STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 51
2 Samuel 11:1-27
December 16, 2001
Text Comment
v.1 As we pointed out last week, we may say and all the more given the historical context the narrator established in chapter 10, "But David remained in Jerusalem" is the narrator's explanation for what follows, an "evaluative viewpoint."
Against myself I bear record
That hence my bondage flows,
When I neglect to serve my Lord
I'm left to serve my foes.
Or, as William Gurnall put it, "Sins of commission are usual punishments for sins of omission. He that leaves a duty may soon be left to commit a crime."
Spring, by the way, was the campaigning season because the winter rains had stopped but the men were not yet involved in harvesting.
v.2 A siesta on a hot Spring day would begin not long after noon, so this lazy king had been in bed a long time. [Alter, Com., 250] The palace was on a height so he could look down on other houses. Bathsheba was probably bathing on her rooftop.
v.3 As we will learn later, David would have known who Uriah was. He was a member of David's elite group of warriors known as "The Thirty." That means, of course, that David knew that Bathsheba's husband was with Joab in the field. The Qumran scroll of Samuel adds that Uriah was Joab's armor bearer. In any case, David can arrange an assignation with Bathsheba without her husband knowing it. The Devil is tightening his vice! It is unusual to have Bathsheba identified in relation to both her father and her husband, but there is an Eliam named among "The Thirty (23:34)." It is possible both men are mentioned because both were members of David's elite guard. In that case, David's affair with this woman is doubly an act of betrayal.
v.4 That parenthetical note - "She had purified herself from her uncleanness" - is added to indicate that when she went to David she was not pregnant.
v.5 Adultery was punished by death in the Law of Moses (Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22). Obviously the pregnancy was, therefore, an immense complication. What Bathsheba thought about all of this we are never explicitly told. David is obviously the focus of the narrator. On the other hand, it is probably fair to say that at no point do we get the impression that Bathsheba resisted the king's attentions or that she was unimpressed by them.
v.6 This section is going to contrast David's behavior with that Uriah the Hittite. Perhaps a point is made by giving the full name, Uriah the Hittite. David's behavior was utterly lacking in principle, but a foreigner showed steadfast loyalty to this principles. Uriah was either a resident alien or the son of one.
v.9 David, of course, wants Uriah to go home, to sleep with Bathsheba so as to cover all traces of David's sexual liaison with Uriah's wife. But Uriah, as a soldier during a time of war, was under a solemn vow of sexual abstinence. Uriah is good as his word. Even David's encouragement that he go home - virtually royal permission to violate his vow - and a gift sent after him, to grease the skids as it were - to demonstrate that there would be no problem if he went home, the king was on his side - did not succeed in getting Uriah into his own bed.
v.11 We can see David reddening in the face. In any case, it is clear he is not going to persuade him by ordinary means. The Ark was apparently in the field with the army and, it is to be noted, that Uriah mentions this as his first consideration! He was a righteous man and a perfect contrast to David.
v.13 David's next ploy to is get Uriah drunk, in hopes that, no longer in full possession of his powers, he would do what he wouldn't do sober. But, as one scholar put it, "Uriah drunk is more righteous than David sober."
v.15 Joab was the kind of man who could be counted on to eliminate a man who was proving an embarrassment to the king. Now, David's earlier complaint, at the time of the murder of Abner, about Joab being cruel and unjust and violent rings hollow. David does not scruple to send the letter ordering Uriah's death by Uriah's own hand. Uriah was a man David could trust not to open someone else's mail! What follows in 2 Samuel is going to make clear that it is this murder, more than the original adultery, for which David and his family will pay so dearly.
v.17 Joab obeyed the spirit but not the letter of David's instructions, perhaps because David's proposal was bound to raise suspicions, perhaps because it was simply too dishonorable and unmanly. As one commentator puts it, "The canny Joab immediately sees that David's orders are impossibly clumsy…" [Alter, Com., 254] Joab was not a man to worry about sacrificing a few more lives to accomplish the king's wishes in a more prudent way.
