For these crimes, God brings judgment upon David.
David repents and we see in 2nd Samuel 12:13-14 how God forgives him.
Though the punishment of sin is forgiven, the effect of sin remains and David's son dies.
At first, it can seem a bit confusing on how the effect of sin is different from the fair punishment that David deserves.
That is, how is David's son dying not a judgment against David?
Does it suggest that David was only partially forgiven?
I find that it can be helpful to clarify terms and think of a few illustrations.
- Sin: A missing the mark, namely anything which deviates from God's perfect order (For 1st Corinthians 14:33 teaches that our God is a God of perfect order).
- Law: A requirement given (in our case, given by God to help us make known God's perfect order).
Imagine a store where neither the store owner nor a potential robber know of God's Law.
And in this case, God's Law consists of the requirement "Thou shalt not steal."
At night, a robber breaks the store window and steals merchandise from the store.
The sin, in this case, is the deviating from God's perfect order of "never steal."
The effect of sin is the broken glass, the merchandise taken, emotional distress on the store owner, costs to the insurance company to pay for the repair, etc.
The imputation of sin is the recognizing the robber as the thief and declaring him guilty.
The punishment of sin is putting the robber into prison.
As any fan of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 will tell you, there indeed is a difference between order and justice.
Any authority can establish their own conception of order (and Romans 13:1-7 teaches that God's order often works through even evil secular authorities).
Not every ordering is a just ordering. And so, how can we know which orderings are just?
C.S. Lewis' book, "Mere Christianity", highlights our intuition of a Universal Morality.
However, Alasdair MacIntyre has shown in his book, "Whose Justice, Which Rationality", how secular attempts (a.k.a. Natural Law) to identify the Universal Justice (which we all implicitly have an intuition of) are merely their own traditions.
Though we have an intuition of Universal Law (i.e. a law on our hearts), true and Ultimate Justice is revealed by God in the Bible.
Meditate upon the Law! Joshua 1:8 is the answer.
Now, that's very nice, but the example given above does not seem similar to the David and Bathsheba situation.
Never fear, this indeed can happen where the effect of sin seems like a punishment.
Imagine a child in their parent's house. The parent's perfect order is that no-one plays around with the stove fire.
The parent gives a law to the child explaining this perfect order.
If the child violates the law, the effect of sin is that their finger is burned.
The imputation of sin is the parent's recognizing and declaring of the child as guilty lawbreaker.
The punishment of sin is the parent's discipline to the child, whether it be spanking, a timeout, or a stern rebuke.
The problem with David's sin, and with all of our sins, is that sin has a cascading effect.
Our sins bring harm not only to ourselves, but to others, and can start a continuing pattern of negative effect.
This can be seen in the example of Achan's sin in Joshua 7. Achan was one person who violated God's perfect order in the attack upon the city of Ai.
His sin brought negative consequences, not only upon himself, but upon all of Israel. This highlights a corporate aspect of sin which we often do not think of today.
The prophet Isaiah, in Isaiah 6:5, pleads before God as both an unclean person and as a member of unclean people. There is both an individual and corporate aspect to sin and its consequences.
In fact, the most prominent example of the cascading effect of sin can be seen in Adam's in in Genesis 3. The apostle Paul elucidates the full implication of this cascading effect in Romans 5:12-21. The Law makes sin increase just as a magnifying glass makes things that are hard to see more clearly visible.
The cascading effect of sin brings an infinite offense against our infinite God, resulting in a just infinite punishment.