The accused is an innocent man. These lyrics from Billy Joe’s “An innocent man” mirror three recent incidents.

Incident one:

I’m helping someone finally read East of Eden in English. Every day, we read 20 pages with vocab questions, discussion, etc.

Biblical parallels are abundant in “East of Eden.”

One day, we started talking about these parallels, and the conversation went something like this:

Student: I can’t figure out the part about the apple. What was so bad about eating an apple? I want to know what the real symbolic meaning of the apple is.

Carol: Well, it’s not really an apple. It’s any fruit. The important part was the disobedience, and the sin it brought into the world.

Student: But I want to know what it means because it said it was an apple.

C: Are you sure it said an apple? Where did it say an apple? After this, we checked three different versions of the Bible. That’s when we both found out that nowhere in any Bible does it say Adam and Eve ate an apple.

Yet, my friend has believed that Adam and Eve ate an apple for years.

Question one:

What if you thought both God and the creation story were kind of stupid your whole life because you were working with faulty information that’s not even in the Bible?

1. There is a tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
2. Touching that tree has consequences.
3. It bears fruit.
4. It does not say what kind of fruit and there is no mention of an apple.

Incident two:

Shortly after that “Apple” conversation, I went on the INTERNET and listened to a powerful sermon by an Evangelist I will not name who listed herself in her bio with Dr. in front of her name.

Her sermon provided some amazing insight into a situation I’ve been dealing with and I was eager to hear more from this evangelist and her husband, who is also a minister.

Later, I had a thought. “Where did this doctor get her Ph.D.?” This thought popped into my head for two important reasons:

Reason one:

Way back when I was in University, this is how you got a Ph.D.: You first do a Bachelor's degree which takes 3 or 4 years. Then, you got master’s degree that took one or two years.

Then you get a 4-year Ph.D. When I was coming up, a Ph.D. was a person who had gone through these steps. This meant that a Ph.D. had 10 or almost 10 years of education.

Reason two:

There is a very famous and successful pastor working in Toronto who introduces herself as Dr.____.

She got that Ph.D. through a diploma mill; the kind of place that will give you a diploma if you give life experience and enough money.

After this question popped into my head about her “Ph. D”, I spent a little while digging around for her credentials. I didn’t dig too much because my woman’s intuition had already answered the question.

Question 2:

What if the person who introduced you to Jesus Christ turned out to be a dishonest fraud?

Incident 3,

Then, I read an article on CNN, a few days later entitled, “Child abuse scandal shatters Irish faith in Catholic Church” In the article, a man described the abuse and rape he had suffered at the hands of Catholic priests.

This man, whose story grieves my heart, will forever associate church with abuse. He ended up in the care of a denomination with a long history of sexual abuse.

Question three:

What if your spiritual leader abused you to the point of suicidal despair?

Final Question:

What if the people you know slowly eroded your belief in a loving God, the Bible, and the church?

By now, you may have figured out that the accused man I am talking about is God.

Human error, human behaviour and even Satan’s lies have a way of painting him and Christian faith in a very guilty, unworthy light. There are even people walking around today who believe that Satan’s been given a raw deal. They believe that God is the real enemy, and that hell is going to be one big party.

The reasons people think God is a jerk or a myth, which I’ve touched on include:

• Being given erroneous information about the Bible
• Christians who don’t behave like Christ
• Church abuse

For these reasons, a lot of people have put God, who is innocent on trial and found him guilty.

Is there a solution?

Is there a way to heal the hurt, pain and disillusionment that results from this? Clearly, someone who is recovering from years of sexual abuse has much more to overcome than someone who got involved with a lying pastor. Nevertheless, a common thread links these three: the middleman.

The middleman is the person standing between you and God. This is the person who is causing most of the trouble. This is the individual who alienating you from God.

I too have been burned by the middleman. I just want to end this by saying what I said to the last person who asked me a lot of questions about God.

Whatever pastor, church, or Christian friend you’re looking to, promise me one thing.

Just let this thing be between you and God.

In the end, it has to be between you and God.

This article was originally published on March 22, 2010.