(2 Samuel)
If the story of the Bible has three stages, then the story of Israel is a Russian doll miniature within it...with a king.
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"2 Samuel is full of action. We lurch from one dramatic moment to another. We move from victory to defeat and back to victory; from civil war to national victory and back to civil war again. We read of domestic dramas and national crises; miraculous interventions and faithful suffering. The big beasts of Israelite politics square off against one another on numerous occasions. It can all be somewhat breathless.
But this is no simple fairy tale with characters drawn in black and white. Alongside all the action is a good deal of ambiguity. Yes, we meet heroes and villains. But more often we meet people somewhere in between. We encounter heroic loyalty and treacherous betrayals. We find people whose lives are both good and bad, ugly and beautiful, selfless and self-serving—people like us.
But through it all we see the hand of God, the true hero of the story. David sings a song at the end of his life in 2 Samuel 22. At the beginning, in the middle and at the end is the affirmation, “The Lord is my rock”. It’s the refrain of the song and it’s the refrain of David’s life." (Tim Chester, 2 Samuel for You, ed. Carl Laferton, God’s Word for You (The Good Book Company, 2017)"