Trusting the Director

2 Samuel 12:15-25

Good morning and welcome to ReCAST Church . . . Don Filcek the lead pastor here . . . We have a privilege to gather together in the name of God. He is forging a community of faith here in our midst.

We think we just showed up to come to church this morning, but if we are not careful, we might find ourselves being swept up into more than a Sunday morning show. We might find that God is enlisting us to join together as an outpost of heaven in enemy territory.

My goal on Sunday morning goes far beyond giving you a good program. Our time together is tactical training for life. This morning, the text of Scripture is going leave us bruised and sore tomorrow. Like one of the tougher work outs. We know it’s good for us, but we don’t always love the burn!

So Before we read this text, let me set the stage for our thinking and interaction with a very direct statement. We can either trust God as the great director of this amazing and grand production of creation . . . Or we can outright reject the Director and decide that this must just be an undirected play. There either is a God over this or we are in a world where every actor merely does what they want and nobody is guiding this thing toward a curtain call. Is anybody captaining this ship!? Or is this world adrift at sea!?

I am starting out the message this way, because our text is going to rub up against one of the most harsh and difficult tragedies we can imagine from our perspective. A little one will die by the end of our text. An innocent will be caught in the cross-fire of adult sin . . . And he will perish for the sin of David.

And in our cultural moment where we are wrestling with so much mental illness that yields the death of so many little ones in Uvalde, TX, I can only imagine that this text comes at a divinely appointed time to address many of our already forming thoughts about death and tragedy. How many of you have already spent some time in the past few weeks considering tragedy and particularly the death of young ones!?

Our text follows on the heels of David’s terrible sin with Bathsheba and The murder of her husband Uriah. The prophet Nathan came to David and confronted him with his sin. David repented, and God issued punishments to him . . . Violence would be present in his house, an evil attempt to overthrown his kingdom will arise from his own household, and the child born to Bathsheba would die.

It is a gut-wrenching story, that requires us to reflect on reality, God, and ourselves with more than a merely light-hearted rah-rah cheerleading session for your week. We do not gather each Sunday morning, ReCAST, to give you a little pep for your week. We come to meet with The Almighty God . . . And that means sometimes our gathering will be heavy lifting!

So let’s rack up the weights and open our Bibles or Scripture Journals or devices to 2 Samuel 12:15-25.

Read/Pray

Get comfortable and keep your Bibles open to 2 Samuel 12:15-25. (coffee, juice, donut holes)

This passage is not hard to understand. You read it, and the narrative is straightforward. David’s child falls sick. He seeks the Lord for mercy through prayer and fasting and humility. The child dies on the seventh day.

When David finds out that the child is dead, he quits mourning, cleans up and eats . . . And worships God. David explains the nature of his counter-cultural response to death and mourning. God grants David and Bathsheba more children, with the highlight being the birth of Solomon who will take the throne after David.

And that is the narrative in a nutshell.

As far as outlining we see three movements:

1. David’s Fast (15-19)

2. David’s Faith (20-23)

3. God’s Faithfulness (24-25)

1. David’s Fast (15-19)

The scenario is set out for us in stark terms that do not allow us to wiggle out from under the cause of this child’s illness. The Lord afflicted the child with illness! And he became sick.

The verb is active enough to get under our skin. Is your God in the business of afflicting children with illness!? There are two types of people here today, and we are not going to resolve the problem today. There are people who lean into the mystery, that the Lord afflicted David and Bathsheba’s infant son as the text say, and then there are people who want to run a PR campaign for God. He would never do something like this, and so after plenty of spin they land right back where we started with sick child, but a God who is marginally better as standing by watching the sick child die without intervention.

And let me cut to the chase and begin to bend our thoughts toward the definition of death, sickness, and the mind-bending mystery of our existence!

N.D. Wilson has written one of my favorite books on this problem of evil, sin, and death in the light of Good and Sovereign God. And he say s the following long quote in his book, “Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl”!

“God has the authority to shape a soul with His voice, bind it to matter, and send it into history (to cast it on the stage of his grand drama.) And He has the authority to sever my soul from my body and call it to another part of the stage. He has the authority to reuse the matter from my flesh in daffodils. I’m not worried. I’ll get more . . . To His eyes, you never leave the stage. You do not cease to exist. It is a chapter ending, an act, not the play itself. Look to Him. Walk toward Him. The cocoon is a death, but not a final death. The coffin can be a tragedy, but not for long. There will be butterflies.”

Death is our worst enemy. But to God it is merely a relocation of an actor to another part of the stage. We do not cease to ever be out of the sight and scope of God. For us, death is a substantial change in our existence like a caterpillar entering a cocoon. From God’s perspective . . . It is merely a moving from the front of the stage to the back of the stage. We are no less present to our God in sickness, tragedy, or death.

And further, when we talk about the sickness or death or mass shooting involving children, we see the tragedy through the lens of the loss of so much potential. But to God, a human is never a potential. He who sees beginnings, ends, and everything in between at the same time only deals in actualities. Every breath, every act, every sin, every good deed, every thought, and every birth and death is always ever-present to Him. His reality is so different from ours, that it is hard to bend our minds to comprehend the way in which God even perceives time.

And one more thing as long as we are laboring under the first of 11 verses!!?? Do not spend too much time trying to figure out why God would assign the death of this child as a just punishment for David’s sin with Bathsheba. Some have indicated that the punishment fits the crime!? And I disagree with this connection for two reasons. The text gives us nothing of the inner mind of God on the matter. And second, is that I can think of other punishments that fit this crime that would be more uncomfortable and more focused on the guilty party: King David!

But don’t lose sight that David is genuinely broken over his sin. See Psalm 51 if you missed the message last week to see David’s confession.

And so David went in to his royal chambers, lay on his face on the floor, fasted from food, wept, and sought the Lord.

I call this entire section “David’s Fast” because in this we see him focus all of his desire and attention on the healing of his little infant son! Fasting is not a tool to manipulate God, rather it is a tool to manipulate our own sinful flesh. We are a bundle of various appetites, passions, and desires. A fundamental appetite, of course is an appetite for food. Our physiology reminds us regularly that we need food.

In fasting, we are actively subduing that routine appetite, to focus our hunger and appetite toward God. In seasons and times of life where our need is greatest, we may choose to forego food for a set period of time in order to borrow the reminders of our stomach to remind us to pray and seek the Lord.

And in humility, David stays on the ground weeping and praying during this time of his son’s sickness! David was NOT an aloof and disconnected father. He loved this little infant son, who he had not even known for long.

In verse 17 David’s servants and governmental leaders tried to get David to eat something. But he ignored all attempts to get through to him for these SEVEN days!

On the seventh day of the child’s sickness and David’s fast, the child died. And his servants were afraid to tell David. In verse 18 they do not rule out the possibility that David may harm himself if he finds out that the child is dead.

And at this point it is good to clarify how counter-cultural David’s actions are here in this text! There were usually 7 days of mourning, sorrow, fasting, and humility AFTER. A death in this cultural era. So the fact that David is behaving this way BEFORE the death is VERY confusing to his servants.

But I love David because he is a man of wide moods and ‘mildly’ unpredictable. In this I find common ground with David. And consider what verse 18 is communicating . . . Those who knew David best, were afraid to give him bad news! This plays into a consistency of character that we see in David from these historical accounts. He was a man of wide emotional response! THEY CANNOT EVEN REMOVE SELF HARM FROM THE TABLE OF POTENTIAL RESPONSES!

But David is no fool and when he sees his men speaking in hushed tones he surmises that the child has died and he clarifies this in verse 19. They don’t have to tell him, he is aware by the change in tone of his servant’s whispers.

The child is dead! Four terrible words. What kind of world is THIS!? Where are we again!? Who’s in charge here!?

Annie Dillard observes in her Pulitzer Prize winning, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” the following: but a caveat before I quote her . . . She has a right diagnoses and comes up short of the cure . . . She is very sympathetic to Christian values, but has not bowed her knew to Jesus Christ . . . But she gets a great diagnosis of this world we live in.

She says, “‘I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelming in spite of them . . .’ - Annie Dillard (Pilgrim)

Annie diagnoses life . . . She doesn’t see beauty in the brokenness , but correctly sees the world as a broken and beautiful place. We are not in control . . . This is a given. Grasp as we might for control . . . Diseases strike, accidents happen, we inflict wounds to self and others through our sin . . . And death is a reality!

And yet we wander this world with awe, and some sense that we are here with purpose.

What Annie comes up short of in this quote is indetofying the cause of the brokenness of this world. We took up a challenge against our creator for control.

And is it not sin in a generic sense, but also in a more specific sense in 2 Samuel 12 that is the reason for the death of this infant. Is it not directly tied to our expressions of freedom from God’s rule and reign that causes devastation? Humans are free to act . . . And wherever we express that freedom . . . It is rightly defined as sin. Free to eat from the one tree in the garden. Free to hit his brother in the head with a rock and try to hide the body. Free to take Bathsheba and kill her husband. Free-will is all over the Bible . . . And wherever mankind seeks to be free from the constraints of our creator, we create sin, and judgment, and devastating consequences!

