Our confessional lesson this evening is found on pages 906, 907 in the back of your Trinity Psalter hymnals. We'll be reading from the Canons of Dort, the third and fourth heading. First article, The Effect of the Fall on Human Nature. Man was originally created in the image of God and was furnished in his mind with the true and salutary knowledge of his creator and things spiritual, in his will and heart with righteousness, and in all his emotions with purity. Indeed, the whole man was holy. However, rebelling against God at the devil's instigation and by his own free will, he deprived himself of these outstanding gifts. Rather, in their place, he brought upon himself blindness, terrible darkness, futility, and distortion of judgment in his mind, perversity, defiance, and hardness in his heart and will, and finally, impurity in all his emotions. Man brought forth children of the same nature as himself after the fall. That is to say, being corrupt, He brought forth corrupt children. The corruption spread by God's just judgment from Adam to all his descendants except for Christ alone, not by way of imitation as in former times the Pelagians would have it, but by way of the propagation of his perverted nature. Therefore, all people are conceived in sin and are born children of wrath, unfit for any saving good. inclined to evil, dead in their sins, and slaves to sins. Without the grace of the regenerating Holy Spirit, they are neither willing nor able to return to God, to reform their distorted nature, or even to dispose themselves to such reform. The three articles from the Canons of Dort give us an entree into the doctrine of sin. Note that it does not begin with sin, but rather creation. be more precise, with man's creation, man created in the image of God. This is the proper order, and why? Because sin does not have an independent reality from that of which it is a corruption and a negation. In this sense, theologians tell us that sin is a nothing. It has no being in itself. And this is probably the most basic element in our doctrine of sin. Augustine in the late fourth and early fifth centuries argued this against the Manichaeans who taught that good and evil are co-eternal. Augustine argued that sin is nothing more than a negation of the good apart from which it cannot exist. Put otherwise, it is parasitic on the good. To give an example that Augustine himself uses, love is a positive reality, lust is its negation. Lust cannot be imagined to exist apart from love, which it negates and corrupts. How did sin intrude into the creation? Canons of Dort remind us that man was originally created in the image of God, as we mentioned, and we recognize this language to come from Genesis 1, verses 26 through 28. In the phrase, the image of God, we see the special significance that God bestowed on man. Only of man, male and female, is it said that he is created in the image of God. This significance is reflected in the order in which God creates. Man is created last on the sixth day. This implies that all that precedes him is oriented towards him. The subordination of all creatures to him finds expression in God's charge to have dominion over them. Now this isn't to suggest that man is the final purpose for which God creates all things. To be sure, all creatures stand in the service of mankind, but these in turn are to enable man to serve God. According to the Westminster Confession, it pleased the triune God to create for one reason, for the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness. Man is most fully himself when he exercises dominion or stewardship over God's creatures in service to God. God is the final end of man, and by extension, all creation. Remember the opening question and answer of the Westminster Catechisms, what is the chief end of man? To glorify God and to enjoy him forever. So this gives us a clue to the way in which the Reformed tradition answers the question, in what does the image of God consist? How does man most perfectly demonstrate that, in fact, he is created in the image of God? To glorify God, man must know God. What distinguishes man from all the creatures is his ability to know God and to glorify God consciously. This is why the statement in article one that man was created in the image of God is immediately followed by the statement that man was, quote, furnished in his mind with a true and salutary knowledge of his creator and things spiritual. We see this affirmed in Romans 1, among other places, man should have known God and His attributes, His power, wisdom, and goodness through the things that God made. Man is created to know God, to delight in Him, to call on Him, to act in accord with His will. In this way, he is God's image. In creating man, God intended to have a counterpart in whom to see His image reflected back to Him. It is in knowing and loving God that man most fully expresses his status as that creature alone in which God creates, which God creates in His own image, I should say. Since the soul is the seat of the intellect and will, it is to the soul that the Reformers and the tradition they inherited related the image of God. If we recall what we read, however, in Romans 1, knowing God and glorifying him as God is no longer an option for man, at least in the condition in which he finds himself today. So what intervened between man's creation and the condition in which he lives today? The canons read, rebelling against God at the devil's instigation and by his own free will, he deprived himself of these outstanding gifts. The phrase, the devil's instigation, obviously has in view the temptation of Eve by the serpent in the Garden of Eden, which we read about in Genesis 3. The serpent approaches Eve and asks her, has God really said that you should not eat from any tree of the garden? Already he's trying to confuse her because that's not at all what God said. The serpent's strategy is to deceive Eve by lying to her about God. He seeks to misrepresent God to the woman in order to undermine her trust in God and in His Word. The