This is not how God responds to abuse—even when it comes from someone who is gifted and anointed. When King David forced himself upon Bathsheba and killed her husband Uriah to cover it up after he discovered she was pregnant, these are the words that the prophet Nathan delivered to David, directly from God.
Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife…Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house. And I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun. For you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun. (2 Samuel 12:9-12)
To be sure, there’s a thick line between “not being perfect” and “perpetrating outright abuse,” and David fell on the wrong side of it.
As a result, the latter part of David’s life was plagued by conflict, violence, pain, and death. Despite the fact that God had used David mightily in the past, and while he never revoked the promises he made to David, God did not stop David from experiencing the devastation his actions wrought. His life was never the same, and that was the just judgment of God.
God is not glib about abuse. Neither should we be. To do so sears our consciences and trains us to minimize or accept heinous acts, so long as we have a fondness for the person who committed them. Nobody’s perfect. But not everyone is an abuser.
This isn’t to say that we ought to put ourselves in the place of God by exacting judgment upon these leaders beyond ensuring their removal from positions for which they are no longer qualified and are a danger of further harm to others. But it is to say that we should consider their abuses with the same measure of sobriety as God does, even where it concerns his most favored servants.
2. An Unequivocal Denunciation of Abuse Does Not Make Us Guilty by Association.
Often bound up in our unwillingness to denounce abuse and scandal where our favorite Christian leaders are involved is a deep sense of shame. And that’s because, prior to the shocking revelations of what was happening behind closed doors, we admired these people. We learned from them. We may have listened to their teaching and been impacted in ways that deeply shaped the trajectory of our spiritual lives.
And if we were wrong about them, what else were we wrong about? How could they preach things that were so helpful to us while, at the same time, they were doing things that were so harmful to others? You may have a gnawing anxiety: if these allegations are true and as serious as we fear, have you somehow become culpable in their wrongdoing?
For some of us who were close to these leaders, we may actually hold some responsibility for not doing enough to stand against their abuse. There’s grace for that.
Or, maybe you were close to the situation and are experiencing a false sense of guilt, because there actually wasn’t anything you could have done to prevent it. There’s a lot to work out with Jesus and your therapist there. And there’s grace for that too.
For others, we didn’t even know these leaders personally, could not have known what was happening behind closed doors, and are not at all responsible for anything they did. But because we see ourselves as having been even tangentially associated with them, our sense of self-preservation tempts us to downplay or deny what they’ve done. No one wants egg on their face.
We need the courage to admit that we were wrong. We were fooled. We didn’t know. But we do now.
