Trusting the Director

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak is preaching from his series,

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The Warrior Poet King, Study of Second Samuel. Let's listen in. I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here, and welcome everybody, glad that you're here.

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It is a privilege to gather together in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He's forging a community of faith here in our midst, here in Matawan, Michigan, in 2022, and it is a joy to be together.

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What I'm going to do now is I'm going to kind of introduce the message, then we're going to sing some songs, then we're going to come back. And the reason that I do that most

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Sundays is, really every Sunday, is so that we kind of, it can be kind of whiplash to go straight from the busyness of a week and the challenges of a week and the difficulties of a week, the highlights of a week, and then just go straight into singing to God.

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And it's like, wait, who are we talking to again? So I like to introduce the message, read the text, get our minds thinking about God, then sing some songs together, then we're going to take this passage apart and dive in more deeply.

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But we think we, I think from our perspective, we think we just showed up to church this morning, woke up and said, yeah,

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I think I'll go, whatever. But if we're not careful, we might find ourselves being swept up into something more than just a

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Sunday morning show. I hope that you already are being swept up into that. We might find that God is enlisting us to join together as an outpost of heaven in enemy territory.

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I heard somebody recently, Eugene Peterson, defined the church that way, and I love that definition.

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Kind of like a colony of heaven here on earth. That's what the church is meant to be.

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My goal on Sunday mornings goes far beyond giving you a good program, whatever that might mean.

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Our time together is tactical training for life. This morning, the text of Scripture is going to leave us a little bit bruised and I think sore tomorrow.

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Like one of the tougher workouts, we're going to know it's good for us as we hear it, but we don't always love the burn, if you know what

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I mean. And have you ever been beat up and bruised by Scripture? And have you ever come to it with your own preconceived notions and then, bam, and it's like, oh man, this is a hit.

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And it's a lot of wrestling and a lot of struggle. So before we read the text this morning, let me set the stage for our thinking and give you a very direct statement regarding where we're going.

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I want to state this emphatically that humanity has a choice. All humans have a choice.

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We can either trust God as the great director of this amazing and grand production of creation.

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He is steering the ship. He is in charge. He is sovereign. He is moving. Or we can be moved to outright, and many in our culture are outright rejecting the director, deciding that this just must be an undirected play.

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There is either a God over this or we are in a world where every actor merely does what they want and nobody is guiding this thing at all toward a curtain call.

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So is anybody captaining this ship? That's really the question. Or is this world that we live in just adrift at sea with random good and bad things happening?

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I'm starting out this message this way because our text is going to rub up against one of the most harsh and difficult tragedies we can imagine from our perspective.

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And by the way, this message is very much one of the benefits that we obtain from going through books of the

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Bible. This is not a passage that I would turn to in a hundred years of preaching if it was up to me.

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So we're going through 2 Samuel. This is the text. It's not very often that we're going to encounter these passages like this that challenge us this deeply.

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And why am I talking this way? Because a little one is going to die by the end of our text. An infant is going to die.

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He's going to be caught in the crossfire of adult sin and perish because of the sin of his father.

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He will perish for the sin of David. And in our cultural moment where we're wrestling with so much mental illness that in our media and in our headlines and in our real lives and certainly in the real lives of those in Uvalde, Texas, we have experienced and seen the death of so many little ones.

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I can only imagine that this text comes at a divinely appointed time now, here, right now, a divinely appointed time to address many of our already forming thoughts about death and tragedy.

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How many of you have already spent some time in the past several weeks considering tragedy and particularly the death of young children?

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Have you thought about it? Has it been on your heart? Has it been on your mind? And for many of us, we've tried to dismiss it.

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We've tried to push it away, and it's there. It's there in the headlines. And even for some of us, as callous as our hearts and as desensitized as we can become, that can be so totally three weeks ago, four weeks ago, right?

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We've already moved on to other things. We've moved on to other tragedies. We've moved on to other difficulties, and it's real.

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Our text follows on the heels of David's, of course, terrible sin with Bathsheba, the murder of her husband,

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Uriah. And then the prophet Nathan came to David and confronted him at the beginning of chapter 12 of 2

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Samuel, confronted him with his sin. We looked last week at Psalm 51 where we saw

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David repent, and God, of course, issued punishments to David through the prophet

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Nathan. And the promises of punishment to David looked like this. Violence is going to be in your household,

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David, for the rest of your life. There's going to be even an evil attempt within your own household to overthrow your kingdom,

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David. And further and third and maybe most harsh to our ears is the child born to Bathsheba is going to die.

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It's a gut -wrenching story that requires us to reflect on reality, the real world that we live in.

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It's going to require us to reflect on God, and who is He? Who is this God that allows tragedy, causes tragedy?

