Bathsheba

The death of David’s son (2 Samuel 12:14)

“Because by this deed you have utterly scorned the LORD, the child who is born to you shall die.” – 2 Samuel 12:14

If we are watching a courtroom drama unfold where the guilt of the accused party has been clearly proven by evidence and cross-examination and there is no reasonable doubt that they committed the crime, and then the jury returns a verdict of “not guilty,” we are justly outraged. The guilty one has been unjustly acquitted. The law has been violated because the guilty have gone free. The law is in place to punish the guilty, and yet this guilty one has not been punished.

In these situations where men have ignored and run roughshod over man’s laws, it is right to be angry and outraged. How much more outraged should we be, then, when a person is proven guilty of violating God’s Law and is unjustly acquitted! Yet this seems to be exactly what we find in 2 Samuel 11-12 in the incident with David’s famous sins.

A quick review is in order for this familiar story. In 2 Samuel 11, “in the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David remained at Jerusalem (2 Samuel 11:1).” Whether by design or by chance, David is walking on his roof and sees Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, bathing. He sends messengers to bring her to his house, “he lay with her, then she returned to her house (11:4).” Bathsheba becomes pregnant by David, and now David has a problem. After calling Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba’s husband, back from the battlefield to Jerusalem, David tries to convince Uriah to go to his house to be with his wife. The noble and loyal Uriah refuses to go to his house to lie with his wife while Joab and Israel’s army are out in the open field fighting the Ammonites. With Plan A foiled, David then implements Plan B, which is to have Joab “set Uriah at the forefront of the fiercest fighting and then draw back from him, that he may be struck down and die (11:15).” Uriah is thus killed, so Plan B appears to have worked, “but the thing that David had done displeased the LORD (11:27).”

In the next scene, the prophet Nathan comes to David and tells him a story about a grave injustice done by a rich man against a poor man. Incensed by the injustice, David cries out, “As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die (2 Samuel 12:5).” Nathan famously declares to David, “You are the man!” The prophet then proceeds to tell David the details of his sins and the consequences that the LORD is going to bring on David because of his sins. David then says to Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD (12:13).” Astonishingly, after this simple and brief confession, Nathan responds to David by saying, “The LORD also has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the LORD, the child who is born to you shall die (12:13-14).”

What?? This is outrageous! David willfully commits adultery with Bathsheba whom he knows is married to Uriah the Hittite, one of his thirty mighty men (23:39), and then wickedly sees to it that this noble man, Uriah, dies in battle, effectively murdering him, and then utters a brief confession of “I have sinned,” and he gets off the hook? “I have sinned,” and adultery and murder are just sort of swept away? How can this be right? O yes, I am sure it was extremely painful to watch as your infant son die, knowing that his death was your fault, but that in no way satisfies the demands of the Law. Surely this is gross injustice! How can the LORD allow this?

SOLVING THE OUTRAGE

            This does seem to be an outrage but consider these things. The death of the child born to Bathsheba highlighted David’s guilt and reminded him of the wages of his sin, but the death of that child brought him no forgiveness. For if Nathan is telling David that he is forgiven because of the death of the child of Bathsheba, then the injustice of that forgiveness and the outrage remain. David violated the Law of God on two counts, and the Law of God demands death for the violator. By David’s own words, “The man who has done this deserves to die!” “The soul who sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:4).” The justice of God demands a death penalty for these sins, and the death of Bathsheba’s son could never satisfy the Law’s demands. Bathsheba’s son died as a judgment for David’s sins, not as a propitiation for David’s sin, because this unnamed son of David was not an acceptable sacrifice for David’s sin. This child was not a worthy substitute.

            How, then, can the LORD take away David’s sin, and how can the LORD legally forgive one who has flagrantly and repeatedly and willfully rebelled against His holy Law? If the death of this child cannot atone, what can wash away David’s sin?

            Nathan can declare that the LORD has taken away David’s sin not based on the death of Bathsheba’s son, but based on the death of Mary’s Son. The death of David’s son born in Jerusalem could not atone for any of David’s sins, but the death of David’s Son born in Bethlehem atoned for all of David’s sins. The unnamed son of Bathsheba was not an acceptable sacrifice for David’s sin, but the Son of Mary, who was named Jesus because He would save His people from their sins (Matthew 1:21), gave His life as an acceptable ransom (Mark 10:45) for David’s sin by His substitutionary death on the cross. Therefore, Nathan can declare that the LORD has taken away David’s sin because Jesus the Messiah, the glorious Son of David, that Child who is born to David shall die.

“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God displayed publicly as a  propitiation in His blood through faith (Romans 3:23-25).”

APPLICATION

            Now the question that we asked earlier about David must be answered by every one of us. How can the LORD legally forgive one who has flagrantly and repeatedly and willfully rebelled against His holy Law? For the truth is that we have all rebelled against the Lord and we have all flagrantly and willfully violated His holy Law. How can God legally forgive us? But the good news of the gospel is that the Jesus who died for David’s sins is also the Savior who died for the sins of all those who put their faith in Him. If you repent and believe in the gospel (Mark 1:15), then Jesus died for your sins, as well. Praise God that the Child who was born to David died!

