Hilton Head Island, SC – January 29, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
II Samuel 12:1-10; II Samuel 12:15-23
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - Nathan said to David, "You are the man." - II Samuel 12:7a (RSV)
Last Sunday we heard how David got Bathsheba pregnant, and how she was another man's wife, how he connived to have her husband killed in battle, and then how he married Bathsheba to try to cover up what he had done. David already had at least three other wives, so it isn't as though he needed a fourth. But he was infatuated with her, and at least he had the decency to marry her.
God did not see it that way. He intended to confront David very directly with his terrible and devious sin. Therefore God sent the prophet Nathan to speak to David. (The name Nathan, incidentally, means "Sent.")
So Nathan came strolling innocently into the royal court, and after a few pleasantries had been bantered, a couple of Twinkies were consumed, and a glass of iced tea had been quaffed, Nathan said to David, "My liege lord, monarch of the land of Israel and chosen king of the people of God, I have a little story I want to tell you, a parabolic fiction you may find of some minor literary amusement. There once was a rich man who had thousands of sheep and cattle, and there was poor man who had only one ewe lamb. The poor man treated his lamb like a pet; he brought it into the house, and he and his children loved it, and it was like a member of the family. Well," said Nathan, about whom nothing is said in the biblical narrative prior to this incident and who is mentioned only briefly afterward, "a traveler came to visit the rich man, and because social custom demanded that he have a feast for his guest, he decided to serve roast lamb. But instead of taking a lamb from among his vast flocks, he slaughtered his impoverished neighbor's pet lamb."
David listened with rapt attention to Nathan's story as it quickly unfolded. When he heard the ending, the king's brow furled, and a dark look came over his face. "As the Lord lives," said David, "anyone who does such a thing deserves to die. At the very least, such a rapacious man must be forced to repay four-fold what he has done!" And Nathan, standing all of five-foot, four-inches when stretched to his greatest stature, weighing 124 pounds when soaking wet, Nathan the seemingly innocuous prophet sent by God to speak to the greatest of all the kings of Israel, said to David, "YOU ARE THE MAN!" "Holy mackerel!" said the king. "You nearly scared the hell out of me!" "Nearly?" said the prophet; "Nearly?" said the prophet. " Nearly is not nearly enough! You have done a terrible thing, and, you're going to pay for it!"
Then Nathan launched into the archetypical prophetic mode, and he declared to the astonished and suddenly mortified monarch, "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: 'I anointed you king over Israel, I saved you from Saul, I gave you his palace and his daughter to be your wife and I gave you other wives, and were that not enough (which it was), I would have given you anything else you asked. But you --- you were not satisfied. You wanted more; you wanted it all. You took Uriah the Hittite's wife, and you got her in trouble (as you amusing humans are wont to say), and then you arranged to have Uriah killed by the Ammonites. Because you have done this," said God via the prophet He sent to David, whose name meant ‘Sent,’ "the sword shall never depart from your house. I, the Lord, have spoken," said God (said Nathan) to David, and that was that.
"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," it says in the letter to the Hebrews (10:31), and a fearful thing it is indeed. But when we have sinned, and have grievously and egregiously violated the commandments of God, unless we fall into His hands, all is lost, and it was for that reason that God sent Nathan to David, because He didn't want to lose him. He had yet many plans for him, and many miles for David to go before he slept. As foolish as David was, as willful and selfish and insensitive, he still was God's anointed, and depending on how he reacted to this severe prophetic chastisement, he could still turn into the greatest of all the kings of Israel, which up to this point he was not yet.
Let me make two observations about Nathan coming to see David. To begin with, David openly and readily allowed him to come. He didn't have to do that. He was the king, and if he didn't want to be bothered by an irritating hair-shirted prophet, he could easily have avoided him. People in power usually don't like to hear what the prophets have to say. Ask our Presidents or members of Congress what they think of the prophets, and they'll tell you they don't much like them unless they are of the utterly compliant and totally tamed variety, which is what politicians really like, in which case such people are not really prophets. But if you get a prophet who is truly a prophet, he will bug the politicians half to death, and the politicians will not be kindly disposed to the bugging thereof. Personally, I'd a lot rather be a prophet than a politician, but were I a politician, I would likely be as ill-disposed to the hair-shirts as most politicians are. Nevertheless, David immediately invited Nathan into his court the moment he came and rapped gently on the palace door, and it is a great credit to him that he did.
Secondly, Nathan acted the way most prophets act: he had all the delicacy of a twenty mega-ton bomb. "YOU ARE THE MAN!" was not a gentle or irenic statement; it had the fierce sting of No. 8 birdshot at fifteen paces.
But David meekly put up with it. He did not order Nathan thrown unceremoniously out into the street. Instead, with shame etched into his face and soul he quietly and sorrowfully admitted, "I have sinned against the Lord." David made no feeble attempts to try to justify the awful thing he had done; he forthrightly owned up to it and acknowledged his guilt. Without Nathan his contrition probably never would have happened, but fortunately, God sends His Nathans to us all, and if we listen and respond to them, we can repent and be healed. But if we won't listen and we don't respond, we can't be healed. It is as simple as that. When confronted by our sins, either we repent and turn away from repeating them or we dig in our heels and tell God to buzz off.
