violence of Scripture Archives

Lots of people wonder why the Bible is so bloody … that is, why there is so much violence and bloodshed in the Bible. (I am going to provide a brief explanation below, but if you want a more detailed explanation, you can read my book, Nothing but the Blood of Jesus.)

Many Christians often condemn the Muslim Qu’ran for being a violent book, but did you know that the Bible is far more violent than the Qu’ran? And this is not just descriptions of violence. There are more endorsements and commands to violence by God in the Bible than in the Qu’ran.

Of course, many Christians rightly point out that Jesus came and changed all that. That Jesus revealed a new a different way, a way of love and forgiveness.

I agree.

But then many Christians turn right around and say, “But in the future, Jesus is going to return to this earth, and slaughter millions of people. There will be the greatest, bloodiest war the world has ever seen. When Jesus returns at the battle of Armageddon, the Valley will be filled with blood up to the horse’s bridle.”

So … wait. Is Jesus violent and bloody or not?

Are we saying that God in the Old Testament was violent and bloody, and then Jesus showed up to try love and forgiveness, but at the end of the world, even Jesus realizes that violence and bloodshed is the only solution after all? That love and forgiveness doesn’t actually work?

I think something is terribly wrong with this way of reading the Bible.

And by the way, this way of reading the Bible causes people to become violent themselves. I have heard Greg Boyd say that we become like the God we worship. If we worship a God who is violent at heart, and even though He tries love and forgiveness for a bit, He ultimately resorts to violence and bloodshed … then this is how we will act toward others.

This is why we hear Christians say, “Well, we tried to love and forgive those people over there …we really did, but they didn’t change, so now we are forced to drop bombs on them.”

Maybe we don’t drop bombs on them … but we do feel justified to hate other people when they don’t respond to our attempts to love and forgive them.

I had a conversation on Facebook Messenger the other day which reveals this attitude pretty well. Here is a screenshot:

(By the way, if you want to Message me on Facebook, you can do so here.)

Do you see? When we believe that God loves for a while, but then turns to hate when people don’t respond to Him, this causes us to hate those who don’t respond quickly enough to our evangelism efforts.

Now, if this is truly the way God is, then I agree that this is how we can behave as well.

But I do not believe that God is hateful, angry, violent, or bloody. I believe that Jesus reveals that God is quite the opposite. I believe that Jesus shows us what God is like, and that God has always been and always will be just like Jesus in the Gospels.

Jesus says “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” Paul says in Colossians 1:15 that Jesus “is the image of the invisible God.” The author of Hebrews says that Jesus is the exact representation of God, the express image of His person (Hebrews 1:3).

Now when Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews were teaching these things, they were talking about how Jesus lived during this life on earth as recorded in the Gospels.

During His life and ministry, Jesus did not engage in bloody violence or acts of vengeance upon anyone. Instead, He always loved and only forgave.

If we believe that Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews knew what they were talking about, then we are forced with a decision: We must either decide that Jesus was hiding the dark, bloody, and violent side of God so that He did not actually reveal to us the full and perfect image of God (and therefore, Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews are not telling the truth), or we must decide that Jesus did, in fact, fully reveal God to us (as He claims to have done), and so God has never been violent and bloody, and never will be.

For myself, I believe that Jesus is telling the truth, and so is Paul and the author of Hebrews.

Which means we need to figure out why the Bible is so violent and bloody. We need to figure out why the Bible contains so much bloodshed. We need to figure out why God apparently commands so much violence and bloodshed in the Old Testament. We need to figure out why John writes in the book of Revelation about the return of Jesus in such violent and bloody ways.

Thankfully, this is not something we have to figure out on our own. Jesus Himself told us why the Bible is so violent. He did this in numerous ways and at various times during His life and ministry.

The greatest explanation was provided through His crucifixion, of course, but many of the parables and teachings of Jesus were also directed at revealing the truth to us about why the Bible is so bloody and violent.

Jesus tells us why the Bible is Bloody (Matthew 23:29-35)

One of the key texts where Jesus reveals this is Matthew 23:29-35 (cf. Luke 11:49-51):

[You] say, “If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.” … Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.

In this text, Jesus provides a summary of how He reads and understands the Old Testament. This is “The Old Testament according to Jesus.” And according to Jesus, the Bible is filled with violent bloodshed.

