10/25/2026 - "Shattered Facade" (2 Samuel 11:1-5, 26-27, 12:1-10)

Last week we talked about Joshua and Israel’s complicated relationship with God and with their own history. This week we are skipping forward hundreds of years to when Israel has become a full kingdom, with a king ruling over them. In our passage today that king is David, the second of three kings of the united kingdom of Israel.

If you’ve heard of David, you probably best know him for being a shepherd boy that took down a giant named Goliath with a sling and a stone. But his story kept going from there, and ultimately, he became king and in Scripture is often called one of the best kings Israel ever had.

But a good king hardly ever remains a good man. When Israel demanded a king to rule over them, the prophet Samuel warned them in 1 Samuel 8, saying:

“This is how the king will rule over you. He will take your sons, and will use them for his chariots and his cavalry and as runners for his chariot… He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, or bakers…He will take your male and female servants, along with the best of your cattle and donkeys, and make them do his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and then you yourselves will become his slaves! When that day comes, you will cry out because of the king you chose for yourselves, but on that day the Lord won’t answer you.”

And in our passage today we see that prophecy continue to be fulfilled, even by one of the supposed best kings of Israel.

Scripture: 2 Samuel 11:1-5, 26-27, 12:1-10

In the spring, when kings go off to war, David sent Joab, along with his servants and all the Israelites, and they destroyed the Ammonites, attacking the city of Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem.

One evening, David got up from his couch and was pacing back and forth on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone and inquired about the woman. The report came back: “Isn’t this Eliam’s daughter Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” So David sent messengers to take her. When she came to him, he had sex with her. Then she returned home. The woman conceived and sent word to David.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

(26-27)

When Uriah’s wife (Bathsheba) heard that her husband Uriah was dead, she mourned for her husband. After the time of mourning was over, David sent for her and brought her back to his house. She became his wife and bore him a son.

But what David had done was evil in the Lord’s eyes.

(12:1-10)

So the Lord sent Nathan to David. When Nathan arrived he said, “There were two men in the same city, one rich, one poor. The rich man had a lot of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing—just one small ewe lamb that he had bought. He raised that lamb, and it grew up with him and his children. It would eat from his food and drink from his cup—even sleep in his arms! It was like a daughter to him.

“Now a traveler came to visit the rich man, but he wasn’t willing to take anything from his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had arrived. Instead, he took the poor man’s ewe lamb and prepared it for the visitor.”

David got very angry at the man, and he said to Nathan, “As surely as the Lord lives, the one who did this is demonic! He must restore the ewe lamb seven times over because he did this and because he had no compassion.”

“You are that man!” Nathan told David. “This is what the Lord God of Israel says: I anointed you king over Israel and delivered you from Saul’s power. I gave your master’s house to you, and gave his wives into your embrace. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. If that was too little, I would have given even more. Why have you despised the Lord’s word by doing what is evil in his eyes? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and taken his wife as your own. You used the Ammonites to kill him. Because of that, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite as your own, the sword will never leave your own house.

~

So when Leigh saw what passage I was preaching on, she rightly said, “I’m not doing a children’s moment on that.”

Which made me laugh, because I first heard this story pretty young, maybe five or six years old, through a children’s TV show called VeggieTales.

VeggieTales is incredibly nostalgic for me and many other people raised in certain branches of Christianity. It was a TV series where a cast of various animated vegetables would act out Bible stories or stories with morals meant to help kids be better people.

So how did a kid’s show tackle this passage?

By making it about rubber ducks.

The episode based off of our passage today is called “King George and the Ducky,” and the story revolves around King George, who has more rubber ducks than he could ever need stealing a rubber duck from Thomas, a kid who only had one. There’s a whole lot more to it involving a pie war and an intermission where Larry the cucumber sings to his stuffed manatee, but I’ll leave you to look it up on YouTube and watch it if you want to.

As I was rewatching this episode in a fit of nostalgia, I realized that even though the details of the story have been drastically changed in order to make it more appropriate for young children, it held on to the same relationship and power dynamics in play in the Bible passage it’s working off of. As adults, we’re able to dig more deeply into those dynamics and see what we can learn from them.

One of the most important dynamics we need to talk about is a cultural one underpinning this entire story. And that is how the culture of the time viewed wives. Because we cannot talk about this story without acknowledging that wives were seen more along the lines of property, belonging to their husbands. A crime against them was treated in the eyes of the law and of the culture as a crime against their husbands.

Which is how you get Bathsheba being referred to as “Uriah’s wife” a majority of the time, and how you get Nathan able to use a lamb as a metaphor for her in his story. It’s also how you get a child version of the story told by vegetables where Bathsheba can be replaced by a rubber duck and yet still the story follows much of the same story beats.

But Bathsheba’s silence except for two words - “I’m pregnant” - is just as much a part of the story as is everyone else’s speech. It highlights how little power she has.

Oftentimes this story is portrayed as a consensual affair between David and Bathsheba; but the power difference between them makes it anything but. When the guards came to get her, there was no way she could tell them, tell the king, no. Who knows what they would’ve done to her had she not gone with them, had defied the king and his wishes?

We don’t know if Bathsheba was okay with this, because she didn’t have the choice to not be okay with it. The only thing she is able to do is refuse to let David forget what he’s done. And she does that when she tells him that she’s pregnant, and he can no longer ignore her and pretend like he never did anything to her. She is the person who cracks the facade of the perfect, good king, and begins to reveal that not everything is all right in the royal government.

