What King David did after being caught in adultery

David and Bathsheba (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Psalm 51:1-19. Even in its heroes, the Bible does not cover up nor excuse sins. David was one of its heroes. The background to this psalm is found in 2 Samuel, chapters 11 and 12. It was a time of war. David should have been at the front with his army. He fell through a ‘look’. He was not the only one to do so, Gen. 3:6; 13:10, 14, 15, etc. Later, the sin he committed with Bathsheba could not be hidden. Bathsheba was pregnant and David was going to be found out. It led to Uriah’s murder. The story would never be revealed. But David reckoned without one important factor, 2 Sam. 11:27—all was known to God. What happened in the year following is told in Psalm 32 verses 3, 4. Then Nathan is sent to David with his story of one little ewe lamb. David’s anger is aroused, but he does not see himself in the story. Oh the blinding effect of sin! We are strangely blind to our own faults and sins. We excuse sin in our own lives and are very critical of it in the lives of others. God seeks to tear down the veil and show David his sin as it really is. ‘Thou art the man’, Nathan tells him. God desires to show mercy to David, but he can only do so when David repents and confesses his sin. David’s response is ‘I have sinned against the Lord’. Nathan’s reply is immediate; ‘And the Lord hath made to pass the iniquity of thy sin’.

Such is the background to this psalm. David is made conscious of his sins. He calls them his ‘transgressions’ (rebellion, overstepping the line); his ‘sins’ (missing the mark, coming short of God’s standard); his ‘iniquity’ (moral crookedness). He prays for the blotting-out (the rubbing out) of his transgressions. He prays, ‘wash me thoroughly’, for sin is a polluted garment, and defilement must be removed. He asks for cleansing, just as the leper was cleansed. He acknowledges that his sin is essentially against God, v. 4, and it springs from a fallen nature, v. 5. God has provided the cleansing for which he pleads—‘purge me’, v. 7, ‘wash me’, v. 7, ‘blot out’, v. 9. He gladly recognizes God’s power to forgive and remake—‘Create in me a clean heart, O God’, v. 10. Happily he can say, ‘Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered … unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity’, Ps. 32:1, 2.

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