“Do You Confess

“Do You Confess?”

Text: 2 Samuel 11:26-12:15

© August 6, 2006 by C. Edward Bowen

A church in western New York had a sign on their front lawn. And that sign said, “If you’re through with sin, come on in.” But apparently one night someone sneaked onto the church grounds and taped another sign underneath that one. That sign said, “If you’re not through with sin, give me a call at 425-8781.”[1]

Are you through with sin? Really, that’s not such an easy question to answer. Sure, for most of us, we’re not out there murdering or kidnapping or committing armed robbery. For most of us, we’re not out there committing the kinds of sins that everyone is going to know about, the kinds of sins that cause our pictures to be plastered all over the newspaper.

But even though we might not be out there committing those kinds of sins, does that mean that we’re through with sin altogether? What about the sins that are more hidden? What about those sins that we go ahead and commit because we figure that no one will ever find out about them, that no one will ever know about them – sins like anger, lust, envy, hatred? What about those sins that we figure that we can get away with undetected? Are we through with those sins?

When the World Trade Center towers burned and crashed to the ground as a result of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, one of the businesses that was headquartered nearby was the Municipal Credit Union of New York City, a bank-like institution that had some 300,000 customers. And although the Credit Union’s offices survived, the link to their ATMs, their cash machines, was cut off. And so the Credit Union had to made a quick decision. To play it safe, they could have shut down all their ATM machines until they got the problem fixed. Or they could leave their ATM machines on, but the risk was that without that connection, customers would be able to withdraw as much money as they wanted and even overdraw their accounts. But the Credit Union ended up deciding to leave their ATM machines on, figuring that that was a time of crisis and they didn’t want to make things any worse for people than they already were by cutting off their access to their money. And in making that decision, the Credit Union believed that since what happened on September 11 was a national crisis, people would surely pull together and do the right thing.

Well, unfortunately that Credit Union significantly underestimated the power of sin. Because within hours people began realizing that there was no limit to the what the ATMs were letting them have, and word spread, and more and more people rushed out to those Credit Union cash machines to take advantage of the situation as well. And by the time the computer connection to those ATMs was restored, some 4,000 customers had intentionally overdrawn their accounts, some by as much as $10,000.[2]

Why did those people do that? Probably they did it because they figured that amid all the confusion of September 11, they’d never get caught. They probably figured that amid all the chaos and turmoil of that day, their sin would never be found out. In other words, those people probably did what they did and took that money simply because they figured it was something they could get away with.

And here in our reading from the Old Testament, that’s apparently the same sort of thinking that King David engaged in. Now we need to begin by saying that on the whole, David was a good, decent, faithful person. At one point in the Bible, David is described as a being “a man after God’s own heart.” After all, as a child God looked with favor on David and made it possible for him to take his slingshot and kill the giant named Goliath. According to tradition, it was David who wrote many of the psalms that are in the Bible, including the most loved of all, the 23^rd Psalm. And in the history of the Old Testament, David is regarded as the greatest king that Israel ever had.

But even though most of the time David was a good, decent, faithful person, he was still capable of sinning. And particularly when it came to what he did with Bathsheba and Uriah, it seems pretty obvious that he engaged in those sins because he thought that he could keep them hidden. He engaged in those sins because he figured no one would ever find out and he could get away with it.

Maybe you remember what happened. One day David was taking an afternoon stroll around his penthouse when he looked out the window and saw a woman taking a bath on the roof of her apartment building. And after David got out his binoculars and stared at her for quite a while sitting there in her hot tub, David could tell that she had a really nice…personality.

And so right away David ordered some of his guards to hurry over and find out who that woman was and invite her to pay the king a visit. And even though David was told that the woman, who was named Bathsheba, was married to one of David’s soldiers, a man named Uriah, David turned on the charm and the next thing you knew, Bathsheba was pregnant.

Well, to avoid a royal scandal, David figured that he had no choice but to have Uriah bumped off, to get him out of the picture. And so David sent word to his general and told him to put Uriah at the head of the troops, march out toward the enemy and yell, “Charge!” And, David said, while Uriah charged out against the enemy, the rest of the troops were to retreat, leaving Uriah out there all by himself to be slaughtered. And that’s exactly what happened. And so, with Uriah dead and buried, David moved in and married Bathsheba, and he sort of smiled, figuring that he had really pulled something off – committing adultery and murder, and no one knew about.

