JESUS DESPICABLE GRANDDADDIES - DAVID

Transcript

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Hello everyone.

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This is Pastor Dean Thompson with a word of hope. Jesus' despicable granddaddies, David.

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David the adulterer, the murderer, the man after God's own heart.

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Jesse, the father of King David. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife. Matthew chapter one verse six. David is the most celebrated figure in the entire Old Testament, warrior, poet, king, the man of whom God himself said there was none like him in all Israel. The slayer of Goliath, the writer of the Psalms, of many of the Psalms, the shepherd boy who became the greatest monarch in Israel's history. God made him an eternal covenant. The Messiah himself would be called the son of David. And Matthew, writing the genealogy, could have simply written David, the father of Solomon. Clean, simple, glorious. Instead he wrote, David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife. He didn't even use her name. He used her dead husband's name. It is one of the most pointed sentences in Scripture. Matthew is not letting David off the hook. He is making sure everyone knows exactly what happened. David was at the height of his power. The wars were won. The kingdom was established. The spring had come and kings went out to battle. But David stayed home. He sent his army, he sent his generals, he stayed in Jerusalem. That was his first mistake. Idle hands, empty ours, a king with nothing to do and no one to answer to. He was walking on his rooftop in the evening when he saw her, Bathsheba, beautiful, bathing, the wife of one of his most loyal soldiers, Uriah the Hittite, who was at that moment risking his life in David's war. David sent his servants to get her. He was the king. Nobody said no to the king. He had his way with her. She became pregnant. What followed was not a moment of weakness. It was a calculated step by step cover up that descended into cold blooded murder. David sent for Uriah from the battlefield, hoping the soldier would go home to his wife and the pregnancy would be explained away. But Uriah, honourable, principled, loyal to a fault, refused to sleep in his house while his fellow soldiers were sleeping in the field. He slept in the palace door instead with the guards. David got him drunk. Still Uriah refused to go home. So David wrote a letter to his general, Joab, and sent it by Uriah's own hand.

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Uriah, who carried his own death warrant without knowing it.

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The letter ordered Joab to put Uriah in the front lines of the fiercest fighting. Then Pulba so that he would be killed. Uriah died. David took Bathsheba as his wife. He thought it was over.

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God saw everything. What the king did had displeased the Lord. Second Samuel 11, verse 27.

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God sent the prophet Nathan to David with a story. A rich man who rather take rather than take a lamb from his own vast flock stole the one precious lamb of a poor man who had nothing else. David's rage at the injustice was instant and volcanic. The man who did this must die. Nathan's response is one of the most devastating lines in all of Scripture. You are the man. The consequences were catastrophic. The child born of the adultery would die. Violence and tragedy would haunt David's household for the rest of his life. His own son Absalom would later lead a rebellion, sleep publicly with David's concubines, and drive the old king weeping and barefooted out of Jerusalem into the wilderness. David would spend his final years in grief and chaos, reaping what he had sown. He had committed adultery, he had committed murder, he had abused his power in the most despicable way possible, using the trust of a faithful soldier to destroy him, and he had spent nearly a year pretending none of it had happened. When Nathan's words landed, you are the man, something in David broke that never fully mended. But what came out of that breaking was one of the most extraordinary outpourings of repentance in human history. He did not make excuses, he did not blame Bathsheba, he did not argue with Nathan, he collapsed before God. Have mercy on me, O God. According to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions, wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin, for I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. Psalm fifty one verses one through four. Psalm fifty one is what real repentance looks like or sounds like. And God impossibly, staggeringly called David a man after his own heart. Not because David was sinless, not because the adultery and murder didn't happen, but because when David was confronted with his sin, he ran toward God instead of away from him. The line of the Messiah ran through Solomon, the son of the very union David had murdered to obtain. Matthew deliberately points to this in the genealogy, calling Bathsheba Uriah's wife. The scandal is preserved, the sin is not hidden, and the grace of God shines all the more brilliantly against that dark backdrop. If God could call the man who murdered Uriah a man after his own heart, he has not given up on you. Oh God, help us, please, to truly trust in you, to lean on your mercy, to lean on your grace, and just to help us to just cast ourselves on you, knowing our mistakes, knowing our doings, knowing our deeds, knowing what we have done and who we are.

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Let your mercy and grace abound towards us and transform us and make us men and women people after your own heart. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.