aymond almost walked away from the Bible because of Jephthah.
He had been raised in the church, faithful, until the Sabbath afternoon he read Judges 11 in a quiet moment between services. Jephthah: a judge of Israel, a man Scripture describes as a mighty warrior whom the Spirit of God came upon. He made a rash vow to God and then followed through on it in a way that cost his daughter her life.
Raymond closed his Bible, set it on the nightstand, and didn’t pick it up again for three months.
“If God allowed that, if that’s in the Bible, what kind of God is that?”
Raymond’s crisis is more common than we admit. The Old Testament is full of stories that disturb us. Lot’s daughters. Samson’s recklessness. David’s adultery and murder. Jacob’s deception. The slaughter of the Canaanites. Many believers quietly skip these passages. Others stumble over them and never recover. And still others simply pretend they aren’t there. But these stories are in Scripture precisely because God wants us to wrestle with them.
Ancient texts routinely airbrushed their heroes. The Bible does something startlingly different: it tells the truth. That unflinching honesty is itself a form of revelation because a God who deals honestly with human failure is a God who can be trusted. God did not put these stories in Scripture to scandalize us. He put them there to save us from the illusion that faith means perfection.
Here is a liberating distinction that changes everything: description is not the same as approval. When the Bible describes what Samson did, it is not endorsing it. When it records what Jephthah vowed, it is not celebrating it. The narrative camera records the scene. The moral lens is supplied by the whole counsel of Scripture. This means we must ask different questions when we encounter a troubling passage. Not just “What happened?” but “What does this reveal about God’s character?”
When we ask those questions, Jephthah’s story stops being a scandal and becomes a sobering portrait of what happens when we make vows out of fear rather than faith.
That is the spiritual genius of the Old Testament’s holy messes. They mirror human nature in its full complexity—ambitious, fearful, faithful, faithless, broken—and they show us a God who keeps showing up anyway.
Don’t skip the hard stories. Sit with them. Ask the deeper questions. Let them disturb you, and then let them teach you. Even in a mess, God speaks. Especially in the mess, God speaks.
When reading a difficult story, ask:
- What does the story reveal about God, not just about the human characters?
- What happened, not what should have happened; distinguish description from approval.
- What are the consequences? God’s moral commentary is often in what follows.
STUDY: Scripture’s own explanation of why these stories exist. “Now all these things happened unto them for examples: and they are written for our admonition…” (1 Corinthians 10:11).
EXPLORE: Bible Project videos on Old Testament narrative, and the SDA Bible Commentary narrative sections for a scholarly Adventist perspective.
REMEMBER: More than one-third of the Old Testament consists of stories with over 3,000 named individuals, most of whom are imperfect. That’s grace to receive.
Why didn’t God remove these stories? Because truth is one of the Bible’s greatest signs of authenticity.
Why do biblical heroes fail so badly? To remind us that salvation is by grace, not perfection.
Lord, give me the courage to sit with difficult passages rather than avoid them. Teach me to hear Your voice even in the stories that unsettle me. Show me grace where I expect only judgment, and truth where I expect confusion. Speak to me, even in the mess. Amen.