The Bible Tells the Truth About Its Heroes

A Book That Tells the Truth About Its Own People

The Bible records the sins of the men and women it honours most. Noah, the one righteous man of his generation, lay drunk in his tent. Abraham, the father of all who believe, lied about his wife to save himself, and did it twice. Moses lost his temper before the whole congregation of Israel. David took another man's wife and arranged the man's death. Peter, the first of the apostles, swore that he had never known Jesus. Each of these failures is told in the main line of the story, plainly and without excuse, and several of them are told by the very men who committed them.

Matthew Henry, writing on Abraham's lie in Egypt, gave the reason in a single sentence: "The scripture is impartial in relating the misdeeds of the most celebrated saints, which are recorded, not for our imitation, but for our admonition, that he who thinks he stands may take heed lest he fall."

Scripture itself gives two reasons for telling these things. A record that tells the sins of its own heroes is a true record, because the word of God flatters no one. And the one man in the whole of Scripture who never sinned is the Lord Jesus Christ, so the plain account of everyone else's failures sends the reader to him, and to the grace that carried a weak and wayward people from Noah to the apostles.

Noah, Abraham and Jacob

Genesis calls Noah a just man, perfect in his generations, who walked with God (Genesis 6:9). Three chapters later, after the flood, the same book tells how he planted a vineyard, drank of the wine, and lay drunk and uncovered in his tent, and how his son Ham saw him and went out to tell his brothers (Genesis 9:20-23). Shem and Japheth walked in backwards and covered their father with a garment.

Matthew Henry wrote that God "has left this miscarriage of his upon record, to teach us" that "the fairest copy that ever mere man wrote since the fall had its blots and false strokes." Noah was upright among the people of his day, and still a sinner who lived by grace.

Abraham believed the LORD, and God counted it to him for righteousness (Genesis 15:6). Yet in Egypt, afraid that the Egyptians would kill him to take his beautiful wife, he told Sarai to say that she was his sister. Pharaoh took her into his house, the LORD plagued Pharaoh and his house, and it was Pharaoh who had to rebuke Abraham for the deception (Genesis 12:11-19). Years later Abraham said the same thing about Sarah to Abimelech king of Gerar (Genesis 20:2). Both times God protected Sarah, through whom the promised son was to be born, and in the second account God still called Abraham a prophet who would pray for the king (Genesis 20:7).

Jacob deceived his blind father. At his mother Rebekah's urging he dressed as Esau, and when Isaac asked who he was, Jacob said, "I am Esau thy firstborn," and when his father asked again, he answered, "I am" (Genesis 27:18-24). He even used the name of God to cover the lie, telling Isaac that the LORD had brought him the venison so quickly. Genesis then shows him deceived in turn by Laban (Genesis 29:25), and twenty years later praying as a humbled man: "I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of all the truth, which thou hast shewed unto thy servant" (Genesis 32:10). The story is told in full in Jacob and Esau: The Stolen Blessing.

Moses at the Waters of Strife

Near the end of the forty years in the wilderness, the people at Kadesh had no water, and they gathered against Moses and Aaron. The LORD told Moses to take the rod, gather the assembly, and "speak ye unto the rock before their eyes" (Numbers 20:8). Moses gathered them, and then he spoke to the people instead: "Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?" He lifted his hand and struck the rock twice with the rod (Numbers 20:10-11). The water came out abundantly for the people, and then God gave his verdict on his servant.

And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.

Numbers 20:12
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A psalm later summed up what happened at those waters: the people provoked his spirit, and Moses spoke unadvisedly with his lips (Psalm 106:32-33). At the end of his life God showed Moses the land from the mountain and told him that he would not go over into it (Deuteronomy 34:4). The whole account is set out in The Sin of Moses at Meribah.

The man who wrote this record was Moses himself, and Matthew Henry saw the weight of that: "It is an evidence of the sincerity of Moses, and his impartiality in writing, that he himself left this upon record concerning himself, and drew not a veil over his own infirmity, by which it appeared that in what he wrote, as well as what he did, he sought God's glory more than his own."

