but strictness is the order of the day when the defendant has a long rap sheet and needs to be taught a lesson.
Divine justice is different. Since God is all-knowing he does not need to rely on the faulty memories of human witnesses or the difficult-to-decipher physical evidence. Rather, he can know absolutely what a person has done and what their intentions were. His wisdom is complete. His judgment is always on target. He says, “I know your works” (Rv 2:2), and the Bible also teaches that “before him no creature is hidden” (Heb 4:13). Again, this omniscience can be either frightening or relieving. While we talk about having to “give an account” to God, his all-seeing knowledge does not need our help. He will know what we’re going to say before it comes out of our mouth. The beauty of this divine justice is that it is perfect. No stone will be left unturned. No evidence will be left out. No one will walk away complaining about an unjust verdict or a biased judge. Instead, when we walk away from the divine “bench” or throne, we will all be satisfied with the result.
King David and Divine Justice
One biblical example of divine justice will help us think through the judicial power behind God’s throne: the story of David. David was the first great king of Israel. He firmly established the throne, fought off Israel’s enemies and was “a man after God’s own heart” (see 1 Sm 13:14). He was brave and just, holy and devout. It seemed that everything in his life was going right; he was destined to be a hero for God’s people! Yet even in the best of persons, sometimes things go awry. One year, during his reign as king, David sits out the battle season (2 Sm 11). Instead of going out with his courageous army, he stays at home at his palace. Then as he strolls along the roof of his palace, which overlooks the regular homes below, he notices a lovely naked woman bathing in her backyard. Desire consumes him. He acts before he thinks. He summons her and sleeps with her. He abuses his kingly authority, his appointment by God, the trust placed in him as king, by taking advantage of a woman with no royal status or political importance. Her husband was a soldier, out to battle with David’s army (absent David). When the woman, Bathsheba, tells David that she has become pregnant by him, he is horrified and tries to cover his tracks.
He invites Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, back from the battlefront. He asks him questions about the battle and suggests he go home and pay a visit to his wife. But Uriah can’t stand the thought of going home when his comrades are camping out and fighting a battle, so he sleeps in the barracks at the palace. When David invites him back and plies him with wine, Uriah still refuses to go home. David feels backed into a corner—his sin will be a public scandal if there is no denying the child is his—so he sends Uriah back to the battlefront. Devilishly, he sends a sealed message with Uriah to the commander at the front. The message is Uriah’s death warrant: it asks the commander to put Uriah’s unit in an untenable position in the battle and then draw back so that Uriah will be killed. In one fell swoop, David breaks a bunch of the Ten Commandments: he covets his neighbor’s wife, steals her, commits adultery, lies about his actions, murders, and dishonors God. Even though previously he had been so faithful to God, his sins are egregious. They demand justice. They require punishment.
However, being the king and chief judge has its perks. It is easy to be above the law. No one has judicial power over you. David sits on his royal throne untouched, that is, until God intervenes. The Lord sends Nathan the prophet to confront David.
Even though Nathan is a prophet of God, he must watch his steps before the king, especially one who has just murdered an innocent servant. Because of this, Nathan comes before David and simply tells a story. The story goes something like this: There was a rich man and a poor man. The rich man had a big house, lots of money, and lots of sheep and goats. The poor man had a little house and just one little lamb that he loved so dearly that it slept in his bed every night as a beloved pet. One day, the rich man had an out-of-town visitor, and he wanted to lay a big feast before him. But instead of using one of his own sheep, he went next door to the poor man’s house, took away the beloved pet lamb, and slaughtered it to feed to his guest. This vicious thief’s dinner roused David’s ire, and he cried out, “As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!” (2 Sm 12:5). With powerful poetic irony, David thus calls down a curse upon himself. To add icing on the cake and seal David’s guilt, Nathan points his finger at David and says, “You are the man!” (2 Sm 12:7).
I can imagine David’s face turning white as a sheet as the full realization of what has just happened strikes him. “If Nathan knows, everyone knows. I just cursed the man in the name of the Lord, but I am the man!” The judgment has been pronounced. David realizes that his toxic sins would be justly punished by death. The prophet lists David’s sins in detail and announces his punishment, yet Nathan actually has some good news: “you shall not die.” But it is worth looking in detail at what the punishment will be:
“Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. Thus says the LORD, ‘Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun. For you did it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.’” David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD.” And Nathan said to David, “The LORD also has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the LORD, the child that is born to you shall die.” (2 Sm 12:10-14)
In the drama of the story, David fasts and prays for the life of the baby born from the adulterous union, but it eventually dies of illness. After the baby’s death, David responds: “Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Sm 12:23).
The Punishment of David
Interestingly, the Lord forgives David but still punishes him. Many preachers use a baseball analogy to explain this one. If you’re in the backyard and hit a ball through your neighbor’s window, the neighbor might forgive you, but someone still needs to pay for the window. Here, the same principle is in play. David has broken his covenant with the Lord, “despised” him by his sinful actions. His violation of Bathsheba, his murder of Uriah, and his duplicity all need to be addressed and punished even though the Lord “has put away” his sin. The Lord does not inflict the death penalty on David but does punish him. Now David’s punishment bears some parsing. To me, it looks as if we actually have three distinct punishments: (1) the “sword” will afflict his descendants; (2) his wives will be publicly ravished by his “neighbor”; (3) the baby Bathsheba bore him will die. The weird thing about these punishments from a modern perspective is that none of them afflict David as an individual. Nothing touches him bodily, so we might think: “That’s unfair! All these other people get punished for David’s personal sin. How about David? Why doesn’t he get sick and die?” However, this observation overlooks the interpersonal connectedness of the ancient world and of traditional cultures today.
In these cultures, children and descendants are of paramount importance. They are the future. To harm my children, to afflict them in any way does more damage to me than to harm my body. Even in modern cultures, to threaten someone’s children is to threaten him or her. One needs only to think of action movies in which a child is held for ransom or a spy’s children are kidnapped in order to force an adult to fork over cash or otherwise capitulate. But in David’s case, the Lord’s “sword” threat is especially ominous. Just a few chapters earlier, the Lord had promised that David’s descendants would have an everlasting throne, but now they will have an everlasting sword. This raises a question: Does God want David to be afflicted? I think the answer is no, but David and his descendants will be afflicted as the due punishment, the logical outworking, even the natural consequence of David’s sin. In the same way that a person’s vices—whether smoking, drinking, drug use, et cetera—can harm his or her children, David’s sins will harm his family tree in a grievous way. In fact, as we read through the rest of Samuel and Kings, we see that indeed
