God's Success Through Our Failures

As I was wrapping up my series on 2 Samuel this past week, I learned something about David's life that I'd never noticed before. If you look at the two greatest sins of David's life, those sins were what gave birth, in a sense, to the temple. God used - not David's greatest successes - but his greatest failures, to produce the greatest good.

What were David's two greatest sins? First, there was his adultery with Bathsheba in Second Samuel 11. This also led to the murder of Uriah the Hittite. David was punished severely for this sin, but from that experience would eventually come a son named Solomon who led in the construction of the temple.

David's second greatest sin (chronologically speaking) was in conducting the census after which God judged Israel and 70,000 died in a plague. Yet the Bible tells us that this plague ended at a specific spot...the house of a man named Araunah. At that very place, God said "enough" and the judgment ended. At that exact same place, the Bible says in Second Chronicles 3, the temple was built and the altar was placed. From David's second sin came the location of the temple.

It's amazing to consider that both the leader and the site of the temple's construction both resulted from the greatest failures of David's life. It's amazing to think that God's sovereignty means that he not only uses our successes, but our failures as well. Satan loves to tell us that God cannot use us because of the sins of our past. God responds, "I'll not only use you in spite of the sins of your past, I'll even use your sinful past itself in order to further my purposes." Understanding this principle is one of the greatest sources of encouragement in the Christian life. It helps us to "forget what is behind" and "push forward to what is ahead." (Philippians 3:13)