on the walk

My son (he’s five) has been reading the Bible lately.

We have had a Children’s bible for some time, but as he has begun to read on his own, we bought a new Bible that is even easier to read and he has been reading it a lot. It is wonderful. He is so excited that he can read the stories for himself and is pleased to be able to share in these stories that he knows are so important to our family.

There have been a few complicated side-effects, mostly due to the complicated questions that my son has begun to ask. Tonight’s complicated questions were about Saul. He was reading the early sections of the David story. He asked, “Daddy, is Saul a good guy or a bad guy?” I answered carefully, “Well, he does somethings that are good but then he later does lots of things that are bad. So I guess he is both.”

He was not satisfied, “He can’t be both. He has to be either a good guy or a bad guy. But on one page he was nice to David when David beat Goliath and on this page he is mean to David. So which is he.”

My wife came to my rescue, ” Well Evan, you know how you are a good boy but sometimes you make bad choices. Saul was like that. He made lots of good choices but then later he started to make very bad choices.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

He thought long and hard. He reflected, “Are lots of Bible people good sometimes and bad guys sometimes?”

“Yeah, I guess they are.”

He was then distracted by something.

He encountered a powerful truth. Life is full of gray areas. Even the Bible is full of gray areas. We people are full of gray areas. What’s the old song, “There ain’t no good guys, there ain’t no bad guys.”

I am glad he is learning that lesson. It makes his world more complicated but it an important developmental step that will help him live in the real world. In fact it is a developmental step that many adults could benefit from because his desire to divide the world into good guys and bad guys seems to be pretty common. It is common because, if we can decide that some people are bad guys (and some good guys) it has two instant advantages.

Number One: Bad guys are not human and consequently we do not have to love them, or care for them or hope for their salvation. It is no tragedy if they are killed, and no blessing if they survive. If we believe this category of persons exists, then we are very likely to find ourselves unable to resist the temptation to populate this category. Whenever someone scoffs to think that Hitler could have been saved, or that some perverse murderer could be converted, they have assumed that some are “bad guys.” This makes it much easier to go to war, or to ignore an enemy.  (You may want to check out this article on the morality of Dungeons and Dragons for further on this topic.)
Number Two: We can assume that we are good guys.  We forget our desperate need for grace.  We forget that without a savior we are forsaken and without a Lord we are lost.  We forget that we are not good at all but rather made righteous in Christ.  We can think that our purity comes by separating from bad guys to maintain our status as the good.

But alas, despite our fondest hopes, the reality is that we all of us live in the gray.  We are not good guys, despite our best efforts and our best intentions.  There are no bad guys.  Many may refuse redemption, but none are so far gone as to be beyond it.

It may not fit within my five year-olds moral universe, but it is the reality of being human.

on the walk

-Ethan

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