I have called this sermon "Nathan: The Highest Point," and you may be wondering why. It is clear enough that the episode with Bathsheba was the lowest point in David's life, but why was David's response to Nathan the highest point?
To provide a partial answer, let me give you a bit of doggerel which was given to me years ago by a minister friend.
David and Solomon led wicked lives.
Besides their girlfriends they had a thousand wives.
When they grew old their consciences gave them qualms,
So one wrote the Proverbs, and the other wrote the Psalms.
Sometimes nothing is so powerful in producing positive human behavior as a guilty conscience, and both David and Solomon had much about which to feel guilty. Yet in their defense, and especially in defense of David, they learned from their mistakes, and they emerged from the divine chastisement as far better and more dedicated people.
The prophetic showdown in the palace was the peak moment of David's life, because from then on he did everything he could to rectify all the wrong he had done. He became far more committed to the purposes of God and far less committed to his own selfish purposes. But his repentance was not without a price. The child Bathsheba was carrying would die, Nathan said, and from then on there would be bloodshed throughout David's family. As we shall see next week, that was true.
But wait a minute. Am I suggesting that God would take the life of an innocent baby in order to punish his guilty father? No, I am not suggesting that at all. However, Nathan suggested it; Nathan said it; Nathan proclaimed it. I don't believe God works that way, but both Nathan and David believed it, and for the purposes of the story, that's what matters.
Nine months after this sorry episode began, Bathsheba gave birth to a son, but he was very sickly. David prayed to God to spare the baby, and he refused to eat anything, but nothing changed. The child went from bad to worse. When he died a few days later, David's servants were afraid to tell him. After David heard the news, however, he cleaned himself up and put on fresh clothes, and he ordered food to be brought. The servants were perplexed by his behavior, so David said to them, "As long as the baby was alive I did all I could to implore God to keep him alive, but now that he is gone, there is nothing more I can do."
When David's son died, he deeply mourned his loss, and he did what he could to comfort Bathsheba. Later she conceived again, and this time a healthy son was born, whose name was Solomon. Solomon went on to succeed David on the throne of Israel, and he became the most glorious of the kings though not the greatest; that honor was reserved for Solomon's father, David.
The greatness of David comes in the midst of sin and death, and it is yet another of the many ironies of God. David's sin was great, but so was his repentance. He was deeply grieved by the death of his infant son, yet he emerged from it a sadder but wiser human being. Sometimes it is not the good things which shape and mold our character the most or the best; it is the bad things which do it. If we can manage to make lemonade out of the lemons that we either willfully grow on our own or are handed by the tenuousness of human existence, we will have done the best we could in a situation we would prefer never to have encountered, but which providentially may prove to be one of the most helpful growing experiences we could ever have. No doubt David would have done anything he could to negate his lustful adultery with Bathsheba and its horrible aftermath, but knowing that was not possible, he went forward as best he could. As evil as his actions were, he emerged from them a better person, because of his genuine remorse and repentance.
Psalm 51 is attributed to David, and it states in its foreword that he wrote it after the incident with Bathsheba. In it he said, "I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me." Our lowest point may be the one necessity for bringing us to our highest point, that place along the continuum of our life where we truly make a fresh start and firmly resolve to follow God's commands rather our own selfish inclinations. Only by realizing who we are is the transformation possible which turns us into who we are to become.
But our highest point also may come to us in very different circumstances, those over which we have no control and for which we are totally blameless. An illness or an accident may create great stress for an individual or for those who are close to that person, but it also may bring the person to a level of faith never before dreamed possible.
The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler's Gestapo for his opposition to Nazism. As the days drew closer to the solemn moment when he would ascend the scaffold with its waiting noose, Bonhoeffer became acutely aware of the necessity at times to become silent before God. He wrote, "What shall we do, in order to penetrate into this silence before God?.... It may be done by taking up a few words from the Bible; but the best is to abandon oneself completely and let the soul find its way to its Father's house, to its home, where it finds rest. And whoever attempts this, working at it seriously day by day, will be overwhelmed by the riches which will flow from these hours.... Our relationship with God must be practiced, otherwise we shall not find the right note, the right word, the right language when He comes upon us unawares."
The lowest point may come because illness threatens our lives, because we are forcefully confronted by our mortality, because we discover that in life or in death we have no one to fall back on ultimately other than God. It may come because of a crisis for someone else, someone we love deeply. It may come because of some odious and awful sin we have committed, something we have long tried unsuccessfully to forget.
Does God cause any of these things to happen? By no means. Does He allow them to happen? By all means. In the providence of God, sometimes it takes the worst to become the catalyst for the best. As with David, the lowest point may very soon be followed by the highest point. But between the two, between the agony and the ecstasy, there may be heard the utterly dismaying, totally disarming declaration, "You are the man!" How we respond to that statement shall determine whether our lowest is transformed into our highest.