I am so thankful that God didn’t candy coat the chaotic journey of men in the Bible. We’re easily intimidated by guys who seem to glide through life with little mess, a perfect backyard, six-pack abs and a white-hot marriage.
Instead, God gives us a book that reminds us on every page that He uses men who are still trying to figure things out. When I have one of those man-what-was-I-thinking moments I remember Abraham who actually said to Pharaoh about his wife, “No, she’s not my wife, she’s uh… my sister. Yeah, that’s it! My sister!”
When I think about my embarrassing, trip-over-my-own-feet-to-save-my-integrity moments, I think about Joseph who, when propositioned by Potiphar’s wife, admirably ran away so fast he literally lost his clothes. We celebrate his virtue, but we have to agree that he needed a better belt.
Eutychus must be thanking God that there wasn’t YouTube in the first century because a video of him falling out of a three story building during Paul’s Bible Study in Acts 20 would have gone viral.
One universal truth of man is that we’ve all missed a rung, slept inappropriately, and said some epically stupid things and the exact time we shouldn’t have. The mic was on, the occasion was not apropos, our judgment was obscured or we just plain blew it. Period.
But it’s all there in the Bible and God manages get the glory and make something amazing in spite of all the kooky conundrums we manufacture in our spare time. This is the book I love because it makes me feel like God could actually use a enigmatic, flawed, perplexing man like me. If fact, the Bible hints to the fact that He not only works with people like us but He kind of enjoys telling the story. It’s almost like he’s saying, “Look at this! I can even use that guy!”
This work by Matt Tullos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International