I’m not convinced that drawing moral lessons from a Bible character’s life is wrong. Teachers have done that for centuries. Is it really all that bad? Sometimes it is that bad—when we force moral lessons that are barely supported by the text or not there at all. One of the thickest books I own is a guide to all the New Testament passages that refer to the Old Testament.2 Only a handful of those are passages where an Old Testament character is used as an example of how to live. If we teach Old Testament lessons that are mostly how-to-live examples, we’re taking a different approach than the
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