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How would we word it? What words in English are the right way to describe this? And it's also going to describe and define us and our role as sinners in a fallen world before a holy and righteous

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God. This is not merely, I think you can probably sense from this introduction, that this is not going to be a rah -rah cheerleading session for your week.

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We do not gather each Sunday morning, recast, to give a little pep for our week.

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It's not our purpose. We come together to hear from God's Word and to hear from the

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Almighty God. And that means sometimes our gathering is going to be heavy lifting like today, here at the start of Mega Sports Camp.

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So let's rack up the weights, open our Bibles or scripture journals or devices to 2

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Samuel 12, verses 15 to 25. There's a little feature on the app, if you've downloaded the app,

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I haven't pointed this out to you before, but under the faith tab at the bottom, if you have your app, you can hit the faith tab, and then there's a take notes section, and it pulls up the

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Bible passage for you for the morning and everything. So I haven't highlighted that, but that's there this week and it's there every week.

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So if you're a note taker and you'd like to take digital notes, that's available for you there. But again, 2

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Samuel 12, verses 15 to 25. This is

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God's holy word, church, a difficult word. And the

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Lord, I'm going to start again. And the Lord afflicted the child that Uriah's wife bore to David, and he became sick.

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David therefore sought God on behalf of the child. And David fasted and went in and lay all night on the ground.

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And the elders of his house stood beside him to raise him up from the ground, but he would not. Nor did he eat food with them.

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On the seventh day, the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead.

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For they said, behold, while the child was yet alive, we spoke to him and he did not listen to us. How then can we say to him, the child is dead?

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He may do himself some harm. But when David saw that his servants were whispering together,

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David understood that the child was dead. And David said to his servants, is the child dead?

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They said, he is dead. Then David arose from the earth and washed and anointed himself and changed his clothes.

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And he went into the house of the Lord and worshiped. He then went to his own house. And when he asked, they set food before him and he ate.

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Then his servants said to him, what is this thing you've done? You fasted and wept for the child while he was alive.

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But when the child died, you arose and ate food. He said, while the child was still alive,

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I fasted and wept. For I said, who knows whether the Lord will be gracious to me that the child may live.

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But now he is dead. Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?

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I shall go to him. But he will not return to me. Then David comforted his wife

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Bathsheba and went into her and lay with her. And she bore a son. And he called his name

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Solomon and the Lord loved him. And sent a message by Nathan the prophet. So he called his name

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Jedidiah because of the Lord. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your word that can be challenging to us in so many ways.

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Is challenging to us in so many ways. That addresses our real life experiences and where we live here in this fallen planet.

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And doesn't just gloss over everything as if every text and every message that we hear needs to be super encouraging.

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And just a shot in the arm for our week. Father, I pray that you would help us to genuinely open our eyes to the glory of what you're doing in the big picture.

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How different you are than us. I pray that you would remove from each heart here the idol that we have made that is not you.

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That we think is you. I pray that we would allow the word to saturate our thoughts about who you are.

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And how you roll and the things that you do. In the process of leading all of us to a great and grand and glorious end.

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We long for that time where there is no sin. We long for that time where there is no death. Where there is no mourning.

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There is no sorrow. There are no more tears. For you will wipe the tears from our eyes on that final day.

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But for now, I pray that you would help us to keep worshiping you. Keep loving you. Keep seeing you as good.

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Keep understanding that you are sovereign. In all the mysteries of that and all the difficulties that our minds try to warp to wrap around.

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I pray that you would reveal yourself here in this gathering through your word. You are high.

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You are exalted. You are other than us. And yet, you love us.

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So Father, I pray that from a place of redemption. A place of recognizing the great sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for us.

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I pray that you would allow us to open our voices to praise you and worship you. Even in the darkness of this text, we see the light begin to shine through.

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And redemption and hope and a faithfulness that you have toward your people. We thank you for your faithfulness.

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Despite the difficulties that we face day in and day out. We ask this in Jesus' name.

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Amen. Amen. Yeah, you can go ahead and be seated. And if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more.

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It looks like there's quite a few donut holes left back there. There's more coffee and there's more juice as well. So take advantage of that.

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And for those of you that this is your first time here or you've only been here a few times. You're not going to distract me if you need to get up during the message.

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So just take advantage of that. Restrooms are out the double doors down the hallway on the left -hand side.

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If you need those at all during the message as well. And then I just ask that you do yourself a favor. Do me a favor as well as far as your attention.

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And make sure that you've got a device or your Bible open to 2 Samuel 12, verses 15 through 25.

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We read that earlier, but we're going to walk through that passage. So that you can see that the things that I'm saying are coming from God's word.

