of divinely commanded genocides are actually a historical fiction made up many centuries after the facts, to encourage Israelites to “live up to the rigors of monotheism” by having nothing to do with the gods of the surrounding nations. The biblical authors were “‘telling a story and at every possible stage heightening the degree of contrast and separation between Israel and those other nations,’ not for the sake of historical accuracy but to send a spiritual message to their own people.”

Jenkins, citing archaeological evidence that “the Hebrews coexisted with many other peoples in the Canaan of the 12th century B.C.,” is convinced that “the pitiless massacres in question almost certainly did not take place.” So “perhaps,” he concludes, “the later commentators, Jewish and Christian, were not that misguided in seeing the massacres in allegorical terms.” “Israel had to kill its inner Canaanite.”

This is a very attractive proposal, because the biblical stories of genocide are so disturbing. It would be a great relief to think that they never really happened. However, I do have some concerns about this proposal, at least as it’s summarized in this review.

As I understand the Bible, it’s the written record of God’s initiatives throughout history to bring humanity back to himself. I allow that the recounting of this history, like all historiography we do on this earth, was necessarily shaped and limited by the sources available to the human authors of the Bible. In it we may encounter multiple perspectives on the same events. But this is very different from saying that the biblical authors, in telling their story, deliberately altered events as they were known to them from the historical record.

We shouldn’t have to read the Bible with a built-in skepticism about what it says happened. We may sometimes get slightly varying accounts of how, and there are often questions of why, but in general we are supposed to trust that we are hearing an overall narrative of what God has actually done in human history.

So I would take a different approach to the violent stories in question. I would accept that they actually did happen. (Even if there is archaeological evidence of co-existence with Canaanites in ancient Israel, this is no more than the Bible itself says: Joshua’s campaigns were against the fortified royal cities of the region; when these were subdued, Joshua gave the individual tribes the task of conquering the Canaanites remaining in their allotments, and in many cases they chose to co-exist with them instead.) But I do not believe that followers of Jesus should consider these stories a “central element” (admittedly Allitt’s phrase) of their tradition.

Quite the opposite. I see these stories as exceptional and even incongruous within the Bible. The challenge is not to see how we can incorporate them into the heart of our faith and practice (as epitomizing the struggle against sin, for example), but rather to see whether we can somehow account for them without losing our faith.

I talk about how we might do this in this post, in which I argue that “Jesus’ life and teachings provide, for his followers, the interpretive key to the entire Scriptural record of God’s dealings with humanity. In light of them, believers identify what things are normative and what things are exceptional. Jesus taught that we should love even our enemies, and that we should show mercy to others so that we will receive mercy ourselves. He died to save people who were, at the time, his own enemies. So his life and teachings show that judgments of total destruction, like the one described here, are “exceptional.”

The question then becomes, “Why did exceptional events like this occur as the Israelites took possession of Canaan?” This is, as I also say, “one of the greatest difficulties in the entire Bible for thoughtful, compassionate followers of Jesus.” It does not have a simple, easy solution.

But I would suggest that if we did abandon the God of the Bible because we found these violent episodes impossible to reconcile with the biblical presentation of God as essentially loving and merciful, then we would also be abandoning that loving, merciful God in the process.

I think it’s better to take as our bottom line John’s statement that “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” If we want to know what God is really like, we can look to Jesus. This is the “made him known” part The challenging questions that remain then have to do with the “no one has ever seen God” part, and we can hope that they will finally be resolved once we do see God.

Why does God make people He knows are going to reject Him?

My conception of God is that He is not only all-powerful, but also all-loving and all-knowing. That’s why my “free will” to accept Him or refuse Him confuses me.

I like to do magic tricks with cards. I ask someone to “freely” pick a card. I have ways of either knowing which card they’ll pick, or easily finding out shortly afterwards which card was selected.

If God knows which option I’ll take, then we really don’t have a free choice that isn’t influenced by our “predetermined destiny.” In that case, why would an all-loving God allow those He knows won’t choose Him even to be born?

On the other hand, if He doesn’t know whether we will choose to serve and love Him, how can He be all-knowing?

I believe that human beings are created with genuine moral freedom. Their freedom is not an illusion, as in a card trick. That being the case, whether they will ultimately accept or reject God cannot be known in advance, by anyone.

In this earlier post I’ve suggested that it’s not a failure in omniscience not to know what cannot be known. So human moral freedom does not present a problem, as I see it, with God being all-knowing.

But we may still genuinely wonder about God being all-loving if he creates a world full of people knowing in advance that many of them will reject Him–even if it can’t be known which particular ones that will be.

But I think we can helpfully frame the question this way: Which is better, to deny a person existence on the grounds that they might reject God, or to give a person existence in the hopes that they will embrace God?

Every time two people decide whether to become parents, they’re facing this same choice. For all they know, their child could grow up to be a serial killer or the next Adolf Hitler. On the other hand, their child might grow up and literally change the world for the better some day. There’s no way to know in advance. But the uncertainty shouldn’t make them shut down the possibilities. There are great risks, but there could be great rewards.

Perhaps we need to acknowledge one more attribute in God: He’s all-courageous, willing to take risks that might break His own heart, but which might also heal His broken world.

Did God really send an evil spirit to torment Saul?

In First Samuel it says that God sent an evil spirit to Saul to torment him. I know what it’s like to go through depression and anxiety, and I don’t understand why God would do that to him. (Other places in the Bible mention similar occurrences of God sending evil: Isaiah 45:7, Judges 9:23, and Jeremiah 6:19, among others.)