content of God's command was not to eat from any tree in the garden, but were The words originally were, you may eat freely from any tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For on the day you shall eat of it, you shall die. The story, if you recall, has it that the woman tries to honor God by correcting the serpent. We may eat from the trees in the garden, but God did say you must not eat fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden and you must not touch it or you shall surely die. The serpent then says, you shall not surely die for God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you'll be like God knowing good and evil. What's going on here? The serpent insinuates that God gave the commandment only to protect himself from these would-be human usurpers. In the serpent's account, God is evidently jealous of the power of these human beings who therefore need to be kept down. The serpent's portrayal of God excludes from Eve the view that God issued the command to genuinely protect human beings from unforeseeable misery. The woman believes a lie and eats. She shares the fruit with the man and he eats too. The man shares in her guilt. We learn that the mutuality of man and woman, which was originally a source of joy, now turns into a mutuality of guilt, into a separation of man and woman by mutual shame. Thus it is the corruption of the knowledge of God that is at the root of sin and leads to sin. We see the sinister role played by the deceitful serpent in the corruption of this knowledge. That ancient serpent called the devil or Satan who goes on to lead the whole world astray just as he did with the woman. Thus colluding with the serpent by succumbing to the temptation to doubt the goodness of God the man and woman have severed their fellowship with God. In breaking from God, the couple broke from everything else, the relationships that they had with one another, with the earth itself. These relationships have become deeply disturbed as a result of the fall. But the fall did not affect only them, but also those who came after them. Man brought forth children of the same nature as himself after the fall. That is to say, being corrupt, he brought forth corrupt children. David, whose sin with Bathsheba that we're going to study later this evening, actually gives expression to this in Psalm 51, the occasion for which, in fact, was this sin. In Psalm 51, verse 5, we read, behold, I was bought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. Because the Lord entrusted to him the gifts that were to be joined to our nature, for that reason, when Adam lost what he had received, he lost them not only for himself, but also for all of us, who by reason of our shared human nature We're all as that one man, as Augustine taught. And of course, Augustine is here following the Apostle Paul. According to Paul, in Adam, our head and representative, we all revolted against God. We may say that Adam and Eve serve as the archetypes of a sinful humanity in which we all see ourselves now. Sin is universal. are born separated from God, mistrustful of Him as Eve was when she believed the lie. As a result, according to the Apostle Paul in Romans 3, there is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands. There is no one who seeks God. All have turned away. There is no one who does good, not even one. Canons read, all people are conceived in sin and are born children of wrath, unfit for any saving good, inclined to evil, dead in their sins, and slaves to sin. To be a slave means that it is no longer only the case that I do not want to obey God's law. It's now the case that I cannot obey God's law even if I want to. Sin is misunderstood if it's reduced to an evil deed or immoral act, or I should say if it is only seen in these terms. An act that violates the law is sin. It is called actual sin, but it presupposes the sinfulness of the subject who does the act. original sin. Jesus teaches us how to understand sin in this perspective. He says, make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is known by its fruit. The outer manifests the inner. Who we are on the outside is an expression of what we are on the inside. Some have seen in this teaching about the universality of sin an inevitability that excludes the freedom and responsibility of human beings. But the universality of sin denoted by the term original sin does not imply that man and woman are coerced against their will to submit to sin. On the contrary, They willingly, without force or compulsion, yield to temptation, thus confirming in their own lives the truth of what the Apostle Paul teaches. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. It's only when we gain insight into our hostility to God and bondage to our sin that we can truly appreciate the redemption that God definitively won for us in Jesus Christ. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Let's continue in worship in singing hymn number 466, My Faith Looks Up to Thee. Let's stand to sing. Our scripture reading for this evening is found in 2 Samuel chapter 11, and I'll be reading the first 15 verses. It happened in the spring of the year, at the time when kings go out to battle, that David sent Joab and his servants with him, and all Israel and they destroyed the people of Ammon and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. And then it happened one evening that David arose from his bed and walked on the roof of the king's house. And from the roof he saw a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful to behold. And so David sent and inquired about the woman, and someone said, is this not Bathsheba? the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. And David sent messengers and took her and she came to him and he lay with her for she was cleansed from her impurity and she returned to her house. And the woman conceived and so she sent and told David and said, I am with child. Then David sent to Joab saying, send me Uriah the Hittite. And Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah had come to him, David asked how Joab was doing and how the people were doing and how the war prospered. And David said to Uriah, go down to your house and wash your feet. So Uriah departed from the king's house and a gift of food from the king followed him. But Uriah slept at the door of the king's house with all the servants of his Lord and did not go down to his house. And so when they told David saying, Uriah did not go down to his house, David said to Uriah, did you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house? And Uriah said to David, the ark and Israel and Judah are dwelling in tents and my Lord Joab and the servants of my Lord are encamped in the open fields. Shall I then go to my house to eat and drink and to lie with my wife? As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing. And David said to Uriah, wait here today also and tomorrow I will let you depart. So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day and the next. Now when David called him, he ate and drank before him and he made him drunk. And in the evening he went out to lie on his bed with the servants of his Lord. But he did not go down to his house. In the morning it happened that David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah. And he wrote in the letter saying, set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle and retreat from him that he may be struck down and die. Thus ends the reading of God's holy and inspired word. May he bless it to our hearts and minds this evening. You know, when I was a young boy, there was this popular song called, everybody's got a hungry heart. The artist, as you probably know, is Bruce Springsteen. Now, I don't think that the boss was intending to make a theological statement here, but as happens, especially among poets and songwriters who are gifted, we find in their words insight into an aspect of the human condition. I don't think we'd be drawn to their art if they weren't thus gifted the hunger of the human heart, this hunger is deep. And we discover this already at an early age. This hunger drives us. It doesn't let us rest until we satisfy it. It can be then a constructive force in our lives, motivating us to pursue important life goals. On the other hand, it can and to a greater or lesser extent, because we are sinful, be a destructive force in our lives. The heart is unruly. It is disturbed by passions It is disordered by sin. This too is what we discover at a relatively early age. This is just a reality in a fallen world of which our confessional lesson this evening reminded us. The heart is invariably prone to corruption, thus that hunger inside us turns into lust and greed. We exchange this partner for a better one, or at least one that promises to satisfy that ravenous hunger. We sell this house to buy a bigger, a nicer one, or we earn another advanced degree because the last one was not enough. And perhaps these decisions do satisfy our hunger momentarily, but soon the discontent, the restlessness returns, and then we wonder who we can seduce, what we can do, or what deal we can make next, and to still the hunger pangs that gnaw incessantly at our insides. David too is beset by this same hunger, this same lust. David, the slayer of Goliath, the friend to Jonathan, the loyal servant to Saul, the worshiper of God. This same David shows to us a very different face today. Enticed and dragged away by his lust, he falls into temptation. Failing to overcome the temptation, he makes a series of decisions that prove catastrophic for his own life and for the lives of those around him. In the opening scene, we see David up on the roof of his palace, and we have to ask what in the world is he doing up on the rooftop of his palace in the first place? He's a king, and it's incumbent on him to do his duty as a king. It's spring, that time of the year when kings go out to battle. But David is derelict in his duty. He did not go out. Instead, he sent Joab and his servants into battle without him. Now, David is a leader. and we rightly expect our leaders to lead, but David in this moment abdicated his leadership. He's now a sedentary king removed from the field of action and endowed with a dangerous amount of time on his hands. A siesta on a hot spring day would begin not long after noon in David's time and place, but it's late afternoon by the time that David arises from his bed. The word in the original language is better translated at eventide. In any event, the recumbent king has been in bed for an inordinately long time. And we know that when the mind is not occupied, it tends to wander. And all too often, it wanders to those places that are not constructive, especially when we're lying on our beds. You see where I'm going here. Has David been indulging his fantasies? Has he already primed himself for what his eyes are about to see from that rooftop? Our narrative here gives us ample reason to believe this is so. David moves from his bed to the rooftop. Now the roofs of houses in the ancient Near East were flat, not sloped. There's no safety factor involved here. People use them as places of recreation in the evening, places to sleep at night, and places of devotion at all times in between. David's palace is situated on a height, and so he can look down on the rooftops below. And he sees what appears to be a woman in a nearby house. He focuses his gaze. He sees that she's very beautiful and that she's taking a bath. David's gaze lingers too long. Captivated by the sight of her naked body, he cannot turn away. He has to have her. We should note here that it's not in looking at the attractive woman or man that the problem lies. It is in looking too long. There's a difference between looking and leering. Often we cannot help looking, but the transition from looking to looking lustfully at requires a consent of the will. Martin Luther once said, you can't keep the birds from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building a nest in your hair. That's a valid observation, I would say, but I think we can extend