Decoding the Violence in the Old Testament: An Examination of God's Character

every night, or most nights I should say it's not every night, but most nights when we're putting our sons to bed, we have Oliver either read his storybook Bible or we read it to him, and so when I was preparing for the talk today that we're getting into, I was curious how his Bible worded kind of some of the stories that we're going to talk to.

So what we're talking about today is violence in the Old Testament, and so I was curious how does this little kid Bible talk about it?

And it was kind of funny because it doesn't.

There's this just huge gap in between kind of Joshua and then Daniel, and so how they've chosen to deal with it is to just not talk about it, which you know what it honestly kind of makes a lot of sense, because what, four year old are you going to read some of the things that we read about in some of these Old Testament books?

Why would we do that?

It just kind of says in one sentence, very quickly and God helped the Hebrews win their battles and took them to the Promised Land period, and that's it.

Of course, like I said, this makes sense because you can't really go into the graphic violence, including some cannibalism, that we read about in the Old Testament in a children's Bible.

I mean, this is some TVMA type of stuff.

Stories of incest and witchcraft and human sacrifices.

There are bloody deaths, decapitations, fingers, feet, hands being cut off.

This is all in the Bible.

There are eyes gouged out, there are impalements and suicides and a countless number of animals sacrificed.

Again, we can't read that to our little kids who are three, four and five years old.

So I get it, but you know, I think we grow up.

If you grew up in or around the church and not all of us did, I didn't but if you grow up in or around the church, you kind of grow up in, I think, a Sunday school environment in which these stories have been very sanitized like my son's Bible has been sanitized but then you get to be a grown up and you start reading a grown up Bible and maybe you're working through the Bible in a year type of deal or you're just reading through it and you get to some of these stories and you're like what is going on?

I didn't know that that was in here.

I mean, you might be an adult by the time you figure out that some of this stuff is being written or some of that stuff was written and is in the Bible and if we don't know any better, it can really leave us feeling like God is very kind of unpleasant.

There's a quote I'm going to read to you that some of you honestly might find offensive, and my point in reading this isn't to offend you or anyone watching or listening.

It's not to offend you, but I think it does kind of capture what people from the outside, if you didn't grow up in the church and if you don't have really an understanding of what's going on.

I think it really encapsulates this quote.

How can be perceived the violence that is in the Old Testament?

And I think it's the atheist and writer Richard Dawkins and his bestselling book, the God Delusion, says that the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction.

Jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control freak of addictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, genocidal bully.

That's a lot right, like.

He just kind of like.

It's like he Googled just negative terms for something, for anything, and he clicked the synonyms and he went to the thesaurus and he's just like.

I want this word and this word and this word and we're just going to put them all together.

But essentially, despite all the different words he chooses, right, the idea is pretty clear that Richard Dawkins thinks that God is just the worst, I mean, in the story.

According to Dawkins, god is the bad guy.

And again, this wasn't.

We're not reading this to offend you or upset you or make you think that we're doing anything like that, but the point is in reading this is that, yeah, there are people and perhaps you're married to one of them, perhaps they're your kids, perhaps they're your parents, friends, family, co-worker and perhaps the reason that they've rejected the Bible is because of this, is because of the violence, and they come to a similar conclusion.

So what do we do with this?

Is God really those things or is there an explanation?

And that's what we're going to talk about today in our sixth and final part of our series, how Not to Read the Bible, which is based on the book by Dan Kimball.

Highly recommend that you get this book if you're interested in some of the stuff that we've been talking about.

I promise we didn't get to even half of what's in here.

There's so much good content in here.

So if you're looking to go further, deeper, wider in the subject material that we've been going through.

Pick up the book.

Really good, and of course, it's based on the Bible, right?

We're reading the Bible every single week and what we've been doing throughout this series is we've said, okay, there's this crazy sounding, crazy sounding part of the Bible.

Is it really crazy or is it just crazy sounding?

Or if it is crazy, what's the explanation?

If it's crazy sounding, what's the explanation?

And that's what we've been doing.

We're kind of not learning necessarily like what to think about every topic that we come to that we don't understand, but we're trying to learn how not to read the Bible through learning some Bible reading techniques.

For example, don't just read one Bible verse out of context.

