Throughout 1 Samuel and now into the first four chapters of 2 Samuel you get a strong sense that David is a man of principle. He has multiple opportunities to kill Saul, who’s tried to kill him numerous times, and yet he refuses to do so out of a sense of duty and principle that Saul is the Lord’s Anointed. Who is he to forcefully change the leadership? You sense that David understands that God is in control of his destiny.

You even find that David hates the unjust killing of someone, even for the sake of vengeance (2 Samuel 3), and he curses Joab and Abishai for murdering Abner and he puts Baanah and Recab to death for killing Ishbosheth (2 Samuel 4). Up to this point you would never have been able to predict that David would murder anyone at any time for anything. Yet this is exactly what he does to Uriah after sleeping with his wife.

One principle I glean from David’s life is that we must always keep our guard up. We can never say, “I’ll never do that”, or “I’ll never do that again.” We can never be slothful in how we personally combat things that we take strong stands against publicly. Often I wonder if we take strong stands against things in a public manner in order to cover for what we struggle with deeply on a personal level. When pride sets in we often fall to the very thing we stand against. There are too many recent examples to mention, but we must be careful to refrain from claiming that, “I’d never do such and such or this and that.” For as soon as we do the seed of pride has been sown and a road to destruction has been paved.

So, for me I can never believe that I can indulge because I have control, or I have defeated, or I once repented because once I do the enemy will be waiting to take full advantage and create an avalanche from a snowball. It will be a butterfly effect where one uncontrolled thought leads to a multitude of physical sin.

So, when we are encouraged to always keep a close watch on ourselves (1 Timothy 4:16) it’s not without historically recorded evidence of what happens when we don’t.