David & Bathsheba

So if you turn to Psalm 51, one of the things I want to do as we sing the Psalms is I want to, at some point, exegete, preach through all the Psalms that we sing together. So you've sung Psalm 1 and 4 and 51 and 84 and 98 together here in this church for a while, and now Psalm 110. And so I'd like us to know what they mean. and be able to put a little bit of oomph behind our understanding of them.

And so Psalm 51 is one of the psalms that we've sang. And I bet you right now more than half the room could quote it from memory. At least you might have to sing it a little bit to do it, but that's okay. And so the next thing we're going to do before we get into the study of Romans is we're going to go through Psalm 51 together. and this is going to take more than the one week that I did Psalm 84 in.

But today we're not going to be in Psalm 51 very much. But I want to read the beginning of it to you. I'm not going to make you stand. But the beginning of Psalm 51 starts, To the choir master, a psalm of David. When Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba. That's it.

That's all we're going to talk about today. And so we're not even getting to what most of your Bibles label as verse 1. And what I'll tell you is those words I just read are inspired scripture. Psalm 51 doesn't actually start at verse 1. Most of the Psalms don't start at verse 1. They actually start with the instructions.

Not the bold heading that most of us have in our Bibles, where your ESV or your NAS or whatever it is gives you a little bit of a subject, a subheading kind of. Mine says, create in me a clean heart, O God. Just quoting one of the verses. The instructions are actually part of the psalm. Now, we don't sing the instructions because the instructions are actually what you're supposed to recognize before you would sing it.

But so one point I just want to bring out, a lot of psalms say to the choir master. and so I actually don't think that it's unbiblical to have a choir some people think according to the regulative principle of worship that you would not have a choir that would sing maybe some songs they've prepared before the congregation and one of the reasons why people say that and hold to that is because of the abuse that's happened as a result because if you look around the United States and I think most of you would know this and some of you it's the reason you're here, is that you've been to churches where the thing they call worship, I'm using air quotes, the thing they call worship is just the singing. And I'll tell you something that might be a shock to some of you, I'm the worship leader here. Bert comes up and he leads the singing and I'm the worship leader because I'm the one that's actually opening the word of God.

And Bert's leading worship and so did Jeremy and Elijah. that we're all leading it in different ways. But when you separate in your mind that worship is when people are singing and that when the man is preaching the word to you or when we're doing communion, that somehow that's something different from worship, that's how we get what we have right now in most of American churches. But the problem becomes the slow slide into performance-based worship then. so what do a lot of churches have up on the stage what did this church have for a long time this building has drum set and guitars and has a lot of instruments that help us to do music and you end up having a group of people that simply perform the songs for others that's why if you've listened for the past almost nine months now one of the things I repeat when I'm up here is that you're a worshipper you're not a spectator you're not observing somebody else worshiping and then maybe participating a little we're all worshiping so some churches never do any kind of prepared choir based singing because they want everyone in the audience always singing or somehow they think they're susceptible to not participating in worship and i think that a church can have a choir i think if someday we had a group of people that said hey we want to practice extra during the week and do a couple maybe harder songs and we want to sing them to bless the people.

I don't see anything wrong with that. You can argue with me after, I guess. But I think that that would be a wonderful thing if we did that. I think it could be a part of our worship too. But so turn to 2 Samuel chapter 11. So if we didn't talk about adult things enough when we read Genesis 38, we're gonna get into it with second Samuel 11 and so we're in a family integrated church and one of the things we believe is that the children in the room even down to pretty small ages are blessed by hearing the word of God read and listening to it preached and the other thing that we also recognize is that God's word is perfect, so we don't mind reading it.

Elijah read some things that I think were probably hard to read. But at the same time, as a preacher, I do have a responsibility to say things in a way that doesn't cause undue harm to people who aren't ready for some concepts, but at the same time can cut to the heart of people who need to hear things. And so if you're sitting in your chair, you could silently pray for me that I would do that well today.

