In answering the above question, one thing’s for sure. David himself hasn’t received them yet. He is still in in his sepulchre today, just as he was when the Apostle Peter proclaimed him “both dead and buried” on the Day of Pentecost nearly 2,000 years ago (Acts 2:29).

The scriptural fact is that the only person to date to have received the “sure mercies of David” is the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus in Acts 13: 32-35 the Apostles Peter announces:

We declare unto you glad tidings, how that the promise which was made unto the fathers, God hath fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus again…

Now the “promise” Peter spoke of is found in Isa. 55:3:

Incline your ear and come unto Me: hear and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David. Behold I have given him for a witness to the people and, a leader and commander to the people.

In this neither God nor the Prophet Isaiah are rehashing history. Isaiah is writing some 400 years after David’s death. So when God speaks of giving David “as a leader and commander to the people” He is speaking of a future event, not David’s prowess as a warrior king some 3,000 years ago. 

As explained in the study “Will David rise to rule Israel again?” posted on the Day of Christ Ministries website, David will indeed be resurrected to be king over Israel after Christ takes over government of the world in the “Day of Christ”, the wonderful epoch of blessing mentioned seven times in Paul’s epistles (see 2 Tim. 4:1, Jer. 30:9, Hos. 3:4-5). Only then will David receive his “sure mercies”, that is his rising from the dead.

So, as of now nobody other than God Himself as a man, the Lord Jesus Christ, has been resurrected bodily and thus received “the sure mercies of David”. Which begs the question: when will the nation Israel itself be restored? And beyond that when will grace-saved believers, such as we Gentiles, who are not party to the covenants with Israel (see Eph. 2:11-13), also receive life from the dead? These are important questions that few preachers today tackle but I am convinced answers to them can be found in scripture.

In Israel’s case it is clear that only through resurrection will the chosen nation once again flourish in God’s sight. Speaking of Israel being set aside by God, a judicial banishment that was finalised in Acts 28:28, the Apostle Paul in Rom. 11:12-15 postulates that if Israel’s “fall” and “diminishing” be the “riches of the Gentiles, how much more their ‘fullness’? He goes on:      

For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them (back again) be but life from the dead?

Jesus Himself warned that only those deemed worthy would enter his kingdom when He establishes it, saying that while the children of this world marry, “they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain ‘that world’ (i.e. his government) and the resurrection from the dead…

… neither marry nor are given in marriage. Neither can they die any more, for they are equal to the angels and are the children of God, being children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:34-36).

And as the Apostle Paul declared: “Not as though the Word of God hath taken none effect, for they are not all Israel which are of Israel” (Rom.9:6). And that’s truth that should be applied to the modern secular State of Israel. It is not the biblical Israel. If it were its leaders would heed the words of the Rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph who taught them to…

…Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good unto them that hate and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. That ye (plural, the whole nation) may be the children of your Father which is in heaven, for He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth his rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:44-46).

Since they don’t – for example blocking food supplies from entering Gaza, condemning 14,000 very young children to death by starvation and slaughtering more than 50,000 Palestinian people, mainly women and children – they and the Israel they head cannot be considered the “Israel of God”. Still less the “children of the resurrection” nor true believers in God.

Down to today many Jewish people still refuse to believe in the resurrection, just as the Sadducees did in Jesus’ time. The wife of a Jewish friend took me to task saying that Jews did not believe there was any such thing as a resurrection. “We live only in this life”, she insisted.

But again what of us Gentiles? Are “the sure mercies of David” given to or for us? No, because we are not party to the covenants, either Old or New, the Lord has made with Israel and Judah (Jer. 31:31-34). In Eph. 2: 11-13 the Apostle Paul confirms that though quickened and saved by grace we Gentiles naturally speaking, were and still are:

… without Christ, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

You see, while Israel had the hope of resurrection for which Paul was taken bound with a chain to Rome (Acts 28:20) Gentiles were then “without hope”. That is, they had no hope of being raised from the dead. Two years later Paul says he is bound with another chain, as the “prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles” to make known the “dispensation of the grace of God” and the “mystery” of Christ which was not made “in other ages” (Eph. 3:1-5) and now only comes through the unique revelation given personally to Paul the prisoner.

Importantly, in the grace of God we Gentiles are now given hope of being resurrected in a body which will be as glorious as that of Christ Himself (Phil. 3:3). Paul says this hope “is laid up in heaven for you” (Col. 1:5) and asserts that the Colossians had already heard of it in the gospel.

But which gospel would that be? Certainly not the gospel of being saved by being baptised into the promises and covenants of Israel (Acts 2:38) but the “gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24) with which Paul at that time had yet to finish his ministry. Meaning that he had not yet proclaimed it when departing from the Ephesian elders on his way to Rome.

Few understand this but the fact is Paul only got to preach this gospel when he was locked up in prison in Rome. He did so by proclaiming it while thus detained writing of it in his last seven epistles recorded in the Bible and sending them by messenger to the churches and “to the faithful in Christ” (Eph. 1:1).

Accordingly, in Colossians 1:5-6 the apostle says the saints he wrote learned of “the hope that is laid up for you in heaven” through “the word of the truth of the gospel, which is come unto you …”

He states that this gospel – that of the resurrection of Gentile believers outside of, and apart from, the “sure mercies of David” promised to Israel –

…is come unto you “as it is in the whole world and bringeth forth fruit, as it doth also in you, since the day ye heard of it and knew the grace of God in truth.

Surely, if this gospel proclaimed that the “sure mercies of David” are for Gentiles it was incumbent on Paul to say so somewhere in his epistles but he does not. Rather, he explains in 1 Cor. 15:12-58 how the dead will be raised “at the last trump”, which is part of the prophesied dealings of God through and concerning Israel and those who trust in God’s promises to the one chosen nation.

However, in his latter “prison epistles” Paul holds out a different promises of resurrection and life after death. This is spelled out in Phil. 3:20-21 and Col. 3:1-4.

For our conversation (i.e. citizenship, our eternal home) is in heaven, from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able to even to subdue all things unto Himself.

If then ye be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life shall appear, ye shall also appear with Him in glory.

Now that’s a very different hope. It is a heavenly hope in contrast to Israel’s now postponed hope of being resurrected to function again as God’s chosen nation on earth. My conviction, therefore, is that the “sure mercies of David” will in time to come will be extended to Israel’s faithful saints of the past. Meantime, Gentile believers saved by grace have the sure promise that they will be raised to be like (and with) Christ when He personally changes their bodies to be like his at his appearing (Titus 2:13, 2 Tim. 4:1).

John Dudley Aldworth

Email: john.aldworth@hotmail.com

For more challenging Bible studies visit the website Day of Christ Ministries.