The "Messed Up" Stories of the Bible - New Evangelizers

I was teaching the story of Sodom and Gammorah in class last week. For those unfamiliar, two angels who look like men go to the house of Lot in the city of Sodom to see if there are at least 10 good men. If these 10 men can be found, God will not destroy the cities. However, the men of Sodom come to Lot and want to sexually assault the angels (again, who look like men). The angels knock out the men of Sodom and tell Lot to leave with his wife and two daughters, but they are not to look back. When Lot and his family get away and God destroys the cities. But Lot’s wife looks back and turns into a pillar of salt. Lot and his two adult daughters hide in nearby caves. Lot’s daughters think that the world has ended and lament that they will not have children. So they get Lot drunk and have him impregnate them.

When discussing this story with my students, one of them said, “Man, the Bible is messed up.”

I replied, “Excuse me? Did you just say that the Word of God was ‘messed up?'”

He responded, “I mean, there are so many messed up stories in the Bible.”

And on that point, my student is 100% correct.

There are many “messed up” stories in the Bible.

Besides the story of Sodom and Gammorah, here just some of the examples:

-Cain murders his brother Abel out of jealousy
-Noah gets drunk and Ham looks upon his father’s nakedness
-Abraham gives away his wife to Pharaoh
-Sarah beats and abuses the birth mother of her adopted son and eventually banishes them.
-Jacob steals from his blind father
-Onan is killed for “wasting his seed on the ground.”
-Reuben sleeps with his stepmother
-Simeon and Levi kill all the townsmen of Hamor to avenge their sister.
-Judah sleeps with his daughter-in-law who he thinks is a prostitute
-Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery.

Those are just some of the “messed up” stories you will find. And those are all exclusive from the book of Genesis. You can find similar stories throughout the rest of the Bible.

So why does the Bible have so many “messed up” stories?

My short answer to my student is this: the Bible needs to have these “messed up” stories because the world is messed up.

The Bible is not some simplistic children’s fable. It is not Barney or Dora the Explorer. To be sure, there are some valuable lessons children can learn from these programs, they do not reflect the darkness of our world. If your house has been burglarized, I’m not sure how much help Dora will be other than to say “Swiper, no swiping!”

We live in a world that is often cruel, dark, and indifferent to suffering. Human beings inflict all kinds of senseless hurts on each other. Just turn on the news on any given day and you will see a constant stream of stories about man’s inhumanity to man.

But we don’t have to look far outside our own homes to see this darkness. In side our families there can be rivalry, jealousy, bullying, selfishness, ingratitude, resentment, and every other kind of vice. We’ve seen families torn apart by divorce, abuse, addiction, and sin.

In that way, the “messed up” stories of the Bible reflect the world we live in. If the Bible was all lollipops and lilacs, then we would dismiss it as soon as we hit adolescents (like many ignorantly do in the modern world) as another children’s tale that we outgrow. But as we grow up, we see the world the people we encounter become darker and more complicated. When we read these darker stories of Scripture, we find a resonance with the darkness found in the people there as well.

But the darkness is not the only point.

The point of seeing all this darkness is to show how God meets us where we are and he raises us to His light.

Despite the sinfulness of the world, God became one of us and took on our human flesh. He lived in a world that was broken by sin and He showed us how to live authentically human lives. He took the sin of the world upon Himself to show us that there is a path out of that darkness.

When we encounter the messed up parts of our own lives, we can be assured that our problems are not new to God. He has been dealing with human sinfulness since the beginning. But, as Pope St. John Paul II wrote, “We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures, we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son Jesus.”

The Bible is not the sum total of human weakness and failures, but it is the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity for human beings to rise out of that darkness and become the image of His Son.

As John’s Gospel states: “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5).

Copyright 2024, WL Grayson

W.L. Grayson

I am a devoutly Catholic theology teacher who loves a popular culture that often, quite frankly, hates me. I grew up absorbing every movie, TV show, comic book, science fiction novel, etc. I could find. As of today I’ve watched over 2100 movies and tv shows. They take up a huge part of my life. I don’t know that this is a good thing, but it has given me a common vocabulary to draw from in order to illustrate whatever theological point I make in class. I’ve used American Pie the song to explain the Book of Revelation (I’ll post on this some time later) and American Pie the movie to help explain Eucharist (don’t ask). The point is that the popular culture is popular for a reason. It is woven into the fabric of our lives and imaginations, for good or ill. In this blog I will attempt to bring together the things of heaven with the things of earth. Of course this goal may be too lofty for someone like me.