Psalm 51 with R. C. Sproul, “The Sin of David,” 2

One of my favorite things is to read. I'm addicted to reading, voracious reading. I'm one of those people that has to always have something to read. If I'm sitting at the breakfast table and there's no newspaper there or book to read, I'm reading the nutrients, ingredients on the cereal box.

I have to read. I love to read. And one of the things I love to read are novels and mystery stories and things like that. But here's what I find out. If I pick up a book to read, I can't read three pages in that book until I'm flipping back to the inside back cover page.

Not to read the end of the story. I don't do that. But I want to see if there's a picture and any biographical data of the author.

Why do I do that?

Because I'm just fascinated to see what the person looks like, where they live and so on who has written this book. Because I understand that the more I can discover about the author of a book, the more that helps me to understand the perspective that person brings to their work.

David the Author of Psalm 51 and the Background of His Life

And that's what I want to do today. We're concerned about repentance. We're going to be spending time looking very carefully at the 51st Psalm, which was written by David. And since David is the author of that psalm, in order for us to understand the intensity of the passion that he is expressing in that psalm, I want to look a little bit at the man who wrote the psalm and the circumstances under which this psalm was originally composed.

And it would take many, many weeks for us to give a complete overview of the life of David. He is obviously one of the most important persons in the entire Old Testament. He is the one who Jesus refers to as David's son, and Jesus is David's son and David's Lord.

David is the one who gives the promise that his fallen house will be restored and that there would come a king like him. And that prophecy is fulfilled in the person of Christ who was born of the seed of David.

And of course in the history of the monarchy in the Old Testament, David is conceded to be far and away the greatest of the Jewish kings. He extended the borders of the land from Dan to Beersheba and gave them their greatest period of prosperity and presided over what was called the Golden Age of Israel.

And not only was he a great king, but he was probably, perhaps next to Joshua, the greatest warrior that the Old Testament ever produced. And so he was a warrior king as well. And not only that, he was a poet and a musician, a statesman.

He was truly a Renaissance man before there was ever such a thing as a Renaissance. And so this person is extremely interesting and fascinating as a human being. One of the most important epithets we hear about David is that he was called a man after God's own heart.

He was a man that God really loved. And yet in addition to the wonderful exploits that are recorded in the name of David and the passion of his spiritual life, which is expressed throughout the Psalms, not just in Psalm 51, David is also remembered for being one of the worst offenders of the law of God in biblical history.

David's Sin with Bathsheba and Uriah

That David's fall into sin is as dramatic as his great exploits were in the other direction. And we read of that case in his history where, while he was king, he went out onto his balcony of his palace and he looked across the way and he saw this beautiful woman bathing on her rooftop, assuming that she was bathing in private.

And David saw this woman in her nakedness and was overcome with sensuous lust, and he just had to have this woman. And so he sent his messengers and summoned her to the royal palace and entered into an adulterous relationship with this woman Bathsheba.

And David was so intoxicated with his affections for this woman that even though the woman was married to another man, David would not let that stop him from gratifying his own desire. And so this obstacle to his affection, this husband of Bathsheba, was one of the loyal servants in David's army.

And so David made arrangements with Uriah's commander to have Uriah placed at the very front of the front lines where he would be in harm's way, where he would be most likely to be slain in battle. And that's exactly what happened.

David had Uriah set up so that Uriah, while he was defending David, was killed. And still David continues his relationship with this woman until God sends his messenger to David. And we read of that account in the twelfth chapter of 2 Samuel, where the text reads as follows.

Then the Lord sent Nathan to David, and he came to him and said to him, There were two men in one city. Now what Nathan is doing here is he's coming to the king and he's going to tell a parable to David.

He said, King, what about this? He says, There were two men in one city. One was rich and the other one was poor. And the rich man had exceedingly many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe land, which he had bought and nourished, and it grew up together with him and with his children.

It ate of his own food, drank from his own cup, lay in his bosom, and was like a daughter to him. So the poor man has one little lamb, and that little lamb is so precious to him that he lets the lamb live in the house with him.

