John Job continues our series on the message and ministry of the non-writing prophets.

Shakespeare has introduced us to the king's jester. His function was much more than making jokes. He played the same sort of role as the press today in holding authority in check. In Old Testament times, the one who was supposed to do this was the court prophet.

Sadly, the record of such men was abysmal. Jeremiah summed up the problem with his unforgettable comment that they spoke “peace when there was no peace”, that is, they went along with policies which should have been resisted. They approved of proposals which meant marching into the jaws of catastrophe. But, there were exceptions. One was Nathan.

Nathan's Mission

Early in his reign, King David went off the rails with a series of disastrous errors. It began with indolence. It was the time of year when kings usually went out to war. The army went, but David stayed at home. This was the root of the problem, for David looking on from the vantage point of his palace spied (lower down the hill) a woman bathing.

Soon it was a case of adultery and, to crown it all, Bathsheba (as she was called) became pregnant. On hearing this news, David attempted a cover-up. He summoned her husband, Uriah, home from the fighting, and encouraged him to go home to his wife. When he demurred, the king ruthlessly engineered his death: he ordered that Uriah be stationed at the most dangerous point in the battle line.

This was when Nathan was sent to rebuke David - a high-risk venture! It could easily have seen him summarily executed. Any realisation that we have broken the law requires action to make amends, and what is less obvious but equally true is that we are called to react when somebody else is flagrantly at fault, not least when it is a matter of hurt or broken relationships.

Early in his reign, King David made a series of disastrous errors which began with indolence.

My father went out of the back door one night in 1938, and saw the next-door neighbour about to drop his wife from an upstairs window. “Stop!” he shouted. It takes courage to interfere with one's next-door neighbour, but next morning the man came round and thanked him.

Nathan's problem called for a different approach. We do not know how his message from God came to him, but he hardly received a divine fax to relay to the king. Simple awareness of David’s wrongdoing created a responsibility to say something about it. In such circumstances, we are challenged to translate God's message into terms with maximum impact on the person concerned, and yet present it in the most gracious way possible.

Nathan’s Tactics

At this point, Nathan has a good deal to teach us. He did not attempt his mission like a bull at a gate. Instead, he gradually came round to the issue that he wanted to raise; as did Jesus when he wanted to confront the woman at Sychar with the sinful promiscuity which had led her to be living with her sixth partner. In the end, his message came out with crystal clarity, but he led up to it with a friendly and tactful conversation.

He was not like an Antiguan girl I once partnered with in house-to-house visiting on a student mission. To women who answered the door that Friday afternoon, expecting to pay their milk bill, her approach shot would be, “What do you think of Jesus?” It was one of the most effective conversation stoppers l have ever heard!

Nathan did not make this kind of mistake. He began by telling David a story. Significantly, it was about a shepherd. Again, there is a striking resemblance to Jesus' technique with the Samaritan woman. In her case, water was what dominated her life. Because she was an outcast she was obliged to fetch it in the heat of the day and could not do it at the usual time of morning or evening. Jesus used the notion of thirst to bring home to her the spiritual need behind her depressed search for acceptance, security and love which had led her from one man to another.

Awareness of David’s wrongdoing created a responsibility for Nathan to say something about it.

Similarly, shepherd language was mother's milk for David. From his earliest youth he had minded sheep and there is evidence that he did it in an exemplary way. It was nothing for him, he told Saul when volunteering his services to fight Goliath, to engage in single combat with lions and bears if they attacked his flock. The enemy champion would be just one more victim for his presumption in challenging the flock of God.

Nathan's Parable

The story that Nathan recounted was of a wealthy sheep-farmer who had limitless flocks, while his neighbour possessed one pet ewe-lamb. The ’fat cat’ had a visitor one day whose arrival called for a meat meal — something of a rarity in the Israel of those days. But, instead of killing one of his own sheep, he took the lone lamb from next-door and served that up.

Only a story, but David became so involved and angry that he spoke as though the guilty farmer could be spirited from Nathan's parable and made to pay four times over for the lamb he had taken. “You are the man”, said Nathan, and with devastating directness he spelt out first the privilege God had conferred upon David by making him king; then the love he had shown by protecting him from a chapter of murderous attempts on his life by Saul; then the generosity he had shown him, such that he had only to ask for as much again as he already possessed and his prayer would have been granted. How had all this been repaid? By laziness, adultery, deceit and murder.

Nathan went on to warn David of the results of his action. Bitter experience years later when Absalom usurped the royal harem on the roof of the palace for all to see must have reminded him of what the prophet had said to him. Painful, painful words, no doubt. But, they were tempered by what was to come. For when David admitted “l have sinned against the Lord”, Nathan was able to reassure him: “The Lord has laid upon another the consequences of your sin.”

In learning how to deliver God's message with grace and yet maximum impact, Nathan has a good deal to teach us.

He was referring to the fact that Bathsheba's son was going to die and, when this happened, David was to see it as the punishment that he himself deserved. No Christian can read this, without seeing reflected what we ourselves owe to Jesus, whose death on the Cross is not only a rebuke to sin, but the assurance of God's forgiveness for sins however grave.

The Message for Today

We can learn first of the need to speak to those for whom we are charged with God's message in language which they can understand. It is no good simply firing at them texts torn from the Bible. What they need to grasp is embodied in Scripture, certainly; but it needs to be presented with the same imaginative insight that Nathan used to get across what God had to say to David.

Biblical teaching is embedded in a culture alien to ours and far removed in history. A bridge has to be built between this and the mental furniture of those with whom we want to communicate. If you are talking to 10-year-olds about the danger of idolising possessions, it is no good talking to them about land or houses; it has to be video games or mountain bikes.

For the average Near Easterner, originally addressed by the Ten Commandments, a donkey was a prized possession and figures in the injunction against covetousness. No doubt you could find somebody today who might covet a donkey but, in the garden of the standard suburban semi, it can only be a liability. So the biblical language needs translation: the donkey of the Near Fast becomes a Jaguar car for 20^th Century man.

The second thing to notice is that for Nathan's bow there were two arrows. The first was the arrow of rebuke: it needed to wound because David was unaware of the heinousness of what he had done. It was an arrow which had to be fired with subtlety. If the shot had been too obvious, David might have seen it coming and shielded himself. But there was also the arrow of healing in the prophet's quiver. Once the king could acknowledge that he had grievously sinned, the way was open to declare that God would forgive him.

In Nathan’s bow were two arrows – the arrow of rebuke and the arrow of healing.

Forgiveness

So it should be whenever correction is the order of the day. Not only does it need to command a hearing, but it needs the back-up of restoration. Sometimes in the face of exposure, a person's life will fall about him like a house of cards, but the Christian never goes into such a situation without offer of a remedy.

Even David: adulterer, murderer, dissembler though he had been, was a candidate for pardon. He is there to convince the most abject offenders that no net is beyond God's power to unravel its meshes and release them, no deed so damning as to prevent his raising up the head that hangs in shame.

Here then is a good test of our motivation. Any Pharisee can put others down. The fuel for self-righteousness comes from finding fault with somebody else. But it is no part of the Pharisee's stock-in-trade to offer forgiveness or restoration to the victims of his criticism. He depends on keeping his victims in the condemned cell to convince himself of his own adequacy. Certainly, there are times when a Christian has to take the lid off wrong-doing. but not without offering the recipe for God's pardon.

Do we desire to make that offer? That is the acid test of whether our attitude is truly Christian. If it is a spirit evident in Nathan. we ought to be able to harbour it much more. For we have heard the risen Christ speak his word of peace to disciples who knew that they were implicated in nothing less than his death upon that appalling Cross.