Great David’s Greater Son or Sometimes It Takes a While

Acts 13:16-23

So Paul stood up, and motioning with his hand said: “Men of Israel and you who fear God, listen. The God of this people Israel chose our fathers and made the people great during their stay in the land of Egypt, and with uplifted arm he led them out of it. And for about forty years he put up with them in the wilderness. And after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance. All this took about 450 years. And after that he gave them judges until Samuel the prophet. Then they asked for a king, and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years. And when he had removed him, he raised up David to be their king, of whom he testified and said, ‘I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my heart, who will do all my will.’ Of this man's offspring God has brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus, as he promised.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

What [Paul] says about the early period, though, is enough to establish the fact that God’s method of operation is to choose his people, to prepare them, to lead them through one stage after another, and then finally, to give them “the man after my own heart” as king. In other words, perhaps the main point of verses 17-20 is to stress that God’s purposes normally take a while to unfold, to get to the place where the ultimate purpose can be revealed. . . .

But the point is not that the story stopped at David, but that in working with Israel for several hundred years to produce the king who would establish the pattern of someone ruling over God’s people with justice and truth . . . God was establishing a further pattern as well: the notion of waiting for the true king, the ultimate king, “great David’s greater son” (10).