Seven Rhythms: Freedom From Strongholds - 2 Samuel 12
Big Idea: When sin makes us blind and crazy, the truth is our hope.
I finished high school in May of 2002, but as important of an event as that was, there was another event coming in June of that same year as American Idol premiered its very first episode. Since that show the amount of competition-type shows involving performances has multiplied. America’s Got Talent, the Voice, etc. American Idol was not the first show with this concept of letting people try out—there had been another well-known show called “Star Search.”
What made American Idol unique though was that they showed both those who were talented and those who weren’t talented. They showed footage of those who were rejected. The show drew people in because of the singing and the competition, but we also liked watching the train wrecks. Perhaps we don’t like to admit it because it seems less than honorable to enjoy watching people fall flat on their faces and fail, but we did. We enjoyed it.
A man named William Hung actually became famous, or infamous, because he was so bad and they showed his performance. Whether we fully admit it or not, part of us enjoyed listening to Simon tear people down. The other part of the somewhat twisted enjoyment in it was watching people’s own image of themselves crumble. One particular one that stuck with me was of a young lady, Mary Ann, who came in and completely bombed her audition. Her voice itself wasn’t terrible sounding, but she didn’t even come close to carrying a tune or sticking with the melody she was trying to sing. She was singing “Unchained Melody” and it was unchained, but there was no melody. The judges were actually trying to let her down somewhat graciously, but she started arguing with them and telling them that their opinion didn’t matter and that she would become famous anyway. She had a completely distorted view of herself, and even when confronted with that distorted view, she couldn’t let it go. She told the judges they were wrong and that one day she would be famous despite their review.
It never ceases to amaze me how far our perceptions of ourselves can be in both good and bad ways. There is a type of blindness that occurs where we literally cannot see with clarity. We have a term for this when driving a car—we say we have a blind spot. Even if we use all of our mirrors on our car effectively, there are spaces around our car that we just can’t see. We don’t know if anything is there or not and so part of driver’s education is to train young drivers to turn around and check your blind spot before changing lanes.
The act of looking behind you while moving forward at a high rate of speed doesn’t feel natural, but we have to remember that we can’t see everything behind us. However, we use the term “blind spot” for far more than driving because we recognize that we all have areas in our lives in which we don’t see ourselves clearly and to some degree don’t even fully understand ourselves. Part of the reason for this is sin. Sin is a big word that the Bible uses to describe a brokenness and distortion of humanity that causes us to turn our backs on God’s original design for us and pursue meaning, value, and identity without regard for how God designed us or how our pursuit impacts other people. Through Jesus, we believe that this changes. We believe that when we place our faith in Jesus, he sets us free from sin and its entanglements. Yet, what many of us have found is that we aren’t totally free. We still have blind spots and places in our lives where our hearts don’t fully belong to Jesus, some of which we can see and some of which we can’t. In the 10-week discipleship journey, we have been talking about, and which many of you have already been through, the term we use for this is “strongholds.” Places where sin stubbornly refuses to let go in our lives and clings to control with stubborn determination.
The Bible is full of stories about people whose stubborn sin made a mess of their lives, but we are going to look at a particularly heavy story this morning. Yay! Aren’t you excited for a real downer of a text? Our text for this morning is 2 Samuel 12 starting in verse 1, but before we get there, we need to understand the context of this story. Up to this point in both 1 and 2 Samuel we have been following the life of David and the amazing way in which God called a simple shepherd boy to become king over Israel. He defeats an enemy champion before he is even in the army and spent years on the run from an insane king who wanted him dead. Over and over he demonstrated rare faith and trust in God despite challenging circumstances and his faithfulness was rewarded.
God finally made him king over Israel and gave him victory wherever he went. We need to understand too that at different points in Israel’s history they were promised a savior who would come and make everything right with Israel. They were promised a prophet or a king who would carry the people. David looks like he could be that much-needed leader. He had already united Israel and continued to give them victory over their enemies.
Then, we come to chapter 11. David had reached the pinnacle of leadership, but there was something else stirring underneath the surface. Chapter 11 tells us that at a time when kings would go off to war, David sent the army out and he remained behind. The author is setting us up to understand that something is amiss. While David is at his palace and the army is out fighting, he wakes up one night and strolls on the roof of his palace. As he looks out over the city, he notices a woman bathing. However, he was able to do it, he spots this woman and tells his servant to find out who this is. He finds out that she is married to one of his small group of mighty men, or champions, and closest companions. Rather than that being the end of the conversation though, David tells his servants to have her brought over to him and he sleeps with her.
Let’s stop for a moment here and talk about this correctly. David kidnaps this woman against her will and rapes her. This isn’t an illicit affair; Bathsheba has no choice. Unfortunately, for David though, the story doesn’t end there. Bathsheba sends word to David that she is pregnant. This is a huge problem for David because Uriah is gone with the army, so Uriah will know the baby is not his. David is creative though and comes up with a plan. He sends for Uriah and he feasts with Uriah, gets him drunk and tries to get Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife. Uriah refuses though because it wouldn’t be fair to his fellow soldiers. They are out on the battlefield, so it wouldn’t feel right to Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife. David tries this one more time and Uriah still doesn’t give in, so David sends him back to the army.
