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There were some exceptions, the most prominent being the sixteenth-century Anabaptists. This group embraced an intensely Christocentric and cross-centered theology that led some of them to recover the early church project of exploring alternative, nonliteral, ways of interpreting violent portraits of God. Unfortunately, by the end of the sixteenth century, most Anabaptist theologians and church leaders had been martyred (by other Christians!).
In Psalms, the Lord told the Israelites that when he remained silent as they engaged in wicked behavior, “You thought I was exactly like you” (Ps 50:21).
We can think of God as a heavenly missionary to our fallen and all-too-barbaric planet. And we can think of the biblical narrative as the inspired written witness to God’s missionary activity.
God has therefore always worked to reveal as much of his true character and will as was possible while accommodating the fallen state of his people as much as was necessary—though, like the missionaries in the above story, it certainly grieved God deeply to do so.
Moreover, God needed to demonstrate the futility of this false conception so that, “at just the right time” (Rom 5:6), he could reveal the only kind of God that anyone can ever be rightly related to. And this, of course, is the unfathomably gracious God who gave his life on Calvary to reconcile all sinners back to himself and who now motivates people to live according to his will by giving his Spirit to all who simply trust him, the way Abraham did.
As barbaric as many of the OT laws are, most reflect an improvement, and sometimes a significant improvement, over the laws of Israel’s neighbors, and this surely is the result of the influential work of God’s Spirit. But insofar as any law falls short of the character of God revealed in Jesus’s cross- centered ministry, it reflects the point at which the fallen and culturally conditioned state of his people resisted the Spirit and, therefore, the point at which God stooped to allow his people to act upon him.
It may yet reflect God’s positive influence inasmuch as it improves over similar but even more violent laws found among Israel’s neighbors. But insofar as it is sub-Christlike, it must be assessed to be a divine accommodation.
For example, Exod 29:25, 41; Lev 1:9, 13, 17. While OT authors believed that Yahweh literally enjoyed this aroma, the phrase would eventually become a metaphor for living in a way that pleases the Lord (2 Cor 2:14–16; Eph 5:1–2).
God created man in his own image, And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
hearts” (John 5:42). Clearly, discerning how all Scripture points to Jesus requires more than diligent study. Jesus is the perfect revelation of God’s love, and only those who have a heart to embrace and trust this love will be able to discern how it is reflected in all Scripture.
What people see and hear is strongly conditioned by what they expect to see and hear.
people are only able to receive the truth about God to the degree that their innermost hearts are aligned with his character.
the faithful you show yourself faithful, to the blameless you show yourself blameless, to the pure you show yourself pure, but to the devious you show yourself shrewd.[4] The Hebrew word for devious is iqqesh, and it is sometimes translated as “crooked” or “perverted.” The Hebrew word for shrewd is pathal, and it is sometimes translated as “torturous” or “deceptive.” Most importantly, both words have the connotation of something being twisted. This author is thus teaching that God appears faithful, blameless, and pure insofar as people’s hearts and minds are faithful, blameless, and
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To the contrary, I think we should be surprised that we find so many depictions that aren’t twisted, as assessed by the criterion of the crucified Christ. Each one reflects the Spirit of Christ breaking through the Israelites’ fallen and culturally conditioned hearts to reveal God’s true, cruciform character!
And, as the passage from Isaiah makes clear, what is currently wrong is that our world is no longer “filled with the knowledge of the Lord” (Isa 11:9). This means that, whenever there is violence in God’s creation, it is an indication that the true knowledge of the Lord is absent. That surely is significant as we consider Scripture’s violent portraits of God.
this alone is enough to prove that “wars are the outworking of the unwillingness of Israel . . . to trust Jahweh,” as John Yoder notes.
it seems that when Yahweh said, “I want my people to dwell in the land of Canaan,” what Moses’s fallen and culturally conditioned ears heard was, “I want you to slaughter the Canaanites so my people can dwell in the land of Canaan.”
Hence, when Moses reports that he “heard” Yahweh instruct him to have the Israelites mercilessly slaughter people to acquire this land, this tells us more about the character of Moses and the culture he was embedded in than it tells us about the true character and will of God.
For we can now see them as permanent testaments to just how low the heavenly missionary was willing to stoop to remain in relationship with, and to continue to further his purposes through, his fallen and culturally conditioned people. Interpreted through this lens, these grotesque portraits become literary crucifixes that reflect, and point to, the historical crucifixion of the humble, sin-bearing, heavenly missionary.
On this matter, their cultural conditioning clouded their vision of God’s true character and will as it is revealed in the crucified Christ and developed in the NT. For example, according to Paul, “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12). We are to battle cosmic foes, not human foes. And one of the primary ways we battle cosmic foes is by refusing to battle human foes, choosing instead to love and bless them.
