1 Peter 3:15 and then David and Bathsheba

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings. Welcome to the Dividing Line. We're going to sneak a quick program in here today.

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I mentioned that we weren't going to do any more this week because I was supposed to be landing in Australia about now, but that didn't work.

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And we're going to give another shot today and just pray that I can adjust to the time differences.

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It's weird going that direction. There's just something about it. It's easier for me to go that direction and that direction.

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I go the other direction and I end up 17 hours ahead or seven hours behind the day ahead.

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So it's just weird. It's a 15 and a half hour flight once I leave LAX, but it's a whole lot more than that because I've got to fly to LAX first and have enough time to transfer.

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I hate LAX. LAX just stinks. But anyway, that's neither here nor there.

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And do pray for my Uber driver. I Ubered home after I couldn't get on the plane. And it turned out he was a

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Roman Catholic and had lots of good questions and heard all about justification and how to have peace with God and everything else.

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So pray for my Uber driver. So that, hey, if you're going to get stuck, you might as well make something good come out of it.

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We're going to look at Dave and Bathsheba for most of the program, but I was preaching

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Sunday morning and I made a mistake. I should remember this.

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I didn't remember it. I didn't deal with it. It's not that it changed a whole lot.

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It's just that I should remember things like this and should remember to talk about it.

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And all of us, if you are in a mixed translation church, this is an example of why we have to keep in mind the fact that people have different translations.

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I think that 1 Peter 3 .15 is a very important text, not only in the apologetic field, but in demonstration of the reality of the deity of Christ.

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But it has a textual variant in it, and it's a textual variant that is pretty much divided along the lines of the older text versus the, well, okay, what we used to call the

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Alexandrian versus Byzantine divide, but it's basically the text of the first millennium versus the text of the second millennium.

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It's pretty much how it divides out as far as the manuscripts are concerned.

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It becomes, there is a reading that becomes the majority in the Byzantine that just simply doesn't reflect what is found not only in the oldest manuscripts, but also in a number of the earlier translations as well.

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And that is, I think, important. I'm going to keep the, I'm going to use just the Nessie Olin UBS to give us more information.

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I don't know if this, if you've got anything you do. Oh, okay, good. We didn't check that beforehand. But basically, this is the text where apologists get their discussion of apologetics from.

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Sanctify Christ is Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give and account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence, and keep a good conscience.

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So in the thing in which you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ we put to shame. Now, I regularly do a sermon on this subject where I go back and demonstrate, and you can see it here in Nessie Olin 28.

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Let me blow this up just even a little bit more so that we have clarity on the on the screen.

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In the Nessie Olin text, this is how you see

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Old Testament citations. The Greek is in italics. You'll notice numeric and standard over here.

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You have the all caps, which worked until the electronic age, and now part of the

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New Testament is yelling at you. But I like seeing it.

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And here's the issue. Even in the Nessie Olin, notice that they have the italics for the word

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Lord and the word to sanctify or treat as holy. So 1st

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Peter 3 .15, Korean, the singular accusative of Koryos, Deiton Christon Hagiacete Enteis Cardeis Humon.

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So the Lord Christ, I was using that actually as my text up there, and all of a sudden it got very small.

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The Lord, and then you'll notice it's two accusatives. The Lord who is the

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Christ, the Lord Christ, separate out or treat as holy in your hearts.

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Now that's not super smooth, and that may be why a variant has occurred, but the point is that we have a quotation here from the

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Tanakh, from the Old Testament, indicated even by the editors, that goes into verse 15.

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But notice the New American Standard does not put sanctify or Lord in all caps.

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So I've pointed out to folks, we are thankful in our

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English language translations to generally have indicators given to us when we have a citation from the

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Old Testament. The Russian Synodal Bible, when I was in Samarra earlier this year, the

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Russian Synodal Bible does not even indicate the Tetragrammaton. There is no indication in Russian when you're even looking at the

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Tetragrammaton in the Old Testament. And when we see L -O -R -D in all caps in our

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Old Testaments, that is the English Bible translator's way of indicating that the text says

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Yahweh. Well, if you go back to Isaiah 8, this is a text concerning Yahweh.

