Heart of Kings - David 21: Nathan's Rebuke

Hello, church.

Hear now the word of the true and living God, 2 Samuel 12, verses 1 through 15.

2 Samuel 12:1–15

And the Lord sent Nathan to David.

He came to him and said to him, There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor.

The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought, and he brought it up, and it grew up with him, and with his children.

It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms, and it was like a daughter to him.

Now there came a traveller to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had come to him.

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

Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man, and he said to Nathan, As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die, and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.

Nathan said to David, You are the man.

Thus says the Lord God of Israel, I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul, and I gave you your master's house, and your master's wives into your arms, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah.

And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more.

Why have you despised the word of the Lord to do what is evil in his sight?

You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.

Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.

Thus says the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house, 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 this sun, for you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.

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

And Nathan said to David, The Lord also has put away your sin, you shall not die.

Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child who is born to you shall die.

Then Nathan went to his house.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good evening.

Welcome to church this evening.

My name is James Rathman.

Welcome to Redemption Church Denver.

I'm the pastor here.

We gather together two ways at Redemption Church.

We gather together large, which you are doing with us now on Sunday evenings, and we gather small, which we do throughout the week in each other's homes.

If you would like to become a part of one of those small groups, which we call redemption groups, you can do so by uh going to redemptiondenver.com and clicking on connect and finding a group there.

You can go down to the lobby afterwards, and at the welcome table, you'll be able to sign up with someone with an RC shirt and an iPad.

Or you can download the Redemption Denver app.

Just go to your app store of choice, you can join us there.

I highly recommend downloading the app.

And also, if you do have the app and if you have been doing the reading plan with us, or if you have been intending to do the reading plan with us, the Bible in a year reading plan that we're doing, this is a great time to start.

Because the reading plan that we're doing, it moves through the New Testament twice in a year, and the Old Testament once in a year.

And just this weekend, we've restarted the New Testament.

So you can jump in now, and it's not too late to miss the New Testament.

Not to give it away, but things really pick up.

There's a whole new dimension to things in the New Testament.

So I recommend jumping in and you can read with us.

There's something really thrilling and exciting about reading it through scripture and knowing that I'm not alone reading this.

This isn't something I'm doing just off on a corner.

I'm reading it with my church.

And others in my church are being built up by the same scripture today.

And he was like, it's just like taking a shower.

You know, every day it's like, I'm glad I read that.

It's like I just rinsed off.

It's like, yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Um so read it or you'll smell.

That's our takeaway.

Uh this is our third evening service.

So thanks for joining us.

Uh the uh to give you a brief catch-up, the building that we are in has sold, and it's sold to another church called the Heights Church.

They meet here in the mornings.

I think that God really has his eye out for this part of Colfax right now, because he's like, I'm just gonna put two churches there.

Uh so if you're meeting people and they live in like the East Colfax area, Jesus probably really wants them.

Um so they're meeting in the evenings, we are meeting, nope, they're meeting in the mornings, we are meeting in the evenings.

And uh this is a temporary setup for the next six months, and during these six months, we are looking for what our next permanent home will be.

So if you own a church building, uh don't hold out on us.

Um uh actually it it is great to have as many tentacles out there as we can, so keep your eye out as you're driving around.

We're really trying to explore where could be our next permanent home in Denver.

So this is an adventurous time to be a part of Redemption Church Denver.

Also, last week for our second evening service, we celebrated by confirming Redemption Church's first official elder board.

A cue applause.

Yeah.

Just one applause, doesn't have to be genuine.

We are uh I'm very excited.

Uh so this is a board of elders who will serve a four-year term, and they uh last last week uh we had a whole ceremony that we went through and confirmed these elders.

Also, we are getting used to a new soundboard and a new setup as we're mixing things together with our uh new uh church home friends, um uh which means you can't listen to it.

So it wasn't recorded, you can't find it anywhere, it's lost to time, it's like we preached in the past.

But you can go and read it if you'd like.

You can read my sermon notes.

Beware I randomly capitalize.

Um uh so our elders are Kyle Boyd, Ryan Kunish, John Kushneroff, myself, and Zach Seely, um, who led us in worship this morning and does, this evening, and does uh every evening.

So uh yeah, that's happened.

The the church that you attend is becoming more and more official.

What will happen next is we'll move through a process with deacons, and then we'll be moving into a process of church membership.

So the idea being we want to establish the leaders of the church, and then I as members you'll be able to know who you're submitting to in the membership process.

So keep your eye out.

That is coming your way.

