Faithfulness Okom on X
The shock you are feeling reading Genesis is completely normal, but it points to the most important rule of reading Scripture: the Bible is brutally descriptive, not automatically prescriptive.
When Genesis records Lot’s daughters sleeping with their father, it is not offering a moral blueprint or endorsing incest. It is recording the horrific reality of human depravity in a broken family fleeing a ruined city.
The Bible refuses to sanitize our ancestors. It gives you humanity unvarnished, with all its rot, betrayal, and violence laid bare.
The Bible is the story of God’s supreme condescension. God did not sit in heaven with folded arms, waiting for humanity to civilize itself before He stepped into our story. He entered the mud of history exactly where we were, working through deeply flawed people over centuries to pull us toward light.
When Jesus was questioned about Old Testament divorce laws, He exposed this exact dynamic. He told them that Moses permitted certain concessions because their hearts were hardened, but from the beginning it was not so.
The Old Testament records God managing the baseline reality of a primitive, broken world, while progressively leading humanity toward the ultimate standard. That standard is Jesus Christ.
In Scripture, Abraham, Moses, and David are not the moral finish line; they are broken men in need of mercy.
Jesus alone is the full and spotless revelation of God’s character. Look at how He lived: He stepped into a first-century world where slavery, violence, and the subjugation of the weak were culturally acceptable, yet He participated in none of it. He owned no slaves, took no lives, exploited no one, and commanded His followers to love their enemies.
This is the fundamental contrast with Islam. The Bible records the moral failures of its figures as an indictment of human nature, pointing forward to Christ who redeems us from them.
Islam does the opposite: it takes a seventh-century tribal leader and declares his historical conduct; slave-owning, military conquest, taking captives of war, and marrying a child, to be the timeless, unalterable moral ideal for all mankind. What the Bible exposes as human sin needing redemption, the Quran canonizes as divine precedent.
Coming from a 12-step background, this should actually make profound sense. The first step is taking a fearless moral inventory, facing the full extent of human powerlessness and brokenness without sugarcoating it. Genesis gives you the diagnosis of human nature so that by the time you meet Christ in the Gospels, you understand exactly why we needed a Savior.