2 Samuel Lesson 63

David led to Repentance - 2 Samuel 12;1-13 – Psalm 32

It’s been some time since we worked with the text of 2 Samuel because we’ve worked with Psalm 51, David’s confession Psalm. 1 Samuel 11:1-12:25 is a section where David brings cursing down upon his court, yet God’s grace is seen because the last act that is recorded in this sequence is that the Messianic promise is borne, Solomon. So where there is sin there is grace, and the lesson of course is that though David brings cursing down, he can’t thwart God’s grace toward him. David has been out of fellowship for some time, David has been on negative volition. Looked at from the standpoint of the two circles that we often speak of, the top circle represents God’s plan, God’s plan for the believer’s life and represents our position at the time we become Christians. It represents all that we have legally. However, the bottom circle represents what we are in experience and the two may not necessarily coincide.

David has been out of fellowship and he’s been out of fellowship over, apparently no greater issue than a lack of thanksgiving for God’s will in his life. Remember the pattern that we have observed in David, prior to the Bathsheba incident, is one of a general frustration with God’s will in his life, a general putting away of first things, turning way and thinking about other things than what God has primed for him in life. As a result of this, David experiences after negative volition, the next step up is darkening; darkness and the chaos of the heart as it grows. Darkness means that the conscious mind contracts; it is painful for the mind to view things that it knows are wrong, and therefore God has provided us with a very interesting method of adaptation. When the mind is filled with thought patterns and attitudes that are not right, immediately there is a feedback from the conscience that says this is wrong. And this causes a mental pain in the mind—this is wrong. And so the mind reacts like your body reacts to constant irritation. It starts to build a callous, and so you have a callous or kind of scar tissue that builds up here because the mind is constantly prodded by the conscience. Now actually the scar tissue is on the mind, not on the conscience; you can’t kill the conscience, all you can kill is your sensitivity to your conscience.

So as a result of a violated conscience, the mind begins to build a wall, a barrier, cover-up, blame-shifting, and other things. And the net result of this is that the mind, the field of operation of the mind, starts contracting. So David doesn’t see the obvious, and that’s why during the Proverbs series, one of the final results of compound carnality in the believer is that the believer loses common sense. Why is it that so many believers do not have common sense, and why is it that they put on such a poor testimony before unbelievers who at least have common sense. Believers don’t even have that from the viewpoint of the unbeliever. Why do you see that happen all the time? It’s because the mind has contracted down because of sin and has eliminated so much of its thought patterns and relegated them to the realm of the unconscious, just dumped them down there, undigested, raw [can’t understand word] just chucked because I don’t want to bother with it.

So all this stuff piles up down here and the conscience meanwhile is still sending signals, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, however the pain directly has been taken out of it because we just train ourselves, oh, I’m not going to think about that, I’ll just think of something else, or I turn away from it. Well, that’s fine, it kind of works as a band aid for a while. But the conscience has another channel. If you want to call that channel one, the conscience has a second channel that it can get to us. And that channel is in the area of the emotions. So when the conscience finds that it can’t get to us by prodding the mind, it starts setting up emotions in the body and these emotions begin to work and you have despair, you have hatred, anger and so, and all these emotions start cart-wheeling. Why? Because they’re being triggered by what the conscience keeps saying there’s something wrong, there’s something, there’s something wrong, and the conscience actually has through the emotions a third channel. If we are not going to respond to the first channel by knowing in our conscious mind that something is wrong, and if we’re not going to pay attention to the fact that we’re having an emotional problem, and the emotional problem is because of our conscience, if we don’t take that as a queue, then the conscience can get to us by direct bodily sickness. And that’s the psychosomatic effect that the conscience has. And it will do this, we’ve been designed with this monitor on our inside and that’s one of the ways it has of speaking to us.

Let’s go to 2 Samuel 12:1 and the confrontation between David and Nathan. David has been out of fellowship, he is in compound carnality. In verse 1 we read, “And the LORD sent Nathan unto David,” now it’s interesting that God did not send David unto Nathan immediately. You see, for many months this had gone on before Bathsheba, let’s say four or five months arbitrarily, thinking that it would take about that long for David to lose those godly patterns of behavior that he had in his life, the patterns that were associated with getting up early in the morning, praising God from the psalms and generally lost the discipline in his life, so he was crawling out of the sack at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon kind of thing. That was a behavioral change and it took time. Now here’s a question you ought to ask when you read 12:1, that all during these four or five months God did not bring Nathan. Now that’s significant; God could have. Why couldn’t have God, if God could bring Nathan now why didn’t God bring Nathan before that? Didn’t God realize that if David wasn’t headed off at the pass he would have gotten in deeper trouble? Yes, God’s omniscient.

