Christian Almanac: Where Faith Meets Real Life
Episode 16 Transcript
Why Does the Bible Include Such Ugly Stories?
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This week, we’re going to talk about the Bible. The Bible is essentially our handbook for practicing our faith. Not a simple policy manual, of course, but the primary place we go to understand who God is, who we are, and how he calls us to live.
When I say that, it reminds me of a project I worked on years ago, when I helped a client rewrite his employment policies, including the employee handbook. I made sure all the language was simple, clear, and easy to understand so there would be no question about what was expected of employees or promised by the company.
If only the Bible were that clear.
But the reality and challenge for us as Christians is that the Bible isn’t always clear at first reading. It’s not always pretty. It can be inspiring, it can be comforting—and it can also be ugly and confusing.
But we can learn from those dark stories, those passages that don’t get preached on very often.
Let’s take a look at one of them. It’s the story told in Judges 19.
A Levite was traveling with his concubine and servant when they stopped for the night in Gibeah, a town in the territory of Benjamin. An old man took them into his home and showed them hospitality. But later that evening, a group of men from the city surrounded the house and demanded that the Levite be sent out to them.
The host tried to protect the Levite, but in one of the most horrifying moments in Scripture, he offered his own daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead. The Levite then took the woman and sent her outside. The men abused her through the night. At dawn, she came back to the doorway of the house and collapsed.
When the Levite got up in the morning and found her there, he told her to get up. But she did not answer. He put her body on his donkey and went home. Then he cut her body into twelve pieces and sent them throughout Israel as a shocking call for the tribes to respond to what had happened.
On the surface, I don’t get this story. I don’t see God in it. I see a helpless woman offered to a mob as a shield for the men who had taken her into their care. And when she died from what the mob did to her, the Levite cut her body into 12 pieces and sent them throughout Israel. It’s sickening.
Now, we need to be clear: the Bible records this story; it does not approve of it. Judges is showing us what happens when people abandon God’s authority and “everyone does what is right in his own eyes,” which is one of the repeated themes of the book.
When you study the story, when you reflect on it, there are some lessons.
Cowards are always willing to sacrifice someone else. The Levite was clearly a coward. When he was faced with danger, he protected himself at the woman’s expense.
Don’t we see that happening today? Not in such a literal way, but when a leader protects his own reputation at the expense of the people he should be serving. Or when institutions cover up abuse to safeguard their image, without regard for the victims.
Violence is usually rooted in a culture that has no moral center, no justice, no accountability, where people believe they can do what they want without consequences. That’s what was occurring in Gibeah. Evil doesn’t just happen, it’s cultivated.
And it’s cultivated one compromise at a time. One failure of leadership at a time. One decision to look away at a time.
We must speak up for those who need our voice. You know that woman wasn’t silent as she was being brutalized. The mob probably wasn’t silent, either. But even though they heard, no one spoke up, no one stepped up to help her. No one had the courage to try to protect a vulnerable person.
That may be the part of this story that should trouble us most. Not just the violence of the wicked, but the silence and self-protection of the people who should have known better.
Perhaps the most important thing this story, and the other dark stories in the Bible tell us is that Scripture is not a collection of sweet, uplifting tales designed to make us all look good—and neither are our lives.
Evil is real. Darkness is real. And a society without guardrails, without compassion, without accountability, and without courage will destroy itself. The weak and vulnerable go first, but eventually everything collapses and is destroyed.
We need leadership. We need courage. We need honesty.
As Christians, we can’t hide behind the prettiness of Christmas and the joy of the Resurrection. We can’t brush the horror aside. We have to face the ugliness that is the reality of our world. And we have to let it teach us.
Stories like this should grieve us. They should disturb us. But they should also wake us up. Because faith is not just about finding comfort in Scripture. It is also about letting Scripture confront us, correct us, and call us to become people who protect the vulnerable, tell the truth, and refuse to make peace with evil.
When we come back, we’ll talk about why the Bible includes stories like this—and how the hard, ugly parts of Scripture can teach us truth, wisdom, and courage.
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Welcome back.
We just talked about one of the Bible’s uglier stories. But it’s not the only ugly story in the Bible.
We turn to the Bible when we’re looking for comfort, encouragement, and guidance. And we should. That’s part of why God gave us his Word.
But then, even as we’re looking for something to uplift us, we run into stories that are violent, confusing, disturbing, or morally repulsive.
Especially if you’re new to the faith, but even if you’ve been a Christian for a long time, it’s easy to look at some of these passages and wonder:
Where is God in this?
What am I supposed to do with this?
Why is this even in the Bible?
What’s important for us to recognize is that the Bible has tough stuff in it because it tells the truth about human history, and human history isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes it’s ugly. Really ugly.
The Bible is not a collection of inspirational stories designed to make people look noble. It’s not public relations material for humanity.
It records betrayal, violence, cowardice, injustice, abuse of power, family dysfunction, idolatry, and national collapse. It shows us the absolute worst of human nature.
The Bible does not hide the ugliness of human behavior. It exposes it.
