Scripture Daily

Context No. 1503 of 4322 · 2 Samuel

Context · Reflection

2 Samuel 11:6-10: in context

6David sent to Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” Joab sent Uriah to David. 7When Uriah had come to him, David asked him how Joab did, and how the people fared, and how the war prospered. 8David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and wash your feet.” Uriah departed out of the king’s house, and a gift from the king was sent after him. 9But Uriah slept at the door of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord, and didn’t go down to his house. 10When they had told David, saying, “Uriah didn’t go down to his house,” David said to Uriah, “Haven’t you come from a journey? Why didn’t you go down to your house?”

David has committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of his soldiers, and she is now pregnant. To cover it up, David summons Uriah home from the war, hoping he will sleep with his wife and think the child his own. He asks Uriah about the fighting, then tells him to go down to his house and rest. But Uriah, loyal to his comrades still in the field, will not go home to comfort and his wife while the army is encamped in the open; he sleeps at the palace door instead. David's scheme has failed, and he will soon turn to something worse.

This passage shows how one sin drags a person into others. David's adultery was already done; but rather than confess it, he set about hiding it, and the hiding required deception, manipulation, the summoning of a loyal soldier to be used as an unwitting screen. When that scheme failed, David would go further still, to the murder of the very man he was here trying to deceive. This is the terrible logic of the cover-up: one sin, unconfessed, does not stay contained but multiplies, each attempt to hide it requiring a further sin, until a single fall has become a tangle of deception and, in David's case, murder. Sin concealed grows; sin confessed can be forgiven and end there. And notice the sharp contrast the passage draws between David and Uriah. Uriah, the foreigner, the soldier, will not enjoy the comforts of home while his fellows suffer in the field; his integrity is such that David's schemes cannot move him. His uprightness only throws David's corruption into sharper relief, the loyal soldier being manipulated by the king who has wronged him. There is a warning in the whole scene about the entangling nature of hidden sin. The moment to stop is at the first fall, by confessing it; every step taken to conceal it instead only deepens the tangle. Better the humiliation of confession than the ever-widening web of the cover-up.

When I have sinned, do I try to conceal it, and so drag myself into the further sins that hiding requires, or do I stop the tangle at the first fall by confessing it, knowing that sin concealed grows but sin confessed can be forgiven and end there?

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