II Samuel 12:1-13 - David's Sin

Mike Yaconelli is an author who lives in a small, rural community. There are a lot of cattle ranches around where he lives, and, every once in a while, a cow is known to wander off and gets lost. Mike tells us that if you ask a rancher how a cow gets lost, chances are that he will reply, 'Well, the cow starts nibbling on a tuft of green grass, and when it finishes, it looks ahead to the next tuft of green grass and starts nibbling on that one, and then it nibbles on a tuft of grass right next to a hole in the fence. It then sees another tuft of green grass on the other side of the fence, so it nibbles on that one and then goes on to the next tuft. The next thing you know, the cow has nibbled itself into being lost."

This is a lot like what we face in our lives. Americans are in the process of nibbling their way to being lost. We keep moving from one tuft of activity to another, never noticing how far we have gone from home or how far away from the truth we have managed to end up. But thankfully, we have a good shepherd who is able to come find us and bring us back to our home.

I. Messing Up

David is described in the Bible as a man after God’s own heart. He shows throughout his life that he truly seeks to follow God and allow God to direct his path. We see that he trusted God even as a shepherd and would go up against bears to protect his flock, trusting that God would bring him through this. And God did. We see him rule with justice and bring peace to the land. Though he spends most of his reign as a wartime king, he is able to bring a peace that lasts through his son’s life. Later in life, as a great palace is being built for him in the city of Jerusalem, which he had conquered, David realizes that there is something wrong with him having beautiful, rich palace and God’s tabernacle being a mere tent, so David desires to build a temple for God. Again, David is doing what it is hard for a person with so much power to do. He is thinking beyond himself, thinking of others and thinking of God. God tells him to wait, for his son will build the temple, but it is David’s idea that causes it to be built.

David, again and again, shows through his actions and his psalms and his life that he truly is a man after God’s own heart and he has something great to offer us as we learn what it means to follow and love and honor God.

But this does not mean that David is perfect. And so we come to today’s scripture. In today’s scripture we see David get rebuked for his greatest sin. It isn’t his only sin, but it is a horrible one, and it brings great difficulty to David’s life as well as the lives of those around him and even the subjects who he rules.

So, to set up for what the prophet Nathan has to say to David, let us look at the story of David and another man’s wife. In 2 Samuel 11 we see that it is springtime and therefore time to go to war. But for some reason, David is not going out to war with his army. He sends his general out to battle and his army goes with his general, but he stays behind in his palace in Jerusalem. We are not told why, but we see that this is so. And we get the idea that perhaps David was a bit idle. One evening, we are told, David got up from his bed (he was in bed in the evening) and walked around on the roof. Talk about the good life: sleeping in until evening and then taking a leisurely stroll on the roof. All this while men are out battling for him and fighting his war. And from this roof he saw a woman bathing in his city. And we are told that he found her beautiful. This woman, Bathsheba, was the wife of one of David’s soldiers who was out fighting David’s war as he loafed around in his palace. Now there are those who say that Bathsheba was specifically bathing on her roof, in sight of the king in order to seduce him. There are those who want to make her complicit in this sin of adultery. The fact is that the Bible does no such thing. It constantly places the blame with the king and never once implicates her in the sin. Though it can be said that she is the one who is hurt most from it as through it she loses both a husband and a baby. But the fact is that roofs were the place where people bathed, and normally the king wouldn’t be up there in the evening. It seems much more likely that Bathsheba was an innocent brought in by David’s sin than a seductress trying to woo him.

So we see the King, David, misuse his royal power and have this woman who he sees in the distance brought to him, she comes as her king has commanded her and we are told that he takes her.

Now the story could have ended there, but this is where it became complicated, for Bathsheba became pregnant. And this is the point where David begins acting like a good politician. He attempts a cover-up. First, he has Bathsheba’s husband brought back from the field, hoping that he may sleep with his wife and therefore people will think that the child is his. But Bathsheba’s husband doesn’t think that it is right for him to come into the city and spend time with his wife when the rest of the soldiers, his brothers in arms, are participating in a siege, are in the middle of battle. Disgusted, David sends Bathsheba’s husband back to the line with a note saying to put him at a place where he is sure to die and to pull back from him so that he might do so. The cover-up gets worse. Basically, David is having his army battle in a bad way so that he may kill Bathsheba’s husband. Lives are lost and there is a setback in the battle. David’s general fears that David will be upset by the results of his plan, but Bathseba’s husband is killed in the battle, and David gets what he wants. The cost is very great and the battle has turned towards the enemy, but David has gotten what he wants.

