The Bible is a Full Disclosure/Radically Honest document.

God has absolutely zero interest in airbrushing His “heroes.”

Most religious texts and media outlets promoting certain people try to make their patriarchs look like porcelain statues; but the Bible reads more like a police blotter mixed with a messy family group chat. It’s not sanitized. It’s gritty, it’s grubby, and frankly, it’s a bit unhinged.

For instance, let’s consider Noah. The guy survives the literal end of the world, pulls off the greatest zoological feat in history, and what’s the first thing recorded in the “New World”? He plants a vineyard, gets absolutely hammered, and ends up passed out naked in his tent while his sons have to play a high-stakes game of “Don’t Look at Dad.”

How did the Noah feel about the inclusion of these details in the sacrosanct published account, and the perennial and pervasive public record!?

Another example … Abraham’s nephew – Righteous Lot (see 2 Peter 2:7). After the fire and brimstone of Sodom, we find Lot living in a cave, getting tricked into a plot by his daughters that sounds like a rejected script from a tawdry soap opera. It is dark, it is messy, and it is deeply unsettling!

Why keep all that begrimed reality in the text? Because God champions honesty over optics.

God isn’t looking for people who sanitize, play-it-safe, and domesticate His Word and His favorite terms (e.g. terms like Honor, Holiness, Awe, Reverence, Righteousness, Sabbath, Covenant, Glory, Sanctification, etc.). God is most certainly not looking for a PR dept. to save Him from scandal or spectacle. Quite the opposite …God is committed to scandal and spectacle (e.g. 1 Corinthians 2:2)! God’s agenda is radical. He doesn’t grow us around or above the mess; He grows us through it. God takes the nitty-gritty, muddled realities of real life—the bad decisions, the family scandals, the “what was I thinking?” moments—and uses them as the soil for growing us grace and mercy (see Matthew 9:13).