The Everlasting Covenant

The Inheritance Future in David’s Time

The people of Israel therefore had not yet obtained the rest and the inheritance. David was a powerful king, and had “a great name, like unto the name of the great men that are in the earth,” yet when he bequeathed the kingdom, with all the material for the building of the temple, to his son Solomon, he said in his prayer to God, “We are strangers before Thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers; our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” ¹ EVCO 432.1

At the time when the kingdom of Israel was as great and powerful as it ever was on this earth, the king declared himself to be as much a stranger and sojourner in the land as was Abraham, who had “none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on.” David in his house of cedar, as well as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who dwelt in tents, “sojourned in the land of promise as in a strange country.” Not only Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but Gideon, Samson, Jephthae, David, Samuel, and the prophets, with many others, “having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise.” ² What stronger evidence could there be that the inheritance which God promised to Abraham and his seed was never a temporal possession in “this present evil world”? EVCO 432.2