Now, enough with announcements, let's pray and get into our text.

Father, we thank you for bringing us together this evening.

Lord, here at the end of a day, Lord, so many things could have happened, so much news we could have received, stresses and anxieties, and just getting used to a new rhythm of Sundays.

Father, I pray that we would take comfort in your sovereignty.

Lord, that we would know that if we're if our minds are hectic and if we're stressed and anxious, you aren't.

But Lord, you are peaceful and loving, and you care about us, and you desire for us to see you in your word.

So, Father, I pray that your spirit would attend this time or before your word, would you apply it to our hearts?

In Jesus' name, amen.

So we're moving through the final uh weeks of our Heart of Kings series.

And in this series, we've looked at three different characters, but the vast majority of our time has been spent looking at the life of David.

And as we've looked, we've seen him go through all sorts of different seasons, and we saw him reach a season where his kingdom was finally established, and he was in this sort of uh moment of Eden in his kingdom, where it was formed and things were going really well.

And just like Eden, sin enters the picture.

And we see sort of the fall of David, where David is uh staying home from battle, he's wandering around on his roof board, and he looks at a woman and sees her beauty, and he takes him for himself.

She is the husband of one of the warriors who fights for David, also the daughter-in-law of one of the warriors who fights for David.

And uh David takes her for himself.

Uh uh she becomes pregnant by David, and David tries to cover it up, and he ends up murdering her husband.

And two weeks ago, when we were looking at this, it ended, and it looked like David might have gotten away with it.

Except for one line which said, The thing that David did displeased the Lord.

And that's where we pick up this week.

God was not uh content to look at David sit in his sin and to see that he would somehow get away with it while his soul is corrupted, and so he sends on his on the Lord's behalf, the Lord sends Nathan, who is a prophet in Israel, and he also happens to be a close friend of David.

We see them together frequently throughout before the story and up until uh this point and then later on in the story as well.

And today what we're looking at is the way that Nathan rebukes David.

It's the story we're gonna be zeroing in on this morning.

Nathan's rebuke of David.

Now, today we're sort of in uh a golden age of rebukes, and maybe even better, we're in like a golden age of the public apology.

And you you probably, just us in this room, we get publicly apologized to like once a week.

It's kind of great.

You just wake up, you check your Twitter feed, and you've been apologized to.

And the way it works is some celebrity says something offensive, and so they quick take out their iPhone and they take out their notes app and they type up an apology, and the apology ends by saying something like, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to offend, I'm still learning, I still have so much to learn, and I'm open to learn.

And hashtag still learning, they take a picture of it and then they post it to Instagram.

That's the public apology.

We're in a golden age of them right now.

But the problem with our public apologies is that the whole process is external.

There's not a moment in the apologies that we see today that requires internal reflection on either side.

Because the offense doesn't take place internally.

The offense simply takes place in a group of offended people who then say, You didn't know enough and you spoke out of ignorance.

And the apology says, look, I just I just have more to learn.

There wasn't anything wrong, there was no wrong intention, there's just a knowledge gap here.

And so the diagnosis is, well, you just need to learn more.

But Nathan's rebuke drives David towards a very different type of apology.

It's it's not really an apology at all, it's it's repentance.

And the reason that it's different is because it drives David to reflect internally on what he's done and what that says about the condition of his heart.

So this is not like the typical external apologies that we see, but this drives towards real repentance.

And Nathan is so skillful in his rebuke that he drives David towards this true repentance.

It's not external, but it requires an actual internal reflection.

That's why this is actually so hard.

And this is such a hard thing to look at and even study, to see someone go through.

Because it will it requires a look at ourselves that we rarely ever make.

A type of self-knowledge, a type of standing before God, being completely and vulnerably known, a type of place that we almost never go to.

And even when we're demanding public apologies, we often aren't asking the other person to go there.

Because when we're asking someone to go there, what we're asking is, you know, could you admit a flaw in the core of you?

And then could we hope that that could be changed, that that could be redeemed?

So what we're gonna see is Nathan exposed the heart of David, and then he's going to name explicitly the sin of David, and this is gonna drive David to a real repentance.

So we're gonna walk through that today and see how that works.

So uh let's go ahead and jump into our text.

2 Samuel 12, verse 1.

2 Samuel 12:1

Uh it says, And the Lord sent Nathan to David.

He came to him and said to him, There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor.

So we'll stop there.

So, first of all, it's the Lord who sends Nathan to rebuke David.

And we read the story, so we won't read it again, but I'll recap it for you.

