There are stories in Scripture which, honestly, I struggle with. One of them comes in 2 Samuel 12, when the Lord took the life of David’s innocent son.

The context for this is the sin of David against Bathsheba and Uriah. The King summoned Bathsheba to his courts while her husband was away and, presumably against her will, slept with her. Then upon discovering that Bathsheba was pregnant, David had her husband killed on the battlefield, to cover up his sin.

In chapter 12, the prophet Nathan confronted David, having had this sin revealed to him by God. He pronounced God’s judgment upon the King, who in response repented, seemingly sincerely and wholeheartedly.

‘Nathan replied, “The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the Lord, the son born to you will die.” After Nathan had gone home, the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became ill… On the seventh day the child died.’ (2 Samuel 12.13–15, 18) 

This raises many questions for me. How is it fair for God to punish the child for the sin of the King? Does God visit the sins of a father on his children? If the Lord had taken away David’s sin, why did the child still have to die? And is this really the action of a good and just God?

These are not easy questions, and the passage doesn’t permit us to reach for simplistic answers. We can’t for instance, say (as we might in some other passages) that the Lord reluctantly ‘permitted’ the death of the child, since the language is so active. The Lord struck the child.

So what is going on here, and how should we interpret this difficult passage? I want to suggest two lines of thinking which, while not answering every question – intellectual or emotional – may at least point us in the right direction.

The death of the son and the goodness of God

I am deeply convinced of God’s goodness. Biblically, personally, experientially. So when I encounter a difficult passage like this, I have to take that as my starting assumption. God is just and He is good. There’s plenty that could be said in a longer article about God’s justice and His right to take human life, but beneath it all I echo Abraham’s prayer:

“Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18.25)

Whilst God may inflict death as a just punishment, within the overall story of Scripture, death is an aberration. It was not part of God’s intention for humanity, and it will not be part of His renewed world. And we need to resist the idea that God somehow delights in dispensing death. Ezekiel 18.23 tells us that God takes no pleasure in the death of a sinner. That being the case, how much less does He take pleasure in the death of an innocent? As David himself writes:

‘Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful servants’ (Psalm 116.15)

The death of an innocent grieves the heart of God, and His choice to strike the child was not a rash or impulsive one. It was certainly not vindictive. It must have been calculated and for purpose – even if that purpose seems opaque to us. And when He issued this judgment, we can be certain that the Lord’s mind was not only upon King David but also upon this innocent child, whose life was precious to Him.

I’m hesitant to speculate, but it is quite possible that taking the child to Himself was an act of God’s mercy, to spare him further suffering in the future. The chapters that follow depict in gruesome detail the dysfunctional, sin-riddled lives of David’s other children, and how they tore the family apart through murder, rape, and betrayal. Perhaps the Lord wanted to spare this child the grief that was to come.

There are a handful of times in Scripture where the Lord does cut a life short as a mercy, to spare someone from future calamity.

‘The devout are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil’ (Isaiah 57.1–2)

‘I will gather you to your ancestors, and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place.’ (2 Kings 22.20)

Furthermore, death is not the end. David assumes that the Lord has taken the child to Himself, and that he will one day see him again (v23). Though from an earthly perspective the child’s life was cut tragically short, from a heavenly perspective he has entered the true and abundant life, in the presence of his eternal Father.

The death of the son and the salvation of God

The second angle to consider is that of God’s overall plan of salvation. Because this story takes place within a far larger story – that of God’s mission to defeat sin and death, ridding His creation of every shred of their destructive power. And this chapter gives some hints of how He intends to achieve that.

Upon David’s repentance, the prophet Nathan declares that God has ‘put away’ his sin (v13). But since we know that sin has to be atoned for, this raises the question, how? And where has the sin been ‘put’? There was no sacrifice of atonement. No substitutionary animal offered in David’s place.

Although it’s not explicit in the chapter, I can’t help but wonder if we’re meant to understand that David’s sin is atoned for by the death of his innocent son. After all, there seems to be no obvious causal link between David’s sin and the child’s death. Might it be that we’re meant to see the death of the innocent child as equivalent to that of the blameless sacrifice in the Levitical system?

I don’t think, to be clear, that the death of the child actually did atone for David’s sin. God isn’t in the habit of taking individual human lives to pay for each and every sin committed by another. But just as the sacrificial system could not atone for sin, but was a shadow of the substance to come in Christ (Heb 10.1ff), so too this is a picture of God’s redemptive plan. The sins of the world will ultimately be atoned for by the death of David’s innocent son. The perfect substitute. Not this nameless child, but his true son Jesus Christ.

This suggestion is strengthened by the presence of Nathan, who appears only twice in the narrative of 2 Samuel – here when he pronounces the death of David’s innocent son, and in chapter 7 when he prophesies the coming of the Messiah, David’s victorious son. This coming king, he says, will have an everlasting kingdom. God will be his father, and he will be God’s son.

Nathan declares of this coming Messiah,

‘When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands.’ (2 Samuel 7.14)

Of any other human this verse would make sense, but Jesus had no sin of his own. And yet he was flogged by human hands. The punishment of God did come upon him at the cross. For the innocent son bore the punishment for the wrongdoing of others.

‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Corinthians 5.21)

This messy, heart-wrenching narrative points to our need for a saviour, and it reveals God’s plan to put away sin once and for all, not through the blood of bulls and goats, nor through the deaths of many children, but through One. The perfect substitute. David’s innocent son, Jesus Christ.

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