How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

I once heard a short saying about Jesus, comparing him to the other religious leaders. It stuck in my head and goes something like this: “Founders of other religions claim they

are a prophet to help you find God. Jesus came to say, ‘I am God come to find you.’ ”

Muhammad said, “The truth has been revealed to me.” Jesus said,“I am the truth.”

What about People Who Are Faithful to Their Religions but Don’t Know about Jesus?

1. We Affirm That God Loves People

2. We Affirm That God Is the Ultimate Loving Judge

This is a complex and emotional question, and I don’t believe we should offer simplistic answers to complicated questions. In the end, while I am convinced that God’s desire is for everyone to know him through Jesus, I believe we must trust God and his love for people, knowing that in the end, no one will be judged unfairly.

3. God Wants People to Know Jesus, So He Created Us for Mission

There are millions of people who don’t know that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life and that no one comes to the Father except through him.

This doesn’t mean being obnoxious or judgmental toward others. But sharing the truth about Jesus is what I hope to do for as long as I live. Why? Because I am so aware of how I have been forgiven by God and how God has shown me grace and mercy I did not deserve, and I want others to know this love. I don’t believe all paths lead to God. I am convinced that what Jesus said is true, so I want to spend my life doing whatever is possible to see others come to know Jesus as the way, the truth, the life, and the way to God.

online. Two guys hit the streets with a hardcover book in hand. The title: The Holy Qur’an. They open up the book and read several verses from it, including: • “If you reject my decrees and abhor my laws . . . You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.”*

After getting several reactions like this, the two fellows remove the paper cover jacket from the book. Though the jacket said “Holy Qur’an,” the book they had been reading from was actually a different book, a Holy Bible. The verses people had been listening to were being read from the Bible, not the Qur’an. The responses are fascinating to watch. They vary from a shocked “What the #$?” to a stunned “Seriously?” to “That is really unbelievable. That is sick, that’s really sick,” and my favorite—perhaps most revealing of all—“Of course I heard Bible stories when I was young, but I really had no idea this was in there.” Most of the people who weren’t raised in a Christian home weren’t aware of some of the violence contained in the Bible. They thought of it as a book filled with good stories and happy things you could teach children. But even those who were raised in a Christian home or taught the Christian faith seemed to be unaware of the violence. I’m frequently surprised by the number of people who say, “I had no idea this was in there.”

Many of the violent acts in the Bible are the result of evil human choices and decisions. Using our analogy of the Bible as a library, much of the violence in the Bible library is in the “history books” that record all kinds of events and activities that humans did. God did not inspire the writers of the Bible to “clean up” the story to give us a filtered version of human evil. That actually makes me trust the Bible more, knowing that the difficult parts have not been edited out.

There are two ways people try to explain away the violence we find in the Bible that I don’t find particularly satisfying. Here is the first approach.

1. The No Apology Approach God did it. He is God and he can do anything he wants, including killing people.

2. The Bible Is Wrong Approach God didn’t command the violence or do any of it. The Scriptures have the stories in it, but the Israelites and those who wrote the stories were mistaken.

believe, in agreement with what the historical church has believed since the time of Jesus, that we must accept God for who he is and that this understanding is preserved for us in the Bible—the entire Bible. We don’t get to choose the parts of it we like, and we don’t get to shape God into the God we prefer him to be. One additional major reason to accept the Old Testament stories, including the truth that God ordered the battles and the violence, is because Jesus believed it. Jesus believed the entire Old Testament is God’s inspired word. He believed Moses really lived and he accepted the stories about him. Jesus believed what the prophets wrote and never once alluded to any part of the Old Testament not being accurate or true. He never once suggested that the battles or the violence in the Old Testament were not true. In fact, he emphasized the importance of the Old Testament, saying that every word was important. He quoted it often and believed the truth of the Old Testament (see “Postlude: Jesus Loved His Crazy Bible”). Since Jesus believed all that is recorded in the Old Testament, I will believe it as well.

Jesus even offered this warning to those who would take his words lightly: “I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.”† The writer of Hebrews in the New Testament offers a similar warning, telling us, “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”‡

God is not slow to love, but he is slow to anger. And as we see throughout the Bible, God does express anger, but it is an outflow of his just love and protection—not a vindictive and selfish anger, the type human beings are prone to display.

When you read the entire Bible and see who God is through his interactions with people, you see he is slow to anger, loving, compassionate, forgiving, and patient.

So let’s make a few observations as we step into that time period and cultural context. We will look at a people group known as the Canaanites, the people God is ordering to be destroyed with what seems like a merciless genocide. There are other people groups in the Old Testament, including the Midianites and Amalekites, that we won’t address here, but with each people group you need to look at what was going on at that time and in that place. The circumstances are often similar.

Understand that God was not randomly ordering battles and encouraging violence. He was ordering them for a specific situation during a specific time period, most of it in the span of one generation.

The Canaanites were involved in some evil worship practices. They had several gods, among whom was one named Molech (18.1). Here’s how the worship of this god has been described: “Molech was a Canaanite underworld deity represented as an upright, bullheaded idol with a human body in whose belly a fire was stoked and in whose arms a child was placed to be burnt to death. It was not just unwanted children who were sacrificed.

Most of these people groups were involved with the worship of false gods. According to some scholars, these false gods weren’t just imaginary beings. They were the angelic beings from God’s heavenly council known as “sons of God” that we mentioned earlier. These beings often played a role in God’s decision making and were used to carry out God’s plans. But they rebelled against God and were then assigned by God to geographic areas.* It is believed that possibly several of the sons of God who were in the divine counsel became the various gods that accepted worship from the Canaanites and other people groups.

there is a whole additional aspect of spiritual, supernatural warfare happening here—concerns that go beyond property and land. These fallen divine beings were also behind some of the conflict between Israel and the Canaanites and give us additional insight into why these battles were important. God didn’t want his people, the Israelites, to be influenced and corrupted by false gods whose culture might persuade Israel to participate in the evil practices and worship of these false gods. We see God saying precisely this in offering this warning from Deuteronomy 20:16–18: “However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach

And he tells Moses the people of Israel will return to the land of Canaan after “four generations.” What’s fascinating is the reason given for this delay. It is because “the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”* What does this mean? It indicates God was patiently waiting for the Amorites (and the other people of the land

of Canaan) to turn from their evil practices.

At a later time in Israel’s history we see God sending a reluctant prophet to warn the city of Nineveh (an ancient city

located in what is now Iraq) that judgment from God was coming unless they changed their evil ways. The Ninevites were also known as extremely wicked leaders, described in this way: “Records brag of live dismemberment, often leaving one hand attached so they could shake it before the person died.

This fits with the picture we see throughout the Bible of a God who gives warning before judgment, who is slow to anger, forgiving, and who wants people to change and not follow their own evil ways but turn to the true God. He gives them chances and promises that no matter who you are, you can be forgiven and redeemed. This is made even more clear in the New Testament, where it says, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”‡