And we'll probably be talking about a couple of these things for a couple of weeks. But when we read the beginning of Psalm 51 we said this is what David said when Nathan the prophet came to him and told him what God had said about his sin with Bathsheba And so we are going to dig into 2 Samuel 11 and 12 in preparation for it. So I'm not just like hopping around books or whatever, but we're going to do that in preparation to be able to go through Psalm 51 with a really good understanding of what's going on there.

And we'll end up referencing things like Psalm 32 as well. And so we're going to get through this. This is a narrative. We just spent 33 Sundays talking about the epistle of 1 Peter. So when you're doing your personal Bible reading, when you're doing your personal study, your devotion, maybe you're doing exegesis, maybe you're preparing for family worship, maybe you're just preparing.

I expect every member in this room who is a man to be prepared on a Sunday if I happen to go down for some reason to come up and preach. All you have to do is write one sermon. You can write the whole thing out. You can manuscript it. You can practice it every Saturday if you really want it at home. Put it in your pocket.

And then Sunday you get the call that says, hey, Michael can't be here for some reason. Somebody needs to step up and preach the word. And so everybody should at least practice making one sermon who's a man in the church. And men who join will challenge you in the same way. So you guys have to have a plan for that. If I'm really out for the count, you guys better, you still have to have a church service, all right?

So this is a narrative, though. And a narrative is when we're like a narrator's telling a story, right? So we all know what a narrator is. Especially Chile, you ever watch Winnie the Pooh? Oh, I got a bunch of heads up. All of a sudden I talked about something that interested them, right?

I guess I could say Incredible Hulk, right? That would get some attention, wouldn't it, Jude? I talked about the Hulk, right? But yeah, a narrative is when someone's telling a story. And that's different from an epistle. Peter's epistle was exhorting and declaring that this is the true grace of God.

Peter was making a bunch of propositional truth claims. So those are just statements of fact. Hey, this is true. and then Peter was exhorting people, because this is true, here's what you're going to do. A narrative is often telling a story. And when the story is told, there's going to be some propositional truth claims that go on. There's going to be some things that are true.

There's going to be indicatives and there's going to be imperatives, the things we do as the result of what's true. But a lot of times the things have to be drawn out a little bit. They have to be exegeted is one of the words we would use. We have to understand what God is trying to tell us through the story. And it's a little bit of a different way than you would read a book like Romans.

Or that you would even read the Psalms. Or that you would read epistle of 1 Peter. Or apocalyptic literature like Revelation. There's different types of Bible books. And because there's different types of Bible books, I think the word is genre that we would use if any English majors in here. there's different types of literature. And so we understand it in that context.

Part of the goal of shepherding people is to feed the sheep, but part of it is that I want you to be able to feed yourself. So that's why I'm belaboring the point about how to read the Bible, how to read it yourself. And when we look at a narrative, we're going to see some things that happen. And there's times you have to draw some conclusions. And so there's going to be things that I say that are not explicitly in the text.

And depending on what tradition you come from, in the way that you were taught to read the Bible, there's a tradition that says if it's not stated in the text clearly, like X, Y, Z happened, we don't believe it. And some people think that that makes them very Bible-minded. In fact, we call it Biblicism when people do that. And if you're a Biblicist, if you have to have a statement in the scripture that says thou shalt or thou shalt not or you have to have an explicit explanation of everything you have to have the word in the bible that you're going to use then you can't actually believe the Athanasian Creed we can't use the word trinity the word trinity is not in the bible did you know that the word bible is not in the bible right it's gonna be kind of tough so we all understand this we all use language on a regular basis so we all understand that when somebody says something to us like i jumped in the shower and then went to the store we all understand a couple things one the person didn't actually jump right unless they're on crutches you might believe they had jumped right nobody jumps in the shower it's a it's a metaphor it's a phrase we use and then we don't believe that they jumped in the shower and then went immediately to the store.

