Clough Manhood Series Lesson 34

David: How to Deal with Mistakes – 2 Samuel 11; 12, 16; 13; Psalm 51; 3;

Shall we start by tuning to Psalm 30:5; we’ve studied three stages in David’s life. David was one of the model men of Scripture and his life can give some guidance, at least some sort of a model for Christian men and we’ve found so far at least three distinguishable stages. One stage is where he, with discipline, he has a discipline development of his natural talents and skills, and this occurs during his adolescent period. So one of the first qualities in David’s character was discipline and responsibility. He was given a job to herd his family’s sheep and he had to hold onto that job, whether it was raining, whether it was sunny, whether it was hot, whether it was cold, whether he was tired, whether he felt like it, whether he didn’t feel like it, he learned responsibility, a vital lesson. Nothing else can go on in life unless responsibility is learned. And so with responsibility and discipline, David then developed his skills of military war, combative skills, hand to hand skills, and his musical skills. Many sheep enjoyed concerts out on the range with David and his harp.

Then we found in the second period in his life a period that often is so frustrating to men, the period of the blocked advance, when it seems like there’s no promotion, it seems like the business doesn’t open up, it seems like there’s no break through, it just seems one interminable year after year of spinning one’s wheels. David went through this. In fact, almost the whole second half of 1 Samuel is this period in David’s life, but we know from Scripture that although David’s career was blocked, and though many of the promotions were never forthcoming, God was working inside of David, so though his career was blocked on the outside, the character that he was developing in his soul on the inside was not blocked at all, but was being honed and developed for that moment when he would ascend the throne.

The third period of his life we found to be the praise period. It was in this case when he ascended the throne, he had rest from all his enemies, he had, so to speak, accomplished it, he had arrived, he showed a tremendous attitude of a godly man by taking the true products of his career that God had given him and focus them in a praise of God. That is, he, so to speak, gave back his career to God. He, in essence, set up the cultist and in so doing said I am not really king. All the struggle of all the years to get to this throne do not mean that that struggle does not mean that I am the real king. And so therefore, after getting the crown on his head, after sitting on the throne, then he says, God is king, and I want God to be king in a very majestic way. And so David, in a very masculine way, structured the praise for God. It was David who began the musical aids to worship.

I didn’t comment last week but some still wonder why the choir sings from the back. I think we’ve gotten over most of the curiosity that we had when first started the choir singing in the back with everyone turning around and kind of eying me with a look that said dog gone it, why are you doing this so I have to look around for. And I used to sit over here and I could see all of your looks. The point there was that the choir was moved to the back because we are following the Levitical strategy. In the Old Testament the choir was not in the front putting on a music show. In the Levitical strategy, both in Leviticus and here in the cultist passages of Chronicles with David’s career, the Levitical choirs were organized to help the congregation worship, not put on a show or performance for the congregation. You can read it, for example, in Exodus 15, where Miriam sings antiphonally with the people, and she’s leading the people in musical worship. It’s not singing at people, thereby requiring a front position; it is singing with people, thereby requiring a position in the back. And this is a sound scriptural approach toward music and toward its place in worship. And so David was the man who started this.

Someone reminded me after the service, after I had made the point last week of saying that isn’t it interesting how the man in his masculine way beefs up the majesty of praise, and so there’s a majestic element to the praise of David that only men can really give. And this person reminded me that isn’t it interesting in history, there’s never been a famous female composer; among both Christian and non-Christian this is the general rule. It’s not because women did not have musical training for they did; generations ago women were very highly trained in some of the courts of Europe in music, and yet it is interesting to observe that almost without exception there is no historical composer of note who was a woman. Now we believe that’s not an accident. We believe that that is something that shows the innate qualities of the male and the female; that it’s the male and part of his maleness before God to be the one that launches, directs and controls musical performance. The woman is there, as Miriam showed; this is not to deny the woman a role, but it’s to say once again that the spiritual leadership cannot be in the hands of women but must be in the hands of men.

Now all during that period of developing his talent, the blocked advance, and the turning over of his accomplishments to God in praise, Psalm 30 depicted the mental attitude, the attitudes that were at work in his soul. Psalm 30:5, one of the famous memory verses of certain systems of memory of Scripture. “For His anger endure but a moment; in his grace is life. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” That’s what kept David going. And in verses 11-12 we have a further evidence of this man’s spirituality. “Thou hast turned for me my morning into dancing; Thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness. [12] To the end that my glory may sing praise to Thee, and not be silent.” There’s the end of his career, that’s the purposed end of his career, not the time end, for David as a godly man looked upon his career as a time in which he would interact with God in history so that at the end of it there would be genuine praise. And that’s what… “my glory” is not some instrument or something here, “my glory” is another synonym for his soul; that “my glory might praise you and not be silent. O LORD, my God, I will give thanks unto Thee forever.” And of course, in the presence of God forever that’s exactly what we’ll be doing.

Now the Scriptures don’t leave us with David at the end of three stages and career but the Scriptures give us a fourth period in his life. This is to remind us that David was not Mr. Perfection; this is to remind us that David is one of us, and therefore the Christian man who looks at David need not get discouraged, and not think that David has something going that he doesn’t have. David has everything we have and we have everything David has, in the broad essentials. Yes, there’s a dispensational shift here and there, but in the broad essentials it’s the same.

