Last
week we looked at a passage in Isaiah 46 which is representative of God’s mercy
toward the penitent. I referred last week to Peter’s thrice denial of the Lord
and his eventual reconciliation with Christ as one of countless examples of
God’s mercy toward any penitent. Today, we look at King David’s sin with
Bathsheba and the arrangement for her husband’s murder. I’ve spoken about this in
the past, and I do it again because it illustrates how honest confession and repentance
brings complete forgiveness and full reconciliation with God.
A
full nine months after David’s sins with Bathsheba and his murder of her
husband – nine months during which he could have gotten himself right again
with God but did not, God finally sent Nathan the prophet to rebuke him.
Listen
to Nathan: “Why have you despised the word of the Lord by
doing evil in His sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the
sword, have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the
sword of the sons of Ammon. 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 from your own household; I will even take
your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he
will lie with your wives in broad daylight. Indeed you did it
secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the
sun.’”
“Then
David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And Nathan said to
David, “The Lord also has taken away your sin; you shall not
die. However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the
enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you
shall surely die.” (2 Samuel 12:9-14)
For
nine months – as we will see shortly in Psalm 32 which David also wrote after
the prophet’s rebuke – for nine months David resisted his guilty conscience.
For nine months, David tried to avoid thinking about what he’d done.
Have
you been there and done that? Perhaps not for nine months – maybe it was only a
day or a week. Or perhaps it’s been years that you’ve been fighting that
inconvenient nagging of the Holy Spirit in the back of your mind. David finally
could no longer – David finally would no longer – fight the Spirit’s hand on
him. Listen to his prayer recorded in Psalm 51:1-12
“Be
gracious to me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness; According to the
greatness of Your compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash me
thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know
my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against You, You only, I have
sinned and done what is evil in Your sight, so that You are
justified when You speak and blameless when You judge . . . Hide Your
face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me
a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do
not cast me away from Your presence and do not take Your Holy Spirit from
me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and sustain me with
a willing spirit.”
Let’s
take a few moments to examine this prayer more closely because it has deeply
applicable relevance to each of us in this sanctuary.
First,
David knew his sins of adultery and murder where first and foremost sins
against God. Indeed, ALL sins – what we might call big sins, little sins, and
in-between sins – all sins are ultimately sins against the Almighty and His
laws. “Against you, you only have I sinned,” David confessed.
The
Catholic Prayer of Contrition recognizes the point about all sins being sins
against God Himself: O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,
and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishments, but most of all
because they offend Thee, my God, Who art all-good and deserving of all my
love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid
the near occasions of sin.
Second,
David took full responsibility for his sins. He did not try to soft-pedal them,
make excuses for them, shift the blame for them. Confession is not honest
confession unless we fully own up to our treachery against God’s laws.
Over
the years I’ve heard people rationalize their sins with some ludicrous tripe
prefaced with, “God understands” – as in, “God understands I did it because I’m
lonely, or angry, or have bills to pay, or it’s my right, or it’s my body, or ‘all
the other ‘Christians’ are doing it,’ or God wants me to be happy, or any of a
dozen other self-blinding and self-hardening excuses.
Third,
David appeals to God for His grace: “Be gracious to me, O God, according to
Your lovingkindness; According to the greatness of Your
compassion blot out my transgressions. The word he uses for ‘grace’
can also be translated as ‘mercy.’ In other words, David asks God’s grace –
that He will NOT give him what he so rightly deserves – meaning, wrath. Likewise,
translated as mercy, David asks God to give him what he does not deserve,
meaning full pardon.
Notice,
David asks for grace or mercy, not at all on his own merits – how
faithful and obedient he’d been before the Bathsheba incident, or that God
considered him a man after His own heart, as God had told Samuel the prophet –
but David asked God for grace and mercy because of who God is: Compassionate,
merciful, and gracious.
