Watching Roy Moore refuse to concede, I felt sympathy for him. He was stunned and inarticulate, and sounded confused while quoting the Bible in an effort to justify himself. The passage he spoke from memory—haltingly, yes, but better than I could do—was the beginning of Psalm 40, which reads, “I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and the mire: he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.” This invocation of shame—“the slimy pit,”—at least shows Moore knew what we had said about him. When Moore introduced this passage, he reminded us, “We also know that God is in control.” To which I say, yes, we do know, but what does it mean to know? The next part of Psalm 40 says, “Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not look to the proud, to those who turn aside to false gods.” In other words, any truth you think you know, any fact your heart is certain of, may be a false god. And these false gods are linked explicitly to pride. When you are proud, implies the text, that’s when you know you’re aiming prayer in the wrong direction. In his certainty, Roy Moore did not mention that part. But as I heard him wielding scripture this way, I realized he was making a mistake that is common among those of faith: he figured that, because he is a man of God—at least in his own mind—God would let him triumph.

That is the opposite of how God behaves. Humans rarely experience victory in scripture. Moses does not enter the Promised Land, for example; God prevents him from doing so over an almost comically meaningless dispute. “This is because… you broke faith with me in the presence of the Israelites at the waters of Meribah Kadesh in the desert of Zin,” (Deuteronomy 32:51) says God, describing an incident in which Moses struck a rock with his staff instead of speaking to the rock. In other words, God prevents his favorite mortal from achieving his lifelong goal, a quest that consumes a significant part of The Old Testament, because of how he followed instructions while doing a magic trick. To paraphrase William Faulkner, no one even remembers what that quibble was about. “There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow” (Ecclesiates 1:11).

The God of the Bible allows us to...