Surviving Sin

--- Welcome to our women's Bible study on the book of 2 Samuel called the reigning king and today we're going to cover chapters 11 and 12 in which many things fall apart in David's kingdom. As we've studied David, we have found many things that have commended him to us and then we've also discovered many flaws developing and that reminds us that no person, David, you, me, none of us falls neatly into either bucket, all good or all bad. The bucket that all of us fall into is a human bucket. We are all human and guess what? No one from that human bucket can bring lasting peace and rest either to ancient Israel or to us today. No king of Israel, no human king, no pastor, no leader today can bring that rest. We need someone that's not in that bucket. We need the perfect king that God promised he would send to us. In fact, even last week in chapter 7, he promised that that perfect king would be from David's line and so that's what we're looking for. In the meantime, we're watching this current reigning king and these chapters really disappoint us. We've got some big disappointments here. So I titled today's lesson Surviving Sin. Do you remember a couple weeks ago we had surviving drama? Okay, this lesson is called Surviving Sin and by the time we're done, I think you'll see what I mean about that. Chapter 11, in the spring of the year when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab and his servants with him in all Israel and they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabah. But David remained at Jerusalem. Remember, God had told him he was not the one to build the house of the Lord. His job was to continue to subdue the enemies of Israel. That is the work that God had given David to do. And last week in chapters 8 and chapters 10, he did it great. It was awesome. And now in chapter 11, what I see is he's tired. He's getting a little tired of that and he's lost interest and we get it. That is a human quality that we share. It's hard to persevere. It's hard to keep going, doing what God has given us to do. We sometimes get fatigued and we get tired and maybe we want to do something else. And in verse 1, David seemed to tire of his assignment from the Lord. So he sends Joab and he just stays behind in Jerusalem, just laying around, eating nachos, watching TV. And how do I know he was doing that? Because, verse 2, it happened late one afternoon after Judge Judy was over that David arose from his couch. What else would he be doing? And he was walking on the roof of the king's house, which is the highest point in several directions. And he saw from that roof a woman bathing. And the woman was very beautiful. And now we need to prepare ourselves for a series of violations, all right? Violation number one is that David did not turn away from what he saw, verse 3. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, well, is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Ilium, the wife of Uriah, the Hittite? And so we are told, David is told, although he knew, she was a married woman. Now, this is a boundary David has not yet crossed. He has collected many wives, many concubines, but we don't know of a married woman. There is Michal, but she actually was married to him first. So we'll push her aside. But to me, this is a new boundary. And we find out, too, that she's the wife of Uriah. Now, that's just not some name or some figure. As soon as we get to chapter 23, we find out Uriah was one of David's 37 mighty men. Okay, a group of 37 is a pretty small group, like I know all of you. And this is way bigger than 37. David knew Uriah, probably knew his family as well. So violation number two in verse four, David sent messengers and took her. And she came to him and he lay with her. Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness, meaning her menstrual cycle. So we learn two things. Number one, she was not pregnant in that moment from her husband, Uriah. And number two, she was probably in the best possible place in her cycle to become pregnant. Verse five, and the woman conceived. And she sent and told David, I am pregnant. And now we watch David scramble to hide what has been done. And he's scrambling because he's probably feeling guilty. We don't scramble in life to hide things unless we feel a sense of guilt. Have any of you on the day after Thanksgiving woke up, started your coffee and think, what I really want this morning is a piece of pumpkin pie with my coffee. So you fix your piece of pumpkin pie and then you hear footsteps down the hallway and you kind of put it behind the toaster. Because I feel guilty. Like, that's not appropriate. I shouldn't be doing that. If I had my scrambled eggs, I would not hide them behind the toaster. That's what I'm supposed to be eating. But if we feel guilty, we want to hide it. So I'm glad you're laughing because this is a sober couple passages. So this is a good start. So David sent word to Joab, send me Uriah the Hittite. And he came and they talked about the war. In verse eight, David said, go down to your house, wash your feet. And Uriah went and David sent a gift after him. But Uriah slept at the floor of the king's house with all the servants of his Lord. And he did not go down to his house. And when David was told that in verse 10, well, then David says to Uriah, Uriah, have you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house? And Uriah said to David, the Ark and Israel and Judah, they're all dwelling in booths. They are not secured. And my Lord Joab and the servants of my Lord are camping in the open field. Shall I then go to my house to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife? As you live, I will not do this thing. And we realize that Uriah is a man that has such a deep sense of loyalty and responsibility that he's really throwing a wrench in David's cover up plans. So David told him to stay another day, verse 13. And David invited him and he ate in his presence and drank so that he made him drunk. And in the evening, he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his Lord. But he did not go down to his house. Even in