The Problem with the Old Testament
The problem is not really with the Old Testament – the problem is with the church’s understanding of the Old Testament. Here are a couple examples of what I mean.
· The Bible class was about Israel’s conquest of the land of Canaan. God commanded Israel to wipe out the Canaanites because they were so evil. “Christians sometimes overemphasize God’s love,” the teacher said. “Everyone wants to talk about love, love, love – but we have to remember that he’s a God of judgement too, and he hates his enemies.”
· The sermon was about Elisha cursing 42 boys so that two bears came out of the woods and mauled them. “We have to respect God’s spokesmen,” the preacher said. “Even though they were only boys, they deserved death because they mocked God’s messenger.”
This is the type of faulty reasoning that I see all the time, and it comes from an over-reliance on the Old Testament as a source of knowledge. The Old Testament is the word of God, but it provides us with only a murky picture of God’s nature.
John 1:18 says that no one saw God until Jesus revealed him to us. Not Adam, not Abraham, not Moses, not David, not Isaiah – none of the great Old Testament prophets saw God as clearly as we see him in the face of Jesus. When we read the Old Testament stories of encounters with God, we marvel at the wonder and privilege of experiencing God like Moses did at the burning bush, or like Isaiah did in his vision in the temple. But John says that we see God more clearly than they did because we have Jesus! Hebrews 1:1-3 says much the same thing – God spoke through the Old Testament prophets, but it’s only through Jesus that we can clearly see his nature.
We see a similar theme at Jesus’ transfiguration. Peter offers to make a shrine to Jesus, along with shrines to Moses and Elijah, representing the law and the prophets, but God interrupts his plans: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” (Mark 9:7). It’s as if God is saying, “Forget about the law; forget about the prophets; I’m doing something new here. Jesus is the answer, Jesus is the way, and Jesus is the one you need to listen to!”
On its own, the Old Testament gives an inaccurate portrait of God. We can understand the Old Testament clearly only if we read it in the light of the New Testament.
Does God have enemies? Does God hate certain people, as the Old Testament seems to say? No. The New Testament teaches us that God loves everyone. People may be God’s enemies, but God does not count them as his enemies. God loves everyone so much that he sent his Son to die for them.
I love the Old Testament but it’s highly variable in its depiction of the nature of God. Sometimes we read language that seems to take us to the very throne room of God. Other times it seems as if the inspiration of the Spirit is overshadowed and almost drowned out by the sinful nature of the human writer. Sometimes the contrast appears even within a single chapter. Consider the disparities between these passages.
Exodus 34:6, 7 – The Lord, the Lord God, is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness, maintaining loving devotion to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.
Psalm 137:9 – How blessed is the one who takes your babies and smashes them on a rock.
Psalm 27:4 – One thing I have asked of the Lord, and this is what I desire: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and seek Him in His temple.
Psalm 18:38 – I beat my enemies to death.
Psalm 18:1, 2 – I love you, Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge.
Psalm 58:10 – The righteous will wash their feet in the blood of the wicked.
If we view God in a way that is contrary to what we see in Jesus, then our picture of God is wrong. Did God command Israel to slaughter men, women, and children? Well, “what would Jesus do?” Can you picture Jesus doing that? I cannot.
Then how can we make sense of God’s commands to slaughter non-Israelites? I conclude that Israel’s understanding of God’s will was faulty because they did not have the complete revelation that we have today in the New Testament. They thought they understood God’s will, and they did their best to follow God within the limitations of their cultural background, but they were wrong. Their understanding of God was warped by their culture rather than being informed by the person of Jesus. “God is love” is not a statement that we find in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament – it’s a statement that reveals God’s essence much more clearly than the blood-thirsty nature portrayed in the Old Testament.
Don’t get your understanding of God from the Old Testament. Read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament. I’m frequently disappointed at Bible classes and sermons on an Old Testament passage that never mention Jesus, or relegates him to a footnote at the end of the lesson. We are not Jews; we are Christians. The Old Testament is the word of God, and that will never change, but it is incomplete. That’s why we have the New Testament.