And so this fourth stage is to show David’s imperfections. These imperfections were there before but the Scriptures, interestingly close out his life on the note of his imperfections, rather than on the note of his triumph as he sits on the throne of Israel. So we can say that this fourth point in David’s life conforms an answer to what every man must ask himself at some point in his life, how do I deal with my own failures? This is something that usually isn’t discussed because somehow we think it derogatory to the plan of God to admit that one can mature in the Scriptures and still fail repeatedly. Now that’s because we have misunderstood the plan of God.

We’ve already had three lousy examples in the Scriptures of men who did not cope with their failures. We saw Cain, who failed before God and defied Him, and therefore Cain became the wandering man, moving from point to point, never resting, flitting from job to job, never a firm perch for any length of time. And Cain, thereby, illustrates what some men do when they fail; they let their failure get them down and they become wanderers; they become, as it were, broken in their spirit. And so broken in their spirit they drift from one point to another. That’s Cain; Cain, the wanderer. Then Lamech; Lamech represents another male failure. He represents a classic syndrome that when the male fails he becomes violent and sexually promiscuous. Sex and violence are the characteristics of Lamech and early in history he shows that that is the result of male failure in some men. Then we saw the third lousy illustration, Saul and we showed that when Saul failed of men, because he failed inwardly; Lamech was a man who failed and he was external in his failure. Saul failed and he became internal, and he had mental attitude sins that ate him up. And Saul finally became, what we would call in our generation, mentally ill, but we disagree with the term. He couldn’t handle his mental attitude sins and his mental attitude sins finally wound up destroying him.

The problem is, with both Cain, Lamech and Saul, but these are all men who never operated at all under the principle of submission to Scripture. They never operated as believers, in a sense Saul was a believer, but they never operated in a real faith grace orientation. So we’ve got a bad example of how men meet failure. And we could summarize Cain, Lamech and Saul by this: we could simply say that these men are meeting their failures by failing again, and failing on top of their other failures and coating one failure with another failure, trying desperately to get out from under the first failure but nevertheless, just piling on one failure upon another.

But now we move to the other principle, what about the men in the Scripture who did operate on a grace basis; how did they handle their failure. Now people at this point will often say well, if they… I just can’t see a mature believer having extreme failure in his life. Well, then you haven’t properly grasped the doctrine of the fall and the doctrine of depravity. How could so and so do that when so and so is exposed to the Word of God for so long? It’s very easy. So and so could do that like you could, because so and so has a sin nature just like you do. And so and so’s sin nature is capable of any violent act that Scripture speaks of the Scripture speaks of thousands of them. So all men are liable to violent acts. All men are liable to mental attitude sin. We know from 1 John 1 that he who denies he has sin within him is a liar, and therefore that holds for all believers at all points in their sanctification; whether they are immature in their growth or mature, we have sin natures and those sin natures, expressed in Reformation terminology, total depravity, those sin natures are always alive and quick and powerful and ready to function. So yes, men fail and yes, it is part of the normal experience of Christian men to fail.

Well, if that’s the case and the Scriptures are complete, don’t you think there would be some passage in Scripture that would help a man out, that would show him somewhere what to do with his failures, instead of keeping them inside and saying well, I’m kind of giving up, I’ve blown it, my career is over, I’ve disproved myself, to hell with the whole thing. That’s the way a lot of people do; this is the way failure is handled, but it’s not the proper way of doing it. So we’re going to look at two points of failure in David’s life; we’re going to look at these quickly because this is not an exegesis of Samuel; we’re going to look at the Bath-sheba incident, his famous adultery and murder failure, and another failure over Absalom’s revolt. These are just two samples of many present in 2 Samuel, so turn to 2 Samuel 11. This time, rather than when we went through it exegetically verse by verse, since tonight we’re in a topical situation, we’re going to look more for principles in several of the verses and then skip quite a few of them.

2 Samuel 11:1, “And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David send Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel, and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem.” And you remember when we went through this in 2 Samuel we pointed out that David’s failure is first manifest in verse 1; Bath-sheba isn’t where he stumbled. He stumbled earlier than the Bath-sheba incident. Bath-sheba was simply a vehicle later on down the descent. The first failure is here, “David tarried still at Jerusalem.” The failure is amplified in verse 2, “And it came to pass in the eventide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house.” That’s the man who, in many, many cases in the book of Psalms had as his lifestyle getting up early in the morning, and now what do you see in verse 2? His lifestyle has shifted; he gets up late. Before we mentioned verses 1-2 but now, since we have already studied the principles of sin in the male, we can observe something else about verses 1-2 and connect it all the way back to Genesis 3.

In Genesis 3 when the curse was placed upon the creation the male and the female were said to experience sin differently. They were in their frustration following different roles, for God said to Adam, Adam, the curse hits you most on the job, when you till the ground and it frustrates you, it brings forth thorns and thistles, instead of the productive crops you want. And to the woman he said, your central problem of frustration will be childbearing including the rearing of the children that you bear. And so it has been down through the centuries that this is precisely where the male and the female have been hit hardest. Now isn’t interesting it’s repeated here in verses 1-2. Isn’t it interesting that David is being hit first on his job, his function as being a king, and only secondarily does the Bath-sheba come along. Isn’t it interesting therefore, how important the man and his job relationship are, how important it is therefore in the family that the man be sustained in his job situation, and his attitudes about his job; encouraged in his job. And if he isn’t, then this is the place where he is most vulnerable to satanic attack. So just kind of an application for Christian women who are concerned for their men, notice where David failed; he failed on the job first, then he failed after that.