a drunken state, Uriah had more devotion to his calling. He would stay in a state of readiness. Even drunk, he knew that. And that is a contrast that we see to David, where he had lost interest in what God had given him to do. And his devotion went out the door when he just tumbled off the couch. So here comes violation number three, verse 14. In the morning, David wrote a letter to Joab and he sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter, he wrote, quote, set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting and then draw back from him that he may be struck down and die. The cruel irony of putting death instructions in the hand of the one that is to die. That's ruthless. That's the first thing. But second of all, now Joab knows all that's in David's heart. And he has been handed power through this. But also, you know, Joab once murdered a man, Abner. David did not bring the sentence of death upon him. And he may feel, David may feel as though Joab owes him a favor due to that. Well, verse 16, and as Joab was besieging the city, he assigned Uriah to the place where he knew there were valiant men. And the men of the city came out and fought with Joab. And some of the servants of David among the people fell. Uriah the Hittite also died. And then Joab sent and told David all the news about the fighting using a kind of a complicated story from Judges chapter nine, which we have studied. In verse 23, the messenger said to David, the men gained an advantage over us and came out against us in the field, but we drove them back to the entrance of the gate. But then the archers shot at your servants from the wall. Some of the king's servants are dead, and your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also. And David said to the messenger, okay, go back and tell Joab, don't let this matter displease you. For the sword devours now one, now another. Begin your attack against the city and overthrow it. And we are greatly disappointed because those are not the words of a strong leader. A strong leader doesn't say, oh, well, people die. Let's keep going. A strong leader mourns over that and offers condolences to people. It wasn't only Uriah that died here. We learned other servants of David died. There was other mothers who lost their sons and other wives who lost their husbands. This was a very, very terrible situation. David has been known to us up until this point. for his kindness and his generosity. We've watched him survive drama by bringing peace and calm and a forgiving spirit. David has had the character where he's able to get people like Uriah that want to come and be on his team. They have admired him up to this point. And now we have really a national security threat. We have military morale at stake. The biggest problem that's going on here is the peril between David's relationship with the Lord. Meanwhile, which we'll come to in a moment, but meanwhile in verse 26, when the wife of Uriah heard that her husband was dead, she lamented over her husband. And when the morning was over, David sent and brought her to his house and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord and that is the core problem here. What David had done displeased the Lord. There was now a deep wound between David and his God. And God rarely lets deep wounds just go on. He initiates a confrontation and that's what we have in the next chapter, chapter 12. And the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him, here's the story. There were two men in a certain city, the one rich, the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up and it grew up with him and with his children. It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, which meant hospitality was required. And he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb and he prepared it for the man who had come to him. And Nathan told that story in such an endearing way that when we hear it, every one of us says, what a low, down, dirty, rotten, crummy thing to do. And that's exactly how David responded. He couldn't even believe that someone would do this. And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man. And he said to Nathan, as the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die. And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, presumably before he dies, because he did this thing and because he had no pity. Now the law in itself did not require someone to die because they took an animal, but it did require restitution of this sort. But David is so worked up at this that he's like, the man should die. And isn't that the way we are? We see someone else do something and we can get really worked up, but find a way to excuse ourself. Once Nathan realized that he had David completely where he wanted him to be emotionally, then he said those four words to David, you are the man. And I picture it as those words just hung in the air between Nathan and David, and they're just looking at each other. And then Nathan gives him the word of the Lord. Here it is. God says, I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. And I gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your arms. And I gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you much more. What does that remind you of? It's the same way God talked to him in chapter seven. I did this, I did this, I gave you. And then God says, why have you despised the word of the Lord to do what's evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with a sword. You have taken his wife to be your wife. You have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. So in this message, God says, I anointed, I delivered, I gave, I would have added. But David, look what you did. You despised, you struck down, you took, you have killed. This is how you have responded to my goodness in your life, which that's all we talked about last week, was God's goodness, God's promises to David. And so God is saying, look what you did with that. Verse 10, now therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. Thus says the Lord, behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house, and