The Seriousness of Sin and The Importance of Friends

Intro

Well good morning. We are going to be in 2 Samuel 12 today and I don’t if you’ve heard guest preachers make this joke before but I’ve heard it several times. Essentially the joke is that the lead pastor intentionally took a particular Sunday off from preaching because the passage that was coming up had something that was going to be really hard to talk about and explain and so he left it to someone else. When we were at our church in North Carolina there were multiple occasions when one of our pastors was filling in for our preaching pastor Tony and they would start their sermon by saying that Tony purposely gave them this passage because it was a hard one to preach for one reason or another.

And as I was sitting there I would laugh but of course I didn’t believe them. But guess what? Now that I’m the one who fills in when the preacher takes as week off, I can tell you that it’s definitely true! There’s been some hard stories over the life of David, but today we have to deal with what is probably the hardest because in response to David’s sin with Bathsheba, God causes the child born to David and Bathsheba to get sick and die.

And that makes us really uncomfortable, doesn’t it? How could the God we love and worship do something like that? And we will deal briefly with the that issue when we get there in the story, but I want us to pause before we dive in and ask ourselves a question that Jeff has posed to us time and again in this series: why is this story here? The Old Testament is history, yes, so the plain answer is that this story is here because it happened. But there were countless things that happened to Israel, and even to David no doubt, that weren’t included in Scripture, so why this story? In other words, what does God want to teach us in 2 Samuel 12?

In this chapter we have multiple stories. First, we see Nathan rebuking David for his sin with Bathsheba and we see David repenting of his sin. Then we have the story of David’s son becoming sick and dying. Then we have the Lord blessing David and Bathsheba with another child and Solomon is born. And then the chapter ends with David back in battle, where he should have been when he chose to stay home and ended up sleeping with Bathsheba, and ultimately the Israelites win the battle and return home to Jerusalem to a state of peace.

And as I studied 2 Samuel 12, I saw three main themes that run throughout each of these stories and really tie the whole chapter together. They are the seriousness of sin, the importance of friends, and the hope of the gospel. So we’re going to split the chapter in half this morning and look first at Nathan rebuking David and see what God wants to teach us about the seriousness of sin, the importance of friends, and the hope of the gospel, and then we’ll look at David’s son dying and Solomon being born and do the same. Make sense? I’ll start reading in verse one.

[Read 2 Samuel 12:1-13a)

1) Nathan Rebukes David

So just to sum all of that up becuase I know it was a lot. Nathan, David’s friend and a prophet, comes to him and tells him a little parable. He says there was a rich many who had many flocks and there was a poor man who had one lamb that was really like a beloved family pet. And the rich man needed a lamb to feed to a guest that had some and instead of taking one of his own many lambs he went and took the one single beloved lamb from the poor man. And as he’s telling this story, David gets enraged and wants the rich man to die for his behavior.

And as soon as David responds this way, Nathan says, “You are the man!” And at once David, knows that Nathan is talking about David and Uriah and Bathsheba, not lambs. And David is sorrowful and repents of his sin, and even though he himself said he deserves to die, God “puts away his sin” and spares him. So what does this story teach us about the seriousness of sin?

a. The Seriousness of Sin

Well one thing is that sin is basically a slap in God’s face because it ignores what God has done for you. We see this in verses 7 and 8 where Nathan speaks as a prophet on behalf of God and tells David, “I anointed you kind over Israel, I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives. And is this wasn’t enough I could have given you even more.” But it wasn’t enough for David.

He had been given incredible blessings by God, including multiple wives, yet David had to have more. This is the same man who wrote Psalm 23 which Chris preached on earlier this month and begins, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” Yet he completely ignored the fact that God had brought him out of a simple life as a shepherd and made him king over his people and given him all the blessings of this world and the blessing of communion with God. And David ignored it all. Do you see how offensive that would have been to God?

As God’s people, when we sin we are doing the same thing. When we get angry at the driver in front of us on the highway, we are ignoring the fact that God has blessed us with a car and a place to be in the first place. When we are prideful about what we’ve accomplished at work, we are ignoring the fact that without God blessing us with that job and the ability to be successful at it, we wouldn’t be able to do it. When we lust, like David, after another person who is not our spouse, we ignore the fact, if we are married, that God has blessed us with a spouse when he didn’t have to.

I haven’t really had this experience yet because my daughter is only seven months old, but I can imagine that when you have kids who are a bit older they probably do things that make you disappointed or angry because you feel like if they actually realized how much you had given in order for them to go that school, or play that sport, or have those things, they wouldn’t have acted as they did. And it’s the same with God. When we sin we are ignoring what God has done for us. And he is grieved in the same a parent is.

This story also teaches us that sin is serious because it ignores God’s Word. In the next verse, verse 9, God says, “Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight?”So first we saw that sin was serious because it ignores what God has done but it also ignores what God has said. God clearly forbade his people from committing adultery and from murder, and David does both. Unfortunately I can’t keep using the parenting analogy because kids never ignore their parents word, do they? Of course they do! Kids are very prone to know what their mom or dad has said and do the opposite.