And so the incident goes, “…David arose from his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house. And from the roof he saw a woman washing herself,” and as we said when we went through the book of 2 Samuel, we know what this washing was, pretty much from the way it goes on and the words that are used; it was the washing that a woman did under the Levitical law, Leviticus 15:19-28, seven days after her menstruation she would wash herself; this was a ritual washing under the Mosaic Law. This explains why she became pregnant at this time; you can figure it out yourself from ovulation and so on, that she was precisely in her period when she was most fertile at this time.

But the point of Bath-sheba and the point that we want to see in verse 2, and we made this point earlier, is that Bath-sheba is never pictured in Scripture as too bright. And it begins here; it’s not to bright to be cleansing yourself from menstruation in public on the roof of a building, and this is what she was doing. Then her other brilliant accomplishments are noted in Scripture, are in 1 Kings 1 where Nathan had to show her what’s going on after she has lived in the court for years and has got used to royal protocol, and there she gets involved in a plot on who was going to be the successor t David and so on, and Nathan has to sit her down and say Hon, now let me explain something. You may have been around here for years but I’ve got to do this; this is what you do Bath-sheba, and you don’t do this and you do this, and he had to give her a whole lesson protocol, 1 Kings 1:11-22. Then the third brilliant thing is she gets herself fouled up with Solomon in 1 Kings 2:12-25, almost gets herself killed. So therefore, although she may have been a beautiful woman, she apparently wasn’t too spiritually bright. She may have been bright intellectually but she just wasn’t too spiritually perceptive, and it’s this woman that is going to become the mother in the line of the Lord. So it’s just to show that God’s plan can use anyone. And Bath-sheba is an illustration.

You know the story, how David got her pregnant and then had to get rid of her husband and so one sin came upon another, and he tried to get rid of her husband by having him rubbed out in a fake military maneuver, a maneuver which, incidentally all of higher officers knew and later on told him about. And so there are two sins; not one, two, actually three mentioned. The first one is whatever it was that knocked him out in pursuing vigorously the calling that God had for him. Then, as a result of that, his life became disorganized. This is something systematic with the man. If he isn’t producing the way he thinks he ought to be producing, the rest of his life is all screwed up. It’s full of chaos; it’s not really satisfying and he’s liable to erratic behavior in these other areas. The reason again goes back to his God-consciousness. God made men this way. And the second thing we, of course, is sin with Bath-sheba, the third one the sin with Uriah, plus hundreds of others mixed in.

So we come to that famous chapter of 2 Samuel 12 where Nathan confronts him. Now the man has failed; David knows he’s failed and though we haven’t got time tonight we could turn to Psalm 32 and you could read, he knew all along that he was failing. It wasn’t a mystery to David. David did not have to go to a psychiatrist and $50 an hour to find out what was wrong. David did not have to go to a psychiatrist and find that his real problem was that Jesse, his father, had dropped him on his head when he was a baby, and he never developed normally; you know, he was the youngest boy in the family and he was excluded by all the other boys, maybe the psychiatrist would say David had a complex, he wanted to get attention, and so therefore he had to do something like this to get attention. And so there would be this discussion for hours and hours on tangents that are totally meaningless. Now Nathan doesn’t use Freud; fortunately! He doesn’t use Glasser, he doesn’t use any of the other shrinks that are running around in place of prophets today. He uses God’s Word and he approaches the situation, the counseling in verses 2-5 is an indirect approach, simply because he’s got to get under David’s guard.

And finally, in 2 Samuel 12:7 that famous line, “Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.” Now that’s very painful for David. It’s the most painful thing that anybody could ever admit, is they’ve sinned before God. That is the most painful thing that anyone can ever do, and that includes dying of cancer slowly; that is not as painful as the pain to the soul of admitting one’s sin before God. But God is very merciful and so he sends Nathan to David. David now is faced with a failure that is known. Before it was a failure that was unknown. David kept it a reasonable secret within the court and he could have gone on and had a successful Watergate if he had tried. But Nathan intercepted that and Nathan brought it all to the surface.

Now watch a man faced with his failure; a man who only a few chapters was a man that established the cultists of worship and the greatest temple that the world has ever seen; the greatest, most structured worship atmosphere that the world has ever seen. This is the man who now kicks himself for being so stupid. Now does he got into a massive depression? Well, he’s been in a depression, basically Psalm 32 says, for a year, when this is written. But now watch what he does. Nathan predicts certain things of him, and in 2 Samuel 12:13 David responds. It’s very simple, “I have sinned against the LORD.” You don’t find David going on a tirade, you don’t find him saying my career is all over because I’ve failed and I might as well toss it in, everything’s gone and this long exercise in self-pity. There’s none of that. What else are we supposed to do? If we sin we sin, so you can’t sit around crying about it, tears don’t for sin; Christ’s blood atones for sin. And so therefore we don’t act as though tears atone for sin. The cross of Christ is here we go. And so he said, “I have sinned,” and we want to amplify his thoughts by turning to Psalm 51 which we’ve gone through many times but tonight we want to just look at it topically.