The Old Testament was faulty according to Hebrews 8:7, but the New Testament is perfect. Jesus said in Matthew 5:17 that he didn’t come to abolish the Old Testament, but to fulfill it. But Hebrews 8:13 says that the Old Covenant was in the process of being obliterated – a prediction that was presumably fulfilled after the destruction of the temple and the discontinuance of sacrifices in 70 AD. In even stronger language, Hebrews 10:9 says that Jesus “canceled” the Old Testament. The Greek word “cancel” is used 24 times in the New Testament and is translated “murder” 22 times! Even though Jesus said that he didn’t come to abolish the Old Testament, the author of Hebrews says that he “murdered” it!
I don’t minimize the beauty and value of the Old Testament – it was the best revelation of God at the time, and it was the Bible of Jesus and the apostles. But we need to go beyond it. Galatians 3:24 says that it was our school teacher to bring us to Christ. We need school teachers, but they are not intended to have a permanent place in our lives. We have graduated from the Old Testament and are no longer responsible to our old teacher. Our old teacher still lives, we still love and respect him, we still value his advice, and we still honor him – but we have advanced to better things.
I’m thankful for the Old Testament, and I wish that the church understood it better in its full historical context. But I’m grateful that God corrected the fuzzy picture that we have in the Old Testament, and that he’s given us a crystal-clear picture in the New Testament and in Jesus Christ.
An important yet underrated topic: the OT.
ReplyDelete1. "The Old Testament is the word of God, but it provides us with only a murky picture of God’s nature." In the formation of Israel during the Exodus, Israelites kept asking God for his "name" (characteristics). If you know how something or someone functions, you might hope to use that knowledge to your advantage. Yahweh's response was "I will be who I will be." In other words, that's none of your business. So it is intentionally murky. The Bible is a minimalist revelation from God of only the bare outline of what we need to know to relate to him - and not enough to control him.
2. "Does God have enemies? Does God hate certain people, as the Old Testament seems to say? No." This English word "hate" is more intense in some scriptural instances than is intended. It can mean anything from an unfavorable view to visceral rage. Yahweh does have enemies that he hates. Satan and his fellow followers are one category. Another are humans who are devoted to Satan. The Edomites also appear to be in that category. On closer inspection, that cannot mean every single Edomite because some became Yahwists, but it can mean Edomite culture and those who perpetuate it.
There is another category of people who Yahweh was intending to wipe out physically, man, woman and child, and these are the human-ET half-breeds, the Nephalim ("giants"). This takes us back to the dispute with Satan over the creation of homo sapiens sapiens, the Adamites (us). The Genesis account is indeed murky; only nowadays, with advances in genetics can we begin to understand the importance of ribs. The marrow in them produces T-cells, undifferentiated cells than become whatever kind of tissue is needed. My working hypothesis is that Yahweh genetically modified a hominid to produce a new race of humanoids - us. The Devil apparently did not want to make brain alterations that would give us as much free will as we have but wanted a servant class of humans instead. Yahweh, in his hesed (covenantal love) had a bigger vision and future for humanity that was godlike. (The Mormons actually have this about right; the source is the Bible itself.) The only other such genetic alteration in human history was that of the conception of Jesus. ETs were involved. Mary become pregnant without the usual means yet Matthew attributes Jesus's genetic line to Joseph. This could only happen if Joseph's genetics were modified to result in a fully human, yet more than just human, unique ("only begotten") individual. Paul singles out Adam and Jesus as the only two instances of this category, which I attribute to genetic modification.
The genocide of the Nephalim, who we are told in the book of Joshua, inhabited cities in Judea, was to be complete because they were the Devil's attempt to again alter (by the usual means of passing on genetics) humanity to be something other than fully human. This was another attempt by Satan to impose his view of what humanity should be on the existing Adamites.
3. Psalm 137:9: Many Bible readers have struggled with this one including the translators of the Scottish Metrical version of the Bible, who render it: How blessed would thy trooper be, While riding on his nagy, to take thy wee barons by the toes, And dink them on the craggy.