Well then why didn’t God send Nathan earlier and if Nathan had come earlier it would have saved David from all this mess. No it wouldn’t have, because David wouldn’t have been ready to listen to Nathan. So God’s timing is very critical in verse 1. In fact, not only did God not send Nathan to David for the first four or five months of his carnality, God did not send Nathan to David even for nine months after the incident with Bathsheba; Bathsheba is now about ready to bear the baby that was born of adultery. So for nine more months we have this situation. So for a period, almost one and a half years, God kept Nathan away from David in this area. You say why is this? Isn’t God interested in preventing people from sinning? Yes, but the point is even Nathan could not have had an effect on David until the time is right. David had to be enough buried under the pile to start looking up and you will find this true in your own experience if you haven’t found it true already. There are times when you will not listen to the Word of God and someone can come up to you and even if an illuminated sign had been dropped by parachute from the nearest cloud, you still would not be prepared to receive that as the authoritative Word of God because you haven’t dug a big enough pit for yourself. After you’re in a big enough hole there’s only one place you can look and that’s up. You get tired of looking at the walls and there’s nothing new looking down because you just dug there, so the only decent scenery is up, after the pit has been dug sufficiently deep. So God has allowed David to dig a pit and get deeper and deeper and deeper.

And now because Bathsheba is about to give birth we have literally the fruit of sin, obvious empirically to David’s eyes. And so this now becomes the fruitful time for a confrontation. Now God sends Nathan to David. The timing, as I pointed out over and over again in the Old Testament is very critical. The Holy Spirit used authors in Old Testament history who constantly emphasized, all the way from the story of Joseph all the way on through the Old Testament, timing, timing, timing, circumstances. So we have timing, “And the LORD sent Nathan;” Nathan is a prophet and therefore he has authority, and he has the authority directly from God to confront David.

Now we are going to study this period just before Nathan walked up to David and began to speak. What kind of situation was David in. Psalm 51 tells us what happened after Nathan spoke to David, but there’s another Psalm in Scripture, Psalm 32, we’ll now look at how David felt emotionally during this period of compound carnality. Psalm 32 was written after the event; David has already confessed, he’s back in fellowship, but Psalm 32 pictures very vividly how he felt when he was out of fellowship, and I say “felt” because here we are dealing with the emotions.

Psalm 32:1, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. [2] Blessed is the man unto whom the LORD imputes not iniquity,” notice the three words for sin, you saw them when Psalm 51 started out, same theme, same content, emphasis on sin from all three dimension, from the dimension of its transgression of God’s absolute authority to the mess that sin always makes, the chaos, to the rebellious autonomous spirit behind it. So from all three of these aspects God covers, He forgives, and He doesn’t credit. Now when David says the word “Blessed,” that is a word now, after the experience, that means something. Now David understands what it means to be forgiven. “…and in whose spirit there is no guile,” notice that in verse 2; those are the spiritual forces involved in compound carnality. And it’s put in parallelism with the first line of verse 2, “Blessed is the man unto whom the LORD imputes not iniquity,” the “guile” means evil his human spirit.

Now what does it mean evil in his human spirit? Our human spirit is regenerated at the point we become Christians, but the regenerate part of the human spirit, and again I have to admit I do not know how to talk intelligibly about the human spirit except to use part; conceptually the spirit is something that just defies our normal mode of categorization. But the human spirit is regenerated in believers; David’s human spirit was regenerated. That happened when he became a Christian years ago, or a believer under the Old Testament dispensation. Now, his human spirit, however, was also affected by the fall, so if you can visualize the human spirit it has a part of it that is regenerated, and the rest of it, so to speak, has to be taken over by that regenerate spirit. Said another way, if the word “spirit” means too mystical, replace it with its synonym in the English language; what is the synonym in our every day language for spirit? Attitude. When you speak of a football game, the football at the halftime you say they went out and had great spirit; what do you mean? You go to visit someone in the hospital and you say their spirits were good; do you mean they had a lot of bottles under the bed? What do you mean when you say their spirits are good? It means their attitude toward life is good. It’s positive, it’s aggressive. All right, replace here the “regenerate attitude.”

Now what would be a regenerated attitude? Orientation to grace, the submissiveness to God’s will, the determination that I will reconstruct after God’s plan, and I will not autonomously generate my own blueprints and build my own buildings and my own towers. That is a rebellious spirit, and David is saying “Blessed is the man” and he links in verse 2 the forgiveness of sins with the absence of this rebelliousness, this rebellious attitude. This is connected with those principalities of Ephesians 2:2, “the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience,” like walking through a magnetic field, there’s no neutrality in life, you’re either subject to that which is a submissive gracious attitude toward God or rebellious defiance toward God and there is no neutrality. Now David equates a change that has happened here. Apparently once the human spirit moves off in negative volition it stains itself; the conscience is actually said, the conscience is apparently part of the human spirit in Scripture, the conscience is said to be dirty, that’s why it has to be cleansed. And while the conscience is dirty, while it is filthy in God’s sight, it stays away from His presence.

There’s an internal battle that’s going on, and this dirt cannot be cleansed by psychotherapy, it can’t be cleansed by taking tranquilizers and drowning your problems away. It can’t be done by any of these methods; only one an experiential appropriation of the finished work of Jesus Christ, our great high priest. And when that finished work of Christ is applied to the point of rebellion, then miraculously and no less miraculously than when we were regenerated, when we first became Christians, the dirt is taken away and washed away and purged with hyssop, and then as a result of the cleanliness, God’s bath, as a result of that, then there’s no more guile in the spirit. That doesn’t mean further lessons don’t have to be learned, it means that the removal of the guile from the spirit is synonymous with the forgiveness of sins, a very important point.