Psalm 51, the confession psalm, written of the event at this time. The initial two verses is a description of the situation; we’ll skip down to Psalm 51:3-4 because here’s the central confession that is made. “For I acknowledge,” it says in the King James, but actually in the Hebrew it means “I know my transgressions; my sin is ever before me.” Now just look at that in verse 3, when you hear the psychologist say oh, there’s some deep seated mysterious forces at work and that will require, let’s see, $25, $50 an hour once a week for two and a half years. Hmm! Because to admit this and to go ahead with that kind of therapy denies verse 3. I can’t be a Bible-believing Christ honoring Christian and say that I don’t know my sin. The Bible says I obviously do know my sin and it’s ever before me. So let’s come off it, we do know our sin. Adam didn’t have a mysterious problem under the fig leaves as he peaked out to see whether God had walked by or not. Adam knew precisely what the problem was. Did Eve know her sin? Did Jesus Christ in the Garden have to conduct psychotherapy and make a couch for her right there by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so we could have therapy? No, not at all, because Eve knew precisely what the sin was. Now yes, at times the sin patterns can get tangled up and we have to work with them a little bit, okay. But they’re not mysteries. If they’re hidden from us momentarily they’re hidden from us because we’ve chosen to hide them from ourselves, that’s all. We’ve cleverly covered them over with fig leaves.

Well, David knows this and it’s a very important word, it is “ever before me.” Now what this says in modern terms is there is a psychological drain on one’s soul from one’s sin. This is why confession is so important; it conserves your psychic energies because you see, when we sinned there’s a signal that goes off inside our souls. Our conscience is there and our conscience is trying to signal to us that something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong. And that signal is automatic, it’s programmed by God; we have nothing to do with it, it’s automatic. And if we fail to acknowledge that simple signal, we block it off by ignoring it and suppressing it, the conscience has other ways, psychosomatic connections with our emotions, with our stomach, with our intestines; you can get ulcers, colitis, other things. There’s every illness known to man, arthritis is often aggravated this way. People say my arthritis is aggravated by an emotional upset. Well, there may be but most emotional upsets are sin upsets because we haven’t handled the situation properly. And so every medical weakness to our bodies are simply amplified and you have a psychosomatic picture of the physical drain on you because of sin.

So over here we have a psychic drain and that’s why the Bible is very merciful when it says confess your sin. It’s not being harsh; these are the operating instructions given to us by the manufacturer, and He says I haven’t built you to take this kind of psychic pressure, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. You aren’t structured that way and you’re going to blow your circuits, so confess your sin.

Now the sin, when it is confessed, ought to be confessed as in verse 4 because in verse 4 the sin is never against people. And this is a classic reference because you just have but to look up at the Psalm heading in Psalm 51 to see that it is no Charlie Clough’s fudged interpretation of bringing Psalm 51 into here. The heading tells you when Psalm 51 was written and so since you know when Psalm 51 was written you have but to go to 2 Samuel 11-12 and you know what the sins are and they’re all social sins. And yet when this confession is made in verse 4 it is not made socially; it is made to God. “Against Thee, and Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight.” Well, I don’t think that’s fair, Bath-sheba ought to get her dose, or Uriah an apology or something. All right, yes, but that’s not confession. The confession is always made to God. Why? And important principle about confession. Confession is an acknowledgment that I have broken God’s law. So therefore the confession can’t be made to the victim, it must be made to the party who made the Law. You go out here, as I’ve said often, and blow someone’s brains out, you haven’t sinned in the eyes of the state against the person who you blew their brains out, this man that sliced this girl’s throat over there on the other side of the university, he didn’t sin against the girl. Do you know who he sinned against? The State of Texas. And when it comes up for court it will be the State of Texas versus so and so. Why? Don’t we care about the girl? Of course we care about the girl, but the girl didn’t make the law; she didn’t protect herself by an autonomous law. The State of Texas made the law under the operations and functions of the fourth divine institution.

And similarly, a larger scale on the whole cosmos, the whole universe, it is God’s law and it’s that’s the thing that broken. So that’s why in verse 4, “Thee only” is mentioned. The Bible, of course says restitution often has to be made. Of course apologies have to be made, but those are not confessions. And that’s what’s wrong with a lot of group therapy, transactual analysis, and a lot of the other stuff this fakey cranked out stuff that tries to simulate the Word of God. Don’t they talk about confession? Yes. To whom? To other people. The Bible is not talking about confession to other people; the Bible is talking about confession to God. The Bible is a Theocentric system; all these other systems are man centered and anthropocentric. They’re humanists in origin and humanist in purpose and the Scriptures alone are Theocentric. I have to confess my sin to God.

