Galen Call's Sermon Library
"Confrontation, and then..." - May 12, 1985 (PM Service)
Would you open your Bibles, please, to the book of 2 Samuel, chapter 12? The subject tonight is confrontation, then what? The introduction to chapter 12 actually is the end of verse 27 in chapter 11, when it says, "But the thing that David had done was evil in the sight of the Lord." David had sinned, not in a careless accidental way, but in a deliberate, premeditated iniquity against the Lord. It involved adultery, deceit, and ultimately murder. What David did has been the source of blasphemy against the name of the Lord from that time onward. There have been those who said that David got by with his sin. J. Vernon McGee said, "Those who say that have not read the whole story." And it is the rest of the story that we want to look at this evening. We looked at the 11th chapter the last time that we studied this text. In chapter 12 it says, "Then the Lord sent Nathan to David." He came to him and said, "There were two men in one city, the one rich in the other poor. The rich man had a great many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing except one little you lamb, which he bought and nourished, and it grew up together with him and his children. It would eat of his bread and drink of his cup and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. Now a traveler came to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take from his own flock or his own herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him. So he took the poor man's you lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him. Then David's anger burned greatly against the man and said to Nathan, "As the Lord lives, surely the man who has done this deserves to die. And he must make restitution for the lamb, fourfold, because he did this thing and had no compassion." And then said to David, "You are the man. Thus says the Lord God of Israel, 'It is I who anointed you king over Israel, and it is I who delivered you from the hand of Saul. I also gave you your master's house and your master's wives and your care, and I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if that had been too little, I would have added to you many more things like these. 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 shall 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." When 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, the blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die." So Nathan went to his house. Then the Lord struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David so that he was very sick. He therefore inquired of God for the child, and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground, and the elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them. Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died, and the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they said, 'Behold, while the child was still alive, we spoke to him,' and he did not listen to our voice. How then can we tell him the child is dead, since he might do harm to himself? When David saw the disturbance were whispering together, David perceived that the child was dead. So David said to his servants, 'Is the child dead?' They said, 'He is dead.' So David arose from the ground, washed, anointed himself, and changed his clothes, and he came into the house of the Lord, and worshiped. Then he came to his own house, and when he requested they set food before him, and he ate. Then the servants said to him, 'What is this thing that you have done, while the child was alive, you fastened and wept, but when the child died, you arose and ate food.' And he said, 'While the child was still alive, I fastened and wept, for I said, 'Who knows, the Lord may be gracious to me, that the child may live.' But now he has died. Why should I fast? When I bring him back again, I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.' Then David comforted his wife Bathsheba, and went into her and lay with her, and she gave birth to a son, and he called him Solomon. Now the Lord loved him and sent words through Nathan the prophet, and he named him Jedidiah for the Lord's sake. Number 12 brings to us God's dealing with his servant David. It reveals the heart of God for all of his children. It tells us that God will not allow his children to live in unconfessed sin, but he will bring them to a point of confrontation. That is as true today in 1985 as it was in the life of David. God will not allow any of us his children to live in unconfessed sin, but he will bring us to the point of confrontation about that sin. The question is, what will we do when we have been confronted by God? Now the text that we have before us seems to fall out into three divisions, each of these revealing something about the person of our God. The first division is that of the confrontation, and it seems to me that it exposes in a beautiful way the faithfulness of God. God is faithful, you see, even when his children fail, he is faithful. Even if that faithfulness means bringing them to the point where they are confronted by their own failure, and that's what God did with David. God has a way of showing his faithfulness to us in this kind of a situation. In David's case, it had all three things. In the first place, he sent misery to him. We have read on previous occasions David's words in Psalm 32 when he describes the kind of physical, emotional, and spiritual anguish that he faced because of his unconfessed sin. During this period of approximately a year, David went downhill. People could look at David and what they would say, "What is wrong with the king?" He was a different person. God sent misery to David. But that was not sufficient in David's case to bring him to the point of repentance. God did something else. He sent a man. The man is Nathan, of course. God's tools are often persons, or they can be circumstances. What we call accidents can be an illness. In this case, God sent a man, a courageous