From Abel to Zechariah, from A-to-Z, the Bible reveals the violence of the human heart as we kill others in the name of God. According to Jesus, the Hebrew Scriptures are primarily about a revelation of bloodshed.

They reveal what the origins of bloodshed, and how sacrificial religion is often at the root of bloodshed, as human beings kills others in the name of God.

And it is not just evil sinners who are killed in the name of God, but righteous, innocent victims, such as Abel, Zechariah, and the prophets.

Jesus also says that the people in His day are doing the same thing.

This violent murdering of others in God’s name is the constant human sin of every culture and every generation. Yet no generation thinks that they themselves are guilty of it. The people in Jesus’ day say that if they had lived in the days of the prophets, they would not have participated in killing the prophets. Yet the people in Jesus’ day killed Jesus.

Today, we say that if we had lived in the day of Jesus, we would not have participated in killing Jesus. But is this true?

If you had lived in the days of Jesus, do you think you would be among those who cried out for His arrest and crucifixion? Or would you instead be among those who stood faithfully at His side and wept for Him as He bled and died?

Do not be too hasty to answer.

In Matthew 23:29-35, Jesus explains that the religious people who claim they would not have participated in murdering the prophets are the very same people who are planning to kill the prophets of their own day.

In this context, Jesus clearly equates blood with murder and violence, and especially the bloodshed that is religiously motivated. When the Bible speaks of blood, it primarily has in mind the sacrificial and religious bloodshed which takes place when we kill and murder in God’s name.

Of more importance, however, is the shocking truth that this text contains for us modern Christians. We Christians like to say that if we had lived in the days of Jesus, we would not have been among those calling for His crucifixion, but would have sided with Him instead, defending His innocence and calling for His release.

Sadly, Jesus disagrees with our assessment. The human condition and tendency is to side with the mob in calling for the death of the innocent scapegoat victim. The religious people in Jesus’ day claimed that they would not have participated in killing the prophets of old, yet it is they who led the charge in accusing, condemning, and killing Jesus.

Just as with every other violent text in Scripture, Matthew 23:29-35 is a serious call to take a careful look at the condition of our own hearts toward others.

This text, like so many others, was not primarily written so that we can condemn the ignorance of those in the past, but so that we can allow this text to expose the darkness in our own hearts. Just as the people in Jesus’ day were guilty of the same sins they condemned in their ancestors, so also, we are guilty of the same sins we condemn in them.

We say we would not have condemned Jesus, yet it may very well be that the people we think God should kill today are the very prophets whom God has sent to us to reveal our sin. Who is it that you want to see dead?

Who is it that you believe God could (and should) “righteously” kill? Could it be that you only think this about them because they are exposing your sin to you, just like the prophets of old?

This reveals why the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, is so violent.

Why is the Old Testament so Violent?

Much of the Old Testament is filled with blood, whether it is the blood spilled in the sacrificial rituals of the Mosaic Law or the blood spilled during Canaanite Conquest and subsequent wars of Israel.

It is not without reason that some have called the Bible the bloodiest religious book in human history. Such a charge is not unfounded, for when the actual calls for violence and bloodshed are tallied, the Bible has more bloody texts than the Muslim Qur’an or any other religious holy book.

The proper response to all this bloodshed in the Bible, however, is not to try to explain it away and justify God as the bloodiest deity in the history of religion, but instead to embrace the revulsion that we feel and recognize that the reason the Bible is so bloody is not so that we emulate the behavior we read about in its pages, but instead to see these events as though they were a mirror being held up to our own faces (James 1:23-24).

In Matthew 23:29-35, Jesus says that the Bible is so violent and bloody, because it reveals what we ourselves are doing in our own day. Jesus says that the Bible is so violent and bloody, not so that we can condemn the people of the past, but so that we can see how we ourselves participate in the same exact bloodshed and violence.

Jesus says that the Bible is so violent and bloody, not because it reveals what God is like (for only Jesus does that), but because it reveals what mankind is like. And therefore, what we are like.

The Old Testament does not reveal God to us as much as it reveals mankind to us.

The bloody passages of the Old Testament provide a better glimpse into the heart of man than they do the heart of God.

This is how to read the violent portions of the Bible, so that when we turn away from them in revulsion, we are trained to turn away from similar violent tendencies in our own heart as well.

