Here is the problem I have with the Bible. Mostly, I spend my life lurching back and forth between the reasonable hope that I’m basically OK and things are going pretty well; and the sickening conviction that I’m a wicked, terribly mistaken lost cause and the whole world is on its way to hell in a handbasket. I can’t be sure which of my own impulses are genuinely good and which are sneakily greedy and conniving: how can I honestly sort out my tangled desires? Looking around, I notice generous, righteous people feeding the hungry and caring for the sick, but they’re surrounded by all kinds of evildoers---angry women screaming at refugee children in Texas, violent men kidnapping children in Israel and Palestine, ostensibly decent citizens like me who do nothing to stop the bad guys.
So I’d like the Holy Scriptures, which after all our tradition claims “containeth all things necessary for salvation,” to shed just a little light on the subject of good and evil. I’d like the Bible to show me how to reliably judge other people, recognize devil-followers, and teach me how to be a good person, and I’d like the Bible to offer instructive lessons about how things should be, in this miserably hard business of being a human trying to relate to other humans and to God. Is that too much to ask?
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