Said another way, at the heart of all mental illness, according to the Scriptures, is a theological problem. The modern psychologists proceed this way: he says the issue is “know thyself.” The Christian says no, you’re wrong, because how do you know yourself. I can only know myself against a frame of reference. Where does my frame of reference come from? God. So therefore don’t I have to know God before I know myself. Right! So either you start with Socrates and say “know thyself” as more… 99% of the psychologists do, or you start with Paul, with Augustine and with Calvin and you say know God, and then after knowing God, then I can know myself.

All right, David then goes on and he solves another problem; it looks at first like a dilemma here; he says, “that,” purpose, “that Thou mightest be justified when Thou speakest, and be clear when Thou judgest.” Now why does David say this? Because in this situation he is freeing God from responsibility of the action. Now that’s an important thing to notice; verse 4 is loaded with things and principles of confession and they are principles that we have to bear down very hard in our day, because our day denies all of them. And worse than that, in our day companies are sponsoring courses for their people using some of these gimmicks.

One outfit had a course for all their salesman and they’re supposed to be selling their goods at the counter and this customer comes in frustrated and you’re supposed to use the Rogerian method, Oh, I see you have a problem, and the customer says yes, I have a problem. Well, what is your problem today, and go along like this. Stupid thing, the reason he’s got a problem is because he was all fouled up. If I order something like I’ve tried to from stores, and you’ve all had the situation, and the first time you order it they lose it in the mail and you reorder that one and the next time it comes they’ve played football with the box and so it’s all busted; the third time you order it part is there and then part isn’t and you say I wanted the whole thing. You know, it’s like ordering a car without the engine; the engine would help, I’m paying for it. What do you want me to do, push it out of the showroom. So this kind of thing. That’s why customers are frustrated, it’s not because they have some secret problem; oh, do you have a problem. It’s not that all, it’s very simple. And so the Scriptures re very simple.

And in Psalm 51:4 one of the key pints is that sin has to be directed to God, not to people, including the people who have been injured by the sin. But, the next part of verse 4, “that Thou mightest be justified,” the other part of sin is to cut away, and this is hard. And this is why I’ve said before when I’ve exegeted Psalm 51 and I’ll say it again, be careful you don’t confess too fast. When we confess our sins we ought to confess it in faith and I can’t confess my sins in faith if I’m really not convicted yet. And therefore if I know I’ve sinned and I’ve violated the Scriptures and yet I can’t do this second part of verse 4, it’s no, I’m not ready yet; I’d better work on it because I know I’m out of line, but what the last part of verse 4 is saying is that I as a creature am responsible. I cannot blame it on circumstances, not even a little eensy bit, I can’t blame it on circumstances. That’s what it’s saying, “that You may be justified.”

You see, if we reversed the end of verse 4 and read it this way, I sinned against Thee, Thee only, that I might defend myself when You try to judge me. Now what defense would I use against God? The only defense I can conceive of before God is God, You set up a situation that overwhelmed me; You overwhelmed me. But God is going to reply back, well Clough, what does 1 Corinthians 10:13 say? It says that I have provided for you and therefore you were not necessarily overwhelmed by what I set up. So verse 4 at the end is a shaving down of blame shifting. This wipes out blame shifting. So that’s another thing about David.

Notice again, we’re looking at a male who fails. And what is the first thing the man does? He confesses. No sense sitting there weeping around, oh, I’ve blown it, oh, I’ve… so what, you can’t do anything until you confess your sins so you might as well start there, it’s a good place. And the next thing that David does, in verse 5-6, is he does something else in his confession that we don’t often think of. Sometimes you don’t have to do this; other times you do. If we again look at the bottom circle of fellowship with God and we conceive of confession as putting us back in the bottom circle, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” And this transaction is done as a believer priest in the privacy of your soul; no one else has to peer in, it’s your business; not someone else’s, your private business. This is why in the communion we have our head bowed; we don’t raise hands and have a contest as to who confess the most things that were done in the past six days, maybe giving you a kite with a string on it as a winner. None of that stuff, because confession isn’t between you and the pastor; it isn’t between you and your husband or you and your wife, or you and someone else. It’s between you and God and in that matter it is your absolute privacy before God. And that must be protected and defended.

Now, when we are at the point of verses 3-4, we confess our sins and then we are in fellowship, but oftentimes there’s this problem of residual guilt. And this will sometimes drive Christians bananas, because they wonder why; why is it that after I confess my sin I keep feeling guilty about it, and so I sit around and I confess my sin; it doesn’t go away. I confess my sin; it doesn’t go away. I confess my sin; it doesn’t go away. Why doesn’t the guilt go away after I confess my sin. All right, that’s what David’s dealing with in verses 5-6. He had to work with this.

So let’s think about verses 5-6 in the light of David’s soul. “Behold, I as shaped in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. [6] Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part Thou shalt make me to know wisdom.” The point David makes is that I have a sin nature, I have a propensity to sin in the direction of adultery and murder again. And so that propensity or the learned behavior pattern is there in his soul, still, though he’s confessed the point act. And he is in fellowship, but the residual guilt mustn’t be interpreted strictly as guilt. That residual guilt has to be interpreted as a message from the Holy Spirit, do something about it. Don’t just sit there, do something about it. Change actively something in your life so you can begin to train yourself away from that pattern that led you to sin in the first place. So it’s far from being depressed and discouraged over residual guilt you ought to be encouraged. It shows that somebody is taking a personal interest in your case, and He’s taking a personal interest almost audibly in your case because it can become that oppressive. That’s the Great Shepherd calling His sheep.

