David and Bathsheba

King David had engaged in a sinful act, but instead of repenting, he tried to cover it up. Do you see how one sin leads to another?

From the act of adultery, next comes the lies, the deceitfulness, and then after the deceitfulness now, the ultimate plot is to murder the husband. David was a great man, to be sure. He exhibited extraordinary bravery in killing Goliath. He rose to power as king of Israel, and more than once we're told that he was a man after God's own heart. Yet one of the most famous chapters in his life is also the most tragic.

Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul recounts David's descent into horrifying sin. We have an axiom in our language that goes like this, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Now that little saying is not 100% accurate, because when we think of absolute power, the only being who exists that has actually absolute power is God Himself. And if it were true that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely in all element categories, that would mean that God would be absolutely corrupt.

But of course when that axiom was first uttered, it was not with reference to deity, but rather had as its viewpoint human beings operating in this world. And it's in that context that we talk about the corrupting influence of power. If we would go to our blackboard today and list the rogues' galleries of the most criminally corrupt people in the history of this world, the names that we would get from any poll would include people like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and the Emperor Nero and people of that ilk. And the reason why, of course, these people stand out for the radical degree of corruption that they exhibit in their lives was that those who are in positions of exalted power and authority have much less restraints upon them than the average person. We may have the same predilection for evil that a Nero had or that a Hitler had, but we don't have the power to carry it out. These men who were leaders of nations became, as it were, at least within the limited scope of their own territorial rule, laws unto themselves.

And so they had the means and the opportunity to be engaged in unbridled evil. But we're not concerned about looking at the great men of corruption that we usually think of in terms of world history. We're studying the life of David. And at the beginning of our study of the life of David, we pointed out that David excelled in so many different arenas and in so many different areas of achievement that I said that he should probably get the title that is usually reserved for Alexander, namely David the Great, who was far greater in my estimation than Alexander the Great ever dreamed of being. But when we looked at the various areas in which David excelled and displayed greatness in the area of music and literature, in government and military exploits and so on, we also mentioned that David was a great sinner, that when David sinned, he did it in a big way.

He didn't do it halfway, halfway measures, but his corruption when it became manifest was dreadfully wicked, to say the least. Well, when we think of the sin of David, we think inevitably of the shameful episode that marred his monarchy in his illicit relationship with Bathsheba. When Hollywood makes movies about David, that's where they focus their attention because it's that salacious aspect of his life that brings the crowds. The record of it is found in 2 Samuel in the 11th chapter, and I want us to review this narrative so that we can get an insight here into what happens in the internal decay that affects David after his problems are solved, after Saul is dead, after the civil war is over, after David consolidates his power and becomes king over all of the nation. In 2 Samuel chapter 11, beginning at verse 2, we read this account, and then it happened one evening that David arose from his bed and walked on the roof of the king's house, and from the roof he saw a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful to behold. And so David sent and inquired about the woman, and someone said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite? So now the first thing that David does, he's walking about, perhaps he can't sleep, he's on the roof of the palace, and he looks across the way, and he sees this fabulously beautiful woman bathing in the moonlight presumably, and David is instantly smitten with this woman's beauty.

In a word, he goes temporarily insane by the gorgeous character that he beholds. And let me just stop for a second here and say as a parenthesis what a difference this story gives us from the episode in the life of Joseph. When Joseph was approached by a woman intent on seduction, a woman of great beauty and of great power, and when Joseph was employed as the house servant of Potiphar, the guard of Pharaoh, Joseph was approached by Potiphar's wife, and we remember on that occasion that Joseph resisted, and he fled from her presence and all of the seductive power that she brought to bear on that occasion, and Joseph said to her, how can I do this thing and sin against God? Joseph immediately saw through the situation and recognized that to succumb to this kind of physical temptation would not only be a violation of the woman, of her husband, of his master, but ultimately a sin against God, and it was his consciousness of obedience toward God that restrained Joseph from his sin. Now here we have another man centuries later whom the Scriptures describe as a man after God's own heart, but he doesn't have that same level of purity of conscience that motivated Joseph. When David saw Bathsheba and was instantly smitten, and this is not a case of Bathsheba's coming to David's palace and trying to seduce him. She's thinking that she's privately bathing, and the king is acting as a voyeur in this circumstance. He gets all excited, and he comes around and he starts making inquiries about this woman.

Now I say that for this reason. The New Testament as well as the Old not only clearly prohibits illicit sexual activity, but also lists lust as a serious sin. When Jesus gives His exposition of the Decalogue of the Ten Commandments and gets to the commandment prohibiting adultery, He broadens the scope of that law of God to say that even if a person is guilty of lust, that that person who lusts after another person has broken the spirit of the law at least of adultery. And when the Scriptures speak of lust, it speaks of not just a passing attraction, but an attraction that becomes a fixation in somebody's mind.

