The Lord sends Nathan the prophet to rebuke David for his sins. Nathan begins his conversation with David by presenting him with a parable, though David evidently believes it is an actual legal case upon which he is expected to pass judgment.
"The Lord sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, 'There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except a poor little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.'" (2 Samuel 12:1-3) David does not yet realize that he is the rich man in the parable and Uriah is the poor man. Bathsheba is symbolized by the little ewe lamb.
"Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him." (2 Samuel 12:4) I suppose we might say that the traveler represents the sexual lust that David satisfied, not by having relations with one of his own wives or concubines, but by having unlawful relations with another man's wife. At this point he still doesn't realize the parable is about him.
David's sense of justice is offended by the thought of what the rich man did. He is enraged due to his love of animals, and for sheep in particular, having been a faithful and loving shepherd of his father's sheep. He's so upset by this story that he declares the man should die for his sin, even though this is not a capital case. "David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, 'As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.'" (2 Samuel 12:5-6)
He is overwhelmed by emotion when he says the man who did such a thing is worthy of death. He could not legally put a man to death for the crime described by Nathan but he displays his knowledge of the law when he adds that the man must pay back fourfold, for Exodus 22:1 states that whoever steals a sheep and slaughters it must pay back four sheep for the one sheep. We see by this that David has been obedient to the Lord's rule for kings in Deuteronomy 17:18-19a which says that the king must write out a copy of the law for himself and must read from it every day of his life. But, sadly, David has not been obedient to the verses before and after those, which state that a king is not to have many wives and that a king must not consider himself above the law. David's downfall into sin began when he took a number of wives and concubines contrary to the word of God. Instead of serving to satisfy his sexual appetites, this served only to fan the flames of this particular temptation. He did not deny himself as many wives as it pleased him to have and this led to him not denying himself the wife of another man. He began thinking of himself as being above the law because he was the king. He thought he could do as he pleased and get away with it.
But he has not gotten away with it. The Lord loves him too much to let him keep living in denial. The Lord loves him too much to let him keep living with unconfessed sin. It has been taking a toll on David, though we find no mention of that in 2 Samuel, but David wrote a psalm that speaks of how difficult it was all those months when he refused to acknowledge his sin. His conscience, though he tried to silence it, troubled him day and night. The Holy Spirit, though he tried to stop his ears to His pleading, repeatedly urged him to confess and repent. In Psalm 32:3-4 David says of this time in his life, "When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer."
At no time during those months was David at peace. He could not have said, "It is well with my soul," because there was a distance between himself and the Lord. He could find no relief from a nagging sense of unrest, not even at night when he was tired and needed sleep. I can recall a time when I did something that shocked myself, something I would never have pictured myself doing, and after I confessed and repented I remember thinking back on the days before I confessed and repented and saying of them, "I couldn't even look the Lord in the eyes." Of course I meant that figuratively but there was a sense of not being able to even lift my eyes heavenwards until I had acknowledged my sin. I went through a few weeks of not wanting to acknowledge my sin and I couldn't even talk to the Lord about anything else because there was this elephant in the room, so to speak, that I needed to deal with.
David hasn't been wanting to deal with the elephant in the room. He's denied its existence for so long that when he hears Nathan's story it doesn't occur to him that this is not a literal legal case the prophet is bringing to him. He's outraged by the facts of the case. He wants the man dead who did such a thing. He does not recognize himself in the parable until Nathan speaks this line for which he is most well known: "Then Nathan said to David, 'You are the man!'" (2 Samuel 12:7a) I picture David's eyes going wide with shock and his mouth falling open in a gasp. I imagine him feeling as if his heart skips a beat before it starts pounding in guilt and fear.
The prophet continues, "This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: 'I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave your master's house to you, and your master's wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more. Why do you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in His eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised Me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.'" (2 Samuel 12:7b-10)
David already had more women in his life than he needed before he ever laid eyes on Bathsheba. He'd married several Israelite wives. He'd married several foreign concubines. He'd inherited the royal harem of King Saul and Saul's son Ish-Bosheth; whether or not David ever visited any of these women and made his relationship with them "official" is not known. But the point is, he had no lack of female company. He did not need to look outside of his own palace if he felt the need for companionship. He had no right to gaze lustfully upon another man's wife or to send for that woman and commit adultery with her. Then, after he committed adultery with her, he compounded his sin by trying to cover it up and pass off his unborn child as another man's. When that didn't work, he committed the ultimate sin of murder. Nathan says that the root of these sins is that David "despised the word of the Lord"; in other words, he behaved as if the Lord's laws didn't apply to him. He thought he could ignore them because he is the king of Israel, but Nathan reminds him that he would not be the king of Israel if the Lord had not elevated him to that position. David owes everything he is and everything he has to the Lord and yet, as the prophet points out, he behaved as if he didn't have enough. He took what belonged to someone else.
Because David meddled in someone else's home life and caused a family to break apart, from now on he will have to deal with strife in his own household. Nathan is not finished relaying the word of the Lord to David. In tomorrow's text he tells him what is to come. In the past David fought many battles on the field of war but in the future his primary battles will be battles within the home. I've mused before that David seemed to live closer to the Lord before he became king, and I believe that may be because his power and success went to his head. I think the main reason the Lord is going to allow troubles to come into his personal life is because David doesn't handle success as well as he handles adversity. Hardship tends to drive him closer to the Lord; prosperity tends to make him drift from the Lord. No one enjoys hardship. David didn't enjoy it either, but he will look back on the discipline of hardship and say this to the Lord about it: "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey Your word." (Psalm 119:67)
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