Covering up the problem doesn’t work

2 Samuel 11:1 In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem. 2 One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, 3 and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, "Isn't this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite?" 4 Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. (She had purified herself from her uncleanness.) Then she went back home. 5 The woman conceived and sent word to David, saying, "I am pregnant." 6 So David sent this word to Joab: "Send me Uriah the Hittite." And Joab sent him to David. 7 When Uriah came to him, David asked him how Joab was, how the soldiers were and how the war was going. 8 Then David said to Uriah, "Go down to your house and wash your feet." So Uriah left the palace, and a gift from the king was sent after him. 9 But Uriah slept at the entrance to the palace with all his master's servants and did not go down to his house. 10 When David was told, "Uriah did not go home," he asked him, "Haven't you just come from a distance? Why didn't you go home?" 11 Uriah said to David, "The ark and Israel and Judah are staying in tents, and my master Joab and my lord's men are camped in the open fields. How could I go to my house to eat and drink and lie with my wife? As surely as you live, I will not do such a thing!" 12 Then David said to him, "Stay here one more day, and tomorrow I will send you back." So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day and the next. 13 At David's invitation, he ate and drank with him, and David made him drunk. But in the evening Uriah went out to sleep on his mat among his master's servants; he did not go home. 14 In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it with Uriah. 15 In it he wrote, "Put Uriah in the front line where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die." 16 So while Joab had the city under siege, he put Uriah at a place where he knew the strongest defenders were. 17 When the men of the city came out and fought against Joab, some of the men in David's army fell; moreover, Uriah the Hittite died. … When Uriah's wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him. 27 After the time of mourning was over, David had her brought to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing David had done displeased the LORD.

My family knows that beyond changing the oil, replacing the wiper blades and filters or filling up the tires, I really don’t know how to fix a vehicle. I don’t remember when it was, but there was a time when the girls thought I was a good mechanic. There was a squeaking and rattling coming from somewhere in the vehicle. One daughter asked, “Daddy, what’s that noise?” “What noise?” I replied as I turned the radio up real loud so the noise couldn’t be heard.

Obviously, I didn’t fix the problem. I just ignored it. Covered it up. I probably made it worse for the real mechanic.

In reality, I see a lot of people doing the same things. But it isn’t with their vehicles. It’s with their lives. They ask their parents’ permission to live together before marriage (pitting their parents love for their child against their love for God’s truth). Parents let a lot of things slide with their kids as they grow up, either because they’re too tired or want to avoid confrontation. One Facebook post with improper language becomes a whole list of un-Christian dialogue and opinions. Others think that if they should loud enough or point their fingers long enough at somebody else, their problems will go away or at least be excused or forgotten about.

Now, I may not be good enough of a mechanic to fix a vehicle’s “thingamajig” or “whatchamacallit” or “even its “flibbertigibbetti,” but I do know a little about fixing broken homes, repairing shattered marriages and putting lives back together that have self-destructed. I do know that if you really want your problems to go away, you need to deal with the problem head-on, right away, the sooner the better. When it comes to sin, the Person you need to come to, the only Person, is the Triune God. He is the One who judges sin, and because of the Son’s sacrifice, has mercy on me a sinner. And with the Holy Spirit, creates a new spirit within me (Psalm 51). God’s divine grace, mercy, sacrifice, substitution and sanctification make Him the only authority with the skill, knowledge, expertise and willingness to make the squeaks and creaks of sin go away before they become disaster and damning. He makes them really go away … for good.

In King David’s case, one sin quickly led to another. He committed one sin, but then covered it up and compounded it – exponentially. The old proverb was true of David, “An idle mind is the devil’s playground.” It was springtime and David should have been leading his army in war. Instead, he was back at his palace, bored, looking for something to do. He walks out his palace porch and sees Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of David’s soldiers, bathing on her rooftop. He had to have her. And he did. He slept with Bathsheba. News came a little while later that she was pregnant. David had to move quickly to cover this up. He brought Uriah home from battle so everyone would assume this was a normal pregnancy. But Uriah wouldn’t go home. So David compounded his sin by getting Uriah drunk, figuring that in his inebriated state, he’d go home to his wife. Nope.

So now David gets desperate. He writes a letter to General Joab, effectively giving Uriah the death sentence. And as a nice touch of murderous irony, David has Uriah deliver the letter. Not only is Uriah killed, but so are some of Israel’s soldiers around him. Plus, Joab is now an accomplice to the murder of his men. After an appropriate amount of mourning is completed, David appears chivalrous by marrying the widow, Bathsheba.

This is a modern day soap opera. The lust. The illicit affair. The cover-up. The plotting. The abuse of power. The treachery. The murder. The sly wedding. The scandal.

What went wrong here? Sin after sin after sin. A failure to check sin when it was small. And a denial of sin after it had gotten out of control.
As horrible as David’s sins were, they were no fluke, no accident, no surprise. We often try to cover up our failings as a follower and ignore our incompetence as a disciple with a veneer of decency, and even moral outrage.

A pastor who resigned from the ministry due to sexual misconduct, made the following confession, “I never thought it could happen to me. But it did. For 15 minutes of rolling in the sheets, I sacrificed everything precious in my life – wife, children, reputation, ministry, even my health.” Someone else said after her adultery, “It just happened! It just happened!” No, it did not just happen. You let it happen. In every sin, every curse word, every gossip, every affair, there is a choice, steps taken, road blocks crashed, red lights run.