This is just a crazy scenario to imagine. David has raped this man’s wife and he is putting on feasts for Uriah and trying to get him to go home and sleep with his own wife, who David couldn’t resist despite having multiple wives already himself. Yet Uriah refuses. David feels that he has only one recourse now. He sends Uriah back to the front lines with a special message for the commander. They are to engage in a fight and then fall back without Uriah knowing about it, so that he will be killed. David is using this battle to murder this man and this is exactly what happens. Uriah is killed. David allows Bathsheba to weep for Uriah and then David takes her into his home as his wife and she bore him a son.
Well, this story about David thoroughly dispels any notion that David could be the Messiah or the perfect leader. Despite all his faithfulness to God and all that he had seen God do in his life, he rapes a woman and has her husband killed to cover it up. Then, at the very end of chapter 11 there is one very important verse. “The thing that David had done displeased the LORD.” David thinks that he has gotten away with something, but God sees it. We don’t have a hard time seeing what David did as sin or being wrong. However, there may be universal ways we can understand sin or brokenness based on what took place in this story. Sin caused David to want that which did not belong to him. It caused him to treat people as commodities in service of his own well-being. It also caused him shame and made him want to cover it up, so no one would know about his downfall.
I have enough conversations with people and have been in ministry long enough to know that there are some of you out there today, who have followed the same pattern in your own lives. There has been something you desired that did not belong to you or wasn’t good for you and you took hold of it anyway. Despite the pain it has caused or the cost you have paid to hold onto this sin you kept pursuing it.
David hears that the woman is married and that doesn’t stop him. The identity of her husband as one of his very own mighty men doesn’t stop him. When it causes a pregnancy, he doesn’t stop. Then, when it ultimately causes him to kill someone else, he doesn’t stop. We know that this is how addictions work. The protection of that drug or alcohol or gambling or sexual addiction is so precious that we give up everything for that addiction. There is even a great deal of shame or guilt that goes with that addiction, but it doesn’t stop. However, addiction is not the only sin that works this way. People will risk a career to steal money from their company. People risk their marriage and relationships with their kids for brief sexual encounters. We gossip and lie about others to gain acceptance or influence with and over others.
The craziest aspect of all of this is that we can do all of these things and be completely unaware. Sin literally makes us crazy and blind. Listen to today’s text 2 Samuel 12:1-14. David hears this story about a man who steals someone’s sheep just so as not to be bothered to lose from his own bounty and he is so angry that he wants to have this man killed when all the time we know that David has done something far worse than kill a poor man’s sheep. David knows he did wrong by covering it up and he didn’t want anyone to find out, but Nathan still has to point out to David that he is the one who stole and killed. Only then does he finally acknowledge his guilt and repent or turn from his sin. People lacking self-awareness and being deceived into thinking that they can sing when they really can’t is sad, crazy, and a bit comical, but this kind of self-deception is on a whole other level. Sin has both made David temporarily insane—he threw all reason out the window and it has made him blind. At the time this took place David already had multiple wives and he probably could have added more unmarried women to his family if he wanted to. I am not saying that he should have or that it would even be right to do so, but he chooses a far worse path. He forces a woman who is already married to sleep with him and this woman isn’t married to just any random guy, but to one of his most trusted soldiers. Rather than admitting what he had done, he has a trusted soldier killed. It is just insanity.
At the same time, David doesn’t understand his own heart. The way the story is told at first glance it just feels like David falls into some of this situation by chance. He doesn’t go into the town, force women to strip for him, and then choose the one he finds most attractive. He happens to see one on a night he couldn’t sleep. He doesn’t force her to come right away, he finds out who she is. Yet, the reality is that he was going to sleep with her no matter what. If she could be married to one of his most trusted soldiers and he took her anyway, there was nothing that was going to stop him from sleeping with her. His heart was yearning for some kind of fulfillment. He had some kind of hole he was trying to fill and he was searching for the answer. He was headed down a reckless path, he just didn’t know the details of where that path would take him.
Sin does the same thing to us. It controls us and causes us to make insane decisions and remain blind to its influence over us. In the story of Cain and Abel, God warns Cain that sin wants to rule over him. This is why the 10-week discipleship Journey helps us to understand sin as a stronghold. It finds a foothold in our lives and refuses to let it go. David was not someone who was outside the community of faith. David walked closely with God and yet he was capable of being overcome by sin. Even when we come into the family of God through Jesus Christ, we can still be blinded to our own motives and desires. Like with a blind spot driving in a car, there are things I just can’t see. So, what hope is there for us when faced with sin and strongholds? The truth is our hope. When sin has blinded us and made us crazy, the truth is our hope.