Don't just read one Bible verse.

Pull it out of context and build an entire theology what you think about God and the world and humanity around just one Bible verse.

There are a lot of Bible verses and so we need to understand that we do.

Speaking of not just reading one Bible verse, we do need to look at the Bible when we read anything, from beginning to end.

What part of the Bible are we reading?

Is it when God is redeeming humanity through Jesus and through the church, or is it back before the fall, when humans were in Eden?

Is it when God is sort of starting this mission and redemption is initiated?

Where are we reading the Bible stories at?

We need to remember that the Bible was written for us and not to us, and what I mean by that is in your Bible.

It contains documents that are thousands of years old.

There's not a letter to the church in Madison in our Bibles, but that doesn't mean that the Bible is irrelevant or not useful for you and me today, and not at all.

It just means that we need to read it in the context that this wasn't written to us addressing our modern 21st century problems in the United States.

Certainly it deals with our modern 21st century problems in the United States, but it's not in a direct fashion, and sometimes we hope it will be.

And, as a reminder, every part of the Old and New Testament, it points us to Jesus.

In the Old Testament we look forward to a Messiah and in the New Testament we look back on the Messiah who came, but we also look forward to his return, and we've taken these four tools on how to read the Bible and we've applied them to several topics that are often misunderstood or created into internet memes that get shared, that are making fun of our faith, and it's easy to understand how they come to that conclusion with misunderstandings.

We talked about unicorns in week one and we talked about how in the King James version, the unicorns show up 10 times, or 10 or 11, 12 times.

And why is that?

If we believe in the Bible, do we have to believe in unicorns?

And we said no, no, that's not true.

Actually, when we look at this Hebrew word, it wasn't referring to unicorns.

It was referring to a type of bull or a type of like cattle that existed thousands of years ago.

So it kind of made sense.

We applied these verses to slavery, because slavery jumps up and it appears in the Bible, not just race-based slavery but other forms of slavery, and in our modern day we talk about human trafficking.

What do we do with these passages in the Bible that seem to say slavery is OK, at the very worst?

It never says that slavery is inherently wrong, and what Sarah talked about in that second week was like there's a lot going on and we have to understand is that in the Bible, when we are talking and does seem to have these verses that seem to support or approve slavery.

It was much more like modern day employment, in which you would put yourself in there to avoid starving to death, to avoid being homeless, to avoid dying, and so it was like that in a lot of ways.

That didn't mean that race-based slavery didn't exist back then.

It did, because the Hebrew people were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years based on their ethnicity.

So it did exist, but what we see in the Old Testament and God's kind of servanthood slavery, the rules of that was making it more humane and it was leading people to a better direction.

We're talking about women in ministry and how, before the fall, men and women were created equal.

Then, after the fall, there was this kind of society in which now women were lesser than men, and how God was trying to put that back together all the way to the New Testament, when we see women are apostles and we see that they're leading churches, and so we see that God, throughout the Bible, has restored that and sometimes some of the things that we were talking about, like when we read that a woman shouldn't speak in church.

I was very culturally specific to a situation.

It wasn't even all of the churches back then, 2000 years ago, it was just a couple of them and specific areas that were having issues.

We talked about science in the Bible and we said well, can you have to pick between the Bible and science, or can I be pro-science and pro-bible?

And we said you could be pro-science and pro-bible, because the Bible isn't necessarily a book on science.

When Genesis was written Genesis one and two it wasn't to answer our questions about the age of the earth, it was said.

Written Genesis was to tell people about God, the God who loves them.

And these people had just escaped out of Egypt where they had a lot of gods, and so they're asking questions about who is this God and does this God love us?

And how do we make this God mad?

And so Genesis comes onto the scene.

When God is speaking, it says I created everything and I love you and I'm the only God.

And so that's where Genesis comes into play.

So you don't have to choose between science and faith in the Bible.

You can have both.

Last week we talked about the other religions.

We said well, is the Bible kind of intolerant?

Does it teach that there's only one way to God?

And what we said was consistently, from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible points us in the direction of Jesus and that Jesus is not just all way to God, but that Jesus is the way to God.

And, like I said, we went through that from Old Testament to New Testament and today we're going to talk about violence and the Old Testament.

