Sunday, July 29, 2012: 2 Samuel 11:1-15; Ephesians 3:14-21
David stares at us out of a mirror and shows us our capacity for sinning.
About a year ago my wife bought a gadget that checks all of the Christmas lights on a string and alerts the user to the one that is burned out. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. Then one day, while I was checking lights one by one (like Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation), she showed me how the gadget worked. It was wonderful!
Like my gadget, 2 Samuel 11:1–15 offers us the opportunity to understand the beauty of a solution. In the case of this text, with its story of King David, we must first understand the magnitude of human sin before we can appreciate the solution: a faithful love and just response of God to our sin.
In 1 Samuel 13, Samuel delivered crushing news to Saul: his reign was over because “the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart.” But after he was made king, David, the man after God’s own heart, failed to understand what was in his heart and was overcome by the seductive power of lust. Fifteen verses detail David’s sins, which include voyeurism, coveting, adultery, a failed cover-up attempt and murder. In a moment that mimics Adam and Eve in the garden, another apple of God’s eye has turned into a bad apple.