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I'm not making this stuff up. Especially, especially, especially today on this subject. So this passage is not hard for us to understand, right?

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A lot of us were here earlier when I read it. And you can understand what's happening. You read it. The narrative is straightforward.

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What happens? David's child falls sick. He seeks the Lord for mercy through prayer and fasting and humility.

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The child dies on the seventh day. When David finds out that the child is dead, he quits mourning, cleans up, and eats and worships

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God. David explains the nature of his counter -cultural response to death and mourning to his servants.

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God grants David and Bathsheba more children, with the highlight being the birth of Solomon, who will take the throne over after David is gone.

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And that's the narrative in a nutshell. So we can go ahead and close our Bibles and end our service. Obviously, more detail there.

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How many of you have some questions about this text? You read it, and there's something there that's like, man, there's something that kind of gets at us.

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But as far as outlining goes, for those of you that like taking notes or just kind of like to understand the structure, it's going to look like this.

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It's David's fast, David's faith, and God's faithfulness.

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David's fast, David's faith, and God's faithfulness. So we'll start off in David's fast.

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That's going to be from verses 15 through 19. Then the faith is going to be 20 through 23. And then God's faithfulness will be those last two verses, 24 and 25.

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But David's fast, the scenario is set out for us in stark terms right from the get -go. It's going to require me to talk about verse 15 here for a minute.

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It doesn't allow us any wiggle room out from underneath the cause of this child's illness.

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And that has to be addressed by our hearts right away. We don't like what the text says.

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I think you guys know what I mean. The Lord afflicted the child with illness.

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How many of you, that's not a sentence that you like that much. Just being honest. And how many of you see it?

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Do you see it in the Bible? You see that it's there. I'm not making this stuff up. This is not a picture of God that I want to paint for you.

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This is a picture of God that Holy Scripture is painting for us. The Lord afflicted the child with illness, and he became sick, the text tells us.

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The verb is active enough to get under our skin and challenge our thoughts about who exactly is this

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God that we serve from the Bible. Is your God in the business of afflicting children with illnesses?

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Oh, tough question. Yeah, that's going to be some heavy lifting today. Now, I would suggest to you that there are two types of people here in this room today, and we're not going to resolve this problem, by the way, today.

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It's not going to be resolved. It's going to be resolved in a life of faith, a life of study, a life of work through the

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Word, seeing that letting the Bible displace any notion that you have about God, letting the

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Word change you from the inside out. But there are people who lean into the mystery here.

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You already leaned into that. That the Lord afflicted David and Bathsheba's infant son, as the text says, and you've leaned into that.

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And then there are people who right away, already in your minds, you're trying to spin the public relations, the

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PR campaign for God. You're already trying to soften the blow. You're trying to figure out, can the word afflicted mean something different, like not afflicted?

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Can the word Lord mean something like Satan? Like you're trying to change it. In your mind, you're already trying to think, how can

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I get God out from underneath? Verse 15, how can I help him? How many of you know?

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Go ahead and raise your hand if you know that God doesn't need your help. Did you know that? God doesn't need our help.

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He's going to do just fine without our spin. But we think

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He would never do something like this. And so after plenty of spin, some will want to land right back where we started, with a sick child, but a

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God who is marginally better than a God who inflicts children, as now a God who stands by while children get sick and die, but without intervention.

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Is that better? Is that a better spin for God, that He stands by and watches the child die, or that He afflicts the child and He dies?

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Which is better? I think it's got marginal issues either way, right? So I would suggest to you that we stick with the text and deal with it.

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So let me cut to the chase and begin to bend our thoughts toward the definition, some thoughts that we need to have, some putting more into relief the idea of death, the idea of sickness, and the mind -bending mystery of our very existence.

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How is it that we're here, cognitively, sentient beings with a body and flesh, corruptible, fallen, broken, all of us to a person dying?

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How do we find ourselves here? Andy Wilson has written one of my favorite books on the problem of evil, sin, and death in the light of a good and sovereign

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God. And I commend it to you highly. If it was only cost that was in between you and reading this book,

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I would buy every single one of you a copy with my own money, and I mean that sincerely. Notes from a Tilted World is the name of the book.

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The author is Wilson, N .D. Wilson, Notes from a Tilted World. And he says the following, and I'm going to quote a long quote here, so I'll start with a quote, end with a quote, so you know

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I'm using his words here. But this is from N .D. Wilson's Notes from the Tilted World, Tilted World being a metaphor for the earth, tilted access.

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Wee! Aren't we having fun? And he does a lot of wee in the book. It's actually a really wandering, well -written book.