Unfortunately, David did not go to people around him to get help before he messed up, but God sent him someone to open his eyes and wake him up to the depth of his sin. I can only imagine what Nathan must have been feeling as he was told to go and confront the king with this news. David could easily have just had him killed, but the truth of what Nathan said cut David to the heart because David did love God. Sin had crept in and blinded him to his own heart and the severity of his actions. Yet, David had the right response to Nathan’s confrontation. He repented and humbled himself before God. It was too late for it to be of any help to Uriah though. It didn’t make Bathsheba’s life very fair. She probably had greater wealth by being married to the king, but you wonder how she really felt about David and having to be married to the man who murdered her husband. David’s sin caused a massive amount of wreckage.
I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like if David would have had a friend he trusted enough to turn to when he felt tempted. What if he had been able to tell a friend that he wanted to sleep with this woman who was not his wife. Could the story have turned out differently? We won’t ever know, but I believe that his heart could have been turned back to God and avoided a lot of heartache if he wouldn’t have been alone.
Perhaps you are sitting out in the audience today and you are sitting alone in something. Perhaps you are even further along than David. You may be well aware that you have a problem, but no one else knows about it. Maybe you are spending your evenings looking at the wrong kinds of images. Maybe you are married, but you are entertaining the attention of that coworker who seems overly friendly. Maybe you just keep eating because you don’t know how to process your emotions. Maybe you starve yourself because you want to have that perfect look. Whatever it is, I just want to encourage you to stop facing it alone. The enemy wins when we try to just handle our junk on our own. He tries to convince us that community is valuable once we have ourselves put together and that people won’t accept us until we have ourselves put together.
Friends, if you are in a church community, even if it is this one, where you have to have yourself put together before you can find community—find a new church. In an interesting irony about the way God created us, we need to find a place where we can be a mess and that in and of itself is healing. It isn’t the only thing that heals us, but it is part of the process to be allowed to be where we are.
Yet, there is another group of people here today who are in a different spot. Actually, every single one of us has areas in our lives where we are blind to our sin. We are unaware of how broken we are. We need community to help us see ourselves correctly. As a high schooler, I spent a summer with a team doing summer camps and I could eat a pan of lasagna by myself. I could eat so much. Well, during the first part of our summer we all lived in a house together and made meals together. I remember one night I just started pounding food and when I went for 3rds before everyone else had even finished firsts, the team leader’s wife stopped me and made me consider what I was doing. Like a good high school boy, I had not considered anyone else in this situation. I wasn’t thinking about whether everyone else would have enough. I was blind to how inconsiderate I was being. It took someone in community to call me out. David’s sin and failings were obviously much larger than just taking someone else’s portion at the dinner table, but he couldn’t see himself and what was driving him internally. We need others to help us identify those areas where our hearts are messed up and help us open our eyes.
I enjoy reading fantasy books and so as not to give away the ending I won’t tell you what series I was reading, but in the book the villain was defeated in a very fascinating way. The author made the villain seem at least somewhat sympathetic by showing that his motivation was to provide stability and order so he could care for his people. In so doing, he had become a destructive person. He caused death and destruction to so many and the way he was defeated was that through some kind of magical spell, the hero was able to show this villain the impact of his style of ruling and he could not bear the weight of what he had done. It completely undid the villain. The consequences of his mistakes were more than he could cope with. This ending was fascinating to me because it is a picture of the message of Christianity. If any one of us could see the true weight of sin in our lives, we would be undone. We would not be able to cope with the weight of that sin. In David’s story there is great tragedy on a variety of levels. One of the greatest, though, is that the weight of the consequences for David’s sin fell on his son. The prophet Nathan tells David that the child will die as a result of David’s sin. While I can’t say that I fully understand this decision by God, it does illustrate the point that David’s sin was so significant that he couldn’t bear the weight of it alone.
This image of the weight of sin is meant to ultimately point to a different son of David. You see the weight of our sin is so great that God knew that weight would have to fall on someone. So, rather than making that weight fall on each person for their own brokenness and failures, He let it fall on His Son. Jesus bore the weight of our sin so that we wouldn’t have to.
The only way that we find freedom from strongholds is when we let Jesus take our sin and put it to death with Him on the cross. We allow Him to carry that weight when we first come to know Him and we keep coming back to Him and allowing Him to carry it each and every day. Sometimes we can think of the Christian life a little like this: we were in a pit with no hope of escape, but Jesus came and rescued us. So, now that we are out, we just have to work hard so as not to fall back into the pit. That is the wrong imagery.
We are much more like a lamp that has been unplugged for a long time. No matter what that lamp does, it won’t provide light until it is plugged into its source of power. Once plugged in, it can access that source of power anytime, but it never moves past needing that source of power.
Friends, we never move past needing Christ to carry us and the weight of our brokenness. One of the ways we do that is through finding community. When we attend a small group or the 10-week journey we have others in our lives who help us see where sin is still impacting us and help us find freedom. We also have a moment here every week when we ask anew for Jesus’ empowering presence to live in and through us as we celebrate communion and pray with members of our prayer team. Whether we realize it or not, in the words of Nathan the prophet, we are that man or woman, but thanks to Jesus that is not true of us anymore. We can come out of hiding, shame, and blindness because the Truth, Jesus Christ, has set us free.