David’s sin and our sin is just like that. We know God’s commands and we choose to disobey them anyway. And I wanted to use the parenting analogy because I want us to try and grasp just a glimpse of how this makes God feel. It’s so easy for us to think that sin is a light thing that doesn’t really matter much, but is it a small matter when your kids continually ignore your words over and over and when they continually look at what you’ve done for them and given to them and say, “It’s not enough”? No, it makes us sad. It hurts us. And in the same way our sin hurts God.

Last thing on the seriousness of sin from this story before we move on, sin is serious because it affects more than just yourself. As God is rebuking David through Nathan, he says, “You struck down Uriah, you took his wife as your wife, and your household is in disorder.” David’s choice didn’t just grieve God and make David feel guilty, it hurt many many people. That’s what sin does. It’s easy for us to think these thoughts don’t hurt anyone, these desires don’t hurt anyone, my anger is just inside it doesn’t hurt anyone.

But nothing stays inside forever. David didn’t just decide in a moment to sleep with Bathsheba. He probably had lustful thoughts in his mind, he desired women other than his wives, and then those little internal sins gave birth to a bigger sin that hurt many people other than himself. We should let this story be a warning to us. Sin never just affects us. It hurts others as well.

b. The Importance of Friends

Well the next main theme in this chapter also has to do with others and that’s the importance of friends. Throughout our study in 1 and 2 Samuel we’ve been making a contrast between Saul and David, right? Saul who didn’t obey God or wait on God or rest in God and who ultimately fell because God removed his spirit from him, and David, who does obey God, who does wait on God, who does rest in God. But what we should realize is that here in 2 Samuel 12, is that there was a very real possibility that we would be studying two Saul’s in Samuel, two people who don’t rely on God and two people who fall. Because at this point in David’s life he could easily have become like Saul. He could have sought out another women and continued to disobey God and ended up as a dead failure rejected by God.

But David had Nathan. So the first thing we should see here is that we need people who will speak into our life. David had Nathan, but without him this story may have been totally different. And we will all come to these crossroads in our life. We won’t all cheat on our spouse but remember this is David, the man after God’s own heart, and he still commits this grave sin. We all sin. We have that in common with David.

Many of us have committed a serious sin, even. But do you also have a friend like Nathan in common? If we as Christians do not have friends in our life to speak into our lives when we fail, and we will fail, then we are in grave danger. But how do we know if the friends we have meet the criteria of being like Nathan? You could have 100 friends but if none of them are able to act like Nathan when you sin, they aren’t very useful in your walk with the Lord.

I think we see two things with Nathan that we should look for to know if we have friends like this. The first is that they know us. Do you remember how Nathan first approached David? He didn’t come in angry calling David an adulterer or anything like that, he told a story. He brought out David’s emotions toward injustice. And then he confronted David. The reason Nathan did this is because he knew David. He knew the best way to confront him in his sin. Do you have people in our life that know you like that? Again, many friends does not equal many Nathans. We have to allow ourselves to be known and be friends with people who care enough to know us.

The second thing that’s important about Nathan is that he is close to the Lord. In this story God is actually speaking through Nathan! Nathan isn’t speaking on his own accord. Now of course Nathan is a prophet and I’m not saying that our criteria for our Christian friends is that they should be prophets. But, do you have people in your life who are close enough to the Lord to speak into your life based on what God’s Word and God’s will? Christian friends who like to do book studies together and hang out with each other aren’t much good in your failings if they aren’t walking close enough with the Lord to know how to speak truth grace into the situation.

Church, if you are a Christian, you need Christian friends like Nathan in your life. That doesn’t mean all of your friends should be Christians or even that all of your Christian friends need to be able to relate to you like Nathan, but you need some. It’s not a matter of if we will need correction from a friend, it’s when, and when you’re in need of that correction, will anyone be there to step in? If the answer is no for you, there are some very practical steps you can take in that direction. You can join a small group, you can ask an older member of our church to mentor you. But even then, you have to be honest and authentic. Within your small group or with your member. You have to allow yourself to be known. And if you already have a Nathan in your life go be a Nathan to someone else. The story teaches us that we can’t overstate how important good friends like Nathan are in the Christian life.

The Death of David’s Child and the Birth of Solomon

So that’s the first half of 2 Samuel 12. For the sake of time, I’m not going to read every verse from the second half but I do want to give us enough to understand the story so I’m going to start in verse 15 and read a few verses.

[2 Samuel 12:15-18a]

a. The Seriousness of Sin

So before we look at what God wants to teach us in story, let me say something about the uncomfortableness of this passage. The main thing we need to keep in mind is that the way David related to God and the way we relate to God is very different. Here’s what I mean by that. Do you remember a couple months ago when Jeff preached on the Davidic covenant? If you don’t I’d encourage you go back and listen but the main thing for us this morning is that God relates to his people differently in the Old Testament, when he made covenants with Abraham, and Moses, and David, and how he relates to us who live in the New Covenant, after Jesus.

