Nobody's Perfect

Some have posed the question, “Why would God use people like ______ to do His work?” Fill in the blank with just about any character in the Bible you would like. For example, Abraham, father and patriarch of all of Israel, the man to whom the Promise was given, tried to pass off Sarah as his sister once because he was afraid that he would be killed by a man or men that wanted Sarah for themselves. Of course, the man that he feared most was indeed attracted to Sarah, but, since he believed that Abraham and Sarah were brother and sister, he just took her. It turns out that he wasn’t the kind of guy that would have killed a man just to take his wife, anyway, but even if he had been, shouldn’t Abraham have trusted God to protect him? Of course he should have. So, basically what we have learned about Abraham is that he suffered from cowardice. So why would God use someone like Abraham?

If that were not bad enough, apparently Abraham was so ashamed of himself for his actions that he didn’t tell Isaac about it. Many years later, Isaac and Rebekah were in the same city, Gerar, under the same king, Abimelech, and Isaac told the same lie for the same reason. So why would God use someone like Isaac?

When David was king over all of Israel, he found himself attracted to a woman that was one of his neighbors, in fact, she was the wife of one of David’s mighty men. He had her brought into his home, and later had her husband killed, so that he could marry her. Why would God use someone like David?

Peter denied the Lord three times, after promising Jesus that he would follow Him into death if it came to that. I can somewhat understand that Peter’s world had just been rocked; he followed Jesus for three years, and, even though Jesus tried to warn him what was coming, Peter was not ready for the arrest. While he was trying to figure it out, to reconcile what he thought he had known with what had just happened, some people started talking to him about being one of Jesus’ disciples. Why would God use someone like Peter?
To be honest, we could go down the list of all the people in the Bible, and they all have faults, except for Jesus Himself. Some of them were fortunate enough to not have their faults actually mentioned in the Scriptures, but every one of them had faults. Paul even talked about his thorn in the flesh; how he sought God to remove it, but God finally told him that he needed the thorn to keep him from being exalted above measure (in other words, God didn’t want Paul to get a big head).

So why is it, that all through the Bible, God used imperfect people to carry out His perfect will? Let me ask you a question: What other kind of people would He have used? The Bible tells us that all have sinned, and all have come short of the glory of God. Let me ask you another question: If God hadn’t been able to use imperfect people all through the Bible, then how would He ever manage to be able to use you? Or, for that matter, how could I believe that God could ever use me? To be honest, I still struggle with that concept. But, if you and I wait for someone perfect to come along and do the work of God, we are going to have a long wait. He has already been here, and He has left it up to us, now. We just need to open up and let Him work through us.

It Rains on the Just and the Unjust

I read something the other day; a blogger was postulating that the rain and flooding in the Midwest was proof that God supports gay marriage. His logic was something like this: When Katrina hit New Orleans, a whole lot of evangelical preachers started talking about how God was pronouncing judgment against the sinners that lived there. So, when the courts in California legalized gay marriage, one would expect a similar outpouring of the Almighty’s wrath in California; instead, we had these major disasters in the Midwest, where the people aren’t even thinking about legalizing gay marriage. Clearly, God is warning the Midwesterners that they are the sinners, and California represents the righteous. If I didn’t think he was being facetious, I would point out the fires that they are having in California now. He makes a good point though, why is it that every time some natural disaster hits, people look for someone or something to blame? There was that one nut that said Heath Ledger died because of that one movie that he did (if so, why are the cast of Will and Grace still alive and kicking?). The fact of the matter is, sometimes things just happen. If you’re having a bad day, it isn’t necessarily your fault (or God's fault). Job had a few bad days, that wasn’t his fault. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that the sun rises on the evil and the good, and it rains on the just and the unjust. Further, in Luke 13, the disciples were talking about some men in Galilee that met a tragic faith, and Jesus asked them if they thought those men were sinners above all the Galilaeans, and that was why they suffered such things, but Jesus said no, they weren’t, and went on to say that if the rest of us don’t repent, we will all likewise perish. He went on to talk about 18 people that died when the tower of Siloam fell on them, were they sinners above all those in Jerusalem? No, they weren’t. So many times, too, people take it personally when something bad happens; for example, if they lose a loved one. I understand that can be a hard thing to deal with. When God calls someone home, though, that’s really between Him and that individual. We all lose loved ones. If you stop and think, though, what is it you really want in those situations? Do you want your wife (or husband) to survive and mourn your passing? Would you really want them to feel that? Death is part of the life cycle; there is just no getting around that. Don’t take it personally, as though God took someone that you cared about just to punish you. He doesn’t usually work like that (I have to add the 'usually' caveat because of David and Bathsheba’s first son. God took him specifically to punish David and Bathsheba--mostly David).God is in control, but a lot of times He stays out of the details. He allows us to make our own choices. Sometimes those choices are good, and sometimes they are bad. Sometimes we suffer because we made a bad choice, other times because someone else made a bad choice. Sometimes others suffer for our bad decisions. That’s not God’s fault. If one dies, but one is ready, then that person’s suffering is over. Of course, if one dies when one is not ready, then that person’s suffering is just beginning. Does God use disasters to remind people to be ready? Certainly, but the people who are hurt or killed during the disaster aren’t necessarily the ones He was trying to remind. And he didn’t necessarily cause the disaster in order to use it as a reminder. Sometimes He just let’s things happen, and deals with people after the fact. “See what happened there? That could have been you. Don’t you have some getting ready to do?”