David then goes to extreme measures to patch up those cracks in his facade and pretend that everything is still good, including orchestrating Bathsheba’s husband’s death so David can marry her. In fact for a few verses it seems as if he has gotten away with everything. He marries Bathsheba, and she gives birth to their son. Sure, there may have been some whispers about how quickly their son was born after they married, or maybe the guards who’d taken Bathsheba to the palace in the first place had told others about that day. But who was going to say anything against the king?

Enter Nathan, the prophet, whom God sends to confront David.

Most pastors, theologians and scholars think that this confrontation took place in private. But there’s actually nothing in Scripture that confirms this. So this confrontation could’ve also taken place in the audience hall. People would go to the king for mediation of disputes and to demand justice if they believed they had been wronged. So what if Nathan seeks an audience with the king when David is sitting in his audience chamber, already in the mindset of dispensing justice? He doesn’t tell David that the story he’s telling him about the poor man and the baby sheep is a metaphor; he makes it sound like this is actually a conflict he’s come across and is now bringing to David’s attention.

It’s only when David pronounces his judgement on the rich man, that Nathan reveals he’s actually just pronounced judgement on himself in front of his entire court, which is stunned into silence.

Bathsheba may have been the one to crack the facade that everything was fine, but Nathan is the one with the influence and position to speak up and fully shatter it. And if he did it in public, that means nobody else present can pretend that they didn’t know either.

We’re never told how Bathsheba felt about Nathan doing this.

There are some theologians who think that the way God sent Nathan to confront David is because Nathan talked to Bathsheba, and Bathsheba had confided in him about what had happened. Years later, Bathsheba and Nathan will work together again to establish Bathsheba’s son, Solomon, as David’s successor to the throne. So it seems as though they had a good relationship, and Bathsheba may have been the one to push Nathan to confront David.

But it’s also possible that Bathsheba wanted to just move forward, and she was mortified by what Nathan did. More than anything else we have to follow the wishes of the person or people who’re most harmed in these situations. If they also just want to move on and live their lives, then we should respect that.

So while we’re not sure how Bathsheba responded to Nathan’s confrontation, we do know how David responded. Verse 13 is a simple confession from the king: “I have sinned against the Lord.”

Maybe he’s sitting there stunned, realizing that for all of his power and wealth and effort to hide it, the truth still slipped its way into the light and refused to be ignored. And for all the lack of integrity David has had up until this point, he at least has enough of it left to not try one more lie to keep up the facade.

David’s thought to have elaborated on his confession in Psalm 51, which is one of the few Psalms that has a specific time and inciting event tied to it.

And at first glance, this is a Psalm of repentance, of somebody deeply sorry for what they’ve done, and is now crying out to God for forgiveness. It’s incredibly dramatic, with David even saying that he’s been in the wrong since before he was born. He’s not trying to put forth some doctrine of original sin here, although these verses have been used to support that idea. He’s writing poetry; he’s expressing how guilty he feels and how deep he thinks that guilt runs, all the way back to before he was born.

But he doesn’t stay on that for long; for most of the passage he’s asking God to restore him, to put him in a place where he can make these elaborate sacrifices to God and help others who have also gone astray as part of his repentance.

But throughout all of this, there’s someone really important missing. Bathsheba.

Nathan names David’s sin as despising the Lord and taking “Uriah’s wife” as his own. But David only focuses on the first part. He only admits to sinning against God. He only asks God for forgiveness. We have no record of him ever asking Bathsheba for forgiveness or trying to do anything to make it right with her. Instead his only focus is writing dramatic poetry and asking God to be able to do showy, public sacrifices and be able to help others without helping one of the people he hurt the most with his actions.

Unfortunately this is something we still see people do to this day. We see people who have power and influence that, when confronted with what they’ve done wrong, scramble to do everything they can to hide it. We’ve seen people try and hide their misdeeds so their facades of good politicians, business owners, and thought leaders aren’t cracked. We’ve seen universities try to sweep sins under the rug for students whose parents donate large sums of money, at the expense of students who don’t have that level of wealth, to keep up the facade of being a good school. And sadly we’ve seen churches and denominations push aside people who’ve been seriously hurt by priests, ministers, and leaders to keep up the facade of goodness and power.

And once the truth comes to light, they either try to downplay it, or they make these public showings of apologizing. For example, people and businesses might donate money to certain nonprofits as a kind of penance. Or they might post a very public apology on social media without first apologizing to the person or people they actually harmed, or trying to do something to make it right with then.

Their actions are really no different from what David wants to do here. They want to try and look like they’re doing the right thing without doing the hard work of apologizing and genuinely trying to make things right with the person they’ve hurt. But more than anything else, they want everyone else to just move on. Which is why some people and organizations also just shrug and ignore it in the hopes that it’ll go away.

But we don’t have to follow along with what they want.

We don’t have to be people who accept thin apologies. We can ask what somebody is doing to genuinely make things right, even if they can never fully fix the harm that has been done. We can be like Nathan when we find ourselves in positions where we can push back against the harm we see someone else doing.

And Nathan is just one person in Scripture who was willing to confront those in power when they’d done something wrong. Jesus did the very same thing during his time, pushing back against the religious leaders of his day when he thought they were causing more harm than good to their followers with their laws and policies.

Now we’re called to do the same. We all have spheres where we have more influence than in other places; whether that’s because we’re in leadership, or even just because we’re good friends or family with somebody. And it’s not always about marching into audience halls with kings and confronting them. It can be as small as calling out somebody for for a cruel comment, which can sometimes be more difficult depending on our relationship with the person.

But we have a responsibility to be the kind of people who speak truth, who speak up for those who cannot. Because while our words and actions may just be one crack in the facade, it will always be one step closer to shattering it. Then we can do the real work of reconciliation, healing, and building new ways where everyone can live and thrive. Just like God has called us to do.