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It is Yahweh whom you are to treat holy in your hearts. And I'm not sure why, since this is, so this means this is a quotation, once again, from the

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Greek Septuagint, that vilified version that was in the

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Bible of the early Church. Here you have Peter drawing from the

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Old Testament a text about Yahweh and saying that it is the

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Lord, the Messiah, whom you shall treat as holy in your hearts, always being ready to give an answer.

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There is pros apologion right here, pros apologion, toward a defense.

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There's where we get apologetics, etc., etc. So, here's the point.

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I kept rendering it. I was looking at the Greek, and I may have had,

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I think it was the NASB, it was at the bottom of my screen on my iPad, and I forgot that this isn't what the

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King James says. Why doesn't the King James say that?

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Well, let's scroll the textual material up here so we can see it. There we go.

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So, here's the textual material. Right here is your variant, right there is that an indication of the variant, right there.

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Here's the data for the variant over here. And so, the text is read by P72, which is our earliest manuscript of 1st, 2nd

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Peter, and Jude, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, most of the major unseals.

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This here, Psi, is from Mount Athos. It is 044 is its number.

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I can tell you this only because I was just looking at a dissertation that was just released that, of course,

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I had to grab hold of because it is on CBGM, and it has some data in it that the rest of us have not been able to see it from.

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It's from the upcoming Gospel of John volume that's being worked out in Birmingham.

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It's from John chapter 6. All of that to say that this particular manuscript from the 9th, 10th century has been elevated in the view that people have of its reliability and importance in light of CBGM analysis.

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So, this is going to be something, again, I just mentioned this in passing, we are in the midst of a textual critical revolution.

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There are some people running the other direction from it. So long, have fun! But we are in the middle of a textual critical revolution with the application of CBGM to the rest of the

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New Testament, and there are going to be more times where manuscripts that in the past maybe were not looked on as being as important as they are.

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It looks like this one, which is a Greek capital letter Psi, 044 in just a numerical catalog, will be seen as more relative and important.

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And what's interesting about that is right there. If you're familiar with New Testament manuscripts, 1739 is a somewhat contemporaneous, a little bit later, but around the same general same time period as Psi.

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But people have recognized that it in 1881 are manuscripts that were copied from extremely early manuscripts.

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So, the point is also you have early translations, Syriac to Coptic, some of the early

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Latin versions as well. And so, the term

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Christ is definitely the earliest reading that you see in the manuscript tradition.

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P here, I think, is 9th century, similar to this one here.

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But if you look at these, this is most definitely a later reading, even though since it has

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BYZ there, it is probably the majority reading. But again, any

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Byzantine readings could be the majority reading because of history. Manuscripts were produced in Byzantium all the way up to the fall of Byzantium in the middle of 15th century.

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They were not being produced at nearly the same rate in other places, both in the West where Latin had taken over and North Africa and other places where Islam took over in the 8th century.

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So, here's the point. The reading of the Byzantine manuscripts is

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Theon. So, Kurion de Tan Theon, sanctify

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Yahweh as God in your hearts. But it would literally be the

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Lord as God in your hearts. Well, who is the

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Lord? Well, Christan tells us exactly who we're talking about.

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But that is what you would call the more difficult reading for any scribe.

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It's difficult to translate, and it's striking to say, to identify

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Tan Christan with the term Kurios in the context of a citation from the

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Old Testament. Maybe in some other context where you're not directly quoting from the Old Testament, but in this instance, it is a striking thing.

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And so, my reading of the text is that the earliest and by all the canons of textual critical analysis, the best reading is

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Christan. Well, I forgot to mention during the sermon that variant.

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And so, there were people in the audience that only had the King James. I had no idea what I was talking about when

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I kept talking about the Messiah, the Messiah, the Messiah, the Christ. And I talked to a fellow afterwards, and I felt badly.

