Governed by Lesser Passions, Part 2

It's true, isn't it, that sin hides from us the potential consequences and it just gives us the commercial? One author put it this way, Satan never tips his hand in temptation. He shows you the beauty, the ecstasy.

You know, this is the adventure. That's the commercial. It never slips back into that dorm room and shows you the hangover. It never shows you a woman dissolved in tears of grief.

It never shows you a broken home. Just the excitement. Do you ever find yourself driven to pursue things that end up taking you further from God? Today on Wisdom for the Heart, we're going to take a practical look at the passions that govern our lives.

Stephen Davey is in a series on the life of King David. Today, he's looking at the account of David's adultery with Bathsheba. Adultery doesn't just happen in a moment. It's born from a lustful mind that's allowed to go unchecked over time.

Stay with us because while the temptation you face might be different, we all need to better understand our own hearts. Now up to this point in David's biography, he has suffered many obstacles and difficulties. In fact, he's been at his best, hasn't he?

One author writes it this way. Look at him now. He's had a humble beginning. He's been a giant killer.

Two decades now of leadership. Choice men in the right places. A military force, every foe respected. Enlarged boundaries that now reached 60,000 square miles. No defeats on the battlefield.

Exports, imports, financial health. A beautiful new home. Plans for the temple of the Lord. So what if he married a few more wives and privately created a harem who would complain? By the way, there's another lesson there at the outset that I want to record. David is about to pursue yet another woman when he has a harem and a multitude of wives.

Here's the lesson. Sexual desire is never satisfied outside God's created design. It only increases and digresses and destroys. Forbidden lust is like someone dying of thirst while begging for salt. David's lust and polygamy and sexual compromises have eroded his integrity. You didn't read about it. I mean you saw a verse here too and you scratched your head. But the hammer doesn't fall and I guess everything's all right. There wasn't any hammer.

There wasn't any shoe dropping in the honeymoon of wife number six or concubine number 12. But it is now beginning to fall. It's now beginning to fall. He's about to take a step that he would never himself have been able to imagine. You could entitle the first half of David's life the triumphs of David. This chapter is the hinge in his biography and you can entitle the second half the tragedies of David. The kingdom will never quite be the same. In fact the failure of the average Bible student or Christian to understand that this chapter spells the end of his triumphs and the beginning of his tragedies will most likely fail to connect the dots of his coming loss of family relationships, a coming political firestorm, intrigue and crime that will include murder and rape and jealousy and abandonment and treason and disloyalty and multiple murders to come. They'll never connect the dots unless you understand this chapter in its context. And by the way, you'll also miss the depths of his genuine confession and repentance and the amazing grace of God, unless you understand this correctly. Now verse 1, in the spring of the year, the time when kings go to battle.

That's not a throwaway line though. That's a hint. David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel and they ravaged the Ammonites. That means they creamed them and besieged Rabah. But David remained at Jerusalem. It happened late one afternoon when David arose from his bed, his couch, and was walking on the roof of the king's house. Let's pause there for a moment.

The author has hinted at several things we ought to take note of. First of all, David was not in battle. He was in bed. Had he been where he belonged, perhaps this episode with Bathsheba might never have occurred. And isn't it true that sometimes our greatest battles with temptation come when things are going so well? Now at a future date, his commander will convince him to not go into battle because the enemy is targeting David to kill him. That's not happening here.

David is most vulnerable to the bait of Satan. He's bored with the mundane chores of predictable days. There's more leisure than necessary. He's luxuriating in his new palace. His army is mopping up one more victory.

Ho-hum! Didn't even need to pray about it. He's resting comfortably physically and metaphorically on his past heroic accomplishments. Life couldn't be easier. And the writer doesn't want us to miss this. He's lounging in bed in the late afternoon.

Now there's nothing wrong with an afternoon nap. Excavations have revealed that Eastern monarchs frequently built palaces on top of palaces. They built gardens, beautiful gardens.

