Flawed (1)


For some years I’ve been interacting with people in jail.  It’s through an organisation known as Crossroads Prison Ministries which specialises in Bible lessons for people who are incarcerated.

Recently I was checking a new student’s first lesson.  He had never ever read the Bible before but what he discovered blew him away.  He expected the Bible to be all about people who were particularly good... better than your average Joe Blow.  Hey, isn’t religion all about saints with haloes..?  With some amazement he wrote, “It so surprises me that all the characters of the Bible are flawed... many of them deeply flawed.”  That’s so true, isn’t it?  Adam and Eve disobeyed a very simple command, not to eat the fruit of a certain tree.  Their son Cain murdered his brother.  Seven generations later we have another murderer who was a bigamist to boot.  Noah was a great bloke but he once got as drunk as a skunk!  Abraham decided to help God along by having a son by his wife’s servant girl.  Lot is called a righteous man but he too got drunk and had two sons from incestuous relationships with his daughters.  The book of Judges has some ‘R’-rated chapters of which I won’t even mention the details.  And by the time we get to Israel’s greatest king – David – we have to mention adultery and murder.  Yep... they’re all flawed... often deeply so.

My Crossroads student added one more comment.  He had also read Paul’s evaluation in Romans: “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  He wrote: “I have trouble believing how the Bible just sets us up for failure...!”  That puzzled him greatly.

Well, it’s actually much worse.  Some words from Isaiah are possibly the starkest picture of our hopeless and lost human condition – as God sees it.  Isaiah 64:6 reads: “All of us have become as one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.”  Talk about being set up to fail...?!  Did you notice that Isaiah said: ALL of us...!?  None are excluded.  So much for human ability and our supposed inherent goodness.  And when Isaiah says that all of us have become as one who is unclean he wasn’t talking about the uncleanness of dirt, grease and grime.  He was talking about the moral and ritual uncleanness that cuts humanity off from a holy and perfect God.  Perhaps the best symbol of that kind of uncleanness is the leper in Bible times who was an outcast – banned from the temple.

But Isaiah’s picture is even worse.  There’s that bit about “all our righteous acts” being like filthy rags?  Notice that..?  It’s not our sins that are like filthy rags... it’s our righteous acts that are like filthy rags.  In other words, the very best that we can do still isn’t good enough for God.  And then I could add for good measure that in the original Hebrew text where we’ve just spoken of filthy rags, it could also be translated as: “all our righteous deeds are like menstrual cloths”.  Yes indeed... the Bible sets us up for failure.

I pointed out to my student that nothing more clearly makes us realise our great need for Jesus.  The point is... there is this one person in the Bible who is not a flawed character.  At the trial of Jesus of Nazareth they could find nothing to charge him with.  So He was executed on trumped up charges.  For the first time since the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, there walked a man on earth who was not “unclean” – for whom there was no barrier to God.  And His righteous acts were precisely that – perfect deeds of love and goodness.

If humanity is inherently good, why did God need to send His only Son to go through that hellish God-forsaken agony of crucifixion to restore us to God again... to remove our filthy rags?

The Bible is an extremely realistic book.  All its heroes are flawed characters.  Except for One..!  But all of us flawed characters need to look in faith to that one flawless character: Jesus Christ.  In Him we not only find forgiveness for all our filthy rags... by faith we are also credited with His perfect goodness.  The apostle Paul put it well in 2Corinthians 5, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

John Westendorp
2MaxFM Feb.16th 2025

 

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