Nathan enters the conversation, not with a head-on collision.

He doesn't come in and he's say, he doesn't say, first of all, look, you murdered Uriah, you cheated on his wife with you, because he wouldn't have said such a horrible sentence.

And uh he doesn't enter this head-on collision with what David did.

And the reason, I think, is because he doesn't want to risk only causing cosmetic damage.

See, if you're in a head-on collision, you could bounce off of each other, and the damage could be just cosmetic.

But remember in Armageddon, when we all learned how to blow up a meteor, you have to put the firework inside of your hand and then close your hand around it, and then when the firework explodes, it blows your hand apart.

Also, it's just as easy to teach an oil rougneck to be an astronaut as it is to teach an astronaut to be an oil rougneck.

That's another thing that we learned, less relevant for our purposes.

He doesn't want to risk cosmetic damage, so he drills into David's heart.

And it's only once he knows that he's in the soft space of David's heart that he makes his sin explicit.

And that's because he wants to break apart the hardness that's taken place in David's heart.

He's dealing with someone whose heart has turned to stone.

So he doesn't just come at him, he drills in first.

Then he'll put the dynamite.

So he does this by telling David a story.

It's a narrative.

You know, there's an artistic component to Nathan's rebuke that allows David to see himself.

And it's a story that's it's so accessible, it's so beautiful.

And it starts with this dichotomy of these two men in a certain city, one is rich and the other is poor.

Oh, you've got my attention.

Something interesting is going to happen.

And what happens is the rich man uh has a traveler come and visit him.

And instead of taking a sheep from his flock, and of which he has many, and sacrificing the sheep and uh using it to provide the meal for the traveler that comes, instead he goes to the poor man and he takes the poor man's beloved you lamb, this beautiful sheep that the poor man loved.

And Nathan describes he raised up the sheep like a daughter, and it would eat out of his hand, and it would sleep in his bed.

It was like his pet little lovely sheep.

And the rich man, instead of taking one of his own sheep, of which he had plenty, he takes the sheep of the poor man and he slaughters it to feed the traveler, to demonstrate a hospitality that cost him nothing.

This is the story.

Now it would have been appropriate for David to have been brought stories like this.

He's the king, and as king he's also judge.

And so when injustices like this are happening in his kingdom, he would rule on them.

And when he hears of this injustice, of the poor man being robbed and the rich man being totally negligent of the poor man's condition, his reaction is visceral.

David goes off the handle angry.

Says, then David, this is 2 Samuel 12, verses 5 through the beginning of 7.

2 Samuel 12:5

It says, Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man.

And he said to Nathan, as the Lord lives, notice he swears by the Lord, as the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die.

And he shall restore the lamb fourfold because he did this thing and because he had no pity.

And then Nathan turns the rebuke onto David and exposes to him, you are the man.

You are the rich man who took from the poor man.

What we see in this is that David's judgment is sound so long as it's external.

David's conscience is working, it's able to assess situations accurately so long as it isn't the situation in his own heart.

Internally, he is completely blind.

Nathan understands that in order for the heart to change, excuse me, Nathan sees that he is not just seeking some behavioral change from David.

He's not just gonna he's not showing up to David and he's like, hey, you know, you slept with this man's wife and then you murdered him after you got his wife pregnant.

Don't do that again.

That's not his rebuke.

His rebuke is there's something wrong in your heart.

And it's this isn't just something, this obviously doesn't show, oh, that's a bad thing.

Stop it, stop doing that.

No, there's something more deeply twisted, and that's the thing that needs to be seen and needs to be repented of.

It's that thing in there.

This is not a matter of mere behavior or lack of information, but David's conscience on his own heart does not seem to be working.

Saint Augustine wrote the world's first autobiography called The Confessions.

And you should read it, it's really readable.

Uh because it's words.

Readable.

What does that mean?

It's like drinkable.

Bud Light.

And in the Confessions, he he says this.

It's this part where he's reflecting on the way sin works in his own heart.

And he comes to this conclusion.

He says, sin is committed when, in consequence of an immoderate urge towards those things which are at the bottom end of the scale of good, we abandon the higher and supreme goods.

That is you, Lord God, and your truth and your law.

Let me sum this up.

Augustine describes our sin not as a lack of love, but as a love that has become completely out of order.

It's a love in our hearts that has set itself on the lower goods in the world.

And it has not set its love on the highest good.

And what is the highest good?

He starts talking to God directly.

He says, which is you, Lord God.

Our sin is that we haven't set our love on you.