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And part of it, quite honestly, was that that was the, you know, atheism debate

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Thursday night, Alma Allred Friday night, conference

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Saturday morning, Lee Baker Saturday night, Sunday school in that morning.

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This was the last thing I was doing, and it just did not even once cross my mind, did not even once cross my mind.

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So, sorry about that to you folks. But very important.

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No, we are not going to be the ones who are going to point at the King James Version and say that the King James took

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Christ out of the Bible and is trying to hide the deity of Christ. No. Yes, that's exactly what would be done by the other side if that were the case.

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Yeah, of course, we don't do that, and the other side does, and I'll just leave that at that.

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But I should have grabbed the text out of my, yeah, yeah,

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Theon, Korean Dae Tan Theon is the reading of the TR at that point.

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So, just as we had to deal with Kamiohaniom and things like that over the weekend, here's an example of a textual variant that is relevant.

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You can go ahead and pull that down. It is relevant, and it is between really looking at the oldest text and then what we have in the later text, which became the traditional text.

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Okay, evidently, back on about six days ago,

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Matt Smethurst, or Smethurst, I'm not, sorry

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Matt, don't know how to, I haven't heard your last name pronounced before, so it could be either one, depending on what your genetic background is, put out a tweet, and it said,

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Adam fell, Noah got drunk, Abraham lied, Jacob cheated, Moses murdered, Rahab prostituted,

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David fornicated, Jonah fled, Thomas doubted, Peter denied, Paul persecuted, we rebelled, and Jesus redeems.

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And Rachel Denhollander responded, replying to Matt Smethurst, David raped.

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It's important to get that right. As far as I can tell, that's what started all of this.

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I mean, maybe there was something else. I don't know. This was while we were up in Salt Lake City, I could not follow all of it.

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Maybe I'm missing some stuff. But a few people pushed back and it's like, why do you say that?

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Well, it's easy to understand why that would be said. But what

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I'd like to do is I would like to look at the relevant text, and just instead of having a

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Twitter war with people, think about this. I mean, I'd never heard anyone use that terminology before.

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I'd never in my entire life heard anyone make that accusation, but it's not a situation

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I've spent a whole lot of time considering. If you're not familiar, it's in 2 Samuel chapter 11.

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In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab and his servants with him, and all

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Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah, but David remained at Jerusalem.

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Now, immediately I've, you know, I have heard sermons on this. I've never preached on it myself, but I have heard sermons about this.

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See, David was getting lazy, and, you know, he's sending other people out to do his business. It happened late one afternoon when

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David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king's house that he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful.

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And David sent and inquired about the woman, and one said, is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah, the

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Hittite? So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. She had been purifying herself from her uncleanness, evidently in the bathing.

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Then she returned to her house, and the woman conceived, and she sent and told David, I am pregnant. So David sent word to Joab, send me

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Uriah the Hittite, and Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab was doing and how the people were doing and how the war was going.

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Then David said to Uriah, go down to your house and wash your feet. And Uriah went out of the king's house, and there followed him a present from the king.

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But Uriah slept at the door of the king's house with all the servants of his lord and did not go down to his house.

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When they told David, Uriah did not go down to his house, David said to Uriah, have you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house?

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Uriah said to David, the ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field.

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Shall I then go to my house to eat and drink and to lie with my wife? As you live and as your soul lives,

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I will not do this thing. Then David said to Uriah, remain here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back.

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So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day and the next. And David invited him and he ate in his presence and drank so that he made him drunk.

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And the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord, but he did not go down to his house.

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In the morning, David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote, set

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Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, then draw back from him, that he may be struck down and die.

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As Joab was besieging the city, he assigned Uriah to the place where he knew there were valiant men and the men of the city came out and fought with Joab.

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And some of the servants of David among the people fell. Uriah the Hittite also died.

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Then Joab sent and told David all the news about the fighting and he instructed the messenger, when you have finished telling all the news about the fighting to the king, then if the king's anger rises and he says to you, why did you go so near the city to fight?

