2 Samuel 12:13 And David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD. And Nathan said to David, The LORD also has put away your sin… If we wish to draw any lessons from the repentance of any one, it is a great assistance to us to know something of the character of the man, something of the sin from which he repented, something of the mode by which he was roused to repentance, something of the nature of the repentance itself. All these we have given to us in the case of David. I. HIS GENERAL CHARACTER. It is a character difficult, perhaps, to understand, but its very difficulty makes it instructive. It is full of variety, full of impulse, full of genius; it is like the characters of our own later times — complicated, intricate, vast; it covers a great range of characters amongst ourselves; it is not like one class or character only, but like many; it is like you, it is like me; it is like this man and that man. He is the shepherd, and the student, and the poet, and the soldier, and the King. He is the adventurous wanderer, strong and muscular, "his feet like steel." He is the silent observer of the heavens by night, "the moon and the stars which God has ordained." He is the devoted friend, the first example of youthful friendship, loving Jonathan "with a love passing the love of women." He is the generous enemy, sparing his rival. He is the father mourning with passionate grief the loss of his favourite child: "O my son Absalom." Again and again we feel that he is one of us — that his feelings, his pleasures, his sympathies, are such as we outwardly love and admire, even if we do not enter into them. But yet more than this, it is exactly that mixture of good and evil which is in ourselves; not all good nor all evil, but a mixture of both — of a higher good, and of a deeper evil, yet still both together. But it is the other side of his character that we are now called to consider; and yet, It is only by considering both sides together that we call draw its true lesson flora either. It was to this tender, and brave, and loving character that the Prophet Nathan came, with the Story of the hard-hearted, mean-spirited man. Every just and generous feeling in David's heart was roused by the story: its simple pathos, now worn through and through by much repetition, was then felt in all the freshness of its first utterance: his anger was kindled against the man. No lengthened comment can add anything to the startling effect of the disclosure of this sudden descent from all that was high and good to all that was base and miserable. II. DAVID'S REPENTANCE AND OUR OWN. 1. Let us observe how the Scripture narrative deals with the case. It does not exaggerate — it does not extenuate. David's goodness is not denied because of his sin, nor his sin because of his goodness. The fact that he was the man after God's own heart is not thrust out of sight because he was the man of Nathan's parable. The fact of his sin is not denied, lest it should give occasion to the enemies of God to blaspheme. This is the first lesson that we learn. 2. The sin of David, and his unconsciousness of his own sin, and so also his repentance through the disclosure to him of his own sin, are exactly what are most likely to take place in characters like his, like ours, made up of mixed forms of good and of evil. The hardened, depraved, worldly man is not ignorant of his sin — he knows it, he defends it, he is accustomed to it. But the good man, or the man who is half good and half bad — he overlooks his sin. His good deeds conceal his bad deeds, often even from others, more often still from himself. Even out of those very gifts which are most noble, most excellent in themselves, may come our chief temptations. 3. Let us observe both the exact point of Nathan's warning, and the exact point of David's repentance. It is most instructive to observe that Nathan in his parable calls attention, not to the sensuality and cruelty of David's crime, but simply to its intense and brutal selfishness. It is remarkable that even deeper than David's sense, when once aroused, of his injustice to man, was his sense of his guilt and shame before God: — "Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight." Dark as is the shade of the dark sin done to man, a yet darker shade falls over it when viewed in the unchanging light of the All-Pure and the All-Merciful. This is perhaps especially the case with these grosser sins. David is driven by the very fervour of his penitence to speak of this one sin as he would have spoken of all sins. Every one of us is in danger of falling into sins of which we have no expectation beforehand, of which, like David, we are ignorant even after we have committed them. Whatever be our special failing — self-indulgence, vanity, untruth, uncharitableness — and however it be made known to us — by friends, by preachers, by reflection, by sorrow, by the death of our firstborn, by the ruin of our house — let David's feeling respecting it be ours. 4. This leads us to see what is the door which God opens, in such cases as David's, for repentance and restoration. There is the general lesson, taught by this, as by a thousand ether passages both of the Old and the New Testaments — that, as far as human eye can judge, no case is too late or too bad to return, if only the heart can be truly roused to a sense of its own guilt and of God's holiness. "Thou desirest no sacrifice;" — consider the immense force of the words; how wise, how consoling, how vast in their reach of meaning — "Thou desirest no sacrifice, else would I give it Thee; Thou delightest not in burnt-offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise." So spoke David in the fulness of his penitence. So taught the Son of David in the fulness of His grace and truth. Two final lessons we may learn from David's repentance. For others, it teaches us to regard with tenderness the faults, the sins, the crimes of those who, gifted with great and noble qualities, are, by that strange union of strength and weakness which we so often see, betrayed into acts which more ordinary, commonplace characters avoid or escape. And for ourselves, let us remember the still more important lesson that such a foundation of good as that which there was in David's character is never thrown away. If it is not. able to resist the trial altogether, it will at least be best able to recover from it. (A. P. Stanley, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD. And Nathan said unto David, The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die. |
    |