How to Overcome LUST: 2 Samuel 11:1-27

You're listening to the Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk about the Bible in fun, in practical ways. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Bible Guys. We're going to get down to business. We are because we have a big chapter. It's a big one. But before we do that, we're going to launch into one of our favorite segments, which is the Dead Joe competition. Well maybe that maybe that should be the intro. We should always just say. It in joke. Competition. That's terrible. Well, these are super important to us personally, yes, being dads, Yes, yes. Okay, I'll go first. Okay, we have five each. I've been called a computer. It has nothing to do with my intelligence. I go to sleep if I if I'm left unattended for fifteen minutes. Okay, that's not bad. Well that's all right. There you go. How do you make the number one disappear? Uh? Just add a G and it's. Gone, Oh my goodness, G in front of it. In front of one one? Yes, and yeah G. And then it's not one anymore. It's gone when. It says added G. I was picturing adding a G at the end. Oh yes, yeah, so I was like what, Yeah, that was a thinker. Yeah, that was a thing. And then I said number one, not just one, so you're thinking, yes, number. And then also it's a reading thing. Yeah, did we just take forty five seconds? Bare joke? Here we go. Number two. Just so everyone's clear, I'm gonna put my glasses on just like that. So every I'm gonna steal that one. That was really good. Yeah, my pet frog broke his leg this morning. He's very unhappy. Oh that's really rough. It's so rough. It's good. Number three if laziness. We're an Olympic sport. I'd made sure I came in fourth, just so I wouldn't have to walk up to the podium. Okay, okay, a blind man walks into a bar and then a table, then a chair. That was terrible. Did she just make me read like a blind man? Joke? Yeah? No, that, but you made fun of a blind man. I didn't make fun of him. I just read what was given me. She didn't even pre read these she made you. Oh no al ready, No, please, if you're mad, send a send a mad email at to sezar Ba at the bible guys dot. Com or desiree. All right, there, we go. Number four, What weighs more a gallon of water or a gallon of butane? A gallon of water because butane is a lighter fluid. Oh no, oh no, that's terrible, terrible. My wife just told me to put the toilet seat down. I don't know why I was carrying it around in the first place. That one, I like that one. It was good. Okay, all right, here we go. What do you call the pink fleshy bits between shark's teeth? I don't know. Slow swimmers? Slow swimmers? Okay, as if a fast swimmer could outswim a shark, that's right, it's. Not going to happen. I just saw my wife trip over and drop a basket of clothes she just ironed. I watched it all unfold. Oh that was a rough one. Yeah, well it's a clever It is clever. I watched it all unfold. Yes, the event and the basket. Yes. Hey, By the way, I just realized something. A faster swimmer doesn't need to outswim a shark. He just needs to outswim the person next time. That's correct. Yeah, okay, I had had to throw that swimmer. I used to be used to be. I'd say I'm probably adequate for a person of my age at this point. But you know, I get that rotator cuff thing, I get that bulging disc spine thing. So you're saying there's a chance, you're saying. There's a chance. I'm saying there's a chance anybody could beat me. Yeah, I'm saying, well, you got a bad you got bad neck, you got bad shoulders. Now, based on my trainer and based on me working out, I would guess that I could swim just fine and fast. Yeah yeah, Yeah, My guess is I could do that. Okay, well I'm gonna so then, but sharks coming after us. I just need to pop your really hard in the neck and ye chop you on the neck, pop you on the shoulder. It actually work, It would actually work. Okay, it's horrible, What a horrible thought. Oh yeah, just sitting there meeting that's horrible. Give me a chance. Okay, all right, So we're. Going to dive right into the one of the most famous stories of David's life. I would say the most famous, obviously is David Goliath, and I would say the second most famous, I would think would be this story, which is David and Besheba. Oh yeah, I did this before, back, you know, back when I think, uh, you know, thirty years ago, forty years ago. I think it generally society was a little bit more biblical literate, biblically literate with regard to the stories. Of the life. They were sure they were. Now a lot of people don't know who Samson was. They don't know, right, you have to explain things more so, I can't remember. Probably twenty five or thirty years ago. I did a thing, and I asked people, just say the first thing that comes to your mind when I say and I said Samson, and and people said Delilah, And I said David, and and it was Goliath first, Bestieva second. Yeah, yeah, And it was