1 Kings 1:1-4
1 Now King David was old and advanced in years. And although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm. 2 Therefore his servants said to him, “Let a young woman be sought for my lord the king, and let her wait on the king and be in his service. Let her lie in your arms, that my lord the king may be warm.” 3 So they sought for a beautiful young woman throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king. 4 The young woman was very beautiful, and she was of service to the king and attended to him, but the king knew her not.
The opening verses of 1 Kings present a strange and unpleasant picture, and we might well feel at a loss to know what to think of them if we did not ask ourselves what the Holy Spirit's purpose could be in permitting this unsavoury incident to be recorded. When we begin, however, to ponder its possible significance, we remember that this is the book which records the decline and fall of the kingly office in Israel, and its message begins to become evident. For it stands as a symbol at the beginning of the book - the symbol of a tragic and disastrous moral and spiritual declension. Just as, under the old priestly code, the people were trained to watch for the tell-tale marks of leprosy or the plague, so this story, for those who have eyes to see, marks the first 'ominous signs of the degeneration which finally led to the captivity of the people of God. David was the greatest and best of the kings, and a man after God's own heart, but even in David there were costly flaws, and the sacred history shows that it was his vices far more than his virtues, the liabilities rather than the assets, which were transmitted to his posterity. This sad, even pathetic, story of the deterioration of a noble monarch in a dishonourable old age proclaims in effect to us: 'This is what the book is about, the collapse of the ideal of kingship.' And, chapter by chapter, the theme of these opening verses is unfolded in grim detail, until nothing was left for God's people but the judgment of the Captivity.