Demythologizing Biblical (and modern day) Heroes
What are we to make of the fact that some of our most celebrated biblical heroes committed some of the most heinous kinds of sin? Moses was a murderer. Abraham, the father of the faith, slept with a woman who wasn’t his wife, and he prostituted his actual wife to avoid the jealous anger of her powerful admirers. King Solomon’s sexual immorality was almost literally unbelievable in scope. Sadly, the list goes on. It’s common to respond to this uncomfortable reality with warnings against self-righteousness and encouragements that God uses imperfect people to accomplish his perfect plans. Although well intentioned, these responses might indicate that we’ve made more of our biblical heroes than the Bible wants us to – that we’ve made them into myths.
Mythologizing real people is easy. When we’re awestruck by their personal accomplishments and powerful personalities, we exaggerate their strengths and minimize their shortcomings. Because Scripture requires us to tell the truth about about one another (Exodus 20:16; Proverbs 6:16-29), these equivocations are dangerous; and myths made with biblical material can be downright diabolical (John 8:44). When believers exaggerate the godliness and minimize the sins of biblical heroes, we subtly form a foundation, an ostensibly biblical justification, for untruthful views of others. We use God's truth to support lies. As such, we inevitably distort the biblical record meant to point us to our righteous Savior. And still more, we deepen the wounds of people who’ve been savaged by the same kinds of sin in our day, especially if the perpetrators are church leaders. So, to use God's Word truthfully, to see Jesus more clearly, and to care for victims more faithfully, we need to demythologize our biblical heroes.
Because David, Israel’s greatest king, seems to inspire the most mythology among Christians, we’ll use him as a case study in the healing, protective power of biblical realism.
Myth Building
It's easy to understand why David is so beloved. His typically tender heart for the disenfranchised (2 Sam. 9); his exultant love of nature and humanity (Psalm 8); his poetic yearnings for personal holiness and world-spanning righteousness (Psalm 119); his courage in battling God’s enemies (1 Samuel 17), his authorship of many biblical Psalms, and perhaps most of all, God’s own testimony that David was a man after his own heart (1 Sam. 13:14) are reasons why it’s common to think of David as the godliest man in the Bible. But that last description, though it sounds scriptural, is actually the stuff of myth.
The Bible doesn’t rank its heroes according to personal godliness. If it did, David would easily fall behind Enoch, Job, Daniel, and so many others who lived “blamelessly,” not sinlessly, before the Lord (2 Chron. 16:9a). We need to remember, especially in a day fraught with scandalous sin among Christian leaders, that the vast majority of Christian leaders make it through life and ministry without falling. This isn’t to praise their inherent virtue; it’s to highlight the way that, in our culture of celebrity, we minimize both the importance of behind-the-scenes faithfulness and the severity of scandalous sin among our public heroes – and this despite the Bible’s own warnings and testimony.
Myth Busting
For a terrible stretch of his life, David lived like the thieves the Good Shepherd decried— those who steal, kill, and destroy God’s flock (John 10:10). He despised God and his word (2 Sam. 12:9–10; Matt. 25:45; John 15:23). The Bible bluntly tells us that David lied, successfully schemed to commit murder, and was a sexual predator with the clear implication that he was also a sexual assailant. To put it in contemporary terms, David deserved to be placed on a watch list and jailed for multiple felonies. We might cringe at such thoughts, but the Bible clearly doesn’t. Chapter after chapter, in multiple books, the Holy Spirit tells us of David’s awful sins (2 Sam. 11ff; Ps. 51,). When Nathan rebukes David in God’s name (2 Sam. 12), there’s no “there but for the grace of God go I” commiseration, nor any preemptive “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” chastisement of any outraged, heartbroken Israelites. We need to learn from this biblical realism.
If it’s difficult to hear the reality about David, or about heroes in our day who commit scandalous sin, imagine how hard it is to have been hurt by those heroes. Yet when victims or their advocates cry out in righteous indignation, they’re often scolded for being self-righteous, unforgiving, and even unchristian. This is just as it was in Jesus’s day when his disciples prevented needy people from coming to him. Victims of scandalous sin need advocates in the church, not accusers. Biblical advocacy requires that we help victims understand that what happened to them was thoroughly evil and completely inexcusable, even more so if the culprit was a church leader (James 3:1; 1 Timothy 3). When we minimize the sin of our heroes, and judge the reaction of their victims harshly, we present a grotesque mirror-image of Jesus’s own fierce, faithful advocacy (Matthew 18:6).
