David was honored by God as no other man in human history, and yet many legalists actually
suggest that he may not have been saved. Among his accolades; He was called by God "A man after
My own heart", and "The apple of Mine eye". His dynasty was selected as the line of Jesus Christ.
In fact, one of His titles is "David's Greater Son".
David also holds the distinction of standing out on both ends of the spiritual spectrum. One the
one hand he was a valiant worrior and wise King who first came to prominance by challenging a 10
foot behemouth while the entire army of Israel cowered in fear. During his reign the Jews enjoyed
freedom and prosperity unequalled in their long history, and they dwelt in undisturbed peace with
David and his army to protect them.
David also had a dark side, as did most of the great heros of scripture. But David's transgressions,
like his noble achievments, were most spectacular of all. His rape of Bathsheba stands out as the
most heinous sin of any hero recorded in the Bible, a sin compounded by his subsequent murder of
her husband, Uriah the Hittite.
Bathsheba was an honorable woman, faithful to her husband, whom she loved, but David used his high
office to force himself on her. When she became pregnant he was desperate to conceal the truth and
sent for Uriah, who was leading his troops in a campagin against the Amorites.
The King asked his general for a report, just a ploy, concerning the campaign. After a dinner in his
honor, Uriah was ordered to go to his wife, or "wash his feet" as David put it, a metaphor used in
the ancient world for entering one's home and cleaning the dirt and mud from the feet in a basin at
the door.
But Uriah was a man of impeccable honor and he refused. The military code of Israel, which all soldiers
observed, forbade a man sleeping with his wife, or enjoying the domestic pleasures of life, until the
battle was won. Until their freedom was secure they remained on the battlefield. So David's gambit failed
and he was left with no choice, or so he decided.
When Uriah returned to the front he carried a dispatch to Joab, David's Chief of Staff. In it David
ordered Joab to commit Uriah's unit to attack the enemy, and when they engaged, his men were to fall
back and allow Uriah to be killed. That's exactly what happened.
God punished David for this crime until the end of his life, but David recovered and went on to be
the greatest King of Jewish history.
The spiritual skill that sets David apart was his ability to sin and endure the punishment for his
misadventures without losing sight of God's plan for his life. All believers who attain spiritual maturity
master this ability, but for most there is a level of divorcement from grace, and loss of fellowship with God,
that draws them deeper into the vortex of spiritual death.
Loss of fellowship with God, when prolonged by guilt or many of the other attendent sins to a transgression
that shocks us, creates a soul environment of subjectivity and disassociation with the fundamentals of the
Christian life. Unless we are able to untangle this morass of carnal thought and reaction we fall deeper
and deeper into the pit of human solutions and motivations.
This condition, termed in the Bible "Squelching The Holy Spirit", can become so overwhelming that some
never recover.
David was out of fellowship for an entire year after the Bathsheba incident, which is the longest period
of carnality her suffered that is recorded in the scriptures. Most believers would never find their way
back to fellowship with God after such an extended departure from the spiritual life.
David's fast and loose life style, such as the bigamy for which is legendary, leads many less astute
Christians to the wrong conclusions. They see God as a stern Sovereign who frowns down at us from His
throne with a disapproving scowl.
David's life brings an entirely different vision of God to light, and this, afterall, is the primary
objective of the Bible, to reveal God to us.
Our failure is inevitable, frequent failure, on a daily basis. Some of our sins are more serious than
others to us, but to God all sins are identical so far as their ramifications are involved. They remove
us from fellowship with Him. The "worse" sins are those which generate addition sin, or "chain sinning",
such as jealousy, bitterness, hatred, guilt, or on the other end of the spectrum; vanity, pride, self-
righteousness, etc. In this sense, that a sin is compounded into more sins, is could be classified as
worse than sins that don't, such as an infrequent lie.
God isn't shocked by our sins, in fact, He is aware of every one of them, and was before He created us,
so we never take Him by surprise. While we should struggle to avoid temptation, an equally critical
demand of our spiritual life is recovering quickly from sin, isolating it as it were, and returning
to fellowship.
It is David's achievment of this technic which raised him to the loftiest stature in God's eyes, which
encourages not to focus on sin, but on recovery from same.
Recovery, then, is a fundamental principle of the successful Christian life. The details of recovery of
fellowship are covered in the Rebound section.