Instead, we've loved something else.

What's wrong?

It's our hearts that's wrong.

And it's what our hearts are loving.

So for Nathan to come out and say, hey, stop murdering and cheating on people, it misses the heart.

Even if David stopped, it misses the real problem which takes place in David's heart.

You know, what's the most important commandment?

Nice.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

You guys must have a good preacher because five of you knew.

And there's a love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

That's where it starts, which means that any sin we must see as not loving God and instead loving something else, setting our hearts on something else.

And once we start to see that this is the mechanism, we realize we whenever we see sin in our lives, we have to go to our hearts.

This is flowing from our hearts.

Augustine spends like, you know, books and books in the confessions describing how this process takes place in his heart.

Tim Keller does it in 140 characters.

He says, What the heart trusts, the mind justifies, the emotions desire, and the will carries out.

Everything follows.

The heart.

So Nathan gets this chain reaction.

Do you see the picture?

What the heart trusts?

You could read what the heart loves.

You've set your heart to love something.

Then your mind goes to work and starts justifying it.

So that you build up all the reasons why you should find that thing lovely, why it's good to love that thing, why there is really no risk for your soul to set your love on that thing that isn't God.

The emotions begin to desire it, and your will carries it out.

Your whole life flows from the heart.

So when Nathan rebukes David, he goes to the heart.

What we see in David is his heart is set on this sin of Bathsheba.

His heart is set on maintaining his own reputation and covering up his sin, even to the point of murder.

And with that, there's this deep justification that his mind has.

And that's what Nathan needs to get through.

How do you rebuke someone who is so certain in their minds of their own goodness?

Because their mind's just been at work justifying themselves.

That's the task that Nathan has.

And so he goes in with a story.

And it's a story that David has a visceral reaction to.

Because outside of himself his conscience works.

J.P.

Fokelman is a theologian from the 80s, which is just like a normal theologian.

Thanks.

David means, this is what he says.

He says, David means to occupy himself with the reality outside of himself, the rich man and his misdeed.

But in actual fact, he is involved with himself and seeks to restore his feelings of well-being in this way.

Nathan provides him with a projection screen for this very purpose.

And indeed, David projects vehemently.

He means to pass verdict upon another, but actually passes verdict entirely upon himself.

Do you see how masterful Nathan's rebuke is?

A mind that has justified itself to guard its own heart.

Nathan has rebuked David in such a way where he projects his own evil onto this story, and Nathan is able to stand back and say, You see that thing that you admit that you hate?

It's you.

You're the rich man.

Uriah had one wife.

You had all the women in the kingdom that had been Saul's.

It's a different time.

It's not what the sermon's about.

And yet you took Uriah's wife.

You're the rich man.

Do you see how clear this evil is?

But do you see how hard our hearts are?

How hard it is to actually come in contact with the depth of evil that's actually in us, for us to see this was a hatred of God, is what I was doing.

This was a love of something that wasn't him.

I've been completely disordered.

And so now that Nathan has burrowed into the hardness of David's heart, now David is broken.

And he can speak directly to the sin.

You know, a lot of us would stop there.

We'd see David's broken, but Nathan just keeps burrowing.

Because Nathan believes that there's a repentance at the bottom of this, but it needs to be a real repentance.

And so that's what Nathan drives towards.

This is how he continues on.

In 2 Samuel 12, verses 7 and 8, Nathan said to David, You are the man.

2 Samuel 12:7

Thus says the Lord God of Israel, I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul, and I gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your arms, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah.

And listen to this.

And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more.

Do you see where Nathan begins his explanation of David's explicit sin?

It's with the loveliness of God towards David.

See, a couple weeks ago in chapter seven, Nathan is the prophet that God sends to David to establish his covenant.

Where he says, My steadfast love will never depart from the line of David.

That's what God says to David.

And with this very same language, this covenantal commitment that God has demonstrated to David, his loveliness that he's demonstrated to David, Nathan begins his rebuke.

He says, David, I God says to David, I anointed you.

And then when there was a threat to your anointing from Saul, I delivered you.

And after I had delivered you, I I gave you all of Saul's house.

All of your master's house.

And for the first time I united the kingdom under you so that Israel and Judah are both yours.

And you know what, David?

This is the part that hurts.

He says, you know what?

If that weren't enough, I would have given you more.

I would have given to you until you said, this is enough.

I'm satisfied.

This is the loveliness of God towards David.

And what Nathan is doing is he's exposing what the heart of David's sin is.

That he had neglected the loveliness of God.