man for God. Nathan had prepared himself well for this confrontation. He did not walk without carefully thinking, did not walk into the king's presence, without carefully thinking, how he was going to approach the king. His basic method was to get the king to condemn himself. And he did that by means of a parable. David didn't know it was a parable. He thought it was an actual event. But in discerning the situation and making his judgment, David actually spoke his own judgment. God sent him misery, God sent him a man, God sent him a message. God brought him to the point where he was confronted with his own guilt in the sight of God. To the point that he could no longer ignore the fact that the thing he had done displeased the Lord. The sending of the misery, the sending of a man with a message for David is evidence of God's faithfulness. God does that for you and me too, doesn't he? I can look back in my life and isolate occasions when I can see the same kind of a process in my life. When God sent something or someone to me, to say to me, they're sin in your life. Has anyone ever done that to you? At that point of confrontation, we have a choice to make. We can become defensive and angry, and I suppose that many of us have done that, even as children when our parents have confronted us. That is the human reaction, the sinful reaction. The God in the reaction is to stop in one's tracks and to examine what is being said. Now if that person is genuinely from God and there is a message there, you're going to know it, God's going to reveal that to you and what you need to do is respond to repentance. Now perhaps you've had the occasion as I have when someone has come to you with a finger stuck it in your face and said, "You've sinned and you're not aware of it. How do you respond then?" I had a letter that I've told some of you about from a friend of mine who was in the church in Kentucky when I passed it there. After I had left a couple of years later, in fact after I had come here to Roseville, I got a letter from this fellow. He lived in a different state by this time and he said to me, "I know why you left Calvary Baptist Church in Covington. It was out of fear you were afraid of throat cancer and you left the church out of that fear." Well, I want you to know throat cancer haven't even entered my mind to that point. I thought about it occasionally since in my coughing and these periodic spells. But up to that point it hadn't even entered my mind. That was not the motivation for my leaving. I wrote backâwell, I was going to see a gracious letter. I better withdraw that word. I wrote back a letter and responded to him anyway to try to set him straight about it. There are times when people confront us and they're not on base. Somewhere along the line they've missed the boat. They think they may be speaking of God sincerely so. How do you handle people like that? Well, try to be gracious with them and listen to what they're saying to see if they're maybe some nugget of truth there. When you're confronted that doesn't mean that you automatically go on a guilt trip every time. But when the Spirit of God is revealing sin in your life, when you are genuinely guilty then the thing to do when confronted is to humble yourself and repent. That's what David did. David said, "I have sinned against the Lord." And that was his sin primarily, it was against Uriah and Bathsheba, but it was primarily against the Lord, against the and the only have I sinned, said David in the Psalms. That brings us to the second division of our text and that is the correction. It seems to me that here we see the holiness of God revealed. First we saw God's faithfulness and bring His servant to confrontation. His servant responded in a positive way. But now we see God's holiness exposed as God chastises His servant. Yes God forgave Him. In fact, Nathan assures Him, "The Lord has taken away your sin because David repented." But God nonetheless allowed David to go through an experience of chastisement, of correction. He allowed him to reap in his life what he had sown. Only two pronouncements were made against David, one of them was that the sword would not depart from his own house. You have now reached in your study of David's life the pinnacle of it. From here on it's downhill. There are troubles upon heartaches, upon disappointments, upon problems that we will see in the life of David from here on. The sword did not depart from David's house. His own son Absalom sought to overthrow his father and did exactly what the Lord said would happen with David's wives. His daughter was violated by his son. His son Amnon then was killed. Absalom faced a horrible death. David knew the meaning of the judgment which he himself had pronounced upon the guilty party. The second pronouncement deals with this little baby that was born. The Lord said, "Because of your sin, this child is going to die." And no sooner had Nathan shut the door to his house having returned home than the Lord struck the child. And for seven days, Nathan sought God, thinking perhaps God would graciously spare the child. He mourned, he fasted, he prayed. His servants could not get him to arise, and after those seven days, the child died. God's judgment, God's chastisement was fulfilled. What does that tell us? Tells us about the holiness of God, the fact that God deals with sin. Just as an electric fence stings the person who comes near it, so in God's holiness he must respond to sin. Now while he does forgive sin that is confessed to him, God will often allow the consequences of that sin to be carried out in the life, to teach us a lesson, to correct us. We see that, for example, in the life of Moses. Moses disobeyed the Lord. He did not sanctify the Lord before the people of Israel, struck the rock twice. And as a result of that, though God forgave him, God said, "You will not enter into the land, I promise to my people." We see it in many other examples in Scripture, but let me just summarize this point