UPDATE:  Apparently the site I was linking to has changed their format; I have fixed the links.  My apologies... 

Women In the Bible (Part II)

Hannah was a godly woman who wanted nothing more than to have children. The Bible says that God had shut up her womb, but that she went to the temple and prayed about it. She promised God that her first-born son would be loaned to God, and she indeed had a son, Samuel, that she loaned to God, and then she had more children afterwards that she raised herself. I could probably spend a lot of time talking about Hannah, but, for now, suffice it to say that God laid something on her heart, and, even though it was hard for her, she did it, and she got rewarded for her faithfulness. Some of you may be saying to yourselves that I shouldn’t be telling you that having children is a reward. Maybe for you it isn’t, but for her it was.
Ruth was an important woman in the Bible; she has her own book. She was not Jewish by birth, but somewhere along the line she accepted the Jewish faith. Naomi was a Jewish woman that went, with her husband and two sons, to the land of Moab when they fell upon hard times in Israel. The two sons married Ruth and Orpah (presumably these women accepted the Jewish faith before the wedding—it doesn’t really say). Something happened to the men in the family, and then these three women were all widows. Jewish tradition (and perhaps Moabite tradition as well) dictated that if a married man dies childless, then his nearest male relative was to take the widow as his own wife, but then her children would be the heirs of the deceased. Naomi had a problem, though, she didn’t have any male relatives in Moab, they had all died. She was going to go back to Israel, but she suggested that Ruth and Orpah go back to their own families in Moab. Orpah did, Ruth, however, insisted that Naomi was her family, and that Naomi’s God was her God, and Ruth went to Israel with Naomi. Once there, she met a relative of her late husband named Boaz. They got married and lived happily ever after; they had a son named Jesse, who had a son named David…
King David’s first wife was Michal, and for the most part she was a good woman—she saved David’s life, but she did criticize David once, and she never had any more children after that (was that punishment or reward? I assume that it was punishment).
David’s wife Abigail was a real prize, although she was married to someone else when David first met her. Nabal had angered David greatly, and David was on his way to kill him, when Abigail interceded for her husband. Later Nabal died anyway, and David married Nabal’s widow.
Bathsheba was, evidently, a very attractive woman. One night, David was up on the roof, and found a vantage point where he could observe Bathsheba taking a bath. It turns out that her husband was one of the mighty men in David’s army, and was off defending Israel. David sent for her, and she came to him, and became pregnant. The Bible doesn’t really say how much of an argument she put up; what do you say in an era when women were treated pretty much as property, and your husband is away, and the king sends for you and wants to have you? I’m sure she argued the best she could; the sin was David’s, not hers.
There was woman of Tekoah that had some significance during David’s reign, whom the Bible doesn’t even name. There had been a situation where David had banished one of his own sons from the kingdom. David was miserable about it, and, quite frankly, it didn’t make a lot of sense. One of the men close to David, named Joab, sent this woman to David with a situation that closely mirrored David’s own situation. Once she got David to look at the situation objectively (that is, looking at it from the perspective that it was someone else’s problem, instead of his own), he realized that he could deal with the situation better, and he brought his son home. As it turns out, he might have been better off if he had left the situation as it was, but that wasn’t her fault.

A Little Bit More

I have mentioned before that I am a Navy veteran. When I was on the ship, there was a guy that had a drinking problem, and knew he had a drinking problem (there are a lot of people in the Navy with drinking problems--few of them know they have a problem). He normally avoided drinking, because he knew that one drink led to another, and two drinks led to four, etc. As long as he didn't take that first drink, he was okay, but if he took a drink, then he felt like he could 'handle' a second drink... We pulled in somewhere in the Bahamas, I think it was, and at the liberty brief they warned us that they didn't have a local Coca-Cola bottling plant, which meant that Coke had to be imported (Pepsi, too, in case you were wondering). They did have local distilleries, though, so liquor didn't have to be imported. This means that rum is cheaper than rum-and-Coke, and rum-and-Coke is cheaper than Coke. So, our intrepid thirsty friend goes out to but a Coke, and, even after the liberty brief, he was surprised at what a Coke cost. To be honest, I was a little surprised, too, but I knew what I wanted, and I was already expecting to have to pay more for it (after that, I bought Coke on the ship, and carried it with me out into town). He decided that for that much money, he should get his money's worth. The flaw in the logic is, that if what you want is Coke, then the only way to 'get your money's worth' would be to get a larger Coke, which, of course, wasn't going to happen. Conditioned by American values, though, he felt like he was getting a better deal by getting a rum-and-Coke, as opposed to a 'virgin' Coke. I've already mentioned that rum was cheaper than Coke, so, take a guess at how much Coke he got in his drink. So now he's paid extra for the privilege of having just enough Coke in his rum to taste. And, he's getting a much stronger drink than he anticipated, and it doesn't take long for the alcohol to go to his head and convince him that another rum-and-Coke is a good idea.

