📖 Old Testament Survey — Unit 5: The United and Divided Kingdoms

Israel asked for a king. God answered with six books and a thousand years — and the answer wasn't a name on a throne in Jerusalem. It was a name on a cross outside it.

That's the whole arc of Unit 5 in one sentence. Six books — Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, each originally one scroll then split in two. Roughly 1050 BC to 538 BC. Samuel and Kings tell the story from a prophetic angle; Chronicles retells it from a priestly angle for the exiles coming home. Saul, David, Solomon, nineteen kings of the north, nineteen kings and one queen of the south, prophets shouting from the margins, an exile that looked like the end of everything — and then a Persian king named Cyrus throwing the door open and telling God's people to go home. Let's take it step by step.

I. The Throne Begins — Hannah, Samuel, and the King Israel Demanded

1 Samuel 1–15

You cannot understand the kingdom unless you start with a barren woman crying in the tabernacle. God doesn't begin the monarchy with a war room. He begins it with a hurting woman who promises that if He gives her a son, she'll give him back. Centuries later Mary will sing a song that is essentially Hannah's song with an upgrade — read 1 Samuel 2:1–10 and Luke 1:46–55 side by side. God rarely begins a movement of redemption anywhere except in the prayer of a hurting woman.

Samuel grows up in the tabernacle and becomes the bridge: last judge, first kingmaker, prophet AND priest AND judge. The most ecumenical figure in the Old Testament. But by the time he is old, his sons are corrupt — same problem Eli had, and apparently Samuel didn't read his own backstory carefully enough. The elders come to him in 1 Samuel 8 with the request that breaks God's heart: "Make us a king to judge us like all the nations" (1 Samuel 8:5). God's response: "they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them" (1 Samuel 8:7).

There is a kind of prayer where the danger isn't that God won't answer — the danger is that He will. Israel wanted a king more than they wanted Him, so He gave them what they wanted. The most dangerous answered prayer is the one that comes from a heart already in rebellion. If you have ever told God I want this thing more than I want You, count the years before you started wishing He hadn't said yes.

Saul: Tall on the Outside, Hollow on the Inside

Enter Saul. Tall. Handsome. Looked the part. The outside of him was everything Israel had asked for; the inside of him was hollow. Two scenes break him. In 1 Samuel 13, Samuel is delayed, the army gets nervous, and Saul offers the sacrifice himself — not his job, but the timing felt urgent and he took a shortcut around obedience. In 1 Samuel 15, God tells him to wipe out Amalek completely. Saul keeps King Agag alive and the best livestock — and tries to spin it as worship. Samuel's response should be tattooed on every pastor's forearm: "to obey is better than sacrifice" (1 Samuel 15:22). You cannot worship your way out of disobedience.

Roy Riegels. Rose Bowl, January 1, 1929. Cal versus Georgia Tech. Riegels picks up a fumble, gets turned around, and runs sixty-five yards in the wrong direction. His own teammate has to chase him down and tackle him at the one-yard line — his own one-yard line. Cal punts from there, Tech blocks the punt, scores the safety, and wins the game by two points. The whole stadium stood and stared. That's Saul on Mount Gilboa. Running hard. Wrong way. The tragedy of Saul is not that he was weak; it's that all his strength was aimed away from the one Person it should have been aimed toward. There are people in pulpits today running sixty-five yards toward their own goal line. Strength is not enough. Direction matters more.

II. The Throne Promised — David and the Covenant That Wouldn't Quit

1 Samuel 16 — 2 Samuel 24

While Saul is unraveling, God is already moving. 1 Samuel 16: Samuel goes to Bethlehem to anoint a new king from Jesse's sons, and the verse that pivots the entire Old Testament shows up: "the LORD does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). That sentence is the seed Christ will harvest in the Sermon on the Mount.

The kid is David. Seven older brothers paraded by Samuel; not one of them is the man. The shepherd boy — the na'ar, the youngest, the one nobody bothered to invite to the feast — is. One chapter later he walks down into a valley with five smooth stones and meets a nine-and-a-half-foot Philistine. The story everybody knows. The point everybody misses: David didn't win because his slingshot was better. David won because "the battle is the LORD's" (1 Samuel 17:47).

Engineers used to claim the bumblebee shouldn't fly. The body is too heavy, the wings too short, the math doesn't work. The bumblebee, not having read the math, flies anyway. A teenage shepherd doesn't beat a giant. The same arithmetic that says a slingstone shouldn't drop a giant says a Galilean carpenter shouldn't unmake a grave. God specializes in the math the world has already given up on. If you are a Christian today, you are a bumblebee — every law of merit and probability says you shouldn't be forgiven, shouldn't be welcomed, shouldn't be flying — and the grace of God lifts you anyway.