v.21 Military strategy required maintaining a safe distance from the walls of a besieged city. However, if David showed anger at the sloppy war-making on Joab's part, he was to be told that Uriah was dead. The king would get the point and no one would be the wiser.
v.24 It is unclear whether we are to presume that the messenger gave the report as Joab said and that this is a summary of the entire conversation, with David's anger at the initial piece of news assumed, or that the messenger just changed the report and mentioned Uriah at the outset no doubt because he easily saw through Joab's instructions and gathered what the really important piece of information was.
v.25 David, in his reply to Joab, smugly and hypocritically attributes Uriah's death to the fortunes of war.
v.27 Bathsheba is not revealed to us in her character until much later. There we learn that she was an opportunist, having her eye on the "main chance." [Alter, Com., 251] The picture of her drawn later suggests that she may well have been a willing participant in the affair. Here, in a verse and a half, she had an affair, became pregnant, lost her husband, observed the customary period of mourning for him, married her lover, the king, and bore his child and we are told nothing of her feelings or of her moral position. This account is about David and his sin. Nevertheless the impression is of hurried action after the death of Uriah. Bathsheba wants to be David's wife before she begins to show.
By the way, completing the thought of the sentence in v. 1 about David staying in Jerusalem is the observation that throughout the chapter David is never anywhere but at his house. Even here at the end, he sends for Bathsheba and she comes to him at his house.
There is actually a literary tie between v. 25 and the final sentence of the chapter. David had literally written to Joab, "Don't let this matter be evil in your eyes" which the NIV translated as "Don't let this upset you" which is what David meant. But translated that way we miss the parallel, for v. 27b literally reads: "But the thing that David had done was evil in the eyes of the Lord."
In the chapter we are told nothing about what David or Bathsheba thought about what had happened or felt about its aftermath. But in an ominous understatement we learn at the end of the account what the Lord thought about it all.
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John Owen defines a temptation as "anything, state, way, or condition that upon any account whatever, hath a force or efficacy to seduce, to draw the mind and heart of a man from his obedience, which God requires of him, into any sin, in any degree of it whatever." In this case, the temptation was the sight of a very beautiful woman bathing.
Obviously we have here one of the Bible's great illustrations both of the power of temptation to seduce even a believing heart and its destructive force when it has succeeded in that seduction. The Bible teaches us about temptation and resistance to it in different ways, and one of those ways is by illustration. We learn to resist temptation and how to resist it both from Joseph's sturdy "nay-saying" to Potiphar's wife and then by his headlong flight when his refusals proved ineffective. Twice in the Gospels we are allowed to view the Lord Jesus under temptation and see how he resists. And we learn to resist temptation in another way by being made here in 2 Sam. 11 to see the ugliness of it and to consider the catastrophe it brought down upon the head of David and his family.
This is a study in how to resist temptation, even as it is an account of a man, a godly man, falling prey to it. It is a lesson in what not to do and how not to do it taught in characters of blood and gall. And it is a lesson in at least three parts.
I. First, we learn here to reckon with and to be alert to our weakness.
Just think of how this point is made in this narrative.
a. There is not a Christian who cannot succumb to temptation and fall terribly.
This is David, after all, who does these terrible things. This is David, the man after God's own heart, whom the Lord had taught so much and to whom the Lord had given so much. This is David who seems to have learned so well to appreciate the power of trusting in the Lord. This is David who wrote in Psalm 24:
"Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart…who does not swear by what is false. He will receive blessing from the Lord…"
This is David, who wrote in Psalm 101:
"No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house; no one who speaks falsely will stand in my presence."
How could you and I presume to be safe if such a man as David fell and fell so terribly?
But there is more.
b. There is not a time when we cannot be tempted and fall.
Can you think of a more innocent time than a late afternoon stroll on the porch. He looked down, saw something he had no plans to see, and in moments he was caught up in a web of evil from which he would not escape for the rest of his life. He was probably still rubbing the sleep from his eyes when his heart had been made captive to evil desires.
