God's covenant with King David and the good news: the new covenant

The covenant for an eternal dynasty that God concluded with King David

About the year 1070 B.C. JHWH promised King David that He would see to it that there would always be a descendant of his sitting on the throne of Israel. This promise can be viewed as being a continuation of the promises that God made earlier with reference to a seed or descendant: the promise which God made in the Garden of Eden and the promise which God made towards Abraham.

The promise which God uttered to King David prepared God’s people for the fact that the prophet greater than Moses who would come and by whose actions all the nations of the earth would be blessed, would be a descendant of King David.

Besides: this covenant between God and King David demonstrated that the people of Israel and their King would have an eternal value. People of the 21st century, who know the Greek Scriptures, realize that this eternal value has not been realized by the physical Israel, but by the spiritual Israel: all people who believe in the ransom sacrifice of Christ and want to make use of it.

The new covenant which took effect when Jesus offered His perfect human life as a peace offering to His Father.

Everybody who is convinced of the redeeming effect of this covenant and who is prepared to assume the attitude towards JHWH that He demands for a place in His eternal Kingdom can make use of it.

There are two groups of people who can profit by this covenant.

In the first place the 144,000 people who will not get a physical body after the establishing of God’s Kingdom, but a spiritual body and who will go to heaven after their resurrection to rule there with Christ as His subordinate priests and subordinate kings. These are the called ones or the chosen ones. They are the people who, during their life on earth, followed in Jesus’ steps so accurately and so almost perfectly that the Bible views them as humans who are heirs to an eternal life in heaven, just as much as Jesus. This group of humans is also called the bride of Christ in the Bible. In other places the Bible calls these people the congregation of Jesus and even the body of Jesus.

During their last supper Jesus promised His 11 apostles that they were going to belong to this class of people and would rule together with Him in heaven. On the Pentecost of the year 33 A.D. Jesus poured out the holy spirit on a group of 120 of His disciples who were together in an upstairs room somewhere in Jerusalem. As a result of this all of them became spirit-begotten brothers of Jesus: people who were going to rule with Him in heaven later on.

Because this group of 144,000 lower kings and lower priests are going to play such an important role in God’s Kingdom, the Greek Scriptures pay a lot of attention to this group.

But as regards numbers this “little herd” pales into insignificance beside the “big herd”.

This big herd forms the second group of humans who can profit by Jesus’ ransom sacrifice and the new covenant. In this case we are talking about hundreds or perhaps thousands of millions of people who, after their resurrection from the dead, will qualify to get a physical body with which they will be able to live a perfect life in perfect circumstances for ever and ever on the paradise earth that is part of God’s Kingdom and that God has always wanted.