Moving through Samuel, God's sovereign glory continues to shine brightly. After the Lord rejects Saul from being king, he provides for himself a king after his heart (1 Sam. 16:1; 13:14). And no one saw this provision coming, not David, not anyone (1 Sam. 16:6ff). YHWH chooses the youngest, a keeper of sheep, David. And YHWH chooses him because he has looked on David's heart and found a man after God's heart.
Now should the heart of David be thought of as prepared by YHWH for the mediatorial and typical role he would assume in redemptive history? This is not explicit. Yet 1 Sam. 16:1 does seem to point in this direction. For there YHWH says, "I have provided for myself a king among his sons." It sounds as though God had prepared and shaped David to be king. No doubt his heart, then, the core of who David was, oriented after God's heart as it was, was part of the provision.
Another text in this chapter speaks similarly to an earlier text cited (Judg. 9:23-24) in this series on Calvinism everywhere. If you're with me as we've moved through all these texts, no comments are really necessary. So I'll simply record the text: 1 Sam. 16:14ff. There we read of an "evil spirit from the LORD" that torments Saul after the Spirit of YHWH had departed from him (cf. 1 Sam. 18:10; 19:9-10, NASB).
Can our view of God embrace these sorts of texts. Or have we fashioned a god to our own liking? Are texts like these rushed over and forgotten for kinder, gentler texts that don't mess up our hair?
The triune God is the Lord, and he is Lord everywhere. And in case you've forgotten, it's called Calvinism.
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