2 Samuel 11–12; Psalm 51

The first great sin David committed takes only four verses to relate (2 Samuel 11:1–5). David is at home in Jerusalem while Joab is off leading the war effort. He takes a nap, gets up when it is evening, and goes up on the roof, where he sees beautiful Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, washing herself. He sends for her and she gets pregnant.

David’s first attempt to solve the problem does not involve murder. He figures that if he can get Uriah to come home, perhaps he can get Uriah to spend the night with his wife, and then the pregnancy will seem to be the natural result. But Uriah won’t spend the night with Bathsheba when his men are away from their families (verse 11).

David tries again. He thinks that perhaps a drunk Uriah will be more likely than a sober Uriah to go home and spend the night with Bathsheba, so David “made [Uriah] drunk” (verse 13). It doesn’t work. Uriah, still in verse 13, “went not down to his house.”

David decides that the next thing to try is murder. In 2 Samuel 11:14–15, we read, “David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.”

Shakespeare uses this device (when Hamlet sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern off to their deaths in England); and I remember a fairytale, too, where a young man is given a letter that contains orders for his own execution by a wicked king who doesn’t want the young man to grow up and replace him. I can’t find the book this is in, and I don’t remember the name of it; I think it is one of Grimm’s fairytales. Apparently, however, this idea was in the scriptures first. Of all people, David understands that his loyal subjects will support him even when he wants to commit a great wrong, because he learned it first-hand from Saul when Saul tried to destroy him. And Joab does not disappoint him.

I find myself wondering how much of this we do in our own lives. We all know what it is like to be the target of someone else’s injustice, cruelty, or insensitivity. But do we resolve to return good for evil, or do we rationalize bad behavior? You are not good just because you are the center of your own life, although our cultural love for stories about good guys and bad guys encourages us to look at ourselves that way; goodness has to do with how you behave. And when you behave badly, you are not the good guy..

After Joab arranges for Urriah’s death, he sends a messenger to David and tells David what has happened (verses 16–25). Bathsheba mourns for Urriah, marries David, and gives him a son (verses 26–27). But then the consequences begin to unfold. In 2 Samuel 12:1, we read: “And the Lord sent Nathan unto David.” In verses 1–4, Nathan tells David the parable of two men, one rich and one poor. The rich man takes the poor man’s lamb and feeds it to his guest, leaving the poor man destitute. David is angry, and in verses 5 and 6 he tells Nathan, “As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die: And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” I love his reasoning here: it was lack of pity that was the problem more than anything else. Do we have pity in our hearts for the hardships that others endure, or does it not matter much to us if someone else is suffering as long as we ourselves are fine? In verse 7, “…Nathan said to David, thou art the man.” He then reminds David of what the Lord has done for him, and he tells him what the consequences are going to be (verses 10–14). They are severe. In verse 13, David says, “I have sinned against the Lord.” According to the JST, Nathan responds by saying, “The Lord also hath not put away thy sin that thou shalt not die.” In verse 14, Nathan tells David that his son will die. This comes to pass in verses 15–23. But David has another son with Bathsheba, named Solomon: “and the Lord loved him" (verse 24). I have skimmed over this story without a lot of detail, but it is really good and worth reading much more closely. And I am fascinated by the fact that Solomon, the child of David and Bathsheba, becomes the next king of Israel.

David had a lot going for him. If you consider the matter, he was (in other ways) an admirable man, and once he was king, he was treated very respectfully by everyone. Later on, he did his best to repent and gave us some beautiful poetry to prove it (Psalm 51). If you were to read a biography of his life, you might be tempted to think that all the good he did must surely balance out the bad. Do we engage in the same rationalizations in our own lives? When we gossip; when we make a business deal that takes advantage of someone else; when we are intolerant, unforgiving, and unkind; is that really so small a matter? Do our good deeds really compensate for our bad ones? Or are we more in need of repentance than we would like to admit?

In conclusion, I don’t know that we can do better than to quote one verse from Psalm 51. In verse 17 we read, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” Is that your sacrifice to God? Or are your sins too precious to you for you to give them up just yet?

It’s worth thinking about.

Sunday School Notebook -June 2006 - Susan Morgan