Damaged Goods

Recently I was in conversation at table with a couple and we were talking about the imperfections of our favourite bible characters and I mentioned Rahab the prostitute and how God honoured her in the lineage of Jesus. The conversation soured. I wasn’t supposed to go there because it was too messy. But I pushed on and said that our standards of righteousness are not Gods standards of righteousness and remembered the woman who washed the feet of Jesus with her tears. The conversation ended, because I wasn’t supposed to go there. But it ended with an interesting remark, ‘if you take the old-testament literally, it can make you very disgusted with this God.’

I was fascinated. That whole situation got me asking, if we have Christians who do not take the bible literally, who and what do they base their confessed faith on? Isn’t this the very foundation of the myriad of crises we have with the church today? Communities of people so desperate to prove their righteousness (the quality of being morally right or justifiable): that they carelessly label those that don’t fit in to their ideas of righteousness as damaged goods? All the while forgetting that righteousness by our own strength is impossible?

Romans 1:17 NLT

This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life.

Galatians 2:16 NLT

Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. And we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law.

God makes us righteous and all we need to do is believe that He is who He says He is and align ourselves accordingly. This is why I love the story of Rahab who was a city prostitute who used her business acumen and wit to hide the spies from Israel and thus help a people chosen by God get into their promise. God honoured her (Joshua 6:25-27). David who writes that he was born out of inequity (Psalm 51:5) was so beloved by God. Bible historians say that David was likely a child born out of an illicit affair and was the son Jesse and his sons preferred to forget existed. Yet God anointed him as King. Even when David committed atrocious sins God did not for one moment disown him. Fast forwarding to Jesus; He was having dinner at a religious leader’s house when a woman came in with a small jar of perfume. As she was weeping, she wet his feet and wiped them with her hair. The religious leader thought to him-self, how can this man who claims to be a prophet, not know who is touching him? (Read from Luke 7:3.)

God, by witness of His word, the bible proves that He is in the business of working with damaged goods. Your world might have labelled you damaged goods, or too messy to be associated with or simply unworthy of their affection. But God uses all those ugly things to meet you in that place of isolation and rejection and if you let Him, he will remove the filthy rags your world has heaped on you and dress you up in royal garments. He will take your tears in his hands and pour over you the oil of gladness. In time, He will lift you up high that all those who rejected you will come to admire what God has done with you and for you in that secret place. So give it up, cry it out, list every ugly thing that has been said about you and ask this God to prove to you that He is real. I pray that the verses that started this post become your reality.