How do we explain or understand these stories where it looks like God is just committing mass genocide and mass killing of people, groups and including women and children?

When we read these things, how do we process that?

And my guess is that maybe you're not even aware.

Up until right now, you weren't aware that those passages were in the Bible, but I would guess that for others of you, you did know and what you've probably done is skip over those and you're like I'll come back to that later.

And well, today's the day.

Today's the day that we're going to come back to that and talk about them, because there is violence in the Bible and there's violence that come out of the evil acts that people do, but there are also violent acts that writers of the Old Testament do attribute to God.

Okay, let me say that again, there are some things that happen in the Bible violence that people do and it's attributed to people.

But then there are other violent acts that are attributed to God or God's will, and what we're going to be talking about today is the violence that's attributed to God, to God's will, and what I hope to do is dispel this character, dispel this character of God, this criticism that we have of God as some bloodthirsty, violent, genocidal maniac.

I hope to dispel that and to do this again.

I want to remind you we're not just going to read one Bible verse, because if we did that, then it would be easy to make those generalizations against God.

We have to understand these violent stories in the context of the larger storyline of the Bible, and so, generally speaking, my guess is that you have heard one of two explanations for the Old Testament violence Like what do we do with that?

Well, some people will take the no-apology approach.

Okay, this might be, you might be someone you know, but no apologies.

It says that God did it.

God can do whatever he wants, including killing children and the elderly.

As God, he owes none of us an apology.

And here's what I would say about that.

I don't think it's true, because, while God could potentially do whatever he wanted, we also know that God is holy and that means that God can't sin.

God can't sin.

It's so far removed from his nature that he can't do it.

And so I think that when we're talking about the no-apology approach, well, god can do whatever he wants.

I would say that needlessly killing people, as we understand it from God and the authority that comes from the Bible about God like killing people needlessly, that would be a sin and God can't do that.

So I don't think that the no-apologies approach is very adequate.

The other one might be that in somewhat of the Bible is wrong approach, which just says that the Bible has these stories in it, but whoever wrote those in the Old Testament, it was mistaken, like God didn't really say those things or God really didn't want that to happen.

I know that's what it's written, but God didn't really.

And I think that that's also a mistake and it's not very adequate.

Because if we begin to do that, I mean where do we stop?

I'm all for like exploring this road and seeing where it takes us, but honestly, there's just no evidence to say that well, here God means this and here God doesn't mean that.

There's no evidence to back that up.

And so what do we do when we come up to these parts of the Bible in which God does say, hey, go into battle here or hey, start this war here.

Well, I don't think the no-apology approach works and I don't think that we can just say that well, god really didn't say that.

But there is a third way to explain it, and I just want to say at the onset that I don't think we're going to get to the end of today's talk, even with this third approach of understanding the violence, and have like warm, fluffy feelings at the end of it and say, oh well, now it all just makes sense.

I think that we're still going to get to the end of this and, despite having a few more answers and I hope that you, I give you a few more answers, I hope that we can talk about it I think we're going to still get to the end and say, man, there's just some things that I just don't understand, and that's okay.

I want to say that that is okay.

Now, the first thing I want to clear up with us today.

I'm talking about Old Testament and violence.

The most violent passages, or most of the violent passages in the Old Testament, like regarding God sending the Hebrews and the Israelites into battles are actually for a very small, limited time.

It's not just, it's not in Genesis, it doesn't show up in the prophets.

This happens in a very small window.

And so when we're reading the Old Testament or we hear about violence in the Old Testament, I think that we tend to think Genesis all the way through the Old Testament and then, like snap, god turns and now we have Jesus and God's no longer angry or bloodthirsty, but he's like this peace-loving, nonviolent Messiah.

What happened, god?

And that isn't true.

We see that these things, the violence that does happen, is in a very small, concentrated window of time, historically speaking, and most of this happened when the Hebrew people were out in the wilderness on their way to the promised land.

Okay, so that's the time when we're reading most of the violence and the battles and the wars.

It's when the Hebrew people are without a land, going to the land that God promised not just them, but Abraham, their great, great, great, great grandpa.

And so when we do come up to these passages, whether in Joshua or Judges, I want you to ask three questions, and you might just want to jot these questions down for when you're reading it, it might help provide some clarity later on.

