Let me start by telling you some wonderful news that I received in an email last week.  It was from the none other than the FBI.

“We the Federal Bureau of Investigation have discovered through our intelligent monitoring network that you have a transaction going on as either inheritance payment or lottery or contract payment to the tune of Millions of United States Dollars which have been approved but have not been settled.

This is to officially inform you that we have verified your contract or lottery payment.  We have just passed a NOTIFICATION to the Central Bank Of Nigeria, to pay you accumulated deposited funds of US$8,300,000.00 through Union Bank of Africa.  (What makes this even more of a wonderful surprise is that I don’t even remember buying a lottery ticket in Nigeria.)

By this method, your funds will be loaded in two batches into an ATM card, and sent to you.  From this card you can withdraw a maximum of $15,000 per day from any ATM machine worldwide. So if you would like to receive your funds in this way please send your following information to the paying bank.
1. Full name
2. Full address
3. Phone and fax #
4. Your age, sex and current occupation

We immediately instruct you to contact Mr Idris Idowu with the email contact
below.”

Well, of course, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Over the last six weeks we’ve formed a picture of King David as a devout, holy, follower of God who is full of passion in his faith and a strong desire to serve God.  A true Bible hero and a wonderful example to modern Christians.  Well, just when you thought King David was too good to be true, we find out that he is.  His coverage so far has been just that - too good to be true.  Today is the seventh reading in his life from the Old Testament books of Samuel.  And at last we catch a glimpse of David’s dark side.  And not just a little glimpse either.  We get a high definition, 1080p resolution, digital, picture of some truly shocking sin. 

We are all familiar with the story of David and Bathsheba, how he took a stroll on the roof of his palace and saw more than he’d bargained for; and how he called for this powerless married woman to be brought to the palace and how he slept with her.  That much we know well.  But that was just the beginning of an insane spiral into depravity.  You see David had not learned the one thing that many modern politicians could have told him, if they had been alive.  When you get caught in sexual wrongdoing don’t try to cover it up and lie about it.  The names of senators and even a president come into our minds.  The same is true of sports-stars taking performance enhancing drugs (obviously I’m not going to mention any of them by name because they all have really good lawyers!).  And what we know is that people are more willing to forgive and give a new start to someone when they admit their wrongs early in the piece and not try to cover them up or deceive. 

In his pride, however, David didn’t know that.  So when he finds out that Bathsheba is pregnant he goes into full manipulation mode.  And he hatches a plan so devious and nasty that Hollywood would be struggling to make this up.  Israel is at war.  And Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, is an officer serving in the army.  David, because he’s king and he can do this sort of thing, sends a message to the commander of his forces, Joab, telling him to send Uriah back to Jerusalem.  When he arrives David orders Uriah to go home and spend the night with Bathsheba.  That way, David hopes, her pregnancy will be attributed to Uriah’s 24 hour R & R.  Well, Uriah has more integrity than his king, and he says “No, your majesty.  While my fellow soldiers are still fighting I won’t go home and relax”.  And, true to his word, Uriah goes to sleep at the entrance to the palace.  The next day David tries again to get Uriah to go home to his wife.  But Uriah continues to say ‘no’.  Here is David, the most powerful man in the kingdom but now he’s looking pretty helpless.  He’s in severe danger of his adultery being found out.  And so David resorts to more cunning.  He invites Uriah into the palace and gives him food and drink.  He acts as if he’s his friend and has his interests at heart, while getting him drunk, and again trying to get to go home and spend the night with his wife. 

But Uriah remains resolute and returns to camp.  So with one cover-up plan thwarted David has to find another.  He’s in trouble.  Now he plumbs the moral depths.  He sends orders to Commander Joab to place Uriah in the front line of battle and then command the other troops to withdraw, leaving Uriah isolated, in the face of the enemy’s best fighters.  And as if that wasn’t despicable enough he puts this message to Joab in writing and hands it to Uriah to deliver.  So Uriah was literally delivering his own death sentence.  Joab, of course, being a good career soldier, carried out the king’s orders and Uriah lay dead on the battlefield.

So let’s count the sins – objectifying Bathsheba (like she was just some object for his pleasure and not a human being created in the image of God and on a par with David), adultery, deceit, manipulation, arranging for someone’s ‘accidental’ death.  And then there’s the overriding sin of arrogance, call it narcissism, if you will. The horrific misuse of power.  David’s belief that he could actually get away with this.  That his power was so great that he could behave this way and be above the law and above God.   He had become so convinced of his own untouchability that he wasn’t even aware that he was doing anything wrong, let alone that he was accountable to anyone for how he behaved.  We’ll see next week that he was devastatingly mistaken.

