It would initially seem that my two core theological beliefs about the Bible (Scripture is inerrant and Jesus focused) cannot be held together coherently.

How is it possible for the commands of God for Israelite violence to fit with the grace, love, and mercy revealed in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ? It seems impossible, which is why most theories give up one or the other. Most either give up on inerrancy and inspiration, or they assign some sort of bloodlust to God which is “hidden” in Jesus Christ. But such approaches surrender too easily.

If pressed to their logical results, these two core theological convictions actually work together to reveal something beautiful and loving about God.

Read the Bible Backward

One way of reading Scripture is to begin in Genesis and work our way forward in a roughly chronological fashion. There is nothing wrong with this way of reading the Bible, and reading it this way helps us see the flow of the narrative and the big picture story of Scripture.

The problem, however, is that when we get to Jesus in the Gospels (and especially in the Book of Revelation), we tend to import what we think we know about God from the Old Testament into what the New Testament tells us about Jesus. This way of reading Scripture causes us to read about Jesus in light of the portrayals of God in the Old Testament and interpret His actions accordingly.

Reading the Bible Backward

I propose that since Jesus reveals the Father to us, that since Jesus is the exact representation of God, that since Jesus says that if we have seen Him, we have seen the Father, that rather than seek to understand Jesus in light of the God of the Old Testament, we seek to understand God in the Old Testament in light of Jesus.

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Yesterday we looked at the first guiding principle for how to understand the violence of God in the Old Testament. We saw that we cannot chalk the violent portrayals of God up to “error.” Instead, we must maintain the full inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture.

The second theological conviction which forms the core of my theology is that Jesus rules.

Jesus Rules over Creation

One of the most important theological convictions of all forms of Christianity is that Jesus is preeminent. This truth is so critical to Christianity, it is impossible to overemphasize. Jesus rules and reigns, not just over heaven, and not just over creation, and not just over the church, but over all things, all people, all situations, all places, and all events.

Jesus Rules over Theology

Jesus even rules over theology and our understanding of Scripture. He is not only the One of Whom all Scripture speaks (John 5:39-40), but is also the One who reveals the Father to us (John 10:30; 14:7; Col 1:15-17; Heb 1:3). In this way, Jesus interprets Scripture and He interprets God. He is the Word incarnate, God in the flesh.

If we want to see what God is like, we need only look at Jesus. If we want to understand the meaning of Scripture, we need only look at Jesus.

Jesus Rules over Bible Study

In this way, Jesus is the first hermeneutical rule of Bible study.  He is the “trump card” of all Scripture study and theology.

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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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