Still reading 2 Samuel 8 – 13.
Tells the story of David sleeping with one of his soldier’s wife and getting her pregnant. Just the way he gave into temptation and then was sly about trying to fix it and when that didn’t work he killed the man. Throughout all of this it doesn’t say once that David called on the Lord. It was like he knew he messed up and then tried to cover it up on his own strength which never works. I can’t help but think things may have gone differently if he called onto the Lord, but at the same time sin is sin and it still comes at a price. The price was unfortunately his son dying.
It’s also funny how, when Nathan brings the analogy to David about the sin David committed but in a different context (2 Samuel 12: 4-11), how angry David gets at his own sin, although he doesn’t even know it is his own sin. Just like we can get so angry at others for doing something but we don’t look at our own behaviour and have the same anger towards it. If God came to him and said what you did was wrong etc, David, like the rest of us, he may have been probably trying to justify himself or been defensive.
If we take ourselves out of the equation and just look at the matter or sin at hand, then we can really see just how bad things are. Then when God told him what the price of his sin would be. Having his son dying him knowing it’s going to happen and not being able to do anything about it. It says in chapter 12: 16 – 17, that David ‘pleaded and fasted’, yet this wasn’t enough to change the situation. I can imagine wanting something so much that I’m not ‘asking’ for it but ‘pleading’ for it; the desperation in the latter goes beyond merely wanting something. I think that was part of the point. God wanted him to feel the pain, the consequence so that he could really learn and change. If there was no consequence it might not have affected him in the same way and therefore he may have done it again. But at the same time there had to be something which paid for the sin, God couldn’t let that go, no matter how much pleading was done.
As I said in a previous post, God’s Word is law and He cannot go back on it so once He said it, it had to be done. At the same time though, although God took away something from David, as a price to pay for sin, He gave him back life in the form of Solomon, so it was like God was saying that ‘I have forgiven you and I will continue to bless you’, as children are a blessing from God. But it just reminds me of how grateful I should be for Christ because now there wouldn’t be none of that taking something away to pay for sin, Christ has already come and paid for it. We don’t need to feel the pain that David felt when God took away his son, as Christ has already felt that pain. That’s why it is so important that we look to God and thank him for his mercies and grace; that he loved us enough to send Christ to pay for our sin – even sin of that magnitude. We don’t have to ‘plead’ like David we just have to repent and promise to not do it again.
TheReadyWriter 