Most preachers tackling this passage, like most regular Christians who read it, focus on the adultery.  As if sexual sin were the most serious of all sin.  And it’s undeniably true that cheating on your spouse has devastating consequences.  Nobody emerges from it happy.  There are only losers and no winners – the people directly involved, of course, but also children, friends, families, churches.  One act can ripple outwards and damage whole communities.  But I don’t want to focus on that.  Instead, I want to spend a few minutes thinking about the very first temptation he faced.  Because if he’d just resisted that one then none of the others would have arisen, he would not have slept with Bathsheba, Uriah would not have died, and the whole sordid episode would have been avoided.

And that first temptation occurred when he noticed Bathsheba bathing.  He couldn’t avoid noticing, of course.  You can picture him innocently strolling around his rooftop taking the evening air.  We can give him the benefit of the doubt that that he did not have mischief on his mind.  His story of failure and consequence begins immediately after he sees her.  He could have turned away.  He could have just removed himself totally from the source of the temptation.  He could have decided to go back inside and read a book and taken his mind off what he’d just seen.  Instead he looks and looks, and invites the thoughts that will in time destroy him.  And then he acts impulsively on those thoughts and the whole sorry saga is set in motion.

Portia Nelson has written a poem call AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS

Chapter I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost ... I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

Chapter II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place
but, it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter III

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in ... it's a habit.
my eyes are open
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

Chapter IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter V

I walk down another street.

Now try to forget for a minute the exact nature of this temptation, because I think this event has a lot to teach us about all sin, and all the temptations we face.  We see something and we want it, but we know it is not right or appropriate to have it.  And we have a choice.  We can do what David did and let the thought take root, and think about it and imagine possessing it.  And in time that thought can consume us until we act on it.  Or we can dismiss it.  We can check ourselves and say “what am I thinking?  I can’t afford that thing … I can’t do that thing … consume that object.”  And we can instead decide to focus on something else.  But once the temptation takes root we can soon find ourselves on a slippery slope that leads us quickly getting out of our ability to control.

20/20 once showed an experiment on self-control with children. They were told that they could have a single treat, such as a cookie, right now. However, if they would wait while the reporter ran an errand, they could have two cookies. Some preschoolers grabbed the cookie immediately; others were able to wait for what must have seemed to them like an endless twenty minutes. To sustain themselves in their struggle, they covered their eyes so they wouldn't see the temptation, rested their heads on their arms, talked to themselves, sang, even tried to sleep. Those who endured to the end received the two-cookie reward. The follow-up of this study found that the children who were able to forgo the instant gratification kept that same temperament throughout their adolescence. The more impulsive kids who grabbed the cookie were more likely to be stubborn, indecisive, and stressed.

What I’m talking about is that desire to possess whatever it is.  And it can be anything.  Probably in our culture it is usually material things, money often.  It can be an experience, it can be a relationship.  It can be anything – just something that we want, but suspect that we can’t really justify before God or our own consciences.  We see it and we are attracted.  And if we are not careful soon the thought can take us over, and we act on it.  And just like for David there are often consequences.  That thing we had to have now means that we don’t have the money for the rent or the gas bill.  Maybe that thing we had to have means we can’t give as we’d like to.  Perhaps the consequences are a feeling of emptiness or a broken trust or a relationship that is hurt. 

I do want to put a positive spin in this, because it’s possible to get very gloomy and falsely guilty about this subject.  The temptation you and I have is usually a desire for something good - something beautiful, something luxurious, something that gives us pleasure, something that makes us happy.  All of this is good.  What makes it a temptation is that God doesn’t plan for us to have it – or he wants us to have it at a different time, or in a different place, or to get it in a different way or to have less of it or more of it, or to have it take less of a priority in our lives.  But, all things are gifts of God, and to be enjoyed with thanksgiving; when we patiently receive them at the right time, place and in the right way, and in the right amount, and we don’t let those things begin to take the place of more important things.  And sometimes God says “don’t go chasing after that … it won’t do you any good.  Here I have something much better for you.”

So to finish I want to sum up the lesson we learn from this episode in David’s life like this.  Walk away from the temptation.  If you entertain it you make it much more powerful.  If you give yourself over to God and ask for his strength he will give you a way out of that temptation.  That’s his promise – he says “I will never let you be tempted beyond what you can withstand”.