We actually can understand that something happened in between. Well, they dried off, they got dressed, they started their car, they got on their bike, they started... A lot of things happened in between. And a lot of those things we can logically deduce. In the first paragraph to the confession that we hold to here, I believe it's in the first chapter, I think it's the eighth paragraph, we say there are good and necessary consequences of Scripture that we can believe, even if things are not explicitly stated.

That's a problem for some people, and it's hard for them to understand. But hopefully as we go through this, you will see what we do as we read the Scripture. And you will see what I do as I try to teach it to you. So David and Bathsheba, or Bathsheba, I think some people would say it. Let's start in 2 Samuel chapter 11, if you want to follow along. And let's read five verses here.

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah But David remained at Jerusalem It happened late one afternoon when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king's house that he saw from the roof a woman bathing. And the woman was very beautiful.

And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, and it's always true, and it's inerrant, and every jot and tittle of the Word of God is absolutely vital. What does 2 Timothy 3.16 say? All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable. And so as we read some of these stories, I want to challenge you in your personal time, as well as when you're here with me, to recognize that every detail that God gives us is actually important.

It's important to God. I'm not saying every detail of Scripture has as much impact on your life, maybe. There are parts of Scripture that are larger, more important doctrines to agree upon, even. You can be Christian and disagree on a number of parts of Scripture. But sometimes we see some of the details of Scripture, and we overlook the detail. So have you ever watched one of those movies or shows where something happened early on, and it didn't seem like a really important moment.

And then at the end, when they reveal who the bad guy was, you realize, well, he was the guy that was there at the beginning, taking the pictures or whatever, right? And so a lot of times in Scripture, God puts details in that to us seem inconsequential, but they actually help us understand what's going on. And hopefully a good preacher will draw meaning out of some of them.

So what's going to happen here, we didn't read the whole thing, is David is going to go through this period of time in his life where as a believer, as a spirit-filled Christian man, David, who believed in the coming Messiah, he's one of God's favorite people, actually. God doesn't show impartiality, yet he talks highly of David. I think a lot of times he's really talking about his son, but David certainly was the type.

David is going to take another man's wife for his own he's going to get her pregnant not to spoil the rest of the story he's going to have the guy killed lie about it and then eventually he's going to be told by the prophet Nathan you are the man and he's going to repent that's why if a guy named Nathan you never want a guy named Nathan to say you are the man You want to avoid that if you have a friend named Nathan. But so David, we're going to evaluate the life of David right now and the life of Bathsheba a little bit. And we're going to draw some conclusions about our own lives.

And not only are we going to look at maybe some bad examples of the Bible, of things not to do, we're going to see how David, someone who you can learn about sometimes as a type of Christ we're going to see how he fell short at times but how Jesus Christ, the greater David would come and he would actually fulfill all righteousness. So let's look at this in a little bit of detail. In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle David sent Joab.

So if you were here last week remember Joab is a dirty guy. We talked about him last day having an homicide in the stomach last week and killing them. And that was in 2 Samuel. That was later. 2 Samuel 20, I think, if I remember. Joab was a bad guy.

He would pretty much do any dirty deed that he needed to do if he thought it would help him. He was a little bit dutiful to obey the king, but at the same time, his duty was to really himself. Like an Old Testament Dr. Fauci. Anyway, I'll just I'll plug that in there. Anyway, you can get mad if you want.

We'll talk about that later. David sent Joab and his servants with him in all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. So here's an interesting point. It's the spring of the year.

They had sort of, you wait out the winter in these times. It was harder to do some of these battles in the winter. They didn't move around as much. And they're besieging Rabbah. And you can read the previous thing about why they're fighting the Ammonites. But David remained at Jerusalem.

But it even says, when kings go out to battle. And one of the problems here is that David's eventual sin with Bathsheba, to some extent, begins with not being where he's supposed to be. David, in a sense, should be out there with the men. He should be close to the battle somehow. He was a mighty man. We knew that. and David remained at Jerusalem.

