Taking the Bible Seriously (Not Literally) Judges 15:9-17 Third Sunday after Pentecost June 29, The Lord is a warrior.

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1 Taking the Bible Seriously (Not Literally) Judges 15:9-17 Third Sunday after Pentecost June 29, 2014 The Lord is a warrior. Exodus 15:3 The story goes that Oscar Wilde, the Irish great novelist and poet, was once giving a lecture here in the states. He became irritated when his audience did not seem to comprehend some of the finer points of his presentation. So he berated them by calling them Philistines. Of course, by using that word he was not referring to those ancient residents of the eastern Mediterranean coast that gave David and the Israelites fits. He was using the second definition that is found in most dictionaries: a crass prosaic often priggish individual guided by material rather than intellectual or artistic values. In other words: an uneducated slob! Well, after his insult, a knowing voice from the back of the room replied: Yes, we are Philistines, and now I see why for the past hour you have been assaulting us with the jawbone of an ass! If you remember the story from the Book of Judges, then you probably know the source of that audience member s keenly crafted repartee. According to chapter 15, Samson picked up a jawbone of an ass and proceeded to smite 1,000 Philistines. He did all of his smiting, of course, in the name of God. In the name of God Samson also put 30 men in the town of Ashkelon to a violent death. While at the rock of Etam Samson glorified God by attacking hundreds of Philistines and striking them down hip and thigh with great slaughter. Of course, after Samson was betrayed, captured, shaved, blinded, and put on display for the amusement of the crowd while chained between two pillars, he repented of his sin and asked God for help one final time. The writer of Judges tells us that God answered his prayer. With all of his might Samson pulled upon the pillars to which he was chained and brought the house down literally. On that fateful night he and 3,000 ungodly Philistines met their untimely death. Now that s a whole lot of smiting! But Samson was not the only one involved in smiting in the name of the Lord. You can t read the Bible especially the Old Testament and not wonder about all the blood, guts, and sheer violence that is found in it. God seems to sanction the killing of thousands upon thousands of people. And when there wasn t a Samson or a Gideon or a David 1

2 around to wield a deadly weapon, then God personally took on the smiting. In the last chapter of II Samuel, for instance, we are told that an angry God wiped out 70,000 Israelites in just 3 days! 70,000! Now all of that violence has been a pretty big issue down through the centuries. Believers and non-believers alike have wondered about it. In the 2 nd century a man named Marcion was so troubled by all the violence that he decided that the angry and brutal god found in the Old Testament was completely different than the loving true God found in the New. While Marcion was eventually declared a heretic, his supporters have not gone away. Recently Richard Dawkins, one of the so-called New Atheists, wrote the following in response to all the violence he found in the Old Testament: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. To be real honest, at first glance he seems right on point! A casual reading of the first 15 or 16 books of the Old Testament shows that God sanctioned the death of hundreds of thousands of people. For now, let s put aside the divine wiping out of the entire world s population human and animal except for Noah, his family, and the various pairs of critters found on the ark. Instead, let s focus on God s command to wipe out those 3,000 Israelites who were caught boogying around the golden calf. Let s also remember the divine decree to destroy the entire population of the cities of Jericho and Ai women and children included. Let s then recall how God led the lovely Jael to drive a sharp spike through a sleeping general s forehead and how God instructed Elijah to slaughter the 450 prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel. And let s not forget those commandments that say that if you sacrificed to a foreign deity, for instance, then God said that you must die (Exodus 22:20). Do you have a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey you or follow your instructions? God said to purge the evil from your midst (Deuteronomy 22:18-21). Know someone who is gay or lesbian? The Bible says that it is God s will to take them outside the city and stone them until they are dead (Leviticus 20:13). You 2

