Liberating you from bad ideas about God
Ever wonder if Jesus would be out there holding a sign with those “Christians” who condemn homosexuals to hell?
I think He would be … only here is the sign He would be holding:
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People often assume that we must determine whether or not God exists before we can raise the question of what this God is like.
In other words, why bother with the question of the nature, attributes, and characteristics of God until and unless we first determine the existence of God?
But this exactly what we must do. The question of the existence of God must be secondary to the question of the nature and attributes of God.
Why?
Well, for one reason, how can a person look for God if they don’t know what God looks like? If a person doesn’t know what to look for in God, they cannot very well look for God.
Furthermore, if we begin with the question of the existence of God without first seeking to understand what this God would be like (if he existed), we run the danger of looking for a God who does not actually exist.
And in fact, this is what I think has happened to most atheists.
Many atheists, I believe, have rightly declared their non-belief in a god that truly does not exist.
They have gone looking for a god that does not exist, and, having failed to find him (and how could they?), have declared that god does not exist. Christians take offense to this, and come up with all sorts of arguments for the existence of God, but fail to recognize that they too are arguing (in many cases) for the existence of a god that does not actually exist.
In such cases, it is the atheists who are the true worshipers of the true God, for they have recognized the non-existence of the non-god.
The Christians who seek to defend the existence of the god who is not God are the idolaters, for if they are seeking to call people to believe in a god who is not God, they are calling people to believe in an idol. In such a case, the rejection of this false god by the atheist is an act of pure worship.
Let me get real concrete and specific.
The vast majority of atheists I know today have rejected a god which is believed in by the majority of Christians, namely, a god who hates people of other religion, hates homosexuals, hates democrats, and hates “sinners.” This god of popular Christianity commanded Israel to commit acts of genocide, drowned millions of people in a flood because they sinned too much, and is planning to send the vast majority of the people of this world to an everlasting torment in flames and boiling lava.
Since the God which Jesus revealed to us is nothing like this sort of violent, blood-thirsty, people-torturing god, the atheistic rejection of such a god is an act of true worship of the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
If God is not like what we have been taught, then when we declare, “God does not exist,” we are not denying the God who does truly exist, but the god who is nothing more than a figment of human imagination, philosophical speculation, sociological superstition, and religious wish-fulfillment.
To deny a god who does not exist is to say nothing about the God who does.
When atheists deny a god who does not exist, this is an act of pure worship to the God who does.
So this bring us back to the idea I began with: Before we can discuss whether or not God exists, it might be best to discuss what sort of God we are looking for.
I propose we invite people to look for the God revealed in Jesus Christ, for this is a God who not only exists, but this is a God who can be found.
I believe that if those people who have rightly denied the existence of a god who does not exist were properly introduced to the God who does, they would no longer deny the existence of God.
In my experience, it seems that the vast majority of atheists have not rejected the God revealed in Jesus Christ, but the false god of popular, power-based, political religion.
I reject and deny the existence of that god too … Does that make me a Christian atheist?
So Christians, let us follow our atheist friends in denying the existence of this false god of power, money, bloodshed, and violence, and instead call people to believe in the enemy-loving, all-forgiving God who is found in Jesus Christ dying on the cross.
Only once we present God as what He is like in Jesus Christ can we expect people to “find God” as He truly is, because the God who looks like Jesus is the only God who can be found.
All three of my girls are currently reading The Picture Bible. When I was young, I think I read through that book 10 times or more. It was a great way to learn the Bible stories and become familiar with the basic structure of the Bible, and since it was written in comic-story format, it kept my interest.
When I got a little older, I also liked Crusader Comics. Looking back now, I cringe a little bit at the theology taught in those comic books, but I remember reading them over and over again.
Back then, comic books were intended primarily for children, but as our society becomes more and more visually oriented, there are more and more comic books being put out for adults. They are actually called “Graphic Novels.”
I have often thought that it would be great if someone could do a graphic novel of the Bible, much like The Picture Bible, but without glossing over or cutting out the “difficult” portions of Scripture. What difficult potions? You know, the rapes, the murders, the sex, and the violence.
