27th November 2024

One of the biggest misunderstandings about the Bible is that it’s primarily a set of moral teachings, a manual on how to be good. But much of the Bible hardly exemplifies virtuous living. Take the (humanly speaking) founding parents of God’s chosen people, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, their wives and offspring. Their behaviour is often hardly exemplary: often a bunch of rogues, lying in their own interests, quarrelling bitterly among themselves, and going to war with surrounding peoples. Jacob’s sons sell their brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt, and Joseph himself, when the tables are turned, isn’t above playing tricks on them to rub in his eventual success. Cruelty, deception, lust, vengeance and idolatry are part of their story. Shocking! Where is the ‘right from wrong’ teaching in all this? Can these really be the pioneers of ‘the chosen people’?

The Biblical story is not first about humans being good, but how the holy God remains the God of his chosen people even when they choose not to be chosen. It makes no bones about their waywardness (no attempts to sanitise the nation’s historical record!). They are indeed called to account for what they do. It’s really about how God’s loving purpose prevails: in the words of a fine hymn, “sin and death and hell shall never o’er us final triumph gain”.  It’s the all-too-real world of sin and violence, the world that still shocks us today, which the Bible talks about. God has immersed himself in it for our salvation, seen in Bethlehem’s crib and on Calvary’s cross: the triumph of grace, to God’s praise alone. Hallelujah!

Keith Clements