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The only way to discover the beauty that lies on the other side of a mountain of ugliness is to courageously confront and work through it.
Whether we do it consciously or not, we subject the OT to a “textual cleansing” in order to create “an acceptable Bible Lite” for ourselves.
the thing about polluted mental images of God is that they inevitably compromise the vibrancy of our relationship with God, which in turn compromises the passion with which we live out our faith in God.
While my best explanations might make the violently behaving God of the OT look a little less nasty, and perhaps sometimes even ethical, they did absolutely nothing to show how these violent divine portraits point to Christ crucified.
God is not offended or angry with our questions.
Origen taught that when we come upon a biblical passage that seems unworthy of God, we must humble ourselves before God and ask the Spirit to help us find a deeper meaning in the passage that is worthy of God.
Like many other Christian thinkers in the first several centuries of church history, Origen considered all the violent portraits of God in the OT to be unworthy of God. Yet these thinkers didn’t feel free to dismiss these portraits, for they firmly believed that all Scripture is inspired by God.
Look, for example, at the honest objections and complaints to God raised by Abraham (Gen 18:23–33), Moses (Exod 32:9–14; 33:12–16), the psalmist (Ps 89:19–44), Habakkuk (Hab 1:3–4, 13), and, of course, Job (Job 9:17, 22–24; 10:3, 8, 16–20; 16:12–14; 24:12).
It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of a believer’s mental representation of God, for the way you imagine God largely determines the quality of your relationship with God. The intensity of your love for God will never outrun the beauty of the God you envision. Related to this, the depth of your transformation into the likeness of Christ will never outrun the Christlikeness of your mental representation of God.
No wonder the first thing the serpent did to seduce humanity was pollute Eve’s mental picture of God (Gen 3:1–5).
While I continue to affirm that the whole Bible is inspired by God, I’m now persuaded that the Bible itself instructs us to base our mental representation of God solely on Jesus Christ.
Jesus himself taught, everything else in Scripture is to be interpreted in a way that points to him. Thus nothing in Scripture should ever be interpreted in a way that qualifies or competes with his revelation of God.
The Greek word for this is polymerōs, which can be translated as “diverse portions” (ASV) or as “glimpses of truth” (J. B. Phillips).
By contrast, the Son is the very “radiance of God’s glory,” which basically means that Jesus is to God’s glory what light and heat are to the sun. When God shines, in other words, it looks like Jesus.
So, in contrast to the “glimpses of truth” that people in the OT were given, in the Son we have the full unveiling of the true God. Jesus is what God looks like when there are no clouds in the way.
“Jesus is what the Father has to say to us.”
Jesus is not part of what the Father has to say or even the main thing the Father has to say. As the one and only Word of God (John 1:1), Jesus is the total content of the Father’s revelation to us.
to say that a passage is divinely inspired is not to say that it necessarily reflects an unclouded vision of God.
the clear implication of the teaching in Hebrews is that the revelation of God in his Son should never be regarded as one revelation among others. He is rather the revelation that culminates and surpasses all previous revelations.
This means that Jesus alone mediates every aspect of our relationship with God, including our knowledge of God. So we should not treat the Bible as an independent source of information about God.
In the words of Graeme Goldsworthy, Jesus is “the central subject matter of the Hebrew Scripture” as well as its “goal and fulfillment.”
“How does this passage of Scripture . . . testify to Christ?”
If all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge about God are found in Christ, then we clearly have no business treating the Bible as an independent source of wisdom and knowledge to supplement what we find in Christ.
Everything we need to know and can know about God is found in Christ.
Jesus viewed the OT as a divinely inspired authority that was under, not alongside, his own divine authority.
What do you do when you know that you have the power to do anything you want? If you’re Jesus, you put a towel around your waste and start washing the dirty smelly feet of your disciples—the very disciples you know are going to soon abandon you in your hour of greatest need! This is the humble, other-oriented, cruciform character that Jesus displayed throughout his cross-centered ministry.
In short, children of the Father are to love others indiscriminately and unconditionally, for this alone reflects the character of the Father, as it is most perfectly revealed on the cross.
