TEEN TREE 
OF LIFE
The Doctrine of Compassion
Part 4
January 26, 2020
Before you begin, ask yourself a very important question: Do you believe that Jesus Christ died on The Cross for all of your sins? If you answered yes, you will need to be sure that you are filled with The Holy Spirit. How do you do this? You name your sins to God The Father in His Son’s Name. This is called Rebound. As a Christian, you must rebound any time you sin. This is taught in 1JOHN 1:9: If we confess [name] our sins [directly to God], He [God] is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now, if you have never believed that Jesus Christ died on The Cross for all of your sins, all you have to do is say to yourself that you believe in Him and you are saved! The Bible verse which teaches us this is ACTS 16:31: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.”
Has anyone ever done something that hurt your feelings? Maybe he or she was supposed to help you with a project for school or come with you to pick out a dress for a party and then just blew you off. You probably felt hurt at first and then maybe even became really, angry. Or maybe your sister was told by your parents to help you clean out the garage while they ran an errand and all she did was goof off, leaving you to do all the work. Brace yourself! Because you’re going to see this type of behavior from people throughout your life.
These are the moments when you need to show compassion. This is when you must remember the moments in your life when God showed you compassion. We’ve all experienced God’s compassion. You may not have recognized it at the time, but if you think back on times when you were in trouble or in need, you’ll realize He was there – as faithful as ever! Remember what Paul wrote which we looked at earlier on in this study: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you, patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. (2CO 1:3-6 New International Version)
God is the “Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” and you can be sure that He has shown this compassion to you throughout your life up to now; and He will continue to do so, especially at times when you don’t expect it. God expresses His compassion in so many different ways. As you go forward in your Christian Walk, you should start to make yourself more aware of these times, because you need to show that same compassion to the people who hurt or anger you in your life. Because of the compassion God shows us, we should NEVER seek revenge when our enemies – or even those we love – do something which hurts or angers us.
More importantly, we should never rejoice when we see our enemies (or those who have hurt us) fail or suffer – no matter how much they’ve wronged us. A good thing to remember when we want revenge (or when we want to smile and say to ourselves, “You got what you deserve!”) is that out of His Compassion, God always forgives us, no matter what we do! This is so evident in PSA 78:32-39 (The Message Bible): And—can you believe it?—they [the Israelites] kept right on sinning; all those wonders and they still wouldn’t believe! So, their lives dribbled off to nothing—nothing to show for their lives but a ghost town. When he cut them down, they came running for help; they turned and pled for mercy. They gave witness that God was their rock, that High God was their redeemer, However, they didn’t mean a word of it; they lied through their teeth the whole time. They could not have cared less about him, wanted nothing to do with his Covenant. And God? Compassionate! Forgave the sin! Didn’t destroy! Over and over he reined in his anger, restrained his considerable wrath. The background to this Psalm is God had done great things (“wonders”) for the Israelites, but they refused to obey him. Like so many of us today, the Israelites wanted to do what they liked, not what God wanted! They didn’t keep His Covenant which basically was that God agreed to give them help, and they agreed to obey his laws, or rules. But they didn’t! They just continued to disobey Him. The important thing here is that He was still compassionate to them, even though they didn’t live up to their part of the agreement! He treats us the same way because of His compassion!
Let’s look at 2SA 12:1-7 (The Message Bible) and why the prophet Nathan was sent to see King David: But God was not at all pleased with what David had done, and sent Nathan to David. Nathan said to him, “There were two men in the same city—one rich, the other poor. The rich man had huge flocks of sheep, herds of cattle. The poor man had nothing but one little female lamb, which he had bought and raised. It grew up with him and his children as a member of the family. It ate off his plate and drank from his cup and slept on his bed. It was like a daughter to him. One day a traveler dropped in on the rich man. He was too stingy to take an animal from his own herds or flocks to make a meal for his visitor, so he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared a meal to set before his guest.” David exploded in anger. “As surely as God lives,” he said to Nathan, “the man who did this ought to be lynched! He must repay for the lamb four times over for his crime and his stinginess!” “You’re the man!” said Nathan. “And here’s what God, the God of Israel, has to say to you: I made you king over Israel. I freed you from the fist of Saul. I gave you your master’s daughter and other wives to have and to hold. I gave you both Israel and Judah. And if that hadn’t been enough, I’d have gladly thrown in much more. So why have you treated the word of God with brazen contempt, doing this great evil? You murdered Uriah the Hittite, then took his wife as your wife. Worse, you killed him with an Ammonite sword! And now, because you treated God with such contempt and took Uriah the Hittite’s wife as your wife, killing and murder will continually plague your family. This is God speaking, remember! I’ll make trouble for you out of your own family. I’ll take your wives from right out in front of you. I’ll give them to some neighbor, and he’ll go to bed with them openly. You did your deed in secret; I’m doing mine with the whole country watching!” Then David confessed to Nathan, “I’ve sinned against God.”
In these verses, we learn that David was extremely arrogant, and arrogant people don’t show compassion to others. At this point in his incredible life, David had fallen into reversionism and stayed there for over a year. Do you remember what reversionism is? It’s reversing or turning in the opposite way. As believers we were designed to execute God’s Pre-Designed Plan; we’re supposed to be going forward in our Christian Walk. But in reversionism, we turn in the opposite direction, so that we go back to being what we were like before we were saved. In reversionism, we become believers thinking human viewpoint. We essentially revert, or go back, to who we were before our relationship with God. We return to a sinful life. Our priorities get mixed up and God’s Word becomes lost in the mix. This is what happened to David.
Despite everything described in 2SA 12:1-7, David had not even come outside the castle for air! He murdered Uriah the Hittite, then even had the audacity to take his wife, Bathsheba! David was so far into reversionism that He had become psychotic. This happened because he had become totally absorbed with himself. There had been no lower point in his life. David had become mentally ill and unstable. This was evident in his lack of compassion for others. He had anxiety, guilt, and fear. He has also become a sociopath – unable to function around people properly. He’d become extremely anti-social. But despite all this, God was very gracious and compassionate to him. He could have let David stay in the castle and die in his sins. Instead, God sent Nathan to reach out to him.
At this point in his life, David was a very rich man – the one Nathan refers to in 2SA 12:1-7. The poor man in this story was Uriah (who was married to Bathsheba). Let’s look at the back story of David, Bathsheba and Uriah. When David first became King, he went with his army to fight the wars against Israel’s enemies. But then David became overwhelmed with the problems within his kingdom, so he left Joab, his general, to lead his warriors, while he stayed holed up in his palace on Mount Zion.
One evening, around sunset, David was walking around on the roof of his palace. He looked down into a garden nearby and saw a woman, who was very beautiful. David asked one of his servants who she was, and he said to him, “Her name is Bathsheba, and she is the wife of Uriah.” Uriah was an officer in David’s army, who worked under Joab. At that time, Joab was fighting in David’s war against the Ammonites, at Rabbah, near the desert, on the east of Jordan. It’s important to note that David knew Bathsheba was alone because her husband was under his command.
{to be continued}