Then come the wilderness years. Saul tries to spear David to a wall. David flees. Twice he has Saul cornered — once at Engedi, once at Hachilah — and twice he refuses to lift a hand against "the Lord's anointed." He has been promised the throne; he is being hunted by the man on it; the kingdom is one knife-stroke away — and he will not take it. The throne God gives is never the throne we steal. If you find yourself maneuvering for what God already promised, you have stopped trusting the Promiser.

The Davidic Covenant: The Thread That Ties Everything to Bethlehem

Saul dies at Gilboa. David is crowned over Judah, then over all Israel. He takes Jerusalem, brings the ark up, dances before it like a man with no dignity left to lose. And in 2 Samuel 7, when David proposes to build God a house, God turns the proposal upside down: I will build YOU a house. The Davidic Covenant: house, kingdom, throne, forever, son. Five anchor words. Read 2 Samuel 7:12–16 slowly. Every promise in that paragraph passes through Solomon, gets cracked by the divided kingdom, collapses at the exile, and lands at Bethlehem. When Gabriel tells Mary that God will give her son "the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end" — Gabriel is reading 2 Samuel 7 out loud.

But David is not sinless. 2 Samuel 11. The roof. Bathsheba. Uriah. The covered-up murder. And the line every preacher has had to preach because every preacher has needed to hear it: "You are the man!" — Nathan's verdict (2 Samuel 12:7). David collapses. Psalm 51 is what genuine repentance sounds like out loud. There are consequences he never escapes — the sword does not depart from his house. But God does not throw him away. The man after God's own heart is also a man with blood on his hands, and the gospel of David is that grace runs deeper than the worst thing he ever did. If you have ever sinned in a way you didn't think God could forgive, you are reading the wrong chapter. The way back to grace is not a maze; it is a door, and Nathan has just opened it.

III. The Throne Compromised and Divided — Solomon, the Split, and the Long Slide

1 Kings 1 — 2 Kings 25

Solomon walked into the throne with a blank check from God and asked for wisdom. God gave him wisdom — and threw in everything else for good measure. Solomon's wisdom ranged from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall, from beasts and birds to reptiles and fish (1 Kings 4:33). He composed three thousand proverbs. The Queen of Sheba traveled across the Sahara to see him and found that the half had not been told. And he built the temple his father had only dreamed of.

And here is the next great station on the Scarlet Thread. At the dedication of that temple (1 Kings 8), Solomon offered twenty-two thousand oxen and one hundred twenty thousand sheep — so many that the brazen altar could not hold them and the courtyard itself had to be consecrated for the slaughter. The thread that began with one animal in Eden, then Abel's firstborn, then Noah's altar, then the ram on Moriah, then the lambs on every Egyptian doorpost, then the goats of Yom Kippur, then the bronze serpent in the wilderness, then a scarlet cord in a Jericho window — that thread now runs in rivers through the courts of Solomon's temple, and will run there every day for almost four hundred years. Every animal that ever died in those courts was a promissory note God Himself would one day cash on a hill outside the same city.

But the seeds of Solomon's defeat were planted long before the harem of 1 Kings 11. They were planted in 1 Kings 3, in two quiet sentences hardly anyone notices. He made an alliance with the daughter of Pharaoh. And he sacrificed at the high places. Two little things. A foreign marriage that looked political; a worship habit that looked devotional. Both small. Both wrong. Both growing. By 1 Kings 11 the small things had multiplied into seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and "his wives turned away his heart" (1 Kings 11:3). The wisest man who ever lived out-loved God by his harem. Catch this: you don't slip into idolatry. You marry into it. Solomon didn't wake up one morning hating Yahweh. He woke up next to a woman who didn't, and built her a shrine to keep the peace. Wisdom does not keep a man. Only a heart that worships does.

The kingdom cracks at his death. Rehoboam in the south, Jeroboam in the north (1 Kings 12). Jeroboam can't have his people walking south to Jerusalem to worship — they would remember whose family God promised the throne to — so he sets up two golden calves at Dan and Bethel and tells Israel, "behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." That sentence is plagiarized straight from Aaron at Sinai (Exodus 32:4). Six hundred years later and the people are still trying to worship Yahweh by getting around Him.

The North runs through nineteen kings, every single one evil. Ahab brings Jezebel and Baal worship — and brings the prophet Elijah, sword of God in human form. 1 Kings 18: Mount Carmel. The great either/or this whole unit has been building toward: "How long will you falter between two opinions?" (1 Kings 18:21). If Yahweh is God, follow Him; if Baal, follow him. Fire falls on Elijah's altar. Israel falls on its face. And then Israel goes back to the calves the next week, because revival without repentance has the half-life of a sigh.

