I honestly can not see any relevance at all to this little homily.
Are you claiming that your son can never thwart your plans?
Because if you are then it why would you need to stand over him with a frying pan? You know that your son will do the dishes as you planned because he can not thwart any plan that you have.
And if you are not, then what relevance does this have to the relationship between God and humans? Are you saying that the Bible is wrong, and that Gods plans can be readily thwarted unless God stands over humanity with a metaphorical frying pan? If so then you have once again demonstrated that God is a liar as well as proving that the Bible is utterly worthless in diving the nature of God.
David sinned by the murder of Uriah, so left the protection of God and fell under the authority given to Satan. Since David committed murder, and Satan demands skin for skin, Satan now had a claim on the royal family. As such Satan will take a child as payment for the sins of the adult. This satisfied the murder and released the claim that Satan had. God could not hear the plea for mercy from David for his child because David gave Satan authority over this and as such Satan had to be the one to respond to David’s cry. But God could act on the cry of the child if the child was ready to cry.
The child had to enter hell, but was given a hedge of protection (Job1:10), which is a bubble of altered reality. This allowed the child to be brought up in a semi-normal way and not experience hell as it is. Though this hedge of protection is still living in a bubble, so it’s not normal life, but simulated normal life.
The reason for this hedge of protection is though God could not hear the prayers and cry of David for his child, as David willingly gave those to Satan (though the murder), God could hear the cry of that child, but that child was too young to have understanding to do so. That child would suffer without knowing why and too young to figure it out. So God protects that child till the time is right, till that child is capable of understanding and God can hear that cry and rescue that child.
Such children do suffer a lot when the hedge is removed (as in Job) and the reality of where they are is revealed, but in the end are given a double portion of the inheritance which God has equipped them for.
So that’s how the mercy of God works in this instance.
It’s very clear in the Bible that people can and do often thwart God’s will, in all kinds of ways. It’s also clear that no matter what happens, he’s gonna win in the end. He’s made plans knowing we were going to screw things up.
After Nathan the prophet confronts David, David responds that a man who does as he did should pay with his life OR pay fourfold. He not only lost his baby with Bathsheba but one son (Ammon?) rapes his sister Tamar & is killed by a half-brother Absalom who then challenges David for the throne & is killed. Near the end of David’s life, a fourth son names himself successor, as rival to David’s appointed one Solomon, his only surviving child with Bathsheba, & is executed for his ‘treason’. Not one baby alone but three more grown sons bite the dust.
That said, I think Chronos &, rhetorically, Lemur866 explained it best. I will challenge Chronos’ assertion that Bathsheba bore no blame. She may have quite willingly come to David’s bed. It’s not stated that he ordered or forced her. Perhaps a “Noble King, the Lord has favored you and seated you on the Throne of Israel but He has also let you travail for it & challenge the King whom He had previously so blessed. If we transgress God’s Law, might He not raise His hand against you?” would have caught David off guard & caused him to repent.
Re the thwarting debate. I’ve always seen it as we can thwart God’s short-range plans & our part in it, but His ultimate plans will prevail no matter what.
Okay, I haven’t read any of the responses yet, so here is my explanation:
I can’t reconcile it. I don’t have enough information. The death of the baby is a tragedy, and like so much other suffering in the world, I’m not really sure why God allows it. I do see that God was able to use this suffering to teach David a lesson, though, and help him become a better man and a better king, so at least something good was able to come from it. But basically you’re just asking the old question, ‘why does a just God allow people to suffer’ and I don’t think we are capable of understanding the answer to that question.
I am not posing the problem of evil here. Yahweh doesn’t allow the baby to die. Yahweh kills the baby, slowly. From the cite in the OP:
That’s pretty unambiguous. The Lord of Hosts killed the kid just as he killed all the firstborn of Egypt.
