When I think of the characters of the bible, I can’t help but think about the awesome men & women of God that have come down through the history: David, Solomon, Sampson, Ruth, Esther, Peter, Mary and many, many others. These biblical titans are great examples of living the life of constant dependence upon God. Their stories are so great and so well known that it’s hard to not deify these mighty men and women of the bible. Yet the bible itself tells us that they aren’t nearly as perfect as we once thought they were.
Sitting in Bible Study Methods class today, a gentleman (whose name I can’t remember for the life of me) gave a devotional about how a boat had started to sink and the people were looking around for the captain and crew to figure out what to do. People looked in the captains room, the bridge of the ship; they looked everywhere, but the captain and crew couldn’t be found. Someone eventually looked out to sea and saw two life boats in the water, heading towards shore. One boat held the captain and the crew and the other boat held all of their luggage. What a shock that must have been to the people on the ship; to see the person in charge of the whole ship, being concerned with himself and his crew and none of his passengers. What a shock it must have been to see the captain fail the expectations of the people on board that ship.
When those we expect to be heroic and powerful, fail to meet that expectation, what does that do to a person? How do you handle that? Does your world come completely crashing down like so many people in the world? Did your world stop when Michael Jackson died like so many others in the world? How hard it has on the people we idolize to be a gods to us.
The thing I really like about the bible is that it doesn’t pull any punches; it tells the story how it happened. Take for example King David: He is called “…a man after God’s own heart,” yet David had multiple wives, had an affair with Bathsheba, had Bathsheba’s husband killed, and then took Bathsheba as his own wife. Does that sound like the King David we normally hear about at church?
How great is our God that He could use someone who had as screwed up a life as David? How great is our God that He could use someone with sins like mine? It’s a very humbling thought to know that I screw up a lot and yet God is still willing to use me anyways.