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Did you not know that they would shoot from the wall? Who killed Abimelech, the son of Jerubasheth?

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Did not a woman cast an upper millstone on him from the wall, so that he died at Thebes? Why did you go so near the wall?

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Then you shall say, your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also. And there's a

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Hebrew textual variant, no there's not. So the messenger went and came and told

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David all that Joab had sent him to tell. The messenger said to David, the men gained an advantage over us and came out against us in the field and we drove them back to the entrance of the gate.

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Then the archers shot your servants to the wall. Some of the king's servants are dead and your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also. David said to the messenger, thus shall you say to Joab, do not let this matter displease you, for the sword devours now one and now another.

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Strengthen your attack against the city and overthrow it and encourage him. When the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she lamented over her husband.

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When the morning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son.

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But the thing that David had done displeased Yahweh. And Yahweh sent Nathan to David.

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He came to him and said to him, there were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought.

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And he brought it up and it grew up with him and with his children. It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms.

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It was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had come to him.

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But he took the poor man's lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him. Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man and said to Nathan, as Yahweh lives, the man who has done this deserves to die.

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And you shall restore the lamb fourfold because he did this thing and because he had no pity. Nathan said to David, you are the man.

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Thus says Yahweh, the God of Israel, I anointed you king over Israel and I delivered you out of the hands of Saul.

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And I gave you your master's house and your master's wives and your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little,

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I would add to you much more. Why have you despised the word of Yahweh to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the

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Hittite with a sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with a sword of the Ammonites. Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the

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Hittite to be your wife. Thus says Yahweh, behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house.

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I will take your wives from before your eyes and give them to your neighbor and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of his son.

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For you did secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the son. David said to Nathan, I have sinned against Yahweh.

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And Nathan said to David, Yahweh has also put away your sin. You shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed, you have utterly scorned

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Yahweh, the child who is born to you shall die. Then Nathan went to his house.

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Now, there is of course, another also very important text that goes with this, and that is

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Psalm 51. In the heading for the choir directory,

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Psalm of David, when Nathan, the prophet, came to him after he had gone into Bathsheba. Be gracious to me,

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O God, according to your loving kindness, according to the greatness of your compassion, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.

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For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified when you speak and blameless when you judge.

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Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. Behold, you desire truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part you will make me know wisdom.

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Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me to hear joy and gladness, let the bones which you have broken rejoice.

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Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

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Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain me with a willing spirit.

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Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will be converted to you. Deliver me from blood guiltiness,

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O God, the God of my salvation. Then my tongue will joyfully sing your righteousness. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth may declare your praise.

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For you do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it. You are not pleased with burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart,

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O God, you will not despise. By your favor, do good to Zion. Build the walls of Jerusalem, then you will delight in righteous sacrifices, and burnt offering and whole burnt offering, then young bulls will be offered on your altar."

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And so, the most famous psalm of penitence is specifically attached to the incident of Nathan, the prophet, coming to David with the entire

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Bathsheba situation. So, with that, what do you do with the assertion that it's important that we get that right, that it is right to say that David raped

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Bathsheba? Well, this took place within the city walls.

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If this was a rape in the Mosaic context, then

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Bathsheba should have cried out if she was resisting this, and that's what the law would say.

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Nowhere do we find in any of what I just read that the term for rape in Hebrew is utilized, nowhere in Nathan's accusation, nowhere in David's confession, either in 2

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Samuel or in Psalm 51, is this the focus?

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David says, against you and you alone have I sinned. He confesses blood guiltiness.

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The primary sin that is mentioned is the killing of Uriah the

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Hittite. When we attempt to be careful in looking at what took place, if we only want to go as far as scripture warrants, then we are going to say that there is fornication and there is murder and you can obviously then beyond that say what kind of impact would this have on Joab, the leadership of the army, the fact that David's servants know exactly what happened.

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Maybe the letter to Joab was, or the message to Joab stayed private, but people aren't stupid, so the upper echelons would have been aware of what took place and then

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Uriah's dead, hmm, how did that happen? So you have all sorts of corruption.

