Up to this point the writer of Samuel has told us nothing bad about David. Now we encounter his dark side. David was supposed to be out of Jerusalem with the army on Kingdom business. Instead he was resting at home. Maybe he was bored with the fighting because a siege can be a time consuming process in which most of the time there is little action. Maybe he arrogantly assumed that the army would do just as well even if he was not there. In any case, staying home was the beginning of his sin for, as we say, idle hands are the devil’s workshop. This sin of not being where God wanted him to be, led to adultery, deceit and murder.
David was a man after God’s own heart up to this point. If a man as spiritual as he could fall so quickly and so utterly we should look to ourselves. David set himself up for this fall because he chose to stop doing the Lord’s work, to take it easy and indulge the flesh. Very often we too do the same thing, indulge the flesh by forsaking the self-denial and self-discipline that godly behavior demands. We get fed up with the rigor of carrying our cross. We prefer to forsake the glory of the Lord to seek our own. We are attracted by the false pleasures of the world.
Inevitably we sin and one sin leads to another and another as it did with David. Soon we find ourselves so far off the way of the Lord that people can not even tell we are Christians. And what is worse, we have built up such a web of lies, deceit and self-deception that we do not even know it.
Comments