Interpreters differ about what this expression means precisely. Some say that the so-called “evil spirit from the LORD” is an actual spirit-being that God allowed to trouble Saul as a punishment for his disobedience. God is not the author of evil and does not tolerate evil in his presence, so if this is the correct interpretation, we shouldn’t think of God having evil spirits waiting around to do his bidding. Rather, the spirit would be “from God” in the sense that its freedom to trouble Saul was a judgment from God.

But this is not the only way to understand the expression. The Hebrew word that describes a spirit-being, ruach, can also be applied to the human spirit. We see the supernatural meaning in Eliphaz’s opening speech in the book of Job, “A spirit glided past my face, and the hair on my body stood on end.” We see the natural, human meaning in Psalm 51, “Create in me a pure heart . . . and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

In addition, the Hebrew word often translated as “evil” means more generally “bad” or “harmful.” It’s the word used, for example, when Job says, “Shall we receive good from God, and not trouble?” (NIV). Some versions translate this as “evil,” but I don’t think that’s correct, since God is not the source of evil. In the other passages you mentioned, the NIV translates this term as “disaster” (Isaiah and Jeremiah) and “animosity” (Judges), which I think fairly captures the sense—not “evil.”

So the actual meaning of the phrase about Saul could be “a bad spirit from the LORD,” signifying not an actual spirit-being, but rather a dark and foreboding disposition of the human spirit, reflecting the break in Saul’s relationship with God.

A couple of times earlier in Samuel-Kings, we read that “the Spirit of God came powerfully on Saul”—once when Samuel anointed him king, and once when he was inspired to deliver the Israelites from an enemy. Now, unfortunately, we hear that “the Spirit of the LORD had departed from Saul.” Once the Spirit’s presence had been experienced, its absence would be keenly felt. This may be sufficient to explain Saul’s dark moods.

On balance, in my opinion, the first meaning—a spirit-being—seems more likely, given the parallelism in the narrative: “The Spirit of the LORD had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD tormented him.”

But whatever this evil or bad spirit was, and however active a role God had in sending it, we need to recognize that God was also gracious to Saul in arranging for David to come to his court and relieve him through music, through a servant who happened to have seen “a son of Jesse of Bethlehem who knows how to play the lyre.”

God allowed Saul the privilege of hearing one of the most gifted musicians in ancient Israel play his lyre and perhaps sing early versions of what became some of the psalms. When David did this, Saul “would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave.” God mercifully tempered the judgment with relief, allowing Saul back into his presence through the worship music he providentially made possible at his court.

I hope that any who experience depression and anxiety today will find this same relief in seeking and finding God’s presence, whether through music, the beauty of creation, the encouragement of God’s word, or some similar means.

Erasmus Quellinus, “Saul Listening to David Playing the Harp”

How could God call David a “man after his own heart” when he committed adultery and murder?

Q. I always felt sorry for Saul. God chose him to lead His people, and he did a good job at it. Saul only made one mistake and God sent David to replace him. I think David did much worse, yet God said, “He’s a man after my own heart.”

In my first post in response to this question, I looked at why God rejected Saul as king. In this post I’ll consider how God could call David a “man after my own heart.”

I think much of our difficulty in understanding how God could apply this phrase to a man who became an adulterer and murderer comes from the way we use the phrase today. For us it means “just the kind of guy I like” or “someone who does what I would do in a situation.” But that’s not what the phrase means when Samuel uses it to describe to Saul the kind of king God is seeking to establish a dynasty in Israel.

The Hebrew phrase is actually “a man according to God’s heart”—one who is in accordance with God’s wishes for the kingship. Samuel makes this clear by observing, “You have not kept the LORD’s command,” that is, that the kingship should not be treated as divine or as encompassing priestly powers.

David set an example for all subsequent kings by never acting as if he were a divine king or priest-king. (Uzziah, by contrast, one of his successors, was punished for going into the temple of the LORD to burn incense, effectively claiming to be a priest-king. The priests challenged him, saying, “It is not right for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the LORD. That is for the priests.” Uzziah was smitten with leprosy and had to turn over royal power to his son as regent. “His pride led to his downfall,” the biblical narrator observes.)

David was always devoted to the LORD as Israel’s supreme ruler and he never turned aside after other gods. This heart of loyalty became the standard by which all later kings were judged. The Bible says about Abijah, for example, “His heart was not fully devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his forefather had been.” We might think of a “man after God’s own heart” as one whose heart is fully devoted to God.

King David, St. Martin’s Church, Yorkshire, England

But even such men and women need to be very careful about how they respond to the challenges and especially the disappointments of life. David committed adultery after his army officers, out of a commendable desire to protect his life, made him stay back in Jerusalem when they went out to war. For a military commander like David, this idleness and apparent uselessness were hard to bear. One may surmise that he tried to find renewed validation by getting a beautiful woman for himself, Bathsheba.

He should have regarded her as strictly off limits because she was another man’s wife—in fact, the wife of one of his trusted “mighty warriors,” Uriah the Hittite. But instead David abused his kingly powers and committed adultery and murder to get her. In a divine judgment, his royal house was torn apart in the next generation. So no divine approval of David’s actions can be found in the earlier description of him as a “man after God’s own heart.”

But here David provides an example in another way. Beware, men and women: even if you are devoted solely to God, you have to flee temptation, recognizing that it will assault you most strongly when you are at your weakest. (For many people, this comes on the “down slope,” when they’ve held an important position but now are facing some new limitations on their role or reductions in their status, as David was here. Be especially vigilant under these circumstances!)