You may have noticed that I did not get a post out yesterday. Why? Because I am struggling with how to present my view about the violence of God in the Old Testament in a way that makes sense and in a way that does not get me branded as a heretic.

So far, I have only briefly shared this view with two people (my wife Wendy, and Steve Dehner), and the response of both was something like this:

Then there are all of your fantastic comments and emails which have raised other great questions and points which I need to consider…

Sooooooooo…. I am going to approach a presentation of my theory through the back door.

So far, I have presented most of the major theories about how to understand the Violence of God in the Old Testament, and rather than just blurt out why my view is, I am going to lead you through the theological and Scriptural reasoning that I went through to get to my view. In doing this, you will see my own thought pattern, and will also see how I arrived at my proposed theory.

The drawback to this approach is that traveling down this road will take 4-8 posts.

One benefit, however, is that some of you may figure out the view on your own before I ever present it here on this blog (No telling, Steve!). That should be somewhat satisfying for some of you…

So, let’s jump in.

Inspired and Inerrant Scripture

As seen in the previous posts (which you can find listed at the bottom of this post), one common approach to explaining the violence of God in the Old Testament is to deny or modify one of the central and historic convictions of conservative Christianity: that the Bible is the inspired and inerrant Word of God. Some views say that the Bible is full of errors and exaggerations so that the things it describes didn’t really happen, while other views hold that the violent events might have happened as described but God did not command them to do it nor did He inspire the biblical authors to write about these events as they did.

I am extremely uncomfortable with all such approaches to the problem of divine violence.

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In this series of proposals for how to understand the violence of God in the Old Testament, there is one final view which may possibly be true, even if it is nearly impossible to believe.

This view is that although the portrayals of divine violence in Scripture appear to be harsh and cruel, they are in fact just and merciful. Though initially this view seems to be similar to the first view, that God is God and so can do anything He wants, this view is different enough that it deserves mentioning.

Essentially, this view takes quite seriously the portions of Scripture which portray some groups of humans as having become “only evil continually” (cf. Gen 6:5). In modern Western civilization, we often have very little concept of how cruel people can truly become. Believe it or not, our laws and our governments do a pretty good job of restricting wickedness and keeping evil people off of the streets and out of our neighborhoods. But this has not always been true of all countries throughout time, nor is it true for all areas of our globe even now.

Imagine a society where every person aspires to be like Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army. It is estimated that Kony has abducted over 30,000 young boys into his army, and many stories report that to prepare these boys for the life they will lead in his army, one of the things Kony forces these young boys to do as “initiation” into his army is to have them brutally murder their own family members. Needless to say, with a beginning like this, the young boys often grow up to be thieves, rapists, and murderers of the worst kind. The United Nations has estimates that over 200,000 young girls and women have been raped in Congo during the past 15 years by members of the LRA.

Now, imagine a whole city filled with men like Joseph Kony. Since childbirth, each person in this city had been trained that the only way to survive was to be crueler than everybody else. That the only way to live for another day was to offer your daughters up to be raped by the warlords and your sons to be conscripted into their horrific army. If you ever refused, your daughters would be raped while you watched and your sons killed, before you yourself were tortured in the worst ways imaginable.

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As we work our way through some of the theories about how God can condone and command violence in the Bible, we come to a view which basically states that the violence is exaggerated.

The basic premise is that we misread the Bible when we think that the Israelites actually killed all the Canaanites (or whatever people group is in view). Sometimes the Bible is exaggerating in the number of people that were killed while other times the Bible says that all the people were killed when in fact they were not.

Then there are those cases where the terminology for “destruction” need not refer to death, but could refer to something else, such as being forced to leave the land or make the decision to join forces with the Israelites.

In other words, this position has several elements and perspectives, depending on which book you read or which scholar you listen to, but the main elements of this theory are described below (Note: Many hold various versions of this view, but you can read one summary of it on the Eternity Bible College blog).

Others Could Join Israel

First, God’s ultimate goal was for the conquered people to repent of their sin, see that God was worthy of worship and obedience, and join with Israel in following Him. Examples of this are found in some of the Egyptian people who joined with Israel at the Exodus (Exod 12:38), Rahab siding with the Israelite spies against her own people and then becoming one of the Israelites after their conquest of Jericho (Josh 6:22-23), and the Gibeonites choosing to be servants of Israel rather than face annihilation (Josh 9:9).

The Canaanites were Driven Out

Secondly, when people did not side with God in this way, God did not actually command the Israelites to kill and slaughter those that remained, but to “drive them out” of the land, that is, to force them to leave the land of Canaan and go elsewhere (cf. Num 21:32; Deut 9:1; 11:23; 18:14; 19:1; 23:27-30; etc.).

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Ever wonder how God can command such violence in the Old Testament, but Jesus commands only love and mercy?

One view that is prominent among biblical scholars is that although God used war, He didn’t like it.

As seen in Jesus Christ, God hates war. But He uses it in human history for two purposes: to accomplish His will through messy human methods, and to reveal the horror of life apart from Him. God used war to bare evil to the bone, to unmask the myth of redemptive violence, to show that bloodshed results only in more bloodshed.

Divine Accommodation in War

Those who hold this view argue that the violent portrayals of God in the Old Testament reveal God’s divine accommodation to human sinfulness and evil. God, knowing that sin will be involved no matter how He uses humans in this world, gives the commands for Israel to perform the violence in a way which reveals to them and to the rest of the world how wicked and evil sin really is.

God wants to expose the wickedness of sin in all its ugliness, and so chooses Israel to bear the curse of sin for the world in all its blackness and horror.

As with many of the other positions mentioned previously, there is much to commend this view. It is absolutely true that violence only leads to more violence. Murder, bloodshed, and war, however it is justified in the minds of those who commit it, always and only leads to more violence. Jesus said that “he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword” (Matt 26:52) and this truth has been seen over and over throughout history and throughout Scripture. Violence does not lead to peace, but only to further violence.

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We are working our way through several of the views about how to understand the violence of God in the Old Testament in light of the love and mercy taught and exemplified by Jesus Christ in the New Testament.

One view is that such an attempt is futile from the start because it is like comparing apples and oranges.

We must not equate what Jesus was trying to accomplish in His life and ministry with what God was trying to accomplish through Israel in the Old Testament. The two events had different goals and different methods, and trying to fit them together is like trying to put a square into a round hole.

Jesus, it is argued, was trying to set up a spiritual kingdom, governed by the rule and reign of God within men’s hearts. In the Old Testament however, God was trying to set up an earthly kingdom, one that had rulers and laws with a system of taxation, government, and military might.

The Kingdom of God in Israel

In a world like ours, countries need military might and wartime violence to establish borders, maintain peace and security against invading armies, and protect itself from crime and revolutionaries within its borders. In this view, since Israel was a theocracy, God, as the “Commander in Chief” sent Israel to war against her enemies. He gave the order to kill, destroy, and annihilate those who threatened the earthly government which He installed in Israel.

The Kingdom of God in Jesus

Jesus, on the other hand, came to install a Kingdom that was “not of this world” (John 8:23; 18:36) and therefore, did not need to issue commands for His followers to kill others for their common cause. The Kingdom of God is a spiritual kingdom, and as such, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers of the air (Eph 6:10-20).

So just as it would seem to be impossible for any earthly government to exist without a standing military, without violence toward enemies, and without governing rules for order and peace which include death to traitors and some form of capital punishment, so also God had to include such things in the earthly government which He set up in Israel. But Jesus had different goals and different methods, and so He was able to show a way of peace and non-violence toward His enemies, and call His disciples to do the same, for His Kingdom is not of this world.

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