Until we read the Bible this way, we will forever be confused about why there is so much blood and violence in the Old Testament. But once we read the Bible through this lens, we see that the Bible reveals man to us so that in Jesus Christ we receive both a perfect revelation of what God is like and a perfect revelation of what mankind is supposed to be like.

Through His death on the cross, Jesus willingly submitted Himself to the violent death of ritualistic sacrifice as a way of exposing to humanity the sin to which humanity is enslaved.

Jesus died, not to affirm and reinforce the idea that God wants blood sacrifice, but to unveil and expose the truth about sacrifice, the truth that it is we who want sacrifice; not God.

It is we who shed blood; not God.

By letting us kill Him in such a violent and bloody way, Jesus unveiled the truth about humanity and the truth about sin, and in so doing, called us to abandon these scapegoating, sacrificial rituals in our own lives.

By letting us shed His blood, Jesus revealed that all such scapegoating sacrificial rituals have nothing whatsoever to do with God and originate instead within the hearts of mankind.

Jesus fully exposed and unveiled the mystery of the scapegoat sacrifice by fully submitting Himself to it.

Through His life and death, Jesus revealed how to live:

We are not to make sacrificial scapegoat victims of others, while at the same time we are to willingly lay down our lives for others.

The blood of Jesus reveals that true life does not come through the death of others, but through the death of self for the sake of others. While seeking life through the death of others leads only to more death, seeking life through the death of self leads to life for all.

The blood of Jesus teaches that while humans seek death, God seeks life, and so when the life of God is in us, we will stop seeking the death of others.

To learn more about this, get my book, Nothing but the Blood of Jesus, or take my online course, The Gospel Dictionary, which you can take for free by joining my online discipleship group:

Understanding the Gospel requires us to properly understand the key words and terms of the Gospel. Take my course, "The Gospel Dictionary" to learn about the 52 key words of the Gospel, and hundreds of Bible passages that use these words.

This course costs $297, but when you join the Discipleship group, you can to take the entire course for free.

The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence

By Jeremy Myers

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I always love reading books that attempt to explain all the violence in the Bible … especially the violence that is attributed to God. I have written two books on the subject myself, but love seeing how other people deal with this difficult topic.

So when Matthew Fleischer asked to send me a review copy of his book, The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence, I readily accepted.

As I read the book, there was much that I loved and agreed with, but a few things that did not sit well with me. Let me start with the positives.

3 Things I LOVED about this Book

First, the book is very readable. It is not overly technical and provides a good overview of some of the views, issues, and texts related to the topic of violence in Scripture.

Second, despite the title of the book, it actually presents a New Testament case for nonviolence as a way of reading and interpreting the Old Testament. I love this approach to Scripture, and have written elsewhere about the importance of “reading the Bible backwards.” Though the New Testament chronologically follows the Old, it provides us with the theological and hermeneutical framework through which to read and interpret the Old Testament.

Third, and related to the first point, Fleischer not only encourages people to read the Old Testament through truths revealed in the New Testament, but specifically points people to the truths revealed through Jesus Christ on the cross (e.g., chapter 10). In one of my books, I call this the “crucivision” lens. I completely agree that the death of Jesus on the cross provides the clearest explanation of all violence in Scripture.

There are other things I love about the book, but let me briefly discuss two things I disagreed with.

2 Things I Disagreed With

First, Fleischer places a lot of emphasis in the book on progressive revelation (which he calls incremental revelation). This is the idea that as human history progressed, God revealed more and more of Himself to humanity, so that the later portions of Scripture more accurately reveal the true nature of God than the earlier portions (see chapters 2, 11). I have never been a fan of this view.

I know … I know. It seems that earlier I said exactly the opposite when I praised the practice of reading the Old Testament in light of the New. Let me try to clarify.

In the progressive revelation view, we see humanity at its lowest in the early chapters of Genesis, and then as God calls Abraham, then Israel, then Judges, then Prophets, and then Kings, each successive step gets us higher up the ladder of truth until we ultimately arrive at Jesus, who then encourages us to keep learning and moving upward toward truth. So in this view, the revelation from God can be drawn like a slope that moves higher as human history progresses, so that we are smarter and wiser and know more truth than did the people of 500 years ago, and especially the people of 5000 years ago.