They dwell on it, they daydream about it, they fantasize over it, and pretty soon in so many cases the fantasy moves over the line into reality. Martin Luther once was asked how he dealt with the problem of lust that assaults most men at some point or another in their lives, and Luther acknowledged that he was not blind to the charms and the beauty of members of the opposite sex, but he said, here is where you must control your thinking. And he used this illustration.

He said, I can't help if birds fly over my head, but I can stop them from building a nest in my air. Now once a person conceives of an erotic association or relationship with someone that is not their wives and begins to contemplate it and dwell upon it, building nests in their hair, they have given themselves over to this pattern of lust that is so destructive. And that's what's going on here. This could have been just a momentary slip of the mind. David, not planning to find this woman, happens to walk out on his roof and looks over and sees this beautiful woman taking a bath.

He could have shied away in embarrassment, hit his eyes, gone back, taken a shower, and gone to bed. Instead, he becomes obsessed with this woman and the image that he has in his mind about her. And so the text goes on and says that David sent and inquired about the woman.

That means he's planning some sort of relationship with her. And when he discovers that the woman is married, that she is the wife of Uriah the Hittite, David is still not restrained. Instead, he sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.

And then she returned to her house. Now again, the Scripture is kind to us by being brief and not going into all the sort of details of this relationship, but it certainly gives us this much information that David sends a messenger to Bathsheba, invites her to his palace. Now I don't know how much guilt Bathsheba carries in this, but she was certainly smitten by this invitation from the king. But I don't care whether he was the king or a movie star or the great warrior that he was, she was a married woman.

And by even answering this summons and the obvious intent of it, she has already entered into a romantic conspiracy that is a violation of her own marriage vows. So they have their time together, and it results in a pregnancy with Bathsheba. The woman conceived, we're told in verse 5, and so she sent and told David and said, I am with child. I just wonder how David felt at that point. He was the king.

Now he's made another man's wife pregnant with his baby. So David sent to Joab. Now that's interesting that as soon as David now realizes the trouble he's in and the obstacle that he has to possessing this woman that he's crazy about, the first thing he does is not to call for the priest.

He doesn't go to the temple. He calls for his general. He's going to handle this problem by a use of military power.

He's going to consider it a problem of damage control, if you will. And so David sent to Joab, saying, Send me Uriah the Hittite. And Joab sent Uriah to David. And when Uriah had come to him, David asked how Joab was doing and how the people were doing and how the war prospered. You see the machinations that are going on here. David now brings in Bathsheba's husband, who has no idea of what's going on.

And David plays little games. He's being very solicitous towards Uriah. How's things going? You're in the army. You're serving with Joab. Is there anything I can do to help you out? Do you need some supplies?

Do you need some provisions? Uriah is probably wondering, Wow, what did I do to get the eye of the king? I'm just a private in the army, and here he is, whining and dining me in the palace. And David said to Uriah, Go down to your house and wash your feet.

Now this is not an insult. David is not saying to the man, Look, don't come into my palace with 30 feet. You need to go home and take a bath. No, he's saying, Take the day off. Enjoy yourself, Uriah.

Go home, have some fun, take a shower, get dressed up, and take some R&R. So we read then that Uriah departed from the king's house, and a gift of food from the king followed him. Do you see the insincerity here of David? What's David trying to do other than to soothe a guilty conscience already? He has violated his servant Uriah in a way that is the lowest form of violation a king can ever make of one of his subjects. He has taken the man's wife. But now he's trying to be his pal and be benevolent to Uriah.

Gives him food to take him, tells him to take the day off. But we read in verse 9 of chapter 11 of 2 Samuel that Uriah slept at the door of the king's house with all the servants of his Lord and did not go down to his house. And so when they told David, saying, Uriah did not go down to his house, David said to Uriah, Did you not come from a journey? Why do you not go to your house? And Uriah said to David, The ark in Israel and Judah are dwelling in tents, and my Lord Joab and the servants of my Lord are encamped in the open fields. So I then go to my house to eat and drink and to lie with my wife.

As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing. Obviously, David is trying to cover up his sin. He wants Uriah to go to bed with Bathsheba so that when she begins to show that she's pregnant, David will not be blamed because Uriah has been away at war. He comes home. If he doesn't visit his wife, and a couple of months later she says, I'm pregnant, he's going to know instantly that he's not the father of this child because he can count. He can add.

He can do the math. He knows that he was out serving the king on the battlefield when all of this was taking place. David is desperately trying to get him to go home, take some time off. But Uriah is faithful to the king. He wants to go home. He's crazy about Bathsheba too. He can't wait to get home, but his duty is to guard the king.

