Chapter 21: The Nature of True Repentance
Lessons from David's Life
I want to spend one more week on the life of David before we move to look at the book of Kings. Last week we saw that David was fundamentally different from King Saul. Saul was a king like all the nations had. He trusted in his own power and strength, rather than in God’s power and strength. As the most powerful person in Israel, he thought he could do whatever he wanted, even to the point of disregarding God’s laws. David, however, was different; he was a king after God’s own heart. What made David different was that he trusted in God’s power and in God’s strength rather than his own. He was a king of faith, and as we saw last time, as David rose to power, he is presented as an almost perfect king. Except that David had one flaw: he had a sinful heart. And as perfect as David was, he fell to the temptation so many powerful men have failed for: He committed adultery with Bathsheba, got her pregnant, and to cover up his wrongdoing, he arranged to have her husband killed. David, it turns out, isn’t perfect at all.
However, David was a man after God’s own heart. So how does this work? How can David, murderous, adulterous David, be considered a man after God’s own heart?
Because David, as a man of true faith, practiced true repentance. How does sin and repentance work in the life of a person of true faith? This is so central to the salvation story that I think it is worth dedicating a chapter to it. So what happens in David’s case?
Step 1: Temptation
2 Samuel 11:1-2
1 In the spring when kings march out to war, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah, but David remained in Jerusalem. One evening David got up from his bed and strolled around on the roof of the palace. From the roof, he saw a woman bathing—a very beautiful woman.
David is tempted when he sees a beautiful woman bathing. At this stage in life, David has everything he needs. He is at the height of his power, his rule has been established, and he is living his #bestlifenow. He has power, wealth, and military success, and yet it is precisely here when he falls to temptation. What we are supposed to understand from this is that we don’t just fall to temptation when things are going poorly, or when we are stressed, or when there are troubles at home. The problem we have is that our hearts are so broken that even during the good times, we fall to temptation.
In fact, the New Testament tells us that each person is tempted “when he is drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire. Then after desire is conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death”. (James 1:14-15). This is exactly what happens to David; he sees a woman he cannot have, desires her, and then sins by taking her for himself. In his case, it leads to literal death when he has Bathsheba’s husband killed.
Step 2: Cover Up
After sin, most of us move to the “cover-up” phase. We try to hide ourselves, or hide our sin. This has been the basic human response since the very first sin came into the world. The first thing Adam and Eve did after they fell was to cover themselves up because of their shame. They then went to hide from God. This is pretty much what all of us try to do, and is what David tried to do too.
He wants to cover up his sin by hatching a cunning plan. When David finds out that Bathsheba is pregnant, he brings her husband Uriah home from the battlefront and tries to get him to go home so that Uriah can sleep with Bathsheba. In David’s mind, this erases his sin and covers everything up nicely so he doesn’t have to face the consequences of his wrongdoing. This is often what we do too through lying or deceit, trying to avoid the consequences of our wrongdoing. Except it never works, not fully. We might get away with the sin, but we can never get away from the guilt and shame that goes with it because we can’t escape God’s presence. In David’s case, he also could not get Uriah to go home to sleep with his wife, so his initial plan to cover up his sin fails.
Step 3: Making it worse
Many of us who fail to cover up our sin dig in and make it worse. Maybe the lie we told to avoid the consequences of sin snowballs, and we end up with this massive web of lies we need to maintain to avoid detection. Perhaps one sin leads to another, and before you know it, you are in over your head. This is what happened to David – when he fails to get Uriah to go home, he digs in and makes it worse. Instead of coming clean at this stage, he instead goes the next step – he writes to his army commander Joab and instructs him to put Uriah on the front lines where it is almost certain that Uriah will be struck down. It happens exactly as planned. Uriah dies in battle, David marries Bathsheba, and she gives him a son. And they all lived happily ever after (except for Uriah, of course).
Except they didn’t.
Step 4: Exposure
The problem with covering up sin is that it can only ever hide your wrongdoing from other people. We may well succeed at hiding our wrongdoing from other people forever. The problem is that our sin isn’t primarily sin against other people. Sin is primarily against God, and no matter how good our cover story is, we can never cover up our sin from God. Adam and Eve couldn’t hide from God in the Garden of Eden, we can’t hide from God today, and David couldn’t escape God either. We have to remember that David was the king of Israel. In those days, a king’s word and rule were absolute. He was the law-maker, the judge, the jury, and the executioner too. If David had been the king of any other nation, he would have gotten away with it. But David was Israel’s king; he was the king of God’s representative nation. The nation that was supposed to show the world how good God was. So God has skin in the game, and because God loved his people and loved David, he could not just let David’s sin go unchecked. His sin had to be exposed.
So God sent the prophet Nathan, and Nathan confronts David with the reality of his sin. David is exposed, and this humbles David. This would have been an extremely painful thing for David to go through, but it brought him back to God. It is what David does with this exposure that sets him apart as a man after God’s own heart. He repents.
Step 5: Repentance
We often think of repentance as just being sorry about our sin, but it is much more than that. Repentance isn’t just about being sorry about our sin; it is a heart change that requires us to come face to face with our sin. It requires us to look deep into our hearts and to see the darkness there. To hate the darkness and brokenness and to mourn over it. Then to turn to God, to ask for forgiveness and for a new heart, and then to live out of the reality of the new heart God gives us in response to our faith.
That is what true repentance takes. What makes David a man after God’s own heart is that that is exactly how David responds. You can see his response in Psalm 51, a psalm in which David goes through exactly this process. I recommend you read it in full, but here are a few snippets.
Psalm 51:1-3
Have mercy on me, Oh God, according to your unfailing love, according to your abundant compassion, blot out my rebellion. For I am conscious of my rebellion, and my sin is always before me.
He has seen his sin, and he prays for forgiveness. That is God’s grace at work on display for us all to see.
V5. “Indeed, I was guilty when I was born; I was sinful when my mother conceived me”.
He recognizes that the problem isn’t even so much this individual sin, but the broken heart that beats in his chest.
V7. “Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow…”
V10. “God, create a clean heart for me and renew a steadfast spirit within me”.
He pleads with God to fix his brokenness, to cleanse the darkness that lives inside him, to give him a new heart that beats with purity.
V13-14. “Then I will teach the rebellious your ways, and sinners will return to you. Save me from the guilt of bloodshed, God – God of my salvation – and my tongue will sing of your righteousness”.
He commits himself to a new life in faith and trust that God has forgiven his sin. He commits to teaching others all about God, in response to what God has done for him.
That is what it looks like to truly repent. David could only do it with what he knew about God at the time. David was a man after God’s own heart, but he was just a shadow of the Ultimate King who was to come. David could only repent as an Old Testament believer could – with a prayer that somehow God would blot out his sin. As New Testament believers, we know so much more than David. We know that God will forgive our sin if we repent, ultimately not just by blotting it out but by transferring our sin unto the Ultimate King, Jesus, who stood in our place. But… we are getting ahead of ourselves again.