Now, verse 3 goes back in time to how David felt. You see, David was in such negative volition that he ignored from his conscience, you have one channel that goes to the mind and it says you’re wrong; David ignored channel one. David had a rich emotional life, that emotional life was in revolt and turbulence, fathered by the conscience, by a channel two, the mind locking authority to the conscience, unable to control the emotions, David retreated into a tremendous sentimentalism, an emotionalism in his life. There’s no more any stability, just this chaos all the time, no stability. But apparently that wasn’t enough for David because the evidence of the text suggests that God had to do something, the third thing, He had to strike him ill physically, some psychosomatic effects and other means. God had to work a medical disaster in his life. Now you see, by bringing physical illness into the picture He forces David to look up because David has to be flat on his back; see, that’s one way of literally getting the believer to look up.

So one of these three methods will be used and I might add a little application to this, when you pray for yourself in the area of illness, if you are thinking biblically, the first thing obviously that ought to enter your mind is an analysis of why am I sick. Now it’s true that you can’t always pinpoint the answer, that’s true, but if you are thinking correctly and Biblically the first thing to do is not call a doctor. Now I have nothing against doctors and we would veer completely away from the Christian Science idea that sickness is just a dream. We’re not talking about that. But in the sequence that you approach and respond to physical illness you always ought to ask yourself: is this discipline. Paul insisted that the Corinthians were sick because they violated the communion order, and he said, “For this reason, many are sick, weak and even many sleep among you.” Death had broken out; we don’t know whether it was a plague that hit the congregation at Corinth or not, but some medical disaster had hit that congregation, and Paul, being a spiritually sensitive man saw it; that wasn’t just germs that blew over Corinth from the Aegean some place. That was due to a spiritual reason. Now what was the reason? Sin.

Now are we saying that all discipline is due to sin? No, review the categories of suffering. Category one, suffering is because of the fall of man. Category two suffering is because of rebellion. Category three suffering is identification of the divine institutions. Category four suffering is identification with Jesus Christ in Satan’s world. Category five suffering is to learn various things from God. And category six is to be a testimony. Now there at least one of those six reasons always involved in every physical illness. However, we don’t live in a universe of chance. God is sovereign, righteous, just, loving, omniscient, omnipotent, omniscient, immutable and that means when you come to a medical problem that medical problem isn’t an accident. There is a reason for it. Now this is not to say that you become morbidly self-introspective because of this. It’s not that at all, but it is to say that the first thing in your sequence should be hey, let’s check things out. So the different categories of suffering are valid, and the one that you should be concerned with is category two; that’s rebellion, have we rebelled against God’s will and He’s been knocking and knocking and knocking at our minds, couldn’t get any activity that way, He’s been hitting our emotions, emotions, and emotions, couldn’t get anything that way, so He had to give us a good swift kick you know where, through medical sickness.

Now, that is what’s happened to David in verse 3, “When I kept silence,” now it’s interesting he says “when I kept silence,” it means I deliberately refrained from speaking. Speaking what, you mean David went around mmmm, for fifteen months never spoke to anyone? Well, that may have been part of the problem but the silence of verse 3 is a silence before God. That’s the silence, there’s no more prayer any more, no more praise of God, no more thanksgiving any more. Remember how vocal David was in his Psalms of praise, he would always be thanking God for something. And now he looks back and says you know, all during those fifteen months, now I look back on it, I notice something, I wasn’t singing any songs during that period of time, I wasn’t composing any, I wasn’t thanking God for anything, I wasn’t even praying to Him and talking about my problems with Him, just maybe a nod to God once every other day, or something, but there was no serious prayerful communion with God. That had all dropped out of his life.

And so he says, “When I kept silence,” and it’s as long as I kept silence, in defiance against what my conscience told me to do, then he says, “my bones waxed [became] old through my roaring all the day long.” And the word “roaring” means constant moaning because of pain. And it means that David during his period of carnality suffered from a certain form of physical illness. Now this explains a lot of divine healing. We have distortion in many areas, but that is not to say that there can’t be quick and rapid healing of many illnesses when the sin behind them is dealt with. We live in a supernatural world, so whey not link the physical with the spiritual, why persist in this big dualism, that somehow the spiritual life has absolutely nothing to do with my physical body. How do you know? It isn’t in the Bible. It ties the two together.

So if the sickness, and again I say not all sickness is due to this at all, Paul prayed three times to God to heal him from whatever it was that was the thorn in his side, three times the Lord said no. And we point out the fact that Paul wasn’t healed then, yes. But the point that we often overlook is the fact that he did besiege the Lord three times about it. And that’s something to remember. In other words, Paul when he was sick immediately must have started thinking, hey, wait a minute, let’s start praying to God about this thing. Now it didn’t mean Paul didn’t use medicine. Do you know why we know that? Who was his traveling companion? Luke. What was Luke? A medical doctor. So did Paul use medicine? You bet he did. All right, so this is not an attack against medicine, it’s simply a way of using medicine economically. After all, medical bills are high, why not cut the cost, confess sin. There’s a new bumper sticker for you: reduce health costs, confess sin. So he had this illness that went on and on.

