(27) And when the mourning was past, David sent and fetched her to his house, and she became his wife, and bare him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD.
The speedy marriage, and the birth of the child, probably made the matter notorious in the eyes of the people. But the chapter closes with what might well be expected, and alarming enough indeed in the relation, The thing displeased the Lord. Oh! what a matter for the most accumulated distress of soul, hath David been heaping up to himself from the dreadful events related in this chapter!
REFLECTIONS
Reader! let you and I make a most serious pause over the perusal of this chapter, and endeavor to gather the improvements from it which God the Holy Ghost plainly intended the church should gather from the awful subject.
See! that the blessed Spirit hath suffered nothing to be kept back in the relation. Everything that can possibly tend to give it the most finished representation of infamy and sin is marked in it. And after the enumeration of adultery, with the art and baseness to conceal it; even leading to drunkenness, and to murder; not barely of one, but of many; we discover (and what is in the representation as awful a view as any) the most consummate boldness in sin, rioting in the fruits of it, in the marriage with the accomplice of his former shame, and a total insensibility and hardness of conscience, as if he had committed no evil at all.
And what may we suppose to be the intention of the Holy Ghost in thus unfolding to the church's view the shame of David? Is it not, Reader, to teach every child of God those most useful, however humbling, lessons; that the best of men are but men, and as liable to fall into the worst of sins as the unrenewed and unawakened. Corrupt nature; in the mass of flesh and blood, is the same in all. That the Lord's people are regenerated only in their better part, their spiritual faculties. The body still continues earthly, sensual, and tending to earth and sensuality. If therefore the affections of the body in the people of God do not break out, and show themselves as vilely as in the unregenerate; this is not from any greater purity in their earthly parts than others, but from the restraining grace of God. This is one precious design which we may venture to believe God the Holy Ghost had in view, in causing this fall of David to be so particularly and fully recorded.
And there is another we may as confidently suppose intended by it, and that is, to teach the infinite importance of being always kept by sovereign grace. David himself was so conscious of it that he cries out in a fervor of the greatest earnestness, Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me. Depend upon it, my Brother, the withdrawment of God's Spirit from a child of God, though but for a short space, is the saddest evil in our pilgrimage state. God hath other ways in the stores of his omnipotency, of punishing the sins of his children, than casting them into hell. It is only, as no doubt it was in this instance of David, (in his first giving way to the lust of his corrupt nature, in looking wantonly on Bath-sheba) it is only for the Lord to suspend the operations of his Holy Spirit, and the enemy, who waits for our halting, joining with our own hearts, and the world around, soon makes us to fall. And, if the Lord be withdrawn, the heart, like a cage of unclean birds, is open to the admission of every evil. And who knows what a succession of sins, like those of David, treading one upon the heels of another, may follow during the Lord's suspension of the operations of his grace? How doth the heart, as in his instance, become more and more hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. Oh! let us, like him, daily, hourly, minutely, if possible, pray, Lord! take not thine Holy Spirit from us!
And, is there not a third sweet lesson, believers in Christ have, to draw from this view of David? Yes! blessed Spirit! I venture to assure myself that in thine own most lovely and gracious office, in glorifying the Lord Jesus, thou didst, above every other consideration, design to teach the church, in the fall of David, the infinitely precious doctrine of redemption by Christ Jesus; and that there is salvation in no other; for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. Oh! dearest Lord, let this view of David serve to impress on my soul this grand truth, in yet stronger and stronger characters. Give me to see, to feel, to be convinced, that if a man after God's own heart, (of whom it is said by the word of truth itself, that save only in this matter of Uriah he turned not aside from anything that the Lord commanded him all the days of his life. See 1 Kings 15:5), if such a man needed redemption, oh! how infinitely endeared to every poor sinner's view ought to be the person, offices, relations, and characters of the Lord Jesus Christ. Yes! thou dear Redeemer! with my latest breath, and earliest song, would I chant those sweet words, as the sum and substance of all my trust; We have redemption through thy blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of thy grace.