Nearly every family has a few skeletons in its closets, and you can find them if you open up enough closets! As a propaganda piece, the Bible is not very good because it doesn't even try to hide the skeletons—not even in Jesus' family tree. Instead, the Scriptures are brutally honest about the failures of even our greatest Bible heroes. You look through today's verses and you'll find some serious skeletons. It's as if God is saying to us, "If I can bring triumph through them and their failures, just imagine what I can do through you!" I don't know about you, but that surely is encouraging to me. I call this the principle of "Hallelujah anyway!" God's power and grace triumph over our failures. (FYI, for those not familiar with the idiom, "a skeleton in the closet" is another way of saying that someone has some bad family secrets that they try to keep hidden. One of the most significant "skeletons" is Bathsheba, the one for whom David lusted, then had her husband placed in danger so that he died in battle, and then David finally married her.)