the bible is full of weird people

The LORD then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation.
18 The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) 19 These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.
20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. 21 When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked.
24 When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said,
    "Cursed be Canaan!
    The lowest of slaves
    will he be to his brothers.” (Genesis 8 and 9)

There are things in the Bible that are just plain old strange, weird even. The world had turned bad. There were no better people than Noah and his three sons, so God saved them from a world-wide flood to begin the human race again.

As soon as the flood is over and Noah gets his crops planted and then harvested, he makes some wine, drinks it and passes out naked in his tent.

Shem, one of his sons, comes in sees him and goes out laughing to the other sons. They cover their father. When Noah wakes up and finds out what Shem has done, he curses him.

Now, why? If Shem was good enough to save, what must that say about the rest of the people who died? And really, what did he do wrong that required him to be turned into a family of slaves? And how much worse was it than Noah getting drunk and passing out naked?

The Bible is full of things like this: righteous people favored of God who are jerks. Noah here. Abraham, a man called a Friend of God (James 2:23 and Genesis 15:6), lied twice about his marriage to Sarah to save his own life. Lot, who God saved from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, got drunk and his daughters had sex with him because they thought they were the only people left in the world.

Jephthah, in Judges 11 who promised God that he would sacrifice the first thing he saw. His daughter was the first thing he saw when he got home, so evidently he sacrificed her. The text isn’t real clear on that, but still.

Samson, who was blessed by God with great strength, but who didn’t even seem to worship God.

David, a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22), couldn’t keep his hands off other women, even to the point of killing their husbands to cover his tracks.

Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, but who married 300 women and had 700 concubines. In fact, if you read the text about most of the men of God, most had not only wives, but also concubines, or mistresses in modern terms, and who were polygamists.

Elijah, a prophet who was so good, God took him into heaven in a flaming chariot rather than let him die (2 Kings 2:11). However, he suffered from such depression that even on the end of a very successful fight against prophets of an idol, he fell into self-pity and misery. God had to tell him, in essence, shut up your whining.

So what’s the point, you ask. I guess it is that I wonder how in the world God could use these men and how in the world he could bless them and hold them up as paragons of faith.

These men were flawed. And I have voluntarily joined a denomination founded by a woman who was deeply flawed herself. And I am a minister of God and am deeply flawed.

The Bible is a strange book in that it doesn’t gloss over the faults of its great people. It mentions them and then moves on. Why? I think it is because God is trying to tell us that with all our failures and problems he can use us too.

So you face problems with pornography, or a drinking problem, or drugs, or overeating or depression or anything else. That means you are no different than the great men of God.

In the book of James, the writer even goes so far as to hold Elijah up as a great man of God and then say, Elijah was a man just like us (James 5:17). Yet it seemed that he was never happy and was a whiner at times, and really depressed.

Interesting thought.