Some of them have been drawn out for contemporary audiences to see. It's hard to imagine what they would do They would build open-sided, column-supported dining rooms and bedrooms where they could enjoy from their flat roofs of their palaces the cool evening breezes. In the evening, a king would be able to walk around his rooftop garden in some privacy above the noisy streets below where he's protected but from which he can see his kingdom sprawling around him. That's exactly where David is at this moment and it happened. Verse 2, late one afternoon when David arose from his bed, his couch was walking on the roof of the king's house that he saw from the roof a woman bathing and the woman was very beautiful. Now the biblical record, by the way, isn't going to write a Hollywood script but it doesn't exaggerate. When it says that she was beautiful, it means it. In fact, we're told that she was very beautiful. One Old Testament linguist pointed out the fact that the Bible rarely uses the word translated very, and I checked it out myself and went to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and discovered that that word very, usually translated exceedingly, only appears about twelve times in the New Testament.

The Bible doesn't exaggerate. And so when it says that she was exceedingly beautiful, she is the perfect storm. She is perfect for this last step. And I would agree, by the way, with others that she bears some responsibility.

In his wonderful commentary on the life of David, which I've enjoyed reading, Chuck Swindoll writes on this text here, Bathsheba was careless and foolish. From her own home, she would often have looked out to the royal palace nearby. She would have known that she could be seen. Now whether she knew it or not, we'll never know.

And it probably wouldn't have mattered. David did see her. And when he should have turned away, he looked again. And his looking turned into lusting. See, lust is never satisfied anyway.

It always craves more. Verse 3, and David sent and inquired about the woman. In other words, I'm going to add her to my harem. And one said, the messenger said, is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliim, the wife of Uriah, the Hittite? This messenger, by the way, deserves a medal. His answer is loaded with warnings.

There are at least four of them. Notice, he doesn't just give her name. He puts it in the form of a question that translated into English means, what in the world are you thinking?

That's what he's saying. Isn't this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliim? Bathsheba, the name, woodenly translated, I don't know much about her, but it means daughter of seven. More than likely, it means the seventh daughter. Eliim and his wife have had seven daughters. She's one of them. She's somebody's daughter. She's somebody's daughter. She's the daughter of Eliim.

This story gets interesting to me. Eliim was the son of Ahithophel. Ahithophel was the trusted counselor of King David.

We're going to meet him again in this biography. It's interesting to me that this chief counselor, in fact, it explained to me this week, I finally got it, it explained to me why Ahithophel will later abandon David, switch sides, side with Absalom, and give Absalom the correct advice. Had he followed it, he would have gotten the throne.

He said, here's how you need to kill your dad. Absalom ignores his advice. Ahithophel will leave and take his life. Why does he end a life of such a respectable career and leave David for Absalom?

Why? Because he's been seething for years because of what David did with his granddaughter in ripping his family apart. The messenger isn't finished. Now, typical introductions in the Middle East will begin with the name, perhaps of the father, add the grandfather. The spouse is rarely included. He saves that for last. Verse 3, she is the wife of Uriah the Hittite. In other words, that beautiful lady down there is married.

That should have stopped him cold. But his heart and culture is so much like ours where a wedding band is nothing but a minor obstacle in the way. Not only is she married though, get this, she's married to Uriah, David. You know him well. He's one of your mighty men.

He's one of the 37 that track all the way back to those days of hiding out from Saul, running for his life. These are faithful men who gave everything to David. David, you know Uriah? She's his wife. In fact, he's a converted Hittite, fascinating man we know little of. But his name more than likely was changed at his conversion to Uriah.

It means Yahweh is my light. David, your God is my God. They've been fighting together. They've been on the same side.

They've watched each other's back for years. David, what are you thinking? She's the wife of Uriah. He knows what David's thinking, which is why he comes back and effectively says, David, you can't do this. She's the granddaughter of your trusted counselor.

She's the wife of one of your faithful friends, as if to say you cannot be serious. David is undeterred, his mind now governed by lust, this lesser passion. He has set reason and logic aside and faith and worship and fellowship. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote in his book entitled Temptation, he writes insightful, he listened to these words. He says, in our members there is a slumbering inclination toward desire which is both sudden and fierce when a secret smoldering fire is kindled.

It makes no difference whether it is sexual desire or ambition or vanity or revenge or love of fame or power or greed for money. It doesn't matter. At that moment when the fire is kindled, note this, God loses all reality. Satan does not fill us with hatred of God but with forgetfulness of God.

