When Kings Go Out to Battle

Everybody knows what David did. Almost nobody can tell you where he was supposed to be instead.

Ask a room full of church men about 2 Samuel 11 and you will get the roof, the bath, the pregnancy, the letter that got a good man killed. All of that is in the chapter. None of it is where the chapter starts.

It starts with a location.

The sentence before the story

"Then it happened in the spring, at the time when kings go out to battle, that David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel, and they destroyed the sons of Ammon and besieged Rabbah. But David stayed at Jerusalem." (2 Samuel 11:1)

Read the last five words again. They are doing all the work.

The verse tells you the season, and then it tells you what men in his position do in that season, and then it tells you he did not. There is no adultery in that sentence. There is no murder. There is a man in a comfortable building at the exact hour his post was somewhere else.

The writer put it there on purpose. He could have opened with the roof. He opened with the absence, because the absence is the cause and the roof is the result.

Nothing was wrong yet

Here is what makes this so hard to catch in your own life.

On the day David stayed, nobody could have charged him with anything. There is no command in the Law that says a king must personally attend every siege. Joab was competent. The army won. The siege held without him. If you had asked David that morning whether anything was off, he would have told you no, and he would not have been lying.

He was tired. He had earned it. He had been fighting since he was a boy with a sling, and a man who has been at war that long is entitled to a spring at home.

That is the whole trap. A man does not step off his post because he decided to be wicked. He steps off because he is tired, and because the reasons are good, and because for a while nothing happens.

Something did happen. Just not that day.

What idle means

"Now when evening came David arose from his bed and walked around on the roof of the king's house, and from the roof he saw a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful in appearance." (2 Samuel 11:2)

He got up from his bed in the evening. Sit with that for a second, because it is a small detail and it tells you the condition of the man.

Not up at dawn. Not out with the men. Up at dusk, wandering a roof, with nothing in front of him and nothing behind him and no one needing anything from him right then.

I am not going to tell you that idleness is the sin. It is not. But a man with no assignment is a man with no resistance, and the thing that came for David that evening did not have to fight through anything to get to him. There was nothing in the way.

You know this. The temptation that takes a man is almost never the one that ambushes him mid-task. It is the one that finds him with an empty evening and a lit screen and nobody expecting him anywhere.

The seasons a man is given

The verse says at the time when kings go out. There was a season for it.

That should land on you, because you have seasons too and they are just as real. There is a stretch when your kids are small and the assignment is physical and constant. There is a stretch when they are teenagers and the assignment turns into being awake and available at hours you would rather be asleep. There is a season in a marriage where the work is repair, and one where the work is just presence, and telling them apart is most of the job.

A man can be doing real work in the wrong season and still be off his post. David's men were winning. His kingdom was fine. He was in the wrong place at the right time of year, and that was enough.

Ask the question the chapter is asking. Not whether you are working hard. Whether you are working hard at the thing this season assigned you.

He was still the king

One more thing about that roof, and it is the part that turns this from a story about lust into a story about a watch.

David could see the city from up there. That is what a palace roof in Jerusalem is for. He was looking out over households he was responsible for, and the first thing he did with that vantage point was take something out of one of them.

The position that was given to him so he could protect people became the position he used to find a person to take. Same roof. Same authority. Same man. Just a man who had stopped thinking of himself as posted.

Every kind of authority a man has works like this. A father's access to his kids, a husband's knowledge of his wife's weak spots, a boss's read on who needs the job. All of it is given for keeping. All of it can be turned around and used for taking, and the turn happens without a decision, in a man who has quit thinking of his position as a duty.

The one who did not stay

I am not leaving you on that roof, because Scripture puts another Man in the same frame and He goes the other direction.

There was a season when He was meant to go out, and He knew exactly what going out was going to cost Him, and He did not stay home. He was determined to go to the city that was going to kill Him. When the men who came for Him arrived in the dark, He did not send somebody else in His place. He asked them who they were looking for and then told them it was Him.

Where a king stayed behind and a faithful soldier died in his place, the King went out and died in the place of unfaithful men.

That matters more than it sounds like it does. If you have already been David in this story, and a lot of men reading this have been, the answer is not to grit your teeth and be more vigilant next spring. The answer is that the post you abandoned was kept by Someone else on your behalf, and He is not asking for restitution before He will put you back on a wall.

Ask what season it is

Here is the small concrete thing, and it is smaller than a life overhaul.

Sit down tonight and answer one question in writing. What season is my house in right now, and what does it require of me that it did not require two years ago.

Not what you are good at. Not what you enjoy. Not what was the right answer in the last stretch. What this one is asking for.

Most men who are off their post are not lazy men. They are men still faithfully doing the assignment from a season that ended, and nobody told them the season changed, and the change is the only thing they missed.

David was a good soldier in a year that needed a king on a field. Find out what this year needs, and go be there.