Why Does God Keep Choosing the Wrong People?
Abraham was a pagan from Mesopotamia. Moses was a murderer in hiding. David was a warrior-poet who committed adultery and had a man killed to cover it up.
These are the heroes of the Old Testament. And the fact that God kept working through all of them, in spite of everything, is not accidental. It is the whole point.
When God called Abram around 2000 BC, Abram was not a holy man with an established track record of faithfulness. He was from a culture that worshipped other gods, living in what is now modern-day Iraq, and he had no prior relationship with Yahweh. God simply showed up and told him to leave everything familiar and go to a land he had never seen. Abram went. But he also lied to protect himself on multiple occasions, passed his wife off as his sister to avoid trouble, and struggled to believe the promises he had been given.
God kept working with him anyway. The covenant was not conditioned on Abram’s performance. It was grounded in God’s character.
Moses is even starker. By the time God spoke to him from a burning bush, Moses was a fugitive. He had killed an Egyptian guard and fled into the desert to escape justice. He was hardly the obvious choice to lead a nation. When God called him, his first response was a series of protests: “Who am I?” “What if they don’t believe me?” “I’m not a good speaker.” He practically argued himself out of the assignment.
God sent him anyway. The mission was not about Moses’s qualifications. It was about what Yahweh intended to do.
David may be the most complicated of all. He is routinely considered the greatest king in Jewish history and he is also the man who sent one of his most loyal soldiers to the front lines to be killed so that he could take the soldier’s wife for himself (2Sam 11). The man who wrote some of the most beautiful prayers in human history also did something that egregiously sinful. And yet the covenant promise ran through David’s line. God did not revoke it. The consequences were real and severe, but the commitment held.
What is God doing in all of this?
He is demonstrating, across a thousand years of story, that his purposes do not depend on finding the right human raw material. He does not work with people because they are impressive. He works with people because he is faithful, and because he has decided to use flawed human beings as the means through which he reveals himself and restores his creation.
This should both unsettle and deeply comfort you. It unsettles the pride that wants to believe God needs your strength, your track record, or your spiritual performance. And it comforts the part of you that already knows how badly you have failed, the part that wonders whether the failures are disqualifying.
They are not. They never were, for any of the people in this story.
(The pattern of God working through imperfect people comes to its strangest and most stunning expression in Chapter 5 of my book I mention below, where the question of who Jesus actually is forces everyone who encountered him to completely rethink what faithfulness and rescue are supposed to look like.)
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK
Think about the person in the Bible you identify with most, not the one you aspire to be, but the one who actually feels familiar. Then read their story again this week with this question in mind: where did God show up in the middle of their mess, not after it? That is the consistent testimony of Scripture. God does not wait for the mess to be cleaned up before he enters it.
Want to go deeper? (Re)Discover Jesus walks through all of this with historical scholarship and modern application, making it ideal for personal study, a small group series, or a church-wide reading plan. Grab a copy for yourself, order a set for your group, or invite Dr. David Pendergrass to bring these ideas to life in person at your church.
Get the book | Bulk/small group orders | Invite Dr. Pendergrass to speak
