As a kid, I used to walk the seven blocks every Saturday afternoon to 30th and Ames. The Beacon Theatre showed the popular movies of the week every Saturday. I loved the Westerns. I loved Shane, High Noon, The 3:10 to Yuma (The original one!), and The Gunfight at O.K. Corral, to name a few. I learned very early in life to identify with the good guys in movies. Like everyone else, I always loved it when the bad guys got what they deserved. I guess that’s just human nature. The movies always present the good and bad guys as very distinctly different. We knew who to relate to immediately. They were all very simple characters. In real life, it’s just never that way. Every player in the game of life is a very complex character, and there are times in our lives when we are all the bad guys. It’s difficult for us to see sometimes and even more challenging for us to admit. Sometimes, it takes a smash in the face to bring us to our senses.

One of the greatest heroes of the Old Testament, King David, had seduced another man’s wife, had her husband murdered, married his widow, and went on with his life as if nothing was wrong.  His life went along all right for a while! David seemed almost oblivious to what he had done. Then Nathan, the prophet, comes for a visit. He tells David about a poor man who owned nothing but a cherished little lamb. He had been robbed of even that by a wealthy neighbor who used the stolen lamb to feed his friends. David became indignant! In 1 Samuel 12:5-7, we read, “As the Lord Lives,” David swears! “That man must die!” Here is a man secretly guilty of a terrible, unconfessed sin and raving against the sins of another. Imagine what Nathan thought! What God thought! David needed a slap in the face. Nathan looked him in the eye and said, “David, David, David, you are that man!” This knocked some sense into David, and he became remorseful rather than indignant. When the religious leaders confronted Jesus with the woman caught in the act of adultery, He said that the one who had no sin should be the one to carry out the law and cast the first stone at her. When Jesus bent down to write in the sand, many believed he was writing what was needed to remind each of these religious leaders of their particular sins. With a finger in the sand, Jesus slapped the religious leaders in the face. Being confronted with their own sin, each of the adulteress accusers slowly walked away, leaving the only one without sin to cast the stone. But Jesus chose to show her mercy instead of judgment and sent her on her way with the admonition to sin no more.

Sometimes, it takes a slap in the face or a hardship of some kind to help us understand and acknowledge our sinfulness. God sent a terrible storm and a big fish to slap Jonah in the face. God allowed the prodigal son to work his way into the gentile pig pen to eat the food that was fed to the pigs. God sent Nathan to David with his bony finger pointing straight at David, saying, “You are that man!” Like Jonah and David, we need to repent of our sins. Like the prodigal son, we all need to come to our senses.  We cannot receive God’s healing if we do not see ourselves as sinners. Jesus came only for the sick. Isaiah teaches us that Jesus came to take God’s slap in the face for us, and “with His stripes we are healed.”