And instead, he had loved, he had set his heart on something less, on the temporal satisfaction of Bathsheba, on the protection of a good name.

It's the breaking of the most important command.

So then Nathan becomes explicit.

In 2 Samuel 12, verse 9, he says, Why have you despised the word of the Lord to do what is evil in his sight?

2 Samuel 12:9

You have struck down Uriah the Hittite.

This is the first time that he says exactly what he did, because now it matters, right?

Now we get what he did.

You've struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, you've taken his wife to be your wife, and you've killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.

You see where he introduces it?

He says, What have you done?

You've despised the word of the Lord.

This is the same thing as to hate God himself.

David, the one who would write in the Psalms, Lord, your testimonies are my delight.

We see that this very same David despises the word of the Lord.

If David had just repented that it was wrong to take Uriah's wife, if he had repented that it was wrong to cover it up, and he'd never do it again, and if he had repented that it was wrong to turn on his own soldier and to have him killed by the Ammonites, if he'd repented of all those things, he would have missed the heart of the matter.

Which is that he had despised the word of the Lord, rejected God's loveliness.

So Nathan moves on to the consequence of David's sin.

In 2 Samuel 12, verses 10 through 12, it says, Now therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.

2 Samuel 12:10–12

Thus says the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house, 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 this sun, for you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.

The response is so beautifully proportional.

You killed by the sword, now the sword will never leave your house.

You tried to cover it up, now you're going to be exposed.

You tried to have peace in your household, I will make sure that this rises up out of your own household.

We can often wonder, is God's justice something that He is doing in the world, or is this just sort of a natural consequence, a fact of the world?

My wife and I have a two-year-old, and so we talk a lot about natural consequences.

Well, I'm naturally his parent.

So he naturally happens to be in front of me, so we're naturally going to consequence him.

But you know, the distinction with God, I think it, I think it doesn't actually matter.

What is just a natural consequence?

You know, David sins, and so he corrupts his family, and these terrible things follow from it.

Well, yeah, God's doing it.

There's no outstepping the justice of the Lord.

Our sin is real and our consequences are likewise real.

And it's in this, sitting under the hard consequences of the Lord, that David finds himself in precisely the same place that his predecessor had found himself, who is Saul.

And it's right here that Saul is rejected by the Lord.

But here's Nathan's response, excuse me, David's response.

And in his response we see the difference between him and Saul.

2 Samuel 12, verse 13, David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord.

2 Samuel 12:13

And Nathan said to David, The Lord also has put away your sin.

You shall not die.

David locates his sin at his core because he says, I have sinned against the Lord.

See, did he sin against Uriah?

Yes.

Did he likely sin against Bathsheba?

Yes.

But David is now, because of the careful rebuke of Nathan, he's repenting of the core of his sin.

He's repenting of what's flowing out of his heart, and he sees he is a creature who has been showed an inordinate loveliness from the Lord.

And in response, he has rejected the Lord.

And so David now repents of that.

And it's in that type of repentance that he discovers salvation.

He discovers the Lord's rescue.

That his heart might be changed, that his heart might actually be healed.

Our repentance can be so shallow.

And I'm gonna give another side to this coin soon, but our repentance can be so shallow.

And we wonder, why am I plagued by the same sin over and over again?

I'm repenting of it weakly.

And the reality is you're not.

You're just saying, hey, you know you shouldn't do that self.

Stop doing it.

All right, I'm gonna stop doing it.

But we haven't looked down into what the color of our sin actually is.

We haven't seen that there isn't there's a depth of wrong towards a God who has been so lovely towards us.

And we've rejected the very words that He's offered to save us.

The other side to that is I know that if you've been around Christian circles long enough, there's also some of you, I've been in this world, who you sin again, and it's like, oh, I've got to go deeper down into, I haven't gotten to the core of my repentance yet.

I haven't figured out there's something here in my heart.

And so I'll be able to stop sinning, I'll be able to stop doing this sin, this thing that I know is wrong and is causing harm in my family, once I finally get to the bottom of this real repentance that's way down here somewhere.

That look, good intentions, but stop doing the thing also.

Right?

Like you're a deep thing, you're not infinitely deep.

And when you look at into yourself and you know, look, I wasn't loving the Lord, and it's because I was loving this other thing, then just stop and repent.

There's hope there.

Like we've got to hold this with some wisdom about the type of things that we really are.

So we can get obsessed with just finding some deeper level to ourselves.

In Romans 1, Paul begins that letter with this description of sin.

And it's a description of how they sin.