it even farther. We can say that as far as it depends on us, we can keep away from those places where these birds are known to fly over our heads. That is to say, if we have a weakness, if we are vulnerable when we are in certain places, why not avoid those places altogether? If we do not, if we think that we are strong enough when we are in those places, sooner or later, we will fall. David does not avoid the rooftop. And since he has the power to make his fantasies come true, he sends his servants out to find out who this woman is. Once they inform him, he sends them back to fetch her from her house. She comes to him and the deed is done. David commits adultery with Bathsheba. We know that this happens in our world far too often. People in power violate boundaries, to use the language that we hear frequently today. That is to say, they abuse their power to take advantage of those who are in no position to resist them. Earlier this summer, I was present at a church trial in which a married minister was defrocked stripped of his credentials because he was conducting an affair with several women over the past decade. And by no means in my career as a minister was this the only trial I attended. It happens far too frequently, more common today than I realized when I was a young man in seminary preparing for ministry. we accept this as an ineluctable feature of our world, or if we just can't accept it, we have to learn to cope with it regardless because it happens whenever and wherever sinners like David are. What stings, however, is when one of our own does it. one of our leaders whom we have come to love and trust. David's case is troubling to us, troubling because David is a faithful man whom we want to trust. It's one thing if a vile person betrays our trust. I mean, we shouldn't have placed our trust in him in the first place. It's another thing, however, when a faithful one does. It's safe to say that all of us here this evening want to be faithful persons. And if we are followers of Christ, we want the assurance that we are making progress in our faith in God. Have we been growing in our faith? Are we making progress in our sanctification? Has the grace of God worked effectively in us, making a difference in how we live our lives? If we can say yes, if we can say that we have made progress, then our lives as followers of Christ have not been lived in vain. But then David was nothing if he was not a man of faith. Could he have not said the same about himself? Was he not also making progress in his faith? And then this episode, and in the blink of an eye, his reputation is ruined, his character compromised, his kingdom imperiled. The failing of David shakes us up. It may even cause us to doubt, is this faith, the faith in the God of the Bible, the God of David, is it real? If David claimed to have this faith and he went down in flames, then does it really have any power? Does it really make a difference? This is why the failings of spiritual leaders are catastrophic because people who are scandalized by them, if they are young in the faith, can fall away. But if David's case is troubling, it's at the same time comforting because he shows that it is possible for us to be close to God and to be sinful human beings at the same time. To be sure, David is a mighty warrior. He's a valiant knight of the faith, but he shows himself here to have feet of clay. And we too have feet of clay. Keeping David's case in mind can help us and save us from despair when we fail. And even if we fail catastrophically, we can recall David's case and thereby hang on to our hope that we have not failed so badly as to be beyond God's reach. As we would see if we continued reading into the next chapter, God does not give up on David and God does not give up on us in spite of how badly we may have messed up our lives. But right now, David goes only from bad to worse. Now David is a mighty warrior and a valiant knight of faith, as we've already said, but seldom is a scandal in which a seemingly trustworthy man is caught up without precedent. It's seldom an isolated incident. There's usually a history. When David became king in Jerusalem, he took many new wives and concubines. Second Samuel notes this without comment, but elsewhere in the Bible, we learn that this is not in accord with God's will for the king. In Deuteronomy 17, 17, we read that the king must not acquire many wives for himself or else his heart will turn away. The servicing of a large harem obviously consumes time and energy. There's need for damage control to contain all the gossip that inevitably spreads. All of it is a distraction from the central concern of the king. He becomes more preoccupied with maintaining the peace in his household and court than with defending and extending the kingdom that God entrusted to him. This became true of David. After his affair with Bathsheba, he would never know again peace in the royal household. And after the reign of his son Solomon, his kingdom broke apart, never again to be reunited. What our parents have always told us proves true. Actions do have consequences. Bathsheba announces to David that she's pregnant. Now the law of God is clear about those who have been caught in adultery. In Deuteronomy 22, verse 22, we read, if a man is caught with the wife of another man, both of them shall die. The man who went into the woman as well as the woman. And so you shall purge the evil from Israel. David, however, does hear what countless powerful men before and after him do. Instead of coming clean and confessing what he has done, he attempts to cover it up. These men are willing to sacrifice the truth to keep their power and to maintain their public image. But if we tell one lie, we usually have to tell another to support the first one and then another and another until it becomes increasingly difficult to keep the story straight and we lay awake at night in fear that at least one person will see the inconsistency in our story and expose us. So we expend energy to keep our plates spinning to continue