So he wasn't where he was supposed to be. I'm not necessarily going to accuse him of sin yet. There could be reasons why he wasn't there. But as everything plays out, we're going to see if David had been with the guys fighting, none of this would have happened that we're about to read about. But of course, God's providential and he organized things. It happened late one afternoon when David arose from his couch that something's going to happen.

And he rose from his couch. So if you read that in 2021 you think about your sofa in your living room Like David was sitting on a sofa and he was reading a scroll or whatever they did on the sofa And that not what you supposed to interpret it as David arising from his couch here one late afternoon is a reference to him getting out of bed. So the idea is that he's lying down.

And commentators are a bit split on this. Some people say he was having just an afternoon nap, which would be innocuous, right? It would be an innocent thing to do, to have an afternoon nap. But some people actually claim this is part of David's problem. He was being lazy. Maybe he stayed up late the night before and he was eating food that he shouldn't have been eating.

So it made him feel sick and sluggish and lazy. Or maybe he was drinking too much. But for whatever reason, instead of being out of bed in the morning and actually working all day like a man ought to do, particularly a king, a king of a nation of God's people, he was laying around. And so he gets up and he's sluggish feeling. His flesh has taken over already with this laying in bed.

That's the idea that some people got from it. Sometimes I'll just present you multiple views. Because I can't say for certain who I read that was right. And I'm not sure I agree with any one of them for sure. So I'll give you the views you can think to yourself about it. But it says he saw from the roof a woman bathing. and the woman was very beautiful.

So another interesting point here. David's on a roof. Now we think of walking around on the roof and what we think of is guys that are like roofers putting a roof together. So at this time, the roof of your house was actually an area where you would go and hang out. It was actually part of the living quarters at times and it wasn't the way we think of a roof. and that's why there was actually a law if you look through the Old Testament law where you had to have basically a fence around your roof because if somebody was on your roof and they fell off and hurt themselves you'd be liable for what happened to them and so it's one of the laws of God that we understand the general equity of today is we're supposed to make our area safe we try to make this area safe too so I would tell the kids don't run around and stay in the other room to throw a ball and we try to do things safe.

If somebody spilled water in there tonight, we'd clean it up immediately because we wouldn't want someone to get hurt. So David's walking around on the roof and he sees a woman bathing. It's this Bathsheba woman. And it says that she was very beautiful, which I find to be an interesting note in Scripture. Because most of us would say beauty is rather subjective.

And certainly we all have some different tastes when it comes to those things. And hopefully all the men think their wife in here is beautiful and everybody thinks their daughters are beautiful and those kinds of things. And you think your husband's handsome and all that stuff. But the scripture drawing attention to it, I find to be very interesting because what's going to happen here is that Bathsheba, this beautiful woman is outside bathing.

And this is not a reference to going to a pool and bathing. this is she's bathing herself like we would have a bath and she's out in the open in some way where someone could see her and certainly she knew that the king's house was in view I think sometimes we paint a picture of Bathsheba as this innocent woman who was doing something all innocent and all these bad things happened because of David and there's actually a whole corner of the internet right now that is probably off the internet too that claims that Bathsheba was actually a victim of rape. Even though there's nothing at all in the text to indicate that. But because of our critical race theory happy culture that we're in anytime something happens people want to look at it and assume there's some kind of oppressor and an oppressed one and so therefore because David was the king and had power it had to be raped, they want to say.

And the Believe All Women and Me Too movements want to make women innocent of all wrongdoing and these things. But what we have is we have a beautiful woman basically undressing in such a way where she could be seen. And there's nothing to indicate otherwise. And so one of the warnings, I don't want to title a sermon like, Don't be a Bathsheba or don't be a David.

But let's face it, we really don't want to do these things. and if you're I think a person has to be able to honestly understand if whether or not the way that they are acting, the way that they're dressing could attract the wrong kind of attention if you go down to Ohio State with me to do evangelism sometime there's actually a way that you will see people dressed when they walk around and you will see some girls who are clearly dressed in a way that attracts more attention to parts of their bodies that are nobody's business to look at except their own husbands someday. And women need to be held accountable for thinking those things through on their own. You need to be held accountable for teaching your children about it.

