From A Certain Point of View
When my youngest sister, Nicole, would cry, I would get up in the night and take care of her.
My room was right next to hers so I could hear her clear as a bell. The first time it happened, I asked why no one picked her up and my mom told me she needed to cry it out. But I couldn’t sit there and do nothing! How could I let her cry, not knowing if anyone cared, while tears rolled down her face? I couldn’t. Not when all I had to do was pick her up to get her to stop crying. The first time I did it, I got in trouble so I would sneak into her room…quietly lower the crib jail door…and rock her to sleep. A couple of times I even changed her diaper when it felt full. Once she fell asleep, I would lay her down gently and make my way back to my room. It only happened a few times. It’s not like I went in there every single night. But still, if you ask my family about it, they deny it ever happened. But my argument is this– how would they know? They were asleep! That’s the whole point!
It’s funny how people remember things differently.
From something as simple as helping my baby sister to huge historical events, different people remember things in different ways. Living in California, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is pretty common knowledge. You may not know a ton about it, but I remember even in junior high we learned about it when we studied World War II. But when I was living in Georgia, most people I ran into either knew very little about it or didn’t know it happened at all. Cassie told me it wasn’t something they were taught in class even though it was a part of our curriculum out here. When I was serving at Roswell UMC right outside of Atlanta, I would share stories in Sunday school and worship about how the internment affected the lives of the Japanese American community and my family in particular and it took me by surprise how many people would come up afterward and talk about how shocked they were and how surprised they were to find out what happened. More shocking to me was how easily people would brush it aside and justify it as a reasonable reaction to the war. I wonder if they would think it so reasonable if their parents and grandparents were the ones locked up?
How we view the world and everything in it depends on a lot of things.
How we were raised. Where we lived. Who were our friends. What our parents believed. The biology of our bodies. Our own experiences. All these things and so much more shape our perspective and color our interpretation of everything around us. So, let me ask you this: Do you believe in OT God or NT God? Are you a fire and brimstone God believer or a God of hugs and love? Drastic oversimplification, I know. But how we understand God and view God depends on the lens through which we view life. One of the biggest difficulties we encounter in the Bible is the difference between the God of the Old Testament who at times seems cruel and angry, and the God of the New Testament filled with love and grace. Now there are plenty of times in the Old Testament where God shows grace and mercy. The hundred or so times that the people of Israeli abandon God and then come crying back to him when things get tough. God always welcomed them back. God saved his people and brought them out of slavery in Egypt. God provided manna and water literally out of the clear blue sky while they were wandering in the desert. But God’s wrath is evident in abundance in the Old Testament, and it makes us wonder, “Is God really like this?” Or is the God we follow the one we see in the New Testament that John describes for us in his letter to the church.
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
13 This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. – 1 John 4:7-15
This is the God we believe in.
But do we just ignore the God of the Old Testament because we don’t like what we see? Do we rewrite history because it doesn’t make us feel good? Or do we wrestle with it and try to understand the complex nature of God? These are both the same God. I think what troubles us most is how it sows seeds of doubt about God’s character and God’s existence. It is also the biggest hurdle for people to overcome in their belief in God. If you take the Bible to be the inerrant word of God (meaning that there are absolutely no mistakes), then there are two possibilities people rely on to justify God’s actions. One, that God as the author of life has the right to take it at any time he pleases. And two, the people God kills somehow deserve it.[1] But does that make it okay? A mother who gives birth to her child wouldn’t be justified in taking that child’s life simply because she gave birth to him, so why would we let God get away with it? Plus, it makes God awfully fickle when it comes to giving and taking life. When Hurricane Katrina hit, there were people who said it was God’s will against the sinful city of New Orleans, but can you tell me what the 10 recorded infants who died might have done to sin against God? Or the other 10 children who died along with them? And could we really say the people who died were among the most sinful in the city? All 971 of them? And that’s only according to one study.[2] Some have the death toll at twice that much.[3] Do we think God handpicked those people to die? And if so, why in that way? God, being almighty, could simply strike down the people he didn’t like. Look at what happened to Ananias. Luke tells us in Acts 5 that Peter simply accuses Ananias of lying to God and he fell over dead. If God was really going to strike vengeance, why not do it this way? What disturbs me most about the passage we read from Deuteronomy is that God is making the Israelites into his engine of death. Instead of doing it himself, he commands them to do the killing including every man, woman, and child for something they haven’t even done yet. Is this the God we follow…or could there be another explanation?
Perhaps the early Biblical writers got it wrong.
Not intentionally but maybe the writers of the Old Testament confused what God was saying with what fit into their idea of the world. As Hamilton wrote in his book, Making Sense of the Bible, “In this case, the biblical authors were representing what they believed about God rather than what God actually inspired them to say.”[4] We test this not by our own opinions, but what we know of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. When measured against that rubric it becomes easier to determine the way in which we are supposed to read Scripture and gives us a more reliable way of understanding what God is trying to say to us. But if that’s the case, then you might ask why include them in the Bible at all? What purpose do these passages of violence and destruction serve? Again as Hamilton points out, there are two possible purposes these passages might serve for us today: As a way for us to understand the times and context in which the early writers put these passages to papyrus and as a reminder and a warning to us how easy it is for people to “invoke God’s name in the pursuit of violence, bloodshed, and war.”[5]
Nothing is ever written without context.
Even as we read passages of the Bible, they are read in the context of our own life and experiences. We can’t help that. As human beings, we are limited by what we know and how we came to know it. That’s why the Bible is such an amazing piece of literature. It has stood the test of time because we have been able to view it through many different lenses and it still talks to us today. But we need to keep that in mind as well. The authors of the Bible as much as us who read it today wrote the Bible out of the context of their lives. In the times of the Old Testament, it was common for people to believe God sent them to war because that was very consistent with the beliefs of the time. It was also common for there to be contests between deities to prove their worthiness. This happened a lot in the Old Testament. It happened in the story of Daniel and King Nebuchadnezzar when Daniel interpreted the dream; between Elijah and the prophets of Baal when they had a contest between which God could light the wood on fire. It was a different way of understanding God. So when they spoke about God and then later wrote down these stories, it was from that frame of reference. Our frame of reference changes, too. Just as we used to believe that God sanctioned racism and sexism, we don’t believe that any more. If our understanding of God could change within the frame of our lifetime, isn’t it possible that the violence we read about in the Bible was how the early writers understood God at the time? Isn’t it possible that our understanding of God has changed over the years? And if that is so, then perhaps the Bible should be seen not as a static work, unchanging in both meaning and words, but instead as a living document that offers us insight into the character of God and our own troubled history. Read your Bibles. Even the most difficult parts of it. And challenge yourselves to discover what God is saying to you within its pages. Wrestle with what you find and do not be afraid, because even though we may turn in the wind, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”
[1] Adam Hamilton, Making Sense of the Bible, p. 212 – Hamilton states directly that advocates for this view “speak of God’s authority to give and take life at will” and then prefaces the destruction of the Canaanites to their evil.
[2] http://www.dhh.state.la.us/assets/docs/katrina/deceasedreports/KatrinaDeaths_082008.pdf
[3] http://www.history.com/topics/hurricane-katrina
[4] Hamilton, p.213.
[5] Ibid, p.214-216.
Craig's Corner 