King David and Bathsheba

Of all the vices, lust is the one many people seem to find the most difficult to control.  This story of Patriarch David and Bathsheba is from the second book of Samuel in the Bible.

When David first became king he went with his army upon the wars against the enemies of Israel.  But there came a time when the cares of his kingdom were many, and David left Joab, his general, to lead his warriors, while he stayed in his palace on Mount Zion.

One evening, about sunset, David was walking upon the roof of his palace.  He looked down into a garden nearby, and saw a woman who was very beautiful.  David asked one of his servants who this woman was, and he said to him, “Her name is Bathsheba, and she is the wife of Uriah.”

Now Uriah was an officer in David’s army, under Joab; and at that time he was fighting in David’s war against the Ammonites, at Rabbah, near the desert, on the east of Jordan.  David sent for Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, and talked with her.  He loved her, and greatly longed to take her as one of his own wives.  But David could not marry Bathsheba while her husband, Uriah, was living.  Then a wicked thought came into David’s heart, and he formed a plan to have Uriah killed, so that he could then take Bathsheba into his own house.

David wrote a letter to Joab, the commander of his army.  And in the letter he said, “When there is to be a fight with the Ammonites, send Uriah into the middle of it, where it will be the hottest; and manage to leave him there, so that he may be slain by the Ammonites.”

And Joab did as David had commanded him.  He sent Uriah with some brave men to a place near the wall of the city, where he knew that the enemies  would rush out of the city upon them; there was a fierce fight beside the wall; Uriah was slain, and other brave men with him.  Then Joab sent a messenger to tell King David how the war was being carried on, and especially that Uriah, one of his brave officers, had been killed in the fighting.

When David heard this, he said to the messenger, “Say to Joab, ‘Do not feel troubled at the loss of the men slain in battle.  The sword must strike down some.  Keep up the siege; press forward and you will take the city.’”

And after Bathsheba had mourned over her husband’s death for a time, then David took her into his palace, and she became his wife.  And a little child was born to them, whom David loved greatly.  Only Joab, and David, and perhaps a few others, knew that David has caused the death of Uriah; but God knew it, and God was displeased with David for this wicked deed.

Then the Lord sent Nathan, the prophet, to David to tell him that though men knew not that David had done wickedly, God had seen it, and would surely punish David for his sin.  Nathan came to David, and he spoke to him thus:

“There were two men in one city; one was rich, and the other poor.  The rich man had great flocks of sheep and herds of cattle; but the poor man had only one little lamb that he had bought.  It grew up in his home with his children, and drank out of his cup, and lay upon his lap, and was like a little daughter to him.

“One day a visitor came to the rich man’s house to dinner.  The rich man did not take one of hgis own sheep to kill for his guest.  He robbed the poor man of his lamb, and killed it, and cooked it for a meal with his friend.”

“When David heard this, he was very angry.  He said to Nathan, “The man who did this thing deserves to die! He shall give back to his poor neighbor fourfold for the lamb taken from him.  How cruel to treat a poor man thus, without pity for him!”

And Nathan said to David, “You are the man who has done this deed.  The Lord made you king in place of Saul, and gave you a kingdom.  You have a great house, and many wives.  Why, then, have you done this wickedness in the sight of the Lord?  You have slain Uriah with the sword of the men of Ammon; and you have taken his wife to be your wife.  For this there shall be a sword drawn against your house; you shall suffer for it, and your wives shall suffer, and your children shall suffer, because you have done this.”

When David heard all this, he saw, as he had not seen before, how great was his wickedness.  He was exceedingly sorry; and said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.”  And David showed such sorrow for his sin that Nathan said to him, “The Lord has forgiven your sin; and you shall not die on account of it.  But the child that Uriah’s wife has given to you shall surely die.”

Soon after this the little child of David and Bathsheba, whom David loved greatly, was taken very ill.  David prayed to God for the child’s life; and David took no food, but lay in sorrow, with his face upon the floor of his house.  The nobles of his palace came to him, and urged him to rise up and take food, but he would not.  For seven days the child grew worse and worse and David remained in sorrow.  Then the child died; and the nobles were afraid to tell David, for they said to each other, “If he was in such grief while the child was living, what will he do when he hears that the child is dead?”

But when King David saw the people whispering to one another with sad faces, he asked, “Is he dead?”

And they said to him, “Yes, O king, the child is dead.”

Then David rose up from the floor where he had been lying.  He washed his face, and put on his kingly robes.  He went first to the house of the Lord, and worshipped; then he came to his own house, and sat down to his table, and took food.  His servants wondered at this, and David said to them, “While the child was still alive, I fasted, and prayed, and wept; for I hoped that by prayer to the Lord, and by the mercy of the Lord, his life might be spared.  But now that he is dead, my prayers can do no more for him.  I cannot bring him back again.  He will not come back to me, but I shall go to him.”