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But God has, quote, God has the authority to shape a soul with his voice, bind it to matter, and send it into history to cast it on the stage of his grand drama.

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What's he getting at here? He's getting at an image of life that is like a play, like a stage, like an acted -out drama.

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Continuing the quote, and he has the authority to sever my soul from my body and call it to another part of the stage.

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He has the authority to reuse my matter from my flesh and daffodils. I'm not worried.

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I'll get more. To his eyes, you never leave the stage.

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You do not cease to exist. It is a chapter ending, an act, not the play itself.

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Look to him. Walk toward him. The cocoon is a death, but not a final death.

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The coffin can be a tragedy, but not for long. There will be butterflies, end quote.

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What is it to our perspective? What is death to our perspective? It is indeed, absolutely, the worst of enemies.

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Is it not? Nobody? Is it the worst of enemies? It is our worst enemy, without question.

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And what is death to God, but a moving of us from one part of the stage to another?

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To God, it is merely a relocation of an actor. We do not cease to ever be out of the sight and scope of the

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Almighty God. For us, death is significant, substantial change in our existence, like a caterpillar entering a cocoon that will not come out the same.

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But from God's perspective, it is merely a moving from the front of the stage to the backstage. We are no less present to our

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God in sickness. We are no less present to our God in tragedy. We are no less present to our

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God in death. Amen? That's our hope. And further, when we talk about the sickness or death or mass shootings involving children, we see the tragedy through the lens of just being honest through the loss of so much potential, do we not?

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Is that not part of the pain in the loss of a child or a teen in a car accident or whatever it might be?

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When we see the loss of a young one, we think, oh, so much potential gone. But to God, hear me carefully, church, to God, a human is never a potential.

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He who sees beginnings and ends and everything in between at the same time only ever deals in actualities, not in potentials.

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Every breath, every act, every sin, every good deed, every thought, every birth, every death is always ever present to the mind and heart of our

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God. His reality is so different from ours that I suggest to you that it's impossible for us to bend our minds to comprehend the way in which

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God even perceives time. He who created it. He who lived an eternity past outside of it.

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And one more thing, as long as we're laboring under the first of 11 verses, don't spend too much time trying to figure out why

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God would assign the death of this child as a just punishment for David's sin with Bathsheba.

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I read commentaries on top of commentaries this week and scholars trying to explain this and all of them trying to figure out the mind of God on this, and some have indicated that, oh, the punishment fits the crime.

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Does it? I disagree with this connection for two reasons. First, the text doesn't tell us.

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The text gives us nothing of the inner mind of God on the matter. Why this punishment for David's sin with Bathsheba and Uriah, the text is completely mute on that subject.

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And second, is that I personally can think of other punishments that fit the crime and seem to fit the crime better, more uncomfortable and more focused on the guilty party,

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King David. How many of you can imagine some punishments that might fit that crime? But don't lose sight that David is genuinely broken over his sin.

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We looked at Psalm 51. If you missed the message last week, you can go back and listen to that one. It's recorded. It's on podcast.

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It's on YouTube. But David is genuinely confessing. He's genuinely sorrowful. He's genuinely broken over his sin.

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And so David went into his royal chambers, lay flat on his face on the floor, fasted from food, wept and sought the

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Lord. As the child falls ill, and he knows that this is the prophecy of Nathan, the child born to Bathsheba will die.

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I call this section David's fast because in this we see him focus all of his desires and all of his attention on the healing of his little infant son.

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Fasting is not a tool. This is important for us to understand because I think that the church misunderstands what fasting is about.

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Fasting is not a tool to manipulate God. Rather, it is a tool to manipulate our sinful flesh, our unfocused sinful flesh.

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How many of you know that you're a bundle of various appetites, passions, and desires? Is that true of you like it is of me?

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A whole hodgepodge of different things warring within us, a whole hodgepodge of things that we desire, we hunger for, good things and bad things, and those are all wrapped up in each and every one of us.

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And of course we know and we experience a fundamental appetite that's going to strike you guys within the next hour, an appetite for food.

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We're going to start thinking towards lunch here in just a moment if you're not already. Maybe you didn't get enough donut holes,

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I don't know. But our physiology, the way that we're put together, reminds us regularly that we need food.

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I mean you get that grumble in your stomach, you get that feeling, you get that kind of weakness, you get that hangry going on, right?

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And our body begins to let us know, hey, dude, get something. In fasting we are actively subduing that routine appetite.

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We're enlisting it to focus our hunger and our appetite toward God. That's what fasting is.

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In seasons and times of life where our need is greatest and where we are most desperate, we may choose to forego food for a set period of time in order to borrow the reminders of our body, the reminders of our physiology, the reminder of our stomach to remind us to pray and seek the

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Lord. Do you get it? That's what fasting is about. And in humility, David stays on the ground weeping and praying and foregoing food during this time of his son's illness.

