The Story - Chapter 12

God is very different than you and I, it's not only that he lives a long time and he lives in a different place, he's just different. We sang already this morning about God being holy. The word holy simply means he's separate, he's different than we are. He's not a human being, he's not a part of the created order, he is the creator. God is different than we are. God's intention from the very beginning was to create a world that would be exactly the way he wanted it. And everything in this world is exactly as God wanted it. The sky, the stars, the animals, the birds, all those things. One element of this world did not turn out exactly as God intended or planned it to be. And it's you and me, human beings. We're the only people in the world, the only creatures that he created that he said, now I give you the freedom to either do what I tell you is the right thing or do something else. This great choice that God has given us has been devastating to this world. God intended to be able to have a relationship with people like he had with all the other part of his creation. That they would listen to him, hear what he said the right thing was and then do it. But that didn't happen. In this world, the people that came into this world decided that God's decisions, God's direction were not adequate for them. And so sin entered the world. Now the word sin is a word that describes a relationship that's broken. It's kind of like in the Bible this word describes if a person starts out on a trip and they know where they're going to go but all along the way they begin to make choices to turn one way or the other and so they get off track and they go the wrong direction and the farther they go, the farther they get from the place they should be going. That's to be off track, out of line with God. The other word that's used, the other way this word is used is to describe somebody who doesn't quite get there. You start out somewhere and somewhere along the line you get sidetracked and you stop and you never get to your destination. Being a friend of God, relating to him is the destiny of all of us. What God wants is to be able to say to us, here's what I want you to do and here's the way your life can be full and complete and satisfying. If you will do these things, this is the way it will work. Believe me, disobedience to God is unbelief. It's the idea in your mind that if I do what God tells me, in some way I will be deficient. In some way life won't work as I think it should. Sin always attracts us to say, your life will be better if you do this or if you think this or if you won't do this. And all of those things are contrary to what God says. The covenant God made with the people of Israel, with Abraham, was a very simple covenant. I will make sure that all of your choices are good, I'll guide you. I will provide every need that you have. I will protect you from being destroyed and I will make your life better than it could be without me. Sin always attacks those four things. It says, here's what God says your choice should be, but I think if you made this choice it will be a lot more fun. You'll have a lot more pleasure, you'll have a lot more money, you'll have a lot of other things that you won't have if you do these things God tells you. It always makes the promise that something better than what God has offered or instructed will come to pass for a person. That's the very nature of sin. That's why it has temptations for us. Now I want to help you understand that temptation and sin are different. Temptation is the idea that comes to your mind that you should do something. And when you think about it, you decide this is either in line with what God tells me is the right thing or it's opposed to what God says is the right thing. And in that moment you're weighing whether or not you're going to make this choice, do this thing or not do this thing. And when you say, I know what God wants, and you do the other thing, then you break that relationship with Him. It's like a goose that gets up in the fall and has this instinct to fly south but all of a sudden decides, no, I'm going to go instead of Canada to the North Pole. Broken the pattern of what he was made to do. And that's what sin does for us. It's a powerful force in everybody's life. The story that you read in chapter 12 of the story, I want to read from the scripture today from 2 Samuel, the story of David's experience with sin. How does God deal with these broken relationships? What David did as a part of the family of God was he made a covenant with God. Every young boy who was born in Israel had to make a covenant with God to say, I accept you as the ruler and Lord of my life, and I will keep all of the instructions that you've given me. I place my life in your hands, and God keeps His side of the covenant, guiding, providing, protecting, and giving His life meaning and value and purpose. David now comes to a place where God has fulfilled so many of these things in his life. Took him from a little boy unknown and made him a great king. Took him from the least in his family to the greatest in all the nation of Israel. He had everything that he could hope for. God had made his hopes and dreams fulfilled in greater ways than he'd ever thought was possible. Now he's at that place where he's gotten the greatest of God's benefits. But something happened to him. He went up on the roof of his house, the cool of the night. You know, if you get up high, the breeze is a little bit better. They didn't have air conditioning. Up there on his house, he was looking out across the land and saw a woman taking a bath. He was immediately attracted to her. David had temptation. If he had simply said, you know, I shouldn't be watching, went back down to where he was supposed to be, everything would have changed in David's life. But instead he took that temptation and he began to think about it and say, you know, I could have that woman. I have power and authority to do it. No one will ever know. I can violate one of the instructions of God and I'll have a lot of fun and nothing bad will happen to me because no one's going to charge me. Anybody in my kingdom won't dare do anything to hurt me. And he rationalized disobedience to one of the Ten Commandments that God had given. He thought in that moment that it would