David & Bathsheeba (2 Samuel 11)

The comparison that seems to fit best for me is with the Profumo affair in Britain, which ultimately brought down the MacMillan government.

Those who remember the story will remember the character of Christine Keeler – the high-class call-girl who became sexually involved with both John Profumo, the British Minister of War, and with Soviet Naval attaché Eugene Ivanov.

I was there when the story broke in 1963, living in Britain. Unfortunately, I don’t remember a great deal of it, as I was only 1 year old.

But the thing I remember about the story, and the reason I find it relevant to today’s story, is what has been related to me about how the whole ‘Profumo Affair’ began. Apparently the Ministers were taking a break from a rather intense cabinet meeting of some sort, and Profumo and others were standing out on a balcony overlooking a swimming pool. Profumo saw a girl bathing in the pool and asked an attaché ‘who is that’? The attaché replied ‘I don’t know... but I’ll find out.’

That’s where the problem starts. It’s when it all still seems quite harmless. It’s when you just seem to be playing with the edge of the flame. It’s when you decide to just take it one step further. It’s when someone says ‘I’ll find out’ and you just nod your head, or just remain silent – do nothing, because what could be more harmless than doing nothing!

This is how it all began for John Profumo, and how it all began for David – a sordid, bloody mess that would end up in death and murder and threaten the collapse of David’s entire kingdom – all beginning with David’s simple question ‘who is that bathing on the rooftop?’, and his aide saying something like ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out’.

There’s a punch line in this whole story of course – this story of treachery, deceit, adultery and murder. The punch line is that the chief villain in the story is David - God’s own guy!

And we don’t just mean that David was God’s own guy before this all happened. Nor that he was God’s own guy after he repented of everything that happened. The fact that he repented might have reflected the fact that he was God’s own guy, but the truth of the matter is that he was God’s own guy before and after, and therefore also in the middle of all this mess. Even while he was busy lying, stealing, fornicating and murdering, he was still God’s own guy – ‘the man after God’s own heart’.

Nobody in the history of the Bible, apart from the Lord Himself, is remembered so affectionately, so lovingly and so idealistically as David. ‘Son of David’ they called Jesus, and no higher title could be accorded a person. ‘Son of David’ in the Hebrew mind was indeed almost synonymous with ‘Son of God’.

How can this be? Saul, David’s predecessor, was also a man with problems, but his failings, we would surely think, pale into insignificance alongside this adulterous and murderous rampage. And yet we’re told that Saul was not God’s own guy, but that David was! One the one hand this has me thinking ‘Thank God, there’s hope for us all’. But on the other hand I’m thinking ‘If David can do all this and still be God’s own guy, how are we supposed to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys?’