SDG                 rmb                 11/14/2020

David’s Repentance (Psalm 51)

How is a disciple of the Lord Jesus to rid himself of besetting sin?

As a disciple grows in their walk with the Lord, it is certain that sin will emerge from the murky depths of the soul. The pure milk of the Word begins to soak into the recesses of the mind and into the closets of the past, and loathsome sins well up from the depths. Until we come to faith in the Lord Jesus and come face to face with His holiness, we have no concept of the ugliness of our sin. If Isaiah the prophet felt himself ruined when he saw the thrice holy Lord, lofty and exalted, and declared himself a man of unclean lips (Isaiah 6), how much more should we expect to need to dredge the black mold of sin out our lives!

But once the sin is uncovered and identified, how do we get rid of it?

Before we get too far along this article, I need to make clear that, in this article, I am not talking about the way for sin to be forgiven. No amount of confession or repentance will ever result in one sin being forgiven. Offering “thousands of rams and ten thousand rivers of oil (Micah 6:7)” will give the Lord no delight and will leave you exactly where you were before the offering. There has always been only one way for any sin to ever be forgiven. “In Him (Jesus), we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses (Ephesians 1:7).” It is the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ that is the only means of forgiveness of sins. Do you want to be forgiven of your sins? “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved (Acts 16:31).” If you have placed your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and are following Him in faith, all your sins are forgiven. “As far as the east is from the west, so far has the LORD removed our transgressions from us (Psalm 103:12).” “The blood of Jesus, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7).”

But for the disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ who has come to faith in Christ and has thus had his sins forgiven, there arises the matter of practical righteousness. Through faith, my sins are forgiven, but the ugly effects remain. As the Holy Spirit reveals sin in my life, and as I begin to recognize and identify and confess my sins before the Lord, the question becomes, “How do I remove the remaining sin?” This is what repentance is for. Repentance is the most powerful weapon in the disciple’s arsenal for removing the filthy remains of sin, but for repentance to be effective, it must be genuine. How do I know if my repentance is genuine? You know you have truly repented when the sin ceases. True repentance results in victory over sin. Colossians 3:5 tells me to “put to death whatever is in the earth of your members: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed.” How do you know if you have put sin to death? It is no longer active. It no longer moves. There are no signs of life. Repentance is the blade that puts sin to death. If the sin remains active, you have not yet truly raised the blade of repentance.

King David was a man after God’s own heart. His passion and zeal for the LORD explode from the psalms which he wrote. The LORD was with David and he rose in power and conquered all the neighboring kingdoms. There seemed to be nothing that David would not accomplish. But David was also very human, and he had some prominent areas of weakness. David was a man who seemed to have a weakness for the fair sex. When he was king in Hebron, he had six sons by six different wives. Then when he moved to Jerusalem, David added more wives and concubines. And finally, there was the disastrous one-night stand with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Through the prophet Nathan, the LORD confronted David and told him that there would be consequences for his sin and his rebellion against the LORD, but more than that, the LORD made clear that if David did not repent of his sin and once again draw near to the LORD, or the LORD would bring more disaster upon David until he was destroyed. David immediately confessed his sin (2 Samuel 12:13) and went into the temple to pray for sin’s consequences to be taken away. But most of all, David repented.

How do we know David repented? First, as a result of his sin, David wrote Psalm 51, his powerful psalm of repentance. In none of the 19 verses of Psalm 51 does David ask the LORD for forgiveness (because David is already forgiven – see above), but he does long to be purified with hyssop, to have the joy of salvation restored, to be washed whiter than snow, and to have the LORD blot out his transgressions and his sins. As a result of David’s sin with Bathsheba, we have this powerful psalm of repentance that can serve as a model for how we can repent of our sins. But second, we know David repented because, when he came back to Jerusalem after the defeat of Absalom, he refused to be intimate with his concubines. Remember that genuine repentance vanquishes sin. David had repented of his sexual sin and so he refused to indulge in any more sexual sin with his concubines. His repentance bore the fruit of repentance. The third piece of evidence of genuine repentance involved Abishag the Shunammite. She was a beautiful young virgin who served the king and kept him warm in his old age (1 Kings 1:1-4), but the Scripture makes explicitly clear that “the king did not know her.” David refuses to violate his repentance from sexual sin by “knowing” this beautiful young woman.

REFLECTIONS

  • Repentance is the most powerful weapon in the disciple’s arsenal to defeat active, remaining sin in their life.
  • True repentance results in the vanquishing of sin. If the sin is not vanquished, then the repentance is not genuine. You must hate the sin to put it to death. If you don’t yet hate the sin, then you will not hire the assassin of repentance.
  • Psalm 51 is an excellent Scripture to use for repentance.

SDG                rmb                8/18/2020