And particularly, if you're pretty, you may have to think to yourself and recognize, yeah, I guess I could attract more attention. People are far more likely to call a woman from her house to the king's palace to go into her if she's a young, beautiful woman than if she was like some 80-year-old lady, okay? Let's be honest here. I know we like to believe we all see everyone equally, but there's a reason why there's certain types of people that always show up in the movies and on the magazines and all that because there is some general consensus of what beauty can be, right?

And things like that. So you have to think about these things. and we have to understand Bathsheba's participation in the sin. So when David sends and inquires about her, somebody said, is not this Bathsheba the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite? Now this is really interesting. because David knew these people. Turn to 1 Chronicles 11. A lot of you might know that David had his mighty men.

Our good friend, Cory, he named his son, Benaiah, after one of these guys, right? Benaiah's a good guy. It's a good name for a boy. David had these mighty men, right? So 1 Chronicles 11, just go to the end. I'm not going to read this chapter, but another reason why.

Is this the right chapter? Oh, no. Oh, there's some. I think I was thinking of a different chapter. But if you look at 1 Chronicles 11, verse 39, it lists a couple of the mighty men Zelech the Ammonite Nahari of Beroth the armor bearer of Joab the son of Zeruiah Ira the Ithrite, Gerab the Ithrite and then Uriah the Hittite Uriah the Hittite was one of David's mighty men and I think I turned to the wrong passage because there's another passage that describes his mighty men and I cannot remember, I think it might be I don't remember, but it also lists Eliam or Amiel, the other name for Bathsheba's dad.

So Bathsheba's dad, Bathsheba, I never know, I say it both ways in case it bothers somebody. Bathsheba's father and Bathsheba's husband are men that David knew. So this isn't like David was walking around all innocent, some beautiful girl shows up naked, he just falls into like... Chances are he may have known who she was once the name was told. But David let lust in his heart proceed out of his heart, and he started to inquire.

Now David already had wives, right? David wasn't at a lack of company of women if he wanted it. And so he inquires, who is this person that I saw? So all it took was walking around on the roof, probably when he shouldn't have been. Maybe he was not in the best state because he had been being lazy and not doing what he ought to do. And then you have this person who is irresponsibly exposing herself in such a way that she could be seen.

Like, I'm just going to bet all of you take a shower, you close the door. I mean, it's just normal, right? to actually bathe openly is really abnormal. It's almost like maybe she wanted some attention. I'll tell you this, if you've read the Bathsheba was just a victim stories, I'm not going to preach that one, okay? I think she's responsible. But so David knows who she is, is reminded that she's the daughter of one of his mighty men, one of his buddies, one of the guys he counted on or counts on still finds out she's married to a faithful guy also one of his mighty men one of the men who David knew was away because this was the time of year that kings went to war, right?

And then David says, okay she's taken I'll just forget it and I'll just move on right that's what he should have done probably shouldn't have inquired in the first place but David instead decides no bring her to me I saw what I saw I want what I saw and I want more of it and I don't care that right now her husband is actually doing battle on my behalf somewhere against my enemies and I don't care how faithful her dad was to me. I want what I want and I want it now and I'm the king. So I get it.

Very different from King Jesus who when he was hungry after 40 days of fasting in the wilderness wouldn't make stones into bread because the devil told him to do it. You think Jesus was hungry? After 40 days? some of us can't go 40 minutes without a snack. Jesus was hungry. He's God. There's really nothing wrong with him making bread if he wanted.

I mean, he did it other times. He made bread and fed people. But Jesus was not going to do anything that was outside of his Father's will, outside of his Father's plan. And so here we have David, a type of Jesus, someone who's supposed to be doing things like throwing rocks at Philistines and killing them on behalf of all of Israel. And instead we have David indulging in the sin of lust.

