When the Bible Lies

One who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will lodge in the shadow of the Almighty.  I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, My God, in whom I trust!”  For it is He who rescues you from the net of the trapper and from the deadly plague.  Psalm 91:1-3  NASB

Plague – The Black Plague killed between 75 to 200 million people between 1346 to 1353.  It effectively destroyed European civilization, forever altering the seats of economic power, forcing migration patterns, and exterminating entire communities.  During these times, the Roman Catholic Church reigned supreme in both political and religious realms.  The Pope offered a special daily mass to plead God’s protection.  It failed.  Communities built cathedrals in homage to Mary in hope she would intercede.  Nothing worked.  And because the priests and the nuns were the first responders to the diseased, they died in disproportionate numbers.  As far as the culture was concerned, this was the end of the world.  God was seeking vengeance against Mankind.

The history of the greatest pandemic ever experienced left behind a very different world.  It opened the floodgates for official atheism.  During the Roman Empire, atheism was a capital offense, not because the Emperors believed in the One God but because the culture was predominately pagan, and the fear was that an atheist would bring the wrath of at least one of the gods down on the rest of the population.  But by the Middle Ages, the Church reigned unopposed.  The God of the Church was the God of all creation, and the Church was His official representative on earth.  The Plague changed all that.  In a few short years, faith in God’s promise of protection was wiped away.  The statements of the “infallible” Bible were undisputedly false.  God did not stop the Plague.  In fact, the only rational explanation in a time before microbiology was that God sent the Plague.  The world was judged—and punished!

Perhaps we know better now.  The biological cause of the Plague was the Yersinia pestis bacterium, carried by fleas on the back of rats.  The human cause was lack of sanitation.  But what was the religious cause?  Were the unbelievers right?  Did God decide to punish Mankind?  If so, why didn’t repentance prevail?  Why did millions of “innocents” have to die?  Or was it andralamousia, the final Judgment, and utter failure of the Church?  Most thought so—and left religious orthodoxy for good.  Why worship a vindictive God?  Or worse, a God who was powerless to stop such a tragedy.  The religious world never really recovered.  Doubts about God’s benevolence continue to this day, with plenty of subsequent, although perhaps not as devastating, examples.  Why would David write such words if, in fact, they are nothing more than a wishful lie?  God didn’t rescue—not in the Middle Ages, not in the 1940’s, and apparently not now.  Is Pedro Calderón de la Barca right (“For man’s greatest crime is to have been born.”)?  Are we born sinful so the best we can hope for is a peaceful end before condemnation to Hell?  The history of Mankind’s experience of evil in the world seems to suggest that those claims about God’s protection of the righteous and His heartfelt benevolence are just fairy tales, something to keep us looking up to Heaven while we sink into the mire.

Or maybe David’s words can’t be extrapolated.  Maybe they are just for him, for his feelings of protection and rescue.  There are a few stories to support this.  Others died when David was guilty.  Maybe that’s how it works.  God has His favorites and the rest of us just pay the bill.  Once again, even if I’m one of the chosen few, why would I worship a God like that?  No, there has to be something more to this than divine election.

I can’t chalk it up to human depravity alone.  Sure, we played our part—and still do.  We are, on the whole, a pretty rotten and pitiful species.  Heschel points out: “Giving birth to one child is a mystery; bringing death to millions is but a skill.”[1]  But the flea wasn’t Man’s fault and neither was the bacterium along for the ride.  We contributed to the spread but we didn’t invent the illness (unlike some other biological agents we did invent).  Isn’t God in there somewhere?  Verses like this one really bother me.  I just don’t know what to think.  I might be able to explain it (away?) as David’s own personal cultural viewpoint, but I wonder if he meant more than that.  In the 10^th century B.C.E., the theory that the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished was already under attack, as it should be.  But don’t we really believe it anyway?  Don’t we believe that God really does care for the righteous and punish the wicked?  And how, pray tell, do we maintain that belief despite human history?  As an a priori faith commitment without experiential evidence?

Or do we hang on to the claim in this verse by excusing God’s lack of assistance, by reading it as if it said, “When He chooses, He rescues, but when you aren’t rescued, well, that’s just because He didn’t choose to this time.”

Help me here.

Topical Index:  plague, rescue, protection, reward, punishment, Psalm 91:1-3

[1] Abraham Heschel  Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 83.