DAILY BYTE
The story of David and Bathsheba is not just a story about sex! It’s also a story about the tragic consequences that arise when self-destructive desires are indulged, when power is abused, when people (and especially women) are objectified, and when wrongdoing is covered over. It’s a story that reveals how small steps down the path of selfish behaviour can quickly lead to major consequences that can scar our lives forever.
For David it all began one sleepless night when he happened to see a beautiful woman bathing, and a deep sexual desire was aroused within him. If it had ended there, the shattering and devastation of many lives would have been avoided. But sadly, David allowed his desire to foment within him, and before he knows it he’s heading straight down the slippery slope into the abyss of immorality.
There’s an old country proverb that says that it’s one thing for the birds of temptation to fly over your head, but it’s another thing to let them build a nest in your hair. When tempting thoughts are entertained in our minds and nurtured in our hearts, they can grow until suddenly they acquire a driving force and power of their own. This is what happened to David.
Having seen Bathsheba’s beauty and wanting to have her, David abuses his kingly power in the worst possible way by having Bathsheba brought to him, and he sleeps with her. The next thing David hears is that Bathsheba is pregnant. Suddenly, one night of selfish sexual passion has become very complicated. Threatened with the possibility of his predatory sexual behaviour being exposed, David makes plans to cover his tracks. He tries to get Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, to sleep with her so that his paternity would be concealed, but those plans backfire. Eventually, the easiest solution for the king is to arrange for Uriah to be killed in battle. As the story is recorded in the bible, David has moved from being an insomniac to a murderer, responsible for devastating the life of an entire family.
How exactly does this happen? Well, the interesting thing about this chapter in the Bible is that God is never mentioned at all. The only reference to God in the whole of 2 Samuel 11 is in the very last verse when we read that “the thing David had done displeased the LORD.”
Jim Harnish writes, “The story becomes our story when we realize that it is ultimately about the apparent absence of God as a living, active, controlling presence in human life. David’s actions uncover the depths to which we can fall when we become so confident in our own powers that we no longer live out of a soul-centering experience of the presence of the living God.”
We may not have kingly power like David to take whatever we want, but there is the capacity within all of us, like David, to be lured down devastating paths of chaos and mayhem by our base desires, if we are not consistently deferring to God as the organizing centre of our experience.
David’s story is a warning to us all of what we are capable of, and it’s an encouragement to us to persevere in the daily spiritual discipline of keeping God at the front and centre of our lives.
PRAY-AS-YOU-GO
Gracious God, without you at the centre of my life I can so easily go astray, seduced by tempting sights and situations that seem so exciting but end up delivering heartache and disaster. Help me to keep trusting you and your ways as the organizing centre of my life. Amen.
FOCUS SCRIPTURE
2 Samuel 11:2-5
One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, "Isn't this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite?" Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. (She had purified herself from her uncleanness.) Then she went back home. The woman conceived and sent word to David, saying, "I am pregnant."