And then lust is coming out of himself. And he's bringing not only just lust, but formulating outward sin. So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him. So remember, when we read the narrative, there's important phrases. it doesn't say and Jesus David sent messengers and took her against her will and she came to him he sent messengers here's where it gets kind of interesting to me I guess the whole thing's interesting because it's God's word these messengers knew what was going on I think some of us have this sanitized version of the story where David goes on the roof trying to do righteous things.

He's maybe practicing his scripture memory. And then this innocent woman accidentally leaves the curtain open where she bathing And David kind of accidentally sees her And then well one thing led to another It was just a quick one thing and we all regret it and we shouldn have done it This is like seriously premeditated planned stuff in some ways on both their parts Now, David certainly, I think, has the greater sin in the matter. We can talk about all those kinds of things and degrees of sin and stuff, but this guy sent messengers to find out who she was. they come back, you think they don't know why David's asking about her?

I mean, try it. Try it sometime. Go somewhere with your wife. Okay, men? Go to a mall. And the first really pretty girl you see, tell your wife, say, hey, go find out who she is for me.

Okay? It's kind of gross to think about. Everyone knows why people do that stuff. I shouldn't have to spell it out. And thank God, as a family of the Great Church, I shouldn't have to spell it out. We know why some guy who sees a woman bathing says, Hey, tell me more about her.

He could have sent a message that said, Hey, close your window. Or bathe after dark. He could have sent lots of messages rebuking her. Saying, You're my friend's wife. Don't do this. That's not what he did.

He said, Who is this? I want to know who this is. And then he says, Bring her to me. It wasn't so he could have a showdown and teach her about modesty. This wasn't like a thing. And it's never a thing like this.

When you read about adultery in the news, when you read about people that do things in 2021, and they say, yeah, and one thing led to another, it all started with lust in their heart and it was fed over and over. and by God's grace some people escape the outward manifestation of some of the greatest evils that we can actually do against a fellow human being. But not everybody escapes it. Every serial killer you read about most of you could probably finish this thought every serial killer you read about what is the thing they say if they're honest they have a time when they were young that they started watching porn.

It's like 100%. Lust in the heart breeds more sin. And so David sent, and she came to him and he lay with her. So they have consensual time together where they decide, we're going to do this. Uriah's gone. Maybe Bathsheba felt a little bit of pressure because he was the king.

There's no indication here that it's anything remotely considered rape, though. And then this phrase is really neat. It's a parenthetical. Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness, then she returned to her house. So there's two ways to interpret this, purifying herself from her uncleanness. One of them is, turn to Leviticus.

We'll go to Leviticus 19. I like making you turn a little bit. I don't want to just... There's a lot of references in here to other things, to laws. Leviticus 18, I think. Yeah, Leviticus 18, verse 19.

You shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness while she is in her menstrual uncleanness. And then David broke this one. You shall not lie sexually with your neighbor's wife, and so make yourself unclean with her. But so you have this uncleanness that she could have been in. And let me find the other reference here. Leviticus 15, 19.

So I don't mean to be gross, but this is the Bible. So Elijah's Elijah's totally redeemed here because I'm going like, I think grosser than he did. Leviticus 15.19 When a woman has a discharge and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days. And whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And if you look at 18, I won't read that one.

Leviticus 15.18 It's a reference to the fact that this woman would have been unclean until evening because of what she did with David. so I'll let you read that one on your own even though it was too racy for this preacher but so there's two ways to interpret her uncleanness in 2 Samuel 11 verse 4 one of them is that she was simply unclean because of what they had done according to the verse that I just wouldn't read and that she had to purify herself in some way from that uncleanness The other way was that she actually had been purifying herself. The way the word is now, she had been purifying herself. And that's a reference to the fact that she had recently finished menstruating before this happened.

