“Flee youthful lusts”. Any guesses on who said this? I’ll give you a hint. It was a guy and he said it in A.D. 67. Give up? Ok, the guy who said it was Paul and he was an apostle of Jesus. You probably didn’t think lust was a major issue back in A.D. 67 but it was just like it is today. And pornography is not a new phenomenon. We can go all the way back to the Old Testament of the Bible and read about a man who was at home looking lustfully at a naked woman. He didn’t have a laptop or an Internet connection but he did have a really tall roof that let him look down on other roofs in the city. Can you guess who I’m talking about? (hint – he was a King). 10 points if you guessed King David. So David is at his palace and instead of pulling up a porn site he peers over his roof and sees a woman taking a bath. Lets look in on the story:
2 Samuel 11:1-2: In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king’s men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem. 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…
Now if David would have said to himself, “whoa” turned his head and then told his gardener to plant a large hedge of trees on that side of his roof to block the view we wouldn’t even know the name of the woman who was taking that bath. Her name was…yes, Bathsheba. As a side note I wonder if she was called Bathsheba because she took bath’s on the roof. So “Bath” and then maybe “sheba” in the Greek means “on the roof”. So Bath-Sheba – bath on the roof. I guess we’ll have to leave that mystery to the scholars.
Back to the story:
2 Samuel 11:3-5 …and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, “Isn’t this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. (She had purified herself from her uncleanness.) Then she went back home. The woman conceived and sent word to David, saying, “I am pregnant.”
David had a chance to “Flee” the situation by turning away when he first saw Bathsheba but he didn’t.
Often we don’t do a good job a fleeing. How often have we been watching TV and questionable stuff shows up and we stay. Or, guys, a woman wearing reveling clothes walks by and we stare to long and think too much about her. Or we find ourselves on an inappropriate website and we don’t flee!
David didn’t flee either. Instead he got all worked up over Bathsheba’s beauty, then he sent for her and slept with her and got her pregnant. If only he’d fled.
Do we do a good job of modeling fleeing to our kids or do we do a good job of compromising? Our kids watch what we do more than listen to what we say. Teach them to flee by fleeing yourself.