that fast, right, So yep there, yeah, all right, So here we are, we're going to read about David Beesheba today. David was a great king, but he was also human, and he made terrible mistakes and committed terrible sins. And so it says here in Second Samuel, chapter eleven, verse one, in the spring of the year, when kings normally go out to war, David sent joeab and the Israelite army to fight the Ammonites. They destroyed the Ammonite army and laid siege to the city of Rabah. However, David stayed behind in Jerusalem. Late one afternoon after his midday rest, David got out of bed and was walking on the roof of the palace. As he looked out over the city, he noticed a woman of unusual beauty taking a bath. He sent someone to find out who she was, and he was told she's Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Then David sent messengers to get her, and when she came to the palace, he slept with her. She had just completed the purification rights after having her menstrual period, and then she returned home. Later, when Sheba discovered that she was pregnant, he sent David a message saying I'm pregnant. Then David sent word to Joeab send me Uriah the Hittite, so Joeb sent him to David. When Uriah arrived, David asked him how Joab and the army were getting along and how the war was progressing, and then he told Urai, go on home and relax. David even sent a gift to your Yah after he'd left the palace, but Uriah didn't go home. He slept that night at the palace entrance with the king's palace guard. When David heard that Uriah had not gone home, he summoned him and asked, what's the matter. Why didn't you go home last night after being away for so long? And Yourbiah replied, the ark and the armies of Israel and Judah are living in tents, and Joe Ab and my master's men are camping in the open fields. How could I go home to whine and dine and sleep with my wife? I swear that I would never do such a thing. Well, stay here today, David told him, and tomorrow you may return to the army. So Uriah stayed in Jerusalem that day and the next. Then David invited him to dinner and got him drunk, but even then he couldn't get Urrio to go home to his wife again. He slept at the palace entrance with the King's palace guard in the spring of the year when King's ope, I'm reading it again, that's the same one. Oh yeah, so I just skipped down to it. Yeah yeah, yeah. So then in verse fourteen it says, So the next morning, David wrote a letter to joe Ab and gave it to Uriah to deliver. Instructed joe Ab stationed Uriah in the front, on the front lines where the battle is fiercest, and then pull back so that he will be killed. So Joeab assigned Uriah to a spot close to the city wall, where he knew the enemy's strongest men were fighting. And when the enemy soldiers came out of the city to fight, Uriah the hit Tite was killed, along with several other Israelite soldiers. Then Joeab sent a battle report to David. He told his messenger to put all of the news of the battle to the king, but he might get angry and ask why did the troops go so close to the city. They didn't they know there would be shooting from the walls. Wasn't a Bimelek son of Gibeon killed that thebez by a woman who threw a millstone down on him from the wall. Why would you get so close to the wall and tell him? Eurya the hit Tite was killed too. So the messenger went to Jerusalem and gave a complete report to David and the enemy came out against us in the fields, and he said, and as we chased them back to the city gate, the archers on the wall shot arrows at us, and some of the king's men were killed, including Eurya. The hit tite. Well, tell Joe ab not to be discouraged. David said, the sword devours this one today and that one tomorrow. Quite harder next time, and conquer the city. When you Riya's wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him. When the period of morning was over, David sent for her and brought her to the palace, and she became one of his wives. Then she gave birth to a son. But the lord was displeased with what David had done. You think, yeah, it's pretty horrible. Yeah, so there's the snowball effect of sin. So it starts with you know, people always say it starts with the lust, you know, where David was watching her take a bath, you know, But that's not really where it started. Did it. No, So it started way out ahead of that. Yeah, Well, it started when it said there's a time when king should go off to war, which is where you started to read. And by the way, that little hiccup in the middle of the passage was we're reading from the chronological Bible, and it started in first Chronicles twenty. It inserted that in there because these are the same stories. Oftentimes, Chronicles and two Samuel record the same thing. So anyway, so yeah, it's a time when kings should be off at war. So the Bible literally includes the fact that David was at home when king should be at war. So that's