The allegations against President Clinton have unsettled many American Christians. He holds a position we honor and uphold in prayer; and he professes to be a Christian. But the trial by mass media—all the talk of moral impropriety and criminality—has led many to believe he betrays the very values and office for which we pray.

We Christians should be accustomed to leaders whose private behavior and public words and actions appear to be at odds. We've been dealing with them for a long time now.

We want our leaders to be above reproach. We project our fantasies onto them, and soon they loom larger than life. David is our premier biblical instance. Michelangelo sculpted in marble what many Jews and Christians have carved in their imaginations—a flawless David, the spirited human body in perfection. But the biblical text does not give us a flawless David. Putting people on pedestals is a way of not having to deal with who they really are (and who the God working in them really is).

The biblical narrator insists on telling us everything bad about David: he married many women, kept a harem of concubines, was an indifferent father, and capped his moral dossier ingloriously with adultery and murder. The narrator refuses to idealize or glamorize him to show that God's sovereignty works through just such a mixed bag of human failure and sin.

We Christians should be well trained through our Bible reading to see how God's sovereignty is worked out through the lives of frail, willful, disobedient—sometimes repentant and sometimes not—men and women who are created to live to God's glory. That is what keeps us reading this story over and over again and finding it "good news."

In the moral maelstrom of our age, ...