And the powers of clear discrimination and decision are taken from us. There on that rooftop, you need to understand David doesn't hate God. He's choosing to forget God and his judgment and clear thinking become the casualties. There's only one verse in the text that informs us of their encounter.

It's going to be hard to write a script for a movie out of this one. We're not told anything really. We're not told if she was surprised by his advances or if she resisted. We're not told if David charmed her or threatened her. Not one word is recorded between them. In fact, in the Hebrew language there's little doubt that God is boiling it down to brute verbs.

Let me read it that way. Verse 4, David sent messengers, took her. She came to him. He lay with her. She returned, period.

No connection, no conversation, just cold, heartless, selfish, uncaring lust. But I do want to point out one thing that the author of Scripture wants us to get. In my text it's in the parenthesis, which I skipped.

Let me go back to it. It's in the middle of verse 4. It simply says, now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness.

Now, getting that correct will determine our application. Some translations imply that she remained in David's house until she ceremonially purified herself from sexual intimacy according to the law delivered in Leviticus chapter 15. And that would lead me to obviously make application from the fact that even though they sinned, they put on a religious show, is that they cared about the law of God. It's that they cared about God, which people in sin often do. I have had individuals involved in immorality say, I have never been closer to God in my life than right now. We pray together.

We read the Bible together. It's amazing, the absolute loss of discretion and discernment. But that would be an application not from this text because of what this writer is actually stating. This parenthetical statement is what Hebrew linguists call a circumstantial clause describing Bathsheba's condition at the time she came to David's bedchamber.

In English, it would be in the perfect tense, and that leads to a different observation entirely. The author here gives us this parenthetical clause because he wants us to know that Bathsheba has come to David having just been purified ceremonially from her menstrual cycle. He wants us to know how undeniably David and Bathsheba are going to be cornered. She knew having just finished this cycle that David has to be the husband. There's no way around it. There's no guessing.

There's no doubt that the child she carries is not her husband's. It had to be David's. Now, in these first five verses, David has done all the talking and this messenger. And now it ends with a note that Bathsheba sends to David, and it's only two words in the Hebrew language. The content of that note that she scribbles offers no name, no explanation, there's no demand, there's no threat, there's no apology. Just two words, three words in the English language. I am pregnant.

In other words, what are we going to do now? It's true, isn't it, that sin hides from us the potential consequences and it just gives us the commercial? One author put it this way, Satan never tips his hand in temptation. He shows you the beauty, the ecstasy, the excitement.

You know, this is the adventure. That's the commercial. It never slips back into that dorm room and shows you the hangover. It never shows you a woman dissolved in tears of grief. It never shows you a broken home.

Just the excitement. Listen to some statistics from a survey of men who were involved in adultery and left their spouses. These men willingly allowed themselves to be tracked over the last ten years. Ten years after the breakup of their marriage, let me read you what follows the commercial. Thirty-three percent of these men admitted to being intensely angry with life. They hated life. Fifty percent of them ended up divorced again, most of them from the woman they believed were the answer to all their problems. Eighty percent experienced the same or a loss of financial strength. Fifty percent under the age of fifty said they were unhappily remarried. Sixty-six percent over the age of fifty said they were unhappily remarried. Eighty percent would remarry their former wives and regain what they lost if they only had the chance. To our culture where sexual encounters are a rite of passage, nothing serious is between friends, no strings attached.

The great destroyer and deceiver never tips his hand. And I think of the generation coming. The media centers of our culture are virtually silent on just simply the physical dangers and diseases. Don't let on that every day four thousand teenagers contract a sexually transmitted disease in this country. Don't let on that even though the world is, you know, bent on providing quote-unquote safe sex, one institute of public health reports there are now twenty-one sexually transmitted diseases which cannot be prevented by contraception. Don't publish the news that thirty percent of college-aged young women are or will be by the time they graduate infected with herpes, a disease that will affect them for the rest of their lives. Don't let on, don't put in the newspaper anywhere about three hundred thousand people in 2014 who are going to contract hepatitis B causing permanent liver damage resulting in the death of at least thirteen people every day. If there was a virus in America where thirteen people were dying every day, do you think we'd hear about it? Don't publish anything that could land in someone's hands that could question moral behavior. It's off limits.

