When it comes to the violence of God in the Old Testament, one of the primary areas of concern is not only with God’s apparent violent actions in Scripture, but what God commands Israel to violently do in His name. In other words, the violence of God is often carried out through commands to Israel to do violence.

Israel as God’s “Hit Man”

Though in the minds of some, there is no difference between God commanding the ground to swallow people up and God commanding the Israelites to kill everyone in a particular city, others see a huge difference between the two. After all, though storms are lifeless and soulless, when God commands people to carry out His judgment He is commanding humans to take the life of other humans thereby involving them in His questionable actions.

Many critics of Christianity think that if God wants to be violent toward humanity, He should do the dirty work Himself. The fact that He asks Israel to be His “Hit Man” only makes the situation worse in the eyes of some.

Some theologians and Bible teachers try to soften the commands of God to Israel to commit violence in His name. Several of these attempts were summarized in the previous posts when we looked at several of the views of how people seek to explain the violence of God in Scripture, but the tragic fact is that violence of Israel cannot easily be explained away, and often the same reasoning that is used to get Israel if the hook in her violence toward neighboring nations is then used to justify (and even encourage) violence today from our own country toward those we view as enemies of God.

We will return to this issue later after we have seen a new way of viewing the violence of Israel.

Understand God by Looking at Jesus

Part of the framework for viewing this violence is to build upon everything we have seen so far in this chapter. If the Bible is the inspired and inerrant Word of God, and if Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels reveals the Father to us, then we should read about God in the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus, and not the other way around. We should try to understand the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob within the light of Jesus. We do not necessarily ask, “What does God teach us about Jesus?” but rather, “What does Jesus teach us about God?”

Understand Israel by Looking at Jesus

The exact same approach can be used when thinking about Israel.

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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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