The Picture Bible, as great as it is, does not give an accurate picture about God, God’s people, or the violent nature of the Bible itself.
These violent events are in the Bible, and we do a great disservice to ourselves, to the church, to our witness in the world, and to future generations when we try to ignore such violence in Bible as if it never happened.
If we want to be honest with ourselves and with others about the God we claim to follow, we can begin by being honest about the book which we claim tells us about this God.
So anyway, I was excited to learn about a new project currently underway to publish a Word for Word Bible Comic of the entire Bible. That’s right … the author plans to leave nothing out.
As the name suggests, the Word for Word Bible Comic will include every word of the Bible:
As part of drawing the Word for Word Bible Comic, the author has painstakingly studied the history, culture, and geography of the text to make sure his drawings are as accurate as possible:
The Word for Word Bible Comic even includes the violence inherent within the biblical text. Here is a scene from Samson, which I wrote a post about yesterday. I am uncomfortable with the violence in these portions of Scripture, but we cannot deny their existence.
Oh, as a side note, if you look at the image above, I really like how the author made Samson relatively skinny. You see how he is smaller in size than the Philistines surrounding him? I think this is historically accurate. Samson likely was not a beast of a man, or else why would the Philistines want to know the secret of his strength? If he had huge muscles, the source of his strength would be obvious.
Anyway, I am thrilled that Word for Word Bible Comic project is underway.
But isn’t all this violence gratuitous? Isn’t it unnecessary to show all the blood and gore? It is only unnecessary if you do not realize that this is the way the Bible is! It can easily be shown that the Bible is one of the most gruesome, bloody, and violent religious books that has ever been written.
If you don’t like to think about the violence in the biblical text, you might want to ask yourself why…
Although, I must say, I am a little curious to see how the Word for Word Bible Comic will handle the Song of Solomon. I don’t see how he can draw that book and not make it X-Rated …
On a similar note, I am quite curious to see how the Word for Word Bible Comic will deal with non-narrative texts such as the Pauline Epistles. There seems to be only so many images you can draw from these letters…
Anyway, here is a bit more about this Word for Word Bible Comic project from the author/illustrator himself:
To learn more about Word for Word Bible Comic, check out the website here.
Also, if you want to help get this project off the ground, you can support the Word for Word Bible Comic Kickstarter project for the initial project goal of publishing the Book of Judges.
I will consider how I will get involved in supporting this project, and invite you to do the same! Go here to learn more.
My wife and I decided that as part of our Easter celebration this year, we would begin watching the History Channel TV miniseries “The Bible” with our three daughters.
I am sure people have reviewed this miniseries to death on other blogs, so I will not say much about it.
The only thing I want to bring up is something that should not have surprised me at all … namely, the violence. I must confess that although I am currently up to my eyeballs in studying and thinking about all the violent passages in Scripture, it is quite another thing to see some of them on the screen, especially when, right in the midst of the violence, many of the people committing the violence scream something like “In the name of God!” or “For the glory of the Lord!”
And yes, I think the violence is gratuitous in this miniseries. There were numerous times where fight scenes were completely unnecessary, and other times where the fight scenes seems to drag on and on, but then, they delete entire portions out of the Bible (such as all of Jacob’s story, the 40 years of wilderness wanderings, etc.) Couldn’t they have cut out the fight scenes and included a scene or two from these other crucial events?
I am not trying to sweep the violence of Scripture under the rug and ignore it, but when God’s angels start pulling out their swords to hack people to pieces (as in the scene with Sodom and Gomorrah), it’s a little too much.
Anyway, as I was sitting there watching all the bloodshed while my wife tried to cover the eyes and ears of our three daughters at the especially gruesome parts (like when Samson slaughters Philistines), my youngest daughter blurted out, “Daddy, where is Jesus?”
Yes.
That is the question, isn’t it?
I don’t know about you, but I find it impossible to take the Jesus I read about in the Gospels, and put Him back into almost any violence scene in the Old Testament.