Just play the commercial. The United States Public Health Services Center for Disease Control published this. It's tucked in the back of some book somewhere. It certainly isn't in textbooks. And I quote, a new sexually transmitted infection is diagnosed every forty-five seconds in America, and in its wake are pain, blindness, arthritis, infertility, brain damage, heart disease, and death.

In spite of half a century of penicillin and drugs, millions of people are contracting new generations of sexually transmitted diseases including incurable strains now linked to cervical cancer which can be passed on to newborn babies. And all I'm doing is giving you a few facts. You won't read the newspaper. And I'm just dealing with the physical issues, not to mention spiritual issues, repercussions, character issues of trust, emotional pain and damage and despair. But just play the commercials.

Listen to your friends. It's all good. Besides, we're a passionate people. We're a passionate person. You're a passionate person.

You ever heard this? He's an alpha male. What does that mean? He gets to act like a dog. That's what that means. That's all it means, the justification of living like the dog I have back home.

Pixie, unconverted. You've got desires, and they've got to be satisfied because really you are just an animal. And people reach for another glass of salt water. And the tragedy is the statistics of those who claim Christ are very similar to those in reaching for their own glass of salt water. David Haig, a pastor in California, writes in his book The Obedience Option of an interesting conversation he was having with a man who was admitting his immoral lifestyle in the church, but he claimed that he just couldn't stop his pattern of sleeping with his girlfriend or any woman for that matter who was available. He told his pastor that his lust was inevitable.

Therefore, it wasn't his fault, especially since God had created him with such strong desires. He couldn't stop it. His lust was an irresistible force. David Haig, very interestingly, interrupted this man and said, well, look, suppose I came to your room and caught you and your girlfriend as you were starting this irresistible process. Suppose I took out 10 crisp $100 bills and told you that if you stopped, I'd give you this $1,000.

The young man laughed and said, well, I'd take the cash. David responded, what happened to that irresistible force of lust? And for the first time he realized, Haig wrote, a very simple truth, one passion may seem irresistible until a greater passion comes along. The only way to overcome a passion, a lesser passion for sin is to develop a greater passion for holiness. For the believer, the temptation to sin is nothing less than a temptation to be governed by some lesser passion. A greater passion is Christ to whom belongs our loyalty. A greater passion is His Word that we with the greatest safety obey. A greater passion is toward His church which we love and with whom we serve. A greater passion is for the lost who are reaching for that glass.

Dare we reach for it too? The apostle Paul would encourage the church living in the kind of culture that we are becoming more like in Ephesus, given over to sensuality. He said that that world is greedy to practice every kind of impurity. Imagine that description, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

They live for it. Paul writes, this is not the way you learn Christ, assuming you were taught in Him as the truth is in Jesus. Here's what you're to do. Put off your old self, those are those lesser passions, but don't just stand there having put those off, shivering in the cold.

That's not all you do. Put on, be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, greater passions, created after the likeness of God and true righteousness and holiness. That is, pursue greater passions as you resist lesser passions, which will govern you and destroy you. As odd as it may sound, we need to pray that God will give us a greater passion for greater passions. That He will give us a longing to long for that which we should long for.

Bad English, but you get the point. And it isn't salt water. It is the refreshing stream of life-giving water that originates with the way, the truth, and the life. If you joined us late, you've been listening to Stephen Davey here on Wisdom for the Heart. Today's message is part of our current series on the life of King David called The Singer. I hope you'll take a moment to interact with us.

We have a special offer this month that I hope you'll take advantage of if you haven't already. A little later in the account of King David, he will suffer the death of a baby. Stephen wrote a booklet based on that account called, Do Babies Really Go to Heaven When They Die? This booklet gives a biblical answer to that question.

It's designed to bring hope and comfort to parents and grandparents and anyone who suffered the loss of a baby. This month, that ebook is free for you to download from our online store. When you get to our website, wisdomonline.org, you'll find a link on the home page that'll take you directly to this offer. Visit wisdomonline.org. And then join us back here next time for more wisdom for the heart.