Today I wanna explore the difference between how Judaism and Christianity view David’s sin with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband afterward.
The truth is, both of these faiths have difficulty dealing with God’s judgment on the matter.
Why?
Because there seems to be a contradiction in how God handles it.
On the one hand, the Lord says David’s sins are forgiven and he will not die.
On the other hand, He decrees that David will suffer the consequences of his actions.
So which one is it?
Judaism takes the approach that God showed divine favor towards David (to an unhealthy degree, I might add)…
Christianity, on the other hand, goes off in a bizarre direction.
They say that God looked forward to the time when He would have His son crucified on the cross…
And on that basis, offered David divine forgiveness.
This exposes a problematic tendency humans fall into when reading the Scriptures.
We always wanna oversimplify things into nice, easy-to-digest bite-sized doctrines.
Unfortunately, that’s not how life works, homies.
It’s filled with complexity and contradiction.
For instance, the Western evangelical church will whittle things down to…
Believe in Jesus, and all of your past, present, and future sins are instantly forgiven.
Therefore, you don’t have to worry about the future consequences of your deeds.
The truth is that both the “Old” and New Testaments paint a different picture.
Yes, sin ALWAYS requires payment.
But payment and forgiveness happen on two levels:
The spiritual and the physical.
We’re dealing with duality here, folks.
And there’s no better fleshing out of this concept than what we’ll find in 2nd Samuel Chapter 12.
We’ll continue with this discussion the next time we meet.
See ya all next time.
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