The Bible Has More People Losing Their Heads Than I Expected

They did WHAT????????????????

I don’t know what I thought the Bible would be like before I started reading it properly. Probably a very long book of people behaving themselves, being sensible and occasionally saying something vaguely inspiring whilst wearing sandals and one of those white, floaty robe things.

It isn’t that.

It’s a book full of absolute nutcases!

Well, parts of it are anyway.

Abraham is basically the father of the whole faith story — the bloke God tells to leave everything behind and trust Him — yet he develops some weird penchant for repeatedly passing his wife of as his sister, despite various warnings to the contrary.

Moses is the man God chooses to lead an entire nation out of slavery, but when God gives him the job, he argues back like he’s been asked to cover someone else’s shift at work on the night all his mates are going out on a mad one.

David is the underdog who kills Goliath and becomes Israel’s greatest king, then unfathomably turns his own life into some bizarre mishmash of Love Island, Eastenders and Saving Private Ryan.

Elijah calls down fire from heaven in front of everyone, wins one of the biggest “my God is realer than your god” moments in the Bible, then immediately hides under a tree and tells God he’s had enough and would rather die.

Even the disciples, who had Jesus physically stood in front of them, regularly seem one bad afternoon away from sacking the whole thing off and going back to the much more peaceful and less demon-infested life of hauling fish out of a lake.

Oh, and get this one… I’ve literally just read Genesis 38, where a man is sent to sleep with his dead brother’s widow to get her pregnant, but after having his way with her, he pulls out, spills his semen on the ground and then God kills him. Fair enough!

I’m beginning to understand why the school performances stuck to three nice wise men following a star carrying presents for Jesus.

But somehow, all this has genuinely helped me.

Because I used to assume faith meant becoming calmer, wiser and more put together than your average Joe. The kind of person who always knows what to say when somebody is grieving, never loses their temper and has a Bible verse ready for every minor inconvenience.

But the Bible doesn’t really flatter people like that, which sort of makes it a bit easier to get on board with.

It keeps showing you frightened people, grieving people, jealous people, people who doubt, panic, leg it, say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, ignore God’s persistent warnings and generally behave in ways that would make you think God might have been better off pressing shift-delete and starting again.

And yet He doesn’t.

Well, ok…. he kind of does towards the start of Genesis, where he wipes everyone but Noah and his family out in the flood (I still chuckle to myself that we used to sing happy-clappy songs as 6-year-olds at school about Noah’s ark and all the animals - oblivious to the fact that we were essentially singing about a divinely ordered mass genocide).

But all in all, God doesn’t seem particularly shocked by human mess. He doesn’t wait until everyone has sorted themselves out before He gets involved. Most of the time, He seems to meet people right in the middle of their worst moment.

There’s something comforting in that — and, weirdly, something that makes it all feel more believable to me.

If the Bible was religious propaganda (think His Highness Kim Jong Un reporting to his jubilant people that North Korea won the World Cup yet again with a stunning 32-0 victory over France in the final), you’d think they’d have cleaned the heroes up a bit. You’d leave out Abraham bottling it, David arranging for a loyal soldier to die because he’d messed up and the disciples repeatedly reacting to Jesus doing miracles by somehow becoming even more confused.

You’d surely give everyone better press if you were making it up.

Instead, it reads like God’s PR department were all made redundant somewhere around the part where Adam and Eve got caught hiding behind a bush, incredulous that their plan to eat the one thing they were told would kill them wasn’t going too well.

But the cast of tainted heroes is very palatable to me, because I’ve had plenty of days where I’ve felt like I’m not doing this Christian thing very well. I still overthink. I still get angry. I still have prayers that sound less like ancient wisdom and more like a strongly worded complaint to a broadband provider.

But apparently, the Bible tells me I’m in decent company.

That’s probably why I’m starting to understand it more.