Saul, rejecting God’s headship, ended a decapitated corpse; David used his last days to set things right.
In a typical Hebraism, we read, “So David rested with his fathers” (1 Ki 2:10). Many years ago, some Jewish high school students asked me, “Do you have to be religious Jews to go to heaven?” “Heaven?” I replied. “Have you been peeking? There’s nothing in your Scriptures about going to heaven. That hope isn’t found until we open the New Testament. Yeshua the Messiah was the first Man to open heaven to us.” At best, the Old Testament saints hoped to be gathered to their fathers, but now the believer’s hope is “to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord” (2 Cor 5:8). Interestingly, the exact location of David’s burial place “in the City of David” (1 Ki 2:10) was still known in New Testament times and was used by the apostle Peter to prove that David must have been speaking about another, the Messiah Himself, when he said, “You will not…allow Your Holy One to see corruption” (Ps 16:10; Acts 2:27). We are also told that “the period that David reigned over Israel was forty years; seven years he reigned in Hebron, and in Jerusalem he reigned thirty-three years” (1 Ki 2:11). Consistently in the Bible, the number 40 speaks of a thorough testing, whether 40 days or, in some cases, 40 years. It would make for a fascinating study (Gen 7:17; 8:6; Ex 24:18; Num 13:25; 1 Ki 19:8; Ps 95:10; Jon 3:4; Mt 4:2; Acts 1:3). Saul, David, and Solomon each reigned for 40 years, just as the Israelites journeyed for that long through the wilderness. Are you passing through a long trial, believer? In W.B. Stevens’ classic, “Tempted and Tried,” the chorus reads: “Farther along we’ll know all about it, Farther along we’ll understand why; Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine, We’ll understand it all by and by.”