David, the King After God's Own Heart

While David's army was at war with the Ammonites, he stayed in Jerusalem, saw Bathsheba the wife of Uriah, and took her. When she conceived, he tried to hide what he had done, and when that failed he sent a letter to Joab by Uriah's own hand: "Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die" (2 Samuel 11:15).

God sent Nathan the prophet with a story about a rich man who stole a poor man's only lamb, and when David burned with anger against the rich man, Nathan said to him, "Thou art the man" (2 Samuel 12:7). David's answer is two words in the Hebrew, the first of them the common verb for sin¹, a word whose proper sense is to miss.

And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD. And Nathan said unto David, The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die.

2 Samuel 12:13
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Forgiveness did not cancel the discipline. Nathan told David that the sword would never depart from his house and that the child born to him would die, and both came to pass. The story is told at length in David and Bathsheba: A King's Great Sin.

David also wrote a psalm about his sin and gave it to Israel to sing. Its title, which the King James Version prints as the opening words of the first verse, names the occasion without disguise: "A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba." Psalm 51 was addressed to the chief Musician, so the king's adultery and his repentance passed into the worship of the whole congregation.

For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.

Psalms 51:3-4
KJV

Augustine, writing on this psalm, heard in David's prayer the measure of his need: "He that implores great mercy, confesses great misery." And he took comfort from it for every sinner who reads it: "Of my own so deadly wound I should despair, unless I could find so great a Physician." A verse-by-verse reading of the psalm is in A Verse-by-Verse Study of Psalm 51.

When the book of Kings later gives its verdict on David's whole life, it praises him and names the one great stain in the same sentence: David did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD all his days, "save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite" (1 Kings 15:5).

Solomon, Elijah and Jonah

Solomon asked God for wisdom and built the temple. The same history records that he married many foreign women against the LORD's command, and that in his old age "his wives turned away his heart after other gods" (1 Kings 11:4). God tore the kingdom from his son and left one tribe to the house of David for David's sake and for Jerusalem's sake (1 Kings 11:11-13).

Elijah called down fire on Mount Carmel, and in the next chapter he ran for his life from Jezebel's threat. He went a day's walk into the wilderness, sat under a juniper tree, and prayed to die: "It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers" (1 Kings 19:4). God answered him with care. He sent an angel twice with bread and water, met him at Horeb, and gave him fresh work to do (1 Kings 19:15-18). The account continues in Elijah on Mount Horeb: The Still, Small Voice.

Jonah was told to go to Nineveh and went the other way, down to Joppa and onto a ship for Tarshish (Jonah 1:3). When God spared the repentant city, Jonah was angry and told God why he had run: "I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness" (Jonah 4:2). The book ends with the prophet still angry and the LORD asking him whether he should not spare that great city (Jonah 4:11). The last word in the book belongs to the mercy of God.

The Apostles

The Gospels are as plain about the twelve. At the Last Supper there was a strife among them, "which of them should be accounted the greatest" (Luke 22:24). In Gethsemane, when Jesus was arrested, "they all forsook him, and fled" (Mark 14:50). Peter followed to the high priest's courtyard, and there, questioned by two servant girls and then by the bystanders, he denied his Lord three times, the third time with cursing and swearing (Matthew 26:69-74).

And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly.

Matthew 26:75
KJV

John Chrysostom understood the Gospel of Mark to be written by a follower of Peter who had learned these things from Peter himself. Mark tells the denial in the closest detail, and Chrysostom marvelled that "so far from hiding his teacher's faults, he declared it more distinctly than the rest, on this very account, that he was his disciple."