Do
we sometimes approach God, asking for something – whether favor or forgiveness,
or for anything else – thinking God will do it because of what WE’VE done? For
example, how often we tithe, or attend Mass or church services, or our kindness
to others, or our willingness to forgive others, or for any of dozen ‘good
things’ we do and have done.
But
listen to the Lord Jesus speak to that point: “Which of you, having a slave
plowing or tending sheep, will say to him when he has come in from the field,
‘Come immediately and sit down to eat’? But will he not say to him,
‘Prepare something for me to eat, and properly clothe yourself and
serve me while I eat and drink; and afterward you may eat and
drink’? He does not thank the slave because he did the things which were
commanded, does he? So you too, when you do all the things which are
commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that
which we ought to have done.’” (Luke 17:7-10)
Wow. That surely cuts at a person’s pride and inclination
to boast in their good works as a basis for God’s favor, doesn’t it? And so David
continued: According to YOUR lovingkindness and YOUR greatness, “Hide Your
face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities.”
Then
David moved from confession to supplication and then to a prayer for transformation.
He knew what he’d done was wrong. It was wicked. It was evil. And not only did
he beg to be forgiven and cleansed of his wickedness, but more than that – he
wanted a heart-change. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and
renew a steadfast spirit within me.”
Without
a heart change, we’re just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic of
our lives. And we’ve all lived long enough and dealt with our sin natures often
enough that we all should readily acknowledge how utterly desperate we all are
for the Holy Spirit to change our hearts to the degree that we hate even our
sinful thoughts and immediately repent of them before our holy God.
How
often do you ask God to change your heart and change your attitude toward your
sins – the so-called little sins and the middle-of-the-road sins? Many of you
remember another of David’s psalms – this one probably written after the
Bathsheba/Uriah incident. Here is how he closed Psalm 139: “Search me, O
God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there
be any hurtful way in me and lead me in the everlasting way.”
(Psalm 139:23-24)
I
know it happens, but I’m unsure of a person’s rationalization to avoid praying
this kind of prayer. Why would any Christian not ask God to show them their
sins? Such revelation would not be to make them guilt-ridden, but only for lead
them in a life of holiness, honesty, and integrity before Him.
Let’s
never gloss over this eternal truth: True repentance will always lead to a
transformed life; Phony repentance always leads to further ungodliness. No
wonder the apostle Paul wrote: “Present your bodies a living and holy
sacrifice, acceptable to God . . . And do not be conformed
to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your
mind.” (Romans 12:1-2a)
In
other words, Christian, place yourselves on the altar of God, a living
sacrifice of ourselves to God that He may transform us through the supernatural
working of the Holy Spirit as we study His holy Scriptures.
David
continues his 51st psalm with these next words “Do not cast me
away from Your presence and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore
to me the joy of Your salvation and sustain me with a willing
spirit.”
We
ought to examine these two verses – indeed, the entire 51st psalm, under
the light of the 32nd psalm, also written in the aftermath of the
Bathsheba/Uriah incident. Psalm 51 is a psalm of repentance. Psalm 32, written
after Psalm 51, is a psalm of reflection.
Here
are the first verses of Psalm 32: “How blessed is he whose transgression is
forgiven, whose sin is covered! How blessed is the man to whom
the Lord does not impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there
is no deceit! When I kept silent about my sin, my body
wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your
hand was heavy upon me; My vitality was drained away as with the
fever heat of summer. Selah. I acknowledged my sin to You, and my
iniquity I did not hide; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to
the Lord”; and You forgave the guilt of my sin.” Psalm
32:1-5
As
I just said, Psalm 32 is a prayer of reflection as David marvels at God’s
response to his repentance. And don’t think for a moment that God’s response to
OUR confessions is not equally wondrous. Oh, how glorious it is to know – to be
absolutely convinced – that our
confessed sins are forever forgiven, that they are carried from us as far as
east is from west and buried in the deepest ocean (see Psalm 103:12 and
Micah 7:19). How comforting and encouraging it is to know God covers over
with His own eternal blood even our worst sins – AND that He does not, nor will
He ever, count those sins against us.
