In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.
Few people other than his family were more personally devastated by the revelations of sexual misconduct by Ravi Zacharias than I was. His public persona was pristine for decades and he did good things. His defense of the gospel is unaffected by these issues but the witness is harmed. Doug Finkbeiner says something interesting about the above verse. Most people see that David didn’t go to war and it got him into trouble. But if we look at the last verse of chapter 12, we see that Rabbah fell to David’s army. David won and his public persona was pristine. He was a winner.
Behind the scenes, however, was rot and decay. He had an affair with Bathsheba. He exerted much energy in an attempt to cover it up. To top it off, he murdered Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba and the man David should have been. To God, the sin was all that mattered and he sent Nathan to tell David, “You are the man!”
How important is your public persona? Is your relationship to those around you and their assessment of you more important than your relationship with God? Matt Chandler recently gave two imperatives to pastors but it applies to any follower of Christ. First is time with God. Second is transparency with trusted advisers. David apparently failed at both and we see the results. Let’s learn from David’s mistakes, not our own. Let us concentrate on our time with God and our confession to others so we don’t win the battle…
And lose the war against sin.