I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives, for you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel. David's violations were centered on adultery and murder, and the consequences for David's violations are gonna repay him in like kind. We are going to see adultery, we are going to see murder. David's first three sons will be devoured by the sword. Amnon, Absalom, and Adonijah will all perish by the sword very soon. David's wives will face the peril that is talked about here, and the remainder of this book will be fairly terrible. But the reason I titled this Surviving Sin is because there is a survival after sin for David and for us. Sin is survivable. Let's look at David's response. David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord, and Nathan said to David, don't worry, the Lord has put away your sin, you shall not die, because David had just said, that man deserves to die. Nathan says, you will not die, nevertheless, because by this deed, you have utterly scorned the Lord. The child that is born to you shall die, and then Nathan went to his house. And once the child was born, it was indeed sick, sick, verse 16, David therefore sought God on behalf of the child, and David fasted and went in and lay all night on the ground. And on the seventh day, the child died, and the servants were even afraid to tell David. And then eventually, David said to the servants, is the child dead? And they said, he is dead. And then David arose from the earth, and he washed, he anointed himself, he changed his clothes. And look at this, he went into the house of the Lord, and he worshiped. And what does that remind us of? That is the same thing David did in chapter seven as well. David responded the same way, whether God was giving him a blessing, you know that song we sing, blessed be the name of the Lord, you give, you take away. David responded the same way, and I find that very, very interesting. We're encouraged when we see that, because we see the hope here that David will survive this sin. And we see hope for David's relationship with the Lord to be restored. So once he goes home, he has food, the servants are puzzled, and David answers them in verse 22, he said, you know, while the child was still alive, I fasted, I wept, for I said, who knows whether the Lord will be gracious to me, and the child may live. But now he's dead, and why should I fast? Can I bring him back? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me. And I love that too, because David sees things very clearly. This is the way it is. And I see echoes of Abraham when he said, will not the judge of all the earth do right? I see David saying, I accept the situation. And we need to, we need to accept consequences sometimes. So this chapter ends here, oh, I'm sorry, I'm not done. Verse 24, and then David comforted his wife Bathsheba, he went into her, he lay with her, and she bore a son, and he called his name Solomon, and the Lord loved him. That's what Solomon means, and sent a message by Nathan the prophet. So he called his name Jedidiah, because of the Lord. Now the chapter ends in the very same way that it began, that the last chapter began, with this battle with the Ammonites, raging Rabah. And Joab was about to win this city, and he sends a message to David, and he says, you better get over here, because I am just about to clinch the deal, and if I take this city, it'll be called by the name of Joab, it'll be the city of Joab. So you better get over here, and David did, and he returned to what God had given him to do, and he brought a lot of spoil back to Jerusalem. What's interesting about this battle at Rabah, beginning at the beginning of verse, chapter 11, and ending at the end of chapter 12, is that the whole business with Bathsheba, and with Uriah, is sort of a big, long parentheses in the middle of that. In fact, if you go to 2 Chronicles, where this timeline matches, the whole parentheses is missing. It's not there. It's just the battle of Rabah. But this parentheses is very instructive for us, so we're grateful that it was put into the narrative of Samuel, because it instructs us. and causes us to pause and to consider sin. There aren't very many things in our life that cause us to stop and think about sin. And it's important for us because remember, we're all in the human bucket. And in the human bucket, we have sin that needs to be survived. So what do we observe about David? Well, one thing we observed is that he got caught up with a sense of entitlement. He saw something in his lifestyle, in his position, he thought he was entitled to that. We see that the seeds of unchecked passion that we watched from his time in Hebron, collecting wives, concubines, and his time in Jerusalem, collecting wives, concubines, we thought to ourselves back then, is this gonna come back to bite him sometime? Because this isn't okay. They were the seeds then that blossomed into adultery now. The seeds of unchecked passion. And we observe that David is human. David is indeed capable of all the worst that human beings are, because he's in that middle bucket called human. And we're all in there with him, all capable of these things. And we also learn from David that humility and repentance are the survival skills that we need when it comes to sin in our life. So I wanna wrap this up by considering ourselves, our lives, and I've made four points that I titled, what do we learn about surviving sin? How do we take this story and bring it into our own heart? So the first thing that we learn is that the best time to survive sin is before violation number one. The best thing to do is to turn away at the point of temptation. We would not have had this story at all had that been the case there. And we're reminded that temptation is not sin. Temptation is something that you don't have control over. I've often had a funny little analogy about having a big tree next to my patio, and I don't want a messy patio with bird droppings. But I can't control if the birds come into my tree, but I don't need to put out a bird feeder, I don't need to put out a