And after this God gave to David and to Bathsheba, his wife, another son, whom they named Solomon.  The Lord loved Solomon, and he grew up to be a wise man.

After God had forgiven David’s great sin, David wrote the Fifty-first Psalm, in memory of his sin and of God’s forgiveness. (See Bible: Psalms 51:1-19; Prayer of Repentance).

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Self Discipline

Discipline is the suppression of base desires, and is usually understood to be synonymous with restraint and control. Self-discipline is to some extent a substitute for motivation.  Discipline is when one uses reason to determine the best course of action regardless of one's own desires, which may be the opposite of one’s self-discipline. Virtuous behavior can be described as when one's values are aligned with one's aims: to do what one knows is best and to do it gladly.

In self-discipline one makes a “disciple” of oneself.  One is one’s own teacher, trainer, coach, and disciplinarian.  It is all odd sort of relationship, paradoxical in its own way, and many of us don’t handle it very well.  There is much unhappiness and personal distress in the world because of failures to control tempers, appetites, passions, and impulses.

Positive Discipline is a discipline model used in schools, and in parenting, that focuses on the positive points of behavior, based on the ideal that there are no bad children, just good and bad behaviors. We can teach and reinforce the good behaviors while suppressing the bad ones without hurting the child verbally or physically. People engaging in positive discipline are not ignoring problems. Rather, they are actively involved in helping their child learn how to handle situations more appropriately while remaining calm, friendly and respectful to the children themselves. Positive discipline includes a number of different techniques that, used in combination, can lead to a more effective way for parents to manage their kids’ behavior, or for teachers to manage their students. Things become dubious for a child when his parents in home and teachers in school act in contravention of positive discipline.

The question has been at or near the center of Western philosophy since its very beginnings.  Plato divided the soul into three parts or operations—reason, passion, and appetite—and said that right behavior results from harmony or control of these elements.  Saint Augustine sought to understand the soul by ranking its various forms of love in his famous ordo amoris: love of God, neighbor, self, and material goods.  Sigmund Freud divided the psyche into the id., ego, and superego.  And we find William Shakespeare examining the conflicts of the soul, the struggle between good and evil called the psychomachia, in immortal works such as King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet.  Again and again, the problem is one of the soul’s proper balance and order without which an individual’s self-discipline cannot achieve positive enhancement.

 But the question of correct order of the soul is not simply the domain of sublime philosophy and drama.  It lies at the heart of the task of successful everyday behavior, whether it is controlling our tempers, or our appetites or our inclinations to sit all day in front of the television.  Our habits make all the difference.  We learn to order our souls the same way we learn to do math problems or play baseball well—through practice.

Practice, of course, is the medicine hard to swallow.  If it were easy, we wouldn’t have such modern-day phenomena as multimillion-dollar diet and exercise industries.  We can enlist the aid of trainers, therapists, support groups, step programs, and other strategies, but in the end, its practice that makes self-control possible.

Considerable disagreement exists over what should legitimately be studied in formal institutions of learning for self-discipline. Usually, some topics or subjects are considered taboo. These taboos may come about through interpretations of the law, as in the case of the exclusion of religious teaching from public schools in the United States. Or they may come about as a result of pressure from interest groups, as in the attempts to exclude sex education, teaching about Communism, and sensitivity training from American schools. The major considerations are that young children are not well equipped to resist heavy bias in teaching and that they are usually compelled by law to attend school and thus constitute a captive audience. It is sometimes argued, therefore, that they should be protected against religious and political propaganda and against material or experiences that require greater maturity to be handled creatively. On the other side, the danger in such arguments is that they can be used to keep all controversy out of schools and to render them places characterized by dull uniformity of thought.

There is nothing distinctively religious in recognizing that religious faith adds a significant dimension to self-discipline. No doubt that Faith is a source of discipline and power and meaning in the lives of the faithful of any major religious creed. It is a potent force in human experience.

A shared faith binds people together in ways that cannot be duplicated by other means.  Clashing faiths, on the other hand, divide people in sometimes the most violent ways. A secular world stripped of all vestige of religion would assuredly have no religious wars, but it follows, by no means, that it would be a world at peace.  We do faith a disservice in laying at its doorstep the fundamental causes of faction.

Faith contributes to the form and the content of the ideals that guide the aspirations for our self-discipline in our lives, and it affects the way we regard and behave with respect to others. “The fruit of the Spirit”—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23)—has its parallels in all the major faiths; and the Golden Rule, expressed in one form or another, is recognized almost universally. Faith can contribute important elements to the social stability and moral development towards self-discipline of individuals and groups.

There can be no disagreement in the fact that the major sources of self-discipline for a child are home and schooling. From birth to adolescence a child learns from imitating the behavior of his/her elders in home.  Also there can be no disagreement in the fact that elders at home and school are not always equipped with positive self-discipline, a situation which affects adversely on a child behavior.

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