In fact, Paul actually equates the “gospel” with “the message of the cross,” using the two phrases interchangeably.
Moreover, as I mentioned above, for Paul, the self-sacrificial love that was manifested on the cross is the model that disciples are to follow.[29] In fact, Paul defines a disciple as one who has been “crucified with Christ.”
Paul’s cross-centered understanding of discipleship by noting that for Paul, disciples are called to “exhibit the self-sacrificing, empowering love that Christ showed in his crucifixion.” In short, “Crucifixion is what makes a Christian.”[31]
This cross-centered understanding of God’s weak-looking power and foolish-looking wisdom is so radical that even the majority of Christians throughout history have not been able to fully accept it. Despite the NT’s emphasis on the centrality of the cross, most assume that God relies on coercive power to run the world and to punish sinners, not the meek-looking power of self-sacrificial love.
How does the crucified Christ become the supreme revelation of God for us?
But to those who by faith see beyond this surface appearance, the cross also reveals the supreme beauty of a God who, out of love, was willing to stoop an infinite distance to bear our sin, suffer our curse, and thereby take on this revoltingly ugly, sin-mirroring, surface appearance.
God, out of his love, is humbly stooping to bear the sin of his people, thereby taking on an ugly appearance that reflects this sin.
So we must assess this ugly surface appearance of God to be a reflection of Jeremiah’s own fallen, culturally conditioned, ugly conception of God.
For when read in light of the cross we are able to look through this ugly sin-mirroring surface to behold the beautiful cruciform God stooping to bear Jeremiah’s sinful conception of him, which is why God takes on this ugly appearance in Jeremiah’s contribution to the biblical narrative. Interpreted through the looking-glass cross, violent divine portraits like Jeremiah’s become both beautiful and revolting for all the same reasons the cross is both beautiful and revolting.
we will only see Scripture’s violent divine portraits as literary crucifixes if we remain resolved in our faith that God has always been exactly as he’s revealed himself to be on the cross.
But if you instead trust in the mercilessly violent character of God that is reflected on the surface of Jeremiah’s ugly portrait, God’s true cruciform character will remain as hidden from you as it was from Jeremiah.
So why on earth would we ever place more trust in someone who had a cloudy vision of God’s glory than we place in the one who is himself the very radiance of God’s glory?
But precisely because the cross appears foolish and weak according to ordinary human standards of strength, wisdom and perfection, why would anyone think that the Bible that is divinely inspired to point to the cross would appear any less foolish and weak? To the contrary, since God always furthers his purposes through “the foolish,” “weak,” “lowly” and “despised” things of the world, as the cross supremely illustrates (1 Cor 1:27–28), shouldn’t we expect that the Bible also will appear “foolish,” “weak,” “lowly,” and “despised” according to the world’s standards of wisdom, strength and
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When God breathed his supreme revelation on the cross, he did it in a mutually impacting relational way. So what results from God’s breathing reflects not only God acting toward us, but also God allowing us to act toward him.
Why would God allow fallen and culturally conditioned people to affect the results of his breathing in his written word? Well, ask yourself: Why did God allow this on the cross? God could have created us without the capacity to choose to sin, thereby sparing himself the need to suffer on our behalf.
Because God sovereignly chose to create a world in which true freedom exists, he refuses to override the personhood of people by controlling us.
“coercion is no attribute of God.”
“The church is reformed and always being reformed.”
Because once in a while, what is new to you can be true, and what is old has not yet been told, at least not for a long while.
the cross is “the key hermeneutical principle in understanding Scripture.”
He who would read the Bible must simply take heed that he does not err, for the Scripture may permit itself to be stretched and led, but let no one lead it according to his own inclinations but let him lead it to the source that is the cross of Christ. Then he will surely strike the center.
“God, therefore, is not mediocre, but the people’s understanding is mediocre; God is not limited, but the intellectual capacity of the people’s mind is limited.”[25]
If my proposal to reinterpret Scripture’s violent portraits of God strikes you as radical and novel, this is why. These portraits have been taken at face value for the last fifteen hundred years!
