This is now the third essay to address the problem of falling pastors. In the first two attempts I focused on the importance of pastoral wisdom as they seek to serve and protect the sheep.¹ In the second I pointed to the importance of connectional church government and accountability. In both, however, we were thinking about external things. In both, I recognized that there is a necessary condition that has to be addressed: the heart. Without purity of heart, no external structure, however valuable in itself, can keep a shepherd from being or becoming a wolf.

When we speak about the heart this way we are using a figure of speech.² We are not thinking about the pump in your chest but about that faculty of the soul that controls the things we love. This faculty is distinct from what we used to call the “intellective” faculty—that is, our rational faculty. Again, in our time, we think about our brain, but as important as that organ is, the intellect is a broader term. The heart is also distinct from our faculty of choosing, or the will. Our English word heart translates the New Testament word kardia (καρδία), which we still use regularly. Patients go to see their cardiologist and get care in the cardiac unit of the hospital.

Our Lord taught us, “Blessed are the pure in heart” (Matt 5:8).³ Purity is fundamentally about being one thing. The antonym of pure is corrupt, and the most basic way of corrupting that which is pure is to mix in it something else. Recently I saw a warning on social media about pepper. The speaker claimed that a lot of pepper in America is corrupted with things other than pepper, including heavy metals. He even said that pepper corns are sometimes mixed with other things that are not pepper but look like it. Whether that is true is beyond me, but it seems like a good analogy for the heart. When a heart is affected (or inclined) toward two objects, it is no longer pure. That person’s affections are mixed.

Our Lord’s explanation of the seventh commandment (“You shall not commit adultery”), in contrast to that of the Pharisees, focused on the heart:

You heard it said, “You shall not commit adultery,” but I say to you that everyone looking at a woman with the intent of lusting after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”⁴

Long before a man commits adultery with a woman physically, sexually, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart. He is already guilty of coveting what is not his, of theft, stealing what is not his. This is evident in the account of David’s sin against God, Bathsheba, and Uriah (2 Sam 11). The writer of 2 Samuel notes wryly that it happened in “the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle. . . but David remained in Jerusalem” (2 Sam 11:1 ESV). David’s troops are in the field shedding blood, but he is lounging around with time on his hands. Again, the prophet who wrote 2 Samuel jabs David as he notes, “Late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king’s house. . .” (2 Sam 11:2 ESV). While David’s boys are sleeping rough in the field, he is taking afternoon naps on the couch. When David’s forces are not in the field, they are sharpening their tools and themselves for battle. But David is wandering up to his roof to see what he can see, and what he does see is a beautiful (טוֹבַ֥ת) woman who is not his wife (2 Sam 11:2). She is the wife of one of his faithful soldiers, Uriah the Hittite. David, king of all he can see, summons her to the royal house and “took her” (וַיִּקָּחֶ֗הָ). This was an act of power, dominance. Ralph Dale Davis quotes Walter Brueggemann,

The action is quick. The verbs rush as the passion of David rushed. He sent; he took; he lay (v. 4). The royal deed of self-indulgence does not take very long. There is no adornment to the action. The woman then gets some verbs: she returned, she conceived. The action is so stark. There is nothing but action. There is no conversation. There is no hint of caring, of affection, of love—only lust. David does not call her by name, does not even speak to her. At the end of the encounter she is only ‘the woman’ (v. 5). The verb that finally counts is ‘conceived.’ But the telling verb is ‘he took her.’⁵

As you know, David’s self-indulgence led to lust, which led to adultery, and ultimately to murder, since faithful, loyal Uriah refused to sleep with his wife, effectively depriving David of the coverup he wanted. So, David commanded Joab to send faithful Uriah to the front lines of battle to be killed: “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, that he may be struck down, and die” (2 Sam 11:15).

Nathan was correct: David was the man (2 Sam 12:7), but he was so well before he lusted after Bathsheba. In that sense, Bathsheba was also a casualty. She was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Both of them, of course, suffered for David’s sin as the boy was taken from them after he was born (2 Sam 12:18).

James gives us the obstetrics of sin:

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. (Jas 1:13–15 ESV)

God is sovereign over all things, but we are to regard him as the Father of Lights and the giver of every good and perfect gift (Jas 1:17). The corruption of David’s heart and ours is our fault. God neither made us corrupt nor corrupted us. We did that all by ourselves. We chose death over life in the garden, and we have been doing it ever since.

David was a sort of shepherd of his people Israel. He knew what it was to focus on the flock and to protect them from danger. But he lost sight of his vocation as shepherd and became a wolf. His heart became corrupt and impure—that is, no longer directed to God the Son, to whom the Father had said from eternity, “Sit at my right hand.” David knew that he was not the Messiah, and he proved it. He allowed himself to be “lured and enticed by his own desires,” and those desires gave birth to taking Bathsheba, to adultery, and to murder. Adult sin truly brings forth death.

In Psalm 51, David reflected on his sin and the wreckage that it made of him and his life, in which biography his adultery is a turning point. He lost his pastorate, as it were, because he chose self-gratification over self-denial. He chose abuse and death over self-sacrificial love for his troops and his people. There he had before him, in Uriah, the perfect example of what he was called to be: a true Christ-like leader of men. Yet all David could think to do was to murder him.

There is bad news in Psalm 51, but there is also good news:

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit (Ps 51:7–12 ESV).

God did purge David with hyssop, as it were, wash him, and blot out his iniquities, and create in him a clean heart, as he will for any sinner who turns to him in faith and repentance. But the wreckage of David’s life and service remain.

Christian, pray for your pastor. He is just a man, but he is subject to terrible temptation and spiritual warfare about which he cannot tell you, but I can. The last thing that the Evil One wants is the pure preaching of the gospel, because the good news is a killing word to him. He has no power over it, so he does all he can to disqualify and discredit the messengers of that Word. So your pastor is engaged in a secret spiritual war every day and every week for his own soul and yours.

Pastor, you already know this, but I will say it anyway because you need to hear someone say it to you: Jesus loves you, and because he does you must guard your heart. The famous ministers who fall are just a fraction of the anonymous pastors whose hearts wander, who lose the plot, and who betray the faith, the flock, and family for a lie. Your heart wanders because of sin, yes, but the occasion is often that we forget who really loves us. Listen to me: no one loves you like Jesus loves you. Flee to him, rest in him, confess your sins and sinfulness to him, and trust him to provide and protect you; but guard your heart because all that David did came from his heart, and you know better than your flock that of which your heart is capable.

Notes

1. See Pastors, The Graham Rule, And Wisdom and How It Happens And Why Church Government Matters
2. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v., “heart,”) our English word heart has roots in Old Friesian. Spellings vary considerably until the early seventeenth century (e.g., Shakespeare). The Latin term for heart (cor) also appears in English in words such as cordial, i.e., from the heart.
3. All translations in this essay are the author’s unless otherwise indicated.
4. 27 Ἠκούσατε ὅτι ἐρρέθη· οὐ μοιχεύσεις. 28 ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι πᾶς ὁ βλέπων γυναῖκα πρὸς τὸ ἐπιθυμῆσαι αὐτὴν ἤδη ἐμοίχευσεν αὐτὴν ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὐτοῦ. Kurt Aland et al., Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th Edition (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), Matt 5:27–28.
5. Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel, 273, in Dale Ralph Davis, 2 Samuel: Out of Every Adversity, Focus on the Bible Commentary (Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2002), 142.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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