Love That Confronts

THE LIFE OF DAVID   •   SERMON MANUSCRIPT

Love That Confronts

2 Samuel 12:1-15 (ESV)

MAIN IDEA

God loves His children too much to let them stay in secret sin.

INTRODUCTION

I want to begin this morning with two questions:

The First, “Suppose that for the next sixty seconds every thought you entertained this week, every word you spoke behind a closed door, every message you deleted before somebody could see it, every appetite you fed in the dark when you were certain that nobody was watching, were put up on the screen behind me and read by every person in this room. Would you still be sitting in that seat?”

Now the second question, “If God loved you enough to bring all of it out into the light, would you call that cruelty, or would you call that kindness?”

That is where David finds himself in Chapter 12 of 2 Samuel.

Last week in chapter eleven, we watched David fall into deep sin. He lusted, he committed adultery, he murdered a man, to keep it all hidden.

And chapter eleven closes with eight words that ought to make every one of us tremble. But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD.

Between the last verse of chapter eleven and the first verse of chapter twelve. A child is conceived, carried, and born.

And then, God speaks. What He says is going to hurt deeply, but serves as a means to redeem the brokenness of David.

God loves His children too much to let them stay in secret sin. He will come after you. He will not leave you alone. He loves you far too much for that.

2 Samuel 12:1–7 ESV

1 And the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. 2 The rich man had very many flocks and herds, 3 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, and it was like a daughter to him. 4 Now there came a traveler to the rich man, 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 prepared it for the man who had come to him.” 5 Then 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, 6 and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” 7 Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul.

I. The Loving Confrontation We Need  (vv. 1-7a)

Look at verse one. And the LORD sent Nathan to David.

Underline that verb. The LORD sent. The Hebrew is שָׁלַח(shālaḥ), to send, to dispatch, to commission. Feel the weight of it, because that is the same verb drumming through chapter eleven like a hammer on an anvil. David sent and inquired. David sent and took. David sent to Joab. David sent the letter. David had been doing all the sending, moving every piece on the board, the subject of every verb.

And now, at last, God takes the verb back.

Folks, that is grace. That is not God losing His temper; that is God taking initiative. If God had wanted to be rid of David, He had only to do nothing. Silence would have finished him. Instead, God loads a prophet and aims him at the heart of the king.

And notice whom He sends. Nathan. The same prophet who in chapter seven carried David the greatest promise any man ever received, that God would establish his throne forever. The prophet who brought the promise brings the indictment. And his name, נָתָן (Nātān), comes from the Hebrew verb meaning to give. What he is about to say will feel like a knife, and it is a gift.

Now, how does Nathan do it? He does not kick down the door. He does not walk in swinging an accusation. He walks in with a story.

There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb.

Do you hear the tenderness? One little ewe lamb. It grew up with his children, it ate of his morsel and drank from his cup and lay in his arms, and it was like a daughter to him.

Understand something. Nathan is not telling a story about sheep. He is describing Bathsheba to David’s face, and David cannot hear it. There is a needle hidden in that last phrase. The Hebrew for "like a daughter" is כְבַת (kĕḇat), and the name of the woman David took is בַּת־שֶׁבַע(Bat-shebaʿ), whose first syllable is that very word, bat, daughter. Nathan is saying her name out loud, and the king does not recognize it.

And notice who sets the tragedy in motion. Verse four: "Now there came a traveler to the rich man." A traveler. Just somebody passing through. The old rabbis had a saying about him. They said temptation comes first as a passerby, then you entertain it as a guest, and then one day it is the master of the house.[1]

That is exactly how it happened on that roof. It was just a look. It was just a traveler. And by the end of chapter eleven the traveler is running the palace.

Now watch David explode. "As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die, and he shall restore the lamb fourfold."[2]

The Hebrew behind "deserves to die" is בֶּן־מָוֶת(ben-māwet), literally "a son of death."

And is it not something how a man can be a lion about somebody else’s sin and a lamb about his own? The sin we prosecute hardest in others is very often the sin we are protecting in ourselves.

And then comes the sentence. Verse seven. Two words in the Hebrew. Two. אַתָּה הָאִישׁ (ʾattāh hāʾîsh). You are the man.

There is not a shorter sermon anywhere in the Bible, and there is not a more effective one.

ILLUSTRATION

Now some of you are already squirming, because the Spirit of God is doing to you what Nathan did to David, and your flesh is telling you that this feeling is a bad thing. Let me tell you why it is not.

