Why is the Bible So Dirty?
Living the Christian Life is Harder than it Seems
Growing up in the Christian faith, my favorite Bible books have waffled over time. Paul’s letters were my favorites in my twenties because they were doctrinaire and heady. For this reason, it’s common for young pastors to like Paul’s letters. As I’ve matured, my Bible interest veered from what seemed doctrinaire to what seemed more empathetic. What was going on in me was I was accumulating life experiences and, thus, came to appreciate the Psalms, Job, and the prophetic writings more as they helped me find voice to my own experiences. Now I’m in my mid-50s and I find myself enjoying Paul’s letters again, but for a different reason than why I enjoyed them in my twenties. Now, I really enjoy Paul’s letters (and the others epistles or letters in your New Testament) because they are so dirty.
You can read Paul’s letters (or the other epistles) as a collection of doctrines, but that would be an unfortunate misread. Your New Testament letters are written to individuals and to groups of Christians who were hard to live with. They are letters born in conflict and frustration with the complexity of living the Christian life in their real day-to-day lives with each other. The letters are dirty in that they are collections of real-life examples of the dirty laundry of regular people trying their best to live for Jesus, even when and especially when their fellow humans were making it particularly difficult to do so.
Paul’s letters are parental exhortations; they are fatherly letters to young Christian communities that were struggling with how to live the Christian life in the context of their much-too-real lives. A favorite text of mine of Paul’s that connects back to the dirtiness of life and to his leadership in that context is Colossians 3:12-13:
Since God chose you to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you.
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? He wasn’t being nice. It was grating and frustrating and hard to hear him out. I am sure, too, that it was frustrating for Paul to have to be so direct, and it was clearly frustrating to his listeners as he was scolding their immaturity and unnecessary destructiveness.
Paul is anything but nice when he says to them in verses five through nine, in leading up to his conclusion in verses 12 and 13, as he exhorts them that as Christ's followers, they must:
Put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you. Have nothing to do with sexual immorality, impurity, lust, and evil desires. Don’t be greedy, for a greedy person is an idolater, worshiping the things of this world. Because of these sins, the anger of God is coming. You used to do these things when your life was still part of this world. But now is the time to get rid of anger, rage, malicious behavior, slander, and dirty language. Don’t lie to each other, for you have stripped off your old sinful nature and all its wicked deeds.
Get what I mean by dirty? You must put to death what is sinful! Put to death what is lurking in and around you that is destroying what God has called you to be as Christians and as a Christian community!
Sometimes, what happens, in an effort to be nice, what we actually end up doing is lying to one another and cooperating with the evil one in the destruction of what is good, true, and beautiful. Sometimes being nice or trying to “make allowance” for one another is actually us throwing parades for what God calls sin and thus causing harm to ourselves and to those we claim to love. It is sinful to be sexually immoral. It is sinful to be lustful. It is sinful to be greedy and angry and foul. It is sinful to slander someone. These are violent behaviors against God’s character and against His will for our lives.
Niceness, too often, is an expression of the demonic underbelly of sin. It is sin crouching, sin undercover, seeking to steal, kill, and destroy. Ephesians is another one of Paul’s dirty letters (meaning human, messy, sin-filled, etc.) where he challenges his readers to “speak the truth in love.” His exhortation to kindly live the truth in and among each other is preceded in Ephesians by his explanation of the role of the Church, her teaching authority, and the command for the Church to help her members no longer be children who are “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.”
It is not kind to preach, teach, or encourage unsound doctrine or immoral behavior. It is not kind to placate or participate in lies. Too often, Christians who have not abandoned the faith like others who deny the authority of Scripture, choose silence in the face of evil to appear nice when, in fact, what is called for by God and by our fathers and mothers in the faith is to be truly kind by speaking the truth in love.