Is it humans Doing the violence or God Commanding the violence?

That's the first question.

It's really important to ask this one because in the case of Kane, who kills his brother able, god didn't tell him to do that.

God was actually very angry About that.

Moses murderers, a couple Egyptian slave drivers almost screws up Moses's life.

God didn't ever approve that.

God never came back and said don't worry about it, no big deal, moses.

God didn't approve that.

That was Moses decision.

David has your riot killed, etc.

Etc.

There are lots of examples in the Old Testament in which somebody, a person, makes a choice to be violent.

Somebody, some person, makes a choice to take a life, and these were all godly people.

There are a lot of godly people who do these horrible, terrible things.

There are also a lot of ungodly people in the Bible who take a lot of lives, and that's a good reminder right now to say just because something is mentioned in the Bible does not mean that God Approves the action.

Right, we talked about that a couple weeks ago.

Just because it's in the Bible doesn't mean that God's approving it.

Sometimes it's in the Bible and God is using this as an example of what not to do, and other times, god's just telling you, historically speaking, what happened.

Hey, this is what happened.

David had your eye killed.

This is what happened.

Kane killed his brother, and so sometimes it's just like matter of factly speaking.

And so when we do come to these passages in the Old Testament and there are several, but when you do come to them and you see the violence, ask yourself a question Is this a human doing this?

Is just somebody going against God's will, or was this God who commanded the violence?

That's the first question.

The second question is is this violence about God making a way?

When God sends Israel into battle with the various cities Going to the Promised Land, or in the Promised Land, his intention was not to destroy but to drive them out.

Okay, his intention wasn't to destroy them, is just to drive them out other people, groups, including the Canaanites.

We're living in the land that God had designated for Israel, the land that God had promised to Abraham, and so it's important to note, like right now, it's not genocide, because it wasn't based on ethnicity.

God wasn't telling the Israelites to kill the Canaanites Simply because they were Canaanite.

That wasn't the point.

It wasn't based on ethnicity, it was based on the land.

God wanted the land because he had already promised the land.

The other thing about this is that God gives people, whether it's the Canaanites or At Jericho God gives people the opportunity to join Israel.

Think about Rahab.

In Jericho, god sends a couple spies to check things out and and Rahab says I know you're God, I believe your God has shown up to me, I believe in your God.

And God spares Rahab, not just spares her, but Rahab's brought into the family of Israel and she actually is in Jesus's bloodline.

If we go and look at the genealogy of Jesus and say where did Jesus come from and who were his grandparents, you'll see Rahab was in there.

And so what?

What I'm saying is that God isn't just saying them, they're in the way, get rid of them.

Them, they're in the way, get rid of them there.

Now the land has been cleared, you can have it.

God's first thing is an ask Do you want to join us?

Do you want to submit to me the one true God?

Will you come, be part of our community?

And what we see over and over again is that for the most part, people say no, we're fine, no, we're good, and then that's when the conflict happens between people.

We also have to think about this in terms of a strategy.

God has this land.

It's not just promised to Abraham, but it's the land that Jesus is going to be born into.

It's the land that the church is going to be born into, and if we think about the spread of Christianity and how viral that was those for that first hundred years, with the first few hundred years, how we went from just a handful of followers to millions of followers all over the world, israel was the right place to start this mission of God was the right place for the church to be birthed, and so it wasn't just like God could say, well, we'll just move over here and it would be fine.

I think of all of the people later down the road who might not have heard the gospel message that Jesus came, live the life we should have lived, died death will deserve, raised from the dead to give us Freedom and forgiveness and grace and love.

They might not have heard that had it not happened there in Israel.

And there are other times where it's hyperbole, which is just an exaggerated statement, right, I mean claims not meant to be taken literally, and so I think of there comes this point where they're like we completely took them out, we demolished them, we destroyed them, which is vernacular we use today when talking about our sports teams.

We'll be like our team totally just destroyed them.

Now, does that mean the Green Bay Packers playing football on a Sunday afternoon Literally killed every member of the Chicago Bears?

No, never, ever.

Does it mean that?

But that's the vernacular we use now.

Of course, in today's day and age, 2022, we would never say that about war.

