"Who Do You Think You Are?”
Text: 2 Samuel 12: 1-10
About Prophets
As we launch on this new series The Prophets and the Powers, I need to start with some basics about prophets—who they are and what it is they do. Many people have the wrong idea about prophets. They think of prophets as foretellers of future events. While that element is there, it is not a major part of being a prophet of God. I’ll suggest that prophets are four things: Truth-tellers, Word-bearers, Critics, and Poets.
Truth Tellers
Every society needs truth tellers—people who speak what is absolute into the messiness of human opinions. Today, sophisticates don’t even believe in capital T truth. Rather there are your truths and my truths, and if they are at odds they are still both true enough. For these types, truth is just one perspective among others and who is to say that your truth is better than mine. We need truth tellers today more than ever.
It is this absence of truth—more than any other single factor—that is directly responsible for the erosion of morality. Because if there is no absolute truth, then there is just your morality and my morality, which can be light-years apart from each other and yet both moral enough that we should accept both as equally legitimate. But truth and falsehood must never be placed on the level.
Scripture is all about truth with a capital T. The center of the Bible is the self-revelation of the one, true God who is absolutely true; and the absolute falseness of the gods we invent for ourselves. And the prophets railing against idolatry is a proclamation of the truth of the one, true God.
Telling the truth comes as a warning to those living against truth. Those doom and gloom prophecies are not always mystical predictions. Sometimes they are simply the foresight of the logical consequences of the people’s present sin.
So prophets are truth tellers. They tell the truth whether the people like it or not.
Word-Bearers
Prophets are also word-bearers. They bear the word of God to the people. That is their job, their calling, and their most basic job description: present the Word of God to the people.
Through the mouths of the prophets, God reveals His love and mercy by promises and warnings. God’s word is spoken by the prophets.
Prophets also bear the Word of God who is Jesus Christ by planting every hope and expectation into the people so they would celebrate His arrival.
Prophets are those who bear God’s Word to the people.
Critics
Prophets are also critics. As Word bearers, they were not purveyors of personal opinions—what they personally thought of things doesn’t play into their role. They certainly felt passionate conviction for the things they shared, but those things were from God and not themselves.
They called the people to correction, but the course of corrections was not their own.
Their criticisms articulated how the people had gone wrong, how they had strayed from God and thereby became immoral, ugly, or unclean. As critics, they named human falseness and called people to realign themselves with God who made them and loves them.
Poets
And fourthly, the prophets were poets. It is clear that they often were unaware that their utterances were prophetic as they made them, as with many of David’s psalms. David’s songs were not written as prophecy, but they were rich in prophetic content nonetheless, and cited for their prophetic power hundreds of years later. David may have thought he was just writing a song, but he ended up proclaiming the Messiah fulfilled in Jesus.
Others—Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, and more—regularly wrote their prophecies as complex poetry. Not simple, rhyme-y poems, but deep utterances inspired by the Holy Spirit.
If we can think of David and his shepherd songs like a Bob Dylan type, we can think of Isaiah and Jeremiah as T.S. Eliot types. This means that many of the prophets’ utterances are difficult and must be meditated upon thoughtfully and prayerfully.
You can take most of what the Old Testament prophets said and boil it down to a couple of basic messages:
1. Stop it with the idols!
2. Worship The LORD only.
But because people are people, it needed to be said ten-thousand times in a thousand ways. It’s no different today. There is no one way to preach, teach, or proclaim the good news of Jesus. There is plenty of room for style.
The prophets spoke God’s truth to power. Pharaoh, foreign armies, kings, the wealthy, the popular masses, and/or the whole collective of humanity—all are powers God sent prophets to address and correct.
Today, God’s truth is spoken to King David, a man after God’s own heart, by a prophet named Nathan.
DAVID RECAP
Now, just to bring you up to speed about David, let me remind you that he was a man after God’s own heart. The prophet Samuel sought him out. He was an underdog, the last of seven sons, a shepherd, a guitar player.
Again and again he proved his love and loyalty for God. He trusted in God when non one else did (remember the story of Goliath?). He demonstrated integrity and mercy even toward Saul who constantly fell into corruption. David sought to glorify the Lord rather than himself in all he did. As king, he was successful in his rule and very much loved.
But power corrupts, and once David decided he had to have Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, corruption got the best of him. David, this man after God’s own heart, as king had the power to summon Bathsheba to himself. After having his way with her, he calls on her husband Uriah and tries to finagle him into a deceptive cover-up.
But Uriah is a man of integrity; he won’t relax at home while his brothers-in-arms, the other soldiers, are still sleeping in the field with the mission yet unaccomplished. Uriah is conscientious and noble.
David plies him with wine, but to no effect. So the next day, David sends good ol’ Uriah the front lines with a letter to general Joab.
11:15 “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.”
And Uriah did die, and Bathsheba was now—as a widow—fair game for David, who took her as his wife. The prophet sent to speak the truth to the power was Nathan. Here’s how Nathan did it:
2 Samuel 12: 1-10
1 and the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him, and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. 2 The rich man had very many flocks and herds; 3 but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meager fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. 4 Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him.” 5 Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man. He said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; 6 he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” 7 Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; 8 I gave you your master’s house, and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more. 9 Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. 10 Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. †
NATHAN TACT
Anyone near David would have seen him taking advantage of his powerful position, but for most worldly kings, this kind of thing would have been the norm. But for God’s people, this was an abomination.