The only thing God the Father did when Jesus suffered the judgment that we deserved was withdraw his protection to allow other agents who were “bent on destruction” (Isa 51:13) to do what they wanted to do to Jesus.
“Grief is what the godward side of judgment and wrath always look like.”
God hides his countenance and leaves people to themselves. The wrathful God of the Bible is a God who turns away in response to the creature who turns away and who leaves it to itself and its desires and thus ultimately abandons it to death.[8]
Believe it or not, the OT does not have a distinct word for punishment.[9] Instead, the “biblical language for judgment . . . refers to the effects of human sin, not [to] a penalty or punishment that God pronounces on the situation or ‘sends’ on the perpetrators.”[10]
It turns out that God’s “sharpened sword” and “flaming arrows” are nothing other than the natural self-destructive consequences of people’s own behavior!
With a grieving heart, God said, “I will judge Judah, and families are going to be mercilessly smashed together.” But what Jeremiah heard was God, with a raging heart, saying: “I will judge Judah by mercilessly smashing families together.”
What the true God actually did was refuse to allow his mercy to further damage people by enabling them to become further and further entrenched in their self-destructive sin.
the true God actually did was humbly allow himself to appear guilty of things he in fact merely allowed.
Examples of Scripture’s Dual Speech Pattern
We’ve seen that the cross teaches us that at the center of the story of what else is going on in the OT’s violent portraits of God is the truth that Yahweh is a humble sin-bearing God and that God brings about judgments by withdrawing his restraining Spirit to allow sin to punish sin and evil to vanquish evil.
First, it’s important to remember that ancient Israelites viewed the world like a sort of “spider web” in which everything was organically related to everything else. This is why the Bible consistently depicts the welfare of humans, the earth, and the animal kingdom as bound together.[4] Whenever humans, whom God entrusted to care for the earth and animal kingdom, push God away with their sin, the land and animals suffer as a result.[5]
And this already provides some confirmation that we should interpret the Flood narrative not as a judgment that God violently imposed on the earth, but as an extreme example of what collective human sin looks like when God withdraws his merciful restraints to allow it to run its self-destructive course.
In this light, I trust it’s clear that the Flood was not the result of something God did, but of something God stopped doing.
This makes the sinless way Jesus used divine authority all the more praiseworthy. Instead of using divine authority to protect himself and crush his enemies, he allowed himself to be crushed by his enemies, at the hands of his enemies, and out of love for his enemies.
fire falling from the sky was often attributed to a malevolent fire-throwing deity. Moreover, Satan is depicted as causing fire to fall from heaven in Job (1:16).[12] And in a passage in Revelation that some argue is intended to associate Elijah’s incinerating miracle with demonic activity, we find a beast operating under the authority of Satan that is able to deceive people by “causing fire to come down from heaven” (Rev 13:13).
“express the remarkable divine authority this holy man possessed and to communicate that it is dangerous.”
that this grisly test was not merely to find out if Abraham trusted Yahweh’s faithfulness; it was, more importantly, designed to help Abraham fully trust Yahweh’s faithfulness.
Yahweh did this to have Abraham undergo a highly emotional paradigm shift in his view of God that removed any doubt that Yahweh might be like other ANE gods who required this ultimate sacrifice.
If the Israelites were tempted to think Yahweh demanded child sacrifices long after he had explicitly prohibited it, it shouldn’t surprise us that Abraham, raised in a pagan culture that routinely practiced child sacrifice, was tempted to conceive of Yahweh along these lines and in these terms.[15]
It seems Yahweh was taking this couple “to the edge,” where they could easily despair of ever receiving their promised son, as a means of freeing them from every last vestige of their pagan assumption that God needed their help. By delaying so long, God was setting them up to learn in dramatic fashion that the promise of the one true God “will be fulfilled not by [their] power, but by HIS power.”[18]
book, God was once again stooping to meet his covenant partner where he was at in order to lead him to where he wanted him to be.[21]
At “the peak point of horrific clarity,” Gibson says, “God crushed the [pagan] image out of existence and introduced a whole new spiritual realization.”[23]
That is, if we read these violent divine portraits while exercising the same surface-penetrating faith we exercise when we come to embrace the crucified Nazarene as the definitive revelation of God, we’ll see how the sin-mirroring ugliness of these literary crucifixes bears witness to the sin-mirroring ugliness of the historical Crucifixion and how the beauty of the sin-bearing God behind these literary crucifixes bears witness to the beauty of the sin-bearing God in the historical Crucifixion.
Unless we fully trust the revelation of God in the crucified Christ, in other words, we will not have the motivation or the capacity to discern how these ugly violent portraits bear witness to the unsurpassable beauty of God revealed in the crucified Christ.