And you know something? I don’t actually have a, ah, problem with the problem of evil, as such. If one grants the existence of God, then I think C. S. Lewis was spot-on in The Problem of Pain (or perhaps Miracles) when he said that, having created a world with definite physical traits and laws, it is impossible even for an omnipotent* deity to prevent all suffering. If the heat from a flame decreases by the cube of a distance, and at distance X that heat will warm a hand, then at distance X-Y that heat will burn or kill.
But this isn’t a case of Yahweh being consistent in the application of natural law. This is a case of Yahweh deliberately stepping in to kill the kid.
Ted, I’d forgotten about the four-fold thing and David’s words coming back to bite him. Thanks.
As for Bathsheba – I dunno. But I tend to think, based on practically no evidence, that David seduced her rather than raped her. He’s a mensch before he takes the throne and a nearly perfect jackass afterwards, but I think rape would have offended his ego.
I think that if one postulates the existence of a deity who is worthy of worship, rather than just being so powerful he can enforce his will, then one has to grant that such a deity is understandable to humans. To refer to Lewis again (and no, I don’t recall which book), if God’s morality is incomprehensible to us, we might as well worship an omnipotent fiend.
And yet, the Old Testament doesn’t always seem to draw a clear distinction between what God allows and what God causes. And in fact I would be hard pressed to say where the line is to be drawn between what an all-powerful creator God causes and what God merely allows to happen (not that I’m saying there isn’t a distinction).
Kind of along the lines of what smiling bandit said, I’m at least a little hesitant to take it uncritically at face value when the OT says what God did and why.
It is a fact of life that babies sometimes get sick and die. And that sometimes this is, at least partially, due to some “sin” their parents committed. And that, more generally, children suffer because of things their parents did, and that God does not prevent this.
One of my first reactions to stories or questions like this is to wonder what the story’s early hearers or readers or tellers would have thought about it. Would it have occured to them that Yahweh was acting unjustly? With a baby that young, would they have considered the baby’s illness and death as primarily something that happened to the baby, or something that happened to David?
I think Lemur866 answered it best. Keep in mind all these events happened about three thousand years ago. That baby would be dead by now anyway. David’s dead. Bathsheba’s dead. Uriah’s dead. Tamar’s dead. Amnon’s dead. Absalom’s dead. Solomon’s dead.
From God’s perspective, it’s no big deal whether you die when you’re a week old or when you’re a hundred years old. Your mortal existence on Earth is just a short prelude to your eternal existence in the afterlife.
There’s a few ways to look at this. One of the most important parts to realize is that God’s justice is not the same as human justice. For one, we have harsher penalties for what we believe to be harsher crimes whereas most Christians would see that God has essentially the same punishment for all sins. Second, while death is the ultimate penalty for human crimes, depending on what one believes about the afterlife, it may be anywhere from the ultimate penalty to the ultimate mercy. And so, while it may seem harsh to us, it could be an effective way to punish those involved (both David and Bathsheba) and remove the illegitimate heir in a merciful way.
However, for me personally, I can’t really agree with that. There is no real fundamental difference in who is punished but rather in that the punishment is appropriate for the desired effect. In this case, the result is still a punishment to those who sinned but it also is a manner of reestablishing as reasonably close to the path as possible. That the child had to die as well isn’t so much that God was doing it as a punishment but that it was another part of the consequence of the choices that were made.
Hence Lewis’s remark that, if God’s will is utterly incomprehensible to us, we might as well worship an omnipotent fiend, because our obedience can be motivated only by terror, not by love.
Theres a difference between being unable to understand fully and being unable to understand at all. Good is mercilessly complicated, as any moral philosopher soon finds. God more or less flat-out says we won’t understand everything, and that you have to accept what you can and move on.
However, I shoudl also point out that the Jews were not exactly perfectly reliable, and tended to put convenient words in the mouth of God. Job is almost certainly a moral story and not to be taken literally, while other things are direct histories or even literary pieces.
I won’t say that truer words have never been spoken(“You look like you could use a full body massage and a vodka on the rocks” comes to mind), but they’re pretty high on the list.