bring more pleasure to him and joy to him than he could see any consequence that God would bring negatively. And so he did it. There's one thing about sin that you have to understand. It grows. It builds on itself. No one in this world has ever committed one sin and stopped. There's an addictive power to sin, stronger than cigarettes, stronger than any kind of narcotic you could take. For no one in the world, once they've sinned, has ever been able to stop. That's its power. David experienced the grip of this sin in his life and he thought that he had experienced what he wanted and he got away with it because nothing bad happened. Then one day the prophet Nathan came. The Lord sent Nathan to David. When he came to him he said, There were two men in a certain town, one rich, the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it. It grew up with him and his children. He shared his food, drank from his cup, and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. Now a traveler came to the rich man but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him. David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die. He must pay for that lamb four times over because he did such a thing and had no pity. Then Nathan said to David, You are that man. This is what the Lord, the God of Israel says. I anointed you king over Israel. I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave your master's house to you and your master's wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more. Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with a sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house because you despised me, took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own. This is what the Lord says. Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity upon you. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you. He will lie with your wives in broad daylight. You did it in secret, but I will do this thing in broad daylight before all of Israel. Then David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. This story is a very powerful demonstration of what sin does and how God reacts to sin. The first thing that you see in this story is that David did something that he thought he was keeping a secret. But God knew every single thing that David did. I'll tell you something about God. The Bible says that He knows the number of hair follicles on your head. I don't know if God has a chart that He keeps all that on or not. But the point of that is God knows more about you than you know about yourself. I've never met anyone in all the world who could tell me how many hair follicles were in their head. Even people with very little hair don't know that. God knows every thought that we have. He listens to us, every person in the universe, and He hears every thought we have. There are no secrets from God. Often times in our sin, as with David's, we try to keep it secret from the people around us for fear of their bad attitude toward us. But somehow or other we ignore the fact that God is present with us everywhere and He sees everything we do and He hears everything that we think. We never escape that. So that even though David was safe from everyone around him, no one would do anything about this, God heard what He thought and He saw what He did. Now I want you to think about things in your own life that you are the only one that knows about. Things you do when no one is looking. Things you say when no one else is around to hear. Things you don't do that you know you should do. God knows those. They are not idle circumstances. David, when he was confronted with this and was faced to realize it, he said, not that I have sinned against Bathsheba or her husband, even though he had killed him, but I have sinned against God. Everything we do that is contrary to the instructions of God is rebellion against God. It is unbelief. You see, if you believe in God and you believe that He is the Lord Almighty and He is all wise and He is all powerful and you read in the Bible that He said, these are the things I have made you to do, the Ten Commandments and all the instructions from God, the Sermon on the Mount, all of these things that are there, you read those and God says, this is what I want you to do because I have made this way for you so that you will find life in all of its fullness. And you look at those things that God says you should do. Then you come to a place in your life where you are tempted to do something else and you say, God says this is the way I can find life in all of its fullness, but this looks like I am going to miss out on some great fun if I don't do this. I am going to miss out on great wealth if I don't make this choice. So what you do when you do something contrary to God is you say, I don't believe you. I don't believe that you are trustworthy. I don't believe that you know more than I know. I don't believe that you know more than the people around me know. What an insult to God. You see, before you ever do the act of sin, you've already looked God in the face and said, I am smarter than you. The very idea is offensive. No one would ever say that out loud, but that action is exactly what happens. That's why David said, I have sinned against God. The story of the prodigal son who goes away and comes back, he says, I have sinned against you, Father. The choice to do something contrary to the will of God or to refuse to do something God tells us we should do is rebellion against God. That's what all sin is. It's the failure to believe in God. I hear a lot of people talk about family members or friends that they have, especially at times of funeral, and they say, well, he believed in God. But here you have somebody who says, I believed in God, but he never went to church, never read the Bible, lived a life breaking most of the Ten Commandments at will. He believed in God. He believed that God was telling the truth when he gave those instructions to us. He believed that God was telling the truth when he says, hide my word in your heart, and didn't do it. He believed in God when he heard God say, these are the things I want you to do, and he refused. No, he didn't believe in God. He didn't trust God. To believe that God exists is not a matter of faith. It's just an intellectual thought. Faith says, I believe God is the ruler