And why that’s so important is that in the Old Testament God revealed himself in special ways only to certain people at certain times. So you have God coming to Moses in a burning bush or literally walking past Moses and he hides in the cleft of a rock. You have God speaking directly to Abraham and asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. But, one of the great promises of the Old Testament is that a new day is coming when God will dwell inside every single one of his people. And that’s where we live.

So these Old Testament glimpses of God give us a picture of who God is and are instructive for the Israelites and for us, but we don’t expect God to show up in the bush beside our house or audibly speak to us. He doesn’t need to do those things anymore because he literally dwells inside us. So we can’t read this story and be afraid that if we commit adultery God might kill our children. No, this story is for a particular person as a particular moment in redemptive history. But, and here’s why this story is here, sin is such a serious thing that the only worth punishment for it is death. That hasn’t changed.

God hates sin and part of God’s holiness requires him to punish sin. In this story, that plays out by God causing David’s son to get sick and to die. Another thing this story teaches us is that sin has reeked havoc on our world. We might not see God kill someone because of sin but the effects of sin are all around us. Broken relationships, anxiety, lost dreams, hostility, natural disasters, even death, are all a result of sin in the world. Life is hard because sin is so prevalent. Even when we aren’t the ones committing the sin.

b. The Importance of Friends

And here’s where friends come in in this story. In the midst of David’s sorrow and brokenness, what do we see in verse 17? “The elders of his house stood beside him.” David had friends around him to support him. Friends who grieved when David grieved and rejoiced when David rejoiced. Can you imagine going through what David went through alone? We don’t know where his family members are when this happening, but we can probably guess that things weren’t very good between he and his wives and his other children, but it seems like the only people there for David are these elders.

Friends, I don’t have to tell you that life is hard. Most of you know that better than I do because you’ve lived longer and the longer you live to more suffering you face. It isn’t really a question of if you’ll have a time like this where you feel like you’ve hit rock bottom and just wish you could die, it’s when. The question is, will there be people there supporting you? Do you have friends like these who don’t just want to hang out with you when you’re having fun, but they want to be there when you’re at your lowest. We need these people in our life.

The Hope of the Gospel

Overall, these two stories are pretty hard for us to read aren’t they? Even though David repents of his sin in the first story, it’s still a harsh reality that sin is serious and we are all prone to fall into it. And then of course, nothing about a child dying is easy. But. Sprinkled throughout this chapter is gospel hope. Incredible hope in the midst of incredible failure and sorrow. And that’s where I want to end this morning. Look with me at the end of each of these stories. First, verse 13, “And Nathan said to David, ‘The Lord has also put away your sin; you shall not die.”

David murdered another human being and therefore he deserved to die. He was done. God’s anointed, the man after God’s own heart, killed for murdering Uriah. But. God put away his sin. Nobody else could have pardoned David. His fate was sealed. Until God stepped in and put his sin away.

And it’s the very same thing for us. Our sin is such a serious thing that it deserves death. Even the smallest sin. Murder required the death of the murderer but disobeying one’s parent required the sacrifice of a living thing. Because the punishment for sin is death. Yet God is willing to put away our sin as well. How?

Well look with me at the gospel hope sprinkled in verse 24, “Then David comforted his wife, Bathsheba, and went in to her and lay with her, and she bore a son, and he called his name Solomon.” There’s not much there at first glance. David gets a new son, I guess that’s good. But it’s so much more than that. Solomon was the continuation of the Davidic line. Solomon was the next step in God’s covenantal plan for his people.

This is so fitting that we are ending here as we start advent this week and begin a sermon series in Matthew 1-2 starting next week. Look with me at Matthew 1 really quick. Verses 1-17 are the genealogy of Jesus, and we usually skip over genealogies in the Bible, right? Well look at the second part of verse 6. “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” God redeemed David’s sin and used it to bring about this new child Solomon who is part of Jesus’s lineage! Without Solomon we don’t get Jesus. Yet God was faithful to David. He had promised his line would endure forever and even in the midst of the death of one son we have the birth of another, who would continue the line.

David had no idea how this would take place of course, but this whole chapter of 2 Samuel is pointing to Jesus! Even as it teaches about the importance of friends in our life it also teaches us that sin is serious and requires punishment by death. And it teaches that only God can pardon sin. And it points forward to the ultimate death by God himself that would cover every sin! Not just the sin of one man.

I hope as we’ve looked at 2 Samuel 12 you’ve understood how serious sin is and how important friends are. We should apply this text to our lives by rightly considering the weight of our sin and by seeking out godly friends who can confront us and be there for us, and by doing the same to others. But this gospel hope is even more important. 2 Samuel 12 is holding up for us in flashing lights: God is faithful and Jesus is coming! Forgiveness of sin, freedom from guilt and shame, ultimate purpose for your life is available in him! May we believe that and celebrate that this Christmas season.

Let’s pray.