The Jesus I read about in the Gospels has compassion on the multitudes when they are hungry. Would this same Jesus give praise to God if He were on the boat with Noah while mothers and babies screamed on the outside as they were dragged to a drowning death?
The Jesus I read about in the Gospels says “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” not “Because you have not let my people go, I will go through all of Egypt and strike down every firstborn son.”
Ultimately, then, it comes back around this question: Does Jesus fully reveal God to us or not?
If He does, then how do you make sense of the bloody and violent texts of the Old Testament, and the complete lack of such violence from Jesus in the Gospels?
This is why I am trying to forge an explanation with my “When God Pled Guilty” series. Frankly, I am quite excited about some recent developments in this series, but I know for a fact that when I am done, my proposal will not be fully satisfactory (even to me).
So how do you read the Old Testament violent texts? When you read them, ask yourself the same question my daughter did: “Where is Jesus?”
Yesterday we looked at the idea of God as a divine scapegoat. We pick up with this idea today, showing how Jesus also was a divine scapegoat. He not only revealed to us what God had been doing all along, but also unmasked the scapegoat mechanism for all to see. Through Jesus, we see the truth of violence, that it comes from us, and not from God.
The way many Christians have come to understand and explain the crucifixion of Jesus, it almost seems as if God Himself was to blame for this violent act as well.
A large swath of Christian theology teaches that God sent Jesus to die on the cross, that it was God Himself who wanted an innocent victim to die for the sins of the whole world. Many forms of traditional Christianity even state that the only reason the death of Jesus could atone for the sins of the whole world is because He was an innocent victim.
In other words, one prominent and popular explanation for the crucifixion of Jesus was that God needed an innocent victim to pay for the sins of the world, and since the innocent victims of bulls and goats could not perfectly accomplish what God desired, God instead had to send the ultimate innocent victim, His only Son Jesus Christ, to pay for the sins of the whole world.
This interpretation of the cross makes God once again the violent perpetrator of this most violent of crimes. According to this view, God ordained the death of His Son because God demands the blood sacrifice of an innocent victim to appease His anger toward sin.
The Scriptures, however, paint a quite different picture.
Jesus came to occupy an all-too-humanly constituted place of shame, violence, and death, and not hold it against us. There is an angry deity in this equation, and it is us, in whose midst God, quite without violence, manifests the depth of his forgiving love by plumbing the depths of, and thus defanging, our violence (Alison, We didn’t invent sacrifice).
Instead of God demanding a blood sacrifice to satisfy His wrath toward sinful humanity, Scripture indicates that it was mankind who put Jesus to death on the cross.
It was we who continued our age-old crime of scapegoating an innocent victim to appease our own guilty conscience.
We were the violent ones, and Jesus submitted Himself to our violence to both expose it and neutralize it once and for all.
Jesus went willingly to the cross, not because a blood sacrifice was necessary to pay the penalty for sin, but because going to the cross unmasked the scapegoat mechanism, revealed the violence inherent within the heart of men, exposed the myth of redemptive violence, and brought an end to the war that men had waged on God for centuries.
On the cross, Jesus removed the veil from the power of sin.
On the cross, Jesus laid bare for all to see the lie that violence toward an innocent victim helps alleviate the curse of sin and constant spiral of violence.
On the cross, Jesus showed us once and for all that God is not violent, but, quite to the contrary, has been taking upon Himself the violence of the whole world.
In Jesus, “God is revealed as the ‘arch-scapegoat,’ the completely innocent one who dies in order to give life. And his way of giving life is to overthrow the religion of scapegoating and sacrifice” (McDonald, Violence & The Lamb Slain).
How can a God who says "Love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44) be the same God who instructs His people in the Old Testament to kill their enemies?
These are the sorts of questions we discuss and (try to) answer in my online discipleship group. Members of the group can also take ALL of my online courses (Valued at over $1000) at no charge. Learn more here: Join the RedeemingGod.com Discipleship Group I can't wait to hear what you have to say, and how we can help you better understand God and learn to live like Him in this world!
