Thou Shalt Not Die

The objection, at full strength. A man arranges the death of one of his own soldiers to cover what he did to that soldier's wife, is found out a year later by a prophet with a story about a lamb, says six words, and is told the matter is closed. Uriah stays dead. A court behaving that way would be called corrupt, and rightly.

The chapter never presents it as cheap. Before the pardon: the sword shall never depart from thine house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes. For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all Israel. Every clause came true, and David lived through all of it. After it, the line that has broken more readers than anything else in the book: the child also that is born unto thee shall surely die. He lies on the ground seven nights: Who can tell whether GOD will be gracious to me, that the child may live. The child dies, a reason is given for it, and the reason has never made the funeral sit easily with anybody.

Augustus Toplady printed a hymn in 1776 with a line few singers have asked about. Be of sin the double cure, save from wrath and make me pure. Two requests, because they are two things: the record, and the man. David gets the first in one sentence out of Nathan's mouth, thou shalt not die. The second takes the rest of his life, in public, badly, with his own sons eventually doing to his house what he did to Uriah's.

You put away David's sin in a sentence and you did not put away the funeral. We would like those two facts to lie down together and they will not, and we are not going to pretend otherwise this morning. What we will not do is use the second as a reason to disbelieve the first. Say over us what Nathan was given to say. And where the damage is still standing, in houses we have been inside, put us there to carry some of it rather than to explain it. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 220 is Cleansed from All Sin (1 John 1:7).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two