He eats from his table, he drinks from his cup, and he holds him to his bosom as he expresses his affection for this single sheep. And a traveler came to the rich man who refused to take from his own flock and from his own herd to prepare one for the wayfaring man who had come to him.

But instead he took the poor man's lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.

This is the story.

And David reacts to this story with fury. He's enraged by this obvious manifestation of injustice. And what does he say? David's anger was greatly aroused against the man, and he said to Nathan, As the Lord lives, he swears an oath here, As the Lord lives, the man who has done this shall surely die, and he shall restore fourfold for the lamb because he did this thing and because he had no pity.

He was a thief.

He robbed from a poor man. He took that man's most prized possession when he didn't even need it because he himself was rich beyond measure. And he was heartless. He didn't care at all for the plight of this man.

All he cared for was his own convenience and his own satisfaction. And so David hears this, and he said, Not in my kingdom. You find somebody like that in my kingdom, he dies. He shall surely be put to death, but not until he restores fourfold what he has stolen from this poor man.

And then Nathan said to David,.

You are the man.

Thou art the man, David. And thus says the Lord God of Israel, I anointed you king over Israel. I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your keeping.

I gave you the whole house of Israel and of Judah. And if that had been too little, David, I also would have given you much more. Why have you then despised the commandment of the Lord to do evil in His sight?

You have killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword. You have taken his wife to be your wife, and you have killed him with the sword of the people of Ammon. Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, and because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.

And thus says the Lord, Behold, I will raise up adversity against you from your own house. Let me just stop there at that point. Several years ago I was in Israel. I was there the week Anwar Sadat was assassinated, the same week Moshe Dayan, one of the greatest heroes of modern Israel, died.

And I was staying on the Mount of Olives overlooking the old city of Jerusalem, and I went out on my balcony one night, and I was standing there looking out over the Valley of Kidron from the Mount of Olives, looking into the old city of Jerusalem.

And if you go there today and you see the walls that are left from ancient Jerusalem, you realize that even before that walled city that was there in Jesus' day. In fact, by the time Jesus came to Jerusalem, it was already a city that was a thousand years old.

It was already a tourist attraction in the ancient world. But the old, old city was to the left of that from my observation post, which was David's city. And as I was standing there, it was like I was conjuring up images of Old Testament history, realizing, I'm standing in the spot where if 3 ,000 years ago somebody was standing here, they could have looked down across that valley and seen shadowy figures sneaking out of the old, old city and down into the valley trying to escape the attack of rebels.

And I see David fleeing in fear from the armies of his own son, Absalom.

And I stood there and I said,.

Here's where it happened,.

The fulfillment of the very prophecy that Nathan spoke to David, that the sword would not depart from his own family. And he says here, the sword shall never depart from your house because you have despised me and because you have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.

And thus I will raise up adversity against you from your own house, from your own son. And I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of the sun.

You did it secretly, David, but I will do all of this thing before all of Israel, before the sun. I wonder how David felt if he would know that the actions of his sin and selfishness would be recorded not only for all of Israel to know, but for the whole world to know for all time.

You talk about wearing a scarlet letter, the letter A blazoned on your chest for adultery. Here it is with David. Now my question is this, how does David respond? See, he had fallen into sin, not because he with malice forethought decided to go out and look for another woman.

He just happened to see her per adventure.

Through a matter of circumstances. He was a man. He had biological drives. He could say to God,.

God, what did you expect me to do?

For heaven's sakes, I'm a man. I've got male hormones. I've seen the most beautiful woman in the world taking a bath right across the way from me at nighttime.

What did you want me to do?

Turn and run like Joseph? God would say, yes, that's what I want you to do, to flee from that. But you didn't, David. You allowed lust to burn in your heart, and you began to pour new fuel on the flames of your heart.

You embraced your sin. You nurtured your sin, and even though at first it made you sick because you knew you were violating everything sacred and everything holy, you kept at your sin. Who does that sound like?

This is not an isolated experience in human corruption, ladies and gentlemen. We are the people.

We are the men.

We are the women who are guilty of the same kind of behavior, of nurturing sin and staying with that sin and saying within ourselves all ways in which we can justify it and make our evil sound like it's actually good.