Verse 4 describes it in a more excruciating way, “For day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me; my moisture is turned into the drought of summer,” that’s dehydration. That’s a complete upset of the electrolytes in his body. He had an imbalance and his body was slowly becoming dehydrated and it’s a very serious condition. This is why, for example, small babies with high fever, it much more critical for a child to have a high fever than it is for an adult in some instances because a child can get dehydrated so fast. His body doesn’t have the quantity or the volume of fluids. Well here you have dehydration occurring. This is not allegorical, verses 3-4, it’s literal. This is a literal physical illness and if David, all during this time, he says while “I kept silence” in other words, this probably went on ten to fifteen months he was sick this way.

Do you think David during this time went to a doctor? Probably did, but you know there was one doctor he didn’t go to and that was Nathan. The prophet’s were also medical doctors. Isaiah practiced medicine as well as being a prophet in his own day and he was called to the side of King Hezekiah, and Isaiah prescribed, he had the right to prescribe drugs for medical illness. Did Isaiah, as a miraculous prophet of God use medicine? He sure did. Medicine is not to be renounced, it’s just to be put in its perspective. You can’t expect a doctor to come in here and solve David’s problem, as though it’s some sort of chemical warfare. See, that’s the human viewpoint of the whole medical problem, it’s just who has the biggest chemicals, the viruses or man; usually the viruses win out. But it’s always viewed as though it’s a chemical battle. What’s the pill that I have to take. That’s a human viewpoint mentality. At no point is the question ever asked what’s the relationship between sin and sickness. That’s a question that David never asked and he’s telling us we’d better check into it.

Verse 5, “I acknowledged my sin unto Thee,” now here he recounts what happened after Nathan visited, “and mine iniquity have I not hidden.” See, that’s the stopping of operation cover-up. It’s also described in Psalm 51. “I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD, and You forgave the iniquity of my sin.” Total cleansing.

Then verse 6, he begins to instruct us. Here’s what David learned about this, this is his response, he not only… you see God in His grace has many reasons for suffering. You go back to these six reasons, David suffered by category one. Category one, by the way, you can always guess, all suffering involves at least category one, so if you have brain fatigue while you’re running through the six and you want to satisfy yourself, at least you know one reason why you’re suffering, it’s because you live in a fallen world. So you can set it in that perspective. So number one was involved in David’s case. Number two was involved in David’s case; number four certainly was involved in David’s case because Satan was interested in tubing David out. Number five is involved because number five is the one that we read in verse 6, this is what David learned out of this thing.

Verse 6, “For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when You may be found,” now isn’t that interesting, it says “For this,” for this what? For this reason. What reason? What David has learned, and that is the godly that he’s talking about in verse 6 are not plaster saints who never sinned, precisely the opposite. Who are the godly people in verse 6 that will be doing the praying? People who will be doing the same sinning David did. And so he’s saying “for this every one that is godly,” that means a believer, and believers who are sinning actively. “…every one that is godly will be praying,” present tense here, the imperfect tense in the Hebrew, “will be praying unto Thee in a time when you may be found,” now what does he mean by a “time when you may be found? He’s talking there about the fact that if the godly learn from my experience, they will try to deal with the conscience up here, when the conscience sends over a signal to the mind, “when thou mayest be found.”

See, something happens here that you ought to be aware of now. When the conscience tells you something in your mind, hey, it’s wrong, it violates a standard of the Word of God, at that point you know you’re wrong. But suppose you say “no” at that point. Now watch what happens; now we’ve got a problem because now how is the conscience going to communicate to you? Verbally or non-verbally? It can’t communicate any longer verbally because you chose to ignore that form of communication. So how then can the conscience communicate? By emotions. But emotions can’t communicate content. So the only way the conscience has is upsetting enough so you will have to go back and use your mind to deal with the problem. But the emotions themselves are only an indirect mode of communication; it’s a non-verbal communication. And then when you deal with physical illness of the body, that certainly is a non-verbal form of communication. So again you can’t understand and you can’t confess if you don’t understand. So you see, once you let go of that first channel and slide into compound carnality, where the only two options are your emotions and your body, the only thing you’ll be really aware of is there’s something wrong, something’s wrong but you can’t really pinpoint it because you’ve chosen actively to repress the clear understanding the Holy Spirit offers you through your conscience. You’ve chosen to ignore that, to repress it, turn it away.

Now “the time when thou mayest be found” is the time when the conscience is telling you through your mind. You may be [can’t understand word] you can understand the thing, so therefore he’s saying the people are going to learn from me and from my experience that keep short accounts, that when your conscience convicts, deal with it then, don’t wait, because if you wait you can’t always find God.

Let me run through this again because it’s an important point. At point one the believer has sinned. The conscience says there’s something wrong and the believer is aware of the issue. So he’s aware of discomfort and he’s aware of the issue. When you slide over to the second mode you are aware of discomfort but you are now no longer aware of the issue, that has dropped away and all you have left is the discomfort and the upset and the chaos and the confusion. You’ve got that but you don’t really know why you’ve got that. And the same when you go to the body, and that’s the time when God can’t be found unless God Himself takes by grace the initiative, which here, behind Psalm 32 God did, and how did God take the initiative? David had the discomfort by channel two, he had the discomfort by channel three, but how did he become aware of the problem? Through his mind and conscience; only when what happened? When God called Nathan from outside of him, then he reestablished channel one. But once channel one is severed one is severed there’s a problem and then God, the Holy Spirit, has to take all sorts of maneuvers to reestablish that broken channel that we, by our own choice, have ignored and destroyed.

