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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Zahnd
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January 31, 2024 - January 28, 2025
The real question isn’t “Does it scare kids straight?” but “Is it true?” The real question isn’t “Does it motivate people to pray a sinner’s prayer?” but “Is it faithful to the God revealed in Jesus?”
God has a face and he looks like Jesus. God has a disposition toward sinners and it’s the spirit of Jesus. This is the beautiful gospel. God is not the faceless white giant of a Chick tract. God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus; we haven’t always known this, but now we do. God is like Jesus!
People have never seen God until they see Jesus. Every other portrait of God, from whatever source, is subordinate to the revelation of God given to us in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Word of God, the Logos of God, the Logic of God in the form of human flesh. Christians are to believe in the perfect, infallible, inerrant Word of God—and his name is Jesus. Jesus is the icon of the invisible God.*11
What the Bible does infallibly is point us to Jesus. The Bible itself is not a perfect picture of God, but it does point us to the One who is. This is what orthodox Christianity has always said.
The Bible doesn’t stand above the story it tells, but is fully enmeshed in it.
In the Old Testament God is portrayed as both quick to anger and slow to anger.*18 It’s Jesus who settles the dispute.
But to literalize a metaphor is to create an idol and formulate an error.
The wrath of God is a biblical metaphor we use to describe the very real consequences we suffer from trying to go through life against the grain of love.
God no more literally loses his temper than he literally sleeps,
What we should do is recognize that it’s very easy for us to project our own violence and immorality on God in an attempt to assuage our conscience by an imagined divine sanction for our sins.
Christians confess that Christ is the Logos (divine Logic) made flesh. This is the theme of John’s majestic gospel as he asserts over and over that it is Jesus who finally and fully reveals to humanity what God is really like. The Incarnation is the ultimate act of divine self-disclosure. It’s Jesus, not the Bible, that is the perfect revelation of God.
The Bible is sent by God and inspired by God, but the Bible is not God.
This is not a low view of Scripture but a high view of Christ.
The Old Testament is the inspired telling of the story of Israel coming to know their God. It’s a process. God doesn’t evolve, but Israel’s understanding of God obviously does.
We should acknowledge that in the late Bronze Age, Israel made certain assumptions about the nature of God, assumptions that now have to be abandoned in the light of Christ. It is abundantly clear from the Gospels that Jesus has closed the door on genocide, just like he has closed the book on vengeance.
The Hebrew prophets frequently prophesied that in the Day of the Lord Yahweh would bring violent vengeance upon the Gentile empires. But is this what Jesus did? Did Jesus endorse the call for divine vengeance on Gentiles?
In announcing that God’s jubilee of liberation, amnesty, and pardon was arriving with what he was doing, Jesus omitted any reference to God exacting vengeance on Israel’s enemies.
Jesus is announcing the arrival of the Lord’s favor, but he is emphasizing that it is for everybody, even for Sidonians and Syrians, even for Israel’s enemies! Jesus takes the implicit subtexts of mercy and makes them his explicit primary text. Jesus is making clear that in bringing the Jubilee of God he is bringing it for everybody!
Jesus didn’t come to bring vengeance; he came to close the book on vengeance.
To complete the law?
“The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”*1 God couldn’t say all he wanted to say in the form of a book, so he said it in the form of a human life. Jesus is what God has to say!
Imagine a preacher today saying, “The Bible says, but I say to you…” This is what Jesus is doing. Those listening to Jesus were forced to make a monumental decision: Does Jesus have the authority to challenge the Scriptures?
That wasn’t what the Law said, but Jesus was revealing the heart of God, not giving a conservative reading of the Torah. Jesus gives us a new ethic of life-affirming mercy, which sets aside the old ethic that supported death penalties. Biblicists who desire to condemn sinners to death can quote the Bible by citing Moses. But Jesus says something else.
The centrality of Christian ethics is found in Christ himself. Though Elijah called down fire from heaven to burn up his enemies, God says to us, “Listen to Jesus!” And what Jesus says is “Love your enemies.”*16
The role of the Old Testament is to give an inspired telling of how we get to Jesus. But once we get to Jesus we don’t build multiple tabernacles and grant an equivalency to Jesus and the Old Testament. This was Peter’s mistake on Tabor. Jesus is greater than Moses. Jesus is greater than Elijah. Jesus is greater than the Bible. Jesus is the Savior of all that is to be saved…including the Bible. Jesus saves the Bible from itself! Jesus shows us how to read the Bible and not be harmed by it. Jesus delivers the Bible from its addiction to violent retaliation. Moses may stone sinners and Elijah
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It’s not biblical justice that we pursue but Christlike justice.
It’s not biblical manhood that men should aspire to but Christlike manhood.
It’s not biblical womanhood that should inform women but the light of Christ.
The Bible is the written word of God that bears witness to the living Word of God. God did not become a book, but God did become a human being. The Incarnation is not the creation of the canon of Scripture but the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.
The question isn’t “What does the Bible say?” The Bible says lots of things. The question is “What does the living Word of God to which the Bible points us have to say?”
We need to understand that the Bible is not an end in itself. The Bible is a means to an end but not the end itself. Jesus said it this way: “You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!”*23
Jesus is the Word of God. Jesus is what God has to say. Jesus is God’s ultimate act of self-disclosure. Jesus is the “true light, which enlightens everyone.”*30 The living Word, who is Christ, is the One who informs us theologically, politically, socially, and personally.
Jesus cannot be locked up in the Bible; he is the living Word who enlightens humanity with the light of God.
And it’s a fool’s errand to try to reconcile all the disparate things the Bible says about violence. But there is a trajectory in the Bible, a movement away from violence as normative and toward God’s peaceable society where swords become plowshares and spears become pruning hooks.
To set aside what Jesus taught about nonviolence in favor of what we can dig up in the violent conquest narratives of the Old Testament is to turn away from the light of salvation and rush headlong back into the darkness.
Despite the fact that religion has a long history of sacralizing violence by projecting it on God, the truth remains that God is love.
God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. God is the eternal light of self-giving love. There is no darkness. No anger. No violence. No retribution. Only love.
For God to resort to violence in order to save the world is not saving the world; it’s condemning the world. But John tells us, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”*10 God saves the world not through the impatience of violence but through the infinite patience of divine love.
But it is the very inconceivability of God-saving love in Christ that Christians are to believe in most of all. If John 3:16 is to mean anything, it must mean that God gets what God wants through love, or not at all. If I believe that love never fails, it’s because I believe that God is love. To believe in the sufficiency of God’s love to save the world is not naive optimism; it’s Christianity.
