"Stand in the place where you live, now face north. Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before." -R.E.M.

Black and White

04/18/2007 09:17 AM Filed in: Theology

Cow

We’re right and you’re wrong, she’s holy and he’s not, George W. Bush is God’s president and Hilary Clinton is the devil. Sound familiarly resolute?

It is an undeniable tendency of Christians to see the world more in terms of black and white than do many people. We often pride ourselves on this fact because, after all, we of all people should know the difference between right and wrong, justice and injustice, good and evil. We believe in absolute truth and therefore cannot condone all actions as morally equal or ambiguous.

It is my firm belief that this tendency is usually a good thing. After all, God has called us to righteousness and Christ-likeness. We are to “take captive every thought” (2 Cor. 10:5) and to “Be holy, because I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44).
But is there room in Christianity for grey? To answer any question with deep spiritual and practical implications we must turn to the Bible. Does God avoid grey area, or does He sometimes seem to work within it?

A good test case for this is marriage. It’s clear from the Scriptures that God’s perfect plan for marriage is one man for one woman: two people of opposite sex united in a life-long monogamous union and growing closer to one another as they grow closer to God.

But even then in some cultures and some times for some reasons, while monogamy is always God’s ideal (He loves monogamy and hates all the alternatives), sometimes polygamy is the lesser of two evils. For example: God allowed for polygamy in several places in the Old Testament without one word of condemnation being spoken of the men who practiced it (2 Samuel 12:8; 1 Kings 11:3-4, etc.).

Throughout the Old Testament you find God allowing for polygamy because monogamy, in this fallen state and in this patriarchal system of society and economics, caused women and children to be starving on the street. God would rather have polygamous marriages than starving women and children so He essentially says, “the lesser of two evils is polygamy.”

I agree with theologian Greg Boyd when he proclaims that the God of the Bible is not a God who is up in his prudish heaven saying, “I will not deal with messy situations.” This is a God who comes in and says, “I’m dealing with imperfect humans. What’s the lesser of two evils?”

Sometimes in the Bible the issue is not, “What is God’s ideal?” Sometimes the issue is, “What is the best thing given the real? What’s the best thing given the here and now?”

And so it is that God makes allowances for polygamy, concubines (2 Samuel 5:13), divorce (Matthew 19:9), and for Israel to have a king despite His command that they should not (1 Samuel 8:7-9).

Christ makes it clear in the New Testament that God didn’t give Israel the fullness of the law in the Old Testament because their hearts weren’t ready for it (Matthew 19:8). Knowing that, God didn’t force something upon them that they were unprepared to accept; He gave them as much as they could handle given the reality of their spiritual condition.

It’s not that God can’t achieve perfection or that God doesn’t see the difference between black and white. The truth of the matter is that God is dealing with imperfect humans who are incapable of achieving righteousness instantaneously. Therefore, God sometimes allows us to muddle through the grey while He shapes us in His image to eventually achieve His ideals. Instead of placing impossible demands on us from the beginning of our salvation, He works with us to attain our ultimate sanctification through a process over time.

So…where am I going with this (it’s not where you think)? Though there are certainly many applications of the “grey area” principle for Christians, there is one in particular I want to focus on in this article:
People.

We are so incredibly guilty of seeing people in terms of either black or white, good or evil. Someone wrongs us and we immediately label him or her in our minds as a bad person. The truth is that most of us Christians are colored in various shades of grey, striving to achieve purity over time.

This last year I had a brother in Christ treat me in a manner that I felt was really, really wrong. It went on for several months and it became difficult for me to speak to this person or worship with him. Because my experience with him was bad, I labeled him as a terrible person who was an embarrassment to the Christian faith (no, I didn’t actually think that exact thought, but that was my subconscious belief).

Then I noticed something. This man who had treated me in an unbiblical manner loved his family more than life itself. He cared for his kids unashamedly and with absolute abandon for his personal needs. When one of his children did anything good his eyes would light up.

This man would help others out when he saw they had a need. Even when it wasn’t always convenient and even if he didn’t do it the way I would have done it, he was still available to help.

I realized I had severely retarded my understanding of who this man was by allowing my own experience to overshadow the truth that lay before my eyes. It didn’t excuse what he had done to me, but it did allow me to treat him with the love of Christ. Regardless of whether or not he asked for my forgiveness, it allowed me to forgive him and release my bitterness.

I know that there will be some people that will go to their graves with the wrong idea of who Josh Crain is. That is a wounding realization to come to, but if I’ll be honest with myself I know there are some people I have wronged who, fair or not, will never be able to bring themselves to look past the hurt that I have caused them. There are consequences to every sin, and this is one of those consequences.

Thankfully, God has not declared that He will not deal with grey people. We are all grey, and He is working on us all. As part of our effort to “be holy, because [he] is holy,” we must also try to work with people who are grey. Many Christians are unwilling to show the mercy to one another that God has shown to them.

People mess up. They say and do mean and hurtful things. We just need to try our best not to see them as all bad or all good because of a few encounters with them.

A recent episode of that great theological program Desperate Housewives ended with this monologue:

“It's not always that easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. Sinners can surprise you and the same is true for saints. Why do we try to define people as simply good or simply evil? Because no one wants to admit that compassion and cruelty can live side by side in one heart.”

Tags: Christianity, God, Desperate Housewives