Oh, we went in and just completely destroyed them.

High five, we wouldn't do that.

But culturally, that was normal thousands of years ago.

Culturally, it was just normal.

You talked yourself up, you talked your culture up, your society up.

We totally wiped them out, and this is true even biblically speaking.

So we read this example in Joshua 10 20.

It came about when Joshua and the sons of Israel had finished striking them down In a very great defeat until they were destroyed.

Okay, so we destroyed them.

We just we came in.

There is a very great defeat and they were completely destroyed, depending on your Translation, but just destroyed.

But then we read the second half of verse 20 and it says and the survivors of them who escaped had entered the fortified cities.

Well, wait a second.

Did you like destroy them, like demolish them, read the world of them?

Or were there survivors who escaped?

Do you see what I'm saying, where it's like we might read the first half of that and be like, wow, god just had them completely destroy everybody.

Joshua went in and destroyed everybody, but there are at least half a dozen examples that I found and studying this week in which that kind of vernacular, the vocabulary, is used, where they completely destroyed them, they extermination, and then either a verse later or chapter later or somewhere else, it's referenced that and they're the survivors went here, the those who escaped did this, or those who surrendered went here.

They're like, okay, so they weren't Exterminated.

And so we do need to be careful sometimes when we're reading the Bible About the hyperbole that is going on.

A third question that we can ask is what kind of warning has God given and and what kind of patience has God exhibited, as I mentioned Already, that God didn't just say, hey, you're in the way, get rid of them.

Hey, you're in the way, get rid of them.

God sends people, he approaches them and says will you join on mission with us for where we are going, and oftentimes that was just rejected.

In the case of the Canaanites, too, there's this additional evil that's going on in the world, and we know nobody's perfect, I'm not perfect, you're not perfect, nobody at Madison Church is perfect.

The Israelites weren't perfect.

That comes up a lot but there's, at some point, some threshold of evil gets crossed.

And so it's not just that they were Occupying the land, it's not just that they rejected God, it was that they were living in this very unapologetic Evil.

And so, in the case of the Canaanites, they were sacrificing infants, babies.

They were sacrificing babies and infants to their God, moloch, and what they would do to sacrifice the kids is that they would place them in the hot metal arms of a statue of Moloch and, obviously, if you're being burnt, it after screaming.

And so what they would do to hide the screams would that they would play drums really, really loud.

And so we have the Canaanites, who are sacrificing kids in an absolutely horrible fashion.

They're not only in the Promised Land, but they're just living out this evil and they won't turn at some point.

God says enough is enough.

In the case of the Ninevites later on, historical records that we have show that they bragged about live dismemberment.

They made parades of heads and they required that the friends carry their heads on Elevated poles throughout the parades.

They pulled out tongues and genitals of live victims and they also burned young children to death.

Any of these things happening today Would be a major human rights violation.

Any of these things that I just described major human rights violations.

It would start worse in today's world that these things if they were occurring on the large scale, that they were happy.

These weren't small cities, these were major, major powers at the time the Canaanites, the Ninevites.

They were major world powers at the time.

And if this was happening in a major world power today, it would start wars.

And even the most anti-war person you're watching, you're listening, you're super anti-war I think that we would have an internal struggle.

Even being Anti-violence, anti-war, we would have an internal struggle if we knew that Infants and toddlers and kids were being burned to death as some sort of a religious Ceremony going on somewhere in the world and the people were unapologetic for it.

So God was always giving these people warnings and he's saying you got to stop, you got to stop, and oftentimes it was for not just a generation but multiple generations.

Now a question you might have now I was thinking about this, a question that you might have now, that you didn't have even 25 minutes ago, where you're like man, if things were so bad and they're sacrificing kids and there's all of this violence and it's just gory and bad, why did God wait so long to do something right?

That might be what you're thinking why did God wait so long?

And we get the answer all over the place, but it's very explicit in Ezekiel 1823, which says do you think that I like seeing wicked people die, says the sovereign Lord.

Of course not.

I want them to turn from their wicked ways and live Well, god clarifies.

He says, yeah, the Canaanites are evil, the, the Ninevites are evil, but I'm God and I don't get any pleasure in seeing wicked people die, and I think that's so true.