Dr. Paul Brand was a British surgeon who gave much of his life to a hospital in Vellore, India, among people with leprosy, and he made a discovery that changed how the world understands that disease. For centuries people believed leprosy ate the flesh off a body, consuming fingers and toes and faces. But, Brand proved that is not what happens. Leprosy does not devour the body. Leprosy kills the nerves that carry pain.And once a man cannot feel pain, he begins to destroy himself and never knows it.[3]

Brand watched patients turn a tool with a splintered handle until their palms were raw and bleeding and keep right on working, because nothing told them to stop. And his wife, an eye surgeon, found why so many of them went blind: when the tiny sensor that makes a healthy eye blink goes silent, the eye stops blinking, and it dries out, and the light goes out of it forever. Nobody screamed. It happened in total silence.

The horror of leprosy was never the pain. The horror was the silence where the pain ought to have been. Brand spent the rest of his life trying to build an artificial warning system for those patients and never managed it, and he wrote at the end that if he could give them one gift, it would be pain.

Now listen to me. Conviction is pain. When the Spirit of God lays His finger on something in your life, it aches, and everything in your flesh wants the aching to stop. But that ache is a nerve ending God Himself installed in your soul so you would know when you are burning.

The most dangerous person in this building is not the one under conviction. It is the one who could do exactly what David did and feel nothing at all. Paul warned Timothy about consciences that are seared, and his word is the word for cauterized flesh, skin burned so smooth it can no longer feel.

KEY THOUGHT

The conviction of the Holy Spirit is not God pushing you away; it is God pulling you back to safety.

Revelation 3:19 ESV

19 Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.

The Lord’s confrontation is a loving invitation to return to him.

TRANSITION

Not only is there the loving confrontation we need, there is the…

II. The Ungrateful Contempt We Show  (vv. 7b-9)

Having said "You are the man," Nathan begins to speak for God. And here is something that ought to surprise you. Before God says one word about the sin, He spends two entire verses talking about His own grace.

2 Samuel 12:7–8 ESV

7 Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. 8 And I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more.

Notice the the verbs:

I anointed.

I delivered.

I gave.

I gave.

I would add.

Five times God says what He did or would do if needed. God is walking David back through his own life and pointing at God’s own handywork.

And remember where this man came from. Youngest of eight, keeping sheep on the back side of nowhere, so overlooked that when Samuel came to anoint a king nobody bothered to call him in from the field. God took david from pasture to a throne.

And then this line: And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more.

Do you hear what God is telling David? He is telling David if you wanted more, all you had to do was ask Me. I was not finished giving. You did not have to steal. You have a Father with an open hand, and you went out and became a thief!

Notice how similar James 4:2 is to David’s situation, James 4:2

James 4:2 ESV

2 You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.

David’s desire to cover up his sin led him to murder, his coveting of another’s wife led him to sin. And James tells the church, ask God for those things you desire and allow God to say yes or no.

And now Nathan gives a charge against David he tells him:

2 Samuel 12:9 ESV

9 Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.

The word "despised" means to count as worthless, to appraise a thing as being of little account.

Every time we sin we state what we believe God is worth to us.

In David’s life, he had a kingdom, a covenant, a nation, and a promise that his house would stand forever, and he said it wasn’t enough. Do you remember Esau, Jacob’s brother, and how he traded his birthright for a bowl.

And what have you traded your faithfulness to God for, what pet sin do you keep returning to saying that God’s not enough for you?

God declares through his prophet, "You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites."

God doesn’t hold back! In chapter eleven, when news of Uriah’s death reached the palace, David said, "Do not let this matter displease you, for the sword devours now one and now another." We often like to soften the blow of our wrongful actions. We make excuses like: It was a mistake. It was a lapse. Things got complicated. But God does not mince words, he tells David, you struck him down, you took his wife, you killed him.

Not only that, God keeps mentioning Uriah. Verse nine, Uriah the Hittite. Verse ten, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Verse fifteen, the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David. While David probably spent a great deal of time trying to erase the memory of Uriah from his memories. But God kept bringing it forward again and again.

And here is a thing to break your heart. Uriah was not even an Israelite by birth. He was a Hittite who threw in his lot with the people of God, carrying a Hebrew name, אוּרִיָּה (ʾÛrîyāh), which means "the LORD is my light." He is listed among David’s mighty men in chapter twenty three, the last name on that roll of honor. And when you turn to Matthew chapter one, to the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ, in Matthew 1:6 it says:

Matthew 1:6 ESV

6 and Jesse the father of David the king. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah,

God continued to testify to Uriah and his faithfulness. Don’t miss this, God never forgets the people we step on to get what we want.

