Do I Believe the Bible is the Word of God?

Some Short Ramblings on Christian Memes and My Shift in Understanding the Bible

I broke one of my self-imposed rules on Facebook a week or two ago. I was sitting in the pharmacy waiting for a prescription to help my daughter fight off COVID. I was killing time by scrolling through my newsfeed when I came across a meme equating one’s belief about using face masks to prevent COVID-19 with beliefs about abortion and when life begins. It was a false dichotomy; a master class in comparing apples to oranges.

I’m somewhat hypocritical here. I’m known to try and stir the pot among my facebook friends. I’ll post something cheeky, well, often. But after realizing social media is the worst place to try and have discussions, I do my best not to respond when I’d like to argue. But the post I described above hit me at a moment of weakness. I was concerned for my child’s health in relation to COVID. The meme seemed to make a joke of our situation.

I responded horribly. I got personal. The logic of my argument was not good and I shot back with a personal zinger which my have permanently damaged my relationship with a lifelong friend.

I regret it. I deleted my response, but the damage was done.

I’ve long thought social media is where the ego goes to live and die. Well, perhaps live and kill would be a better way of describing it.

The meme below was another I wanted to respond to. It was all I could do to resist jumping all over it in the moment. But I don’t have a close relationship with the person who posted it, and I’m afraid had I given into my ego’s desires to set them straight I might have damaged my relationship with them¹. So, I’ll write about it here instead. Here it is:

I suppose I could be mistaken and the person who made this meme isn’t referring to homosexuality, but I’m going to go out on the thickest of all limbs and say that’s what they’re referring to. This is a reference to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. As a refresher, some local guys from Sodom try to gang-rape some angel-guests of Lot. (The same angel-guests who’d just visited Abraham and told him his wife would have a son.) To try an appease the gang and protect the visitors, Lot offers them his virgin daughters to do with as they so desire. They’re not interested in having their way with Lot’s virgin daughters who he offers to provide. Instead they threaten to break down the door, rape the visitors and do worse to Lot. The visitors then use their angelic powers to blind and confuse the gang before they can break in. It’s a weird and disturbing story. Some (as the creator of this meme would contend) say this is clear evidence of homosexuality being the sin of Sodom. Others argue it’s about how inhospitable the people of Sodom were to visitors.

There is a verse in the Bible that directly addresses the “Sin of Sodom.” It’s part of a dress-down Ezekiel is delivering to Jerusalem. It goes like this:

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.

You can find all sorts of commentary about these verses. I’m not here to do that today (or likely ever). In fact, I almost deleted most of the above for brevity’s sake. Here’s my point:

If God destroyed Sodom, it was about more than just homosexuality.

Proposing that the destruction occurred solely due to a single category of wrongdoing, as depicted in this meme, oversimplifies the narrative to align with a specific perspective. One that is likely somewhat - ahem - homophobic like mine was back in the day.

Also, do we ever get to address the idea that maybe if a church is requiring me to worship a God that destroyed an entire civilization perhaps that would be a reason to look for a different church?

Seriously. An entire civilization.

That doesn’t make you uncomfortable?

It does me, which leads me to:

This meme gets to the heart of how I began to look at my faith differently than I did growing up. My discomfort with some of the things I once believed came out of nowhere when I least expected it.

I was reading a book in the Left Behind series. I’m not sure which book it was exactly, but it was late in the series. If you’re unfamiliar, the books in the Left Behind series were a fictional telling of what some believed would happen when Jesus Christ returns. I was among those people. Here’s a quick overly-simplified synopsis: Jesus comes back to earth, takes all the good people (the Evangelical Christians) to heaven and kills all the bad guys (non-Evangelical Christians). They go to hell.

At one point in the story, the recently returned Jesus Christ is walking down a road which has become a literal river of blood due to the amount of people he’s killed. His death weapon of choice is a sword. But not just any sword. It’s a sword which us attached to his tongue … or actually is his tongue. Jesus is walking down the road slicing and dicing the bad guys.

It was grotesque. I couldn’t reconcile it with what I saw of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

After a bit of research I soon found there were some other ways to understand apocalyptic literature. Not only are there issues in translating ancient languages for people like me 2000 years later, but there are differences in storytelling, allegories and metaphoric expressions to send messages to the intended reader whilst also avoiding the dangerous, prying eyes of ancient empires that might not like what you’re writing to your people when in exile.

There are many scholarly opinions about stuff like this. I reached a point where I started believing that if there was an alternative perspective to comprehend apocalyptic literature in a way in which Jesus didn’t kill all the baddies with his sword-tongue, I should probably do some work to at least understand the new-to-me perspective.

Make no mistake, in the days when I mistook disagreeing with Christianity as persecution against people like me, a story about non-Christians getting what they had coming to them stroked my ego a bit. That is, I found it somewhat comforting to be on “the right side” of the religion debate. I hid behind the whole idea that my people were warning them of what was coming for them, so their destruction was their own fault.

But then, I didn’t see much of Jesus telling people that he was going to slice and dice them if they didn’t shape up. Seems like an important distinction. Not exactly something I’d want to misunderstand.

I’m sometimes asked if I still believe the Bible is the Word of God. I do. But I understand it to operate differently than I did before. It can be hard to explain why.

So, I’m thankful for this meme, though it understates the reality of the situation.

1. In regards to the post I did respond to, I had a longer, closer relationship with the person who posted it. While I regret responding, the relationships were different.