But just then Nathan appeared on the scene. You might say that the prophet Nathan was sort of David’s conscience, because at key moments in David’s life Nathan would come and say, “David, you know what you’re planning to do, or you know what you just did, that’s not what God wants you to do.” And in this case, Nathan showed up to let David know that even though he thought his sins were hidden, even though he thought he had gotten away with something, the truth was that God knew what he had done, and God was none too happy.

But instead of coming right out and beating David over the head about his sin, Nathan took a rather subtle approach. What he did was he made up a story and asked the king what he thought about it. Nathan told David about a rich man who had great wealth and a poor man who had virtually nothing except for a little lamb that was the family pet. One day a visitor came to the rich man’s house, but instead of the rich man taking food out of his own cupboard for the guest, the rich man went and took the poor man’s pet lamb, slaughtered it, and served it up as dinner for his guest. “What do you think ought to be done to that rich man?” Nathan asked. And right away the veins in David’s forehead started to stick out, and his face turned red, and he shouted, “Why that rich man should die for doing something so despicable as that – taking a poor man’s pet lamb and killing him like that! Tell me, Nathan, who did this outrageous thing?”

And Nathan looked the king in the eye and said, “Sire, it’s you. You are the man.” And when David heard those words, he knew what Nathan meant. No, David hadn’t taken and killed anyone’s lamb. He had done far worse! He had taken a man’s wife and then had her husband killed. But instead of denying it, instead of trying to make up some excuse for what he had done, instead of pretending that what he had done wasn’t really so bad, David confessed. He said, “Yes, Nathan, you’re right. I did those things. I have sinned.”

I think the problem for many of us is that we don’t have a Nathan. For many of us we don’t have someone to come along and say, “Hey, I know what you’ve been up to, God knows what you’ve been up to, and it’s not right.”

I suppose that’s why inventors at MIT recently came out with a device that they call the Jerk-O-Meter. The Jerk-O-Meter is a small unit that you can hold in your hand when you’re talking with someone in person or on the phone, and it lets you know if you’re being a jerk or not. Apparently the device monitors the tone of your voice and your speech patterns, and it can detect if you’re being rude or if you’re not paying attention or if you’re just generally not being a nice person. And if the device senses that you’re acting like a jerk, a message appears on the screen to tell you to watch yourself. A message appears that forces you to face up to the fact that what you’re doing isn’t right.[3]

When we do things that aren’t right, when we sin, are we willing to face up to what we’ve done? When we do things that aren’t right, when we sin, are we willing to confess our sin? The truth is, I think, that quite often we hesitate to do that.

We hesitate to do that because we try to trick ourselves into thinking that there are two kinds of people: there are good people and there are bad people, there are nice people and there are rotten people. And if we had to put ourselves into one of those categories, most of us would put ourselves into the good category, the nice category. After all, we’re nice people, aren’t we? We’re here in church, we’re praying, we’re singing hymns. We’re not axe murderers or terrorists or some kind of villains. No, we’re good people, we’re nice people. And so we try to convince ourselves that good people, nice people, like us don’t sin. No, sinning, real sinning, is something that only bad, rotten people do.

But what the story of David shows us is that even good, nice people sin. And when David finally faced up to that fact, at first he felt guilty about what he had done, which was certainly understandable considering the horrible things he had done. But in the midst of feeling guilty, David discovered something – he discovered that despite what he had done, God is a merciful God, and God forgave him.

Over in Spain, Paco is a rather common name for boys. And there is a story about how one day a father put an ad in the local newspaper in Madrid that said: “Paco, meet me at the Hotel Montana at noon on Tuesday. All is forgiven. Signed, Papa.” Well, at noon on that Tuesday the police had to be called out to break up the crowd of 800 Pacos who had all gathered at that hotel, each one desperately hoping that he was the one who had been forgiven.[4]

As Christians, we know that Jesus came into the world to forgive sinners. But all too often we hear that message and we think to ourselves, “Well, it’s nice that Jesus came to forgive sinners. That’s good news for all the bad and rotten people in the world.” But Jesus came into the world not only to forgive the bad and rotten sinners, he also came to forgive sinners like us.

They say that confession is good for the soul. Are we willing to face up to the sin that’s there in our lives? Are we willing to confess that there are ways that we at times fall short of what God expects from us? If we can muster the courage to take an honest look at ourselves, yes, for a while we might end up feeling guilty about some of the things that we’ve done. But the good news is that guilt doesn’t have to be the final word. That’s because the final word, as far as God is concerned, is forgiveness. As far as God is concerned, the final word is: in Jesus Christ you are forgiven.