SERMON XIX.  FORGIVENESS

Psalm li. 16, 17.  Thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it:  thou delightest not in burnt offering.

The sacrifice of God is a broken spirit:  a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.

You all heard just now the story of Nathan and David, and you must have all felt how beautiful, and noble, and just it was; how it declares that there is but one everlasting God’s law of justice, which is above all men, even the greatest; and that what is right for the poor man is right for the king upon his throne, for God is no respecter of persons.

And you must have admired, too, the frankness, and fulness, and humbleness of David’s repentance, and liked and loved the man still, in spite of his sins, as much almost as you did when you heard of him as a shepherd boy slaying the giant, or a wanderer and an outlaw among the hills and forests of Judaea.

But did it now seem strange to you that David’s repentance, which was so complete when it did come, should have come no sooner?  Did he need Nathan to tell him that he had done wrong?  He seduced another man’s wife, and that man one of his most faithful servants, one of the most brave and loyal generals of his army; and then, over and above his adultery, he had plotted the man’s death, and had had him killed and put out of the way in as base, and ungrateful, and treacherous a fashion as I ever heard of.  His whole conduct in the matter had been simply villanous.  There is no word too bad for it.  And do you fancy that he had to wait the greater part of a year before the thought came into his head that that was not the fashion in which a man ought to behave, much more a king?—­that God’s blessing was not on such doings as those?—­and after all not find out for himself that he was wrong, but have to be told of it by Nathan?

Surely, if he had any common sense, any feeling of right and wrong left in him, he must have known that he had done a bad thing; and his guilty conscience must have tormented him many a time and oft during those months, long before Nathan came to him.  Now, that he had the feeling of right and wrong left in him, we cannot doubt; for when Nathan told him the parable of the rich man who spared all his own flocks and herds, and took the poor man’s one ewe lamb, his heart told him that that was wrong and unjust, and he cried out, ‘The man who has done this thing shall surely die.’  And surely that feeling of right and wrong could not have been quite asleep in him all those months, and have been awakened then for the first time.

But more; if we look at two psalms which he wrote about that time, we shall find that his conscience had not been dead in him, but had been tormenting him bitterly; and that he had been trying to escape from it, and afterwards to repent—­only in a wrong way.