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Oct 06, 2024 06:00am

Our Sins, His Good

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God weaves all our failings and mistakes into the grander scheme of His overall purpose. When David was a young king, God made a covenant with him—to make David’s name great, give him rest from his enemies, and build him a house. God promised to raise up David’s offspring and establish his kingdom forever (2 Samuel 7:8–16). In our humanness, we might like to say that all these promises were fulfilled because David was so faithful to God and loved and served Him with his whole heart as long as he lived. We could read many of the psalms and certainly see David’s passion for God. We may know him by his God-given title “man after God’s own heart.”

But if we know David’s deeper life-story, we know he wasn’t perfect. He had many moral failings and personal shortcomings. He stole another man’s wife, got her pregnant, and then had the man murdered to cover things up. He sat idly by after one of his sons violated his daughter. David sinned just like the rest of us. He was anything but blameless.

And yet we find God using a man guilty of adultery, murder, and more to fulfill His covenant and establish an everlasting throne from his line. David had many sons and daughters. But it was the son from David and Bathsheba’s second union whom God chose to build Him a house. And it was through the lineage of this son, Solomon, that God chose to send the Messiah—his forever king.

God is faithful to His promises to the end. There is no sin, no mistake, no failure of ours that can thwart God’s plan—His plan for our lives and His redemptive plan for the whole world. In fact,

God loves to use broken people with dirty pasts as part of His greater purpose. He is in the business of changing lives.

He uses murderers (Moses, David), liars (Abraham, Jacob), prostitutes (Rahab), adulterers (David), thieves (Matthew), persecutors of the church (Paul) and puts them on display—not to parade their sins but to demonstrate His marvelous mercy through lives changed by His matchless grace.

This is why David could say:

“The LORD dealt with me according to my righteousness;

according to the cleanness of my hands he rewarded me.

For I have kept the ways of the LORD

and have not wickedly departed from my God.

For all his rules were before me,

and from his statutes I did not turn aside.

I was blameless before him,

and I kept myself from guilt.

And the LORD has rewarded me according to my righteousness,

according to my cleanness in his sight.” (2 Samuel 22:21–25)

Although David was deeply aware of his sin, even to the point of depression (Psalm 32, 38),

David knew that when God looked at him, God saw a righteous man with clean hands. How

could this be?

It wasn’t because of David’s righteousness; David knew he was made righteous by faith in God’s

coming Messiah, the one promised since Genesis 3 and who’s advent was planned before the

foundation of the world. David knew it was not the cleanness of his hands, but the cleanness of

another who would take his place by dying on a cross. He knew that by faith in this coming

Savior, his sins were washed away.

God’s plan for David’s life was bigger than David’s mistakes. And so is His plan for us. Our sins

can’t foul it up, wipe it away, or make it null and void.

If you have made mistakes, if your burden of sin is too great for you to bear, look to Christ, repent, and find forgiveness there. He is not finished with you yet.

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. (1

John 2:1–2)