The same Gospels record Peter's restoration, when the risen Lord asked him three times whether he loved him and three times gave him his flock to feed (John 21:15-17). That scene is the subject of The Restoration of Peter, and the denial itself of Peter's Denial of Jesus. Even after Pentecost Peter could fail. At Antioch he stopped eating with Gentile believers for fear of those who came from Jerusalem, and Barnabas was carried away with him. Paul wrote, "I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed" (Galatians 2:11), and put the rebuke in a letter that the churches would read. Years later Peter wrote of "our beloved brother Paul" (2 Peter 3:15).

Paul and Barnabas, who had carried the gospel together through Cyprus, Pisidia and Lycaonia, quarrelled over whether to take John Mark with them again, and "the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other" (Acts 15:39). Paul later asked Timothy to bring Mark, "for he is profitable to me for the ministry" (2 Timothy 4:11).

Matthew Henry, commenting on that quarrel, wrote that "it was their infirmity, and is recorded for our admonition," and then he named the only exception: "It is only Christ's example that is a copy without a blot."

Paul did not hide his own past either. He had been a persecutor of the church, and he called himself "a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious" (1 Timothy 1:13) and "the least of the apostles" (1 Corinthians 15:9). His own account of what changed him is the gospel in one sentence. The story of that change is told in Paul (Saul of Tarsus): From Persecutor to Apostle to the Gentiles.

This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.

1 Timothy 1:15
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Why the Holy Spirit Wrote It Down

Set side by side, the record and what God did afterwards look like this.

Men who write the story of their own kings and founders usually leave out what would shame them, and the Bible puts it in, often in the words of the people concerned. Moses wrote of Meribah. David set his sin to music for the congregation. Mark, who learned the Gospel from Peter, told Peter's denial most fully. Paul called himself the chief of sinners in a letter to a young pastor. A record that tells against its own heroes in this way carries the mark of a true witness, and it agrees with what Scripture says of its Author: God cannot lie (Titus 1:2). The doctrine behind it is set out in The Inspiration and Inerrancy of Scripture.

Scripture also says why the record was kept. Paul wrote to the Romans that the older Scriptures were written for the instruction of those who came after.

For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.

Romans 15:4
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To the Corinthians he applied the same truth to Israel's failures in the wilderness. He called those events examples² (1 Corinthians 10:6), using a word that can mean a pattern to follow or an instance given for warning. Here it is a warning, addressed to anyone who reads the failures of others and feels safe.

Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come. Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.

1 Corinthians 10:11-12
KJV

So the honesty of the record keeps the reader from making heroes of men, because the best of them fell, and it keeps the reader from despair, because the God who disciplined these men also kept his promises to them, received their repentance and went on using them. Hebrews 11 gives Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses and David their place among the faithful because they believed God, and the same Scriptures keep the account of their sins for anyone who wants to know what kind of people God saves.

The One Without Sin

There is one life in Scripture with no failure in it to record. The letter to the Hebrews, after showing Christ as the great high priest, says that he was tempted in every way that his people are, and stood where every other figure in the story fell.

For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.

Hebrews 4:15
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The word for sin³ in that verse is the ordinary New Testament word for an offence against God, and Peter and Paul both use it of Christ to say that he had none of his own. Peter, who had denied him in the courtyard, wrote that Christ "did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth" (1 Peter 2:22). Paul, who had persecuted his church, wrote why it mattered that the sinless one should take the place of sinners.

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

2 Corinthians 5:21
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Every failure in the record points the same way. Noah needed grace, Abraham needed a promise that did not hang on his courage, David needed a cleansing that only God could give, and Peter needed a Lord who would look on him after the third denial. Matthew Henry wrote of that look: "It is well for us that Christ does not deal with us as we deal with him." The heroes of the Bible are sinners saved by the one man who never sinned, and the fuller portrait of that man is drawn in Who Is Jesus? What the Whole Bible Says About Him.

Paul told the Corinthians that this has always been God's way. God chooses the weak and the despised, so that no one can boast before him.

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence.

1 Corinthians 1:27-29
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The Bible keeps the sins of its saints in plain view for the same reason. No one comes out of its pages as a man to glory in, except the Lord himself. "He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord" (1 Corinthians 1:31).