Thank you. You ever wish you had a delete button so that you could quickly erase a thoughtless act or a misguided action, something you've said that you wish you could take back?

King David certainly would have liked that. Today on Truth for Life weekend, Alistair Begg considers King David's regretful dilemma involving Bathsheba and the compounding effect of trying to conceal his sin from others, even God. We're looking at Psalm 51.

The story goes like this.

There were two men in a certain town.

One of them was particularly rich, and the other one was very poor.

The rich man had a considerable number of sheep and cattle, and the poor man had simply one little ewe lamb. He had bought it when it was tiny, and he had raised it. It had grown up

both with him and with his children. It shared his food, it drank from his cup, and it even slept in his arms. Indeed,

it was like a daughter to him. A traveler comes into town and goes to the home of the rich man.

The rich man, in seeking to provide for the physical needs of this individual, chooses not

to go to his own herds and flocks, but goes instead and intrudes on the flock of the

poor man, a flock of one, as you will recall, and takes the U-Lam from this gentleman and uses that as the means of preparing food

for the traveler who arrived at his gate.

Now, there's an obvious moral incongruity of that. Those of us who listen to it say,

that's not right, and that's exactly what David said when he heard this story. When Nathan came to him

and told him the story, David was filled with anger, and he declared, the man who did this

deserves to die. He must pay for that lamb four times over because he did such a thing,

and he had no pity. The story was a moral outrage.

It struck David. And then in that instant, the dagger pierced the heart of the king.

Because Nathan the prophet immediately then seized on the story that he had told. This,

he says to David, is a parable of your life, and particularly of your activities of late,

because he said, you are the man that I'm describing in the story. And the awful actions

of this leader were described in the words of Nathan.

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