2. But David is not left in his fasting. Starting in verse 20 we see David’s Faith.

The narrative was slow over the 6 days of mourning, but now on the seventh day the narrative picks u0 pace with the use of short and quick verbs. David got up off the floor, took a shower, put on his aftershave, changed his clothes, went into the tabernacle, worshiped God, went back home, asked for a meal, and ate for the first time in seven days!

This is so countercultural, that it is clear to me that David’s actions here are meant to teach us something. Further, his actions are SO VERY DIFFERENT from his response to the news of the death of his adult son Absalom later in this book, that the contrast MUST be accounted for. When he finds out that his adult son Absalom has been slain in battle, David becomes inconsolable, screaming that he wishes he had died instead . . . And crying out in grief and mourning.

But his res)nose here in verse 20-23 seems nearly non-challant! All of his grief and mourning happened while the child was Alive. And we need to ask ourselves, what makes the difference!? Why these two vastly different methods of mourning.

John MacArthur in his book, “Safe in the Arms” which is his book about where babies go when they die, makes much of this difference. And this argument is the most compelling to me personally, to conclude that infants who die are eso how redeemed.

David is inconsolable before the child dies. After then child dies he explains in verses 22 and 23 why he can be peaceful after such a terrible week of grief.

He now says in verse 23, “can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.”

This is the hinge that leads David to a radical shift in his emotional state, and there is no way that David is merely taking comfort that they will be side by side in the cemetery. David has a very clear and obvious faith and comfort in this text that he will be reunited with his son.

And the reason this is absent from the account with Absalom is simple and even more tragic. Absalom rebelled against God, rebelled against his father and was not likely in a convents relationship with the Almighty. David was not consoled by the notion, “I cannot bring Absalom back, but I will go to be with him.” David did not have the comfort over his adult son that he had over his infant son.

This obviously pushes the tragedy down the road for us parents to the fundamental concerns for our adult children . . . But for multiple reasons, I have grown in my confidence that infants who die will be on the new earth!

David seems like he is able to move on with trust that His child has been moved by God to a portion of the stage that he will also one day occupy! And this is good news! His words at least leave an open door, to an understanding that God has a category of redemption for those who have not testified of their faith in Jesus. I don’t know what the mechanism of this would be . . . But I DO KNOW THAT THE BASIS of the salvation of anyone who will be redeemed from the curse of sin, is the blood of Jesus. How it is always applied is faith . . . And so we trust that God has provided some opportunity for faith for those who died before they could express faith . . . I cannot state anything more about the mechanism of that salvation . . . I am left trusting in the God who I must also trust for my OWN SALVATION.

AND IT IS THAT GOD who we see is final short movement of the text. Because David’s faith is placed in:

3. God’s Faithfulness

And what we see in verse 24 is a subtle nod to the God who keeps his promises despite our sin. Back in chapter 7 of 2 Samuel, God made a promise to David to maintain his royal line and to set up one through his royal line who would sit on the throne forever.

And Solomon will be the son fo David through whom God will keep that promise in faithfulness!

Between verses 23 and 24 we should see significant time. Don’t think that David’s comfort to Bathsheba was an afternoon. They had three kids before the birth of Solomon. And he is highlighted here for obvious reasons. He will be the next king.

And he received two names Solomon meaning “his peace”. And from the prophet Nathan he is given the name “Jedidiah” meaning “loved by the Lord”.

I cannot put a bow on this message . . . A fallen world has tears and jagged edges. We were born into the world that IS, not the world we WISH for.

And yet the pathway to the world we wish for is here found in a pathway of suffering. God who does not delight in inflicting us, has made a way to bring us to eternal glory, an eternal kingdom without sin, without suffering, without death. And God Himself suffered . . . Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity suffered and died on our behalf.

We cannot always makes sense of the jagged and broken pieces of Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York and the death of any infant.

And so in those moments of tragedy and hardship the only thing I can do is come back to the very thing we mean every Sunday morning in communion. We mean to make sense by remembering that God is not distant in our suffering. But in Christ, he has taken on Himself the harshest punishment of the wrath of His father against all of our sin . . . So that we can be brought to a kingdom without sin, without, death, without tears and without suffering.

If your hope is placed in Jesus Christ for your salvation. Then come to one of the tables to receive the only solace I have been able to find in this broken world . . . His body broken for us. His blood shed for us. Which we remember through the juice and the cracker.

David had faith in the God who keeps His promises, even at the loss of his infant son. So let’s go out from this place trusting God who is faithful to keep His promise. And He will wipe away every tear from the eyes of his children when He brings us backstage.

Let’s Pray!