Scripture: 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13
You are the man. You’re
the Man! In our culture today, this is a phrase that you want to be said about
you. The phrase can be used in many different ways, but it is almost always
good. A friend can say that “you’re the man” and they may mean that they think
you are fun to be around, or the life a party. If you helped someone to do
something, they may say, “you’re the man” as an informal way of saying thank
you. When applying for a job, the boss may tell you, “you’re the man” meaning
that you are the man that they want for the job. Whenever we hear someone say
that phrase about us, it makes us feel happy, appreciated, and respected.
However, in our scripture today, “you’re the man” is the last thing that David
wanted to hear come out of Nathan’s mouth.
To better understand what exactly is happening in our
scripture lesson today, we may need a little recap of what has happen just
prior to this. We start with the beautiful Bathsheba, bathing naked on a roof,
where David sees her and lusts over her. David uses his power as King, and
sends a messenger to get her, and when she comes he sleeps with her, and
Bathsheba becomes pregnant, and oh yeah did I forget to mention that Bathsheba
was married, and that her husband was away fighting in King David’s army? So David
invites Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband trying to convince him to sleep with his
wife, but he refuses because he is a noble soldier and sleeps outside out of
respect for all of his comrades who are still out in their tents fighting.
David even tries to get Uriah drunk so that he will sleep with Bathsheba, but
Uriah stays committed. So David, afraid that his deed will be found out, sends
Uriah back out to battle, puts him on the front line, and tells his commander
to pull back as they charge the enemy so that Uriah will be killed in battle.
That is exactly what happened, and so David takes the new widow Bathsheba to be
his wife, and the child is then born in
marriage.I don’t about you, but I don’t think that Jerry Springer has anything
on this story right out of the Bible.
And so that leads us to Nathan, a prophet of God and
someone who was well respected by David, telling David a parable. He tells him
that there was once a rich man who had a large amount of sheep and cattle, and
a poor man who owned only one poor lamb.
One day a traveler came to town, and it was the custom to prepare a meal
for the traveler out of hospitality, but the rich man refused to use one of the
many sheep or cattle that he had. Instead, the rich man went to the poor man,
took his only lamb, the lamb that the poor man loved so much, the only thing
that he had, and gave it to the traveler.
When David heard this story he was furious. He could not
believe that a rich man who had so much would take the only lamb the poor man
had. David was so angry he cried out, “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.” If there were ever a
foot-in-mouth moment this was it, because Nathan simply looks at David and
says, “You are the man!" Nathan goes on to tell him that the Lord will
make his house be filled with calamity, his wives will be given to other men,
for the whole nation to see, and now this child that he just had with
Bathsheba, was going to die; A very tough, embarrassing and painful punishment.
How did this happen, I mean this is David after all. This
is the King of Israel, the boy who with a small stone killed the giant Goliath,
the man who on multiple occasions was proclaimed to be favored by God, and
anointed as the King of Israel. This is one of the most revered men in the Old
Testament, still even to this very day, yet how could he do something like
that? As we read the story of Nathan
confronting David, it becomes quickly evident that David was somehow blinded to
the wrong that he was doing. That David so easily saw the despicable act of the
of rich man in the parable, and even called for that man’s death, yet David was
absolutely blind to the fact that he was that man. David was blind to his own sin
If the great King David, the man appointed by God to lead
all of Israel, can be blind to such an egregious sin, how much more likely are
we to be blind to our own sins? I was a psychology major at Randolph-Macon, and
I remember one of the things that we talked in one class, is how we perceive a
person’s actions. We are as humans usually will see a wrong action of another
person as something that is due to an internal character flaw. In other words
if someone does something bad, it is because they are a bad person. If we were
to do the same action however, we are far more likely to blame it on external
factors. We may say that we were provoked, or I wouldn’t have normally done
that, but because of __________ I had
to. We try to rationalize our sins, we tell ourselves that they are ok, or that
they weren’t that big of a deal, or we even ignore them so that we become blind
to our sins. We see both of this in the story, first David is blind to his own
sin, probably because he had rationalized it as being for love or some other
excuse, but then we also see David calling the rich man out on his sin, viewing
him as an evil man deserving of punishment.
So what does this passage tell us about how we should
live our own lives? It tells us two things. First, this warns us against
pointing the finger at someone else. It is so easy to see the faults in someone
else, and we love to tell people when they are wrong. We are quick to call for
the punishment of someone else, yet we are so slow when it comes to looking in
the mirror. The first thing that this Bible passage tells us, is that none of
us are blameless. That we need to be aware that so often we are pointing to the
faults and the sins of someone else, we are also pointing to our own faults and
sins.
That leads to the second to the second thing that this
passage teaches us, and that is that we need to truly reflect upon our own
sins. Instead of trying to hide from our faults, we need to stand in front of
that mirror and truly recognize our sins. When Nathan revealed to David that
the man in the story was David, David did not try to defend himself. He didn’t
try to rationalize why he did what he did, he simply said, “I have sinned
against the Lord.” David accepted his
sin, and accepted the punishment for his sin. When we look at ourselves in the
mirror and recognize our sins, we like David must also take responsibility for
the wrong that we have done, but at the same we do not look in the mirror to
demean ourselves, to berate ourselves, or to belittle ourselves, after all when
David confessed his sins Nathan replied, “The Lord has taken away your sins.”
We have a God of grace, so when we truly stand before our own sin, it so we may
change and lead a life more like the life of Christ. In Christ there is
forgiveness, in the Holy Spirit there is grace, but we must also do our part,
we need to face the man in the mirror and say, “You are the man.”
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