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I want to point out what's obvious in this text as well, and that's just that David was not an aloof, disconnected father.

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He loves this infant, this little infant son born to Bathsheba. He hadn't even known the child implied in the text.

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He hadn't even known this child, this son, for long, but he loved him. In verse 17,

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David's servants and cabinet members and leaders in his government tried to get David to get up off the floor and eat something.

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You're going to get sick here, bro. You're going to just be weak. You've got to get something to eat. But he ignored all attempts to get through to him, even implied in the text in a moment later is just that he didn't even pay attention to them, didn't even respond to them as they came along and grabbed his elbow and tried to get him off the floor.

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He was just dead weight there, weeping before the Lord, crying out to God, fasting before the

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Lord. And he did this for seven days. For seven days.

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But on the seventh day of the child's sickness, the seventh day of David's fast, we get this terrible news.

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The child died. And his servants were afraid to tell David. And in verse 18, they do not rule out the possibility that David may harm himself if he finds out the child is dead.

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And at this point, it's good to clarify why they're so confused about David's response and why his servants seem to be so bothered by the way he's acting.

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He is responding in a significantly, very, very counter -cultural way here in our text.

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They were prescribed for people during the loss of a loved one seven days of mourning, sorrow, fasting, and humility, laying down in the dust, after the death.

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After somebody you loved died, you spent seven days mourning and weeping on the floor like this.

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That was commonplace. That was expectation in this cultural era in which we read about here in 2

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Samuel. So the fact that David is behaving this way before the death is very confusing to his servants.

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You can imagine that, right? It's like he's mourning as if the child is already gone before the child is gone. And they're confused about this.

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They're wondering what is his behavior. And I love David because he's a man of wide moods and he's kind of mildly unpredictable.

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If you study the life of David, you begin to go, wow, this guy had some pretty wide breadth of emotional response to things.

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And in this, I find common ground with David. Consider that verse 18, what it's communicating, those who knew

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David best, those who interacted with David on a daily basis and in a routine were in his cabinet, lived in his household as servants, they were afraid to give him bad news.

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This plays into a consistency of character that we see in David from these historical accounts. He's a consistent person in the way that we view consistently inconsistent, we could say.

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He was a man of wide emotional responses and they cannot even remove self -harm from the table of potential responses on David's part here.

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But David is no fool and when he sees his men speaking in hushed tones and he probably even notices the change in timbre of their voices, he surmises the child has died and he clarifies that with a question in verse 19.

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They don't have to tell him. He's aware by the change in the tone of the servants' whispers. And what are they saying?

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The child is dead. I don't know.

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Those four terrible words. Are those bad words, church? Raise your hand if you think those are bad words.

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The child is dead. What kind of a world is this recast?

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Do you ask that question over Uvalde? Do you ask that about Buffalo? Do you ask that about Ukraine? Do you ask that about personal tragedies and difficulties?

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What is this world? What is this place?

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Where are we? Who's in charge here? Can I please speak with the manager?

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And yes, you can call me Karen if you want. But I want to speak to the manager. The child is dead.

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Are you kidding me? I didn't sign up for that. I didn't even sign up to be here.

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Just am. So what is the world that we're in is what this text is. This text is rubbing up against fundamental things about the way that we view the place that we are.

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Because you're here, aren't you? Raise your hand if you're here. Good. Woke you up.

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Annie Dillard. This sermon commends itself to quoting others that are wiser than me.

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So I turned to N .D. Wilson. I turned to Annie Dillard. Annie Dillard observed in her Pulitzer Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek the following.

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And I want to give a caveat before I quote her because I've gotten into trouble for quoting her before. Absolutely love the book.

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Recommend it to you. But you need to understand one thing. Annie Dillard does a fabulous job looking at the world around us and diagnosing there's something wrong.

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If you look at the world enough, you might come to the same conclusions. She diagnoses things very well, but she comes up short of understanding the cure that we have and we know.

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She is very sympathetic to Christian values. Almost every single page that she writes drips with biblical themes.

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And she's very versed in the Bible, but she has not yet bowed her knee to the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

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But she gets a diagnosis of this world we live in and she says this, quote, I am afraid.

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And I'm a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world. And I'm getting along.

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I'm aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful in control of a shining world in which everything fits.

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But instead I am wandering, awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for.

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Whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air. Whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions.

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And whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelming in spite of them.

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And he diagnoses life. She diagnoses where we live. She doesn't see beauty in the brokenness, but correctly sees the world as broken and beautiful.