the deception. So David sends for Uriah the Hittite, the cuckolded husband of Bathsheba from the battlefield. He doesn't want to arouse suspicion, and so he talks to him as one soldier to another, pretending to be interested in what is happening on the battlefield. Then he orders him to go down to his house to wash his feet. If we don't know Hebrew slang, then we'll probably be confused by the order that David gave to Uriah here, feet. in Hebrew as a euphemism for male genitalia. What David is telling Uriah then is to go down to his house to sleep with his wife. Obviously David is confident that in arranging a romantic evening for Uriah and Bathsheba, he will alleviate the suspicion that anyone but Uriah is the father of the child. No doubt there is probably talk about David's tryst already in the court. To ensure that the couple will be in a relaxed mood, David even has a gift of food sent to their home, a catered romantic dinner to help Uriah and Bathsheba to get into the mood. Applying Uriah with wine is a last desperate attempt, and a rather crude one, to get Uriah to sleep with his wife. But David's plan does not work. He chose the wrong man to defraud. Uriah is a loyal soldier, true to his nation and to her God. So instead of going home to his wife, Uriah chooses to sleep at the entrance of the king's palace with his fellow soldiers, guarding the king and the royal household. Notice how Uriah stands in contrast to David. David stays at home from the battle to indulge his sensual appetites in an illegitimate way while Uriah denies himself legitimate relations with his wife so that he can stay committed to the battle. This contrast is developed even more in the subsequent exchange between David and Uriah. Uriah protests that he cannot go to his own house when the Ark of God and the soldiers are in tents." Now, that language should remind you of 2 Samuel 7. Consider David's zeal there to build a temple for the ark. He was dismayed that while he lived in a palace of cedar, the ark of God stayed in a tent. Where is this David now? Uriah embodies the very values that David embodied when he was at his best, but now David does not care. And this is what happens. Passion derails us from our purpose, clouds our judgment, and makes us surrender what we hold most dear. Passion has turned David into a very different man than he was before. Uriah's reason for his refusal exposes the darkened heart of the king and undermines his plan to cover the affair in an act of In desperation, David keeps Uriah back from the battle and invites him to a party at his palace. This is plan B. David wants one more time to see if he can get Uriah drunk in the hope that with his blood inflamed by the alcohol, he will stumble home finally and go to bed with his wife. Again, the plan is foiled. As dutiful as before, Uriah chooses to spend the night at the front entrance of the palace with the rest of the king's servants. The tragic irony of this action appears in the subsequent verse while Uriah is dedicated to protecting the king's life. The king is devising a plan to take Uriah's life. The tragedy is heightened when we see that David has Uriah himself deliver his own death sentence to Joab, the commander of Israel's forces. So in 15 verses, this great king, who always did what was right and just for all his people, breaks at least three of the Ten Commandments, if not more. Lust leads to an abuse of power, which leads to adultery, which leads to deception, which finally leads to murder. We spoke at the beginning of this deep hunger in the human heart. David's story is unsettling, not because it is so sorted, though it is that. but because if we are honest, we see in our own hearts what was in his. We have experienced in our own hearts this hunger and its corruption, this movement from hunger to lust and to greed, and as a result, we have done things that we now regret. Whether or not we have learned from our experience, however, the hunger is still there. To diagnose the problem does not provide the remedy. And this problem is universal, as we saw in our confessional. Every human being born into the world has this hunger. And it's interesting to study how the philosophies and the religions of the world have sought to come to terms with it. Stoicism, for example, teaches its followers to purge the heart of its passions, to make it hard against the arrows of misfortune so that it may remain undisturbed in all circumstances. Buddhism is based on a sermon that the Buddha preached at a place called Deer Park, the foundation of the Buddha's teaching lies in what Buddhism calls the four noble truths. Life is pain. The cause of pain is hunger. The solution is the extinction of hunger. There are ways to extinguish this hunger. Contrary, perhaps, to popular opinion, our faith does not teach us to deny or to kill this hunger. Rather, it teaches us where we can go so that it can be satisfied. Thinking about those several places in all four Gospels where we find Jesus' concern to feed hungry people who have thronged to him from far and wide. And in the feeding of the 5,000, in the feeding of the 4,000, Jesus teaches that God is the generous provider who satisfies our hunger. God demonstrates this above all in giving to us his only son, the bread of life, which he gives for the life of the world. It's God's will for us to know the love of Christ, which surpasses all knowledge, so that we can be filled with all the fullness of God, as we read in Ephesians 3. Whoever eats this bread will never go hungry, when we experience that in Christ God satisfies our deepest hunger, we find in the love of Christ more than enough to satisfy us. Amen. We now have a few moments to discuss any questions that you may have or comments you may have on our confessional lesson or on our scripture reading this evening. If there are none, please stand to hear, to receive our Lord's parting benediction. Now may the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you. May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you his peace. Amen.