What A Tangled Web We Weave Series

Insights from the Life of David – Part 7:

“What a Tangled Web We Weave: David & Bathsheba”

II Samuel 11:1-27

Our story today is not for young ears. It’s a story of adultery and premeditated murder. It’s the stuff that movies are made of and yet it’s the stuff we find in the life of one of the Bible’s most beloved characters.

This week as we continue in our series on the life of David we come to a completely different part of his life. We’re jumping ahead at least twenty years at this point. So let’s do some catching up. We discovered over the last few weeks that Saul had grown to hate David and desperately wanted him dead. After a long chase in which David had continued to elude Saul, Saul finally died and David ascended to the throne. There David had distinguished himself as a trusted leader of his people. He was a man of passion and compssion. He led the people in righteousness and now had two decades of sterling leadership on his resume. His military boundaries now reached 60,000 square miles. His army was undefeated. The country was financially healthy; David had a beautiful home and was making plans for a new temple of the Lord. And we discovered that the reason for David’s success was that the Spirit of the Lord was with him. Things were good, in fact, they were very good.

But the Bible never flatters its heroes. When it paints a portrait of their lives it’s a very realistic one. It doesn’t ignore, deny or overlook the dark side.

With that said we find ourselves today reading about a sin which has received more press than any other sin, save the sin of Adam and Eve.

Somehow David became so entangled in sin that it drug him to a new depth in his life, a place where he never thought he would end up. David, the giant killer, the writer of beautiful Psalms committed not only adultery but premeditated murder. Who would have ever thought?

What makes this sin even so much more difficult to swallow was the fact that this was David, you know the same one who was said to be “a man after God’s own heart.” Everyone looked up to him! How could he have fallen?

I was in the first semester of my sophomore year in college the night I received the call that would forever change my life. I was attending Houghton to pursue what I believed was a call by God into full time pastoral ministry. From the time I was young I had wanted to be a preacher and I credit a lot of that desire to the fact that I held my own pastor in a place of high respect. To me he was a super hero. I had never seen a fault in him and wanted to be just like him when I grew up. He was my mentor by choice, the man to whom I looked up.

As I listened to what my mother told me on the telephone on that Fall evening my heart sank. My pastor had been caught in an affair and had already left the church. In fact, he had also left his wife and was moving in with this other woman. I was devastated. Suddenly the man to whom I had always looked as my example, had committed a sin that I did not think he was capable of committing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That evening forever changed my perspective on ministry and has significantly shaped the way in which I conduct myself.

As I studied the life of David and specifically this chapter on his affair with Bathsheba I began to ask myself: how is it that a person reaches the point where he or she takes that fatal step in which their life will forever be altered? We all face temptations but where’s the point at which we move from facing a temptation to committing a sin? What causes a person to step over that line?

There are three things in the life of David which we can use to alert us that we are most susceptible to failure.

The first is when we become too comfortable. There’s a little verse that’s tucked neatly away in the book of II Samuel that says an awful lot about David’s attitude. It’s in chapter 5:12. Listen to this: “David then perceived that the Lord had established him king over Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for the sake of his people Israel.” In other words, any naiveté had faded away. David knew that he had been chosen for a special purpose. It became obvious too him that God was on his side. And he was beginning to become a little too comfortable with the way things were. His head had gotten just a little too big. David was at an all-time high. He was fresh off a series of victories on the battlefield. He had reached the peak of public admiration. He had ample money, incredible power, unquestioned authority, and remarkable fame.