Payday Someday

Ahab and Jezebel had been getting away with it for years. They wanted a vineyard that belonged to a man named Naboth, and Naboth would not sell — it was his ancestral land. Jezebel arranged false witnesses, a kangaroo court, and a stoning. Ahab walked down to take possession of his new vineyard and found Elijah standing in it. The prophet pronounced sentence in the exact place where Naboth's blood had soaked the ground: in the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth, dogs will lick your blood. A woman on death row once said, before they walked her to the chair: "I knew all along that God ran the whole show. I just tried to steal one little act." She had Ahab's theology exactly. The years rolled on. Ahab got rich. Jezebel painted her face. And then one ordinary battle day a Syrian archer drew his bow at random — and the arrow found the one unprotected seam in Ahab's armor. The servants propped him up in his chariot, but he bled out by sundown, and the dogs came (1 Kings 22). Twelve more years passed before Jezebel's day came, but it came. Jehu rode into Jezreel. Her own servants threw her down. By the time burial detail arrived, the dogs had eaten everything but the skull, the hands, and the feet — the head that had plotted, the hands that had written the murder order, the feet that had walked Naboth's vineyard (2 Kings 9). It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31). The bill always comes.

The South gets nineteen kings and one queen — a mixed bag. Two bright spots stand up. Hezekiah, with Sennacherib's army at the gate and Rabshakeh shouting blasphemy from the wall, takes the threat letter into the temple and spreads it before the Lord (2 Kings 19:14). Pray the way Hezekiah prayed when the worst is at the wall. The angel of the Lord goes through the Assyrian camp that night. 185,000 dead by morning. God doesn't always save us from the wall; sometimes He saves us at the wall. But He saves.

Josiah, eight years old when he takes the throne, finds the lost Book of the Law during a temple cleanup (2 Kings 22). Reads it. Tears his clothes. Renews the covenant. Holds the biggest Passover since Samuel. And still — Manasseh's fifty-five accumulated years of wickedness tip the scale and the judgment falls anyway. 586 BC. Jerusalem burns. The temple is rubble. The Davidic king is blinded and dragged in chains to Babylon. It looks like the covenant collapsed.

IV. The Throne Lost — and the Throne Promised Again

Chronicles, the Fall, and Cyrus's Decree

It hasn't.

Chronicles is a priestly retelling, written for the exiles who came home and walked into a city of rubble and wondered if God still meant it. The book opens with nine chapters of genealogy — names, names, names — and the names are the message: You are still HIS people. The line still stands. Chronicles barely mentions the northern kingdom. It focuses on David, Solomon, the temple, the southern kings — because the priestly perspective is asking, can we still worship? And the answer is yes.

Then the Old Testament closes with one of the most extraordinary mid-sentences in literature. 2 Chronicles 36:22–23. Cyrus, king of Persia, makes a proclamation: "All the kingdoms of the earth the LORD God of heaven has given me. And He has commanded me to build Him a house at Jerusalem… Who is among you of all His people? May the LORD his God be with him, and let him go up!" That is the last sentence of the Hebrew Bible. Go up.

Go up to what? To rebuild. To wait. To watch the genealogy in Matthew 1 thread through every name we just read in 1 Chronicles. To stand under a star in Bethlehem. To follow a Galilean carpenter to a hill outside Jerusalem and watch Him take a throne by way of a cross. To stand at an empty tomb. To live, right now, under the Cyrus decree of the New Testament: whoever is among you of His people — let him go up.

The old preacher's mule story preaches here. A mule fell into a dry well. The owner couldn't get him out, so he started shoveling dirt down to bury him. The mule kept shaking the dirt off and stepping up. What was meant to bury him became the steps that raised him. Babylon shoveled dirt on Israel for seventy years. God used every shovelful as a step. The exile was not the end of the covenant; it was the school of the covenant. And every dirt-throw your enemy has aimed at you may yet be the floor God raises you on.

Christ in 1 Samuel — 2 Chronicles

Three convictions to take with you and never put down.

First — Christ is David's greater Son, the King who never falls. Every flaw in every king in this unit is a finger pointing at Bethlehem. Saul's hollow heart, Solomon's compromised one, Manasseh's wicked one — every empty throne is a sign at the door of an empty manger. The child in Mary's arms is the King the prophets ached for and the kings of Israel could never be.

Second — Christ is the True Temple, and the Lamb the temple was always pointing to. Solomon built the picture; Christ built the substance. "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19). The rivers of blood that flowed through Solomon's courts for four hundred years were all promissory notes. The Lamb of God cashed every one of them on Calvary. The stones Solomon laid were beautiful; the body Christ raised is eternal. You and I are not waiting for a temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem — we are walking, breathing stones in the temple already standing.

Third — Christ's call is the Cyrus decree we live under. The exile is over. The way home is open. Whoever is among you of His people — let him go up.

Israel asked for a king. God answered with six books and a thousand years and a Cross outside Jerusalem and an empty tomb. The king they wanted, they got — and lost. The King they needed, He gave — and He still reigns.

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