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Now, if I'm understanding the accusations right and the context of power,

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I saw statements that were made that basically the reason that you can call this rape is because of the power dynamics involved, and that is

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David is king and Uriah is one of his soldiers, though one of his upper echelon soldiers obviously, but because David is king that he is abusing his position of power and authority and hence this is the appropriate foundation for the accusation of rape.

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And so do we know, and then what

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I've also seen is people saying that it's important to get this right so that Bathsheba is not inappropriately accused of improper behavior.

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Now, I've not read every commentary on 2

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Samuel. I suppose that maybe somebody at some point has argued that Bathsheba was in some way complicit in all of this in the sense that, well, what are you doing bathing openly?

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Well, she was probably on the roof of her house and it specifically says that she was part of the ritual purification, cleansing herself of uncleanness.

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So that would be a pretty long stretch to try to say that she was somehow complicit, that she was trying to show off for the king, knowing that he'd be able to see her.

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There's just no evidence of that, and the specific line that she was cleansing herself from her uncleanness,

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I think is part of the scripture's way of saying no.

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That's verse 4, by the way, of chapter 11. That's not what was going on.

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It seems to me that she sends to David, I am pregnant.

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She does not try to, as far as we are told by the... And see, most of this is whether you're willing to just stick with what the text says or whether you just have to tease out stuff that you can make applicable to modern situations is really where you have the problem here.

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There's no evidence that she is rebuking David, saying,

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I'm going to let the whole world know what you did, David, that type of thing. She simply sends to David, I am pregnant.

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Yeah, there's no blackmail going on, no. So could she have felt trapped in this situation?

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Yeah. And if you want to identify the sex act that resulted from that as rape because of the power dynamics, just make sure you're being clear that you're not using the

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Mosaic definition. You're using a modern definition and reading it back into the historical context in a way that the author of scripture wouldn't have understood.

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So if what you're saying is, when we look at this story in the 21st century, we would see this as a power dynamics rape.

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But don't see what concerns me is what

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Matt Smethurst had posted.

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First of all, it wasn't even meant to address this. It wasn't. I mean,

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Rahab prostituted. OK, could we find some way of the power dynamics of that day in Jericho excusing her profession?

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You know, Abraham lied. Well, he was trying to save life. And I mean, there's always a way around any of that kind of stuff.

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But it is true that David fornicated. I mean, the specific term that would be utilized was having sex with another man's wife.

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And yet, even then, the focus, at least in David's confession, and then in the narrative in chapter 11, is the murder of Uriah.

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I mean, David says, cleanse me from blood guiltiness. That's the murder aspect. He shed innocent blood.

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Interestingly enough, by the hand or the sword of the Ammonites. So he used the enemies of God as his mechanism of getting what he wanted.

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This is the focus. But the argument in some of the stuff that I saw, and I'm not sure if I can pull it up here.

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Yeah, here it is. Rachel Denhollander says, it is all over the place.

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This and several other serious errors along these lines are part of why women and victims feel such a deep sense of betrayal from the church.

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Scripture protects us as twisted and weaponized to crush with unfounded guilt and shame.

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The evidence is in the imagery used where blame is placed on both parties as the law would require, and the cultural mandates power dynamics.

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It's clear when we understand abuse. Getting this wrong is crushing. I talk about it in my book.

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To start, when Nathan tells David the parable of the rich man who took the ewe, David is portrayed as stealing, not as two people running off together.

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Bathsheba is portrayed as an innocent lamb that is slaughtered. This is the exact imagery for rape from the

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Old Testament. So evidently, this is part of this book that was just released or coming out or something.

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I don't know. I only saw it today. And this is going to be a part of the argumentation.

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So evidently, the argument is that you take the parable that Nathan tells rather than the narrative of the preceding chapter, which gives you the actual acts, and you take the stealing of the ewe lamb and say that that's an imagery for rape and that that's how we get this right.

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I think I'm being fair from at least, you know, it's Twitter, from what is being read here.