This is our nature as fallen people, and I'm sure David played that game. Every step of the way, he had to justify his sin to his own conscience, and he allowed his heart to become hardened by repetition of sin.

How many times does the Bible speak about the hardening of the heart? The heart gets calluses from overuse. People who work hard with their hands get calluses on their hands. They don't get them the first time they work.

The first time they work with their hands, they get blisters. They hurt, but if they keep working at the same work, those blisters turn to calluses, and they become hard, and they are inured from pain, and that's what happens to what we do with our consciences.

We allow calluses to form on our conscience so that the conscience becomes seared, and when we would hear the voice of conscience telling us to stop this behavior, we repress that.

We quiet it.

We seek friends who will comfort us, and we say it's okay. That's what David was doing, and he was so smitten with his affection for Bathsheba that he didn't even see Uriah, except he didn't see Uriah as a humble human being.

He didn't see Uriah as a heroic servant of the king. He saw Uriah as an obstacle to his own lust, and while he was doing that, he wasn't sitting there thinking, you know, God did some things for me, but look at how good I've been to God.

I mean, after all, he anointed me king, and Saul tried to kill me, and instead of letting me ascend to the throne, which I should have, I spent all those years as a fugitive running around the desert while Saul was trying to kill me.

I mean, if God was really going to be gracious, he would have made me king, and look what I did for Israel.

They were on the brink of defeat,.

And they were all intimidated by the giant Goliath until I went up against this giant, and I was the one who had enough courage to slay the giant and cause victory for my people over the Philistines. You would think all that I've done for God and all that I've done for Israel could have let me have a few breaks here, let me have the object of my affections, couldn't take away from me the woman I loved the most.

And put her in the hands of this insignificant private in the army.

I think I'm justified to get rid of him. That's the way he was thinking until God sent Nathan, until God came with the Word of God, and the Word of God was accompanied by the Spirit of God because it is the Spirit of God who along with the Word of God that has the power to use the sword to slice into your soul and to divide between bone and marrow and to convict you of righteousness and of sin.

Ladies and gentlemen,.

Unless the Holy Spirit pierces our conscience like that with the Word of God, our hearts would become so hard that we would have no conscience left, and everybody would do what was right in their own eyes.

But there is something absolutely liberating, wonderful and sweet about the conviction of the Holy Ghost. Repentance is painful, but there is an exquisite pleasure to that pain when one realizes that that repentance is born of the saving action of God the Holy Spirit.

God does not convict people of sin in order to destroy them. God convicts people of sin in order to heal them, in order to restore them, in order to bring them to Himself. And this is what happens to David.

When David listens to this parable, first he responds in anger against this mythical person that Nathan had just spoken of, and when Nathan reveals that he was talking about David and he hears the judgment of God falling upon his head, David doesn't stand there and say,.

Wait, wait, wait, wait a minute.

Let me give you all my excuses for why I was engaged in this. I'm not a crook, you know. I made some mistakes, but please don't get carried away with the severity of this crime. It's not what he did. Here's what he says.

David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord.

I did it, Nathan.

You're right, Nathan.

I am the man.

You see, already the fruit of repentance is being formed in the soul of David before he ever picks up the pen to write Psalm 51. He is already responding as a godly man to the confrontation of the prophet.

And Nathan said to David, the Lord also has put away your sin and you shall not die. David, you know the penalty for this is death. God has you on two counts of capital crime here, adultery and proxy murder.

And God would be perfectly just to slay you at this moment, but God is not going to kill you. He is going to temper his justice with mercy. But there will be consequences, David, because by this deed you have given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme the child who was born to you, and this woman shall surely die.

And Nathan departed to his house. And then we read how the Lord struck that baby and how David for a week in sackcloth and ashes fasted and cried and begged that God would spare that baby. And then until finally he looks out and he sees his guards whispering among themselves and he knows that the baby has died, just as Nathan said.

And when he hears the word that the hammer had fallen, what does he do? He changes his clothes. He anoints his head with oil and he goes to church to worship God. That's repentance. That's the kind of man who wrote Psalm 51.