Pentecost 4
II Samuel 11:26-12:10,13-15
I don’t know about you, but this has never happened to me, that I come home at the end of a day, take a seat on the couch, kick my feet up onto the coffee table and remark, “you know, I really felt like a king today!” You probably also have a difficult time identifying your life with that of a king. I mean, when was the last time someone asked you how your day was and you said, “it was just royal,” or “I had such a majestic day, I felt like a monarch. Everyone couldn’t stop bowing before me, it was a little embarrassing.” Again, compare our normal, everyday lives to the powerful, stately, luxuriant life of a king, and it is hard to identify with that a kingly kind of a life.
But in one respect, I really feel like a king. One particular king, King David. In a spiritual sense, I feel like this king more often than I would care to admit. You see, sometimes kings have a tendency to act as though they are above the laws, and that’s exactly what King David did. And that’s exactly what I do sometimes. And if you are honest with yourself, you will also find plenty of times during the course of a normal day when you act like this king, King David, in regard to the times you feel that you are above God’s laws (we call those times “sins”). So we ask this morning, Do you every feel like a King? 1. Are you ever in denial of your sin? 2. Are you ever crushed by your sins? 3. And you are forever freed from your sin!
Part I
I’m surprised that we have yet to see Hollywood come out with the movie entitled, “David and Bathsheba – A Romantic Thriller.” I mean, this story has all the makings of a steamy suspense story. You have a king. A beautiful woman married to someone else. An illicit affair. The cover-up. The plotting. The abuse of power. The treachery. The murder. The sly wedding. The scandal. And while the world might look at this and say that David and Bathsheba is a story that really gets our hearts racing and our excitement up, the Bible impresses on us the darker side of David and Bathsheba. And what we really see is not the exhilarating tale of a secret affair, but instead we witness the ugly effects of one little sin spinning lives out of control.
It began innocently enough. David probably didn’t intend to commit a grievous sin that evening. But he let his wandering eye stop at a sight he had no business looking at, the wife of one of his neighbor’s bathing. And that one little sin set in motion a series of events that would eventually leave two people dead, and a royal family forever stained with strife. But what happened to David is what happens to often when people tell a lie. Lies have a snowball effect, don’t they? You only intend to tell one lie, (Oh, I’m late getting home because I had to stop at the gas station because I was out of gas) but then you need another to cover that one up (well yes, I filled up just yesterday, but I did a lot of driving around in the last 2 days), and the can of worms gets opened so quickly when we start lying that we start getting defensive (well, I can’t remember all the places I was in the last 2 days that caused me to use up all that gas, so can you just give it a rest?). In David’s case, one sin led to another. After the affair, news came that it had led to a pregnancy. David had to move quickly to cover this up. To he tried to get Uriah the husband to come home, so everyone would assume this was a normal pregnancy. But Uriah wouldn’t go home. So David compounds his sin by getting Uriah drunk, figuring that when he was in high spirits, he’d go home to his wife. Nope. So now David gets desperate. He writes a letter to the commanding general, effectively giving Uriah his death sentence. And as a nice devious touch, David has Uriah himself deliver this letter. And after Uriah is quickly killed, David chivalrously marries the widow Bathsheba to comfort her in her loss.
What went wrong here? Sin after sin after sin after sin. A failure to check sin when it was small. And a denial of sin after it had gotten out of control. And before we tar and feather King David for this, look at your life and ask if you ever feel like David in regard to your sin. Have you ever found yourself saying, “well I don’t think it’s very Christian for so-and-so to do such-and-such.” You don’t feel as bad about your own sins, do you, when you can find someone who is worse than you. “Oh boy, what’s the world coming to when our own city hosts an event called ‘Gay Days’” you might lament because if you can find someone living in open sins, the secret sins in your heart don’t look nearly as bad. “Isn’t it terrible that in the name of religion, hate-filled terrorist behead innocent people,” you say as you think it’s perfectly OK that you, a Christian, carry around a hateful grudge against someone else. Because it’s easy for us to reason that a harmless little feeling of resentment against someone can’t be as bad as what a terrorist does.
But when we find ourselves in denial of the seriousness of our sins, we are forgetting the story of King David. This whole episode began with one little sin. One harmless little lustful thought where David thought, “wow, look at her!” And our your sins any less dangerous?
Part II
Fortunately, the Lord has a way of knocking us upside the head when we start to take sins lightly. He did that to David by sending him a prophet.