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Maybe the book will provide further argumentation, but it really, it's not the theft that is the issue.

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What does God say by Nathan? I gave you all of this, and if that had not been enough,

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I would have given you more. That's his terminology in verse 8.

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I gave you your master's house and your master's wives and your arms and gave you the house of Israel and Judah, and if it was too little,

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I would have added you as much more. Why have you despised the word of Yahweh to do what is evil in his sight, which is you have struck down Uriah the

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Hittite with a sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house.

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There's the sin. I mean, even after killing Uriah, he takes her and he's still trying to cover over because he takes her as wife, so when she gives birth, oh yeah, well, you know,

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I mean, I don't know what kind of time frame there was here.

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I'm not sure how this would have worked, but even back then, people knew pretty much how long births were, but you know, you can always argue the baby is born prematurely or something or whatever.

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He's still trying to cover things up is what he's doing. He's using his position to cover things up, but the first thing is you've struck down Uriah the

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Hittite with a sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Doesn't even actually focus on the initial act of fornication, having another man's wife.

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So you'd have to say, well, this is the imagery, even though it's not the application

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Nathan makes, who was the source of the imagery in the first place. So it's troubling to recognize that there are all sorts of questions that we can ask of pretty much every historical event to which we do not have a complete and full response.

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So how did Bathsheba respond to the king's servants?

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Did Bathsheba have any idea of why she was being summoned to the palace? Once she had an idea of what

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David wanted to do, did she resist or did she simply submit to his kingly authority?

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We don't know. We are not told. We know that what

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David did was wrong, but going beyond the text to try to derive some kind of application to modern power dynamics

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Me Too movement type stuff, I think eventually robs the text of its meaning because you should at least, and especially in this context, the initial statement was a response to the assertion

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David fornicated. And what's being said is that's not enough. You have to say more than that.

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You have to say David raped. If that's not enough, then why didn't the

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Holy Spirit inspire it that way? I mean, that's where you get to when you start saying that an accurate, biblically -based statement is not enough because we need to be doing something about this thing today.

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Well, that's not how you use Scripture. That's not how you engage in interpretation of the text and make application in that way.

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And my concern, there's a number of concerns. I'm always concerned when people start reading into the text concerns about application to modern things.

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What you do with Scripture is you create consistently principles that are applicable across time, or you recognize there are some things in the

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Old Testament Scriptures that were applicable at that particular point in time. I mean, when you look at the royal house of David and how

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David engaged in warfare against the Ammonites, just how much application is to be made to that in our context today, where you don't have a king, you don't have a particular land being given to a particular people to build, you know, the people through whom the

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Messiah is going to come. This gets us into that whole area of how to make appropriate application of law and then principles that can be derived from how

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God interacted with men outside the giving of the law. And this is not an easy area.

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This is a very challenging area. It requires a wide and balanced knowledge of the

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Tanakh as a whole. And as a result, it can be abused greatly and has been down through the history of the

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Church. So you have to be very, very careful in especially looking at the historical books and we look at someone like David and we go, well,

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David's the man after the God's own heart. Yeah, but there are lots of things that David did that would not be appropriate for us to do and that maybe

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David shouldn't have done. This is obviously one of them, but there are other things too. And so you have to be very, very careful about the context that we're going for and that we need to understand what it was initially.

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We can't read into, we can't read modern Me Too attitudes into this period of time, hundreds and hundreds of years before Christ.

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So am I saying that there's nothing to be learned here? No, I mean, and that's the other thing. Psalm 51 has been down through the centuries viewed as the quintessential penitential psalm.

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My concern would be if you really take this perspective, it's going to impact how you see that psalm because if we get it right, then

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David didn't get it right in Psalm 51. That's not a complete confession.

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There is no complete confession, either in 2 Samuel 12 or in Psalm 51, if in reality, the primary focus should be upon the concept of rape rather than murder to cover over fornication.

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And I could see how people could take that view of Psalm 51 if they embrace this idea that, well,

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David's real sin was his use of his power, and he did abuse his power.

