Getting Biblical in Daily Life
God's Favs
God plays favorites—it's a hard fact of the Hebrew Bible. And David is his super favorite, his Charizard, the best card in his deck…
So God loves David, and in doing this, he starts to think of himself as not just the Big Daddy of the universe, but as the father of human beings as a whole. He loves David, and by extension Israel, and starts to develop a more familial attitude towards them.
God's motives are sort of mysterious in 2 Samuel, but he seems to have a long-term plan in mind. While in 1 Samuel God strongly implied that it would be better for Israel to continue to be ruled by judges like Samuel than by a king like Saul, he seems to have become rather pro-monarchy in 2 Samuel. And to be fair, Saul was kind of terrible at the whole king thing.
He promises David that his family will endure, ensuring the Solomon will rule wisely and well and won't lose God's favor. Which implies that God knows the future, and he's going to ensure what will happen. What his game plan really is, no one can tell—aside from generally lifting up his people—but he has one.
I Yam what I Yam
So the God of 2 Samuel—like in so many other books of the Hebrew Bible—is a God who cares about history. He's not standing above and watching human beings scuttle around like ants while he remains peacefully indifferent. He's going to get his hands messy, he's going to favor the people he wants to favor and play the game the way he wants to play it.
Simultaneously, he's a God who punishes sins—by making David's child die, for instance—sometimes in baffling ways, like when he orders David to let the Gibeonites impale Saul's seven sons, or when he punishes Israel for David's census-taking. But he's also merciful.
Still, this version of God isn't going to be contained by any stuffy, rational ideas about moral behavior, just desserts, and crime and punishment. If someone shows up who has virtually the same charismatic qualities as David—like Absalom—that doesn't mean God's going to favor them. He does what he wants to do—kind of like Prince. That's just the way he is: rock n' roll.