HARD TO FORGIVE
Psalm 51
Dr. Phillip Reynolds, Pastor
This is the third sermon in the Old Testament portion of the Great Chapters of the Bible series. We began with Genesis 1 and talked of how God purposely and lovingly created the whole universe and each one of us. Next we looked at Genesis 12, how God reached down into creation to call Abraham and Sarah, through whom God would bring promise and blessing. Today we will look to Psalm 51 and seek, with King David, forgiveness when God’s creation is violated and when we fail to keep God’s covenant.
As we begin, notice the little inscription above verse one of this Psalm. I believe it appears in virtually all translations. In my New American Standard Bible the inscription reads, “For the choir director. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone into Bathsheba.” In order to understand David’s devastation and the depth of his plea for forgiveness we must first know the story of his sin with Bathsheba.
This story is found in II Samuel 11. It begins with an ominous tone, “at the time when kings go out to war . . . but David stayed at Jerusalem.” Trouble, you can see it coming. The scene gets even riper for trouble in the next verse. “Now when evening came David arose from his bed and walked around on the roof of the king’s house.” We get the feeling he’s wandering aimlessly about—bored, unchallenged, unexcited. Then, from his roof he spies a woman bathing. Big trouble. Her name is Bathsheba and David sends for her and sleeps with her. A month or so later David receives a message from her, “I am pregnant.”
From this point on, David takes a mistake and compounds it, making it a lot worse. He could have admitted what he had done and tried to take whatever steps he could to resolve the situation. He could have tried to make restitution, whatever that may have entailed, even if it could have been drastic for him. I don’t know what could have happened. Could he have continued his kingship? I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the historical context to know that. But I know that he should not have done what he did in the following verses.
He embarks on a slippery slope of cover-up that will lead to lying and conspiracy and murder. He goes about it this way. The first thing that enters his mind is to just send for Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, to give him a furlough. Surely Uriah will be glad to be at home and will spend the night with his wife. Unfortunately for David, Uriah was a real gung-ho soldier and refused the comforts of home and his wife’s bed while his comrades were deployed on the field sleeping in tents near the front lines of battle. Uriah would not go in to his own home. So David comes up with another plan. He invites Uriah to dinner to get him drunk. He thinks that the alcohol will weaken Uriah’s commitment to his comrades and energize Uriah’s desire for his wife and that certainly after getting inebriated at supper he will go home and sleep with Bathsheba. He doesn’t. We’re not told why, but he doesn’t. He stays with David’s servants instead.
At this point in the story we start to get a sense of David’s frustration and desperation, so his scheming advances to a more heinous level. He sends Uriah back to the front with orders for everyone else to fall back when the fighting gets fierce so Uriah will be left alone and unprotected and will very likely be killed. David was foolish enough to put this plan into writing. His sinfulness is clouding his common sense and good judgment. But, in a twisted sort of way, finally David is successful. Uriah is killed in battle.
I’m not sure, as I read this story, how this helped David. I’m really not. How does this help cover up his sinful act with Bathsheba? What started out as bad enough turns evil in what looks like to me “evil for evil’s sake.” Such is the nature of sin. In any event, Uriah is dead and Bathsheba is a pregnant widow. After an appropriate period of mourning, David sends for her again and takes her into his house as yet another wife.
The whole thing is a mess. And it reminds me of the Garden of Eden when God gave Adam and Eve everything they needed, everything they could ever want or long for, a paradise with one proviso, and you know what it is. “You may eat of any tree in the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you may not eat.” And what do they do? They go and eat from the very tree that they were warned to stay away from.
A brief aside. It’s fascinating to watch children grow up and start to put things together. It’s fascinating to watch children put language and words together and start to form sentences. One of our children growing up could not understand the difference between the words need and want and so would use them together, as in “I need-want a cookie.” Or “I need-want you to play with me.”
Apparently, David could not understand the difference in need and want as an adult. What he wanted, he thought he needed and reached out and took it. He had everything he needed. He had everything he should have wanted—riches, power, respect, glory. If women was the thing for him, he had wives upon wives. But what does he do? Maybe the only thing that he was forbidden to do, to take another man’s wife, and when that went badly, to have that man killed.
Now enter Nathan the prophet in the very next chapter. Nathan comes in to David and says, “Suppose there’s a rich man who owned lots and lots of livestock. And suppose there’s a poor man who only owns one little ewe lamb, just one little lamb, and he loves that little lamb and treats it like one of his own children. And suppose that the rich man has a visitor, and custom and tradition being what it is, he is to prepare a big meal, a feast, for the visitor. Suppose instead of taking one of his many, many lambs or goats or calves from his livestock, he takes that poor man’s only little lamb and has it killed and served for supper. What should happen to that man?”
David gives the answer to Nathan. He burns with anger and says, “That man must die. Fourfold restitution must be made because [verse 6 of chapter 12], he did the thing and had no compassion.” Then Nathan said in one of the most famous lines ever uttered, “You are the man.” David had done the thing and had no compassion! Nathan then connected the dots for David and showed him how what that fictitious man had done with that little lamb was exactly what he had done with Uriah and Bathsheba.
Finally it hit him. It hit him like a truckload of ice. I think King David’s blood ran cold. I think it stopped him in his tracks and then he felt the depth of his self-centeredness, his awfulness in confusing wants and needs, his placing his fleeting desires for a moment’s pleasure over another’s stability, home life, and even life itself. He felt all that and he confessed what he had done (in verse 13), “I have sinned against the Lord.” At some point after this he wrote Psalm 51, which you have helped to read this morning in the litanies you have recited.
