"God picked you because you were a loser"

Got this iPad app called Glo Bible. Doing a prepared plan to read the whole Bible in one year. Read about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah this morning, then the part about Lot’s daughters getting him drunk and having sex with him. Expected that God would come slap up those silly hos, but He didn’t. I hope that scene is in there at some point. Just seems to me that incest is far more immoral than orgies and whatever other sexual impropriety. And apparently it was okay for Abraham to commit adultery, maybe because his wife suggested it(?). Confused. I’ll be praying for clarity on this.

–July 29, 2012 [link]

At the end of July, I posted to Facebook about incest in the Book of Genesis. I wondered why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah but didn’t punish Lot’s daughters, and said I would pray for clarity on this. Well, Pastor Rob Ketterling mentioned the story in his sermon this weekend at River Valley Church, along with several other examples of less-than-stellar behavior in the Bible.

The executive pastor proposed that God wanted these stories included so we would know and remember that “the whole line is flawed.” Noah was a drunk¹; Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery after plotting his murder²; the tribe of Judah, from which Jesus descended, was started through an act of deceit and semi-incest (Judah and his widowed daughter-in-law)³; Samson was practically bipolar, vacillating between being obedient to God and being a hot mess⁴; and so on. These biblical heroes were only recipients of God’s grace.

“God didn’t pick you because you were all that,” Pastor Rob said. “He picked you because you were a loser.” A woman’s laugh pierced through the tension that had befallen the 11:00am congregation, but discomfort remained. “Some of you don’t like hearing that you’re a loser.” He went on to describe the parishioners as part of the one-percent—not in the Occupy Wall Street sense but in the global sense, being among the population that holds the majority of the world’s wealth. The richest people in other countries have turned away from God. We can say the same of many U.S. citizens, who bolster themselves in arrogant assurance of their own faculties. But here sat members of the global one-percent—the “top one-percent of losers”—gathered together for worshipping God and growing spiritually.

“God put these things in the story so we would know that He wants to put us in the story.”

The inclusion of Lot’s daughters’ incestuous conduct isn’t to demonstrate Old Testament Yahweh’s fickleness in punishing sin. It is to reveal the flaws—some more shameful than others—of God’s chosen people. We are far from perfect. These stories of gracelessness bear witness to the moments of grace that can only come from Him. When tempted to self-righteousness, we are reminded that we are no different from them: losers made into conduits for His power and glory.


¹ Genesis 9
² Genesis 37-45
³ Genesis 38
⁴ Judges 14-16