In our text, the prophet, a man named Nathan, used a clever tactic to get David to understand the significance of what he had just done. Nathan could have said, “King David, I know what you did, and it was wrong.” But that would have been too easy for David to continue with his denials, “What are you talking about? No, that’s not how things went. You should get your facts straight, Nathan, before you accuse your king of something.” Instead, Nathan tells this story of a rich man and a beggar, and he wants David to feel the injustice that this beggar got at the hand of this cruel rich man. And then, as David is drawn into this story, his anger against the rich man reaches a head as he blows up, “the man who did this deserves to die!” And what a reversal it was when Nathan turned the tables on David and said, “you are the [rich] man!” All of a sudden, David is confronted with the weight of all those sins that he was trying to hide, and he collapsed under the pressure. We can almost hear his sobs as he confesses, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
One thing that just gives me the willies is to imagine what it must feel like to be buried alive in the rubble of a building that has just collapsed. You can breathe, but that’s about it. You can’t move your legs, you can’t move your arms, your head is locked into one position, and on top of all that you feel the crushing weight of the rubble all over your body. No possibility of escaping on your own. That’s how King David felt when he came face to face with his sins.
Have you ever felt like King David here? I hope so, because it’s a good feeling. I didn’t say it is a pleasant feeling, but it is a necessary one. For you cannot go through life just singing, “La-Ti-Da , I’m a believer, I go to church sometimes, so I guess that makes me square with the Lord.” It was exactly when David became complacent that he nearly lost his faith. In fact, some people think that during this period of his life, David was an unbeliever. The Bible does not tell us one way or another. In other words, if David lost his faith and if David had died in that state, he would now be in hell, and we would lump David in with Bible characters like Cain, King Saul, Judas Iscariot. That somber reminder should be enough to shock any of us back to reality whenever we find ourselves playing with a sin and thinking that we cannot be hurt. Much more healthy is to feel the tremendous mass of your sins pinning you down, with no hope of escape.
Part III
Because where we have no escape, the Lord miraculously provides a way out.
I don’t know if the U.S. has any punishments for the crime of adultery, but I guarantee that whatever they are, they are much less severe than what would happen to an Israelite caught in this sin. The Law of Moses was simple: adulterers are to be put to death. No getting a high-priced lawyer. No disputing the DNA evidence. No appealing for another trial. Commit adultery, and congratulations, you die.
And that law put David in a tight spot. He deserved death, and now the secret was out. What an embarrassing thing it would be for the king himself to have to be executed. But look at how the forgiving Lord reacts, “Nathan replied, ‘The LORD has taken away your sin. You are not going to die.” Though he deserved to be, David was not going to be put to death for this sin. And God’s grace went many more steps further. David deserved to go to hell for the adultery with Bathsheba and for the murder of Uriah and for the countless subjects who would be tempted to take their sins lightly if this was the way the spiritual leader of the land acted. But the Lord was also planning to spare David from that. One of David’s descendants would be born a thousand years later. Unlike David the king, this Son of David would live a perfect life. Unlike David the king, the Son of David would be punished for sins…sins that he didn’t even commit. And it was going to be through this unfair execution of the cross that King David would get off scott free, all because one of his descendants, a man named Jesus Christ, would bear the brunt of that punishment for David.
And here I hope is where the pendulum swings all the way for you this morning. Because it begins on one side, with you taking your sins lightly. And as this pendulum moves toward the middle, you see the gravity of your offenses and the hell that you deserve. But finally through the Holy Spirit God allows you to understand where that pendulum ends, at the cross of Jesus. Where you see your forgiveness, and where you understand how God can open up the doors of heaven to rotten, corrupt people like us. Like David, we are not going to die for our sins. God isn’t going to punish you on earth for your sin, and more importantly, he is not going to punish you in eternity for them. Jesus’ job was to be God’s punching bag so that he could take out all his anger on Christ instead of on you.
Conclusion
So yes, many times during your life, and hopefully multiple times during each day, you will feel like a king. I hope that you go through the same gamut of emotions that King David faced during this experience.
And I hope that there is one other way that you feel like a king. While you may feel like anything but a king here on earth, I pray that you always remember that you are royalty. There is a place where you will be a ruler, a king or a queen, ruling alongside other forgiven saints, ruling with imperfect people like King David, St. Peter, and the prostitute that we heard about in the other readings. I will see you there, as we spend an everlasting existence serving Jesus Christ, the King of kings, and Lord of lords.
sdg