3 think it s horrible when Wile E. Coyote tries to drop an anvil on Road Runner s head (Looney Tunes 6.1)! That image doesn t hold a candle to some of the stories we find in the Bible. Can Richard Dawkins and his ilk be correct? Is God violent? How do thoughtful people of faith like you and me explain all of the violence that is found in the Bible? Before we get to that let me remind you that for the past couple of weeks we have been trying to understand the best-selling book ever published: the Bible. We have discovered that unlike the Quran or the Book of Mormon, both of which are said to have come together rather quickly, it is best to understand that the Bible is a book that was slowly compiled through the centuries as the people of Israel and the followers of Christ struggled to understand their relationship to the God who loved them beyond measure. It was not dictated by God to human secretaries, like other religions believe their scriptures to be, but instead it is a record of the response of faithful men and women to their encounter with their God made known first through Israel and then through Jesus. Now understanding the Bible in this way (that its origins are more human than divine) does not deny the reality of God or the ability of God to speak to us through its pages. It is simply a more accurate description of what people like me believe it means to say that the Bible is inspired. Inspiration does not come in the fact that God spoke these words to people who recorded them yesterday, you see, but in the reality that God can use these words to speak to people today as inconsistent and as confusing as those words often can be. And all of this becomes really evident when we attempt to give voice to the violence we have already addressed. Let s think. As I have said before, thinking is always a good thing for us to do. Doing so makes use of that amazing organ that God has graciously placed between our ears! If we take a literal approach, understanding that God spoke these words and the biblical writers were simply acting as secretaries, then we have no choice but to see all that violence as an accurate description of God s nature; that the merciless killing of tens of thousands of people whether they were totally innocent or fully guilty was what God wanted and what God did. And when and if we think in this particular way, then we have to come up with some kind of way to defend and justify all of that divine killing. The other day I read an article that attempted to do 3

4 just that by saying that the Canaanites those people that the Israelites were routinely commanded to exterminate were a brutal, aggressive people who engaged in bestiality, incest, and even child sacrifice. 1 In other words, they deserved it. Blame the victim. The Canaanites were awful people whose words and deeds merited the butchery they experienced. In his new book, Adam Hamilton reminds us that it was not only Hitler who often used this specific argument. It is one that has been bandied about throughout history by so many to justify all kinds of genocide. But what about all those Canaanite infants and children that were killed along with the adults, you ask? Surely they did not do those terrible things. Well, that same article had a ready explanation for their smiting. It said that it would have been cruel for God to take the lives of all the Canaanites except infants and children. Without the protection and support of their parents, the infants and small children were likely to face death anyway due to starvation. This article believes that the wiping out of an entire population including children was actually an indication of God s great compassion. Better to kill those kids quickly than to let them die slowly! And then this article ends its defense of all the killing with this: God may have provided for the salvation for those infants who would not have otherwise attained salvation if they lived to adulthood. God killed those infants and children, you see, because they would have just grown up to be bound-for-hell-heathens anyway. Kill them when they don t know any better and they can go to heaven. Do you see the problem? When you understand the origins of the Bible in this way, that it is God s literal word to humanity, then some very fancy footwork needs to be done. And if that fancy footwork fails, then you must resort to the argument that has long been used as the last resort in justifying those things that we don t understand. You have probably heard it before. Personally speaking, this is the argument that I find to be the most unsatisfying, as it assumes that we are limited in our ability to comprehend. It goes like this: God s ways are not our ways. It is a line of reasoning that harkens back to Isaiah 55:8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways. God purposes are very different from human purposes. God does things now that will only make sense later; things that can only be truly appreciated when seen from an eternal perspective; that someday up there in the sweet by and 1 4

5 by all will be appreciated. All that brutal killing may seem impossible for us to fathom now, but as most parents have said to their children at one time or another: One of these days you will understand. When you read the Bible literally, understanding it as God s literal word to us, then God often comes across as that great big bully in the sky that the skeptics like The New Atheists love to skewer. But what if you read the Bible as humanity s words about God; as a record of faithful men and women s encounter with the God who is always with them? What if you approached the scriptures seriously rather than literally? In his book A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren acknowledges that there is an awful lot of gore in the Bible. He acknowledges that when you read the Bible literally God often comes off looking very poorly. If you read it as a record of people s experience with God, however; if you understand that it came together over a long period of time and examine the stories chronologically; if you read the Bible seriously and not literally, then you can see how faithful men and women s understanding of God has changed over the centuries. God did not change, mind you; men and women s understanding of God changed. Now please listen again to what I just said. I don t want anyone to hear me wrong or miss what I believe is very important to hear. Listen: When you read the Bible seriously and not literally, then you can see how faithful men and women s understanding of God changed. God did not change. Men and women s understanding of God changed. Take, for instance, the very evident shift in the understanding of God s ethics. In the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, that part of the Bible that most scholars believe was written first, God is presented as very concerned with religious and ceremonial faithfulness. The Book of Exodus, for example, takes a full 6 chapters detailing how to build the tabernacle and its furnishings as well as what kind of garments the priests are supposed to wear while conducting services that will be held in it. The Book of Leviticus details not only what kind of sacrifices for what kind of sins are to be made, but how they are to be made. In those early scriptures, religious and ceremonial faithfulness appear to be God s primary concerns for faithful living. Yet when Amos came around several centuries later, religious and ceremonial faithfulness was the last thing on the prophet s mind. As a matter of fact, Amos famously said 5