C. S. Lewis called this view chronological snobbery, and I agree.

In my view, we probably know less today about God and “true” theology than did people of the past, such as Adam, Abraham, and Moses. While we do have a superior revelation in Jesus Christ, we have so drastically failed to understand what most of what Jesus revealed about God, we are still theologically inferior to Adam, Abraham, and Moses.

So in my view, rather than a constant upward slope toward “truth,” human history actually made a downward slope into sin and ignorance. Jesus Christ came at the deepest trough of this slope, and turned things around. His life, ministry, and teachings provided the correction, so that we are now generally on an upward trajectory, but we are still “below” some of the biblical saints of the past when it comes to what we know to be true about God.

This may seem like a minor point, but really, it makes a world of difference in how we approach some of the ancient biblical texts, like those of Moses and David. Rather than approaching them with a morally and theologically superior attitude, we instead approach them with humility, asking and hoping and praying that we can see what they saw and know what they knew.

This brings me to my second criticism of Fleischer’s excellent book.

Due to his view of progressive revelation, he frequently mentions that since people of the past did not have the full revelation that we have today, God had no choice but to occasionally accommodate their violent tendencies by engaging in some violence Himself.

Fleischer especially argues this in his chapters on “Just War” (chapter 7; see esp. pp 121-122), and then reinforces this idea in some of the concluding words of the book where he writes that God “may have temporarily used limited violence to advance his nonviolence agenda, but his use of such violence was always good and just” (p. 230).

I simply cannot agree, based on what is revealed about God in Jesus Christ. Jesus reveals what God is truly like, and Jesus shows us that there is no violence in God and never has been.

So should you read this book?

Of course. And you can get it here on Amazon. It is a good introduction to the difficult theme of violence in Scripture. But as you read, just recognize that there are other ways of dealing with the violence in Scripture than by assigning these activities to God and calling them “good and just.” God does not accommodate such violence, nor does He withdraw and allow it to fall upon us.

Instead, He dives into the mess and sin of life with us, and bears the blunt and the blame for sin on His own beaten and bloody back. This is what we see in Jesus. I present this idea in one of my other books, which is also available on Amazon.

Jonah 3:10 – The Repentance of God

By Jeremy Myers

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What is repentance? What is evil? If you think you know, here are some harder questions: Does God ever need to repent? Does God commit evil?

Well, Jonah 3:10 seems to indicate that God does commit evil and does repent of it. Yikes! What does that mean? This is what we’ll look at in today’s study.

The Text of Jonah 3:10

Jonah 3:10. And God saw what they had done, that they repented from their evil ways, and God was sorry about the evil which He had declared to do to them, and He did not do it.

In this discussion of Jonah 3:10 we look at:

What is repentance?
Does God ever repent?
What is evil?
Does God commit evil?
The sad, humorous truth about repentance from evil in Jonah 3:10

Resources:

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Buy my new book, and get BONUS Materials

By Jeremy Myers

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My new book, Nothing but the Blood of Jesus, is out, and people are loving it!

It’s #1 in three categories on Amazon, and many say that it has helped the Bible make a lot of more sense to them … especially the passages about a violent God.

If you have ever struggled with why the Bible is so violent, this is the book you need to read.

The book also received several enthusiastic reviews from other authors. I put them on the Amazon book detail page if you want to read them. Here is one such endorsement:

To celebrate the launch of my book, if you buy it before September 17, 2017, and then send an email to me at bloodofjesus@redeeminggod.com stating that you bought the book, I will send you some bonus materials next week.

It’s hard to know what the bonus materials are worth, but I estimate they are around $50-$100 in value. Here is what you will get:

A free PDF of the book (for printing on your computer to use for Bible studies – please don’t share the whole thing with others though!)
A video related to one of the central ideas in the book
Five mp3 audio downloads based on the five key terms of the book (Sin, Law, Sacrifice, Scapegoat, Blood)
The opportunity to buy paperback copies in bulk at a steep discount (for small group study purposes).

The book is only $3.99, so get the book today, and then send me an email for your bonus materials.

The Crucifixion of the Warrior God (A great book with a gaping hole)

By Jeremy Myers

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Greg Boyd has a new book out. Actually, it’s two books. The two-volume work is titled The Crucifixion of the Warrior God.. I have been waiting for these books for about four years now … His book attempts to provide an explanation for the violence of God in Scripture.