“For this shall every one that is godly pray unto Thee in a time when You may be found,” when the conscience is actively speaking to the mind, then deal with the problem, don’t wait to get this channel one tubed out. “…surely in the floods of great waters, they shall not come near unto Him.” Now “great waters” is a sign of judgment. Why? From the divine viewpoint of history? Noah’s flood. Okay, so that is why the flood in the Bible from Noah forward are pictures of judgment. So now you can interpret what the flood in verse 6 is, actually it’s flood, singular, “the flood of great waters,” that’s an illustration from a literal flood but it’s an application of the idea. The flood, the metaphor, is great problems and great difficulties that come in the life, the great pressures that come in, and particularly pressures from channel two and three.

In other words, if the godly would pray while the conscience is functioning along channel one to the mind, then “the flood of great waters will never come night unto thee.” What are “the flood of great waters”? Judgment, that is suffering under category two, which is suffering by an emotional disturbance and suffering by a bodily disturbance. And he says if you just take the precautions of handling your problem, you won’t get to the point where God has to send great waters, they’ll never come near you, it’s a promise in verse 6. Deal with sin in the mental attitude and the great waters will not come near unto you. God does not take pleasure in judging His children, but He will judge them if we misbehave.

Verse 7, “You are my hiding place; You shall preserve me from trouble: You shall compass me about with songs of deliverance.” Now that shows you he’s not talking about believers here in verse 7 who are plaster saints; he’s talking about believers that have dirt under their fingernails, about believers who sin. And the “songs of deliverance” are the songs of praise because he has been restored, and they are sung because he has had a rapid restoration from carnality.

Now verse 8 is the final application to the congregation to whom this Psalm was sung. He says, “I will instruct you and teach you in the way which you shall go; I will guide you with my eye” upon you. Now commentators differ as to whether David is speaking this or whether God is speaking this through David, and it looks to me that verses 8-9 are primarily God the Holy Spirit speaking to us through David’s mouth. [9] “Be not as the horse, or like the mule,” in other words, don’t be a stupid ass, there’s the Biblical passage if you’ve been lacking a reference, “that have no understanding, whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto you.”

Now the bit and the bridle refer to the powerful means of restraint God will bring upon sin, by channels two and three; that’s the whole point here. He’s trying to get believers not to [can’t understand word], will this ass go running all over the place, no because who has his hands on the bridle? God does. All right, this ass is going to have a very sore mouth if he tries it. And this is God’s point here, that God has a bit and a bridle. Now you can go one way or the other day down the path. You see, the believer has a path by predestination; we are predestined to be conformed to Jesus Christ; visualize it as a highway going up a mountain. And we have this point all along the highway. Now we can choose to go along that highway, happy or sad, but we will stay on the road. That’s the fine print in the doctrine of eternal security most people don’t look at. The fine print says yeah, you’ll go on the road and if I have to put a bit in your bridle I’ll drag you along the road. So what David is saying, don’t be like one of these people, don’t be a stupid ass.

Verse 10, “Many sorrows shall be to the wicked,” and the “wicked” in verse 10 are believers, not unbelievers. “Many sorrows … but he that constantly trusts in the LORD, mercy shall compass him about. [11] Be glad in the LORD, and rejoice, ye righteous ones; and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.” Those are those who are forgiven.

All right, that’s how David felt. Now let’s turn back and see how Nathan confronted him in 2 Samuel 12. Nathan is going to confront David with a two-fold approach. Nathan is a student of God’s Word. We don’t know how God laid it on Nathan’s heart; God did not have to speak to Nathan in a vision, God could have very easily just opened Nathan’s perception that Nathan knew enough of David to know how David normally reacted. When you see a believer and you get to know that believer well enough, and you know they’re in fellowship and out of fellowship, and they have this kind of pattern, that’s fine, you get used to that. But when you begin to notice a deviation that lasts for a time period, you know you’ve got a problem. So Nathan must have known just from observing David in the court, Nathan was in the court, he walked in there, he saw David, he knows David wasn’t acting right and hasn’t been acting right for months. So he knew David had a problem.