When David caught her, she was purifying herself. And a lot of people believe that's the case because about a week after that time, with a period of cleaning, which is what we just read, it takes seven days to ceremonially become clean again, she would have been ovulating, and thus that would have made it so easy to conceive, which is exactly what happened. And so either interpretation, I think, brings us the same question and application we have to apply, which is, who is this person who is so concerned with her ceremonial uncleanness, and yet she's committing adultery on her husband, and against David's wife too, right?

Like what kind of hypocrite is so concerned with obeying the jot and tittles of Leviticus 15 and 18 right And yet the moment the king calls her to come and the king a good guy he got a lot of power and money she gone right This is exactly what we talked about last week with Judas. when we talked about the foot washings and the people who are quite happy to be outwardly washed by religious works because we all love the rituals because they're easy, right? A lot of you are going to walk up here and you're going to get a little cup of fermented grape juice and you're going to get a little piece of bread and you're going to do something. And it's real easy to do.

And outwardly speaking, I have no idea if you're doing it with a worshipful heart to Jesus Christ or not? I have no idea. I'm actually focused on myself trying to worship at the moment. I'm not even thinking about what you're doing in your heart. We can do the outward acts of religion very easily and we can even deceive ourselves into thinking that because we're doing those things, we're actually a good person.

We're actually keeping God's law. We're actually doing what's required of us somehow. And yet, a couple minutes after it happens, or sometimes it could take days. We just jump right into even grosser sin. But something about us feels pure and clean inside because, well, we did that. And this is why you should evangelize.

I don't mean to turn every sermon into an exhortation to that, but one of the reasons you should evangelize people is so you can hear the responses of the unregenerate when you talk about the commands of God and the demands of God on how righteous we're supposed to be. And every man will proclaim to you his own goodness. I have met very few people who on the street, who in the store, who at the gas station, confess that they're sinners to me.

And it's good to hear that sometimes if you're a Christian. It's good to know that people think that they're actually obeying God. Even the most ardent God-hater somehow thinks they're obeying Him. In the end, they all know His law, it's written on their heart. but so she returned to her house and she conceived and she sent and told David I am pregnant and it's just like when you read it it just sounds so similar it's like she just texted him you know like she sent and told him like somebody had to get the message to David and I'm going to tell you what if any of you guys have ever been told a secret that you were supposed to just tell one other person like, what's the old saying?

I'm actually good at secrets. It's the people I tell that aren't. That's the problem, right? I'm telling you what, I think this whole kingdom knew what David did. I think his guards in the palace knew. I think most of it was obvious.

Okay? Hey, there's that beautiful girl walking into the king's palace and they shut the door. Like, people knew. Right? Kings don't chill alone. Like there's people all over.

There's workers, there's servants. And you know what? Most of them will turn a blind eye to the evil of the guy paying them. Most people will turn a blind eye to the evil of the person who happens to be in charge, either has power or has the money. Happens in churches all the time too, doesn't it? that's why some people are here right some of you went to churches with bad leaders that did bad things and you found out later and you found out there were people who knew and didn't say anything or people who said things and they were ignored Google Ravi Zacharias wicked wicked man spent his life pretending to love God and being an apologist, doing a poor job at apologetics, by the way.

So if you like Robbie, he's not even a good apologist, right? So I can teach you about that if you want. But this is a man who basically traveled the world raping people, coercing women into doing things that they didn't want to do, lying about it, using his spiritual power, his spiritual position as a leader to convince people it was okay. And there were people who knew about it and wouldn't say things about it.

And there were people who said things about it and they weren't listened to. There were people who questioned it and they were ignored. The same thing happened here with David. But so here we have a problem. David's problem now is that his sin is now going to be exposed. David is going to somehow have to explain how the pretty lady that came to visit him whose husband is out of town somehow is going to have a baby when he was the only one that people knew was near her and David doesn't have a Planned Parenthood he could just drive up to and have it cleaned up for him so there's a quote from John Gill it's in my phone I didn't print any notes today so I already spoiled the story that David's going to have this husband guy killed eventually we'll talk about that more next week it looks like but John Gill says and this is often the case that murder follows adultery either by way of revenge for it or in order to cover it.