So David confessed his sin and dealt with these things and so let’s turn back in conclusion to this incident to 2 Samuel 12:24 for the conclusion. David’s first failure, the failure we’re studying here of the Bath-sheba incident, the Uriah incident, David blows it royally. He’s concerned with his failure and he responds magnificently. Bob Thieme, years ago, coined the expression “rebound and keep moving,” and he always used to use an illustration of soldiers on the battlefield, getting shot at and the tendency was always to freeze and he always used to say that if you freeze up that’s a sure way to get hit because sooner or later the enemy is going to hit you, he’s going to zero in on your position and you’ve had it. Oddly enough, your safety consists in keeping on, pick yourself up and keep on driving toward them. Now that isn’t something that comes naturally to anyone, when somebody’s shooting at you to move toward them. But that’s your safety.

And so confession is like that; Satan will pin you down and fire and the tendency is to lock down and freeze, and just throw it all to the wind, I’ve had it. But rather the biblical response ought to be all right, I’ve blown it but I’m not going to sit here for the rest of my life in this idiot foxhole; I’m going to confess my sin, I’m going to go; if I’m going to have to spend my vacation it’s going to be in the next one a hundred yards down, but it’s not going to be this one, I am going to make some progress.

So David, in 2 Samuel 12:24 interestingly under the sovereignty of God, “David comforted Bath-sheba his wife, and went in unto her, and lay with her; and she bore a son, and he called his name Solomon; and the LORD loved him.” And here is the Messianic seed. So out of the confusion, because David was a guy who failed, yes he went into a tailspin, but he confessed his sin and he got right back and he kept rolling and God immediately blessed him with the Messianic seed. See, there’s the man who’s grace oriented. He can accept his failures and he doesn’t let his failures get him down.

The second incident, we’ll go through this rather quickly, hopefully you’ll remember some of it, some of you who have gone through 2 Samuel; if you haven’t read 2 Samuel I’ll try to just describe the highlights. 2 Samuel 16:15. This is the Absalom incident. To make a long story short, David’s family, the dynasty, the whole thing began to erupt from inside; there was chaos, tremendous chaos in the home and so therefore Absalom got himself in a revolutionary situation. By the way, Absalom was like Samson, he was kind of a brat; he wasn’t quite as uncouth as Samson, but Absalom was a very… almost Saul in many, many ways. In verse 15, “And Absalom, and all the people, the men of Israel, came to Jerusalem, and Ahithophel” who was a counselor, went “with him.”

And the situation is that Absalom has taken the initiative from David, looking at a map of Israel, David is going to have to execute a maneuver that is awful for most men to do, but notice, guys, that he does it anyway. He is sitting in Jerusalem. Absalom his son comes up here and knocks him out; he started in Hebron and he advanced north, and he’s kicked his father out of the city. He’s about ready, in fact, to ambush and kill his father. And so the word comes to David, get out of Jerusalem. And so therefore David has to pull a tactical retreat, a tactical withdrawal. Now it’s a very smart man that knows when to do this. David knows he’s failed; he’s failed in the home with his son, but now is not the time to worry about what he did five years ago; now the immediate problem is getting out of the city so he can fight another day, and some of the greatest men in history had had to make tactical withdrawals, the humiliation of having to retreat.

Think of George Washington pulling the battered colonial armies off of Long Island and having to give up that whole island to the British. And as he went through town by town, the dejected colonists who had been his partisans, Nathan Hale and the young guys that were in his intelligence service, who finally were hung, giving all these men up. It troubled Washington and it’s not easy to do that. Think of General Lee during the critical moments of the Civil War, when he has to withdraw, and he pulled some of the greatest tactical withdrawals that military science has ever seen, taking what would have been a chaos and a collapse of many of the southern armies, and Lee pulled them together and at least it was an orderly withdrawal. You can think of MacArthur, falling back before the Japanese, from island to island. No man likes to do that, but under God’s situation sometimes our failures dictate our retreat and so we have David retreating.

And in 2 Samuel 17:22, “Then David arose,” and here he executes his famous retreat, “David arose, and all the people that were with him, and they passed over the Jordan, to flee;” how humiliating, David, the great military hero, and who’s he fleeing from? His amateur son. You can’t ask for a more humiliating defeat than that. “…and by the morning light there was lacked not one of them who was not gone over the Jordan.” Do you want to know what was on David’s mind when he had to do this thing. Just as we turned to Psalm 51 in the Bath-sheba incident to look at David’s soul, we turn to Psalm 3 to look at what happened inside David.

Here’s the man facing another one of his failures. Notice the Psalm heading, “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom, his son.” Psalm 3:1, “LORD, how are they increased that trouble me! Many are they that rise up against me. [2] Many are they which say of my soul, There is no help for him in God.” See, he recognizes the existence of the situation. He knows he’s outnumbered; that’s what the “many” is in verses 1-2, this is a lament psalm, incidentally, and so he rehearses the taunts of his enemy in these two verses. Now in verses 3-6 he acknowledges by his action that he completely trusts in the Lord. This is hard because it’s after a failure. It’s awful hard when you know you’ve failed and you know you’ve blown it to say okay, but I’m going to cut my failure, at least at this point, and I’m going to start trusting; I may still be sliding down or I may still be retreating but by golly, I’m going to retreat in faith.