You know how this goes. You can be tempted in church! You see someone or think about something and suddenly your mind is off in evil places, you are preoccupied with thoughts you would be mortified for anyone else to know. Or, at another time, you are busy at something and into your mind or across your eye flits a thought or a sight and, before you know it, you are knee deep in evil thoughts and desires. We can be tempted at prayer, at our family tables, at work, at any time whatsoever.
There is no time we are safe from the Devil's wiles or from the influences of our own flesh.
But there is still more.
c. There is no sin that we cannot commit under the power of temptation.
Evil as his adultery was, inexcusable theft as it was, the betrayal of everything sacred that it was, the utterly selfish disregard for others that it undoubtedly was, people have less difficulty understanding how it might have happened. It has happened so often, after all. Sexual lust is a powerful and destructive force. We all know that. And David already has struck us as a man who appreciated women.
But, what is so frightening about this episode is what that first sin then led David to do. Here was David, a man's man, a soldier's soldier. Remember the loyalty his troops had for him as their commander. Remember the men who went at risk of their lives to get him some water from Bethlehem's well and remember the noble way in which he repaid their devotion, pouring out that water as an offering to the Lord. We see David at his very best at the head of his army. What we would never have expected of David, and what he would never have expected of himself, was that he would have taken advantage of one his senior commanders, stolen his wife - remember David knew very well who Uriah was - and then arranged for his murder in a fashion that violated every sacred obligation of the military oath. The soldier's soldier murdering one of his own soldiers. This is nothing short of terrifying, to think that we might do such a thing. And we cannot say that it is beyond us without admitting that it was beyond David also; but he did it anyway. Such is the power of temptation. As holy a man as Robert Murray McCheyne admitted that he found in his heart the seed of every conceivable sin. And if there is any sure lesson learned in the 20th century it is that, given the right influences and opportunities, perfectly normal human beings can be led to do virtually anything, no matter how horrifyingly evil.
There is the first lesson: we must be alert, awake to our danger. All of us, at any time, can commit any sin under the power of temptation. No wonder our Savior told us to watch and pray that we enter not into temptation.
II. The second part of the lesson taught us here is that we must learn to reckon with the dangers of succumbing to temptation, the price that must be paid when we toy with sin.
a. We see it first in David's estrangement from the Lord.
This is not said in so many words to be sure, but we can detect the change reading between the lines. Can you imagine David in prayer - he once said that he was a "man of prayer" - can you imagine him in prayer as he is waiting for his servants to deliver Bathsheba to him? Can you imagine him in the Word and prayer as he waits to see if Uriah has gone down to his house and to his wife? Can you see him asking God to bless his plans to ensure the death of his loyal captain so as to cover up his own crimes? There is nothing in the chapter that reveals David as here a man of faith or of prayer or of obedience.
But there is more. In Psalm 32, which seems to hark back to this experience, to the nine months between his sin and his repentance, he tells us that when he did not confess his sins to God,
"When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For night and day your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer." [vv. 3-4]
The Lord withdrew his presence from David and his blessing. A man who heretofore was known to us for the intimacy of his fellowship with the Lord lost that fellowship and the strength that came from it. God departed from him.
b. But, in addition to that, we see the danger of temptation and the sin that comes from it in the whirlpool of sinful behavior into which that first temptation had sucked David.
When he was on that balcony, wrestling with himself, David might very well have used the argument that we have sometimes used - at least in the back of our minds -: well, I shouldn't do this, but I will repent later!
But David was going to find repentance very hard to come by. It would be nine months or more before Nathan the prophet came to him and brought him to his knees. And, much worse, in the time after his sexual liaison with Bathsheba, he conspired to deceive and then murder her husband, drawing others into the guilt of his crimes, a prospect that hadn't crossed even the outskirts of his mind when he first gave himself to lust.
