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by Bill Seng

Reason 10) Truth

The Bible tells me the truth about what happened in the past, no matter how ugly it might have been.

Atheist, magician, and comedian Penn Jillette has made some outrageous claims against the Bible regarding the types of things that the God of the Old Testament was okay with. One noteworthy concern of his was that in one story it is noted that a woman was “gang-raped and beaten and God being ‘cool’ with it” (Mr. Jillette said this during a Big Think recording, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3rGev6OZ3w). First off, God was not “cool with it.” Second, the point of the story was not to describe the activity of righteous people living in obedience to God, but wicked people living in rebellion against God. The story he paraphrases is found in Judges 19 and is actually more gruesome than he paraphrases. The book concludes with the words “everyone did as they saw fit,” meaning that there was no moral authority in the land.

The Bible does not sugar-coat its history to make it seem as though any person or group of people were perfect. In Genesis, we see Noah get drunk after the flood and Abraham’s nephew, Lot, commit the sin of incest with his own daughters. In Judges, Samson is overcome by lust and marries a woman, Delilah, who conspires to have him arrested. In 2 Samuel, King David, a man described as one after God’s own heart, committed adultery with another man’s wife and then sent the husband off to the front lines of war to be killed. The Bible does not hide the faults of its heroes. One ought to take note of its honesty. Psalm 51 is even entitled, “For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.”

With such brutal honesty about its fallen heroes, how much more ought we to take note of the good things it says about its triumphant heroes? The sins of those who were models of the faith were so horrible that the story of Jesus is refreshing. Many people fell to Satan’s woos while trying to accomplish God’s will for their lives, but Jesus crushed the head of the serpent under his feet.

I believe what the Bible says because the people it describes are just as susceptible to evil as you or me. Even Jesus was tempted with all of the same evils that we have been tempted with. I would encourage everyone to use the truth filter when testing the validity of any message. The Bible passes the test.