It is no secret that there are some awful things in the Bible. There is no need to detail them all here, but the question arises, “What to do with all this stuff?” What can God possibly want to communicate through it, or, how do you preach on it? It would be much easier to avoid it and give another sermon on Jesus’ love. Yet, the awful stuff still sits there needing to be dealt with.
In my former life counseling addicts, I was once assigned to preach a particularly difficult passage: the story of the rape of Dinah. Found in Genesis 34, it is a story of rape and vengeance. In a nutshell, a prince named Shechem rapes a woman named Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, one of the great fathers of Israel. Things continue to get complicated in that Shechem finds that he loves Dinah, so he gets his father King Hamor to talk to Jacob to arrange a marriage. They promise Jacob anything the family wants, including allowing this nomadic family to live in their lands in peace. Dinah’s brothers are really angry, however, at what Shechem did, so they jump in and say, “Sure, we can arrange the whole marriage thing, but first, your whole tribe needs to be circumcised.” The king and prince agree to this, but while all the men of their city are in medical recovery, Dinah’s brothers Levi and Simeon break into the city and kill them while they are unable to fight back. The other brothers then loot the city bare. Their father, Jacob, then rebukes the brothers for what they did, but also partly because he fears for their safety when other inhabitants of the land hear about this.
The whole story is a mess. God is not mentioned in the story, and it seems like God pretty much stays out of it. Additionally, no word is heard from Dinah’s point of view.
What the story told me, however, came from the very mess itself. The people in the story are a mix of doing very bad things, bad intentions, and some good ones as well. Shechem did a very awful thing, but he tries to make it right. The brothers rightfully want to stand up for their sister but end up doing another very awful thing. Jacob doesn’t stand up for his daughter, yet rightfully calls the brothers out on their bad action, but at the same time also has mixed motives.
This is a lot like present day life. It’s messy. People are messy. Can I rightfully say all my motives are pure, even when I do something good? People do good, they do bad, and they do bad for good reasons and do good for bad reasons. Again, a mess.
But through this mess, Levi, one of the brothers that committed murder, founds the line that becomes the entire priesthood of Israel. The other brothers found the other tribes of Israel. A country is begun. And bypassing hundreds of years of more messiness, Jesus appears. God was still able to accomplish God’s purposes no matter what the mess, what awful thing someone did, or the mixed motives. Therein lies something in which to have faith. The mess is still a mess, but no matter what any of us have done or have had happen, or the mess you might be in, externally or internally, God can still bring great things about. Nothing is hopeless.
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