Where the New Testament Goes With Him

Almost nothing in David's story goes unclaimed later, and it's worth tracing the thread all the way through rather than treating it as background. "Son of David" becomes the standard messianic title on the lips of the crowds throughout the Gospels — blind Bartimaeus shouting it, the Palm Sunday crowds shouting it, Matthew opening his entire Gospel by tracing Jesus's genealogy specifically through David's line (Matthew 1:1). Peter, preaching at Pentecost, makes a deliberately careful argument from Psalm 16 — "thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption" — pointing out that David himself "is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day," so the psalm can't have been David speaking about himself; he was speaking, as a prophet, about a descendant who actually would rise (Acts 2:25–31). Paul opens Romans by identifying Jesus as one "made of the seed of David according to the flesh" and "declared to be the Son of God... by the resurrection" (Romans 1:3–4), holding both descent and divinity in the same breath. And when John, in Revelation, is looking for the one worthy to open the sealed scroll, the title he's given draws directly on this whole line: "the Root and the Offspring of David" (Revelation 22:16) — the ancestor and the source, in one person, the promise God made Nathan finally closing exactly the way it was spoken.