![]() ![]() Side note: I’d like to take a moment to appreciate the amazing gift God gives us in animals! Especially the ones who share our homes. The rich man had many flocks and herds the poor man had only one ewe lamb.” And this lamb ate from his table, slept in his bed, and was like a member of the family. Nathan tells the story: “There were two men in a city, one rich and the other poor. The parable is a study in opposites: rich vs. In answer to his prayers God gives him a message, which comes in the form of a parable. No doubt Nathan had heard the palace gossip about the affair – and no doubt he has been praying for David. I also notice Nathan does not approach David with guns blazing and moral outrage flaring. One wonders if maybe David was starting to think he’d gotten away with it somehow, that the crisis was past and everything was going to be OK? This conversation takes place after the marriage, after the child has been born, so it’s been close to a year since David first saw Bathsheba bathing on that rooftop. ![]() II Samuel 12 continues: “But the thing David had done displeased the Lord and the Lord sent Nathan to David.” (II Sam 12:1) It strikes me as strange that the Lord didn’t send Nathan the prophet right away. But it also meant she and her child would have a home and would be provided for. ![]() And it seems Bathsheba’s marriage to David was, at best, on his timetable rather than hers. All indications are she was honestly grieved at Uriah’s death: he had been a kind and loving husband to her. We don’t know whether she had consented to the affair in the first place we don’t know how she felt about David. We have no record of how Bathsheba felt about any of this. Our passage tells us ‘she became David’s wife’ and then ‘bore him a son’ in that order, which means Bathsheba was still in her year of mourning when David married her. In Jewish tradition the death of a spouse is usually grieved for a year, but the most intense period of grieving was the first 30 days – after which the person in mourning would slowly return to daily life. Scripture says David sent for her when her time of mourning was over – which was probably around 30 days later. ![]() She only knows she is alone and pregnant with no means of support. She has no way of knowing David is the one who ordered her husband’s death and she has no way of knowing that David has further plans for her. So last week we saw King David – a man who had been called “the man after God’s own heart” – breaking a majority of the Ten Commandments and seeming to get away with it.Īs our scene opens today, Uriah has just died, and Bathsheba is alone at home, grieving the loss of her husband. Side note: in that Uriah was an innocent man put to death by a conspiracy that was both illegal and immoral, and yet his death set in motion a series of events that would end up blessing the nation – in as much as that’s true, Uriah’s story foreshadows the story of Jesus, because Jesus also was put to death by a conspiracy that was both illegal and immoral, and yet his death brought blessing to the nation… and in fact to the whole world. And that’s where our scripture reading ended last week: on a very dark note. He had slept with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and she had gotten pregnant and when David’s attempt to cover up the affair failed, David sent word to Joab, commander of the army, and said “put Uriah where the fighting is the hardest and then draw back so he dies”. Last week I ended our sermon with the words “to be continued…” because when we left off last week, King David had just committed adultery and murder. ![]()
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