As C.S. Lewis once put it, "Like a good chess player, [Satan] is always trying to manoeuvre you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop." [The Weight of Glory, 31-32]
Well he put David right where he wanted him, but David didn't have a clue that he was on the edge of a whirlpool that would capture him and not let him go until several good men were dead and death and destruction had been written in black letters over David's own family.
I see this so often. How many are the sins that come from other sins we have committed. How hard it is to escape the clutches of evil and how evil breeds further evil. A wise man knows how poisonous sin is and how it spreads its destruction when once the virus has been let loose in the soul and body. One sin rarely remains but one sin. And, in the providence of God, the punishment of sin is often being left to commit more of it to your even greater misery.
III. The third part of the lesson here is that we must learn and then take to heart and keep in mind the simple truth that temptations are met best by the total effect of an obedient life.
The fact is, one cannot prepare for temptations individually and specifically. They come upon us suddenly and by surprise. They take forms we did not expect. That is certainly the case here! We made this point last Lord's Day evening, but we make it again tonight because the narrator tells that this is his own great lesson. He begins this sorry, dismal episode in David's life by telling us that it was spring, the time when kings go off to war, but David stayed behind in Jerusalem. There was the tragic failure that led to this catastrophe. David stayed home when he should have been leading his army in the field. He had responsibilities and he laid them down. It was when he was napping and enjoying the privileges of his position that his world collapsed around him; he was safe when he was fighting the enemies of the Lord and fulfilling the obligations the Lord had laid upon him.
It is something known to holy men and women that temptation is best defeated, more often it is only defeated, at the outset, when it first appears. At that point a believer still has his wits about him. She is still not yet caught up in the power of the temptation, the mind has not yet been turned, the heart not yet drawn away. Then and only then, usually, can one turn away and decisively deny the temptation. "Venture all on the first attempt," is John Owen's recondite way of putting this lesson. Strike while you still have the will and the strength to strike.
But will you, will it even occur to you to do so, unless you are busy about the Lord's work? If you have already allowed yourself to nap, your mind and your heart will be too dull, too disinterested even to recognize what is really happening in those fateful moments when the world, the flesh, and the Devil, are setting their traps.
The way I have always illustrated this is in this way. When I was growing up in St. Louis, MO, the church we attended had a janitor whose name was Arlee Crockett. A nice fellow. Arlee Crockett's claim to fame was that he had a son, named Ivory. I remember meeting Ivory one day in the basement of the church. Ivory was famous! He was a world-class sprinter. In fact, at one time - and for all I know still today - he owned the world record for the 100 yard dash. 9 seconds flat! They rarely run the 100 yard dash anymore, the track world having gone over to meters, so perhaps he still holds the record, I don't know. But at that time, he was the fastest sprinter ever to have run the most prestigious race. His reputation rested on a performance that lasted 9 seconds.
But how many hours, days, months, and years of training had gone into that one fabulous 9 seconds! Practicing starts, building endurance, perfecting form and technique, learning to extract the final few hundredths of a second by leaning for the tape at just the right time. All that work so that for 9 seconds he would perform perfectly.
Well, the Christian life is like that in this way. How many seconds do you suppose the issue remained up for grabs in David's heart as he stood on that balcony looking down on Bathsheba. How long did he have? 9 seconds? A few more? How many seconds into that staring did he still maintain sufficient control of his heart and mind to turn away, catch himself, go back into his bedroom, realize what he had done, change his clothes, call for his chariot, and leave the palace immediately for the field and the army where he ought to have been all along. But in those few seconds, he was too weak, too dull from idleness and spiritual indifference, and he didn't turn away and we will read the terrible consequences of that in the weeks to come.
You have only seconds when temptations appear, seconds only to get hold of yourself, to tell yourself what is going on, and to pull yourself away. But will you? Not likely, if when the temptation strikes, you aren't where you ought to be and aren't doing what you ought to do.
We are not told the details of David's fall for our entertainment, but for our warning and for our instruction. Don't do what David did, or you are very likely to suffer as he suffered and others with you. Do what David did not do, and be about your master's business! Temptations are weakest when they first have to distract you from the work you are doing for the Lord!