by saying, one can sin, and by the grace of God be forgiven, but yet he can have scars and regrets that could last a lifetime. I have a very dear friend who has passed her to church in another state, who allowed himself to be involved in immorality with a woman that he counseled. As a result of that sin, he lost his church, nearly lost his family, though he was restored to his wife and children. He repented, God forgave him, but he bore the marks of that terrible sin. Yet God graciously allowed him to take up another pastorate in another state, and allowed him to be restored to the place that he loves, teaching and preaching the Word of God from behind the pulpit, a gifted expositor of the Word of God, went to a little town in a state far from where he was originally, built a church of several hundred people, and three months ago did it again. I heard that last week, and I want to tell you my heart was broken, because I know the potential in that man, and to see him fall, and to know the kind of scars and regrets that he must now bear for his lifetime, is almost more than I as his friend can bear. I talked to him on the phone in the last few days. He openly admitted what had taken place, has confessed his sin, is still with his wife, what a gracious, gracious lady, has admitted it to the church where he had pastored, he has now resigned of course, but he will never ever escape what he has allowed himself to be trapped into in terms of the scar upon his reputation. Yes, God does forgive sin, but don't ever forget that while God forgives, he allows the consequences often to take place in our lives, so that we learn our lessons. It happened with David, and it brings us now to the third division of our text, a division which I think reveals the love of God. For God, this is the consolation, the comfort of this man David. God comforts his chastised children. God does not allow us to reap the consequences of our sin, in order to be mean to us, that is not God's motive, but because he loves us, God put his arms around David, as it were. He embraced David, he forgave David, he said, "David, you will not die." God gave him consolation from a couple of sources. This is so kind of God. The first source was that David knew that he had a future reunion coming with his deceased son. He says, "I shall go to him, he will not return to me." Now it's true that primarily what David is saying is that his son is gone, he will not come back to life, and someday David too will die. But I think there's more here, and the reason I say that is because of David's response. After the child died, he got up, he cleaned himself up, he ate food, and had different countenance. And there was that, because David knew that God had dealt with him, a holy God had dealt with him in love, and that though his son would not be seen any longer on the earth, he would see his son again in heaven, where he would join him one day. And since he had that future reunion, David could no longer mourn. It was inappropriate now, he was going to rejoice that that time was coming. But there's a second consolation that God graciously gives David, and that is the birth of Solomon. He and Bathsheba had another son, called by the Lord Jedidiah, which means "beloved of God," "beloved of God," isn't that wonderful, "that God allowed Bathsheba to bring forth another son for David." And while David called him Solomon, God said, "No, he is beloved of the Lord." God says, "David, I want you to know that this little boy, I love him as much as you do, he is Jedidiah to me." David was given a replacement for the son that he had lost, and that gave him peace. In fact, the name Solomon comes from the Hebrew Shalom, which means "peace." His son brought peace to David from the heartache that he had had, but Shalom was also beloved of God. God consoled his servant, God loved his servant, and my friend God loves you. It may be that God has put his finger into your life, and through a person or circumstances, God has said to you, "You are the man, you are the woman." And there's been something that you have refused to deal with that God has now exposed. He's brought it out in the open. You've been confronted. The question is, now what are you going to do about it? I hope like David, you will repent, and put yourself into the hands of a heavenly Father who loves you, who even though he may allow the consequences of your own sin to be carried out in your life will embrace you and console you and use you. That's what God wants to do in your heart and life tonight. He wants to use you. Let him have his way. Will you? Let's pray. Let our heads bowed and our eyes closed, as the Spirit of God searches our hearts with his perfect knowledge of us. I wonder if there's someone here this evening who would be honest enough to say before God, I have been confronted. God has put his finger into my heart and exposed to me, hidden, unconfessed sin. And I now need to make a decision, the pastor I wish you would pray for me. God help you, my friend, to make the right decision. Could I pray for you? You're at that point of decision. What are you going to do? Will you by the uplifted hand say, "Pray for me." I've been confronted. Now I need to do the right thing. God bless you. Yes. Yes. Anyone else? Several hands. Yes. Amen. Anyone else? Yes. Our Heavenly Father, I pray for these dear children of yours. These ones that you have faithfully confronted, I pray that now you will help them to take the right steps so that they will be repentant and give evidence of that repentance in openness and honesty, in making restitution if that is necessary, in going to someone else perhaps in asking forgiveness. I pray that you will so thoroughly deal with that area of your concern, Father, in those lives, that it will no longer be an issue between you and your children whom you love so dearly. I pray that tonight there will be a right response to the Spirit of God in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's keep. Amen. Amen.