He vanished beneath the covering of moonlit shadows. He frequently halted during his midnight flight, waiting until the wind whipped sand to conceal his footprints. Whenever the night breeze failed to conceal his sandal impressions, he swept the evidence away with a wispy branch. He laid low in ditches, hid within caves, and painstakingly obscured his trail to evade capture by trackers intent on bringing justice to his blood-stained hands. As John Steinbeck tells this fictional story in his novella, The Pearl, any reader can see what the murderer, Kino, cannot: evil deeds cannot be erased by erasing the evidence. 

Likewise, this is what the Author of Scripture wants believers to see in the non-fiction story of King David’s intricate cover-up of his abominable adultery with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11. Upon discovering that she was pregnant with his ill-conceived child, David hid his dirty laundry rather than simply coming clean. He hastily summoned her husband, Uriah, anticipating that he would spend the night with his wife after many long days of war, leading everyone to believe that the child was his (vv. 6-8). When that scheme failed, David concocted another by getting Uriah drunk, expecting that he would stumble home intoxicated and lay with her (vv. 12-13). Unable to conceal his wickedness, David finally devised a hitman scheme to eliminate Uriah, disguising his death as a mere wartime causalty—and for extra protection, he married Bathsheba to fool the masses into believing that her pregnancy was not the result of his animalistic lust (vv. 14-27).

David covered his tracks, but he could not clear his conscience. The longer he kept skeletons in his closet, the more his bones ached from misery. He later admitted, “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer” (Psalm 32:3-4). Once Nathan the prophet rebuked him (2 Samuel 12:1-15), David brought his sin into the light and confessed, “Against You, You only, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight, so that You may be justified in Your words and blameless in Your judgment” (Psalm 51:4).

Confession of sin is always better than covering it up. The Scripture promises, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). When a Christian sins, the most unwise and futile course is to hide it from the Lord whose eyes are everywhere (Prov. 15:3). The greatest solution for the guilty is to come clean in confession and cast oneself upon the arms of a merciful God who dwells with the contrite (Isaiah 57:15). There is no soul-healing in sin-hiding; as the Puritan Richard Sibbes succinctly said, “What we hide God will never cure.”

---