When one of my students does something bad and gets caught, there’s a number of different reactions that you can see. It depends on the student, on the teacher, and on what they’ve done. But some reactions are a lot more common than others.
• There’s the “I’m really sorry sir and I won’t do it again.” Sometimes this is genuine. Unfortunately, the sorts of kids who are most likely to be genuine about this are usually the least likely to do anything wrong in the first place – so I don’t get to hear it too often. Most of the time this statement is an attempt to get out of a punishment. When I inform them that I appreciate their remorse but they still need to do a lunchtime detention, I often hear “but you’re a Christian, sir! Aren’t you supposed to forgive?” Little do they realize that such a statement usually makes me even more determined to make them serve their time.
• There’s the straight-out denial. The number of teenagers who are quite comfortable with telling a blatant lie has, unfortunately, seriously dented my ability to trust anyone’s word – and I say that quite seriously. They may have thrown a wad of paper across the room right in front of me, but some people will still deny it. Many will lie without thought, without conscience, and if they’re found out will simply shrug and say “well, it was worth a try”. As a teacher, untruth makes me particular angry and disappointed.
• Perhaps most popular of all is the blaming of others. He started it. She called me this first. Somebody else was talking as well, why are you picking on me? She gave me the cigarette. If God didn’t want us to swear, why did he invent the words? The woman you put here with me, she gave me the fruit and I ate it!
Well, Psalm 51 is essentially a prayer written by David when he’s caught out in sin. We read yesterday in Psalm 14 that there is no one who does good, and we see that oh so clearly here. King David was, of course, God’s chosen king. He was the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ. The LORD described him as being a man after God’s own heart. With that sort of rap we expect a king of unquestionable righteousness, impeccable strength of character and morality. And he’s better than most.
But then we get to 2 Samuel 11 and one of the more famous stories of a fallen hero.
David has built for himself a huge palace on the hilltop and could stand out on his balcony and look down over the city. The way many homes were built back then was with a sort of flat enclosed roof, and because David was up in his palace he could see down onto these roofs. One evening he caught sight of a woman called Bathsheba having a bath on her roof, and David liked what he saw. He decided he wanted to get some of that. So he sent a servant to find out who she was. The servant reported back that this was Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite who was a soldier in David’s army. The King knew the Law, he knew God’s commandments, but still he sent the servant back to fetch Bathsheba and bring her to him. She came and they committed adultery together. A few months later she found out she was pregnant.
David had many other wives, but he still wanted this woman all to himself. So he hatched a plan to get rid of her husband, Uriah. He even had him around for dinner one evening. But a short time later, when Uriah was away fighting David’s war, the king secretly instructed his general to make sure Uriah was placed where the fighting was heaviest and where the best enemy soldiers were stationed. David even told his general to withdraw and leave Uriah alone on the battlefield to die. Sure enough, Uriah dies and David marries Bathsheba. He thinks he’s gotten away with it. But God knows, and God’s prophet Nathan confronts David with his sin.
Psalm 51 is David’s response.
I’m going focus on three main parts of David’s response, and what I’ll suggest should be three main parts of our response to our own sin.
• Confession
• Grace
• Transformation
Now they’re sort of jargony Christian words, but hopefully we’ll all understand what they mean by the end.
So, firstly confession.
Vs 3-5
PS 51:3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.
PS 51:4 Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are proved right when you speak
and justified when you judge.
PS 51:5 Surely I was sinful at birth,
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
There are confessions and there are confessions. There’s the one which sounds like “yeah, I did it, I broke the rules – but deep down I don’t really think it’s wrong. I’ll probably do it again if I can get away with it.” It’s admitting it, but it’s hardly a heart-felt confession of wrongdoing.
There’s also the “yeah, I know I did the wrong thing this time – but I’m basically a good person. At least I don’t do as much as that other person over there.” With that sort of confession you’ve admitted you’ve done the wrong thing – you might even actually accept you genuinely made a serious mistake, but you’re still trying to minimize it. That’s the sort of line I used on my mother when I was a teenager. I used to argue with my mother quite a lot back then – she’s settled down a lot now, thankfully, and has a much more mature attitude to life – mostly about fairly insignificant stuff. If I got caught out doing something stupid I’d usually resort to “well at least I’m not taking drugs or going out partying to 3 in the morning like John down the road.” Sometimes that line even worked. But it’s not a genuine confession.
And it’s not like the confession we see here from David. He acknowledges not just the sorry episode with Bathsheba, but that his sin is always before him. In other words he confesses that he’s always sinning, always disobeying his Lord.
He admits that all his wrongdoing is ultimately against God. I’m sure you’ve hear people say, “oh, there’s nothing wrong with that – it doesn’t hurt anyone.” This is particularly popular when it comes to sleeping around, or maybe to telling dirty jokes with your friends. But even if it doesn’t appear to hurt anyone, it hurts God.
And, finally, he admits that God would be right to judge him. To punish him: so that you are proved right when you speak
and justified when you judge.
The punishment for adultery and murder in the OT is clear – death. And we know that ultimately the punishment for all sin is death and hell. So David is saying, that is what I deserve. I have been sinful since before I was born. Sin is part of my being, it’s ingrained on my heart and I can’t get rid of it. I’m so bad that I deserve to rot in hell forever.
That’s not an exaggeration. That cold, hard fact. That’s a realistic, honest assessment of not only David, but all of us. We read yesterday that we are not good people. We are sinful, broken people. We all deserve punishment. And that, but for the grace of God is what we will get.
In the face of that knowledge, David has only one choice. He throws himself down before God and begs for mercy.. Vs 1 – “Have mercy on me, Oh God, according to you unfailing love, according to your great compassion blot out my transgression. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.”