Now we also know who it was that were the intermediaries between Bathsheba and David; they were members of the court. So apparently Nathan didn’t even need supernatural revelation to understand what David’s problem was, he got it from the court gossip. That’s a supposition but it’s a reasonable one, that he picked this up talking to the people, they knew what was going on in the background. So Nathan is going to come to David with two approaches. He’s going to start out with an indirect approach, then he’s going to try the direct one. The indirect approach is by means of a parable. Now the parable, and this is the classic reference for the use of a parable, by the way, those of you who like to read Jesus’ parables in the New Testament, here is why so much doctrine is taught in the Bible by means of parables. The reason God teaches in parables, and I used to be frustrated, as a new Christian, why does God teach in parables, why doesn’t He just say what He’s going to say, beating all around with the talents and everything else, why didn’t He just say the stuff, why go through this parable business. God teaches by parables… [tape turns]

We are not prepared to receive the truth that He has, and so this is His way of sneaking up on you. He gets you to agree that He’s right before you’ve really realized the implications of what you’ve agreed to, because if you realized all the implications to what you agreed to you’d never have agreed to it, because you see, the sin nature always likes to cover itself up. You know when you’re out of fellowship, you know you’re vulnerable before God. Go back to the doctrine of the fall; why did Adam and Eve cover themselves with fig leaves; they were naked before and it didn’t bother them. But their nakedness did bother them afterwards. Why? Because now they were going to confront God and now it became an issue, they were naked before God and how foolish to cover up one’s nakedness before God and His omniscience. Nevertheless, they tried. And when they did so, at this point, they mirrored the reason why we have parables. Parables are to get over the fig leaves, the cover-up and all the rest of it.

And Nathan knew that David had all sorts of excuses and cover-ups made, so he knew if he just went in there and plowed into David like a bulldozer, David would harden his heart further. You could argue here, well but isn’t it God’s will that David come around at this point. Yes, but God’s sovereignty in the Bible never excludes human responsibility and He expects Nathan to use his head in dealing with David. So Nathan isn’t going to walk in there and have the thing blow up in his face, he’s going to use his head. So he approaches it first with a parable because he knows, deep as David is in his sin, David at heart knows God’s standard. He still knows God’s Law. So the parable is now designed to secure David’s agreement that wrong has been done.

So he starts, [1] “And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. [2] The rich man had very many flocks and herds. [3] But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up; and it grew up together with him, and with his children. It did constantly eat” this is an habitual imperfect in the Hebrew, constantly, daily, “of his own food, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. [4] And there came a traveler unto the rich man, and he was not willing to take of his own flock and of his own herd….”

Now at this point Nathan begins his technique, because right in verse 4 where you see that, “And there came a traveler,” he uses a particular verb, it caught my eye when I was translating this because it’s not the verb you’d expect; you’d expect “there came a traveler unto the rich man, and he didn’t take, or he didn’t choose to take of his own flock.” That’s the way you’d expect it. In the Hebrew there’s a strange verb put in here. It says, “he had compassion on his own flock.” And he’s slowly working here to point out to David something, this is phony compassion. You see, this is the self-righteousness of the cover-up that he’s holding out here. He says “this man had compassion on all those sheep in his flock,” he’s going to kill a little ewe lamb but he had compassion on all of his, and you can sense the sarcasm here, but it’s put there because the parable has got to eat away first at the cover-up because this is the excuse. You see, David would have an excuse why it had to be Bathsheba or why it had to be Uriah, always an excuse. So this prepares the way for dealing with the excuse. “…and he showed great mercy to his own flock, and of his own herd, to dress [prepare] it for the wayfaring man who was come unto him, but took the poor man’s lamb, and dressed [prepared] it for the man who was come to him.”

And now in verse 5 we have one of the great [can’t understand word] of literary structure of Samuel, “And David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man;” so here you have David, he’s still in his conscience has norms. Now if you stop here a moment you’re going to see something that’s very important to Biblical psychology, and you’ll see it in your own heart time and time and time again, it’s disgusting but nevertheless, everyone here has it so it’s one thing we can share one with another. Conscience has the norms and the standards. Okay, he knows David’s got the norms and standards. Now in the mind David has various categories of experience. Here’s David’s own life, and here are other’s lives. Now while David is in sin, because his own life is guilty before the conscience, what area of his mind is going to be cut off from the norms and standards of the conscience? Obviously his own life. So David has built up a big compartment here, and so he employs his conscience selectively; he employs it only on certain things now, instead of across the board the conscience is applied only here, but not up here. It’s applied to others but not himself; this is the mote and the beam of Matthew 7, casting the beam out of your own eye before you go casting the motes out of others.

So David will apply the norms and standards, they haven’t gone, they’re still lodged firmly in his conscience and Nathan knows this. So Nathan says aha, I’m going to use those standards, I know inside David’s heart there’s Bible doctrine, and I know it’s there because probably Nathan taught him. In fact David says something right now that he’s familiar with the Law because what he’s going to say is almost a quotation out of Exodus. So the Law is on David’s mind. So Nathan says I know that David knows Bible doctrine. So therefore he’s been to Bible class and he’s taken it but right now he’s not applying it to himself. So what I’m going to do, I’m going to get him started applying doctrine, but I’m not going to start with himself, I’m going to start with other people. So let’s get David applying, so okay, he throws the conscience in action, Lord, that’s wrong. So now Nathan has got David’s conscience beginning to move. It’s beginning to apply, it’s beginning to judge.

Verse 5, “And David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan,” and now God is going to use a very interesting piece of irony. God is going to sit back and Nathan is going to sit back and they’re going to let David judge himself, because the sentence that David passes on the man is the sentence that David will receive from God. God is going to allow David to judge himself when he thinks he’s judging someone else.