bird bath. And if I see them carrying little pieces of straw, I can shoo them away and say, no, no, no, not here. But I can't control them just showing up, and temptation is the same way. It just shows up. That is not sin. But don't give it food. Don't pay attention to it. The next thing we learn is that when we do get to violation number one, or number two, or number three, we have to own our sin. We cannot blame someone else for our sin. When the Holy Spirit shows us that we have sinned and convicts us and says to us, you are the man, I have to say, I am the man, or woman, because I have that figured out. I am the woman. I am the thief. I spoke those destructive words. Nobody made me do it, I spoke them. I watched that show. In fact, I watched the whole season. And what God said here, I despised the word of the Lord to do what is evil in his sight. That's what I did. Now, in your study guide, I sent you to Psalm 51, because that was representative. That was written by David during this season. And so I wanna show you some of the things from the heart of David, from the words of David, from that Psalm. So look at here in verses three and four, and this is out of the NIV. David said, for I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. It was nobody else's fault. This was mine. Against you and you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. So that you're proved right when you speak and justified when you judge. He affirmed what God said. And that is how we survive sin in our lives. Number three, we must respond to the Lord with humility and with repentance. Humility is what we just looked at, owning it. Saying yes, that was me. And repentance is changing our course. Sometimes we might call it a brokenness. We used to call it breaking horses, now we call them gentling horses. But a breaking means taking the wildness out and being able to direct that. And look what David says about brokenness in verse 17. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. If we come to the Lord in brokenness, God will not reject us, he won't turn away. And this is what opens up the way for us to ask for cleansing, to ask for forgiveness. And I didn't list these, but I just want you to hear all the words of cleansing that David wrote in this psalm. Wash me from my iniquity, purge me with hyssop, blot out my iniquities, create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit in me. And this is the work of the Lord. My oldest daughter, I'm lifting this as a quote from her, and it is a good one, this will preach. She said, it may be too late for prevention, but it's never too late for redemption. Quotable, right? Say it again. It may be too late for prevention, but it is never too late for redemption. And that is what David did. He knew the character of God and he knew he could press in for redemption from this situation. And number four is don't confuse consequences with punishment. Do not let your past sins perpetuate a constant rift between you and God, a wound between you and God to the point where now you're living your life and you think that every single crummy thing that happens to you in life is God's punishment, forever punishing, forever punishing, for your sins. Don't do that. Now, there were severe consequences in this lesson for David's sin. To whom much is given, much is required, right? But God also lavished his mercy on David in this moment. Okay, and the next child that would be born from David and Bathsheba would be a great and a wise king who would bring us one generation closer to the real king, to the Messiah. And so God's grace and his mercy are lavished all over this. So we need to learn, instead of seeing my life through the eyes of crummy things equals God punishing me for my past, we need to learn to say, Lord, I'm just gonna lean into your mercy. And that's where David started in this psalm. Look at verse one. David said the first thing out of his mouth, have mercy on me, oh God. According to your steadfast love, David was saying, I know your character. I know your steadfast love. Have mercy on me according to your abundant mercy. I doubt that there's one woman in here that doesn't have some sort of consequences in your life from some past sin or season of sin. All of us do. Some door has been closed. Some relationship has been destroyed. Some opportunity has been lost. These are just the physical consequences that we live out in this world. These are not eternal, okay? These are the physical things that we're living out in this world. What is our remedy to this? Exactly where David started. We lean into God's mercy. We just lean into God's mercy and we say, I know your character. I know your steadfast love. I know your abundant mercy. I'm just gonna lean into you and see where this goes. So I have another scripture that I didn't put on a slide because I just wanna close with it and lead us into prayer. This morning I was reading in my Through the Bible, I was at Psalm 103, and I read it through two times and I really just had a nice time with the Lord this morning. But I wanna close in light of this, in light of leaning into God's mercy and considering the things that do happen in our lives, but how good he is to us. I just want you to close your eyes and listen to these verses and then I'm gonna close us in prayer. You can write this down if you wanna go through it later. It's Psalm 103, 11 through 13, and it goes this way.

Lord, we just want to lean into you as we see your character described here and we understand. and what you do with our sin. And we say that you are good, and you are a father, and you intend for us good things, Lord. And we realize our sin is survivable. As long as we admit it, as long as we ask for your cleansing, then we get up and we move on. And Lord, we just thank you, all of us today. We thank you for your character. We thank you for your tender love. We thank you that you remind us, you are mindful of us, and you don't let a distance, a rift, or a wound between us just continue to go on and on. And we thank you for that, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen. ---