Later on that evening, he was walking through the streets, and noticed a hotel that tried to create the impression of being an international entity by flying flags from many different countries from the building's facade. He was inebriated enough at that point to become very insulted that these 'foreigners' were flying an American flag, so he took it (we were, of course, the foreigners, but in his state of mind that wasn't clear to him). By the way, in case you are wondering what I was doing during all of this, we didn't get liberty at the same time--I didn't see him all that night, but he told me about it in the morning.

When he sobered up, and realized what he had done, he took the flag back, and explained himself, as best he could, to the manager of the hotel. The manager was gracious enough not only to not press charges, but also to thank him for returning the flag.

I think what brought this incident to mind was Gehazi trying to get something for nothing, in the story of Naaman the leper. I can understand Gehazi's desire, but, of course, the fact that he tried to sneak around behind the back of the man of God shows that he knew he was wrong. My friend should have known he was wrong (he knew he had a drinking problem, but he had a drink anyway), but he let money cloud his judgment. Granted, he wasn't trying to get something for nothing, exactly, but he did try to get more for less. Generally, more for less is a good thing, unless the 'more' isn't what God has for you. David ran into the same problem with Bathsheba, and that turned into a real tangle.

So often, we think we know what's best for us, but God has something better in mind. Sometimes, when we pray, we get what we want; sometimes we get what we need, instead. Sometimes we get things that we didn't even know that we wanted, and yet, it makes us forget all about what we thought we wanted.

Solomon's Temple

(Image from www.mishkanministries.org/architectural_modles_kst.htm )

I have heard a lot of discussion about King Solomon's Temple; King David wanted to build a temple for God, but God refused him. Later King David told Solomon that it would be Solomon's responsibility to build the temple. There are multiple theories about why God wouldn't allow David to build the temple, but most of them seem to be out in left field to me.

If you look at the text where David found out God didn't want him to build the temple, God starts out saying that He doesn't need a house (after all, why would a spiritual being need a physical house), and a lot of the rest of it actually sounds like Messianic prophesy. God certainly told David that after David's death, God would raise up one of David's sons and establish his kingdom; I have to wonder though, did God mean immediately after David's death? He says that He will establish that throne forever: Does that mean that Solomon's throne is established forever because we still remember King Solomon today? It seems to me that God is talking about Jesus, of the lineage of David, whose throne is established for evermore.

Now, if you look at the text where David assigns the task to Solomon, it reads very differently. David seems to think that it is because of the bloodshed during his reign that he was not allowed to build the temple. There was no mention of bloodshed before... Further, David says that God prophesied that Solomon, by name, would build the temple. There was no mention of Solomon's name before, and, quite frankly, it would have been meaningless if there had been; Solomon hadn't been born yet, David could have named any of his sons Solomon... God definitely told David that the temple would not be built until after David's death, but there's no mention of that when David spoke to Solomon. So what happened? Well, it's certainly possible that the writer of First Chronicles (Nathan?) simply left out some of what God told David. It's also possible (and more likely, IMHO) that David had thirty years to ponder what God had told him, and that he formed his own opinions about what God meant, and he paraphrased or embellished the instructions unintentionally. I have been asked if I thought David lied to Solomon: No, I don't think he lied, but I think what he said wasn't entirely true; lying implies intent to deceive, I don't believe that there was any such intent.

I also want to point out that a lot of people believe that when David talked about bloodshed, he was specifically referring to the death of Uriah the Hittite. I would tend to agree. All of the other blood that was shed during David's reign was the blood of enemies of God, or at least, enemies of Israel (if there was a difference). Uriah was one of David's mighty men: a hero of Israel. David had not yet met Bathsheba (Uriah's wife, for whom David had Uriah killed) at the time Nathan told David that God did not want David to build the temple. We know this because there are two places in the Bible where it talks about David sending Joab to besiege Rabbah at the time "...when Kings went forth/out to battle..." and both times, David tarried still at Jerusalem. The point, of course, being that David was not where he was supposed to be. The first time is in Second Samuel 11:1, the second being First Chronicles 20:1. Obviously, these are both references to the same battle, but in Second Samuel, the narrative goes on to spell out the whole story of David suffering from insomnia, and going up on the roof, and seeing Bathsheba (the original bathing beauty), and thinking that she could put him to sleep; not caring that her husband, Uriah was off at Rabbah, putting his life on the line for his nation, Israel. For some reason, First Chronicles doesn't mention Bathsheba or Uriah; perhaps an attempt to reduce redundancy. Amazingly, only two chapters later, David charges Solomon, his son by Bathsheba, to build the temple. That should make it clear that First Chronicles is somewhat abbreviated. In any case, there are also two places where it makes reference to God saying no to David when he was seeking to build a house for God: Second Samuel 7:5, and First Chronicles 17:4--both times, several chapters prior to his encounter with Bathsheba. So, even though David may have still felt guilty over the encounter when his son Solomon was old enough to assume the throne, it really had nothing to do with why God denied him the opportunity to build the temple.