Now this is why Jesus said something in the Sermon on the Mount that pertains. Turn to Matthew 7:2. Now if you’re the kind that likes to go around snooping in other people’s business, and judging them, I can save you a lot of grief if you’ll just pay attention for about three minutes, then you can tune out and lose the rest of it but in you just pay attention you might learn something that will help you. After the phrase, verse 1, “Judge not that ye be not judged,” that’s the maligning criticism, that’s not trying to say that you can’t evaluate people, for example, employer to evaluate potential employees, etc. That’s not talking about that, it’s talking about this criticism thing. And what Jesus is saying is “Judge not that ye be not judged.” And then he expands what he said, verse 2, “For with what judgment you judge someone else, you shall be judged; and with what measure you mete it shall be measured to you again.” Now we’re going to watch that principle in action. Turn back to 2 Samuel 12 and let’s watch this principle work.

David says two things about this man; he’s furious at what Nathan said, and Nathan has been very clever in all of this because he’s apparently said it so David doesn’t catch on that it’s a parable. See, if he’d come right out and said there was once upon a time a man, now that’s the way a parable would begin, but Nathan doesn’t begin the parable that way. He starts it very ambiguously so David doesn’t catch on to what he’s done. And the reason he does this, as far as David thinks, Nathan is telling him about somebody that’s out there. See, the king passed sentence on people, the king could judge in Israel. So Nathan has very cleverly dropped off the usual heading of the parable and just come up to David. So David responds as though Nathan has somebody out there that should be judged and he’s coming to David to find out, hey, I’ve got this guy out here and I need some help, what do you think we ought to do. So David very aggressively applies the rules of his conscience. And so he says, “As the LORD lives, the man who has done this thing shall surely die.” So point 1, capital punishment, in a few seconds David is going to become an advocate of the abolition of capital punishment but right here he’s very much for it because it’s someone else.

Verse 6, and then the second, “And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had not pity.” Now watch it, this second sentence is the four-fold restoration. Now where did David get that. Turn to Exodus 22:1, here is why David said it was four-fold, David didn’t just foam at the mouth, David was actively using Bible doctrine that he already had in his soul. He was applying it and it was legitimate for David to do this. David just didn’t blow his cork and come out with this sentence. It was a thought out wisely applied sentence. What does Exodus 22:1 say: “If a man shall steal an ox or a sheep, and kill it or sell it, he shall restore five oxen for an ox, four sheep for a sheep.” So David’s sentence conforms to the Law. The only place where David is really a little bit out of line is applying the first sentence, capital punishment for theft. And you’re going to see how God is going to correct that in a moment. But let’s look at the sentence that David has passed.

But then in verse 7 Nathan says, and at this point, it’s the most startling passage in Scripture, “And Nathan said to David, you are the man.” And now he goes to his direct approach. Now keep in mind the four-fold restoration because now that four-fold restoration is going to reappear again in another verse, so just remember, back in the parable David passed the sentence. “And Nathan said to David, you are the man. Thus saith the LORD God of Israel,” and now watch what God is going to do in verse 7; the tendency always is, in any kind of sin, what did we say in Genesis 3, always to blot God’s authority and smear His character. Now God, if you can think of it this way without distorting Him, God gets defensive when we sin and God will actively defend His character upon us when we make these counterclaims in our carnality against Him. And so here is God’s defense.

“…Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul,” seven times we might add, if you recall the details. Verse 8, “And I gave you your master’s house,” from this point forward when you see the word beth or house, it doesn’t just mean the kingdom, it’s a particular part of the kingdom, it is the harem. Now it may seem like a problem today in New Testament ethics but in the Old Testament it was legitimate that when one king took the throne he took all the king’s girlfriends with him. It was a sign that he was reigning as king. And the claim to try and marry one of the king’s wives was tantamount to saying I claim the throne. So the harem went with the throne, you can’t separate them.

That’s what verse 8 is talking about, “I” God did this, “I gave you your master’s house,” that’s Saul’s house, “and Saul’s wives into thy bosom,” and “into thy bosom” means the right of sex, God said I gave you those women and you had the right to have sex with any one of them because I gave you that privilege as king, and not only that, “I gave you the house of Israel and Judah,” do you know what the implication of that is? You could have gone out and married any virgin girl that you wanted to, any one, you could have done this. “…and if that had been too little, I would, moreover, have given unto thee such and such things.” In other words, David, I know you had a big libido, and I was willing to provide for it lawfully.

But verse 9, “Why have you despised the commandment of the LORD, to do evil in His sight? In other words, the Word of God means the general plan, I provided for those needs but you despised Me. See this is works orientation, that’s that mental attitude of rebelliousness, the autonomous spirit, “you despised” literally “the Word of God to do this evil.” You see the evil follows the despising in this sentence; please notice the order. Overt activity follows not precedes, follows God’s Word, and it’s [can’t understand word]. “Thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite, with the sword,” there’s murder, “and you have taken his wife to be your wife, and you have slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon.” And that’s an added insult because he’s taken the enemies of Israel and you’ve let them glory in this disaster.