ILLUSTRATION

At Saratoga National Historical Park in New York stands one of the strangest monuments in America. It is a monument to a boot. A left boot carved in stone. The monument is there in honor of a war hero, he was credited for winning for his countrymen the decisive battle of the American Revolution.[4]

Yet, the monument does not give his name.

The reason it is nameless is that it honors Benedict Arnold, who would commit treason against the United States.

Benedict could have been remembered as a decorated hero; instead, his life was stained by his treason agains the nation he fought to establish.

When you receive Jesus as Lord, every time you sin, you are committing treason against a holy God. You are testifying that you have contempt for the one who paid the ultimate price for your sin. Instead, living your life in a way that says you have despise God, seek the Lord live a faith-filled life.

III. The Unavoidable Consequences We Harvest  (vv. 10-12, 14)

2 Sam 12:10-12; 14

2 Samuel 12:10–12 ESV

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.’ 11 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 in the sight of this sun. 12 For you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.’ ”

2 Samuel 12:14 ESV

14 Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child who is born to you shall die.”

In verse six David said the man ought to restore fourfold. He was quoting the law; Exodus twenty two requires four sheep for a stolen sheep. And without the faintest idea what he was doing, David had handed down his own sentence. Count the deaths of his own sons:

The coming child of David and Bathsehba.

Amnon, murdered by his brother Absalom in chapter thirteen.

Absalom, run through with javelins during battle in chapter eighteen.

Adonijah, executed in First Kings two.

Four.

The king got exactly what the king demanded.

And look again at verse eleven. "I will take your wives before your eyes."

Where was that fulfilled?

In Chapter sixteen. Absalom has driven his father David out of Jerusalem, and on Ahithophel’s (a-Hith-o-fel) advice they pitch a tent for him on the roof of the palace, and he goes in to his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel.

David’s sin started on the roof and consequences came home on that same roof.

"For you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun."

Everything done in the dark is will come into the light.

2 Samuel 12:14 ESV

14 Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child who is born to you shall die.”

Let me say two things.

First, this is how sin always works in a fallen world. Sin never only impacts the sinner. It impacts everyone around the sinner. Ask the child of an alcoholic. Ask the wife of an unfaithful husband. Ask the congregation of a fallen pastor. David sinned and a baby died.

ILLUSTRATION

In 2017 a fire started in Ventura County, California. They called it the Thomas Fire. Before it finished it had burned more than 280,000 acres and become the largest wildfire in the recorded history of that state.[5]

Then the flames ende, and the hills above a little town called Montecito (Maan-tuh-see-tow) breathed relief. The danger had passed.

Then, 36 days later, the rain came and the rain was hard. Those hills had nothing left on them after the fire. There was nothing left to hold the ground together. And in the middle of the night the mountain came down, a wall of mud and boulders bigger than automobiles, straight through that sleeping town. When the sun came up, twenty three people were dead and more than four hundred homes were gone or ruined.

The consequences of the fire led to the loss of life from the rain mixed mud slide.

Our sin, might burn in our lives but it often times catches others in the aftermath.

Even though the consequences for David were severe, God forgave David completely.

Which brings us to the,

IV. The Unmatched Cleansing We Receive  (v. 13)

in Christ!

And now, thank God, verse thirteen.

2 Samuel 12:13 ESV

13 David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And Nathan said to David, “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.

First, look at the confession.

Now look at what is not there. No "but." No "she should not have been on that roof." No "you do not understand the pressures of leadership." No "it was wartime, and men die in wartime." Not one word of blame, or excuses, or negotiation. He owns his sin.

Now the second half of the verse,

2 Samuel 12:13 ESV

13 David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And Nathan said to David, “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.

Notice the immediacy of forgiveness from the Lord!

And that phrase "has put away" is a rich one. The Hebrew is הֶעֱבִיר (heʿĕḇîr), a causative form of the verb עָבַר (ʿāḇar), which means to pass over, to cross over, to pass on by. God caused David’s sin to pass away from him.

Where did it pass to?

God is holy, and holiness cannot simply wave at sin as it goes by. If God caused David’s sin to pass away from David, it had to pass on to somebody.

And Isaiah the prophet would explain this well, he tells us exactly where the sin went. "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all."

God took David’s sin and passed his sin onto The Lord God’s one and only Son, Jesus.

Nathan is standing in a palace in Jerusalem years before Calvary, announcing a pardon that has not yet been paid for. Every ounce of that guilt was passed forward down the corridor of time until it landed on the back of Jesus on that Roman cross outside the wall of that same city. God did not overlook David’s sin. God transferred it.

