How Can the Bible Be Right If It Makes Us Feel Oh So Wrong? God’s Word Is the Inconvenient Truth.

Last updated on: January 4, 2017 at 10:49 am by Paul Louis Metzger

How Can the Bible Be Right If It Makes Us Feel Oh So Wrong? God’s Word Is the Inconvenient Truth. 2017-01-04T10:49:44-08:00 Paul Louis Metzger

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In our moralistic, therapeutic deistic age, one often hears “If it feels right, it must be right.” If feeling determines rightness, the Bible must be wrong—at least much of the time. Fortunately, not everyone agrees at every turn with this assessment.

Here I am reminded of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie, where he and his poodle Charlie set off on a cross-country journey in his truck. Soon after beginning the trek in New York, they stop in Vermont on a Sunday morning. Steinbeck decides to attend church. The church he chose was of the old school “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” variety, where Steinbeck was the recipient of a fire and brimstone message. Here’s what he wrote:

It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren’t really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control…. For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble of kicking the hell out of me. He put my sins in a new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity. I hadn’t been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn’t a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.[1]

Steinbeck welcomed this spiritual butt-kicking, to my surprise, unlike King David of old when the prophet Nathan confronted him on his adulterous and murderous ways with Bathsheba and her husband Uriah the Hittite (See 2 Samuel 11). If you don’t know the story, David, the king of Israel, stayed home from battle. As he gazed over his kingdom from the roof of his house, he gazed upon a woman (Bathsheba) bathing; he called for her. After having his way with her, he received the news that she was pregnant. Trying to cover over his dirty deed, he had her husband (Uriah), one of his great warriors, return home from battle. David hoped Uriah would sleep with his wife so as to make it appear that the child was Uriah’s. Given his loyalty to David and his fellow soldiers who were engaged in battle at the time, he refused to go to his house and sleep with his wife. So, David had the commander of his forces, Joab, place Uriah on the front lines in the heat of the battle so that he would be killed. When the news reached David that Uriah was dead, he sent for Bathsheba after the time of her mourning for her slain husband. David took her to be his wife, and she bore him a son.

But the story is not over. 2 Samuel 11 ends with these cryptic words: “But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD” (2 Samuel 11:27). So God sent the prophet Nathan to David (2 Samuel 12:1). Just when David thinks that he has swept the whole scandalous ordeal under the rug, God exposes him…

Nathan the prophet appears at the palace to share with David a horrible tale that had taken place in David’s kingdom. The story goes that there were two men in a certain city, one very wealthy and the other rather poor. The rich man had many flocks and herds, whereas the poor man had only a ewe lamb. The rich man prepared a feast for his friends. Instead of taking from his own flock of sheep, the rich and powerful man took the poor man’s lamb, slaughtered it, and prepared it for his guests to eat. David is furious over the injustice and plans to wreak havoc on this man and his estate. And just as he rages, Nathan turns to the king, and exclaims “You are the man!” (2 Samuel 12:7) David is undone. What may have felt so right up to this point now felt oh so wrong! God judges David for his scandalous actions (2 Samuel 12). It almost undoes David, his family, and his kingdom, as the ensuing narrative reveals.

David may have been hoping at the time for a divine butler or cosmic therapist, as Christian Smith describes the deity of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.[2] How can the Bible be right if it makes us feel oh so wrong? God’s Word is the inconvenient truth.

We tend to think that the God of the Bible takes away our freedom by holding us accountable for our actions. To the contrary, what we lose when we are not held accountable is our humanity—our personal responsibility. As Steinbeck’s account above teaches us, whereas a certain therapeutic deity would have us think we have no control over our actions, we have control and must be held accountable for our deeds. Only those who are responsible have human dignity; those who operate otherwise are like involuntary amoebas or robots.

If anything, the God of the Bible to whom Steinbeck refers should make us feel worthwhile even when his judgments make us unhappy. Which would you rather have it be—the nihilism of a happiness of convenience or the sober-minded worthiness of personal responsibility and accountability? As Steinbeck makes clear, God as the Inconvenient Truth gives our sins “size and bloom and dignity”.

__________________

[1]John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), pages 60–61.

[2]Christian Smith, “On ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ as U.S. Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith,” page 50: https://www.ptsem.edu/uploadedFiles/School_of_Christian_Vocation_and_Mission/Institute_for_Youth_Ministry/Princeton_Lectures/Smith-Moralistic.pdf.

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