Back in 2013, I joked that Greg Boyd stole my book, but then about a year later, as I heard more about his book project, I realized that Greg Boyd and I were not quite saying the same thing after all …

But I wasn’t sure exactly what he would say in the book, since it hadn’t yet been published. But now it has been published, and … and it turns out that while I agree with him on about 90% of what he writes in the book, I disagree with him on the central point.

What is his central point? It seems to be this (SPOILER ALERT!): Greg Boyd argues that God withdraws from sin so that evil will be destroyed by evil. The violent portions of Scripture are to be understood as the times when God withdrew from sinful humanity and a sinful world.

Greg Boyd calls this the Principle of Redemptive Withdrawal. He spends most of volume 1 leading up to this point, and most of volume 2 unpacking and defending it.

As with everything Greg Boyd writes, these two books are well-written, well-argued, and thought-provoking. And regardless of what you believe about the violence of God in Scripture, these books will present you with a new way of looking at things so that you no longer have to choose between accepting that God is violent or writing off the Bible as hopelessly full of error. There are other explanations.

Greg Boyd has presented one such explanation. And there is so much to praise about these books.

That which is Praiseworthy

I love the Greg has stuck with a high view of Scripture and biblical infallibility (which is related to, but distinct from, inerrancy). In the reviews I have read so far, Greg takes a lot of flak for this stance, but I am completely on board with him. When people give up on the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture, I find that they rarely wrestle with the text. Instead, they too quickly write off the uncomfortable passages as being “hopelessly in error.” I am convinced that one reason Greg Boyd is a leading theologian is that his view of Scripture forces him to wrestle night and day with the troublesome texts. Such an approach leads to creative thinking and approaches to biblical hermeneutics, rather than simply consigning something to the trash bin of “error.”

Another major point from Greg Boyd’s excellent book is his insistence on the truth that Jesus reveals God to us… and especially through His crucifixion. Greg Boyd calls this the cruciform (or crucicentric) hermeneutic. I have referred to this elsewhere as reading the Bible with a crucivision lens. This approach to Scripture and theology is essential.

Third, I 100% agree with Greg Boyd that sin bears its own punishment, so that when sin comes to fruition in our life, it brings forth only death and destruction.

I could go on and on about the many areas of complete agreement I have with Greg Boyd and this book.

My One Main Sticking Point … or Maybe Two

Ultimately, while I agree with so much of Boyd’s approach to the problem of divine violence, I believe it misses the mark in two main areas.

First, I was consistently uncomfortable with Boyd’s understanding of sin. Since sin is “the problem” in Scripture, it seems he should have spent more time discussing the origin and nature of sin. For example, Boyd wrote in numerous places that Jesus bore the destructive consequences of sin “that we deserved” (cf. e.g., 768). I’m not certain, but Boyd seems to view sin as creating a sort of debit in the divine ledger books, which ultimately got charged to Jesus. I think this transactional way of viewing sin led Boyd astray.

Yes, there are destructive consequences of sin, but I am not sure that there are destructive consequences of sin “that we deserve.” That’s like saying that “Jesus came to deliver slaves from the chains that they deserve.” This means something else entirely than saying “Jesus came to deliver slaves from the chains.”

Much more needs to be said on this point, but I’m trying to keep this review relatively short.

So the second main point of disagreement I have with Boyd is in his central thesis that God withdraws from sin to let it have its way with us. I already briefly mentioned this above, but I find this view so disheartening and discouraging. I 100% agree with Boyd that all of Scripture and all of God’s character and activity in human history must be viewed through Jesus Christ, and especially Jesus Christ on the cross. But Boyd’s main thesis for God’s withdrawal comes from Jesus’ statement on the cross “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46-47).

And though I read and re-read Boyd’s explanation of this cry from the cross (pp. 768-780), I never really understood how Greg understood this text. Here is his basic conclusion:

Perhaps the best way of thinking about this is to distinguish between the loving unity that the three divine Persons experience, on the one hand, and the loving unity that defines God’s eternal essence, on the other. We could say that on the cross, the former was momentarily sacrificed as an expression of the latter. …

… While the Principle of Redemptive Withdrawal is focused on the abandonment Jesus experienced as he experienced the Father’s judgment on the sin of the world, it is nevertheless grounded in the truth that the cross is the definitive expression of the self-giving, mutual indwelling agape-love that defines the triune God throughout eternity (p. 778).

