Are there bits of the Bible that maybe would have served God better if He’d left them out?
God doesn’t whitewash things about the characters in the stories He chose to share with us. We see that for the man after God’s own heart, God doesn’t hide the fact that this man killed a trusted, loyal warrior so he could take his wife.
Of the man God chose as the father of our faith, He doesn’t hide the fact that this man laughed when God told Him He’d have a son (Genesis 17:17). He also lied about his wife, calling her his sister.
God doesn’t hide the fact that the man we see spread the gospel so fearlessly was relentlessly hunting down believers to have them put to death.
He shows us that the man from whom the nation Isreal gets its name was a conman.
He doesn’t hide that He was betrayed by one of His prayerfully chosen apostles. Even God’s inner circle had a snake – what a shock!
We see that He cried in the garden of gethsemane (Hebrews 5:7). We see that He asked that the cup be taken away.
He shows us that some of His disciples doubted He’d risen.
He doesn’t edit out the circumstances surrounding Jesus’s birth and the difficult position it must have put His parents in in the society. He leaves in there how a powerful, anointed, wise man like Solomon ended up with thousands of wives and turning away from God.
God doesn’t edit Jesus’s earthly lineage to remove the prostitute.
God lays it all bare. There’s a lot to say about this but I’ll stick to one thing – In all these stories, we see God loving every one of these people in spite of their weaknesses. We see the story of God’s love for the world working past brokenness to bring us salvation in spite of all the human failures along the way.
God doesn’t whitewash any of these things. I believe that in the same way, He expects us to come to Him as we are, bare, naked and unedited. Let Him continue to do what only He can do – weave a tapestry that stretches all the way from the beginning of time to the end of it. You don’t have to have it all together – you just need to hand it all over. He finds a way to still weave that into His master plan.