We’ve already talked about the violence and moral chaos in Judges, but there are plenty of other places in the Bible that are heartbreaking and bewildering.
Think about David and Bathsheba. David saw Bathsheba, sent for her, and slept with her. When she became pregnant, he tried to cover it up by bringing her husband, Uriah, home from battle. But Uriah was an honorable man and would not go home to his wife while the army was still in the field. So David arranged for Uriah to be placed where the fighting was fiercest and then abandoned, so he would be killed. You can read that story in 2 Samuel 11.
Or think about Joseph. His brothers hated him, threw him into a pit, and sold him to a caravan of Ishmaelites headed to Egypt. Then they deceived their father into believing Joseph had been killed by a wild animal. That story begins in Genesis 37.
History is often ugly because sin is ugly.
These hard stories are not in the Bible to shock us. They’re there to show us what sin does, to show us how it damages people, families, communities, nations, and systems, and to show us that sin doesn’t stay private, it spreads.
Something else these stories do is remind us that sin has victims. It’s not just theoretical. We don’t sin in isolation. Someone else is always affected by our sin.
Now, a lot of the stories in the Bible are there as models for us, to show us what we should do. But not all of them. The Bible records what happened but it doesn’t always endorse what happened. It’s important to remember that not everything recorded in Scripture is meant for us to imitate, but it’s all meant for us to learn from.
It can be tempting to just skip over the difficult passages, to dismiss them, saying “We’re not meant to understand everything, and this is one of those things.”
We shouldn’t do that. We should stop and read the passage carefully. We should pray about it.
We should ask ourselves:
What’s really happening here?
Who is being harmed—and who is doing the harm?
Who is acting faithfully—or faithlessly?
What does this reveal about human nature?
And perhaps most importantly:
What does this reveal about the need for God’s justice and mercy?
It’s nice to read those passages that give us simple moral lessons that are clear and easy to see. The hard passages don’t do that, but they can still give us truthful warnings we should heed.
When we talk about the Bible as a guide for how we should live, we need to remember that the lesson is not always “this is what you should do.” Sometimes the lesson is, “this is what happens when people are disobedient and turn away from God.”
If the Bible only showed polished people and pleasant stories, it would not speak honestly to the world we live in. If you take modern conveniences and technological advancements out of the picture and focus on human nature, things aren’t much different now than they were during biblical times.
We know life includes suffering, betrayal, abuse, injustice, grief, and consequences. Scripture does not ask us to deny that.
The good news is not that the world is already good. The good news is that God enters a broken world and brings redemption.
Romans 15:4 tells us:
For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. (Romans 15:4, NKJV)
Biblical hope is not fragile optimism. It is hope strong enough to look evil in the face and still trust God. And that’s why these ugly stories matter for us now.
Reading the ugly biblical history should make us more honest about our own world.
We should be less surprised by evil, but not less grieved by it.
We should be less naive about human nature, but not cynical.
We should be more alert to injustice, cowardice, abuse of power, and silence in the face of harm.
The hard stories in Scripture should form us into people who tell the truth, protect the vulnerable, and refuse to make peace with evil.
We don’t read these stories to become depressed or discouraged. We read them to understand. We read them to become wise.
The Bible has tough stuff in it because real life has tough stuff in it. History—the history that’s recorded in the Bible and the history that has happened since—is often ugly because people are often sinful, selfish, fearful, and cruel.
But Scripture does not leave us there. It shows us the truth about humanity so we can better understand our need for God and become the better people depicted in the more pleasant stories.
That’s one reason we don’t have to be afraid of the hard passages. We don’t have to pretend they are easy. We don’t have to force them into something sweet and simple. We can let them tell the truth—and then let that truth point us back to God.
When you come across a hard passage in Scripture, don’t assume it has nothing to teach you. Sit with it. Study it. Let it disturb you. And then ask God what he wants you to see—not only about the past, but about the kind of person he is calling you to become.
I’ll be back in a moment with this week’s real life tip.
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This week’s real life tip is something we all know but occasionally need to be reminded of.
Before we share anything on social media or on any other platform, verify that it’s true and accurate.
If it’s an obvious joke that simply amuses you, it’s fine to click share and move along. But if it’s represented as something real, whether as something that happened or statistics or whatever, don’t share it without checking it out first.
I know that takes time, but it’s worth it.
When you do that, you play a small part in helping to stop the spread of false information and the consequences of that. And you build and protect your own credibility as a trustworthy source.
So before you share, check the source to be sure it’s reputable. Also check to see if other sources are reporting the same information.
If you’re sharing an article, read the entire piece before you post it.
Check the date to be sure the information is not old and being reposted out of context. Use various fact-checking tools to confirm the veracity of the information.
Sure, when we see something that we agree with or that confirms our own biases, it’s tempting to quickly click share and keep scrolling.
But Ephesians reminds us:
So stop telling lies. Let us tell our neighbors the truth, for we are all parts of the same body. (Ephesians 4:25, NLT)
So pause before you post. Verify before you share. And remember that speaking truth is not just something we do face-to-face. It matters online, too.
Thanks for being here. See you next week.