ReplyDeleteThis tension over the fact that God does not love those who choose to side with his archenemy the Devil, led in the early centuries of the church to the heresy of Marcion, who taught that the OT God was a different, savage god in contrast to the God of Jesus. This heresy finally died out, but it seems to have some resurgence in our time; I call it neo-Marcionism. The judgement of God is something to be feared. The American colonists understood this. In modern America, nobody fears anyone any more; self-confidence is too high for that. Yet even the NT portrays the returning Jesus as a king and lord of governments, who will rule his opponents with an "iron sceptre" and carry our judgement ("shock and awe") on his adversaries - this very same Jesus.
4. To say that the OT was faulty (as did Marcion) is to discredit the Word of God in a way that neither Jesus nor his disciples did. A review of the Marcionite heresy would be appropriate here. God is not nice. The fact that he even bothered to provide a way for us to be saved from his wrath is a supreme expression of his love, for those who avail themselves of it.
I should add that God's love for and salvation of his people is the flip-side of his judgement and wrath against the unrighteous. Scripture says that the judgement of God effects the salvation of the righteous. The two alternatives are extremes and emphasizes the importance of the exercise of free will by humans. In our time, freedom of choice and responsibility are depreciated, but the biblical worldview from God emphasizes this contrast.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting and good points, Dennis - I appreciate your participation here. I won't respond to every point that you made, but I will say that if you can claim that the "the Mormons actually have this about right," then I can claim that Marcion had some things right too :) When we reject the Marcion heresy, we don't need to reject everything that he said or believed. I don't go as far as Marcion did, but I can appreciate some of his reasoning and his motivation. Regarding your statement that "even the NT portrays the returning Jesus as a king and lord of governments, who will rule his opponents with an iron sceptre and carry out judgement ..." very true! And I do struggle with this portrayal in the NT, especially in the book of Revelation. I don't understand how to reconcile all of the seemingly contradictory portrayals of Jesus in the NT, but I will say that even the NT is culturally conditioned to a certain extent.
ReplyDeleteI don't see contradictory portrayals of Jesus in the NT (or OT of YHWH). What has fallen out of contemporary American Christian attention is the basic fact that we express the biblical concept of love to others through righteousness. God as revealed in Jesus is the most loving of us because he is the most righteous. And we know what righteousness is because it is defined by the law of God. Whoever acts lawfully (according to the covenantal obligations of the human party, which is the law of God) behaves perfectly, and hence lovingly, to others. Those who intentionally reject righteousness reject love and all that it entails. They hate the behavioral content of love.
DeleteI would add that when it comes to evangelization as an act of love, Jesus sent his disciples to those who were already to some extent prepared to receive the gospel. To those who intentionally rejected it, as did certain cities, Jesus openly condemned them. The aspect of love that is missed in America is that the rejection of evil and those committed to it is an act of love because it rejects that which rejects love. About this dark side of reality regarding love the American church is in denial. It's a blind spot that the early American colonists did not have.
This also applies to YHWH's command to Joshua to wipe out the Nephalim of Kiriath-Arba. It was God who was bringing his judgement against them by means of Joshua's army. It wasn't a perfect solution because initially, YHWH said he would drive out the people of Canaan without an Israelite military. Yet the Israelite army became involved. Israel exercised their free will and God did not oppose them, but it was not his choice either. The same applied to a human monarch ruling Israel. That didn't last long either. God respects human free will, though he also will judge how it is exercised.
Whether different portrayals of God and Jesus in the Bible are 'contradictory' or not is largely a matter of semantics. There are certainly portrayals that are much different, and that are given from much different perspectives. Is the wave theory of light "contradictory" to the particle theory of light? I don't like to use the word "contradictory" - they're just different perspectives. But neither do I want to minimize how different they are. I don't need to resolve the differences in perspective - I can accept both as valid without dismissing either one.
DeleteRegarding "judgement" - yes, there is a lot of it in the Bible. But there are also a lot of examples of God "leaving mankind to his own devices," or "giving man over to his own desires," and similar such language. Is that "judgement"? Again, it's a matter of perspective. I like C. S. Lewis's perspective in "The Great Divorce" that pictures hell as a place where God leaves mankind alone to his own devices. I think that this picture of God is more accurate than that of a God who actively punishes evil.
Well, this is obviously a huge topic, but those are just a few of my thoughts. I don't dismiss the cultural baggage that the Biblical writers brought with them, despite their inspiration by the Holy Spirit - and I don't dismiss the cultural baggage that I bring with me either.