Hi Folks:
A happy birthday to my wife Jan today. Read carefully and you'll discover
her age in today's letter (I have her permission). I arranged a surprise party
for her yesterday and wrote a silly song for her. My gift to her is a trip to
We continue to look at David's affair with Bathsheeba. Today I'm writing as a guy, primarily for guys, because this is what I understand best. As I mention below, I'd be interested in your comments on how this issue affects women.
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2Samuel 11:2 "One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful,..."*
I had been married only a year or two when a recently married friend made a comment which has always stuck in my mind. He said, "When we got married God didn’t close our eyes, did He?" It was a candid admission that marriage does not prevent us from noticing beautiful, attractive people.
Not only did our eyes not close at marriage, but I wonder if they grow wider with age. When I married at 22, I noticed women around my age. I never would have noticed a 39 year-old. Now that I’m a little older, I think Jan is rather fine. But its not as if younger women are no longer attractive. I have found that the age range of attractive women has increased with my age.
Billy Graham is said to have defined lust as the "second look." There is a difference between 1) noticing that someone is attractive and 2) following through for a second look. In our passage, David crossed the line between first and second looks.
Trains don’t have steering - the rails guide them.
To go in a different direction than the current set of tracks, crews wait until
they reach the right junction. Then they stop the train and throw the switch
which will guide them onto the proper set of tracks. A few years ago a group of
teens here in
Here’s the issue. There is no shortage of beautiful people, so how can we avoid the "second look syndrome?" For its when we take that second look that we tamper with the switch and end up going down the wrong track to Lust Siding.
We can see a strategy in our passage today. We can train our eyes to look away.
Watch the men around you as a woman walks by. Many are not ashamed about following her with their eyes. Its kind of creepy. A female friend told me about an experience she had one time with a man who openly watched her chest while they talked. She told him, "My eyes are up here." A current cracker commercial shows a man who looks down the blouse of a woman stooping to pick up something on an airplane. It’s a scenario that’s not hard to anticipate and then to divert our eyes.
Elicit pictures are out of the question. A friend of mine caught a church member paging through such a magazine in a store. His response: "I was just appreciating the beauty of God’s creation." Somehow I don’t think that was the whole truth.
New cable channels, late-night tv, and the internet offer new chances to look without being caught. Again, we need to train our eyes to avoid these temptations. I’ve also found there are some prime-time shows which are better avoided.
We can train our eyes to divert away from the "second look." The first look is often unavoidable. The second look is the one we control. After David noticed she was beautiful, did he need to continue to look? Of course not. Its all in the training and discipline of looking away.
Today I’ve been writing as a guy for guys, because I know best the temptations that I face. I suspect, however, that the issue of the second look is slightly different for women. I’d be interested on hearing your thoughts on this one.
One last note on today’s passage. We often hear in sermons and studies that Bathsheeba was bathing on her rooftop. Based on this, she is often accused of being immodest/ improper, or of intentionally trying to catch the eye of the king. I find this ludicrous. There is nothing in the text to suggest her location - only David’s. David is the one solely responsible for his action on this one.
I hope this helps. Be On Fire.
ON FIRE is a weekly letter of
encouragement by
*All scripture references from the New
International Version, copyright 1973, 1978 by the International Bible Society.