Sin Makes You Stupid

David sinned with Bathsheba and that led to more sin as he tried to cover it up. He tried his best to get Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, to do wrong in the process. Uriah didn’t. So David convinced himself the solution was to have the noble warrior killed by the hands of the Ammonites. His actions made him an adulterer, a liar, a despicable leader and a murder. But it also made him stupid.

You see in order to make the death of Uriah happen; he had to enlist the help of his commander Joab. Joab wasn’t the type to not take advantage of the situation. So when Joab made an error in battle by letting the men get too close to the wall, he used the information of Uriah’s death to distract David from criticism.

“and if it happens that the king's wrath rises and he says to you, 'Why did you go so near to the city to fight? Did you not know that they would shoot from the wall? 'Who struck down Abimelech the son of Jerubbesheth? Did not a woman throw an upper millstone on him from the wall so that he died at Thebez? Why did you go so near the wall?'--then you shall say, 'Your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.'"

2^nd Samuel 11:20-21

David should have been critical. History had shown this was a dangerous maneuver. Joab should have been reprimanded. But David wasn’t thinking about his duty, he was thinking about his sin. Since it got him what we wanted David didn’t much care that his commander had lost good men, weakened his army and endangered kingdom.

Sin does that to everyone. We’ve seen it for years when smart people do very dumb things in pursuit of or in the cover up of sin. Politicians, CEOs, stars athletes who should know better ruin it all by their vices. Ordinary people do it as well. Sin is a toxic substance that corrupts pollutes and dulls everything it touches.

Sin is a dark veil that clouds your judgment. Don’t get hoodwinked by it!

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog