Broad meadows

The next place that we see the cup presented is in 2 Samuel 12 and it is there that we continue our study. In 2 Samuel 12, Nathan confronts David about using the sword of the Ammonites to kill Uriah and take his wife to be his own.

One of the guidelines that I use when analyzing theses texts is that nothing that I think I have found can contradict a plain reading of scripture. As I noted in a previous writing, I treat each of these accounts as parables, but when a king is or does evil and that God the Father or Jesus is usually that king in the parable, am I saying that God is doing evil?

No, that’s definitely not what I’m saying. Scripture says, and I believe wholeheartedly that God is good and that His love endures forever. When looking at texts like these, what I have done is tried to strip out the means and focused on the result . What I mean is that similar to what Joseph told his brothers when his father died, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

2 Samuel 12:1-4 says,

“The LORD sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.
“Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him.””

In this parable another symbol joins (merges with) the cup, a lamb. We know from the New Testament that the lamb of God is Jesus, from John the Baptist in the gospel accounts and in Revelation 5. When using the method of merging, not only do the symbols merge, with each line adding its own nuance to the overall message, but the characters merge, also. That is, the prophet to come, the king and the man who died are all the same person. So let me characterize it this way: The king to come would be a prophet and an innocent man who would die to gain a wife (the church, John 3:29) for the king, Jesus being all of those characters. It would be impossible to gain such an insight without the concept of merging.

The last thing that I would point out is that while the parable that Nathan told had a ewe or female lamb that was killed, that the man who died in the story was male. So as we continue to examine these accounts, we should look at such descriptors as modifiers that aren’t necessarily literal.

In the next installment, the cup takes an unexpected turn, so look for that.