That is how Nathan could say "you shall not die." Somebody else would in Jesus Christ.

Corrie ten Boom, used to say that God casts our confessed sins into the deepest ocean and then posts a sign that reads, "No fishing allowed."[7]

David would write that as far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us.

Some of you have carried sin with you for years, and the devil has convinced you that yours is the one sin too big for forgiveness. Look, David was forgiven Adultery. Premeditated murder. The abuse of power. And it took God one half of one verse to put it away.

If the future blood of Christ can cover David the already shed blood of Christ can cover you!

CONCLUSION

Now let me close, and let me speak to two different people in this room.

To the one who has never come to Christ

Friend, when Nathan said "You are the man," he was talking to a king. But the Word of God turns that same finger on every one of us. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." All. Not most. All. And "the wages of sin is death."

You may have never taken another man’s wife or signed another man’s death warrant. But here is what you have done. You have looked at the God who gave you your breath, your health, your children, and this very morning, and you have appraised Him as worth less than your own way. That is בָּזָה. That is contempt. And there is a reckoning coming.

But hear this. The pardon has already been purchased. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, lived the life you could not live and died the death you deserved to die. He was buried, and He rose again the third day. Your sin can be caused to pass from you to Him.

But listen, because a pardon has to be received.In 1830 a man named George Wilson sat under sentence of death for robbing the United States mail. President Andrew Jackson signed a pardon for him, and Wilson refused it. The case climbed to the Supreme Court, and Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that a pardon is a deed, that a deed is not complete without acceptance, and that no court on earth can force one upon a man who will not take it.[8]

The pardon is signed in the blood of the Son of God, and it has your name written on the face of it. But you must receive it. "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved."

To the child of God with something covered

And now to the believer who walked in here this morning with something hidden.

You know what it is. Nobody has to tell you. You have been managing it, keeping the plates spinning, learning to pray in public with something buried in private. And you are tired. You are so very tired.

David wrote about that: "For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away." Then he wrote the way out: "I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin." And Proverbs: "Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy."

Beloved, God is not standing over you this morning waiting to punish you. God has sent Nathan into this room because He wants you back.The conviction you are feeling is not a door closing. It is a Father calling.

I began this morning by asking whether you would still be sitting in that seat if everything hidden were suddenly put on the screen for this whole church to read.

Here is the answer of the gospel. Carry it out of this building with you.

You can sit there. And more than that, you can rise up out of that seat, and you can walk down this aisle, and you can lift your head while you walk, because everything that would have been on that screen was already on His cross.

The LORD has put away your sin.

Would you come?

[1]  Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 52b. The rabbinic reading takes the "traveler" of 2 Samuel 12:4 as a picture of the evil impulse, which arrives as a passerby, is entertained as a guest, and finally becomes the master of the house.

[2]  Exodus 22:1. Compare the Septuagint tradition, which reads "sevenfold" at 2 Samuel 12:6; the Masoretic Text and the ESV read "fourfold."

[3]  Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do about It (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997). Brand was the first physician to demonstrate that the deformities of leprosy result not from tissue destruction by the bacillus but from repeated, unfelt injury following nerve damage.

[4]  Boot Monument, Saratoga National Historical Park, Stillwater, New York, erected 1887 by John Watts de Peyster and sculpted by George Edwin Bissell. It is generally identified as the only war memorial in the United States honoring a specific individual that does not name him.

[5]  Nina S. Oakley et al., "Brief Communication: Meteorological and Climatological Conditions Associated with the 9 January 2018 Post-Fire Debris Flows in Montecito and Carpinteria, California, USA," Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 18, no. 11 (2018): 3037-43. The Thomas Fire ignited 4 December 2017 and burned 281,893 acres. The debris flows of 9 January 2018 killed twenty-three people.

[6]  This aphorism is used widely in American pulpit ministry and is commonly attributed to Adrian Rogers; it circulates in nearly identical form in earlier revival preaching and in recovery literature. Its precise origin is uncertain.

[7]  Corrie ten Boom, Tramp for the Lord (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 1974). The image of the sign reading "No Fishing Allowed" posted over the sea into which God has cast our sins is among her best known illustrations of Micah 7:19.

[8]  United States v. Wilson, 32 U.S. (7 Pet.) 150, 161 (1833). Marshall held that a pardon is a deed whose validity depends upon delivery, and that delivery is not complete without acceptance. Accounts of Wilson's ultimate fate vary in the popular retellings and should be cited with care.