Most people can do basic math.
Maybe not everybody can do linear algebra,
probability or calculus, but even relatively low-IQ palace servants living
1000 years before the birth of Christ could hardly fail to notice that
David’s latest wife, Bathsheba, had just delivered a baby well short of the
average human gestation period of forty weeks.
Sure, David married Bathsheba the moment he
could reasonably get away with it. But nobody was fooled. Their affair had to
be the worst-kept secret in Jerusalem.
The Worst-Kept Secret
Between the time Bathsheba conceived and
her hastily contrived marriage to David, Uriah’s wife had to first discover the
pregnancy (well before the days of Clearblue Easy®) and communicate it to David, after which David had to try (and fail) to fool her husband into believing the
child was his, following which he had to plot Uriah’s murder by proxy and carry it out
successfully. Then of course Bathsheba had to mourn her husband.
That didn’t all happen in a couple of weeks, we can be sure, fueling the gossips and speculators. And we cannot forget
the servants who inquired about Bathsheba at David’s request, not to mention the
messengers he sent to bring her to his house. These people knew precisely what had occurred and when, and it’s inconceivable none of them ever said a word about it.
So when David’s son Absalom staged his coup
against his father over a decade later and chased him from his home, David’s detractors
were less likely to have forgotten his disgraceful behavior than pro-Trump
Republicans are to forget Bill Clinton’s.
No Salvation in God
Thus the people who said of David, “There is no salvation for him in God,” as he packed up and ran for his life from Absalom had probably not forgotten that David had once been the beneficiary of God’s grace and providential — even
miraculous — care. They may not have been irreligious at all, nor were
they necessarily expressing doubt that God was capable of saving the
king from his murderous child.
They may simply have been saying, “Look,
God’s done with that sinner,” much as Job’s friends said to him. The difference
is that Job’s friends had no evidence against him, while those who anticipated
the imminent end of David’s glorious reign had every reason to believe he was
experiencing God’s righteous judgment.
The Sword Shall Never Depart
Which, actually, David was, at least in the
sense that God had said this to him through the prophet Nathan:
“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.”
The circumstances of David’s life and his
children’s lives were to be permanently changed for the worse as a direct
consequence of David’s sin. He was to know sorrow in many different ways during
his latter days. God is not mocked, even by kings.
That can happen to Christians, can’t it? We
may love the Lord just like David did, but in moments of weakness or
uncharacteristic rebellion do things we can’t take back. And life doesn’t let
us un-ring the bells we have rung. The practical consequences of willfulness and
disobedience follow, just as they do for unsaved men and women.
The Lifter of My Head
So I find David’s response in Psalm 3 both interesting and encouraging, because despite
the fact that his detractors correctly understood that God must punish sin and sometimes even does
so in this life, they had missed out on something about God that David understood:
“But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head.”
A man needs his head lifted not when he is
walking tall, but when he appears to be down for the count. And notice that
David wasn’t proudly lifting up his own head and asserting his very
questionable righteousness. It was God who did that for him:
“I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill.
I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.”
That’s grace, folks.
No Earthly Remedy
David had brought on himself a curse for
which there was no earthly remedy. It would affect him until the day he died.
But he had also repented of his sin and been forgiven. God rightly declined to
relieve David of the fallout from his actions and the sorrow they produced —
after all, how could the Almighty reasonably fail to punish a man who had set such a
wicked example for his entire nation? But that same God sustained David through
the trials he had brought on himself. His personal fellowship with his God
remained blissfully unhindered.
Okay, maybe that’s not so basic. But it’s a
wonderful thing all the same.
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