I can not wait to meet King David. He is one of my most favorite people in the Bible, "a man after God's own heart."
Up to this point in 2 Samual we have seen the triumphs of David, but now we are going to see the troubles of David. The story starts with "In the spring of the year, when kings normally go to war," ok, let's stop right there. A season to go to war? Yep. If you are a list person, Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8 is the list of lists laying out times for every season and thing.
King David knew that it was time for war, but he sent out Jab and the Israelite army to fight the Ammonites, but he stayed behind in Jerusalem.
The first question that I have is why did he stay back? He was a great warrior. This was not like David at all. Maybe it was because of his beautiful comfy new palace. Or perhaps the thought of living out in the caves during battle didn't sound so thrilling to him anymore, whatever it was the Bible does not say why, but he stayed.
So David was at a place and time where he shouldn't have been.
Before I move on, I've never really thought of this, but I always blamed David at this point in this story. Anyway, now we have Bathsheba. She decides to take a bath on the rooftop (keep in mind that her husband Uriah has gone off to war). My next question is, what was Bathsheba doing bathing on the roof? She had to have known that her rooftop could be seen from the palace, right?!
Bathsheba wasn't entirely innocent.
As the story progresses, (this is what I call the shovel part of the story because David keeps digging and digging deeper and deeper holes for himself) David's attempt to cover his sins gets worse and worse. The choices that he makes will affect his future and his family's future to come.
My takeaway from this portion of the reading is how sin always starts out small, seemingly meaningless, or even fun, but before we know it, we are in a place where we were never meant to be. Ultimately David could have looked away, to turn from his sin. Bathsheba could have used the indoor bathroom, but they didn't, and that began a legacy of pain and destruction for David and his family for years to come.