I mean of the.

We talk about God's grace, his love, his forgiveness, and even when it comes to these evil people who are doing Terrible things and just living and creating systems of injustice, unapologetically, god says that, even when it comes to the point where we are battling them, I get no joy in that, I have no pleasure in that God's will for all of us and even though the most wicked people is that they turn from those evil ways.

Now, why would God do that?

Well, I think we know the answer, but in Exodus 34, 6, it says that I'm the God of compassion and mercy.

I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness.

God is love.

God is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger.

So, even though there were these terrible things happening, we know that God doesn't get pleasure off of the violence or killing people or the wars or the battles.

And this is the message of God that is communicated throughout the entire Bible, in Genesis, when God is communicating that I am the true God and I love you.

And in the New Testament we see Jesus dying across.

And it's that communication I love you.

And I think it's really important that even when we come to these violent scenes in the Old Testament, we have to remember that God loved them as well and that God was slow to anger.

And so we're asking that question why didn't God step in sooner?

Because he was slow to anger and he was hoping that people would turn and repent from their wicked ways?

We have to read these times when God commands battles or enters the people in for war.

We have to read them in light of these considerations, if we just cherry pick a few violent verses of the Bible and ignore God's character, then we do get to the point where that opinion piece that quote I read at the beginning, we see that it was very uninformed.

It's very uninformed because it takes one situation and it says well, god must be like this, ignoring all the other evidence contrary to that.

But God must be like this.

Because I read this one Bible verse, whereas when we read the Bible from beginning to end, we see that it does get a little bit more complicated than that.

We should absolutely consider the character of God anytime we read about violence in the Old Testament and we have to ask ourselves the question I do, you do.

We have to ask ourselves the question what kind of God would we serve?

What kind of God would we believe in?

What kind of God would be out there, whether we served or believed or not, if God never interjected into our lives to right wrongs?

If God just eternally turned his back on people who sacrifice kids, on people who torture people for sport, on people who inflict not just physical damage but emotional damage, what kind of God would that God be if he never brought justice, when all people and systems have failed people, what kind of God would we serve?

And again, I want to keep go back to this idea that this is the picture of God.

The consistent picture of God that we see in the Bible is the God who gives warning, and plenty of warning, and shows great patience and is slow to anger before judgment.

But at some point we cross an evil threshold, there's too much injustice, and God does eventually step in.

And, as I mentioned, I don't suspect that I'm answering with this third kind of this third wave presenting of how do we explain violence in the Old Testament.

I don't think you're walking away feeling warm and fuzzy about it.

I think that we still have questions like well, why wasn't there another way?

Like God, infinite wisdom, why wasn't there another way?

Why wasn't there a better way?

I think that those questions will exist for a while.

They certainly exist in me, but I do love what Dan Kimball writes.

He says that when I struggle with the violence in the Bible, I try to recall the God of the whole Bible, the God who is patient, loving, compassionate and forgiving, and I trust that, although there are mysteries I may not know in this life, I have more than enough truth from scripture to keep faith and trust God.

I may not understand why violence happened, but I trust the God who does.

We may not have a super duper, 100% satisfactory answer to our questions about God violence in the Old Testament, but I think that there are some answers and I think that there are some explanations and I think that actually, by studying these and asking these hard questions, we get a fuller, better picture of God.

The broader story line tells us that he is a God.

He is a God of extreme patience, overwhelming love and immense compassion.

I hope that, whether you're a Christian or not, the past six weeks has been meaningful for you and that you've gained some confidence in the things that we've talked about.

I hope that your faith comes more alive between Sundays not just here, but between Sundays that you read the Bible.

You now have tools to help you better understand the Bible on your own.

If you're a believer, I just want to say that we have to read the Bible and it's best if we read that Bible every day so we can hear from God every day.

If we don't read the Bible every day, I think we're spiritually starving ourselves or neglecting ourselves, and I think that we get to the point where we lose our sense of truth, because God is truth and if we're not reading that, if we're not engaging and immersed in that, I think we get confused and we start buying into the lies that we see all around us in culture and in society.

Let's remember this truth about God, even in the midst of all the violence that we read about in the Old Testament, that God is compassionate and God wants everyone to turn from their evil ways.