In reading today’s devotional from the book Conflict and Courage by Ellen White, it reminds me of a truth that seems clear to me but perhaps not to everyone. The truth that the Bible is true, there is a Creator God and that our lives are transformed when we embrace Him.
I have to wonder why God would allow a book such as the Bible to be propagated in His name.
EW states it this way: “It is a subject of wonder to many that inspired history should narrate in the lives of good men facts that tarnish their moral characters.”
Most of the stories are of seemingly uncaring humans who struggle with temptations and fall time after time. Selfish humans. Lying humans. Adulterous humans. Unforgiving humans. Murdering humans. Humans who are not a good witness to those God wants to reach.
Or are they? If you want to understand the world of a pig you should get in the mud and roll in it with him. I’m not calling humans pigs here — just a parallel.
When the first humans of the world, Adam and Eve, decided to disobey God’s instruction and follow their own hearts, the rest of creation in harm’s way and sent this world into a spiral that it has not recuperated from.
So here we are. Weak fragile humans with the same inadequacies as the Bible people we read about.
What makes the difference is how some of the Bible people respond to a God calling out to them and how God responds back to them.
I have always marveled when reading the story of Adam and Eve because after their failure in obedience, God comes to them and asks “Where are you?” fully knowing where they were, fully understanding what they had done and yet fully loving them.
This is the behavior we can emulate when those around us fail us. We may know of their misdeeds and their weaknesses and yet fully love them.
Yet we can only emulate this behavior if it exists in us. And it can only exist in us if we have embraced the God who is perfect and who made us to be like Him.
And there’s where the rubber meets the road.
Whether the Bible is true or fiction should not depend on whether people can see the character of God in our lives. There is plenty of nature and science that speaks to the creative power of a God in heaven. However, weak and fragile though we be, the best witness we can have to those who can’t comprehend what all the fuss is about — a God or no God — is to allow His character to live in us.
When people see the transformation in my life perhaps they will look up to the heavens and say “surely there must be a God.”