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She has a hard time accounting for that in her writing, as you can imagine. Do you have an accounting for why the world both has beauty and brokenness?

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The Bible makes sense of that. The Bible clarifies that for us. We are not in control, are we, church?

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How many of you love control? Just being honest, just go ahead and raise your hand. My hand is up, my hand is up. I'm not trying to model it for you,

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I'm telling you. I like some control. But we are not in control and our entire culture and our entire society is driving towards autonomy, driving towards self -control, driving towards being able to dictate things that we can't really dictate.

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It's a given to us when we actually wake up and realize that we're in this world that we are not in control.

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I hope you've realized that. You didn't choose. How many of you chose which century you were gonna be born into?

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It's weird if you raise your hand. Okay, that was an example. That wasn't me, I don't, yeah. I didn't choose when

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I was gonna be born, didn't choose my parents, didn't choose the place I was going to be born, didn't choose my height, didn't choose my genetics,

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DNA code, I had nothing to say about that whatsoever. We just,

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I didn't choose my gender. God made me this way.

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It's all set. We are grasping. Do you see our culture just grasping for control and trying our best?

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But try as you might, you're not gonna identify as a six foot five guy from Kenya.

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You just can't identify that if you're not six foot five and from Kenya. You just can't identify that way.

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Grasp as we might for control over this world and try to control our circumstances and try to control every minutia of life to try to give us security or whatever it might be.

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Diseases strike, right? Accidents. Accidents happen.

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Masks happened. We inflict wounds to self and others through our sin.

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And death, death is a reality, is it not? And yet we wander this world with awe in some sense that we're here with purpose, right, church?

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Do you have a sense that there's purpose behind it? What Annie Dillard comes up short of in this quote is identifying the cause of the brokenness in this world, but we know it.

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We took up a challenge against our creator for control and the world has been broken ever since.

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And is it not sin in a generic sense but also in a more specific sense in 2 Samuel chapter 12 that is the reason for the death of this infant?

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Is it not directly tied to our expression of freedom from God's rule and reign that causes devastations?

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Humans are free to act. We are. And wherever we express that freedom,

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I think it could rightly be defined as sin. Free to eat from the one tree in the garden.

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Free to hit his brother in the head with a rock and try to hide the body from the all -knowing.

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Free to take Bathsheba and kill her husband. Free will is all over the

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Bible. And wherever mankind seeks to be free from the constraints of our creator, we create sin and we incur judgment and devastating consequences.

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But David is not left there on the floor fasting. Starting in verse 20 through 23, we see

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David's faith. We see his faith arise. The narrative was slow over the six days of mourning, but now on the seventh day, the narrative picks up pace with the use of, in Hebrew, in the

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Hebrew language, of short, quick verbs. David got up off the floor, took a shower, put on his aftershave, changed his clothes, went into the tabernacle, worshiped

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God, went back home, asked for a meal, sat down, ate his first meal in seven days.

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And this is so counter -cultural that it has his servant's head spinning. It's clear to me that David's actions here are meant to teach us something by how radical his behavior is.

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And further, I want to point out that his actions are so very different. So it's very different from his culture to the point where it needs to be explained, but it's also very different from another accounting, from his response to the news of the death of another son later in the book that I want to highlight.

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Because David is also going to become aware here. He becomes aware of the death of his infant son. Later, he's going to become aware of the death of his adult son,

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Absalom. It's going to be tragic. It's going to be difficult. And when he finds out that his adult son,

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Absalom, has been slain in battle, David becomes inconsolable.

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His response could not be more different than the accounting here of the death of an infant son compared to the death of Absalom.

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He screams, he cries out. He says, God, why not me? Why not me instead of him?

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Oh, Absalom, my son, Absalom. Absalom, my son, Absalom. And he just keeps crying and weeping and screaming over the death of his adult son.

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Not so here, he cleans up, goes and has a meal. How many of you see that as different?

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Different response? What accounts for that? His response here in verses 20 through 23 seems almost nonchalant after the death of this infant compared to his response to the death of Absalom.

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All of his grief and mourning happened while the child was alive. And we need to ask ourselves, what makes the difference?

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Why these two vastly different methods of mourning in the same man? John MacArthur in his book

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Safe in the Arms of God, which is a book about where babies go when they die, he makes much of this difference here in this text in the accounting of Absalom.

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This argument is the most compelling thing to me personally that has shifted me from I really don't know to conclude that infants who die are somehow redeemed and that's where I stand right now as your pastor.

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David is inconsolable before the child dies. He is desperately seeking God because he even says in the text, who knows?

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Maybe the Lord will be gracious and allow the child to live. I know this is the punishment that has been meted out, but maybe

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God will be gracious. But then after the child dies, he explains in verses 22 and 23 his faith, why he can be at peace after such a terrible week of grief.