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I mean, that's what Yahweh says to him. I gave you all this, and you have shown me no respect.

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You have despised me by how you have behaved in this situation. But that still doesn't substantiate the idea that it's one thing to say that, well, in light of the disparity of power, it seems like that act of fornication could be seen as a category of rape.

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That's different than saying the right understanding of David requires you to not just say he fornicated, but you must say he raped.

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Do you see the difference between the two? The one, I can go, okay, I see how you could make an application and say, you know, she was put in this position because of his great power, and that that was sinful on his part.

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Got it. But to then go, no, the right interpretation of this requires you to see that the focus is actually upon rape.

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And so, if you simply say David fornicated, you're not getting it right. Well, he did a lot of things.

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But that is the legal mosaic identification, along with murder.

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And when Nathan enumerates these things, he starts with the central thing, the murder of Uriah the

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Hittite. That's the biggest sin. And then the cover -up of the sexual sin is that he has taken, then,

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Uriah's wife to be his wife. So it's really, you know, if you want to argue with the list that was initially posted there, instead of David fornicated, you'd probably want to go

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David murdered. If you wanted to go for the big sin, David murdered to cover over his fornication.

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Then we could say David played the hypocrite. I mean, David did. Sin breeds sin.

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But what is concerning is when you say, well, because of my experience and what

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I do and what I'm involved in, then the right interpretation is to see my interpretation, which, while it's possible in the sense of, well, you know,

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I could see an application here, you say, no, it has to be the interpretation, even when that's not what you'd be led to by the direct exegesis of the text.

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This is especially the issue when we are looking at these types of stories, this historical narrative, trying to make application.

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And it's appropriate to make application because the New Testament writers did that. They drew from these very

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Old Testament texts, and they made application. So it's appropriate to do so. But it has to be done very, very carefully.

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And from my perspective, if a New Testament writer didn't make the application, then be very, very careful where you're going to go with something like this.

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And so I think I saw some people pushing back pretty hard, some stuff about, well, you know, if you've got a book coming out, you've got to find some way to start, people start talking about it and that kind of stuff.

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I don't even want to get in that. I don't even want to go there.

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But it does seem to me that what we see in Christian Twitter are, we tend to gravitate into groups.

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And then what's going on in our day with critical theory and the way we behave on social media is we want to believe the worst, and we want to grab hold of some kind of cause that will allow us to have a bigger weapon on Twitter, a bigger club, a sharper knife.

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On Facebook, Twitter, it doesn't matter. We get to be the righteous warriors. We have a cause.

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And so there are certain people that it's popular to hate. There are certain movements that it's popular to promote.

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And if you don't get on the bandwagon, if you don't hate the right people, if you don't promote the right causes, then these

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Christians feel a righteous basis for dismissing you, attacking you, seeking to destroy your ministry, slandering you in private groups.

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And there are a lot of those private groups out there which are just nothing but the electronic version of slander and gossip fest locations.

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It's how to absolutely ignore what Scripture says about that activity and get away with it while still feeling religious and praying on Sunday morning at church.

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And I think private Facebook groups and bunkers and places like that where you get to spew all your venom and you get to do it around people who aren't going to rebuke you because the whole reason you're all together is you're hating the same people.

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You're hating on the same people. And look, you know that there are certain places you go, that you go there because you're accepted.

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You go there because you look like everybody else and you think like everybody else. But if you just sat back and sort of watched them for a while and didn't participate and asked yourself the question, is what is being said here regularly pleasing to God?

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Does it demonstrate that the people in this group are being sanctified, being made more like Christ?

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You have to admit that the answer is no. And you ignore that. You don't want to be told that because, well, these are my bros, you know?

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We're just sitting around and making fun of the people who deserve to be made fun of. There's this stuff about a root of bitterness.

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And I just simply recommend you think about it and ask yourself the question, when

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I participate in these groups, and if I sit around going, well, we've gotten that guy today.