Now that Bathsheba’s husband is out of the way, David brings Bathsheba to himself, marries her, and a son is born to them.

This whole instance is much like the cattle eating tufts of grass and letting themselves get out of hand without realizing it. David didn’t wake up on that spring evening thinking he was going to commit his troops in an unsafe way so that he could murder one of his soldiers. But he let one sin lead to another, which led to another, which led to another. And we are told at the end of 2 Samuel 11 that what David had done displeased the Lord.

II. Blinders

David knew right from wrong. He understood justice. 2 Samuel 12 shows us this. Nathan comes to David and tells him about a rich man and a poor man and how the rich man abuses the poor man and takes all that he has. We are told that David burned with anger against the rich man. Here we see that even having sinned, David showed that he was a man with God’s own heart. He saw the lack of justice in what the rich man had done and his heart burned with the need for justice.

But David had blinders on, for he did not see the evil in what he himself had done, and Nathan, the prophet then spoke to him and showed him his own sin, saying, “You are the man.” And here is where we see something amazing in the character of David. For he doesn’t try to make excuses as we might. He doesn’t try to explain himself. He doesn’t try to wiggle out or downplay the sin he has committed. Instead he confesses, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

We like to downplay sin and make it into something that we can live with. This makes sense because sin is something that we all do have to live with. Even the man after God’s own heart, King David, lived with it in a horrible way. But that doesn’t mean that we should downplay it. I found this little saying from Moody press, which talks about the seriousness of sin.

What is sin? We call it an accident, God calls it abomination. We call it a defect, God calls it a disease. We call it an error, God calls it an enmity. We call it a liberty, God calls it lawlessness. We call it a trifle, God calls it a tragedy. We call it a mistake, God calls it a madness. We call it a weakness, God calls it willfulness.

We all have certain blinders that we wear. Special glasses that help us to think that all we do is fine. These blinders allow us to come down hard on others and their sins. They allow us to point out the wrongs of the world around us. But we can continue to live in sin ourselves without realizing it, without accepting how much it truly affects us. David was lucky, he had a prophet come right to him and explain to him his sin in a way that he could understand, in a way that didn’t allow for him to make any excuses. We need the same thing. We need to be convicted of our sins, of our failings. We need to have our blinders taken off as we realize what it is that is keeping us from that proper relationship with God.

Once it was made known to him, David didn’t try to downplay his sin. Instead he admitted to it. He confessed it. He turned it over to God and put it in God’s hands. The sentence that David had proclaimed for this horrible act was death, and by admitting to the sin himself, he was accepting that punishment from God himself, but God showed mercy.

III. Forgiveness

Nathan responds to David’s confession by saying that the Lord has taken away his sin. God forgave David for what he had done. God didn’t take away the results of this sin, he didn’t take away the consequences, but he did forgive. David himself did not face death.

I don’t know which is harder for me to understand about this story and about David. Is it harder to understand why a man after God’s own heart could do such a grievous and horrible thing or is it harder to understand how God could forgive such an act? David let his power get to his head. He allowed his kingship to tell him that the rules didn’t apply to him. David messed up, he made a mistake, he had an accident. And people died because of his actions. He was corrupted by his power and if you continue to read the story of David, you discover that this event in David’s life leads to a very difficult time for David as his sons turn against each other and against him and he even needs to flee from his palace in Jerusalem to protect himself from his own son.

But David repented. David turned from his evil ways when his eyes were opened to them. And David found much needed forgiveness. The same is available for us. Though none of us are responsible for having someone killed wrongly, we all do have sins that our blinders help us to ignore. We all need the forgiveness that God offers. We all need to repent and turn from our sinful ways. God is good. Yes, there are consequences to the sins you commit, and God does not take away these consequences, but as God told David, he tells us, “The Lord has taken away your sin.” That’s what Jesus did for each of us on the cross. He hung there, taking away our sin and paying the price that we all owe.

So stop making excuses. Stop ignoring your conscience. Allow God to convict you of those problems in your life, those things that you need to change. And then allow God to forgive you and change you, allow him to make you whole. A forgiven life is a healthy life. A forgiven life is one lived without guilt. A forgiven life fills us with strength. Let yourself be filled with the strength and love that forgiveness brings. Give it to the Lord. Amen.