To be fully HUMAN — A Daily Reflection

David told the messenger, "Say this to Joab: ‘Don’t let this upset you; the sword devours one as well as another. Press the attack against the city and destroy it.’ Say this to encourage Joab."

When David heard that Uriah was dead, his reaction was pretty lame.  He sent a message back to Joab saying, “Don’t let it upset you.  People get killed in battle.  So what?”  That’s a pretty big contrast to David’s reaction to the news of Saul’s and Abner’s deaths (2 Samuel 1 NIV; 2 Sanuel 3:22-39 NIV).  Saul and Abner were his greatest enemies, and yet David mourned them.  Uriah, on the other hand, was a loyal subject who refused to go relax and spend time with his wife and instead stayed where he was supposed to be with the army.  But David’s reaction to this good man’s death was cold, callous, and uncaring.  Why?  Because David had gotten so used to sin, he had become anesthetized.  He had suppressed his feelings of guilt so deeply, he no longer felt guilty for what he was doing.

This is an excellent guide for avoiding the idea, “If it feels good, do it.”  Feelings are a totally unreliable guide when it comes to sin (actually, they’re an unreliable guide in all areas of our lives!).  In the first place, sin is fun.  If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be tempted to do it.  In the second place, you may have been sinning so long that you have gone on past the guilt stage.  You may have anesthetized yourself against feeling bad.  I can still remember the first time I saw an ad on television for Maidenform bras.  I was in high school at the time.  I was mortified!  How embarrassing!  How gross!  By today’s standards, it was very benign… a mannequin with no head or arms and nothing below the waist – wearing a totally modest bra.  If it ran today, no one would even notice it.  In fact, most of the time, we don’t notice underwear ads at all.  They’re commonplace.  And most of them are very mild compared to the other things we see on prime time television.  The sad thing is, we’ve all been anesthetized against the evil we’re watching.  And those few people who are still shocked… those few people who are voicing protests to the sex and violence and attacks on family values and the encouragement to sin that we see and hear on television and in movies and in our music – well, those people are just fanatics, right?  They’re not up with the times, right?  They are people to be ridiculed and ignored, right?  Wrong.

The same type of thing happens with our personal sins.  The worse we get, the less we feel guilty.  So, what should we do?  Start with staying out of harm’s way in the first place – and then stop relying on feelings to tell us whether something is right or wrong.  The only reliable guide we have is the Word of God.  We just need to use it.