It sounds like Greg is saying something similar to how I understand this passage (Here is my explanation of Matthew 27:46-47), but I am not sure. I don’t know what he means by “the Father’s judgment on the sin of the world,” and I don’t find his distinction between the divine experience and the eternal essence to be helpful.

But this is the crucial (pun intended) passage for Greg’s thesis. What exactly happened on the cross when Jesus cried out “Why have you forsaken me?” is the most important text for understanding how God responds to sin. Greg seems to believe that God truly did abandon Jesus to sin, and therefore, God also abandons humans to sin when we persist in it.

Even if Greg is right that God abandoned Jesus to sin (which I do not agree with), wouldn’t it be better to say that God abandoned Jesus to sin so that God did not have to abandon us to sin?

In my view, it is best to say that God never abandons anyone. Not Jesus and not us. “Something else is going on” when Jesus cries out from the cross, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”

The flood event in Genesis 6-8 is one example of how Greg Boyd deals with the violent texts of Scripture. He says that since wickedness had spread over the face of the earth, all humanity had become corrupted by the sons of God (Gen 6:1-8), and so Noah was literally the last pure man on earth, and so to save, rescue, and deliver humanity from complete destruction, God had to step back from humanity and withdraw His protection so that sin would destroy humanity and a new creation could occur through Noah and his family, whom God rescued and delivered from the flood through the ark. Boyd argues that God’s only activity in the flood was to rescue and deliver Noah. The flood waters came on their own as God stepped back.

I am extremely uncomfortable with such an explanation of the flood account, or such a way of reading Scripture. My discomfort is not because Boyd’s thesis is new, but because I think it ultimately violates one of his preliminary points, that all of Scripture must be read and interpreted through Jesus Christ, and especially through Jesus Christ on the cross. I do not believe that what we see on the cross is God withdrawing from sin, but rather jumping head-first into it.

God Does Not Withdraw from Sin. He Dives Into It

Since Jesus reveals to us what God is really like, and since Jesus is the incarnation of God, then Jesus also reveals how God deals with sin.

God does not back away from sin to let it have its way. No, God, in Jesus, enters fully into our sin, not to participate in it, but to deliver us from it. He does not draw away; He dives headlong into the mess.

I do not believe that God allows sin to have its way with us, even if we continue to rebel and live in it. This is little more than another form of child abuse. A neglectful, absentee parent is barely better than an abusive one.

I do not believe that God destroys sin by letting sin destroy itself. I believe that God destroys sin through redemption. He destroys sin by tearing it apart from the inside, not violently, but through love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, and revelation. I believe God destroys sin through the revelation and illumination brought by the incarnation. He rescues, not be retreating, but by redeeming. Jesus said “I will never leave you, nor forsake you.” And neither does God. He never withdraws. Never backs away. Never leaves us alone.

Does sin hurt us? Yes. Does sin bear its own punishment? Yes. God does not punish us for sin. But the blows we feel as a result of our own sin are the glancing blows that hit His back first.

This is starting to turn into a book of my own, so I will stop here. Look, read this book. Absolutely read this book. Even though I disagree with the central point of the book, it does a fantastic job of presenting some truths that all Christians need to hear.

But if you are uncomfortable with Greg’s point that God withdraws from sin to let it have its way, that’s okay … be uncomfortable .. for there are other ways to maintain Boyd’s cruciform hermeneutic without turning God into an absentee parent when we need Him most. You can get your copy on Amazon here.

… Of course, if you want my own take on the subject of how to understand the violence of God in the Bible, my explanation is found in my recently-published book, Nothing but the Blood of Jesus.

Why is the Bible so Bloody? Jesus tells us why in Matthew 23:29-35

Jesus tells us why the Bible is Bloody (Matthew 23:29-35)

Why is the Old Testament so Violent?

The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence

3 Things I LOVED about this Book

2 Things I Disagreed With

So should you read this book?

Jonah 3:10 – The Repentance of God

The Text of Jonah 3:10

In this discussion of Jonah 3:10 we look at:

Resources:

Downloadable Podcast Resources

Do you like learning about the Bible online?

Buy my new book, and get BONUS Materials

The Crucifixion of the Warrior God (A great book with a gaping hole)

That which is Praiseworthy

My One Main Sticking Point … or Maybe Two

God Does Not Withdraw from Sin. He Dives Into It

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