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He now says in verse 23, the hinge. Can I bring him back again?

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I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.

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That's the hinge that leads David to a radical shift in his emotional state from grieving, mourning, fasting, sorrowful, down on his face before the

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Lord, praying, praying, praying. And there is no way on earth that I believe that what David is merely taking comfort in is that I will go to him means

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I'm gonna die too. That's not comforting. We're gonna share a plot at the cemetery.

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Is that what he's getting at? Is that why he cleans up and is at peace after this? Some have posed that as a possibility.

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Well, maybe it's just all he's saying is simply, you know, he's not coming back to me, I'm going to die.

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That doesn't account for the change. That doesn't account for the shift in David's response. David has very clear and obvious faith and comfort in this text that he will be reunited with his son, with his infant son.

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And of course, that adds to the other side of the equation. The reason this is absent from the account with Absalom is simple but more tragic.

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Absalom rebelled against God. He was in the act of rebelling against his father and his father's kingdom that was instituted by God.

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He was likely outside of a covenant relationship with the Almighty when he was run through by a spear.

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David was not consoled and not consolable by the notion, I cannot bring

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Absalom back, but I will go be with him. Well, if it's merely about death, then he could say that about Absalom too.

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I'm going to go see him. He's not coming back to me, but I could go there. But that's not the case. David did not have the comfort over his adult son that he had over his infant son.

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This obviously pushes the tragedy down the road for those of us who are parents to fundamental concerns for our adult children, right?

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But for multiple reasons, I've grown in my confidence that infants who die will be on the new earth.

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David seems like he is able to move on with trust, with faith that his child has been moved by God to a portion of the stage that he also will one day occupy.

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And this is good news. His words at least leave an open door to understanding that God has a category of redemption for those who have not had an opportunity to act in rebellion against him.

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We certainly all have a sin nature. We are born that way. He already said that back in Psalm 51.

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David, his very words, from my birth, from conception, I've had a sin nature.

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But infants and the unborn have not had a chance to act upon that sin nature. They have not acted out willfully on any transgression or iniquity or sin.

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They have not experienced the rebellion that certainly would be there if they were given enough time and enough capacity.

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I don't know what the mechanism of this salvation is, church, but I do know that the basis of the salvation of anyone who will be redeemed from the curse of sin is the blood of Jesus Christ, and that is it.

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I cannot state anything more about the mechanism of the salvation. I am left trusting in the God who

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I must also trust for my own salvation as well. And it is this

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God, it is this God that we put our trust in, who we see in this final short movement of the text because David's faith is placed in God's faithfulness.

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What we see in verse 24 is a subtle nod to the God who keeps his promises despite our sin.

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One of you are glad that God is faithful to you despite your sin? I'm so glad for his faithfulness to me.

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Back in chapter seven of 2 Samuel, God made a promise to David to maintain his royal line and to set up one through his royal line who would sit on the throne forever.

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And this sin of David has not stopped the promises of God. And so we hear an accounting of Solomon.

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Solomon will be the son of David through whom God will keep that promise in faithfulness. He will be the next king.

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Now between verses 23 and 24, you have to see a little bit of a significant amount of time because if we cross -reference this with other passages of scripture, we find that actually

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David and Bathsheba had four children. Solomon was the last. He was the fourth. They have the one that just passed away.

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They have two more children. And then Solomon is born. And he is highlighted here for obvious reasons.

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He will be the next king. And I want you to hear carefully that David's comfort to Bathsheba wasn't an afternoon.

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I would imagine that took some time. And he receives two names, child,

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Solomon, meaning, and I think with intention, meaning his peace, his peace, the giving of God's peace, his peace.

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And then from the prophet Nathan, he's given a second name, and it's a little unclear which one. One of these was probably likely his ruler name, and one was his personal name.

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Friends call me this. And in the royal courts, they call me that.

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And enough scholars are laying on both ways that it's like probably in his courts, they called him Jedediah, and probably in his family life, they called him

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Solomon, but we're not exactly sure. Solomon meaning his peace, Jedediah meaning loved by the

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Lord, loved by the Lord. Now, I said this is heavy lifting, and this is one of those passages, one of those messages, it's not easy to just put a bow on, clean it up, and square the edges, and hand you a nice bright package.

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Okay, there we did that. A fallen world has tears, right? A fallen world has jagged edges.

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It has puzzle pieces that don't fit, and we're like, man, until God puts this thing together in the end, it's not gonna make a lot of sense.

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I'm not getting this full picture here. We were born into the world that is, and not the world that we wish for.