Sin often starts small and grows. We ignore it. Hide it. Cover it up. I compare it to my grandfather’s right leg. He’s 85 with diabetes. Around Christmas time, Grandpa showed me his leg. It wasn’t pretty. There was an ugly wound on his shin. The blood wasn’t circulating properly. In fact, blood would squirt out of his toes. The wound started small, but it grew infected, it became worse and became gangrene. And last week he had his leg amputated below the knee. The leg was cut off in order to save his life.

That’s why Jesus warns, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell” (Matthew 5:29-30). Jesus doesn’t really want us to maim ourselves, but the point is clear – it is better to go to heaven by getting rid of sinful desires than go to hell while having a whole lot of fun with our bodies.

Our Savior’s call to holy living leads us to have a healthy fear of sin. Fortunately, the Lord has a way of knocking us upside the head when we start taking sin lightly. What a warning God provides us in David! When the king was at the height of his power and full of God’s blessing, his great fall began.

We cannot toy with sin. David toyed with sin, but in the end, it was sin and Satan that toyed with him. We cannot let lust morph into adultery. We cannot allow anger to fester into hatred and jealousy. We cannot permit guilt to keep us from worshiping the One who has come to remove our guilt. Because very quickly we become worn out from working so hard to hide our sin and cover up our guilt. We grow to have a godless disregard for any life but our own.

You cannot go through life singing, “La-Ti-Da, I’m a believer, I go to church sometimes, so I guess that makes me square with the Lord.” It was exactly when David became complacent that he nearly lost his faith.
David eventually asked for forgiveness he did not deserve. Rather than trying to candy-coat his actions, he was finally honest. He prayed in his fifty-first Psalm, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” He admitted his sin, iniquity, transgressions and evil that had infected and affected him from the time of his conception. He did not deserve to be forgiven. He simply threw himself on God’s mercy, begging for forgiveness.

Be honest with God about your sin. Don’t hold anything back. Confess to the Lord all the sins, iniquities, transgressions and evils that lurk in your heart. Tell Him about your pent-up anger and resentment. Fill Him in on the gossip and lies. Bend His ear to the way you fill up your life with worthless pursuits while virtually ignoring His priorities. Admit your prayer and devotional life is almost non-existent.

Though you and I may take our sins lightly, God doesn’t.

I hope this is where the pendulum swings all the way for you this morning. It begins on one side, with you taking your sins lightly. As this pendulum moves toward the middle, you see the gravity of your offenses and the hell that you deserve. Finally, through the Holy Spirit, God allows you to understand where that pendulum ends, at the cross of Jesus. Because God did not take your sins lightly. So that He would not have to kill and condemn us, He killed and condemned His Son to suffering an eternity of hell in a few hours on the cross. There on that cross, you begin to see God’s horrible wrath your sins have caused. But there you also see His tremendous love. You see your forgiveness hanging there in God’s dead Son. And when Jesus rises from the grave, that is when you know that God has opened the doors to heaven to rotten, corrupt people like us.

Like David, we are not going to die for our sins. God isn’t going to punish you on earth for your sins, and more importantly, He is not going to punish you in eternity for them. Jesus’ job was to be God’s punching bag so that He could take out all His anger on Christ instead of on you.

After finally repenting of his adultery with Bathsheba, David wrote Psalm 51. We use this Psalm more than you probably know. In David’s Psalm we realize that as great as our sins are, even greater is God’s undeserved grace. Because of Christ, God cleanses us from our sins. He washes us clean through Christ’s blood. He hides His face from our sin so He no longer sees it. He blots out our sin from His record book. God creates a pure heart within us. Christ has reconciled us to God, so He does not cast us from His presence. He doesn’t take the Holy Spirit from us. He restores to us the joy of salvation and gives us a willing spirit to serve Him gratefully. Even though we don’t deserve any of this because of our original sin inside of us and our actual sins we commit in thought, word and deed, God still forgives us. Christ still cleanses us.

This full and free forgiveness is not a license to sin. This is not an excuse to go sin some more. Rather, this is God’s great comfort when the treachery of our sinful nature takes over and we are caught in Satan’s clutches.

Instead of wanting to keep on sinning and spending our time hiding our sin and covering up our guilt, our souls are filled with joy for the salvation Jesus has accomplished for us. By faith in Jesus, we live in the peace of His forgiveness. Now each day we strive to express with our lives the great gratitude we have for Jesus, our Savior, great David’s greater Son.

In 1885, Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson conceived of a marvelous “bogey tale,” as he called it, to illustrate the duality of human nature. He called it, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” It was a great hit with the reading public. People resonated immediately with the good doctor’s daily dilemma of an internal struggle to keep the beast in him at bay.

Like King David, we daily wrestle with the Mr. Hyde inside of us. We are schizophrenic. We are never sure which one is the real us – the sinner or the saint. We are going to struggle with self-control. But we have a loving God who shares His power with us, power that streams into our minds and hearts through His wonderful Word. He promises that we can rebuke the devil and He will flee from us. We can even rebuke the junior version of the devil that resides within us.

You are going to sin. It is the sad reality of being a schizophrenic saint and sinner. Before Mr. Hyde gets loose to kill, instead of exerting all your energy on covering up your sin, come to the only One who understands, the only One who cares enough, the only One who can help, cure, repair, forgive and save. Don’t cover up your problem any longer. Give your problem to Jesus. And receive His forgiveness and new life in return. Amen.

6th Sunday after Epiphany at Epiphany on February 13, 2011