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Guilt Outlasts Lust

GUILT OUTLASTS LUST

Guilt Outlasts Lust

It was a glorious spring afternoon when he saw her. He was relaxing on the roof of the palace. He’d had a tough but successful road to become the leader of the nation, and now he was taking some time out. Probably in his early 50s, King David was tantalized by the beauty of a young woman bathing on a nearby rooftop. But she was the wife of one of his army officers. ‘It would only be a one-night affair,’ he thought. ‘Her husband is away. No-one will know.’

But things went wrong: Bathsheba became pregnant. A scandal was inevitable. He tried to cover it up. He called Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, back to the city. For three days he entertained him, urging him to have a night with his wife. But Uriah refused while his army was still fighting.

So David adopted an unscrupulous plan. He had Uriah put at the center of a major battle and left to fight alone and die. It worked. Uriah died and David married Bathsheba. Like the eye-surgeon in Woody Allen’s Crime’s and Misdemeanors, he had apparently committed the perfect crime. But David had made a mistake. In his lust he had forgotten God.

We live in a self-absorbed society, intent on pursuing its own interests, ignoring the reality of God. Not that this is new. Writing in his Letter to the Romans (1:28-32), Paul the Apostle said:

‘Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.’

Foolishness

As Paul points out earlier in Romans 1, we have the evidence all around us that there is a creator God. We have also the evidence of history – the life of a unique man, Jesus of Nazareth. Furthermore, we have the evidence of our own conscience that we are guilty before a holy God. Deep down we don’t agree with the implied conclusions of Woody Allen’s, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point – that there is no God to whom we are all accountable.

It is the ultimate foolishness to ignore God. Psalm 49:13-14 (worth reading the whole psalm) says:

Such is the fate of the foolhardy, the end of those who are pleased with their lot.
Like sheep they are appointed for death;…
But God will ransom my soul from the power of death, for he will receive me.

Forgiveness

Three millennia ago, King David of Israel understood these things. He knew the guilt within him was neither socially conditioned nor a psychological hang-up. He knew that he had offended God: You are justified, God, in your judgment, for against you alone, have I sinned… And, when he turned to God in an honest confession from his heart (Ps.51:7), he could say: Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

We have now this assurance: God in Christ not only pardons our sin when we turn to him and confess it, he also delivers us from its consequences. Guilt outlasts lust, but God’s offer of forgiveness to the truly repentant trumps all.

The Downcast

Hippocrates, the 5th century Greek physician, identified four kinds of temperament: the sociable extroverts – the sanguine; the driven leaders – the choleric; the analytical and reflective – the melancholic; and the relaxed and inward looking – the phlegmatic. While medicine today has much more sophisticated models identifying the complexity of personality, certain characteristics may dominate.

Some people have a greater tendency to depression than others. This is just as true for professing Christians. Some of the great ones of the Bible, such as Elijah and Jeremiah, and later Christian leaders, such as the poet William Cowper, or the English preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, suffered with depression at times. It is simply wrong to dismiss a believer who experiences mood swings as having a spiritual problem. In fact, the reality of their faith is seen in the way they persevere despite their mood swings.

Psalms 42 and 43 illustrate this well. The writer(s), had been forcibly taken from his home city of Jerusalem into exile, either at the time of the Babylonian exile or, more likely, when king Jehoash of the northern kingdom of Israel, defeated king Amaziah of the southern kingdom, Judah (2 Kings 14:14).

Far from home, and from the temple in Jerusalem where he led the worship, the writer asks: Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me? (42:5, 11; 43:5). He was depressed and disturbed. Any talk of joy and peace would have been empty and false. God seemed remote as we see in his cry: As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God (42:1-2).

Many of us today know what it is like to move away from the comfort and security of family and friends. A good part of how we respond will depend on our underlying temperament. And this can all combine to affect our spiritual awareness – as was happening in these two psalms.

The Psalm writer points us to the solution. When he says: I say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me? (42:9), we see that we should admit our feelings to God, even asking him questions. This takes courage. Further, we learn that we need to address our inner self, our soul. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a great English preacher wrote: ‘The main trouble in this whole matter of depression is that we allow our Self to talk to us instead of us talking to our Self.’ The psalm-writer’s soul has been depressing him, crushing him, so he stands up and says, ‘Soul, listen! I will speak to you: “Hope in God; I shall again praise him, my help and my God”.’ Don’t let your feelings dominate.

Throughout these two psalms we see the movement from depression, to admission, to self-exhortation, and then to prayer: Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people, the writer says; Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me (43:1, 3).

Confident in God’s grace, he is assured of the day when, again filled with joy, he will sings songs of praise to God. Psalms 42-43 urge us to move beyond believing things about God, to actually sensing the living presence of God, whoever we are, and whatever our situation in life.

Where is the joy?

C. S. Lewis once observed, I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by anything else.’

Was he right? Is there real joy in our lives?

I am not talking about a manufactured, false kind of joy – putting on a brave face when we are anxious or when things go wrong in life. I am talking about, and I am sure Lewis was talking about, the deep joy that springs from a clear conscience.

The concluding verses of Psalm 32 read:

 Many are the torments of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.
 Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

Why should we be glad and rejoice? What might motivate us to shout for joy?

David wrote Psalm 32 following the humiliating exposure of his affair with Bathsheba. While he wrote it about himself we too can benefit, for if we are going to find the kind of joy that he is speaking about we need to attend to his words. Verses 1 and 2 read:

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

Misdemeanors?

Freud told us that guilt is a psychological hang-up. But King David tells us that it is something objective, something real that stands between each one of us and our Maker. The God who rules the universe is not simply an impersonal force. He is a moral being, a holy judge.

However, we do not naturally lead godly lives, pray, trust God, and generally delight in honoring him. Our natural inclination is to try to cover up our sin, thinking of our failures as foibles and misdemeanors. So, we often compromise on issues we know are wrong, calling it tolerance; we slide into godlessness, thinking we are free.

In Psalm 32 King David is telling us that when we ignore God we offend him. This is one of the tough words of Christianity. Malcolm Muggeridge, a former editor of the English Punch magazine put it this way: The depravity of man is at once the most unpopular of all dogmas, but the most empirically verifiable.

Forgiveness. The only safe way, the only permanent way, to deal with guilt is to have it washed away. And there is only one person in the world with the cleansing power needed to erase such stains – the Lord himself. David knew this: Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

We have a far better knowledge of the truth of David’s words because we live on the other side of the cross of Jesus Christ. Christ died for our sins, the apostle Paul wrote. And it is Psalm 32 that he quotes in Romans 4:6-8 where he argues that God, in his mercy, declares an amnesty for sinners who turn to him in faith. We are saved by grace alone, not by any intrinsic good within us or by any good works we have done.

Reason for joy. Too often our lack of joy comes because we have not been honest with God and opened our hearts to him. We have not truly grasped that in Christ our sins are washed away and that each day we can enjoy a fresh start in life.