The vehicle for Nathan’s prophecy was a parable. David has eyes to see and ears to hear, so the story turns David into indignant rage over the injustice of the thing.
Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nathan can say, “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king!”
Nathan could have just shown up and wagged his finger in David’s face saying “Who do you think you are? Sinner! Sinner!” David might have had his head for it.
Or Nathan could have rounded up the local gossips and unemployed young adults to form a mob and stage a march outside the palace, making a big scene to get attention and somehow leverage the king into admitting his guilt. But this kind of thing rarely works with kings.
Nathan possessed a virtue which is long in decline: tact. To be tactful doesn’t mean to be calculating or scheming, but discreet, subtle, sensitive, prudent, and refined in one’s approach. The tactful person continues to honor the one he or she corrects. To be tactful means to be thoughtful and mindful in what one does. Tact refuses to demonize others—even the nastiest of sinners—so it honors God by honoring the image of God in others.
This seems a far cry from much of America right now. People who would set themselves up in the role of prophet to rail against one injustice or another usually fail when it comes to refinement. They are neither discrete nor sensitive, neither prudent nor refined. They rush to judgment and love to sling the F word at every possible opportunity. They are on both sides of the political fence, and the word that characterizes their self-righteous advocacies is hostility, the opposite of tact. They speak the truth to power in hatred and vileness. As such, these prophets are false prophets. They do not bear the Word of God, but their own word as if it were the Word of God. But we’ll consider that more when we get to Elijah in this series.
Nathan, in dealing with David, exercised admirable tact. By couching his critique in a parable, he awakened David’s righteous conscience. It was a short step from there to get David to make the connection. “You are the man!” says Nathan, and rather than fortifying David’s denial or resistance, David immediately falls into repentance. This is the ideal outcome.
Nathan spoke the truth in love, even when the power he addressed was completely, deeply sinful—totally in the wrong. It was loving not to scold or harangue David (we know that never works, don’t we?). He clearly had thought through his options and with great tact—gentleness and excellent style—helped David toward both the acknowledgement of his sin and the ability to experience the horror of his own injustice, which led to repentance.
Nathan speaks the truth in love because doing so it redemptive. It addresses David’s evil in a way designed to win David back to God and to good.
TACT IS A BETTER WAY
Tact is a better way to deal with others as well, even in the home—especially in the home. A colleague of mine was a nationally-known and respected leader of youth ministry. HIs books and resources equipped tens of thousands of youth ministers in this country and around the world. One night his son, a high-schooler, came home three hours late so intoxicated that he couldn’t open the front door of the house. My friend and his wife heard him trying to get in so they both went to the door and opened it. The boy fell on the floor. As my friend tells it, he was enraged at his son. He had steam blasting out of his ears, he was so mad.
His instinct was to stand his son up on his feet and blast in his face: “WHAT ON EARTH WERE YOU THINKING! WHY HAVE YOU BEEN DRINKING? WHO WERE YOU WITH? EXPLAIN YOURSELF! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? DON’T YOU REALIZE THAT I PUT A ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD BY HELPING OTHER YOUTH PASTORS TO GUIDE THEIR KIDS? DON’T YOU SEE THIS IS THE WORST POSSIBLE THING YOU COULD HAVE DONE TO US AND TO YOURSELF! WHAT KIND OF CHRISTIAN—“ on and on went the thoughts in hi head.
His wife saved the day—and perhaps her son’s life. As they struggled to hold their beloved son on his feet, she looked to my friend and calmly smiled, and then began to chuckle, because my friend, the boy’s father, wasn’t much different when he was in high school. The voices in his head—his desire to rage—was likely his own father’s voice raging at him years before.
So here’s what they did. They helped their son get undressed and into bed. They pulled the blinds, turned off the alarm clock, and put a do-not-disturb sign on his door. They put a bucket beside the bed. They let him sleep in till noon. His mother made his favorite breakfast: eggs, bacon, and waffles with a big glass of orange juice with a couple of aspirin on the side.
At noon, my friend and his wife slowly, gently made their way into their son’s room, set out the beautiful breakfast, and slowly opened the blinds. The boy woke up, looking like death warmed over, and sat up to see his gently smiling parents, who kindly encouraged him to eat.
The son, who later became a youth pastor, said it was the most uncomfortable meal of his life. He was waiting for his dad to lower the boom, but the boom never came down. He know he had made a mistake. He knew he owed his parents explanations, but he also said, “that one meal changed my life more than any other.”
When it comes to effective truth-telling, not all ways are equal. Not all are equally efficient or equally good. We should seek to do what is redemptive in approaching the realities of injustice and sin in the world. Our aim is not to be right, but to be helpful and useful in the fulfillment of God’s will.
It is clear that Nathan did not react—he did not simply shoot from the hip—but rather he assembled a presentation that would do David good and enable him to continue what he was already great at: integrity and glorifying God. It is far more excellent to find the path of redemptive outcomes, and doing so glorifies God who is quick to forgive the sinner who repents.
That is the good news to you and me as well. God is quick to forgive sinners who repent and return to their one, true Lord.