However, because by this deed you have given great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born unto you shall surely die.
All Commentaries on 2 Samuel 12:14 Go To 2 Samuel 12
Cyril of Jerusalem
AD 386
If you like, however, I will give you further examples relating to our condition. Come then to the blessed David, and take him for your example of repentance. Great as he was, he suffered a fall. It was in the afternoon, after his siesta, that he took a turn on the housetop and saw by chance what stirred his human passion. He fulfilled the sinful deed, but his nobility, when it came to confessing the lapse, had not perished with the doing of the deed. Nathan the prophet came, swift to convict, but now as a healer for his wound, saying, “The Lord was angry, and you have sinned.” So spoke a simple subject to his reigning sovereign. But David, though king and robed in purple, did not take it amiss, for he had regard not to the rank of the speaker but to the majesty of him who sent him. He was not puffed up by the fact that guardsmen were drawn up all around him, for the angelic host of the Lord came to his mind and he was in terror “as seeing him who is invisible.” So he answered and said to the man that came to him, or rather, in his person, to the God whose messenger he was, “I have sinned against the Lord.” You see this royal humility and the making of confession. Surely no one had been convicting him, nor were there many who knew what he had done. Swiftly the deed was done and immediately the prophet appeared as accuser. Lo! The sinner confesses his wicked deed, and as it was full and frank confession, he had the swiftest healing. For the prophet Nathan first threatened him, but then said immediately, “And the Lord has put away your sin.” And see how quickly lovingkindness changes the face of God! Except that he first declares, “you have given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme” as though he said “you have many that are your foes because of your righteousness, from whom nevertheless, you were kept safe by your upright living. But as you have thrown away this best of armors, you have now, standing ready to strike, these foes that are risen up against you.”
So then the prophet comforted David as we have seen, but that blessed man, though he received most gladly the assurance, “The Lord has put away your sin,” did not, king as he was, draw back from penitence. Indeed he put on sackcloth in place of his purple robe, and the king sat in ashes on the bare earth instead of on his gilded throne. And in ashes he did not merely sit, but took them for eating, as he himself says, “I have eaten ashes as it were bread, and mingled my drink with weeping.” His lustful eye he wasted away with tears; as he says, “every night I wash my bed and water my couch with my tears.” And when his courtiers exhorted him to eat food, he would not, but prolonged his fast for seven whole days.