really what the first that's really where it began. In other words, David was out you could argue and say comparably outside of God's will because he's the leader of the nation, he's the leader of the army, and you know, he's representing God's agenda, and yet he should be at war and he's not. And we didn't cover the fact that we skipped over the passage where God, after David unified the whole nation, God told him, now go finish the job and destroy all of the enemies of God's people, destroy them all. So it was David's job. It wasn't just a thing that David was doing because he's a mean guy. It was his job that God gave him. Remember the other day we talked about how David's told God, God, I want to build you a temple. I want to build you a building where a house, because I'm living in a palace. And God said, no, David, I'm going to bless you because you want to bless me. But what we did covers the fact that God said, no, your job is not to build me a temple. I'll let your son do it. Your job is to go and continue to finish wiping out the enemies. And he said, because you have blood on your hands, I don't want you to be in the one building my temple, right, but your job is to be that bloody man. Your job is to be the one who wipes out the enemies of God in God's people. And so it wasn't like this was something that, oh, it's just another Saturday, you know, all the all the all the guys are going out and doing it. I should do it too. Nah, I'm tired. I want to stay home. It's it's not a pick up softball game, right, this is This was his job. And then it was that time of the year it talks about, you know, it's the beginning of the year. This is This would have been April or March or April. The Hebrew calendar kind of the beginning of the year changes a little bit, but it would in March or April, planting would have been done and the rains were over, so now it would have been dry enough that typically the time that you would be most in danger in a kingdom would be sometime right after the planting, and then the next time that you'd be really in danger is rate about harvest time, and so you can count in the fact that your enemies are probably on the war path. They're on the way, and so a good king oftentimes would preemptively take his bigger army and try to catch the enemy army heading towards the attack. So bring the attack to them instead of letting them come all the way and put your cities under siege. That was the idea. So when it says it was about that. So it says in two Samuel eleven, in the spring of the year, when kings normally go out to war, David sends Joe Ab, his top general, say hey, you go do it. You know, he's the greatest warrior in the history of Israel. But he sends Joe Ab, you know, a surrogate to do it for him. So many people probably wonder, you know, how was David able to see Bethsheba. This is just a practical answer. His palace would have been higher, his palace would have been grander, his palace would have been on a hill. And then also acknowledging the fact that Bethsheba was wife to your ride, the Hittite, who was also in the army. But because Thatsheba's house was right next to David's, it's also an indicator that he was a very prominent man. He was a prominent man in the war, because you know, if you live next to the palace, then you know it's not going to be a shack, it's going to be a prominent structure, right and. So and David and so the city of Jerusalem, the city of David, the part that he took from the Jebi sites, is on a slanted part of what is now modern Jerusalem. You've been to the City of David part of right, and so the palace was at the top of that hill and everything in the city was below him. And it's smaller than you think. Yeah, yeah, it's not very big. It's a few hundred yards wide and less than a mile long. Yeah, wouldn't you say maybe a half mile long? Yeah? Yeah, I would, I would agree with that, yeah, and the and so yeah, he's so he's elevated already because that's where you build palaces on top of hills. And then and he's looking down, so he sees bit about and then what does he do The sin of him not being at war, you know, when he's should be outside of God's will leads to being somewhere. Where he shouldn't be. And then that leads to him saying, oh, I'm gonna go ahead and pursue that which I desire, knowing that it's wrong. And then you know, he calls Bevan and then. What does he do. He leverages his position. So that's a dangerous thing. That's a warning against all spiritual leaders, right when you when you are able to leverage your influence to get what you want. It doesn't have to be a sexual sin. It could be any sin. It could be a money sent right, you know, it could be it could be anything where if you're a leader in a position of a nonprofit organization and the heck listen, this applies to bosses leveraging their influence, right, And so anyway, Well. The Bible pretty much sums it up that there's