lest we pretend

Monday June 6^th, 2 Samuel 12: ⁷ Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; ⁸ I gave you your master’s house, and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more. ⁹ Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.¹⁰ Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house.  Hell is truth seen too late.  It is not that David, or you and I don’t know what we are doing, but we have all mastered the ability to shield the truth from our eyes with a thin veneer of self-righteousness.  Once David proclaims judgment and verdict, Nathan tightens the noose and in one of the greatest images in scripture points that boney finger and David and says, “You are that man!”  And lest we pretend to believe that this is one of those text that pertains to that someone else in life, rest assured, it is not.  It pertains to all of us some of the time and some of us most of the time.  It is that human desire to be like gods, knowing good and evil and having our eyes opened to the shame this adventure in self-righteousness brings.  It is the essence of human sin.  But even as in the story of David, it is not a cause for God to gloat over our failings any more than we gloat over the failings of our children.  Rather it is an opportunity to learn and with the grace and forgiveness of God, move forward in life, perhaps a bit more forgiving of others along the way.