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We warned people against that ministry today. We got somebody to drop somebody's

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Patreon support today. You walk out of that group. Are you more likely to be sensitive to the

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Spirit's leading? Are you more likely to be a person who's going to bear witness to the gospel, to someone who comes across your path?

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Or have you just simply been confirmed in your prejudices, really is the question.

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So anyway, there are a lot of people out there in groups like that, have mindsets like that, and they'll grab hold of something like this and they'll say, you need to interpret this text in this way.

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You need to believe like we believe on this. Rather than going, especially with this,

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I would simply say to Rachel Denhollander's statement, we need to get this right, is to say, well, to get it right is always to stick within the parameters of the explicit statements of scripture.

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And hence, to get it right is to focus first and foremost upon the taking of human life.

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It was murder. And the act of fornication was indeed sinful.

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And there may well have been an element of that to where Bathsheba felt helpless in light of the power of the

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King. I can't disprove it. It seems probable, but to make that necessary, if you don't see this, you're getting it wrong.

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That's where you cross the line. Yes, sir. I'm over here chomping at the bit.

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I've seen some interactions that go the opposite way, and I think those are overreactions as well.

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I heard this morning, apparently there's a view out there that has been around in Baptist circles for a long time that paint

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Bathsheba as a bit of a hussy. And I don't think that's fair either. Yeah, since Jan Hus was many, many years later.

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That's funny. That's very funny. I think ultimately what we have here, if we just do what you did in walking through the text, first of all, the first question is, when

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God sent Nathan, do we not think that God knew what actually happened?

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Because it seems to me that I think he pretty much had a pretty good bird's eye view of what actually happened, and the charge against David is explicit.

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Murder, blood guiltiness, and wife -stealing. That's how I put it. I think we can look at the text and maybe surmise that there was a seduction through David's power that took place, but I think even that is a bit speculative.

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Well, someone might say, was Bathsheba like Zaynab bint

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Jash in the Islamic context? Right. Where once she found out that Muhammad wanted her,

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Zayd, who needs him? Right. I'm going to divorce this guy. I'm going to make life worthless for him.

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And you see that through the message of, hey, I'm pregnant! Yeah, I don't... Yeah, I mean, it's possible.

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You can't disprove it, but there's... None of that is in the charge, and none of that is in the text, and we see maybe some indications here or there, but again, we come back to that, be careful as we handle the text.

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And it's been a case that, I don't know, over the last two years just seems to be hitting me upside the head, right and left, that we have had too many preachers for far too long feel the comfort of, write the headline, write the sermon title, and then fill in the blanks with the facts, and if you really can't find the facts, let's embellish a little bit in order to make the case.

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And I think we're now bearing the fruit of that mentality of feeling the freedom to manhandle the scriptures and get it to say what we want it to say.

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Yeah, well, the danger is to have a overriding concern, and it can be a very proper concern about sexual abuse in the

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Church, and then not finding the plain statements of scripture about holiness and things like that enough.

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We need to find better stuff, and that's one of the dangers here.

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And as you come back to your point, it's well taken. If your outrage here is that you think that David power -raped

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Bathsheba, poor Uriah, because he got murdered, it seems to be the bigger picture.

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It does end up diminishing the central aspect of what clearly Nathan was saying was the central act that deserved punishment from God.

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Well, okay, so there you go. We talked a little bit about textual criticism. We talked a little bit about 1

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Peter 3 .15, and then we looked at the whole story of David and Bathsheba and its modern application, and just asking for a little bit of balance.

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And if you're going to say, we need to get this right, then you need to be sure that it's right in every decade of every century.

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It needs to be a proper interpretation of the text and not reading something into it that may or may not be there.

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So hopefully people can calm down a little bit. But if it's in the book, then now when the book's coming out, then

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I suppose there'll be more discussion of it. I don't know. We'll find out. We'll find out. Lord willing, I'm going to get on a plane in about five hours this time and heading to Australia.

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So prayers appreciated for that. We've got debates and ministry down there in Sydney and Melbourne.

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so prayers appreciated for that. We'll see you next time, whenever that is, on The Divided.