Sermons

David sends a letter to Joab and kills Uriah. It could happen because his fear of God was gone. When the prophet Nathan comes to him and tells the parable of the rich man and the poor man’s ewe lamb, David is furious and declares that the rich man deserves to die, not knowing that he himself is that sinner.

People judge the wrongs of others with precision while committing the same sins themselves. Just as David could not see the beam in his own eye and saw only the speck in another’s, despising God shows itself where faith is filled with worldly lusts and where greed leads to harming good people. Nathan told David that God had given him everything and asked how he could despise it, and that rebuke carried grief and compassion for David more than anger.

God fulfilled the promise he had made with David without leaving out a single part of it. The sword did not depart from his house, his son lay with his wives in broad daylight, and the son Bathsheba bore died. While the child was alive, David fasted and pleaded with God, but after the child died he promptly got up and worshiped God. God did not hate David but hated his sin, and he brought suffering on David in order to forgive that sin.

David stayed in bed until evening, and from the roof he saw a woman bathing. Though told that she was another man’s wife, he had her brought to him, and as a result she conceived a child.

While his soldiers were risking their lives on the battlefield, David remained behind in the palace. Sin has already begun the moment it is harbored in the heart; the more one tries to hide it, the more lies it breeds, and those lies end at last in the taking of a life. David summoned the woman’s husband and tried to send him home, but when the man refused to rest in comfort while his comrades were still in the field, David went on to arrange his death in battle.

The ease that followed victory and peace caused David’s heart to forget God, and into that empty place sin entered. What David had done was evil in the sight of God; he accomplished his human plans, yet before God he fell. The moment ease comes without hardship is the moment that calls for the greatest care, and it must be taken to heart that even in the very act of sinning, people do not recognize how far wrong they have gone.

When Hanun comes to the throne, David sends his servants to offer him heartfelt congratulations, wishing to repay the kindness he had received from Hanun’s father, Nahash. But Hanun listens only to his scheming officials and humiliates the envoys as though they were slaves, shaving off half of each man’s beard and cutting away their garments up to the buttocks.

This was to treat David and Israel with contempt, and it amounted to a declaration of war. Because he did not know how to receive as grace a grace given without condition, and because there was no wise counsel at his side, Hanun could not judge rightly. In the end he hired the Aramean army with money to stand against David, but he could not overcome the army of David, who had relied on God from the very beginning.

Mephibosheth knew how much he had to be thankful for in the grace he had received, and so he served David with his whole heart, and David in turn cared for him to the end. Hanun, by contrast, took grace for granted and lost a good relationship, and with it the lives of many people. When a person has the character to know grace freely received for what it is, and to repay it with thanksgiving, God makes that life beautiful and glorious.

Jonathan, who had protected David in every crisis, asked him to spare his descendants once he became king, and David promised that he would without fail. Even after Jonathan fell on the battlefield, David kept his word and sought out Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth was lame, and as Saul’s grandson he was afraid of David, but David restored to him the land of his grandfather and had him eat at the king’s table continually.

David kept this promise alone, with no one there to witness it. Character shows itself not when others are watching, but when there is no one to reproach. The grace Mephibosheth received came not from any merit of his own but from the sacrifice of his father Jonathan, and he humbled himself, calling himself no better than a dead dog.

If grace is treated as something owed and turns to pride, it can be taken away again. Those who have received grace must therefore remain humble to the last, and keep to the end the promise they have made with Christ.

David prayed that he might build a temple, but God refused him. A man who had killed many and shed so much blood, God said, was not fit for the task. David did not grow angry; instead he gave thanks that God had kept him from falling into greater sin.

He could respond this way because he believed his own judgment could never come before God’s. In place of the temple, he turned his prayer to a blessing on his descendants, and set aside gold and silver in advance for Solomon, who had not yet been born. In the years that followed David won battle after battle and took great plunder, yet he did not keep it as his own but offered it back to God.

Where there is faith that God will lead along a good path, there is no need to lose heart, even when an earnest desire is refused. Making Joab, who had betrayed him, commander of the army and leaving judgment in God’s hands was a decision born of the same faith. In the end, God’s work is God’s own doing.

David hurried to bring the ark of God up to the City of David, and Uzzah died along the way. Only after repenting with his whole heart did he move it again, this time safely, by the hands of the Levites. Later, comparing his own splendid palace with the humble tent, he resolved to build a temple, but through Nathan God plainly stopped him: “You are not to build it.”

The desire to build a temple looked good, yet it was human zeal that had not sought God’s will in prayer. God is not one to be confined within a house made by human hands, and because David had shed much blood, the work was left for his son Solomon. Faced with this refusal, David neither made excuses nor nursed a grievance; instead he gave thanks and praised God.

However good a person’s own will may seem, wisdom lies in setting it aside when God says no. When an answer comes as a refusal and the believer still trusts that a greater plan of God lies within it and gives thanks, it becomes possible to walk with God, like David, who rejoiced even when he was not allowed to build the temple.