He’s got something incredible to rely on here. He asks for mercy based on the very character of God, the character of God that we read about in Psalm 145 a couple of days ago. The LORD is loving and compassionate, and that’s why David can seek forgiveness. He’s asking God to wash away his sins, to blot out his iniquity not because he deserves forgiveness, but because God loves to forgive.
That’s an incredibly important distinction. And it’s a distinction that’s so hard to get through to our culture. It flies in the face of everything we’re taught. The God of the Bible, the God of David, is a God unlike any other you’re going to meet in any other religious system. This is the real one. All the other gods basically work on the system that you get what you deserve. You do some sort of work – different sorts of work in different religions – and you get a certain benefit. The real God is all about being generous. The last thing that God wants to give you is what you deserve. He will, in the end, if you insist upon it – make no mistake. But he doesn’t want to give you what you deserve.
I said to one of my year seven classes the other day. And some of the looked at me and said “why?”. If God gives me what I deserve I’m going straight to hell. I said that to the class and it was like I had said to someone “oh, I’m a paedophile”. They looked at me as if I was some sort of freak. They had obviously never met the idea that nice people don’t earn their way to heaven.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that forgiveness is just a free pass, a get out of gaol free card that you can use whenever you’ve slept with your neighbour’s wife or killed you neighbour cause he’s in the way of your relationship. In Psalm 51 David doesn’t ask for forgiveness so that he can keep on committing adultery and murder. He asks for his very soul to be transformed. TRANSFORMATION – that was my third point. Have a look at vs 10 – “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit with me.” Vs 12 – “grant me a willing spirit to sustain me”. A big part of this prayer is David asking God to change him. He knows he can’t do it on his own, he knows he’s been sinful since birth. He wants God to change him.
What we’re talking about here is GRACE. A grace that forgives and a grace that transforms. For those of you who aren’t that familiar with the word in this context, grace is an undeserved gift – like God’s mercy to David or, most especially, Jesus’ death on the cross for us.
I find that the students at Peakhurst High don’t hear nearly enough about grace, and when they hear about it they have real trouble about believing it. They can’t fathom that God is outrageously generous to us. God’s love for us is nothing like any other love you will ever experience anywhere. I’m an English teacher and I love Shakespeare. In Romeo and Juliet, I don’t want to give the story away, but in Romeo and Juliet they fall in love. Now the love they experience is perfectly good and perfectly natural, but it’s nothing like God’s love for us. Romeo doesn’t see Juliet and think “look at that ugly hag! I bet no one had ever cared for her in her whole life, how could they – look at her!” And she didn’t look at him and say “look at that geek! He needs some care. I’m going to hate being married to him, but life is full of suffering!” No, they fell in love, there was an attraction between them. But that is nothing like grace. We need to work very hard to get that idea out of our view of God’s love. God is not in the slightest attracted to me. (That’ll surprise you!) And God is not attracted to you. He values you. But he doesn’t look at you and think “man, I’m just falling in love – that woman in the fourth row just has such lovely eyes!” It’s not like that. It’s a different sort of love. It’s grace-type love, where God says you desperately don’t deserve this, but I’m going to bless you anyway.
A little while ago I saw a musical called “Les Miserables”. Les Miserables or however the French pronounce it. Now I had heard that in this show, the bishop is the hero. How often nowadays does a Christian get to be the hero? But this was written before the bigotry of the present, and the bishop is the hero. Basically what happens is Jean Valjean is released from prison and he’s been hated and he’s learned to hate. He’s being pursued by this gaoler who believes that no one ever changes. Crime should be punished. So he’s pursuing Jean Valjean waiting for his to fall. Jean Valjean can’t get a job, he gets taken in one night for dinner by the local bishop. The bishop is very kind to him and he then invites him to choose any room in the house to sleep in and during the night, he nicks some of the very expensive cups. He runs away, the cops come, look through his bag find the cups and say “how did you get this?” And Jean Valjean says “the bishop gave them to me”. The cops say “sure!” and they go back to the bishop’s place, wake him up and they show him the cups and he knows what’s happened. He knew that he had been robbed by the person he’d been kind to. He’d owed the man nothing, and Jean Valjean returned his kindness by stealing from him – this is a dangerous man. But what the bishop says is “How could you do this to me?” He sings a song as they do in these musicals. “How could you treat me like this? I not only gave you those, I also gave you those golden candlesticks and you hurt my feelings by not taking them – please take them as I asked.” And the cops are going “what?” and Jean Valjean is going “what?” And then Jean Valjean sings this song which because times running out I won’t sing to you, but it’s a semi-tortured song, because what he’s experienced is something he’s never heard of or dreamt of before. He’s experienced grace. He deserved absolutely to be condemned and punished for what he’d done. But what he got from the bishop is love, not because he deserved it, but the bishop doesn’t want to give him what he deserves. He wants to show him grace. He wants to give him forgiveness and a fresh start. And Jean Valjean sings this tortured song because he doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t fit into his brain. And his life is completely shattered. And his life is transformed. And what you see in the rest of the story is that he becomes a new man and begins to be gracious himself.
Please drink in the grace of God. It’s hard to believe and it’s hard to keep believing that God can be that generous to us. It starts with a broken and contrite spirit as vs17 says – with knowing and admitting that we are sinful and evil and deserve punishment. But, like David does, we can rejoice because God doesn’t want to give you what you deserve, he wants to show you mercy, wash you clean, and change you.
Keep covering yourself in the grace of God. It will transform your life, just as it transformed the life of Jean Valjean in that play. Just like it transformed David’s life. Dare to believe it. God loves to take unlovely people and shower them with his goodness.