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And yet the pathway to the world, I would suggest to you, the pathway to the world that we wish for is here found in Scripture in the pathway of suffering.

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We sang about it with intention. There's a reason we sang that song about affliction just before I preached.

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God, who does not delight in afflicting us, has made a way to bring us to eternal glory, a way to bring us to an eternal kingdom without sin, without suffering, without death, and he will wipe away the tears from every eye of his children.

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Further, who is it that suffered for us? God himself,

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Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, suffered and died on our behalf.

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We can't always make sense of the jagged and broken pieces of Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, New York, and a whole host of personal issues that we might face, the death of an infant, the death of one that we love, loss of job, loss of income, so many different things, and yes, there is a variety of traumas, right, all the way from the lowercase

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T to the big capital T traumas, and life is full of all of them, and so those moments of tragedy and trauma and hardship, the only thing

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I can do is come back to the very thing we mean every Sunday morning in communion.

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What do we mean by doing this together? We mean to make sense, to make sense of the world around us, to make sense of our own hearts, to make sense of God by remembering that God is not distant in our suffering.

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The Heavenly Father knows what David went through in the death of a dearly loved son, but in Christ, he has taken on himself the harshest punishment of the wrath of the

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Father against all of our sin so that we can be brought to a kingdom without sin, without death, without tears, without suffering.

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That is the hope, and so if your hope is placed in Jesus Christ for your salvation today, then come to one of the tables to receive the only solace that I have been able to find in this broken world, and really the only solace

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I've been able to find in the Word of God. It is his body broken for us. It is his blood shed for us, and so we come back to this every

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Sunday church, and I recognize that it could become routine, and it could become rote, and the thing that we do just to get out the door, line up, take the bread, take the juice, drink it, chew it, leave.

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God forbid that it becomes that, and I recognize it's a risk doing it every week that that might become routine to us, but in it, in it, church, we are remembering the only hope that we have in a broken and fallen world.

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His body broken for us, his blood shed for us, the cracker and the juice.

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If you belong to Jesus Christ during this next song, I encourage you. When I say that, I hope you know what

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I mean by that. When I say you belong to Jesus Christ, it means that you have, at a point in time in life, you've recognized that you're a sinner against a holy

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God. You deserve judgment, and you've said, God, save me. Jesus, rescue me.

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It is to ask for him to be your savior, and then say, and I want you to run the show. I want you to be my

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Lord. That's what it means to be saved, to be born again, and he will come in, and he will start something new in your life, a new work in you whereby you will begin to love the word.

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You will begin to desire and hunger for obedience, even if it's not all there. You'll want it, and if that's true of you, then

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I encourage you to come to the tables, and the beauty of this is when we line up, I like to look around, and I encourage you to look around.

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I encourage you to take others in. Don't shuffle around and look at the floor. This is not merely a time.

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It is a time for you to deal with God, but not merely a time to deal with God. You can do that on your own. You can do that on the way here.

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You can do that when you're exercising. You can deal with God privately alone, but lift your eyes up, church.

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You are not alone in your neediness. Nobody is coming to those tables out of worth.

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Boy, I'm so awesome. Jesus died for me. We're coming to those tables to say, wow,

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I suck big time. I don't have it together, and I am so jacked up that it took the

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Son of God dying for me to redeem me. You're in good company, church.

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We all smell the same. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. It's getting sweaty up here.

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No, we know. So take communion that way. Come to the tables that way.

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Not out of pride. Not out of a hurry to get out, but as a genuine reflection on what

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Christ has done, the suffering He endured for us. David had faith in the

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God who keeps His promises even at the loss of his infant son. So let's go out from this place trusting

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God who is faithful to keep His promises, and He will wipe away every tear from the eye of His children when

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He brings us to be backstage with Him. Let's pray. Father, I thank

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You for these challenging messages, these challenging passages of Your Word that really sharpen me and are difficult to communicate, but Father, I pray that You would allow

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Your Spirit to meet us here in this place. Even over these coming moments and these final moments of our service,

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I pray that You would help us to just, in gratitude and thankfulness, recognize that we don't suffer alone.

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We don't go through these hard times and hard seasons alone. I pray that we would turn our eyes, turn our thoughts, and turn our ears to our

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Lord and Savior who suffered, who bled, who experienced the pain and suffering to His very nerve endings, who was scourged by a

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Roman whip, who was hung there asphyxiating and bearing our sins for us.

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I pray that would snap everything into focus and that we'd be people of the cross, people of the great purchase, people of a great hope because of what

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You have done for us. And that as we look at the tragedies, we experience the tragedies, we walk through dark waters,

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I pray that we would all to a person feel Your hand, Your nail -pierced hand in ours, walking every step with us.