And so verses 3-6, “But Thou, O LORD, You are a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of my head.” Do you know why he put that in there? Because of the problem of shame. He’s ashamed to have to retreat before his son. And so in his pride and his wounded pride, and every man has wounded pride in failure, Lord, You are “the lifter-upper of my head;” You lift me up, you are going to give me back my honor and I’m going to trust You for it. [4] “I cry,” literally, not “cried” but “cry” present tense, “I cry unto the LORD with my voice, and He hears me out of His holy hill. [5] I lay me down and slept; I awoke; and the LORD sustained me.” The night of that retreat he laid down and slept. Now what a fantastic calmness and tranquility he had in his soul, because in the face of the humility and all the rest of it, he battled it out, he prayed to the Lord, and he got it to the point at least he could relax that evening. [6] “I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, who have set themselves around me.”

And now the concluding call to God, he petitions God and he petitions Him in very masculine terms. Don’t tone the language down in the Psalms; don’t try to change it like some of the modern translators. Leave the Scriptures the way they were written. This was written by a man and he’s talking to God as men talk to God when they’re not around pansies. And this is what he says: [7] “Arise, LORD; save me, O my God; for You have smitten all my enemies upon the cheekbone; You have busted their teeth in.” Now it’s in the past tense because like many of the lament psalms he looks forward to the answer, so he’s dwelling in the future and he’s looking backwards to the answer and that’s the expression of his confidence. Thank you God, you smashed them in the cheekbone and You’ve smashed their teeth. I like that. That’s what he’s saying to God; you see, that’s the way men are. That’s not wrong, that’s just the way men are built. It’s not impious that David’s talking this way. So let’s leave the text the way it is; the Holy Spirit left the text in these ways so that we would have guidance. It is not wrong. And you see, what’s happened in our own generation is… and that’s part of the feminization of our own generation in our time and that is that the men have been told repeatedly that aggressiveness is carnality. And they get this stuff in the school system, the even denominator approach. Oh, Johnnie, don’t get too far ahead of the other students, they might not like it. Well the hell with the other students, if you want to do your lessons faster than the other ones, do it. If you want to go to algebra and everybody else is on arithmetic go ahead and do it, conquer it, subdue it. And if the other phonies don’t want to go along why should you be in chains to the clods. You see, but we don’t want to do that, you might hurt these poor little darlings. Well now isn’t that strange it operates in the classroom; it doesn’t on the athletic field. Do you know of a major college football team that says well now we got to let him play and him play to give everybody a fair turn. Now isn’t that a strange thing, what operates on the athletic field doesn’t seem to operate in the classroom.

So you see, the male from the time that he’s brought up in kindergarten and first and second grades, what is the state he gets, usually from a woman teacher, incidentally? What does he usually get? He gets effeminatized. The male aggressiveness is suppressed. Now we’re not talking about going out and raising hell; David is not talking about that. He’s talking about the drive to subdue and conquer and dreams. And that’s whipped out of a kid by the dog gone oppressive atmosphere that says it’s wrong to do this, and in America we have a double dose of this stuff because we’ve got this deal about the democracy and one mustn’t excel too far above the curve. That’s part of our American human viewpoint and we as Americans, particularly, have to go… we have got this idea of everybody’s on the same plain.

Everybody isn’t on the same plain, and you should always strive to get to the next higher plain… always drive, always increase, always increase to your business, to your academics or anything else; there’s always another field to conquer and this ought to be the drive of the man. And that’s what David’s talking about. You don’t have this skunky kind of feeling where this is the pious thing for the guy to do. Or as they politely call it in educational circles, social adjustment. Listen, no Bible-believing Christian Christ centered male is socially adjusted to Satan’s world. He is not going to be; that’s precisely wrong; he is not going to be socially adjusted. He is going to know how to deal with wisdom with people, yes, again I’m not justifying aberrant behavior in that sense, but the man has got to break out of this mold of being oppressed into the mob of the 51%. The 51% are usually wrong. If God operated on the 51% principle nobody would get to heaven and the millennial kingdom is not going to be operated on the democratic principle either. Jesus Christ is going to say what the law is and that’s it. He’s not even going to have a Supreme Court to interpret it; He is going to interpret His own law.

Now, where did this all leave David? 2 Samuel 23, the last portrait we have of this great man. David left a path strewn with good and evil, like all men do; a path that had divine good, it had human good and it had evil in it, just plain gross-out evil. It had its high points, its +R, that’s the path of David; righteousness and evil. And every man has a mixed path behind him; his tracks are black and white and that’s what the Scriptures are saying, all men are this way. That’s why the Bible doesn’t leave us with David in an image of perfection; it leaves us with David wandering around with a broken home, wandering around with the place politically torn up, as I went through in detail when we exegeted 2 Samuel. Politically the kingdom is not on a solid ground, and that’s why Solomon is going to have to come along and straighten it out politically and he never can do it and finally his son, Rehoboam blows the whole thing. David did not congeal the nation Israel together properly but what he did do was he left a great heritage of a grace oriented man, who had his evil, but he had his good points and those good points are summarized in these last closing chapters of 2 Samuel.