6 that God hates the people s religious feasts and takes no delight in their solemn ceremonial assemblies. The prophet said that God could care less about their sacrifices and was totally uninterested in their burnt offerings and grain offerings. Instead, Amos said that it is God s desire to let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Do you see? Where earlier passages were concerned about doing religion right, later passages were concerned about treating people right. What about the shift in the understanding of God s universality? Once again, in the Torah the earliest part of the Bible God is almost always understood as Israel s God. In some of the early passages we find in the Torah depict a very tribal deity. God was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and favored their descendants above all the other nations. There are passages that refer to Israel as the chosen of God and the apple of my (God s) eye. In later passages, however, there is a very different understanding of God. You may remember that Isaiah shocked the people of Jerusalem when he foresaw the day when people from all over the world would worship on Mt. Zion. You may also remember that Jesus almost got himself thrown off a cliff when he suggested to the good folks of his hometown that God s love extended even to the woman of Zarephath, who just so happened to be a Gentile! Peter had to convince his fellow disciples that he was doing what God wanted him to do when he broke all the rules ad baptized Cornelius, a Roman centurion! Where earlier passages understood God as the God of the Jewish people, later passages understood God as the God of the world s people. And you and I now believe that God s got the whole world in his hands. Now listen once again and very closely when I tell you that it wasn t that God had changed. From the beginning our faith has always been very clear on that. God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It wasn t that there was some divine decision to move from a God concerned with ritual to a God concerned with justice; not a celestial choice to change from an exclusive deity to an inclusive deity. God wasn t once some teenager that threw hissyfits when angry but then grew up and learned how to control the divine temper. It wasn t that God changed. Rather, it was the people s understanding of God that changed. That shouldn t be difficult to understand. I would imagine; I would hope, that you don t have the same rather 6

7 simple Santa Claus-like understanding of God that you did when you were 3. If you do, then perhaps we need to talk. Come and see me after the benediction. Instead of remaining like you were, you grew up. You moved from a Jesus loves me, this I know way of expressing your faith (which, by the way, was very appropriate for that particular time in your life) to an O for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer s praise way of expressing your faith (which is very appropriate for this particular time in your life). Your thinking changed, your faith matured, and your understanding of what it means to be a religious person evolved. God didn t change, but you sure did. God is not responsible for all of the violence that we find in Holy Scripture. People are responsible for all of the violence that we find in Holy Scripture. In the same way there were those who believed that it was God s will for them to fly jet aircraft into skyscrapers, so there were those who believed that it was God s will for them to completely wipe out the cities of Jericho and Ai. After all, the Bible tells me so. But that is not a serious reading of the Bible. I believe that is not how we are to understand those stories. Yet if we read the Bible seriously instead of literally, then all of that smiting is going to make a whole lot more sense. Let s end with this: Jesus who the writer of John told us was the Word of God made flesh, who the writer of Colossians described as the very image of the unseen God, and who the writer of Hebrews said reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of God s nature reminds us that God is and has always been love. You may remember that after Jesus had tenderly washed the disciples feet and then had given them the command to love one another just as he had loved them, Philip asked Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied. Do you remember Jesus response? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. In commenting on those words, the Quaker author Elton Trueblood once said that the Christian understanding of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that, he wrote. It means that God is like Jesus! 2 Now I don t know about you, but I have yet to read anywhere in the Bible that Jesus ordered the smiting of anyone! So if Jesus, the definitive revelation of God didn t kill anybody, well, then you figure it out. 2 Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, HarperOne, New York, 2010, p

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