How do you understand the violent portrayals of God in the Old Testament, especially in light of the love and mercy revealed in Jesus Christ?

We are working our way through some of the theories regarding this biblical dilemma, before I eventually propose an idea of my own (for your theological target practice). The view for this post is this:

God-Inspired Error

One view is that the descriptions of God in the Old Testament are accurate descriptions of what people wrongly believed. That is, the Bible is an inerrant guide to the bad theology some people had during the Old Testament era, and now that Jesus has come, we can see where and how they were wrong. The Bible includes these ideas, not to encourage us to emulate and copy their thinking and their actions, but to show us how their incorrect theology led to poor actions and destructive behavior.

In this way, much of the Old Testament is not a positive example to follow, but a negative example to avoid. It is not showing us what we should believe and do, but is showing us what people in the past thought about God and what they did as a result, and now that Jesus has come and shown us what God is really like, we can follow His example in not following the example of much of what the Old Testament says.

Different people who hold this view have different ideas about how involved God was in the whole process of the inspiration of the Hebrew Scriptures. Some believe that God inspired the human authors to write incorrect theology and ideas about Himself so that later generations could see the damaging effects of bad theology, while others think inspiration has little to do with it, and the human authors simply recorded what they thought God was saying and telling them to do, even though they were incorrect in what they thought.

When read this way, the Bible is not exactly an accurate record of what people should believe, but instead, an accurate record of what people did believe

The Bad Theology of Job’s Four Friends

This view sounds pretty far-fetched until you actually begin to realize that many passages of Scripture function in exactly this way. Take the book of Job as an example.

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As we slowly move toward a proposal for why the God of the Old Testament commanded the Israelites to engage in warfare against the the Canaanites, I am laying out some of the views that people have on this tough issue.

One rare view is that the name “Yahweh” in the Hebrew Scriptures represents two different beings: Jesus and Satan. When reading the Bible, the word “Yahweh” can sometimes refer to Jesus Christ and other times depicts Satan. See this article for a more complete explanation: Forgotten Key to Old Testament.

Apparently, one of the basic premises of this view is that ancient Israel cosmology had not yet developed to the point of being able to discern the difference between Yahweh and Satan. Ancient people, it is taught, believed that God was behind everything that happened, and so sometimes wrongly attributed the works of the devil to Yahweh. Today, since we know the difference between God and Satan, we can use the revelation we have received in Jesus Christ to tell the difference.

So according to this view, whenever we see Yahweh mentioned in Scripture (translated as Lord in most Bibles), we should use the revelation of Jesus Christ in the Gospels to determine whether Yahweh is referring to Jesus or to the devil. If Yahweh is doing, saying, or commanding something that appears evil, then Yahweh is the devil, but if Yahweh is doing, saying, or commanding something that looks like Jesus, then in these cases Yahweh is Jesus.

Proponents of this view do not argue that Yahweh is both good and evil, but that the term Yahweh represents two different beings, Jesus and Satan, and we must use later revelation in Scripture to determine when Yahweh refers to one or the other. God Himself, of course, is always loving and just, but sometimes the human authors of Scripture confused the true God as revealed in Jesus Christ with the actions of Satan in history, and referred to the actions of both as coming from “Yahweh.”

I, frankly, am opposed to this view.

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We are working our way through some of the views about how God could command the Israelites to kill and annihilate various people groups as they entered Canaan.

The bottom of this post contains links to some of the other views we have looked at so far. After I get through summarizing the views, I will present my own view, which (so far) I have not read anywhere else.

The view in this post is quite similar to the view which believes the Bible is wrong. Christians who hold this view simply cannot believe that the God revealed in Jesus Christ would do the things that Yahweh is said to be doing in the Old Testament. Those descriptions of God are clearly wrong.

But whereas the people who hold the previous view state that the Bible is in error, there are other Christians who argue that these passages are not in error, they just should not be interpreted literally. Instead, they must be understood allegorically. The tough texts of the Hebrew Scriptures which have God commanding Israel to go kill men, women, children, and animals are taken out of their historical context, and are given spiritual meaning which fits with what we find in the New Testament.

Allegorical Interpretation was Popular in the Early Church

This view was the dominant view of the Early Church Fathers, and is how most of them taught and understood these Old Testament texts.

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As I try to move toward an idea about how to understand the violent portrayals of God in the Hebrew Scriptures, I posted two introductory posts on the subject, here and here, and then had planned to present my thesis….

As a result of those two posts, I received numerous emails and Facebook messages from people who had their own theories which I did not cover. Thank you for sending these in!

Of course, I always think that if one or two people have a question about something I wrote, dozens more probably have the same question and just didn’t write in or leave a comment.

By my most recent check of email and Facebook, I have eight additional views!

So in an attempt to be fair (and in a way that I hope will not bore you), I decided to spend several more posts looking at other ideas about how to understand the violent portrayals of God in the Bible, before finally getting to a post that reveals my idea.

One of the things that I hope this series of posts accomplish is to show you how difficult the problem is, and how creative some of the “solutions” get. This problem has not been “solved” and will likely not be solved by me either. But through my posts I hope to move the conversation in a particular direction, so that maybe together we can come up something that raises appreciation for God rather than alarm.

A Violent God Does Not Exist Because No God Exists

So one view which almost everyone is aware of, but which I neglected to write about in my previous posts, is the view of atheism.

When dealing with the problem of violent portrayals of God in Scripture, some simply say that the Old Testament is wrong in its most basic premise, namely, that God exists.

This is the view of atheists who argue that there is no way a God of love could command the Israelites to do the things they do in Scripture, and there is also no way a God of love could send the flood, the plagues, and the other natural disasters that are described in the Old Testament, and so the best option is simply to believe that God does not exist, and that the people who wrote these texts ascribing these actions to God were simply deluded.

Just like the ancient Mesopotamian people had creation myths, and the Egyptians had tales about Amun, Ra, Seth, and the rest of their gods, and the Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans all developed their various pantheistic beliefs to explain weather patterns and the movement of the sun and stars across the sky, and why bad things happen to some people, so also, the Israelites developed and invented their own “fairy tales” to describe events and situations in their life which they did not understand or comprehend.

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As I try to work my way toward developing a solution to the problem of violence in the Old Testament, I thought it would be good to briefly summarize some of the common ways of dealing with divine violence in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Certainly, these are not ALL the solutions, but just the three most popular. But even most of the alternative solutions are similar to one of these three. Anyway, you may have guessed by now that I am not comfortable (or satisfied) with any of these three popular solutions. I am not certain that my own solution will be satisfying either, but that is why I am writing these posts… to flesh out the idea that is rumbling around in my head and see if it can fit within Scripture and theology.

So, here are the three most popular solutions to the problem of divine commands for mass murder in the Old Testament.

1. God is God and Can Do What He Wants

The first solutions is surprisingly popular among many Christians today, especially those who highly value the “sovereignty of God.” They say something like this: “God is God and He can do what He wants.”

This is the basic view of people who believe that God sends hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis on cities, and diseases and pestilences on people to punish them.

The strength of this view is that it allows a straightforward reading of Scripture and allows you to easily affirm the full inerrancy of Scripture.

The problems, however, are monstrous. Literally. In my opinion, this view turns God into a monster. I mean really, what would you think of a god who says, “Even though it is wrong for you to murder, torture, rape, kill, and slaughter, I can do it, because I am god.”  Is this really the god you want to worship? Is this really the god depicted in the Bible?

More importantly, is this really the God revealed in Jesus Christ?

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