only three kinds of sins. The lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. Right, so you're looking at at at lust is one of the things that we leverage our power for. It's stuff money, We try to leverage our power forward to get get around. And then the pride of life is is fame. Right, So those are the pretty much those are the three sins. Yeah, everything falls into those those categories. And I would say also the pride of life and my you could probably include some self selfish driven things as well, right, and self promoting, self gaining, right, yes, yeah, fame and so anyway, so then then after then, after that, then what happens is then he acts on his desire, he forces Bethsheba, uh, based on his influence. You know Bethsheba. We were just left to assume that she probably has no choice. Now she could have been a co conspirator in it. Yeah. Well, when when people come and give David bad news, he kills them, right, so, so just bad news. Right, So when she gives him the bad news of no, I'm not sleeping with you, what would happen, right, So this was a rape. Yeah, yeah, there's no other way around it. Sometimes people point, well, she was taking a bath on the roof. Everybody took baths on the roof, right, They didn't have bathrooms and showers, and so that would have been the place, a place that there was an expectation that you had a certain amount of privacy on the roof of your home, right. And so she wasn't out there, I don't believe trying to tempt David. She was just doing what you do. And you're supposed to look away. And a lot of those cultures, you know, you and I've been in places before where where their sense of modesty is a little bit more flexible than ours. And and and so the idea where you know, I've been in villages before where you know, say, nursing a baby openly or whatever they're the idea is that the village just kind of looks away, right, is different than and and there's kind of a growing expectation in America that way. But for the most part, culturally, it's still a surprise. Yeah, yeah, it's still a surprise. But in a lot of the a lot of the developing places we've been to. That's just the thing, and you just you look away. That's you're supposed to do. And so the idea would be that you have a right to privacy on your property and others should away. And David chose not to. When we were all in Kenya, they weren't trying to be immodest to look at us because of nakedness. It was because we were white as ghosts, right right right, very curious and so. Like we would take our shirts off and they would just you know, like gawk at us. And we had this room where there was like little uh like spaces in between the walls and these and these these little kids would. Look they were gawking. They were all lined up in gawking watching. Us change and and and it was and I realized very very quickly because then they made comments and said we as ghosts. We had little boys, me and Bill, our friend Bill, and they grabbed our short that we were they thought we were ghosts, and they grabbed our shorts to check and see if we were really men. Just they looked in our shorts to see if we were men. Yeah, So a very different view than than the way that you know, our sense of modesty. So there's I don't think that there's any indication that Beshiba was doing anything inappropriate. Yeah, but David certainly was. He was on the prowl, you know, he was. He was probably bored with being a successful warrior. He's a little tired. Maybe his joints are hurting. He's got a sore necker, so he has rotator cuffs hurting, right, and he decides, hey, you know, I want to stay home. I just I don't want to go out today. And they're going to Aman, by the way, so Rama Raba. I wonder if he was a good swimmer at this time. Rabba is modern day Aman, Jordan. Oh, and you can see Jerusalem from Aman, which is pretty amazing at nighttime, the lights of Jerusalem you can see from a man. It's not very far. And so just across the Jordan River aways maybe sixty miles or so, I think it's one hundred miles to drive it, but it's like sixty five miles across the from mountain to mountain, right, so you can see it. Because Aman Jordan or Rabba here would be a lot higher even than Jerusalem, so you're kind of looking down there. So it's not very far. This isn't that big of a battle. We're just going to go and wipe out the Ammonites and Joe ab can do it. And I think you've got a certain amount of boredom. And there is something about that that we are men are supposed to work. We're supposed to work, and it's hard to get into sin when you're actually working, right, right, But he's not. He's throwing off his responsibilities and uh, he's get he's overly confident in his power and in his might. And it's interesting because yesterday we just read I don't trust in war horses and chariots and that kind of stuff. But today he's trusting in his war horses and chariots, right, And that's