Truth Telling
David himself would be the last to minimize his catastrophic sin. In fact, under the leading of the Spirit, David wrote a song that would continually remind God’s people of it. In Psalm 51, David doesn’t portray himself as a supremely godly man who tragically fell, but as one who desperately needs his grievous sin and constitution as a sinner cleansed. He makes no excuses and pleads no platitudes. Though he’d lived like a wolf, David finally listened to the Good Shepherd’s disciplining voice and truly repented (Ps. 23:4; John 10:27). David demonstrated his sincerity by facing consequences he’d surely have given his life to prevent, including the death of the child he’d fathered sinfully (2 Samuel 12), the treasonous rebellion and violent death of an adult son (2 Sam 18; Psalm 3), and the eventual disintegration of his kingdom.
David’s acceptance of his sin’s consequences illustrates the need for fallen leaders in our day to do the same. Calls for quick forgiveness and even restoration to leadership often base themselves on David’s continuance as king. However, that thinking twists sobering biblical truth into harmful moralistic myth. It minimizes God’s moral standards for leaders, and it trivializes the suffering of those who’ve been betrayed by them.
God does not show favoritism, nor does he relax his righteous standards (Deuteronomy 1:17). Nathan’s withering confrontation applies Jesus’s axiom that God requires much of those to whom he entrusts much (Luke 12:48). For example, Scripture makes it clear that David’s sin would have disqualified him from holding church office (1 Tim. 3:1–5). Think of that! A writer of God’s holy word not ethically qualified to preach it! If we recoil from such a thought, we have to remember that church leadership is a privilege, and not a right. Though conversations about restoration to office can be complex depending upon the sins involved, can we not at least maintain that sins like murder, adultery, stalking and sexual assault – and all of these committed while in a significant position of leadership among God’s people – merit the permanent removal of the privilege of church leadership? Though repentance be sincere, would it not be best to focus on the restoration of personal relationships rather than reinstatement in public, authoritative ecclesiastical office? Such would bear witness to the biblical truth that there are temporal consequences to face for sins that are eternally forgiven. Indeed, as we see with David, facing them demonstrates the sincerity of our repentance. Such would also demonstrate that the church takes both grace and sin very seriously, and that the church can be a safe place for potential and actual victims of especially heinous sin.
But what about David? He didn't abdicate the throne when his scandalous sin was exposed. True, but the fact that David continued as king in Israel should not be interpreted as precedent or pattern, nor does it reveal an inconsistency in the Bible’s application of its moral standards. Rather, it reminds us why Scripture tells us about David and other historically significant believers to begin with —to point us to Christ (Matthew 5:17-18).
Christ Proclaiming
David understood that God raised him and his dynasty up not for their own glory, but to serve a unique purpose in salvation history (2 Sam. 7). David’s life as the shepherd king who loved God’s law was a living preview of the coming Christ, David’s greater son and his Lord (Ps. 110; Matt. 22:37–46). This is surely a significant part of why God called him a man after his own heart! (John 14:9; Heb. 1:1-4). David’s sin severely distorted that preview of Christ, but the fact that David’s life was significant beyond himself is shown in that his Spirit-inspired confession provides the model of repentance for all who seek God’s forgiveness.
As Christians, we must confess that all sin— beginning with our own— is as evil as Scripture says it is (Rom. 6:23). This means refusing to minimize anyone’s scandalous offenses. Precisely because David did not minimize his sin, he saw clearly that only an act of God could provide the cleansing we all need (Psalm 51:10ff, Romans 3:23). David wrote eagerly to tell everyone about the righteous, gracious Savior who provides redemption and calls all people to himself, no matter how far they’ve strayed (Isaiah 53:6).
To rightly handle the Word of truth in a day of scandalous sin among church leaders, to present a clear picture of the Savior who fully met God’s relentlessly righteous standards, to honor and care for present-day victims and to provide safety for the most vulnerable among us, we must must demythologize our biblical heroes - and our modern-day heroes as well. If our estimation of our heroes, fallen or not, decreases to biblical proportions, then our estimation of Christ can increase beyond all measure. And isn’t the praise of Jesus Christ what our biblical heroes, in their best moments and over the course of their lives, longed for most? Their testimonies, positive and negative, form a collective witness that calls us to persevere in faith (Hebrews 11). But it is to Jesus that we must always look (Hebrews 12:1-3). He is, most essentially and most gloriously, the man after God’s own heart.