Why include this sordid, totally uncomplimentary story of one of the Biblical heroes? I think God is trying to show us all something here, and I think it’s this: No one, no one, no matter how blessed or good or well-fixed in life we are, no one is sinless. David was God’s very best, chosen, anointed, empowered by God, called in the scripture “a man after God’s own heart,” yet he did just about the worst thing imaginable. The lesson is, if David can fall, I can fall. If David can fall, you can fall. And the depths to which we can fall will astound us. This is not a theory. This is not a theological position. This is not just Old Testament history. This is living reality for you and for me.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn realized this when he was imprisoned in a Soviet prison. He wrote, “Good and evil passes not through states nor between classes, but right through every human heart, and even in the best of hearts there remains an unuprooted small corner of evil.” Granted, now, our small corner of evil may not be as deep and dark as David’s, but it’s there and it has to be dealt with. It has to be dealt with.
Do you wonder why it has to be dealt with? Why can’t we just lighten up a little bit? Why can’t the Bible and Sunday School lessons and preachers, for goodness sake! just lighten up and accept the fact and say, “Hey, we’re imperfect.” We’re not perfectly made. We’re going to trip. We’re going to fall. We’re going to sin. Why can we just say, “That’s part of the human experience; let’s all have a great big group hug and sing a couple of verses of Kumbaya or something and then we’ll all go home?”
Why not say, “Look, we sin. Okay? Get over it! We sin.” Why can’t we just lighten up about this thing? You know why? Because the Bible doesn’t lighten up about it, and the Bible is our place for guidance and truth. The Bible takes this stuff seriously, and we’d better take it seriously. It’s a good question. Why can’t we just lighten up? We can’t because sin is insidious and it’s powerful.
Let Frederick Buechner put it into words: Buechner says, “The power of sin is centrifugal. When at work in the human life, it tends to push everything out toward the periphery. Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left. Eventually, bits and pieces of the core itself go flying off until in the end nothing is left. Sin is whatever you do or fail to do that pushes God and others away, that widens the gap between you and them, and also the gap within yourself. Original sin means we all originate out of a sinful world which taints us from the word go. We all tend to make ourselves the center of the universe, pushing away centrifugally from the center everything that seems to impede its freewheeling. More even than hunger or poverty or disease, this is what Jesus came to save the world from.”
Do you see how soul-killing is our own sin? We must find forgiveness. And the first place we must find it is in ourselves. Of all the people who sin against us, perhaps the hardest to forgive is ourself. Perhaps the most necessary to forgive is ourself. And that’s no small statement, because sinning against others is important. But I’m not so sure how capable we are of really extending forgiveness to another until we’ve experienced it in ourselves. We can’t give what we don’t have. And if we don’t have forgiveness, how can we extend it?
You know some of the little trite, pithy sayings about not forgiving another person. What’s the one? “Withholding forgiveness from another is like taking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.” Withholding forgiveness just doesn’t work, so let’s not withhold it from ourselves. We need to experience forgiveness in our own hearts. We need to long for it the way David longed for the ability to forgive himself. His self-incrimination was killing him. You can feel his anguish in what we’ve read from Psalm 51. Phrases like “my sin is ever before me,” show that he feels this sin has infested him so much that nothing good is in him at all. He wrote, “I was brought forth in iniquity.” He prays for, “the broken bones to rejoice.”
There’s a companion to Psalm 51 in the Bible, Psalm 32. It’s just like it. The same story is behind it. In Psalm 32 David wrote, “When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away. My vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer.” I think he felt like he lived in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in August with no air conditioning and no end in sight. Who wouldn’t that kill?
Paul was right, then, wasn’t he? When he said, “The wages of sin is death.” So we must find forgiveness, the clean heart that David longed for. We’re going to talk about that more next when we talk about Isaiah 53. But for our purposes this morning, the old sinner, David himself, is helpful in verse 13 of II Samuel 12. David confessed to Nathan. “I have sinned against the Lord.” Forgiveness starts with confession, with honest, open confession. It means being honest with ourselves. It means being honest with God. And it very well may mean also—this is the part that we resist—being honest with someone else, another human being. Maybe privately, maybe a pastor or priest, or a counselor. I don’t know. Maybe publicly. You can be the judge of that. Maybe just a trusted friend or a soulmate. But whatever we do, we have to get it out, or like an infected boil it will fester and become more and more serious until the whole system is compromised.
Do you think that’s an overstatement? It’s not. The chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge never saw it opened because he died from an infected foot, a little injury on the job that was left untreated just long enough for it to kill him. Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, had a mild case of pneumonia that he did not get treated, and the bacteria grew until he died of pneumonia, a very treatable disease.
Get it out. Confess your sin.
Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, writes, “sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic, but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.”
It’s hard to imagine worse behavior than David’s. Yet, he confessed what he had done and he started on the pathway to forgiveness. I want you to notice something about David. Before this incident with Bathsheba—really notice this now—he was revered as the most honored and respected person in Israel. After this incident with Bathsheba, he was revered as the most honored and respected man in Israel. And Jesus Christ, who knew the Old Testament and Hebrew Bible so well and knew all of this story about David and all that he had done, spoke of David only in terms of admiration and respect.
How does such a sinner become so restored? It’s because our relationship with God is not based on how well we live this life (thank God!) but is based on God’s forgiveness toward us when we come to him and confess our sins. Then comes about the saying which is written, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Yes, that is truth.
Let’s pray.