Have you ever tried to cover something up? Kids do it all the time. Hey run around and end up breaking something and try to cover it up. They try to meticulously place the broken item back where it was and in a special position so that you can’t notice. I do this all the time in my own life. I will screw something up and I will try to put things back the way they were so, hopefully, no one will notice that something is wrong.
Adam and Eve tried to do that in the Garden. Eve ate the fruit of ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ and then fed it to Adam (never trust a woman who takes with animals. I learned that from ‘Smallville’). When they ate the fruit the realized they were naked... like really naked. Suddenly they realized they had done something wrong, covered their nakedness and tried to hide from God. Hiding from God never works. God found them, revealed their sin and protected them from themselves. Still Adam and Eve were stuck with the consequences, the wages of sin.
There is another story of the ultimate cover up, David and Bathsheba. Obviously David had never seen CSI (or King’s for that fact, it is about him after all). It was spring so David did what all the other kings did this time of year, sent men out to war. 2 Samuel 11 records, “One evening David got up from his bad and walked around on the roof of the palace”. It is never good to walk on roofs... notice how bad stuff always happens on roofs. “From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, 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?’” At this David should have known, don’t rub another man’s rhubarb. Obviously, David wasn’t Canadian. David takes Bathsheba to the love shack and helps people understand why it is called that (Thax B-52’s). She got Prego and David was thinking “O no, how do I get out of this one”.
What they really need was Maury Polvich. He could have done one of his ‘who is the Daddy’ shows. “David you are the father”. Bathsheba runs to the green room crying. Uriah is held back by the security guards and David goes on a rant on how it is his baby and he’ll support it (said it an almost unintelligible ghetto like voice).
David tries to cover his tracks. “So David sent this word to Joab: ‘Send me Uriah the Hittite’...The David said to Uriah, ‘Go down to your house and wash your feet.’ Uriah, unknowingly to David, was a man of honour was not about to go and sleep in his house eating a drink while his men slept in tents on the ground. Plan A failed, time for plan B. David invited Uriah, before he headed back to war, to dine with him. David tried his hardest to get Uriah drunk (with jell-o shots I think, but don’t quote me) thus tricking him to sleep with Bathsheba. I am betting that Bathsheba is not feeling great about herself. The King can’t even trick her own husband to sleep with her. Even when Uriah was drunk he still went outside the city and slept on his matt.
Plan A flopped and now plan B flopped. David is getting desperate. He needs to cover his tracks. He can’t let anyone see that he did something wrong. We’ve all been there. We do something stupid and then end up doing something even more stupid (or studiper) just to cover up what we’ve done. Really we are worse off than if we would just admit it our mistake from the beginning.
“In the Morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it with Uriah. 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.’” Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky, David not only is David a home wrecker now he can add murderer to the list of infractions.
Worst than these things, David had no shame. “When Uriah’s wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him. After the time of Mourning was over, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing David had done displeased the LORD”.
David the Hero, the mighty Champion over Goliath, the man with so much integrity that he would not slay God’s anointed king, Saul, has become David the slime ball. You can’t hide from God. David would have heard the stories of Adam and Eve and how they could not hide their shame from God. But yet David tried. God brings people along like Nathan. You can read about him in 2 Samuel 12. Nathan is a tricky fellow himself. He tells a David a story to which David responded with burning anger against the man in the story. David said, “As surely as the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.”
There are times in life that you wish you never said anything. I wonder if David knew what was happening as soon as he spit those words out of his mouth. Maybe he was totally oblivious to all that was happening. One thing that we can know for sure is that David was guilty of his trespass against both Bathsheba and Uriah. Nathan said, “You are that man!” UH-OH someone’s been caught. David is like the kid who sneaks chocolate pudding unaware that it is all over their face. The child’s mother asks if they ate the pudding, knowing full well that they did, while the child denies even know there was pudding. The evidence, however, is all over the child’s face. (This pudding talk is making my hungry... be back after lunch).
David’s sin has been revealed. It could have been so easy if he would have admitted his folly to God from the beginning but pride got in the way. “Pride is a foolish game that we all play, because we’re all nothing more than broke, weak and frayed”. David was exposed and repented. I am sure if David could do what, unfortunately, Cher sang about and ‘turn back time’ I am sure at this point he would have chose a different path.
We have this challenge every day. We can admit our sins to God and if necessary one another or be exposed when your day of judgement comes. I think prefer the prior. When we try and cover our sins we end up make things worse. For that time on the people in the kingdom knew what David had done and when people read the Holy Scriptures they are able to read of the shamefully things that David did. Even ‘the man God’s own heart’ found himself unable to repent on crouched knee until he was exposed. Repent, be free, rid yourself of pride and don’t kill anyone named Uriah (We are running out of Amish boys).
Everyone needs a Nathan in their life. :)
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