Thou Art the Man
Nathan, David, and the four words that saved a king
This is not a story about a king who fell. Kings fall on every page of every history. It is a story about what God does with a man who has done the worst thing he will ever do, has hidden it well, and has almost got away with it. It has a roof, a letter, a lamb, and four words. And it ends with a psalm the church has been praying for three thousand years, because the man who wrote it had nowhere left to stand.
The roof
It begins with a sentence that already knows something is wrong. "And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel… But David tarried still at Jerusalem" (2 Samuel 11:1). The time when kings go to battle, and the king stayed home. The man who killed a giant with a sling, who spent years sleeping in caves, who once refused to take the throne when it was one sword-stroke away, is on his roof in the evening with nothing to do.
He sees a woman washing. He asks who she is, and the answer he gets is a warning wearing the shape of an answer: "Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?" (11:3). A daughter and a wife. Two men's names, one of them a soldier who is at that moment in the field, fighting the king's war. David sends for her anyway. The text does not slow down: "and he lay with her… and she returned unto her house" (11:4). Then the one sentence she sends back: "I am with child" (11:5).
The letter
What follows is the part the Sunday school version leaves out, and it is the part that matters, because it shows how far a good man can go once he has decided not to be found out. David calls Uriah home from the front, hoping he will sleep with his wife and the child can be passed off as his. Uriah will not go home. He sleeps at the palace door with the servants, and when David asks why, he says he cannot lie in his own bed while the ark and the army are in tents. David gets him drunk. He still will not go home. The Hittite mercenary keeps a loyalty the king has abandoned.
So David writes a letter. "Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die" (11:15). And he seals it, and he hands it to Uriah to carry to Joab. The man walks back to the war with his own death warrant in his hand, and does not open it, because he is faithful. When the news comes back that Uriah is dead, David sends a message to his general that ought to make the blood run cold: "Let not this thing displease thee, for the sword devoureth one as well as another" (11:25). These things happen. Then he marries the widow. And the chapter ends with the only verdict anyone has spoken so far: "But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD" (11:27).
Notice what David has not done. He has not confessed. He has not been caught. Nobody at court will say a word, because he is the king, and because it worked. Months pass. The child is born. And a man who once could not sleep for guilt, who wrote that when he kept silence "my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long" (Psalm 32:3), has learned to sleep.
The lamb
"And the LORD sent Nathan unto David" (12:1). Not the prophet's idea. God's. And Nathan does not walk in and accuse. He walks in and tells a story, the way you tell a king a story, and the king, who has been a shepherd, leans in.
"There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him" (2 Samuel 12:1-4).
And David, who has not felt anything in months, feels something. "As the LORD liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die: And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity" (12:5-6). He is furious. He passes sentence. He even quotes the law about the fourfold restitution. He is entirely right about the rich man, and he has no idea who the rich man is. That is what a hidden sin does: it does not make you stop caring about justice. It makes you care about it for everyone but yourself.
Four words
"And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man" (12:7).
In Hebrew it is two words, attah ha-ish. The king has just pronounced the death sentence, and the prophet has just told him whose it is. Then God speaks, and what He says first is not the crime. It is the gifts. "I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul; And I gave thee thy master's house… and if that had been too little, I would moreover have given unto thee such and such things" (12:7-8). If that had been too little. The rich man with exceeding many flocks was never short of anything. Only then the charge: "thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife" (12:9). Chrysostom saw what the order means: David was reproved more severely precisely because he had been given so much, "that even when he had enjoyed such security, he was like this."
And then the consequences, which are real and which are not cancelled by anything that follows: the sword will not depart from his house, and what he did in secret will be done to him before all Israel. Every word of it came true. Amnon, Absalom, the civil war, the son who dies. Forgiveness is not the same thing as the harvest being cancelled. It is something else, and David is about to find out what.
What David said
Here is the hinge of the whole story, and it is short. "And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD" (12:13). No excuse. No "the woman was on the roof." No "Uriah was a Hittite." No reminder that he is the king and Nathan is not. Saul, when Samuel caught him, argued for three verses and then asked to be honoured in front of the elders. David says five words and stops.
And Nathan's answer is faster than the confession. "The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die" (12:13). The same verse. Not a week of penance first, not a sacrifice, not a probation. The king had said "the man shall surely die," and God says "thou shalt not die," in the same breath as the confession, because the confession was real.
“Hear him crying, and with him cry: hear him groaning, and with him groan; hear him weeping, and mingle tears; hear him amended, and with him rejoice. If from thee sin could not be excluded, be not hope of pardon excluded. There was sent to that man Nathan the prophet, observe the king’s humility. This David could not say, ‘Ignorant I did it.’”
St. Augustine, on Psalm 51 · c. 410The psalm
We know what David did that night, because he wrote it down, and the heading on the psalm says when: "when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba." It is Psalm 51, and it is the prayer of a man with nowhere left to stand.
"Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight" (Psalm 51:1-4).
Against thee only. He had sinned against Bathsheba, against Uriah, against Joab whom he made an accomplice, against the whole army. But he had learned on the roof that every one of those was first a sin against the God who gave him everything and would have given more. So he asks for the one thing he cannot do for himself: "Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me" (51:10). Create is the word from the first verse of Genesis. Nothing less would do. And he knows now what God wanted all along, which was never the lamb: "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise" (51:17).
The child dies. David fasts and lies on the ground for seven days while it is sick, and then, when it is over, he gets up, washes, and goes to the house of the LORD and worships. His servants cannot understand it. He tells them: "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me" (12:23). Then he goes to Bathsheba, and comforts her, and "she bare a son, and he called his name Solomon: and the LORD loved him" (12:24).
Where this lands
A thousand years later a genealogy was written down, and it did not clean this up. "David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias" (Matthew 1:6). Matthew could have written "of Bathsheba." He wrote "the wife of Uriah," so that no one reading the family line of Jesus Christ could miss what was in it. The Son of David comes down through the roof, the letter, and the lamb.
And Paul, when he needed one man to show what it means to be counted righteous without earning it, reached for this one: "Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works, Saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered" (Romans 4:6-7). David is the example. Not David the giant-killer. David the man Nathan found.
That is the story. A man does the worst thing he will ever do, and hides it, and God sends someone to tell him a story until he says the four words to himself. Then five words back: I have sinned against the LORD. Then forgiveness in the same verse. The consequences still came, every one. And the child of that marriage was in the line of the Christ, who would one day stand before another accuser, with no sin of His own, and take the sentence David had pronounced on the rich man. Thou art the man, Nathan said. And on a hill outside Jerusalem, for David and for everyone who has ever said those five words, He was.
Related: The Word He Used Only Once, Repentance, Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me, and The Bored Ear. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.