David defeats the Philistines and rules his kingdom in peace. Once peace has come, he resolves to bring the ark of God to the City of David. The Levites were commanded to carry it on their shoulders, but David ignores this and has the ark set on a new cart. At the threshing floor of Nacon the oxen stumble and the ark is shaken. Uzzah reaches out and takes hold of it, and God strikes him dead on the spot.

The fault was not Uzzah’s alone. David had made a wrong plan from the start, and in God’s sight he and all the people gathered there were sinners who deserved to die. David believed that human devotion and zeal would please God. In truth he had mistaken his own ideas for God’s will. When no answer came, he turned his anger on God and called the place Perez-uzzah.

Afraid, David sent the ark away to the house of Obed-edom, and it was that household which was blessed. Later he summoned the leaders of the Levites, had the ark carried as the law required, and repented. Faithfulness lies only in doing what God’s word commands. However great human zeal may be, it is not in itself acceptable to him.

When the angel Gabriel brought Mary the news that she would conceive, she asked how she could have a child when she had not known a man. Her question was a protest: how could a pregnancy before marriage happen to her?

The angel answered that no word of God is without power, and pointed to Elizabeth as proof. She had been unable to bear children, yet she was already in her sixth month. Mary replied that she was the Lord’s servant and longed for it to be done according to his word, but only after meeting Elizabeth did she truly believe it. Until Mary accepted this with all her heart, God waited for her, pouring out the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Seeing that the covenant promise of the Messiah was to be fulfilled through her, Mary confessed, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” An unmarried virgin, she faced the hardship of bearing a child, yet she obeyed willingly, because the accomplishing of God’s will mattered more to her than her own life. That obedience is why all generations call Mary blessed.

Two thieves were crucified alongside Jesus. One jeered that if he really was the Christ, he should come down and save them; the other would not let that mockery stand. Both were men who had risked their lives fighting to free their nation, and both had been caught.

The same circumstances drew two different responses, and what divided them was faith. One never saw his own sin, even as he was dying. The other confessed that Jesus had done nothing wrong and pleaded to be remembered when he came into his Kingdom. However much they had given for their nation, what settled their fate after death was that confession alone.

Going to church is not the same as believing in Jesus Christ. Working hard in the world has its value, but the real dividing line is what that life is for, and whether Christ comes first. Just as Jesus received the thief who confessed his faith at the very last, Christmas is a day that asks once more for that same Christ to become the standard by which we live.

Hunted by Saul and driven to the very edge of endurance, David held fast to God alone. Years went by, and when Saul died, the elders of Israel came of their own accord and made David king; and by way of the Jebusites’ water shaft he took Jerusalem, a city that had been thought impregnable.

What David gained was not won by his own strength. He had endured long years of refining and striven not to hate his enemy, and there God added a city, authority, and even peace with the neighboring nations. Yet even after he came to power, David inquired of God before every battle, and God himself went ahead of him and scattered his enemies.

The time of blessing is the most dangerous time of all. Those who forget the grace that led them and grow proud lose even the blessings they have received, but those who give thanks and humbly keep the statutes go on enjoying them. For those who, like David, live as dead to the world and keep God’s law with their very lives, that blessing is not reserved for a special few; it is open to everyone, even now.

In the world God created, Adam gave way to Satan’s temptation and sinned by judging good and evil with himself at the center, and since then the world has grown ever more corrupt as it races toward judgment. When the whole earth was filled with violence, God called Noah, the one man who walked with him, and told him to build an ark. Though he was mocked for it, Noah poured his whole life into the work and saw the ark completed.

The ark is not a church building or church attendance; it is faith in Jesus Christ itself. Just as Noah believed in the coming judgment and built the ark, those who believe in Christ’s return and the judgment must live now as people who build the ark of Christ and call others into it. As with those who laughed and made merry outside the ark, judgment is no less real for being unseen.

Even inside the ark Noah knew loneliness and a sense of emptiness, and after the flood he fell for a time, yet God did not rebuke him but waited for him. Ham, however, who mocked his fallen father, came under a curse; those who grow weary in the life of faith are to be embraced, not ridiculed. To obey the word as Noah did, building the ark and bringing even one more soul aboard, is the task entrusted to us today.

When word came that Abner was dead, Ish-bosheth lost heart, and Baanah and Rechab, the men who were meant to protect him, waited until the king lay asleep at midday, killed him, and hurried to David with his head. They expected a reward, but David rebuked them sternly and had them put to death.

They assumed David would be glad of Ish-bosheth’s death, yet what David wanted was not an enemy’s head but a living man who still had the chance to turn back. Because they had dressed up a deed born of their own greed as though it were done for God, they were judged for the evil in their hearts, even though the outcome served David well. More than once David saw his enemies collapse of their own accord, but each time he mourned, and he never took revenge with his own hand.

God looks less at the outcome than at the heart of the one who brings it about, and at the way it is done. David waited patiently because he believed that God alone is the Lord of life and the one who would one day repay on his behalf; seeing that faith, God judged the house of Saul and granted David a united kingdom. In the end, the different fates of Saul and David were the fruit of the choices each had made.