And I would venture that at least two to three of all the abortions that happen in our country are just to cover up the sin of adultery Or if not to cover it up, but just to at least get rid of the consequences of it. Now sadly, there's actually married couples that have pregnancies that they murder their child too. Which is even worse. in a sense there's no excuse almost but the sin of murder follows the sin of adultery this is a guy that wrote this hundreds of years ago but we see it every single day every time we go to Planned Parenthood we see people pull up in cars I don't know about all you guys Jason's got his big bus because he's got a lot of kids but most of the cars in that parking lot there I couldn't afford you know I drive an old paid off Honda it's not terribly old but some of these cars that pull in there are real nice and yet what do people tell you why they get abortions oh I can't afford another kid that's funny you can afford a $45,000 Lexus so you know what else follows or even precedes adultery is lying you'll lie to cover your murder you'll lie to cover your adultery too Sin breeds more sin.

So, look, David's failing here. And Bathsheba's failing. And David did not do what the better king would do one day, Jesus Christ, and turn away from temptation. He didn't make no provision for the flesh, which we're told to do. but if you just turn to Matthew 1 just a little encouragement before we close them because it's a really sad story and of course in my mind I was going to get through the whole chapter 11 today and so we'll finish chapter 11 sometime and we'll get to Psalm 51 eventually and we'll see that David does become repentant and that David's sins are forgiven by a holy God who loves him and punished Jesus Christ instead of punishing David eternally for his sin, although David will have some temporary consequences.

But for the person in this room who's thinking, well, I failed. I slept with somebody else's husband once. Or I slept with somebody else's wife. Or, hey, I still lust after people I shouldn't. Or I'm not as modest as I ought to be. or even to the child in here who may backslide one day, to the people in this room. There's people in this room who professed Christ at a young age and then walked away from Him like David.

They had periods of time in their life that there was nothing about their life that anyone could have called Christian. Thank God now they're here. God still uses failures. In fact, there's only one person that wasn't a failure that God's ever used. That was Jesus Christ. So as great of a man as David really was in a lot of ways, David failed miserably.

And it's easy for us to judge him because it sounds so obvious because we've read the story so many times. We all have the advantage of having read David's story. So if you've avoided David's sin, praise the Lord that you're not the one he was writing about for all eternity to read about. But look at Matthew 1, verse 6. Talking about the genealogy of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It says, Jesse, the father of David the king. So David, who had done this horrible deed, is called the king by Matthew. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah. So not only is Uriah given a little bit of eternal credit, But just kind of nice for him. He didn't do anything wrong. Uriah was a pretty righteous guy in this situation.

But through this woman and through this man who did abominable deeds in the eyes of God, punishable by the death of stoning, certainly David gave up his right to be called king. through this. He should have been stoned according to the law. An adulteress should be stoned according to the law of God. Instead, God redeems them and actually uses them to bring His promised seed, Jesus Christ.

And God is using people in this room to do things that He intends to do. He's using people in this room to preach the gospel to others, to teach kids about the gospel, to make music that we can sing to Him. I didn't name everything. I don't want anyone to feel left out. But He'll use every one of His people. And you may not have it written about.

It may not be as significant as being an ancestor of the Lord Jesus Christ. But it's significant to God who will not forget your labor of love for Him. So be encouraged that the greater David did come. and be encouraged that God can use even broken sinners who fail. Father in heaven, we praise you for your perfect word. We thank you that we can understand what your word says because of the perspicuity of scripture.

Or perspicuity, I don't remember how to say it. But your scripture is clear, Lord. And we thank you that we can learn from it. We can learn things to apply to our lives. but we also thank you that it's not just a bunch of rules to follow, but it's a person to follow. That your word reveals to us the failure of humanity, that it might exalt the perfection of Jesus Christ in whom we pray.

Amen.