One
might ask how could David, who lived long before Jesus died that sacrificial
death for our sins – how could David be as convinced as he was that his sins
related to Bathsheba and her husband were erased? Because he believed God’s promise
through the prophet Nathan, “The Lord also has taken away
your sin; you shall not die. (2 Samuel 12:13)
And listen, please. That same message applies to
you and me. When God says our confessed sins are eternally erased, it doesn’t
matter who disagrees – whether a church or a pastor or a theologian or anyone
else. God’s word is His uncompromisingly trustworthy bond. The penitent is
cleansed of all sin. Yes, there may be consequences of sin in this life –
sickness, broken relationships, financial loss, imprisonment, or whatever else
God uses to chastise us – but there will be no consequences of those sins
in the next life.
How do we know that? Well, let’s think this
through: Jesus is God incarnate. He is Almighty God in the flesh of a man. So, what
sin can ever run more deeply that the blood of God Himself cannot erase
completely, spotlessly, eternally?
If we STILL must suffer for our sins after death in
a place called purgatory where the so-called ‘stains’ of our sins must be
cleansed, then we are saying that Almighty God’s blood is insufficient for full
forgiveness. And that He has lied to us when He’s told us we’ve been forgiven.
Is THAT what we want to say?
Let’s
return briefly to that 32nd psalm. As David reflected on his sin, he
wrote: “When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted
away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand
was heavy upon me; My vitality was drained away as with the
fever heat of summer. (Psalm 32:3-4)
We
all know the emotional turmoil that ALWAYS plagues our conscience when we try
to ignore our sin or rationalize it. And
every Christian also should know intuitively the spiritual DANGER we face when
we’ve excused our sins for so long that we no longer experience a troubled conscience.
THAT
is a very dangerous place to be. Many of you remember the warning Jesus gives
to all of us in Matthew 7:21-23, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’
will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is
in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me
on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your
name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles? And
then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who
practice lawlessness.’
The
important point here is that those standing at the Judgement THOUGHT they were
saved. They believed heaven was their destiny. But they were SHOCKED to
discover they were wrong on both counts. They were terrified to hear Jesus
reject them – eternally reject them.
Why
is it, do we think, that Christians can live their lives so self-deceptively? The
answer to that question should make us uncomfortable: It happens through
step-by-step, compromise by compromise, rationalization by rationalization,
slowly blinding our eyes and hardening our hearts.
And
that answer should provide us all the more reason to be diligent in seeking God
to show us our sins as only He can reveal them to us. As the apostle wrote in
his letter to the Christians in Rome: “Do you think lightly of the
riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing
that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? But because of your
stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for
yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of
God.” (Romans 2:4-5)
Yes,
we are all in danger of deceiving ourselves. But listen again to verse five of
this 32nd psalm and draw comfort from it: David wrote: “I acknowledged
my sin to You, and my iniquity I did not hide; I said, “I will confess my
transgressions to the Lord”; and You forgave the guilt of my
sin.” (Psalm 32:5)
The
message here is clear: Confess sin. Receive God’s forgiveness. And we will not
be surprised at the Judgment.
Listen
to Proverbs 28:13 – “He who conceals his transgressions will not
prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will find
compassion.”
Not
too long ago as I spoke with the Lord in prayer, I was greatly disheartened by a
recurring sin. Frustrated, I said to the Lord, “I get so tired of having to apologize
for the same sin again and again.”
I’ll
never forget what He said to me. He answered, “But I never get tired of hearing
you confess it.”
God
never tires of hearing YOU confess your own sins – even again and again. Honest
confession always brings full pardon. Why? As the Psalmist reminds us: For [God]
Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust.
(Psalm 103:14)
Be
at peace. Trust Him to keep His promises.
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