You know.

Them, 80s theologians.

I'm just kidding, I just wanted to use that again.

And it's a description that we look at and we see, yeah, I can see that all over the place.

I see people who sin like that everywhere.

This does explain why the world is so corrupt.

You know, it's kind of like a story about a rich man and a poor man and the rich man who steals from the poor man.

Yeah, that is wrong.

I can look in that at that and see how wrong it really is.

And then in Romans 2, he turns it in and he says, you know, you know, you who are who are judging those people who are sinning?

I'll read it, I'll prove it to you.

Romans 2, verses 3 through 4, do you suppose, O man, you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God?

Romans 2:3–4

Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?

He says, look at the very things that you are judging so passionately.

And then consider, how is that in you?

Are you judging it so passionately because you think perhaps by knowing it's wrong that you might justify yourself?

It certainly was the case for David.

But in the case of David and for us as well, we are just heaping judgments upon ourselves and more and more cultivating a hardness of heart.

And he says, Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience?

Do you consider, you know what?

I'm a Christian, and so the Lord's kindness and the riches of his kindness and his forbearance and patience, that just means that I can pretty much keep on living however I want.

And you're neglecting to see that it is God's kindness that is meant to lead you to repentance.

It's knowing the kindness of the Lord that drives you to repentance.

Why is that?

Well, look at the way that it worked in David's heart.

What does Nathan do when he's driving David towards repentance?

He says, Do you remember that you were anointed by God?

And that you, this sinful you, you were delivered by God, and that you, this sinful you, were the one who God gave all of his blessings to?

That drives you to repentance because what are you repenting of?

Not loving the most lovely thing.

And so when you once again see, look how lovely he is, it shows, look how disordered my heart is.

I need to repent because I'm out of sync with any sort of reality here.

And that's real repentance.

So to close, how much more can we say it?

We were anointed by God, not to be king of even a 400-year dynasty.

That's pretty good, right?

That David got, got to be king of a 400-year dynasty.

It's not like he saw all of it.

It's still nice to know.

We're anointed with the Holy Spirit of God.

The one that spoke creation into existence, the one that recreates our own hearts.

We've been anointed.

We've been delivered, not from some king that won't leave us alone.

We've been delivered from sin and death itself.

What have we been given?

We've been made co-heirs with Christ.

To reign with him for eternity.

Look at how lovely Jesus has been to us.

Look at how good He is.

What a lovely, what a lovely God.

Let us see that.

Let it drive us towards repentance.

So with that, I'll take a question if there is one.

It seems as if women in this story are treated as property and punished for David's actions.

How is this fair to them?

So there is an element of that in this story, right?

Like I'm not going to like I literally read it, right?

You were given these wives.

And they do seem to be treated as property in that regard.

As far as a defense of the rightness of that, I'm not confident to offer one.

Not of that regard.

However, as far as being punished for David's actions, I don't think we see an injustice of that measure.

The injustice that we see is perhaps being being treated as property and being commoditized.

That's not a good thing.

The commodification meant a life of royalty.

And yet I still think that the commodification was not good.

But as far as being punished for David's actions, that is not something that I think we actually see.

The only person who we could likely say was punished for David's actions would be the uh you could potentially the only woman you could potentially say was Bathsheba.

But as we covered when we looked at the sin between David and Bathsheba, Bathsheba was not coaxed.

Bathsheba was coaxing.

This is not a sin that David committed outside of the mutual autonomy of another woman.

And so this was a sin that they committed together.

And in that they share the punishment together as they both lose their son.

You know, the punishment seems most harshly to fall on David's son, who dies as a result of this sin.

He doesn't live.

And yet it is the Lord's to give life and to take life away.

And how he doles out his punishment is simply not ours.

Yeah, that's that's my answer to that question.

I think that's the only one.

Thanks for asking.

If you want to talk further about that, um, or just women in the Bible more generally, uh, I'd be happy to stick around and talk after the service.

So with that, let's pray and then we'll take communion together.

Father, I pray that you would give us the confidence in your grace to look perhaps more deeply into our hearts than we ever would have before, that we might repent truthfully.

Lord, I pray that you would give us real friends that can help us do that.

Lord, would you perform the surgery on our hearts that requires the skillful surgeon that you are to show us where our hearts have been disordered and fallen out of love with you?

God, would you cause us to see your loveliness and repent?

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Now we'll take communion.

And as we take communion, we'll remember that God has set his sin away from us in Christ by breaking his body and pouring out his blood.

We remember that this evening.