where he goes off the rails. And isn't And what's I think it's the Book of James. What says sin leads to more sin and sin. When ith book at James, Yeah, and. It leads to death, right and so and so what happens is the snowball rolling down the hill gets bigger. He's out of God's will, He's somewhere where he shouldn't be. He acts upon his desires and then what does that turn into? It turned in turns into manipulation of your riyah. He calls Uryah back, and then it turns into murder eventually before before it turns into murder. You know what that one of the most convicting things about this entire story is that he actually hands Uriah his own death sentence. Because Uriah is so noble, so the Bible goes out of its way to say Uriah wouldn't go home. He has so much character. He says, Oh, my men are something man, What a guy? What a man? He says, I'm not going to go home and be, you know, be with my wife and my kids and or. You know, indulge in the luxury and the joys of my home when all of my fighting buddies are still stuck out intentsime, right, So. I will sleep at the gates. So he sleeps at the gates on the ground I'm assuming, right, and then or you know, maybe on a maybe on a bench or something. And then then David tries to get him drunk. Even and even in a state where he's not even necessarily controlled by his you know, morality compass, he still doesn't go home. And so this man is. A good good man and uh, and then David's like, hey, he's such a good guy. I'll just go ahead and send a sealed envelope with my seal by his own hand. At any time. You Urray could have broken the seal and read it right, right, but you're right I didn't because he's a good man. And then Joe Ab, you know, he knows something's fishy. He knows something's dirty when Uriah hands him a letter and then Joeab opens it and it says kill you rriyah. You know, Joe Ab is like, oh, something's going on here, which is why he sends the message back and says, hey, when the king. Gets mad because people died, because people. Died, let him know there was a high cost for his letter. But tell him you're that I did the job. Your Rayah is dead. And then and then what does David do. Oh oh, now I understand, Well, tell him, don't be discouraged. I know you lost some men, but you know, but hey, his word was carried out. It's a it's a terrible, terrible, terrible Uh. What progression of sin? Right? And and sin always goes farther than you meant for it to go right? Right? Was that that old song Sam, I'll take you farther than you want to go and keep you longer, and you want to stay, It'll cost you more than you want to pay. That's right, right, that's right. Here's a life application study. Note. In the episode with Bethsheba, David allowed himself to fall deeper and deeper into sin, which is what happens you spiral. You ever hear somebody say, what happened? How did I get here? Right? I've had so many people tell me that, and then it's just a series of bad choices. So it says one David abandoned his purpose by staying home for more. Two he focused on his own desires. Three, when temptation came, he looked into it instead of turning away from it. What a good phrase. Four he sinned deliberately. He did it on purpose. Five he tried to cover up his sin by deceiving others. Six he committed murder to continue the cover up, and eventually David sin was exposed and it was punished. The consequences of David sin were far reaching, affecting many others. David could have chosen to stop and turn from evil at any stage along the way, But once sin gets started, it's difficult to stop. The deeper the mess, the less we want to admit having caused it. It's much easier to stop sliding down a hill when you're near the top than when you're halfway down. The best solution is to stop sin before it starts. You know, that is full of rich stuff. Oh yeah, it's. Easier to stop at the top of the hill than it is halfway down. You know, this is I've compared this before to Genesis chapter two, where you know, it's the it's the Temptation of the Garden where it starts with you know, just just a just a what doubting God's work? Right, doubting God? Basically right? Right, you know, just to say half God said? Did God really say? You know, did God really say that you're supposed. To be at war? Right? Is it really necessary to be where God told you to be to do? Yeah? Can't you bend the rules? And that's where it starts in the garden, And that's where it starts here, And the progression really is the same. So well, hey, that's a that's a lot and that's uh, there's a lot packed in there. I'm sure we can probably do a whole series on just that one chapter, couldn't we Yeah, you know, several weeks. That could be a four week series right there. So anyway, well, hey, we'll continue on in the story because next podcast we get a confrontation from the prophet of God. Here it comes, Yeah, here it comes. We'll see then on the Bible. Guys,