Pastor White did it again. He used one of the controversial parts of the Bible as text a for a sermon. The story is well-known, and yet it is surprising to some people who have an idea of the moralism that should be in the Bible. Here you have an incident that sounds like it came out of a soap opera or an R-rated movie. It has voyeurism, abuse of power, deceit, illicit sex; all of which leads to a pregnancy produced by adultery, a cover up, additional deceit, further corruption, continued and accelerated abuse of power, conspiracy, and murder. All together it was an ungodly mess. It is all the more striking because David was a man after God’s own heart, he was a hero of faith and courage, and he was an eloquent Psalmist. Yet there is more about this incident and its aftermath in the Bible than any of his triumphs, any of the events that showed his greatness as a spiritual leader, any of the examples of his goodness and virtue.
Why? As Elder Tom has said before, the Bible is a realistic book. All of the heroes of the Bible – save One – are shown as they really were, warts and all. (Of course, that One, our Lord Jesus, was also shown as He really was and is; He just happened to be, and still is, completely without warts.) Events like this shows how bad sin is, what it can do to the best of people – and David was the best of the best. This in turn emphasizes how badly a remedy is needed, how badly a Savior is needed. The Bible was written to tell us of our Savior and all that He did to rescue us from our sins. The Bible is not a book of the ideals for human virtue, but a book that discloses the reality of the grace of God, grace that delivers people who lack virtue from the consequences of their vices, big or small, obvious or barely noticeable. Interestingly enough Bathsheba is one of the four women mentioned (though not named, as the other three were) in the ancestral line of our Savior in Matthew I. Her inclusion, like that of the others, serves to emphasize that Jesus is the Savior of sinners, even of those who sin against their better knowledge, compound their sin with impenitence, and heap up sin after sin in trying to hide what they have done.
Some people take offense at this point. One of Elder Tom’s very dear friends was upset because of the way many of her friends and family reacted to this incident, especially as presented in a motion picture (to which Pastor White also referred in his sermon.) The impression these that people got was that it was wonderful to be able to do what David and Bathsheba did and get away with it. As Elder Tom pointed out, they did not get away with it. The Bible not only gives attention to this incident but also to the aftermath – to the damage that David did to himself and Bathsheba, to Uriah (one of David’s top men), to their first child (who died), to his family, and to his people and his kingdom. But David was told “The Lord has put away your sin.” A later son of David and Bathsheba, Solomon by name, became king and an ancestor of the Savior. As the Bible says in another place, where sin abounded grace did much more abound.
Some people do use the demonstrations of God’s grace, here and elsewhere in Scripture, as excuses to sin, thinking they can do so with impunity. Some actually think they can sin as much as they want, and wait to repent when they get to be Elder Tom’s age or even older. (An old adage says ”Those who plan on repenting at the eleventh hour may well die at 10:30.”) Still others turn up their noses and look for spiritual direction elsewhere than in the Bible. Elder Tom has some sympathy with them. He was never bothered by this episode, but he was upset by the story of Samson. It was not just Samson and Delilah, but the whole account of his dealings with women, the wrong women. And it was not just his womanizing, but his lapses of judgment. (Elder Tom is ashamed to admit it, but in his younger days he tended to overrate his own intelligence and give other people less credit for theirs; he also had the bad habit of minimizing his own lapses of knowledge and judgment while failing to exercise the proper degree of charity and balance toward similar lapses he observed in others. Elder Tom daily repents of this attitude in sackcloth and ashes.) Elder Tom thought that Samson was as dumb as a box of rocks. But the Lord did not let Elder Tom go on like that for long. The account of Samson emphasizes the grace of God in many ways. First, in the fact that God forgave Samson and led him to repentance. Elder Tom needs to repent daily and daily he lives by the Lord’s forgiveness. Secondly, Elder Tom, although somewhat precocious in his youth, has huge areas of ignorance (for example, Pastor White had to give him detailed instructions so that he could write this blog) and has made many, many mistakes in judgment, including in and especially in his efforts to serve his Savior and his church. God not only used Samson in his strength, He used his very mistakes to execute judgment on the Philistines and bring about deliverance for His people. God can still use Elder Tom in spite of his mistakes and can even use those mistakes to accomplish his purpose.
What applies to Elder Tom applies to one and all. God has forgiven all your sins because of what Jesus did for you. Like Elder Tom and like all the heroes of the Bible, you need God’s grace and forgiveness every day. That God showed grace to them assures you and me that He has shown, is showing, and will continue to show the same grace to us. God has led us to repent. God loves us and wants us to be his own, whoever we may be and whatever we may have done. God can use us in His service, no matter how weak and flawed we are. God can and does use those very flaws and weaknesses to accomplish his purpose. He can and does do that in Jesus Christ.
Does this mean that we cultivate our flows, our weaknesses, our faults, our sins? Indeed we do not have to cultivate them, they keep coming up no matter how hare we work at trying to uproot them and throw them away. But we who have repented certainly will never take our sins lightly, nor will we despise or take the Lord’s generosity for granted. We know what our Savior did for us and how much it cost Him to procure our salvation. Because He did that for us, we will spare no efforts to remove all those things from our hearts and minds and lives. Because the Holy Spirit lives in us, we want to live as our Father wants us to live. We want to serve Him, to thank Him, to honor Him, to do as David did when His sin was brought home to him. For David was not a man of God’s own heart because of any inherent virtue, but because he was a sinner repented and trusted in his Savior and a man who valued God’s forgiveness, forbearance, and munificence. Elder Tom has spoken of the aftermath of David’s sin. He once heard a wonderful sermon about the aftermath of David’s repentance. That sermon was based on Psalm 51. Elder Tom is going to pray that Psalm as soon as he is done with this blog; he respectfully suggests that you do the same. Then we can learn together the true lesson to be learned from the story of David and Bathsheba.
