Flawed People

Recently, I've been reading my way through Genesis and then Job. One of the things that really struck me this time was how God uses flawed people. Time and time again, we see people who make mistakes and who struggle with sin, and yet we see God having a relationship with them and using them to affect the lives of others.

One of the first things that Noah does after getting off the ark is to get drunk. There are a couple of occasions where Abraham passes his wife off as his sister, and he uses this lie to help make himself get rich. Isaac does the same thing. Jacob lives the first half of his life as a selfish manipulator. Joseph was pretty much the definition of arrogance up until the time he was sold into slavery. Yet these people are heroes of the book of Genesis.

Job and his friends spend almost 40 chapters arguing about God. Both sets of people have incorrect views of who God is and how he works. Then God shows up and explains how Job misunderstood him. Yet after three chapters of taking Job to task, God still calls Job his friend.

Too often, people think that they have to be perfect for God to use them, or that we need to clean ourselves up before God will want to have a relationship with us. Nothing could be further from the truth. We don't have to be perfect in order to have a relationship with God. If that were true, the Bible would have no heroes, other than God and Jesus. Because everyone else in the Bible is a human being who struggles with the same kinds of things that all human beings struggle with.

Certainly sin is wrong. And as we have a relationship with God, we should see changes in our lives. We should start to become more like him. Typically, that change is a result of a relationship with God, it isn't a prerequisite for it.