And so he sacrifices his own pleasure and his own enjoyment, his own domestic tranquility in order to sleep on the steps of the palace, to be there in the event of an attack upon the king. It's like Uriah working for Joab would be like a member of the Secret Service in America whose job it is to guard the president. And David said to Uriah, wait here today also, and tomorrow I will let you depart. So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day and the next. And now when David called him, he ate and drank before him, and he made him drunk.

And at evening he went out to lie on his bed with the servants of his Lord, but he still did not go down to the house. So everything that David tries is frustrated. So finally he comes up with the final solution, the ultimate plan to escape the wrath of a husband that's been violated. He calls in Joab and he said, Joab, I want you to go to the front lines, and I want you to take Uriah the Hittite with you. And when the battle heats up, I want you to retreat without letting Uriah know so that Uriah will be slain in battle. Do you see how one sin leads to another? From the act of adultery, next comes the lies, the deceitfulness, and then after the deceitfulness now, the ultimate plot is to murder the husband.

And this task is accomplished in short order. We read in verse 16, so it was while Joab besieged the city that he assigned Uriah to a place where he knew there were valiant men. And the men of the city came out and fought with Joab, and some of the people of the servants of David fell, and Uriah the Hittite died also. And Uriah is now removed as an obstacle for the king. Power corrupts.

Great power corrupts greatly. And so often we forget that in the sin of David it was not merely a sexual sin, not merely an act of adultery, but David compounds the felony by committing murder by proxy. He virtually orders the death of Uriah and orchestrates the death of Uriah in such a way as to make it seem that Uriah simply fell in battle and David had nothing to do with it. But it was set up. He set him up. What kind of a man would do that? In order to remove a rival for the woman of his own affections. This does not sound like a man after God's own heart, but it sounds like a man who has lost his conscience, like a man who at least temporarily has gone morally insane. And David, I'm sure, at this point in his life did what every other human being does when they're involved in this kind of sordid affair. He makes excuses.

He does everything in his power to rationalize his actions. And he even gets to the place, as we will see in our next session, that he has so deadened his conscience that he's not even losing any sleep over the depths of his own treachery. David's conscience was seared, and as Dr. R.C. Sproul said today, David had gone morally insane. He plotted murder and went through with it. What a dark chapter in the life of a man we count as a biblical hero. I'm Lee Webb, and we're glad you've joined us for Renewing Your Mind on this Saturday. Every week we return to this in-depth look at David's life. The first few chapters were glorious. It seemed that David could do no wrong.

But as we saw today, he forgot his place as a servant of God. We can learn so much from David's life, and I think our resource offer today will be a great help to you as well. When you contact us with a donation of any amount, we'd like to send you the special edition of Dr. Sproul's series, Dust to Glory. In 57 messages, R.C. explores the themes and events of the Bible from Genesis all the way to Revelation, and we provide you with an extra disc containing the study guides for the series.

So request Dust to Glory when you go to renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. The Christian life is a matter of thinking and living biblically. Our monthly resource, Table Talk Magazine, is committed to helping Christians do just that. Each issue contains thoughtful articles from gifted teachers along with daily guided Bible studies. So we invite you this New Year and beyond to make Table Talk part of your daily reading.

You can subscribe at TableTalkMagazine.com. This is a wonderful resource to understand and apply the Word of God. Now here's R.C. with a final thought for us. In our Coram Deo thought for today, I remind you that by looking at this incident in David's life that it reveals not only the heart of David, but it reveals the heart of man. This is what sin looks like, not just with the particular act, but in the complex of behavior that precedes it and follows it. This is how we behave as sinful people. Not only do we sin, but in many cases we sin planning our sin in advance. And then after we commit this sin, we go to great pains to conceal that sin, to cover it up, to hide it from public view or scrutiny. And it doesn't stop with our trying to hide it simply from others, but we try to conceal it from ourselves. We begin to tell lies not only to those outside, but we begin to tell lies to our own conscience. Our conscience is what St. Thomas Aquinas once said, that inner voice of God that either accuses or excuses us. And we can't stand the burden of an accusing conscience, and so we seek to create a rationale that will excuse our own sin so that we can silence the voice of the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Don't hear this story of David and think that it is a story of one man's isolated sin. It's my story, and it's your story. David's situation did seem hopeless, but we will be reminded next week that because God loved David so much, He would not leave him alone. He needed to face the truth. Please join us for a message titled Nathan's Confrontation next Saturday on Renewing Your Mind. Copyright © 2017 Mooji Media Ltd. All Rights Reserved. No part of this recording may be reproduced