ervice. He might well have found in the many troubles and
vicissitudes of his past life an excuse for luxurious repose now. But
devout souls will consecrate their leisure as their toil to God, and
will serve Him with thankful offerings in peace whom they invoked with
earnest cries in battle. Prosperity is harmless only when it is
accepted as an opportunity for fresh forms of devotion, not as an
occasion for idle self-indulgence. So we read, with distinct verbal
reference to the words already quoted, that "when the Lord had given him
rest round about from all his enemies, the king said unto Nathan the
prophet, See now, I dwell in an house of cedar, but the ark of God
dwelleth in curtains." The impulse of generous devotion, which cannot
bear to lavish more upon self than it gives to God, at first commended
itself to the prophet; but in the solitude of his nightly thoughts the
higher wisdom speaks in his spirit, and the word of God gives him a
message for the king. The narrative in 2 Sam. makes no mention of
David's warlike life as unfitting him for the task, which we find from 2
Chron. was one reason why his purpose was set aside, but brings into
prominence the thought that David's generous impulse was outrunning
God's commandment, and that his ardour to serve was in some danger of
forgetting his entire dependence on God, and of fancying that God would
be the better for him. So the prophetic message reminds him that the
Lord had never, through all the centuries, asked for a house of cedar,
and recalls the past life of David as having been wholly shaped and
blessed by Him, while it pointedly inverts the king's proposal in its
own grand promise, "The Lord telleth thee that He will make thee an
house." Then follows the prediction of a son of David who should build
the house, whose kingdom should be perpetual, whose transgressions
should be corrected indeed, but never punished as those of the unhappy
Saul; and then, in emphatic and unmistakable words, the perpetuity of
David's house, his kingdom, and his throne, is reiterated as the close
of the whole.

The wonderful burst of praise which sprang from David's heart in answer
cannot be dealt with here; but clearly from that time onwards a new
element had been added to his hopes, and a new object presented to his
faith. The prophecy of the Messiah enters upon a new stage, bearing a
relation, as its successive stages, always unmistakably did, to the
history which supplies a frame