of the universe, and everything that he tells me to do is the right thing to do, regardless of how difficult it is or regardless of how hard it might seem to be. Doing the things God tells us don't always seem to offer benefit to us. Oftentimes they will seem like a thing you have to do that will be hard. But God promises that even though you can't see it, benefit will come. Sin, on the other hand, always promises great benefits and hides from you the disaster that looms behind the benefit. Who do you trust? The temptation of Satan or the word of God? David did not trust God. He'd been told that he was not to commit adultery, and he did it anyway. The violation of this covenant with God brings consequences to whoever does it. It brings consequences whether you repent and turn back to God or not. If you repent and turn back to God and you renew your covenant relationship with Him, you say to God, OK, I broke your covenant. I didn't do the things you told me I should do. I admit that. I acknowledge it. I want to come back and say, I will, from this moment on, do what you tell me to do the right way. God will renew you in the covenant, but the sin still has consequences. That's the devastating power of sin in our lives. The consequences to David were very clear for him. Not only was this act that he did given openly to the whole world to know about David the rest of his life, but it changed David. And it changed the way people looked at David and thought about him. Before, he was thought of as a great warrior. Before, he was thought about as a man who loved God with all of his heart, soul, strength, and mind. And now he was seen as a man with a serious flaw in his character. Before, he was an example to people to be obedient to God in the most difficult circumstances. Even to face a giant as a small boy with no weapon. He could take a rock and kill him. And with the power of that rock in his sling, he could kill giants because God was with him. Now he looks like just another human being. Weak, pitiful, and wrong. He was now an adulterer. One of the Ten Commandments. And he was now a murderer. Another of them. He had violated the first one. You shall have nothing in your life, control your decisions, except God. So that's three of them. He made his own life and his pleasure the idol that allowed him to make a choice for his pleasure instead of obedience to God. And that was four of them. He committed four of those. He coveted his neighbor's wife, which is five of them. Half of them already he had done in one single event one night. No longer could people look at him in the same way. We kind of overlook this part of David's life. We kind of put it behind us when we think of David. We don't think of him in a bad way. But people lived there. You know what happens when a major figure like the President, or did you see in the paper, on the news, the Senator elected to the Senate who's been arrested for buying cocaine? He was the darling of his party. Rising star. Everybody thought he would someday make a great mark. And now he's called the cocaine congressman. Changed everybody's picture of him. You have to believe that in David's day it did the same for him. His children couldn't anymore respect him the way they used to. They couldn't think of him in the same way that they used to think of him. His commanding general, Liddy, talked into murdering this guy with him. He had to bear some of that guilt. He couldn't do anything except get the wrath of his king if he denied and sin if he did what he asked. He had to look at him as a man not worthy of being his leader. We don't know the consequences of all this or how it affected them, but soon one of David's sons began to look at his niece and have the same thoughts that David had. And he raped his niece. Did he think, well, my father did that. What's wrong with me doing that? We don't know. The two brothers then were alienated from each other. And one of them then killed the other that raped his daughter. Just like his dad killed a man as a result of his own sexual lust. There has to be a connection there somewhere. David didn't intend it to happen. He would have done anything to have stopped it. His family was torn apart. I think it had a great impact on his standing with the whole nation of Israel. I mean, isn't it hard for you to imagine having King David as your king and thinking anyone else would want to be the king of that nation? I mean, we would think of Lincoln and say, who would ever vote against Lincoln? Or who would ever vote against George Washington running for president? But they didn't get 100% of those votes. There were a lot of people that didn't agree with them. David became so unpopular with the people of Israel that his son was able to rouse an army of people who were willing to die to get David off the throne. And so his son Absalom led an attack on the city of David, Jerusalem, and he took it over. David had to run and hide in the wilderness like an outlaw. What did all this have to do with David? I think it was a consequence. In fact, what God said is you have had a relationship with this woman in secret, but someday when your own close family members will come into this city and have a relationship with all your wives out in the open, in public. That's what happened. Absalom took over the city of Jerusalem, took the wives of David up on the top of the roof where everybody in town could see, and he had a festival. The consequences of sin are powerful and let me say this, unstoppable. What David set in motion, even his repentance and his return to God could not stop. So you want to look carefully inside of yourself to see what there is that you do that is contrary to what God wants. One step leads to another and when that action is done or when you refuse to do it, the consequences will be big and powerful and strong. The consequence did this with God. It broke David's relationship with God. God could no longer look at him and say, you are my faithful servant. He had to say, you have rebelled against me. You have turned your back on me. I can no longer consider you my faithful servant. It changed something inside of David. No longer could he look at himself and say, I am the faithful follower of God. It changed his relationship with other people around him. No longer could they see him in the same way.