And one of those closing chapters, 2 Samuel 23, gives David’s last words. In the Scriptures the last portrait of man is given is usually not in the speech that would be given for his funeral, but it is his blessing upon his children or his blessing upon the nation. This is a formula, for example Genesis ends with Jacob doing this; Joshua ends with Joshua doing it. The Law ends with Moses doing it. And so Samuel ends with David doing it. 2 Samuel 23:1, “Now these be the last words of David. David, the son of Jesse, the man who was raised up on high,” notice passive voice, the man who therefore responded to grace, “the anointed of the God of Jacob, and the sweet psalmist of Israel, said,” that’s God’s evaluation in verse 1 of this man. The Bible recognizes David had failure in his life, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure but he had these things and God forgets the failures. Isn’t that the neat thing about grace, God forgets the failures. Write them off, because you see, God’s plan doesn’t depend on our works. If God’s plan did depend upon our works, then the failures would count, wouldn’t they, because they would block God’s plan. But God’s plan is never blocked because in the first place it never depends upon our works. What good we carry out of this world, done in obedience to Scripture, through the indwelling Holy Spirit, is then an item of praise. But God’s perfect will is done. Notice this.

2 Samuel 23:2, “The Spirit of the LORD spoke by me, and His word was in my tongue.” And if we looked at it the way most people think and man often gets discouraged, and if he had the kind of discouraging failures had he’d say well, huh, I don’t think the Spirit of the Lord spoke by me, look what I did in my life. David says yeah, I know what I did with my life, and I still say “the LORD spoke by me, and His word was in my tongue. [3] The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel spoke to me, He that rules over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. [4] And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun rises, even a morning without clouds, as the tender grass springs up out of the earth by a clear sun shining after rain.

[5] Although my house be not so with God, yet He has made with me an everlasting covenant,” do you see what he’s saying? Here is a guy who says his house was fouled up, that’s the whole book of 2 Samuel, but David says I still can hold my head up high as a man because I am made in God’s image and I’ve been forgiven by God’s grace, and you can beat me over the head if you want to for my failures, David is saying, in essence to Satan, go ahead, and try to beat me down by rehearsing every screwball thing I’ve done, go ahead, you’re not going to get me to hang my head because I’ve confessed my sin. And I intend to walk proudly into the presence of God; I am not going to shuffle along, oh, I’m a failure, and kind of be brought in by a stretcher. God has made an everlasting covenant, “ordered in all things, and certain,” David says after all, you see, my whole life didn’t depend upon what I was going; it depended upon God’s plan. “…for this is all my salvation, and all my desire, and will He not make it grow,” is the proper Hebrew translation of this.

In other words, David’s saying yes, yes, I had failures, but what is the everlasting covenant that God gave to David? What was that promise? It was a promise for a dynasty, was it not. Does his house look in pretty good shape for dynasty at this point? No! Does the political cliamte look real great for a dynasty? No. And therefore as David’s about to die, and look at the future, what does he say to comfort his own soul? The future’s in God’s hands, He said that dynasty is going to survive; I don’t know how it’s going to but I’ve known God to be faithful to His promises, so somehow my dynasty will survive. Will He not make it to grow? That’s his confidence.

But now a warning, and one of the central things that he passed on to Solomon and Solomon never did get this one straight, but David learned something in all that adversity, the fleeing from Saul, the fleeing from his own son, he learned a principle that I wished government leaders today would learn. 2 Samuel 23:6, “The sons of Belial are all of them as thorns thrust away, because they cannot be taken with hands. [7] But the man that shall touch them must be armed with iron and the staff of a spear; and they shall be utterly burned with fire in the same place.” Now that is a physical model of a leader functioning; he’s saying that Solomon, and all my future dynasty, because the words of this blessing in 2 Samuel 23 are given to his whole dynasty, down father to son as it goes all the way down to Christ. And David is saying sons, as though he’s looking over the centuries, sons always learn this one principle, you will be dealing as long as this world is fallen with idiots. The “son of Belial” means jackasses.

You are going to be dealing with idiots and he says you don’t come up to the idiot nicely and touch him like you would touch a rose bush, to pick the flower, because you’ve got thorns in it and it’s going to tear you up. The way to come in there is with sword and cut them down. Oh, that’s not a pious thing to say, David. Is that what the Christian man is supposed to… why, I am a New Testament Christian, I don’t look at those nasty things in the Old Testament. Well, you’d better start because David is a model of the Messiah and he is giving directions to warn men who are in leadership positions that there comes that time when a physical act of just violence is called for, and that is the only way you keep your freedom, the only way you keep your peace. Never be afraid to do it and don’t ever accept some bully’s evaluation… that’s not the Christian thing to do. David is giving this with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. These are directions given, not just to Solomon, but to Rehoboam and every boy on down to one who’s going to be the son of a carpenter in Nazareth, and He too will take the sons of Belial and He will destroy them. If you doubt that read how Christ reappears in Revelation 19; He doesn’t come with white clothes. His clothes come dripping with blood of people Christ has killed so that He may establish His kingdom for those who trust Him.