Verse 10, “Now, therefore,” now God is going to pronounce the sentence, and God is going to reverse the sentence. What were the two sentences that David passed? He said capital punishment on the man and he said the four-fold restoration of the lamb. Now God is going to turn around and He’s to confirm part of the sentence, so He starts with the second one, the four-fold, not the first one. “Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised Me and you have taken the wife of Uriah, the Hittite, to be thy wife. [11] Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I am raising up” and it’s a future [can’t understand word] participle in the Hebrew, it means right this moment and right this hour David, “I am raising up evil against thee out of your own house, and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them unto your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of the sun. [12] For you did it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.”

Now the “sword” and the “taking of the wives” is a very interesting irony of history because now I want to show you the four-fold restoration that David had to make. David killed Uriah, he took his wife. That is going to be restored four-fold, let’s watch how it happens. In 2 Samuel 12:19, David has committed adultery with Bathsheba and the boy that is born dies. David loses his first son as a result of this. Notice the two things, adultery leading to death.

Now turn to 2 Samuel 13:28, we’ll study this event in detail but tonight we’ll just highlight it to show you the overall pattern and structure that history is not chaotic, these things just didn’t happen in David’s life, there was a pattern to them. Notice what happened the second time. David has a daughter by one wife and a son by another, and the son is Amnon, and the daughter is Tamar, and Amnon rapes his half-sister, Tamar. So you have a rape and then in verse 28, Absalom, who is the full brother of Tamar said, “Mark ye, now, when Amnon’s heart is merry with wine, and when I say unto you, Smite Amnon; then kill him,” and so you have murder. David loses a second son, Amnon.

Turn to 18:14, Absalom captures all of David’s wives, he had sex relations with them, and so again have adultery and then Absalom in verse 14, “Then said Joab, I may not tarry thus with you. And he took three darts in his hand, and thrust them through the heart of Absalom,” while he was hanging with his long hippie hair from the tree. And so again you have murder. Absalom was the forerunner of the hippie movement. So again notice the pairing, you’ll have a sex sin and then you’ll have a violent sin, and David loses a third son.

Finally 1 Kings 2:24, Adonijah claims David’s wives for himself, Solomon is king, and Solomon recognizes it as an attempt to capture the throne, and so Solomon says against Adonijah, “Now, therefore, as the LORD lives, who has established me, and set me on the throne of David, my father, and who has made me an house, as he promised, Adonijah shall be put to death this day.” Adonijah, adultery and execution and David loses a fourth son.

Now is this just chance, that in every one of these four instances David loses a son and he loses it after the son has done a sin very parallel to his own.

Let’s turn back to 2 Samuel 12. God is very gracious here and in verse 13, David says, “I have sinned.” Now that shows you that David has come through, he’s crashed through, and I want you to notice a very interesting thing, a detail about this text, and if you follow Psalm 51 and Psalm 32, we’re going to wrap it up with verse 13, and you’re going to see a very interesting point about restoration. Let’s try to chart this chronologically so we can catch the moments of time. Nathan comes to David, he confronts David, David is exposed to his sin, and then David admits that he has sinned, so he confesses here, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Now immediately, with no psalm singing, no psalm composition, no big long agony, no long misery, immediately there’s a sign of grace. See, that’s how urgent God wants grace to flow toward us.

Verse 13, “And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD. And Nathan said unto David, The LORD has put away your sin; you will not die.” Remember the two sentences? Capital punishment on that man who stole the sheep, and he will restore him four times. The four times is lawful by Exodus, and so God says I’ll let that one go; David you’ve sentenced yourself, but David, you were too hard on yourself. Now of course David didn’t know it was himself that he was hard on, but God said you didn’t have to do that and I’m going to erase it. So David is granted the right to live.

Now the interesting thing about all this is that apparently in verse 13 David was restored to fellowship but it is also apparent from Psalm 51 that there was some time involved. How can we reconcile Psalm 51 with verse 13. Psalm 51 involves a great deal of thought about the problem; verse 13 is quick. Verse 13 records what actually happened; Psalm 51 is how God the Holy Spirit dealt with him after he confessed, got back in fellowship, and he had these –R learned behavior patterns, that is when things were dealt with. In other words, at a point in time David confessed, but that doesn’t mean he just tripped on his merry way after that point. It means that immediately he went into a period of contemplation, intense prayer and Bible study and he got everything straightened out, and during those times he composed three Psalms. We studied two, Psalm 32, Psalm 38 and Psalm 51. And they were composed out of this apparently then prolonged period of what happened.

Let’s have a postmortem and find out what the deal is. This is David’s confession and I think we can all take heart to notice how willing that God is that we do confess our sins to Him. There is not one person here this evening, if you are a Christian and you think you’ve committed some sin or something and you’re walking around holding off confession because you want to work up a lot of good works to impress God, now just forget it and relax. Instead of getting up tight about yourself let’s just look at it from the point of the Word of God. God wants you home functioning more than you want to be home functioning. God is not going to sit there and smash you in the face if you will come to Him and confess your sin. He’s not that kind of a God; Satan has bewitched you if you think that God the Father is going to sit there and throw mud in your face when you come to Him with a penitent heart. Our Father is not that kind of Father; Satan is that kind of a person, but not God. And God the Father would have us understand His grace just as David did, not wait, call upon Him when He may be found, don’t wait. And there are times in our life when we have neglected channel one and we’re on channel two and three, but God in His grace calls us through His Word.

Let’s bow for prayer.