“When she carried on her prostitution openly and exposed her naked body, I turned away from her in disgust, just as I had turned away from her sister. Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled. (Ezekiel 23:18-21 NIV)”
Don’t be offended. It’s in the Bible.
I grew up with a pretty squeaky clean version of Christianity. Great parents who raised me very morally, and I was told early on not to say certain words, not to sleep with someone before your married, not to do drugs, not to lie, not to steal and so on and so forth. I was also raised with a pretty pure view of the BIble. I’ve heard before that the Bible is the word of God, that God has every word in there for a reason. The Bible is God breathed and in it he tells the story of redemption for humanity. While I fully agree with this, we’ve (conveniently) skipped the grittier parts of the God’s word.
God is honest. He doesn’t skip over the ugly parts of humanity. He doesn’t try and sugar coat things. In the Bible we see the ultimate depravity of man. Gang rapes, sacrificing children to pagan gods, incest, manipulation, affairs, murder, it’s all in there. Why? Because we compare ourselves. We say to ourselves “there’s no way God could use that person” while we forget that Jesus was born through the line of David, a man who had slept with a woman and then had her husband killed in battle. We forget that Paul wrote most of the New Testament and before he was converted, he was responsible for hunting and killing Christians. God uses what we as humans deem as the morally corrupt. People that we see as reprehensible, offensive, and utterly disgusting. God instead sees them as redeemed, and He restores them from death and corruption to life and integrity.
We need to see people that sometimes Christendom deems as unapproachable as approachable. For example when it comes to the sexually corrupt such as pornographers, exotic dancers, and people in that industry we often think to ourselves unclean, unclean! We say to ourselves “well sure God can save them but he sure won’t be using me to do that!’. When we think that we are too morally clean to get in the trench with broken, dirty people we fail as little Christs’. We fail to model who Jesus was. We all know the story of the woman at the well, the woman who was seen by the religious elite as too unclean. Jesus goes right up to her, approaches her, engages in conversation and she is changed forever. Next time you think of someone like a dancer, or someone you know who is sexually promiscuous remember the woman at the well.
What’s my point? God isn’t afraid to get in the trenches with the most morally corrupt. God isn’t afraid to write about them in his Holy book, and God doesn’t sugar coat what they did in that book either. He is upfront, honest, descriptive, and in it we see a good God redeeming humanity. The Bible is not a children’s book full of fairy tales of unicorns and ponies. It’s gritty, vulgar, and gross. The best part? It’s good.
We need to view the Bible for what it is and we need to let that be a sobering reminder that nothing is too unclean for God to use and turn in to restored goodness. Let’s not put walls in between us and certain people because the God of the Bible most certainly does not.
